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Quest for Identity America Since 1945 1st Edition
Randall Bennett Woods Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Randall Bennett Woods
ISBN(s): 9780521840651, 0521840651
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 7.96 MB
Year: 2005
Language: english
QUEST FOR IDENTITY

Quest for Identity: America Since 1945 is a survey of the American experience
from the close of World War II through the Cold War and 9/11 to the present.
It helps students understand postwar American history through a seamless
narrative punctuated with accessible analyses. Randall Bennett Woods ad-
dresses and explains the major themes that highlight the period: the Cold War,
the civil rights and women’s rights movements, and other great changes that
led to major realignments of American life. While the narrative political history
is featured, the book also fully discusses cultural matters and socioeconomic
problems. Dramatic new patterns of immigration and migration characterized
the period as much as the counterculture, the growth of television and the Inter-
net, the interstate highway system, rock and roll, and the exploration of space.
The pageantry, drama, irony, poignancy, and humor of the American journey
since World War II are all here.

Randall Bennett Woods is John A. Cooper Distinguished Professor of History

at the University of Arkansas. He has written widely on twentieth-century
American history, including Dawning of the Cold War (1991), Changing of the
Guard (1990), and Fulbright: A Biography (1995), which won both the Ferrell
and Ledbetter Prizes. He was also editor of Vietnam and the American Political
Tradition: The Politics of Dissent (Cambridge, 2003).
Quest for Identity
America Since 1945

Randall Bennett Woods

University of Arkansas
  
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521840651

© Randall Bennett Woods 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published in print format 2005

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Contents

Preface page xi

1 The Republic in Transition: Demobilization and

Reconversion 1
The Heritage of War 1
Truman, Demobilization, and Reconversion 7
To Secure These Rights 17
Civil Liberties under Siege 20
The Election of 1948 23
The Fair Deal 27

2 The Origins of the Cold War 32

Roots of Conflict 32
The Birth of Containment 39
The Cold War in Asia 52
The Second Red Scare 64
The Heritage of Fear 70

3 Staying the Course: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Politics

of Moderation 73
A Changing of the Guard: The Election of 1952 74
Eisenhower and Modern Republicanism 78
Farmers, Workers, and the Economy 80
Redefining Federal Power 83
Black America and the Struggle for Civil Equality 86
Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott 92
Little Rock 93
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 96

v
vi Contents

4 Containing Communism and Managing the

Military–Industrial Complex: The Eisenhower Administration
and the Cold War 99
John Foster Dulles and “Rollback” 100
The Bricker Amendment 101
Containment in Asia: The Formosa Crisis 104
Brinkmanship and “The New Look” 105
Vietnam and the Demise of French Colonialism 107
Offending the Good Neighbor: Eisenhower and Latin America 108
The Suez Crisis 111
The Election of 1956 115
Soviet–American Relations and the Nuclear Arms Race 116

5 Capitalism and Conformity: American Society, 1945–1960 121

Postwar Economic Boom 121
Conformity and Materialism 126
A Homogeneous Religion 140
Poverty in America 143
The Beat Generation 144
Intellectual and Artistic Life 145

6 Liberalism Reborn: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and

the Politics of Activism 155
Liberalism Transformed 155
The Election of 1960 158
The New Frontier 164
The Second Reconstruction 170
The Death of a President 177
Taking the Stage 178
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 182
The Crusade for Economic Opportunity 185
The Election of 1964 186
The Great Society 191
From Conservationism to Environmentalism 201
Shooting for the Stars 204

7 The Wages of Globalism: Foreign Affairs During the

Kennedy–Johnson Era 208
A Call to Arms: JFK and the Cold War 208
The Cuban Revolution and the Bay of Pigs 212
The Cuban Missile Crisis 215
A Thaw in Soviet–American Relations 218
The Congo 220
Contents vii

Vietnam: Staying the Course 221

The Domino Theory Ascendent: LBJ and Vietnam 224
Revolt at Home 235
Managing the Cold War: The Rest of the World 238
Cracks in the Alliance 244
The Middle East Cauldron: The 1967 War 244

8 The Dividing of America: Vietnam, Black Power, the

Counterculture, and the Election of 1968 248
Black Power: The Radicalization of the Civil Rights Movement 248
The New Left 256
Student Protest and Vietnam 258
The Counterculture 259
Vietnam: A Bloody Stalemate 263
Tet 266
The Pueblo Incident 269
Turning Point: The Election of 1968 270

9 Realpolitik or Imperialism? Nixon, Kissinger, and American

Foreign Policy 281
The New Realism 282
Vietnam: “The Will to Win” 285
“Balance of Terror”: The U.S., USSR, and the Arms Race 288
Vietnamization 291
Congress and the “End the War” Movement 298
The Unravelling of the Vietnam Consensus 301
The Politics of Diplomacy 305
Détente, Linkage, and Soviet–American Relations 308
Denouement in Vietnam 310
Containing Latin America: Nixon and Chile 313
The Yom Kippur War 314

10 The Limits of Expediency: Richard M. Nixon and the

American Presidency 320
Playing to the Silent Majority: Nixon’s Domestic Policies 321
Watergate: The Constitution under Siege 340

11 From Confidence to Anxiety: American Society, 1960–1980 351

An Economy in Transition 352
The Rebellious Generation 357
Women’s Liberation 363
Gay Liberation 370
The Chicano Movement 371
viii Contents

Native Americans 373

The Culture of Poverty 376
Public Education under Fire 378
Fundamentalism versus Ecumenicalism:
Religion in Modern America 379
The Mainstreaming of Environmentalism 384
Television and the Homogenization of America 386
Music: From “Folk” to “Rock” and Beyond 388
High Culture 392
Literature and American Society 393

12 Governing in a Malaise: The Presidencies of Gerald R. Ford

and Jimmy Carter 399
The Interim President 400
Unfunded Liberalism: The Carter Presidency and Domestic Affairs 406
Human Rights and a Hard Line: The Carter
Presidency and Foreign Affairs 416
The Carter Malaise 424

13 The Culture of Narcissism: The Reagan Era 438

The Emergence of the New Right 438
The “Me Decade” 443
Ronald Reagan 444
Supply-Side Economics 446
From Social Security to the Environment 448
Spending the Way to Victory: Reagan and the Cold War 450
Sandinistas and Contras: Central America and the Cold War 452
Disaster in Lebanon 454
The “Great Communicator” 455
The Election of 1984 456
Four More Years 458
The “Culture of Greed” 460
Terrorism as an Issue 462
The Iran–Contra Affair 464
Battling the “Evil Empire” 467
Glasnost and Perestroika 468
Reagan the Conservative 470
The Paradox of America 473
Laissez-Faire in Education 473
Popular Culture 474
A Penchant for Hypocrisy 478
The AIDS Epidemic 479
Contents ix

14 In Search of Balance: America into the Twenty-First Century 481

Brave New Conservatism: The Presidency of George H. W. Bush 482
“It’s the Economy, Stupid”: The Election of 1992 503
America the Diverse 506
The Female Dilemma 511
The Culture Wars 513
The Presidency of William Jefferson Clinton 514
Clinton Abroad: Foreign Affairs in the 90s 520
Revolt of the Middle Class 523
Four More Years 526
Impeachment 528
Election 2000 536
9/11 and the War on Terror 540

Index 557
Preface

The study of any period in history is in part defined by what came before
and by what came after. What makes an inquiry into postwar American
life unique and somewhat problematic is that there is no postscript, no
epilogue. Consequently, there is in such chronicles an inevitable lack of
perspective. Nevertheless, the case for writing a history of the recent past
is compelling. Students are fascinated by it; the half century since World
War II is the frame of reference for their parents and grandparents. For
many it will be the gateway to the study of history as a whole. It is the
period that, for better or worse, is most likely to inform the present and the
future. And surely, the recent era is as full of change, drama, and complexity
as any other period in human history.
Perhaps the three most obvious themes for a book on postwar Amer-
ica are the Cold War, the struggle of nonwhite Americans for their full
rights under the Constitution, and the women’s movement. The fifty-
year battle that the United States and its allies waged with the forces of
international communism affected virtually every aspect of American life.
Most obviously, it dominated foreign affairs, forcing policymakers to view
every problem through its distorting prism. The East–West confrontation
involved the United States in two hot wars, Korea and Vietnam. That latter
conflict shattered the New Deal–Fair Deal–New Frontier–Great Society re-
form coalition, marking a break in a cycle of reform-consolidation-reform
and introducing one of reaction-consolidation-reaction in domestic affairs.
Because it seemed to many Americans that only a monolith could defeat
the monolithic communist threat, the Cold War made change for women
and minorities more difficult. At the same time, because the ongoing con-
flict with the Soviet Union and Communist China continually forced the
nation to reexamine its values and identity, it actually facilitated change.
The Cold War spawned the military–industrial complex and the national
security state. And finally, it gave rise to periodic domestic witch hunts by
extremists convinced that the greatest danger to the nation’s survival was
posed not by the threat of external communist aggression but by the threat

xi
xii Preface

of internal communist subversion. The resulting impact on the intellectual,

cultural, and political life of the country was profound.
The half century following World War II was characterized by dramatic
new patterns of immigration and migration. The country continued to be
a magnet to the oppressed and poverty stricken of the world. Encouraged
by more liberal immigration laws passed in the 1960s, by special provi-
sions stemming from the Vietnam War, World War II, and the commu-
nization of Cuba, and by a relatively porous 2,000-mile border between
the United States and Mexico, millions of immigrants, both legal and ille-
gal, flooded into the country. One of the many effects of this inflow was to
ensure that Hispanic Americans would become the largest ethnic minor-
ity in the United States sometime early in the twenty-first century. By the
1970s millions of Americans were abandoning the manufacturing regions
of the North and Midwest for the more service- and high tech–oriented
economies of the South and West: the “Sunbelt.” This migration and its
underlying causes gave rise to new pockets of poverty and prosperity and
contributed to a major realignment in American political life.
Spurred by the changes wrought by World War II and by their own frus-
trations, African Americans and women made huge if uneven and painful
strides toward full citizenship and self-realization. The civil rights and
women’s movements in turn forced the country to continually confront
its democratic values and attempt to reconcile them with reality. It was a
sign of how far things had progressed that by the 1990s the national debate
was not over whether blacks and women ought to be accorded equal rights
but whether through affirmative action they should be given preference in
hiring and admission to educational institutions.
No period in American history witnessed greater cultural change than
the years from 1945 to 2000. Sports, professional and amateur, increas-
ingly integrated and became a national preoccupation and at times an
obsession. The television, the interstate highway system, the credit card,
and the computer changed the way Americans lived and thought. Explo-
ration of space became more than just a dream of science fiction writers.
The advent of rock and roll and the emergence of a counterculture dur-
ing the 1960s highlighted the emergence of an increasingly self-conscious
and assertive youth culture. High culture remained solidly entrenched in
American life, but pop culture flourished. While highbrows reveled in post-
modernist painting and the renderings of avant-garde composers, televi-
sion, motion pictures, videos, and compact discs made Elvis and Madonna
accessible to even the poorest Americans. By the 1990s the country was im-
mersed in the so-called “culture wars” as advocates of change urged their
fellow citizens to do nothing less than reject the until-then-accepted past
as a contrivance of “dead white males.” They were in turn denounced by
traditionalists as “feminazis” and intellectual nihilists.
Preface xiii

During the 1960s Americans “discovered” the culture of poverty. Liberals

tried to change it while conservatives attempted either to ignore it or wait it
out. Poverty, particularly in urban ghettos, in Appalachia, and in the rural
South, persisted. As a result so did drugs and crime. It should be noted,
however, that by the 1980s drug use and violence had become an affliction
not just of the poor but of Americans of all classes, colors, and regions.
Americans also rediscovered the environment. By the late 1970s the drive
to prevent pollution, limit population, and preserve at least part of nature
in its natural state had become a movement that involved Americans of
all political persuasions. Frequently they were pitted against advocates of
“development” and economic progress who argued that providing jobs and
the good life for all was more important than saving the spotted owl. An
important part of environmentalism was population control but that move-
ment aroused the fears of Catholics, Muslims, religious conservatives, and
anti-abortionists in general.
Aside from the Cold War and other, lesser foreign crises, politics was
dominated by the growth of the welfare state and the debate between con-
servatives and liberals (admittedly amorphous and uncertain terms) over
the wisdom and implications of this phenomenon. In essence, what tran-
spired was an ongoing struggle between two historical narratives: one fea-
turing the doctrine of the free, self-reliant individual voluntarily associating
in limited government for personal and collective benefit versus the concept
of a benevolent state regulating society to ensure equality of opportunity
and a safety net for those who could not fend for themselves. It was, of
course, the age-old story of two competing views of human nature.
Quest for Identity is designed to meet the need of students of postwar
America for a concise but full narrative encompassing the events, person-
alities, and conditions that shaped the national consciousness. It also in-
cludes analyses of the causes underlying the principal social, economic,
political, and international problems of the era. The book is divided into
14 chapters. Chapter titles seem to indicate an emphasis on politics and
foreign affairs, but far more than half of the material deals with cultural
matters and socioeconomic problems which are, of course, the sources of
all politics and diplomacy. I am acutely aware that history is made on shop
floors, in rural church meetings, and in local coffee shops as well as in
the West Wing, congressional caucuses, and corporate board rooms. Each
chapter features an introduction and conclusion and is punctuated with
maps designed to enhance the students’ understanding of the content. A
list of “Additional Readings” follows each installment except the last.
1 The Republic in Transition

Demobilization and Reconversion

A s World War II came to a close, Americans were exhausted,

numbed by four long years of war, but at the same time most were op-
timistic, and the country was remarkably united. A general agreement pre-
vailed that the struggle against the Axis had been just. Germany, Japan,
Italy, and their allies represented the forces of evil, and the United States
had to intervene to save itself and mankind in general. As a result of this
consensus, America was spared the isolationist backlash that had over-
whelmed the Treaty of Versailles following World War I; nor was there a
Red Scare similar to that which had swept the United States in 1919. Except
for treatment of the nisei, Japanese Americans, and some 11,000 German
aliens – unjustly interned by a government that confused ethnicity and na-
tionality with treachery – violations of civil liberties did not compare with
those committed during previous conflicts. Convinced that the struggle for
democracy abroad would translate into equity under the law and nondis-
crimination, African Americans experienced a rising level of expectations.
Similar expectations arose among American women who had entered the
workplace in droves during the war and who wanted the freedom to choose
between a career inside and a career outside the home (although most, like
returning male veterans, dreamed of marriage and children). The dawn of
the atomic age created widespread anxiety, but for the time being, only
the United States possessed the bomb. Clearly, the world was a dangerous
place, but American hegemony seemed an adequate safeguard against an-
other major war. In short, Americans no less than Britons were convinced
that World War II had indeed been “a people’s war” and that a new age of
social justice and peace was in the offing.

The Heritage of War

As was true of the Civil War, World War II served as a great stimulus to
the national economy. America truly became the “arsenal of democracy.”
By 1943, U.S. industrial output exceeded that for all of the Axis powers
1
2 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

combined. Massive government spending produced a steady stream of

guns, planes, tanks, and ships; stimulated the private sector; and laid the
basis for postwar prosperity. So large were wartime expenditures that they
twice exceeded all federal appropriations prior to 1941. Indeed, historians
would later conclude that World War II rather than the New Deal pulled the
United States out of the Great Depression. During the New Deal, the admin-
istration of Franklin D. Roosevelt experimented with Keynesian economics
(government spending to stimulate the private sector), but the president’s
innate fiscal conservatism had kept government expenditures to a mini-
mum. As a result, unemployment persisted. In forcing billions in federal
expenditures, World War II had the effect of converting Roosevelt into a
Keynesian. The war, moreover, contributed to consolidation in industry
and labor: fewer corporations produced more goods more efficiently and
employed more people. One hundred companies received $160 billion of
the $240 billion spent on war contracts, and 10 companies received 30%
of the total. New industries, such as those manufacturing synthetic rubber
and, later in the war, jet aircraft engines, sprang up, and American chemical
and electronics enterprises led the world in productivity and technological
innovation.
Although the rich grew richer during World War II, working-class
Americans prospered as well. In 1941, 53% of all families lived on less
than $2,000 per year, while 24% lived on less than $1,000. During the war,
average weekly incomes increased by 70%, more than enough to offset a
47% inflation rate. For the first and only time in the twentieth century,
the United States experienced a downward redistribution of income. The
share of the nation’s wealth taken by the top 5% of the population declined
from 22% to 17%, with most of the difference going to the bottom 40% of
the population. Not coincidentally, trade unions flourished during the war.
Encouraged by the prolabor stance of the Roosevelt administration and
led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), American workers
in the 1930s had staged sit-down strikes and successfully organized the
automobile, steel, and textile industries. Ordinary citizens appreciated the
benevolent neutrality of the White House. One blue-collar citizen put it sim-
ply: “Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who
is not a son of a bitch.” During the war, the War Labor Board, committed
to maintaining industrial peace, encouraged new workers to join unions
where they immediately were eligible for benefits, including higher wages,
better fringe benefits, and increased job security. From 1941 to 1945, union
membership increased from 10.5 to 14.8 million.
Another enduring legacy of World War II was the growth of the federal
government. Although free enterprise and civil liberties survived during
the war, the government intervened into every walk of life, setting prices,
allocating manpower, rationing tires and gasoline, and taxing on a mas-
sive scale. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected to an unprecedented
The Republic in Transition 3

fourth term in 1944, symbolized the presence and grudging acceptance of

this leviathan. Federal bureaucracies, already swollen by the New Deal,
expanded still further under the impact of war. The War Production Board
told industries what to manufacture and set quotas for them to meet. The
Office of Price Administration set prices for virtually every commodity pro-
duced in America. The federal government determined the distribution of
strategic raw materials – aluminum, rubber, and food – and classified jobs
according to their contribution to the national defense.

The “Conservative Coalition”

Not surprisingly, the growth of the federal government during the New Deal
and World War II, Roosevelt’s election to four terms as president, and the
return of prosperity produced a conservative reaction during and after the
war. Indeed, sensing this trend, Roosevelt had rejected the notion of coun-
tercyclical deficit spending and promised to balance the budget before the
war ended. Rationing and wartime controls generated resentment against
big government, while a widespread desire to get back to “normal” life mil-
itated against social reform. Wartime prosperity had elevated millions of
working-class Americans to the middle class, and in the process, dissipated
much of the energy that had been responsible for the New Deal. President
of the National Association of Manufacturers, anti–New Dealer, and anti-
unionist Frederick Crawford argued for “jobs, freedom and opportunity”
and “enterprise [that] must be free of restraint and government regula-
tion.” Congress fell under the sway of a “conservative coalition,” consisting
of Republicans and southern Democrats who championed the causes of
states’ rights and free enterprise and believed the federal government had
no business interfering with the relationship between races and sexes, no
matter how exploitive or oppressive. The midterm congressional elections
in 1942 had produced marked Republican gains, and the conservative coali-
tion had attacked hallowed New Deal programs such as the Works Progress
Administration, the National Youth Administration, and the Farm Security
Administration. The latter agency was virtually the only arm of government
committed to defending the interests of poor farmers and sharecroppers.

The Melding of Isolationism and Internationalism

World War II had converted many former isolationists into aggressive na-
tionalists. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had destroyed the myth
of impregnability that the America First movement had worked so assidu-
ously to disseminate. The Atlantic and Pacific were not great barriers pro-
tecting “Fortress America” from attack as the isolationists had argued, but
rather were highways across which hostile ships and airplanes could rain
down destruction on the Western Hemisphere. Led by Time-Life publisher
Henry Luce, old America Firsters decided that if America could not hide
from the rest of the world, it must control it. The United States emerged
4 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

from World War II as the most powerful nation in the world, both economi-
cally and militarily. It controlled most of the former Japanese islands in the
Pacific, took an active role in the occupation of Germany and Japan, and by
virtue of its massive gold reserves and industrial plants was in a position
to act both as the world’s banker and its chief supplier of manufactured
goods.
Joining the neo-imperialists in pushing for an activist American role in
world affairs were Wilsonian internationalists who believed that, if only the
United States had joined the League of Nations and acted in concert with
the western democracies, fascist aggression could have been nipped in the
bud. In the spring of 1945, the United States led the way in establishing
a new collective security organization, the United Nations, whose stated
goals were the prevention of armed aggression and the promotion of pros-
perity and democracy throughout the world. Most Americans believed that
the lessons of the past had been learned and that the world would never
again have to confront a Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo.

The Changing American Woman

The war changed the face of American society in numerous ways. Perhaps
women were the group most affected by the global conflict. The Great
Depression had erased many of the gains made by American women in the
1920s. Federal agencies, the popular print media, religious organizations,
and even women’s groups urged females to return to the home to make
room in the workforce for men, still perceived to be the traditional heads
of household. Federal legislation prohibited more than one member of the
same family from working in the civil service.
All that changed with the coming of the war. The outbreak of hostili-
ties created a huge labor shortage. In response, 6 million women entered
the workforce, dramatically increasing the number of females employed
outside the home. In 1940, 14.2 million women made up 25.2% of the
workforce. Five years later, the 19.3 million employed females constituted
29.2% of employed Americans. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the federal gov-
ernment and the mass media launched a campaign to convince women that
their place was in the factory as well as in the kitchen. Women maintained
roadbeds, operated giant cranes, and replaced lumberjacks in the forests
of the great Northwest. But the most conspicuous workplace for the new
woman was the defense industry. The head of the War Manpower Commis-
sion acknowledged that “getting women into industry is a tremendous sales
proposition” and encouraged the defense industries to hire women work-
ers. In 1941, a total of 36 women were employed in the ship construction
business. By 1942, more than 160,000 were at work laying keels, welding
hatches, and installing conning towers. Rosie the Riveter, the fictional de-
fense plant worker created by government public relations experts, became
a national heroine. However, the most important change wrought by the
The Republic in Transition 5

war on the working woman was demographic. From the beginning of the
industrial era in America, the typical working female was single, young,
and poor. But during World War II, almost 75% of those who took jobs
for the first time were married, and 60% were older than 35. Two thirds of
the women who joined the labor force during the war listed their previous
occupation as housewife, and many had preschool-age children. Margaret
Hickey, head of the Women’s Advisory Committee to the War Manpower
Commission, declared that “employers, like other individuals, are finding it
necessary to weigh old values, old institutions, in terms of a world at war.”
Prior to World War II, women had served in the Army and Navy Nurse
Corps, but they had received neither military rank nor pay in return for their
services. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, however, the War Department, at
the prodding of Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers, backed legislation
creating the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, later changed to Women’s
Auxiliary Corps (WACS). Subsequent measures in 1942 and 1943 created
a women’s naval corps (WAVES), the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, and
expanded versions of the nurses corps. The 350,000 women who served
in the armed services during World War II were barred from combat but
not immune to danger. The vast majority of those in uniform remained in
the United States working primarily as communications, clerical, or health
care experts. In France, Italy, and North Africa, however, Army and Navy
nurses performed their duties close to the front lines, and more than 1,000
women flew planes in a noncombat capacity.
Ironically but not surprisingly, the new woman continued to encounter
stereotyping and discriminatory treatment even in service to their country.
Virtually without exception, females were excluded from top policy-making
bodies charged with running the wartime economy. Although the National
War Labor Board endorsed the principle of equal work for equal pay in
1942, it was never enforced. In 1945 as in 1940, women workers in the
manufacturing sector made only 65% of what men earned. Although an
estimated 2 million children were in need of child care services, federal and
state governments proved extremely reluctant to provide them. The private
sector was equally recalcitrant. The notion that “a mother’s primary duty is
to her home and children” and fears over the breakup of the nuclear family
proved to be powerful inhibiting factors. Overall, the American woman’s
mass participation in the workforce did not significantly affect popular
attitudes toward sexual equality. “Legal equality . . . between the sexes is
not possible,” declared Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins, “because men
and women are not identical in physical structure or social function.”

African Americans on the Move

The period from 1941 to 1945 produced an acceleration of the great inter-
nal migration of African Americans that had begun during World War I.
Conditions in the South made life well-nigh unbearable for the descendents
6 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

of slaves. One black man recalled being “born in poverty” in Georgia where
“white people virtually owned black people.” White farmers would not al-
low black farmers to raise tobacco, he said, “cause there’s a lot of money
in it.” Two million blacks moved out of the former Confederacy, mostly to
urban areas in the Midwest and Northeast. They were prodded by the per-
sistence of lynching, disfranchisement, and discrimination in their native
region and lured by the prospect of government and defense industry jobs.
Overall, the number of African Americans employed in industry grew from
500,000 to 1.2 million.
In 1941, black activist and labor leader A. Philip Randolph called for “ten
thousand Negroes [to] march on Washington” and “demand the right to
work and fight for our country.” He then founded the March on Washington
Movement (MOWM). Prompted by the MOWM, his wife Eleanor, and other
liberals, President Roosevelt at least paid lip service to equal rights. In
1941, he established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC)
and encouraged African Americans to seek redress of their grievances in
court. But as was true of women and other groups, the black experience
was a case of small progress in the midst of mass discrimination. Most
national trade unions excluded blacks from membership. The FEPC had
only “persuasive” powers, and these were generally ignored. Despite some
improvement in job opportunities, most openings were at low levels, with
blacks hired primarily as laborers, janitors, and cleaning women. Although
African Americans enlisted at a rate 60% higher than their proportion of the
population, they encountered discrimination at every turn in the military.
Segregation was still the official policy in the armed forces, and blacks had
to struggle to persuade the Army and Air Force to allow them entry into
combat units.
Yet, the war unquestionably brought about new opportunities and new
freedoms for African Americans. The Army agreed to train black pilots,
and some integration took place on an experimental basis. Thousands of
African American servicemen experienced life without prejudice during
their overseas tours of duty. Despite the fact that the multitudes of south-
ern blacks who moved north to find positions in munitions industries found
themselves living in squalid ghettos, they also enjoyed greater psycholog-
ical and political freedom than they had in the South. Northern political
machines sought their votes and granted favors in return. The very acts
of physical mobility and enlistment contributed to a sense of control and
generated a rising level of expectation. In the face of continuing oppres-
sion and even violence – the worst example of which was the Detroit race
riot of 1943 – black protest mounted. During the war, membership in the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in-
creased nine-fold to more than 450,000 individuals. Black newspapers took
up the cry for a “Double V” campaign – victory at home as well as victory
abroad. But the growing activism among African Americans, coupled with
The Republic in Transition 7

1.3%
10.6% 3.8%
13.4%
11.0%
14.8%
68.0%
77.0%
South
North Central
1940 1950
Northeast
5.8% 7.5%
West
16.0%
19.2%

59.9% 18.3% 53.0%

20.2%

1960 1970
Figure 1–1. Regional distribution of the black population, 1940–1970.

the resurgence of conservatism among the white majority, foreshadowed

an era of racial progress amid great conflict.

Truman, Demobilization, and Reconversion

It was one of history’s great ironies that Franklin D. Roosevelt did not live to
see the end of World War II. Ravaged by the effects of polio, which had left
him partially paralyzed since 1921, and by 13 years in the most stressful
job in America, he died suddenly at his retreat at Warm Springs, Geor-
gia, on April 12, 1945. “Who the hell is Harry Truman?” Admiral William
D. Leahy asked upon hearing that Roosevelt’s moderately obscure vice pres-
ident had taken over. It was an important question, one asked frequently,
if less profanely, by many other Americans.
Harry S. Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, in 1884, the child of a
family of farmers that had migrated from Kentucky. A typical son of the
middle border, Truman grew up in and around Kansas City. Following his
graduation from high school, Truman worked alternately on the family
farm and as a bank clerk in town. Upon the outbreak of the Great War,
his National Guard unit elected him an officer. The artillery unit in which
Truman served saw a good deal of action in France, and through courage
and perseverance, Truman worked his way up to the rank of captain. He
returned to Kansas City in 1919, and opened a haberdashery with one of his
Army friends. Caught up in a postwar depression that crippled the econ-
omy, Truman was bankrupt within one year. One business failure followed
another, and in desperation he turned to politics in 1922. With the help
8 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

of the Pendergast political machine, which dominated Kansas City and its
environs, Truman was elected a county judge, rising to the post of presiding
judge in 1926.
Again with machine support, Truman captured the Democratic nomi-
nation for the U.S. Senate in 1934 and won easily in the Democratic land-
slide of that year. He was, however, received coldly by the nation’s politi-
cal elite. The Washington, D.C., press referred to Harry Truman derisively
as “the gentleman from Pendergast.” He was, according to one Roosevelt
aide, a “small-bore politician of county courthouse caliber.” It seemed that
Truman’s career had come to an end when, in 1939, Big Tom Pendergast
was sentenced to federal prison for income tax evasion. Valuing personal
loyalty above all else, Truman refused to distance himself from his discred-
ited benefactor. In 1940, the Roosevelt administration threw its support
behind one of Truman’s rivals in the senatorial primary. Incredibly, without
either White House or machine support, Truman won reelection in 1940.
Stumping in every city and village in Missouri, he put together a coali-
tion of farmers, blue-collar workers, and ethnic voters, including African
Americans. Because of Truman’s toughness, his unwavering support for the
New Deal, and his work during World War II as chair of a Senate Commit-
tee supervising the awarding of government contracts, President Roosevelt
selected the Missourian to be his running mate in 1944.
As he readily admitted, Harry Truman came to the highest office in the
land ill equipped for his new job. The vice presidency, he declared, had
turned him into a “political eunuch.” He was somewhat undereducated
and had no experience in foreign affairs. Roosevelt had compounded the
problem by shutting his vice president out of crucial policy deliberations
during the first months of 1945. Uninitiated at the outset, Truman tended
toward the view that great power relationships were analogous to Kansas
City politics. Dean Acheson complained that the new president favored
action over contemplation and wanted to simplify the complex. He some-
times seemed “to think only in primary colors,” as Fred Siegel has written.
In fact, Truman deliberately cultivated the image of a no-nonsense, tough-
minded man of action. Aphorisms such as “The Buck Stops Here” and
“If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Get Out of the Kitchen” adorned his office.
That aura of decisiveness masked a deep-seated insecurity. One part of
Harry Truman was convinced that in education, experience, and intelli-
gence he was unprepared to be president. Another part believed that if a
man of the people could not do the job there was something fundamentally
wrong with the system. Unfortunately, the new president’s overvaluation
of personal loyalty made him prone to cronyism. Indeed, Truman replaced
much of Roosevelt’s cabinet with personal friends, a practice that infuriated
many members of the old administration. After his resignation as secretary
of the interior, Harold Ickes retorted, “I am against government by crony.”
The Republic in Transition 9

Finally, he was given to intemperance in public statement. When columnist

Drew Pearson dared denigrate his daughter Margaret’s singing, he publicly
threatened to punch “the son of a bitch” in the nose.
However, Harry Truman did have positive aspects. For example, he was
a man of immense personal integrity. He readily accepted responsibility
for all aspects of his administration and was absolutely committed to the
interests of the United States as he perceived them. He had not sought
the presidency, but events having thrust the office upon him, he would not
shirk his duty. Truman was a man of great compassion who believed that
the government had a responsibility to care for those who were unable to
care for themselves. He was a lifelong crusader against legal and social
discrimination based on race and religion. Above all, the diminutive mid-
westerner was tough. Although he sometimes privately broke down in tears
under the weight of the office during the early days of his administration,
he had no intention of quitting or knuckling under to antireformists at
home or would-be aggressors abroad.

The Baby Boomers

The American people wanted to return to normality, variously defined, as
quickly as possible following V-J (Victory over Japan) Day. Above all, they
wanted to forget about war and things military and return to making love
and money. The president and Congress were besieged by demands that
they “bring the boys home.” In one of the most rapid demobilizations in
history, America’s military force shrank from 12 million in 1945 to 1.6 mil-
lion in 1947. Rapid demobilization brought dislocations but not the re-
turn of the Great Depression that many feared. The economic impact of
the reflux of so many workers on the economy was cushioned by unem-
ployment pay and other Social Security benefits, but particularly by the
Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the “GI Bill of Rights.”
Under its provisions, the federal government spent $13 billion for vari-
ous veterans’ benefits, including unemployment payments, housing subsi-
dies, education both formal and vocational, and small business loans. By
1947, more than 1 million former servicemen were among some 2.5 million
Americans attending college. Most importantly, the pent-up demand cre-
ated by wartime rationing and billions of dollars of forced savings were
unleashed on the economy, stimulating the private sector and creating
thousands of jobs.
Thus did veterans return to schools, new jobs, wives, and babies. Dur-
ing the postwar years, Americans experienced a population explosion. The
birth rate grew from 19.4 per 1,000 in 1940 to 24 in 1946, and did not decline
again until the 1960s. The affluence of the postwar period coupled with the
cult of the family, which was such a prominent feature of the 1950s, served
to make the four-child family rather than the two-child family the norm.
10 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

Future social analysts would give the name “baby-boom generation” to this
bubble in the demographic curve.
Matured by the war, young Americans in the latter part of the 1940s
were serious and focused beyond their years. Veterans returning to col-
lege under the GI Bill of Rights were in a hurry; they rushed through
the curriculum to begin raising families and making livings. They were
more security conscious than the previous generation, a tendency that had
as much to do with the Great Depression as World War II. These young
men and women shunned risk and preferred to work for large corpora-
tions rather than opening their own businesses. “Security had become the
big goal,” declared Fortune magazine. “[They] want to work for somebody
else . . . preferably somebody big.” The pessimism and quest for security
bred by depression and war were partially counterbalanced by optimism
spawned by technology. In a brief five-year span from 1945 to 1950, Amer-
ican engineers and scientists gave consumers the automatic car transmis-
sion, the long-playing record, the electric clothes dryer, and the automatic
garbage-disposal unit. With the lifting of controls, families were able to
buy refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, electric ranges, and freezers stocked
with frozen foods at unprecedented rates. One of the most important, but
least noticed, breakthroughs came in 1945 when the American Gas Associ-
ation persuaded manufacturers to standardize the size of kitchen cabinets
and appliances. The counter workspace would extend 36 inches from the
floor and 25 1/4 inches from the wall with a “toe cove” to prevent stub-
bing. No longer would housewives have to cope with unsightly gaps and
bumps, and they could buy new items without having to remodel their
entire kitchens.

Crisis in Housing
The preoccupation of returning veterans and the Truman administration
was the massive housing shortage. The crisis began in December of 1945,
when the first of thousands of returning veterans reached the United States.
Because of the depression and the war, there had not been a good year
for new housing starts since 1929. Pollster Elmo Roper estimated that al-
most 19% of all American families were doubled up and 19% were looking
for housing. Another 13% would have been in the hunt, he estimated, if
prospects had not been so dim. Over the next decade, Americans would
require 16 million new homes, Life magazine estimated. To deal with the
problem, Truman named former Louisville mayor Wilson Wyatt to be fed-
eral housing expediter. Wyatt set a production target of 1.2 million units
for 1947, but starts fell well below that number. Building materials contin-
ued to be in short supply, and the housing industry, burdened by outdated
building codes, archaic technology, and lack of capital, could not keep up
with demand. For a time, industry leaders even opposed federal subsidies
on the grounds that they would lead to “socialized housing.” Those units
The Republic in Transition 11

that were built, even the ghastly prefabricated variety, were too expensive.
Fortune magazine estimated that veterans would have to earn $58 per week
to afford the average new house, but the average weekly wage was only
$46 per week.
The problem was eventually solved by a private–public sector partner-
ship. Traditionally, banks and other lenders had followed a very tight mort-
gage policy, demanding as much as 50% of the total cost of a dwelling as a
down payment and allowing no more than 10 years for the note to be paid
off. Following the war, however, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)
began insuring housing loans for up to 30 years and requiring only 5% to
10% as a down payment. Reassured by government guarantees of repay-
ment, private lenders eased mortgage terms, bringing them in line with the
guidelines set by the FHA. As a result, by 1950, the housing industry had not
only revived but had also become one of the primary engines of the flour-
ishing national economy. New home construction jumped from 117,000 in
1944 to 1.7 million in 1950. The keys to recovery were the healthy avarice of
the American entrepreneur and 30-year mortgages at 4.5% interest made
available through the FHA and the Veterans Administration (VA).
The needs of returning veterans meshed with a consolidation movement
among construction firms to produce not only a boom in the housing in-
dustry but also a new phenomenon in American residential life – suburbia.
In 1946, construction tycoon William Levitt began work on a revolutionary
project that would change the way Americans lived. Building on his experi-
ence as a maker of prefabricated housing for the Navy during World War II,
Levitt purchased a 1,200-acre tract of flat, open land on Long Island, New
York. Within just a few months, his workers had built 10,000 inexpen-
sive, separate standing, individual family homes. Levitt transferred the
assembly-line techniques pioneered by Henry Ford in the auto industry
to the housing business. Teams of semiskilled workers went up one street
and down the other laying concrete foundations. They were followed by car-
penters, spray painters, and roofers. Levitt purchased appliances en masse
and cut costs by using linoleum instead of hardwood floors. To the aston-
ishment of the construction industry, nearly all of the homes in Levittown,
as the project came to be known, sold within days. Total cost ranged from
$7,000 to $10,000; veterans could get into one of Levitt’s inventions and
pay as little as $56 per month. The developer moved on to establish even
larger communities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Suburbia was based on an irony. Although developments required the
felling of trees and pouring of concrete, those who moved out of the city
were self-consciously moving to “the country” to enjoy the pleasures of
an idyllic pastoral existence. Hence, the names of eastern developments:
Stonybrook, Crystal Stream, and Robin Meadows. In fact, suburban hous-
ing was dreadfully uniform and monotonous. Floor plans varied little, the
lots were small and either square or rectangular, and the neighborhoods
12 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

generally treeless and flat. One popular song described suburban dwellings
as “little boxes made of ticky-tacky.” Lewis Mumford, author of The City
in History, declared the move to suburbia was doing more to destroy the
western city than all the strategic bombing of World War II. Instead of the
rich, varied culture of ethnic neighborhoods, Americans were opting for a
lifestyle in which everybody barbecued, played bridge, mowed their lawns,
watched television, and wore the same clothes.
There is no doubt, however, that suburban developments filled a need.
the New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger chided the whole
concept as an “urban planning disaster,” but admitted that “Levittown
houses turned the detached, single-family house from a distant dream to a
real possibility for thousands of middle-class American families.”
Undoubtedly, suburbia contributed to racial polarization in America and
the impoverishment of its inner cities. Major population centers lost in-
habitants after the war. As white upwardly mobile families moved to the
suburbs, they were replaced by African Americans, Puerto Ricans in the
East and Midwest, and immigrants from Mexico and Central America in
the West. The outflow of well-to-do whites and businesses that catered to
them cut the tax base of the inner city, leading to a decline in housing and
public services. Racism prevented middle-class blacks and Hispanics from
moving into the white doughnuts that surrounded America’s urban cen-
ters. “We can solve a housing problem, or we can solve a racial problem,”
declared William Levitt, “but we cannot combine the two.” In fact, Levitt’s
houses came with closed covenants that limited purchasers to members of
“the Caucasian race.”

Inflation and Labor Unrest

Housing was only one of Harry Truman’s many problems. The administra-
tion quickly became caught between its justifiable fear of runaway infla-
tion and demands from business and labor that wartime controls on prices
and wages be scrapped. Industrialists, businessmen, and representatives of
farm interests pressed Congress to abolish all controls. Manufacturing and
agriculture were starved for new equipment and machinery. With billions
of dollars in savings, consumers were no longer willing to wait for auto-
mobiles, tires, radios, and refrigerators. Nonetheless, determined to hold
down inflation, the Truman administration decided to continue the Office
of Price Administration (OPA) indefinitely into the postwar period. The
National Association of Manufacturers and other business groups re-
sponded by insisting that the OPA be dismantled, arguing that controls
were delaying full production, perpetuating a flourishing black market,
and artificially restricting profits. One Republican partisan denounced the
OPA administrators as “the single most important collection of American
fascists we’ve got.”
The Republic in Transition 13

Meanwhile, organized labor, which tended to favor price but not wage
controls, set out not only to increase their portion of the economic pie,
but also to transform the face of American capitalism. Labor leaders were
convinced that workers had not shared equitably in wartime prosperity.
Concerned about the return of the 40-hour week, with the accompanying
loss of overtime, and by the prospect of an end to the OPA and ensuing
runaway inflation, union leaders set about getting everything they could
for their members. During the winter of 1945/1946, the nation was racked
by strikes in the electrical, automobile, steel, and meat-packing industries.
Angry and frustrated by these work stoppages, Truman asked Congress for
legislation giving him the authority to declare an emergency and assume
direct control over any industry he might deem vital to the national in-
terest, to order all workers back on the job, to subject any resisting labor
leader to fine and/or imprisonment, to set wages and prices, and to draft
anyone refusing to work into the military. “Let’s put transportation and pro-
duction back to work, hang a few traitors and make our country safe for
democracy,” he wrote in an unused draft of his speech to Congress. United
Autoworker head Walter Reuther proclaimed that the proposal “would
make slavery legal” and organized labor pressured Congress into rebuffing
the White House. Denied a legislative remedy, the Truman administration
intervened and mediated a series of settlements in which labor achieved
approximately two thirds of its wage demands and made substantial gains
in fringe benefits. Management agreed to these concessions with the tacit
understanding that they could pass the costs on to consumers.
No sooner had this crisis been averted than the nation faced in the spring
of 1946 another series of potentially paralyzing strikes from the railway
brotherhoods and the coal miners. John L. Lewis, the burly, beetle-browed
leader of the United Mine Workers, led his men out of the pits on April 1.
Genuinely popular with the workers, Lewis told them, “I have pleaded
your case not in the quavering tones of a mendicant asking alms, but in
the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights
to which free men are entitled.” The strike by the 400,000 mine workers
threatened to bring every steam-driven apparatus in America from heaters
to locomotives to a halt. The walkout seemed to threaten not only the do-
mestic economy but also European recovery. Citizens began hoarding fuel
and food, while the Truman administration warned that hundreds of thou-
sands of Europeans would starve if vital grain and meat shipments were
delayed. Management refused to negotiate, whereupon Truman seized the
mines. After 59 days, the president brokered an agreement in which the
miners received a $1.85-per-day raise and owners agreed to finance a re-
tirement and welfare system. Then, in the midst of the coal strike, the
railroad brotherhoods called a nationwide walkout. Under the provisions
of the Smith–Connally Labor Disputes Act, the president had the power to
14 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

seize strikebound plants that were crucial to the war effort. Although his
move was of dubious legality, the president invoked this measure and took
over the roads, whereupon all the brotherhoods except the Locomotive
Engineers and Railroad Trainmen agreed to a compromise settlement.
When Truman threatened to go before Congress and seek legislation further
restricting the right to strike of workers in occupations vital to the national
interest, they too gave in. The strikers remembered that the House and
Senate had rebuffed the president in late 1945, but opinion polls showed
that Truman’s disciplining of Lewis was immensely popular with the public
and that antiunion sentiment was building across the United States.

The Conservative Coalition

Truman had managed to restrain organized labor and contain inflation,
which rose only 7% during the first 10 months following the war, but his
unwillingness to scrap controls offset the credit he received from Congress
and the public. Opposition to the OPA mounted until it reached a crescendo
in 1946. With the agency’s mandate scheduled to expire July 1, Truman ap-
pealed to Congress to extend its authority. The House and Senate complied
but only after stripping the agency of most of its powers. Truman vetoed
the watered-down bill, and in the two-week period that followed inflation
increased by 25%. The House and Senate passed a second bill on July 15,
continuing price and rent controls for another year. Nevertheless, the Re-
publicans managed to blame the president for the runaway inflation that
had momentarily terrified the nation.
The immediate postwar years, then, were ones of stress and frustration.
Civilians and veterans alike had comforted themselves during the sacrifices
of World War II with expectations of a tranquil, stable postwar America, a
land of justice, equality, and expanding opportunity. Instead, they encoun-
tered housing shortages, continued rationing, inflation and price controls,
crowded classrooms, and an increasingly deadlocked government. The na-
tional mood was summed up in the bittersweet 1946 film, The Best Years
of Our Lives. Naturally, the electorate blamed the party in power. Truman
jokes abounded: “He reminds me of an uncle who played the piano in a
whorehouse two years before he found out what was goin’ on upstairs.” As
a result, in the 1946 midterm elections, the GOP won control of Congress
for the first time since 1928.
During President Truman’s first term in office, he and the Republicans in
Congress – often joined by southern Democrats – frequently had engaged
in bitter battles over aspects of social and economic policy. In September
1945, the president had called on Congress to revive and extend the New
Deal. Specifically, he proposed the extension of Social Security benefits
to cover millions of new workers, an increase in the minimum wage, the
establishment of a national system of health insurance, creation of new
The Republic in Transition 15

regional development projects similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority

(TVA), passage of a full employment bill, and reorganization of the execu-
tive branch. Congress passed the Employment Act of 1946, but it did not,
as its authors orignially intended, commit the federal government to public
works projects and control inflation when employment levels fell below a
certain level. Rather it provided for the establishment of a three-member
Council of Economic Advisers to study economic trends and recommend
to the president policies that would prevent or combat recessions and de-
pressions. Congress also approved with some modification the administra-
tion’s plan for reorganization of the federal government, but the House and
Senate would not go beyond these two measures. The Republican victory
in the midterm elections of 1946 seemed to guarantee a continuation of
congressional recalcitrance.
The leader of the new Republican majority in Congress was Senator
Robert A. Taft of Ohio. A states’ rights conservative, he was a trenchant
foe of the welfare state and preeminent champion of business interests. He
spoke for those Republicans who held a pseudoreligious view of America
as a largely stateless society of self-regulating individuals. For them, the
Great Depression had been a cataclysmic event that had paved the way
for the greatest threats to democracy, free enterprise, and individual lib-
erty that the Republic had yet encountered – Franklin D. Roosevelt and
the New Deal. Soon after the Eightieth Congress convened in early 1946,
Taft and Truman immediately joined battle over the Taft–Hartley bill, the
centerpiece of the conservatives’ legislative program. According to Republi-
cans, the National Labor Relations, or Wagner Act, which had been passed
as part of the New Deal in July 1935, had created an imbalance in the
labor–management equation in favor of unions. The American people, an-
gered particularly by the series of wartime strikes staged by John L. Lewis’s
United Mine Workers, were clearly in an antiunion mood, and the GOP in-
terpreted its victory in the 1946 midterm elections as a mandate to break
the back of organized labor.
In June 1947, both houses of Congress passed the Taft–Hartley Act by
large margins. Actually, the bill did not go as far as some conservatives
wanted. In its final form, the measure outlawed the closed shop (in which
union membership was required as a condition of employment) and cer-
tain “unfair labor practices” – refusal to bargain in good faith, secondary
boycotts (in which members of a nonstriking union boycotted the products
of a plant being struck by another union), jurisdictional strikes (in which a
union seeking to be recognized by the employer as sole bargaining agent,
struck to force that recognition), and exaction of pay for work not per-
formed. It permitted employers to sue unions for breach of contract and to
petition the National Labor Relations Board for elections to determine bar-
gaining agents. When the president found that a strike imperiled national
16 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

health or safety, he was empowered to impose “cooling off ” periods and

even to seek court injunctions suspending such work stoppages. Finally,
the measure required unions to register with and submit annual financial
statements to the secretary of labor, forbade union contributions to politi-
cal parties, and compelled union officials to submit affidavits swearing that
they were not members of the communist party. Denouncing Taft–Hartley
as nothing less than an act of class warfare that would divide the nation
for years to come, President Truman vetoed it in June 1947, only to see
his veto promptly overridden by both houses of Congress. With the presi-
dential election looming, he had suddenly become intensely interested in
ensuring that organized labor remained within the New Deal coalition. The
Taft–Hartley Act stood as the most important achievement of the conser-
vative coalition in the postwar era. Its most severe impact was probably on
the CIO’s “Operation Dixie,” a drive to unionize the traditionally antiunion
South. By 1954, 15 states, principally in the South and Southwest, had used
the Taft–Hartley Act as authority to pass “right-to-work” laws outlawing the
union (or closed) shop. To avoid unions, many labor-intensive industries –
textiles, for example – relocated to the right-to-work states. This trend had
the effect of ensuring low wages for workers in the states in question and
generally retarding the economic development of the South.
In areas free of ideological difference and on subjects not susceptible to
political advantage, there was a good deal of bipartisan cooperation during
the first Truman administration. An investigation into the circumstances
surrounding the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other in-
quiries had revealed that turf wars and institutional barriers had hampered
the war effort, especially during its early stages. In an effort to improve co-
ordination among the armed forces and increase the nation’s intelligence
capacity, in July 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act. It created
a unified military establishment by setting up a cabinet-level Department
of Defense, with the Army, Navy, and Air Force becoming subcabinet
departments answerable to the secretary of defense. A new body, the
National Security Council (NSC), composed of the president; vice
president; secretaries of defense, state, and treasury; and the chief of intel-
ligence, met regularly to plan for the nation’s strategic well-being. The act
made permanent the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was a creation of World
War II, and brought into being a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to coor-
dinate intelligence gathering abroad. At the time of its creation, there was
no intention to have the CIA engage in covert operations; its mission was
simply to gather information. But in future years, the CIA would interpret
the provisions in its original charter to authorize it to perform “such other
functions and duties related to intelligence” as the NSC might direct, and
give it responsibility for “protecting intelligence sources and methods” to
allow it to overthrow unfriendly governments, meddle in foreign elections,
and even raise secret foreign armies.
The Republic in Transition 17

At the behest of the Truman administration, Congress also enacted the

Presidential Succession Act of 1947, which inserted the speaker of the
House and the president pro tempore of the Senate ahead of the secre-
tary of state in the order of succession. This was based on the grounds that
elected rather than appointed officials should hold the highest office in the
land. In the end, however, the reorganization movement could not escape
the blight of partisanship. The Republican Eightieth Congress took it on
itself to pass and submit to the states the Twenty-Second Amendment to
the Constitution, which limits the president to two terms. It was, as every-
one recognized, a belated slap at Franklin D. Roosevelt, although in the
future Democrats would have more cause to rejoice at the amendment’s
existence than Republicans. After three years in office, President Truman
was still plagued by lingering doubts concerning his ability to do the job.
His approval rating had risen only slightly from the low of 32% he had
recorded in 1946. One wag, when asked what Roosevelt would do about
the Soviet menace abroad and the deadlock of democracy at home if he
were alive, remarked, “I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive.”
His lack of educational credentials and his sometimes embarrassing def-
erence to successful businessmen alienated liberals within the Democratic
Party while his determination to extend the New Deal and his veto of Taft–
Hartley aggrieved conservatives. “To err is Truman,” was one of America’s
most popular aphorisms in 1948. The president was not about to back
down in the face of his critics, however. Following the example of his pre-
decessors, Truman used the State of the Union address in 1948 to outline
the program on which he would run for reelection to office. The theme, he
declared, would be social and economic justice for all. He repeated his call
for a national health insurance program, extension of Social Security, and
an increase in the minimum wage. He also urged Congress to reintroduce
rent controls and embrace the notion of federal aid to education.

To Secure These Rights

World War II had created a rising level of expectations among African
Americans. During the war, labor shortages coupled with pressure from
civil rights activists and certain unions had increased blacks’ share of de-
fense jobs from 3% to 8%. A million African American soldiers had fought
to preserve democracy in Europe and the Pacific, and in the aftermath of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were determined to fight for full citizenship
under the law and equality of opportunity at home. “I spent four years in
the Army to free a bunch of Frenchmen and Dutchmen, and I’m hanged
if I’m going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around
when I’m back home,” declared one black veteran. Civil rights organiza-
tions, such as the NAACP and the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE),
the latter formed in 1942 (changed to Congress on Racial Equality in 1944),
18 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

targeted discrimination in employment; disfranchisement through the

poll tax, white primary, and other devices; and terrorism through beatings,
burnings, and lynchings. There were some successes.
Employing the nonviolent civil resistance techniques of Indian indepen-
dence leader Mahatma Ghandi, black activists attacked racial barriers both
north and south. In Washington, D.C., Patricia Harris led the first sit-in to
protest segregation and exclusion in public facilities. CORE staged a “free-
dom ride” to contest discrimination in interstate transport. Members trav-
eled by bus south from the nation’s capital but were arrested in Durham,
North Carolina. CORE members also staged lunch-counter sit-ins in New
York, New Jersey, and other northern states. The demonstrators were fre-
quently beaten and arrested, but a growing number of public restaurants
stopped segregating blacks and whites. In the South, African American vet-
erans headed straight for their local voter registration offices. Most were
threatened, many were beaten, and some were murdered. But there was
progress. In Atlanta, 18,000 blacks registered to vote and in Winston-Salem,
North Carolina, 3,000. In these two cities and in Greensboro, embryonic
black political machines began to emerge. Altogether the number of blacks
registered to vote in the South increased from 2% in 1940 to 12% in 1947.
Nonetheless, whites, particularly large land owners in the South and
businessmen in northern and midwestern urban areas, were determined
that blacks accept their old low-paying, menial jobs and acquiesce in their
continued exclusion from the power structure. The Raleigh News and Ob-
server was so angered by black veterans collecting government benefits
rather than returning to low-wage work that it suggested that the unem-
ployed “ought to be forced to watch themselves starve.” In Mississippi,
future civil rights leader Medgar Evers and four other African Americans
were barred from voting by armed whites. Men in uniform were assaulted
just for wearing those uniforms in public. In Georgia, Eugene Talmadge
was elected governor by promising to keep blacks away from the polls. For
white supremacists that abhorred violence, there were other techniques.
The vast majority of blacks in the South worked for whites. Activists, that
is, people who sought to exercise their constitutional rights, could simply
be fired or thrown off the land they were renting. When veterans rebelled,
ugly race riots broke out in cities across the United States, and in the end,
African Americans were forced once again to accept discrimination, dis-
franchisement, and impoverishment.
In 1946, President Truman had appointed the President’s Committee on
Civil Rights, composed of distinguished Americans of every color and re-
gion to look into the state of race relations and make recommendations.
Their report, To Secure These Rights, published in 1947, described a per-
vasive pattern of segregation and discrimination, both institutional and
informal, that reduced African Americans to second-class citizenship. It
called for the “elimination of segregation based on race, color, creed, or
The Republic in Transition 19

national origin, from American life.” The president’s February 1948 mes-
sage urged Congress to convert the committee’s recommendations into law.
In the first special civil rights message by a president, Truman depicted
an America where “not all groups are free to live and work where they
please or to improve their conditions of life by their own efforts.” The pres-
ident called specifically for a federal law to combat “the crime of lynching,
against which I cannot speak too strongly.” As he anticipated, it failed to
respond. On July 26,1948, through executive order, the president banned
racial discrimination in federal hiring and four days later ordered an end
to segregation in the armed forces.
Perhaps the most significant development in race relations in the United
States during the immediate postwar period was the integration of major
league baseball. The wave of racism that swept the United States in the
1890s and that led to the disfranchisement and segregation of African Amer-
icans affected the national pastime. Blacks were barred from established
professional organizations and relegated to teams in the Negro League,
some of which were owned by the proprietors of major league clubs. In
spite of the fact that black athletes such as Satchel Paige possessed talents
equal or superior to their white counterparts, they were forced to labor in
relative obscurity.
During World War II, black activists pushed for the integration of
baseball. One who responded was Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn
Dodgers. In 1945, he decided that the time had come to break the racial
barrier in the nation’s national pastime. The man he handpicked to do the
job was a remarkable person named Jack Roosevelt Robinson. The child
of southern sharecroppers who emigrated to California, Jackie Robinson
attended UCLA where he starred in a number of sports. His college creden-
tials helped him land a commission in the military during the war. To break
the color barrier in baseball, Rickey wanted a person with the courage to
challenge segregation and with the poise to withstand the abuse that would
surely accompany that challenge. He was impressed by the fact that Robin-
son had confronted and overcome efforts to segregate him while he was in
the military.
In 1946, Robinson was assigned to the Dodgers’ top farm team in Mon-
treal where he proceeded to lead the league in hitting. In April 1947, he
made his debut in Brooklyn. He was generally well received in New York,
particularly after hometown fans saw what he could do with the bat and
glove. On the road, however, he was subjected to verbal and even physi-
cal abuse from racist fans. The Saint Louis Cardinals, the major league’s
southernmost team at that time, even threatened to forfeit rather that take
the field with a “Negro.” However, the black star persevered. Just after he
was picked up by the Dodgers, the press had questioned Robinson on what
his future career might prove. He responded, “It proves, or at least it in-
dicates to me, that once the ice is broken and the idea accepted, the thing
20 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

is entirely possible.” Before Robinson’s retirement in 1956, several other

black athletes had signed major league contracts.

Civil Liberties under Siege

The racism that characterized American life in the years immediately fol-
lowing World War II was part of a larger nativist movement that saw tra-
ditional American folkways and institutions, including segregation, being
threatened by foreign cultures and ideologies. Conflicts from the Revolu-
tionary War to World War I, featuring relentless appeals to patriotism and
paeans to Americanism, had bred intolerance for difference and change.
World War II was notable for the relative respect for civil liberties, except-
ing those of Japanese Americans and German aliens, but wartime tensions
coupled with the emerging rivalry with the Soviet Union gave rise to a be-
lated second Red Scare. From 1945 to 1950, nativists sought not only to
preserve existing patterns of racial subordination, but also to prevent the
emergence of political radicalism in the form of communism. Opportunis-
tic political figures exploited nativist fears for their own purposes. In an
effort to discredit New Deal programs and liberalism in general, a group of
conservatives declared them to be extensions of Marxism-Leninism, man-
ifestations of an invasion of American political culture by an “alien” ideol-
ogy. Increasingly, GOP leaders found it profitable to label the Democratic
Party as soft on communism. Racists denounced integration as a com-
munist plot to “mongrelize” the United States. Conservative union leaders
in the AFL–CIO and other national labor organizations resorted to label-
ing their enemies as either communists or “fellow travelers” – communist
sympathizers.
Despite the fact that the United States was born out of revolution, it had
throughout its history proven itself to be one of the most politically conser-
vative societies in history. Anarchism, nihilism, communism, even social-
ism, which became increasingly mainstream in Europe following World
War I, never emerged from the political shadows in the United States. The
Communist party gained limited popularity during the Depression as some
Americans, disenchanted with capitalism, looked to the Soviet experiment
as a hopeful example. Rumors concerning Stalin’s massive purges of real
and suspected political opponents during the 1930s coupled with the Nazi–
Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 did much to discredit the Communist
Party of the United States (CPUS). Despite the Soviet–American alliance,
party membership continued to decline until it stood at a mere 20,000.
Although the Soviet Union did manage to place secret agents within the
federal government between 1945 and 1950, and these operatives turned
over vital, classified information to the Kremlin, the CPUS never posed a
threat to the established order either through the legitimate electoral pro-
cess or through subversion. The Kremlin rarely used members of the CPUS
The Republic in Transition 21

as spies because they were closely scrutinized by the Federal Bureau of In-
vestigation (FBI), which had thoroughly penetrated the organization. Nev-
ertheless, Americans recoiled from Marxism-Leninism, which they equated
with Soviet communism. It was godless, authoritarian, repressive, aggres-
sive, and socialistic. This long-standing ideological aversion, coupled with
the military might of the Soviet Union and the superpatriotism spawned
by the war, made Americans susceptible to anticommunist hysteria.
The principal instrument available to those who wanted to promote
and profit from a campaign against communist subversion was the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Established originally to com-
bat fascism, the committee was given permanent status and broad pow-
ers to investigate domestic subversion in 1945. The legislation converting
HUAC to a standing committee was the work of Representative John E.
Rankin (D-Mississippi), who had denounced the decision by the Red Cross
not to label blood according to race as a communist plot and who had ac-
cused “enemies of Christianity” – in particular, Jews – of attempting to take
over the national media. Liberals protested. The Nation denounced HUAC
and pleaded that “the only way to save the country from the indignity
of these repeated witch-hunts is to abolish the committee.” But nativism,
nourished by the burgeoning East–West confrontation, proved too strong.
In 1947, following the Republican victory in the midterm congressional
elections, Representative J. Parnell Thomas (R-New Jersey) became chair
of HUAC. No sooner had he taken up the gavel than he announced the
existence of a conspiracy to overthrow the government, a conspiracy cen-
tered in Hollywood. As historian Walter Goodman put it: “[T]o Rankin,
Hollywood was Semitic territory. To Thomas it was New Deal Territory. To
the entire Committee it was a veritable sun around which the press wor-
shipfully rotated. And it was also a place where real live Communists could
readily be found.”
Judging from the products that the motion picture industry turned out,
it was a hotbed of red-blooded Americanism. It had enthusiastically coop-
erated with the government in producing wartime propaganda films such
as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Only three releases, including the absurdly
flawed Mission To Moscow, could have been interpreted as pro-Soviet. But,
as Goodman pointed out, there were communists in Hollywood, principally
among members of the Screen Actors Guild. Scriptwriters were mercilessly
exploited by ruthless studio heads such as Sam Goldwyn and Jack Warner.
They had no control over their scripts, which producers cut and spliced to
suit their whim, and they were paid a pittance.
On October 20, 1947, HUAC began hearing testimony from “friendly
witnesses” encouraged by Goldwyn and Warner to cooperate with the com-
mittee. Actor Gary Cooper denounced communism for “not being on the
level.” Others, including Adolph Menjou, declared that Hollywood was rid-
dled with reds and fellow travelers. These anticommunists were followed
22 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

by 10 writers and directors, including Ring Lardner, Jr., and John Howard
Lawson, who were or had been members of the CPUS. Upon the advice of
their lawyers, they decided to seek refuge in the First Amendment, which
guaranteed freedom of speech and political association rather than the
Fifth Amendment, which protected citizens from giving self-incriminating
evidence. Several were defiant, unrepentant, and abusive in their testimony.
The Hollywood Ten were convicted of contempt of Congress and, after the
Supreme Court upheld their convictions, sentenced to one year in prison.
HUAC’s investigation completely intimidated the motion picture indus-
try. Following the hearings, the heads of all major studios pledged not to
hire communists or communist sympathizers. The industry created an un-
official blacklist and dozens of writers, directors, and actors were barred
forever from practicing their trade in the United States. Refusing to cooper-
ate in Congress’s investigation or being mentioned in another’s testimony
was frequently enough to earn a writer, actor, or director a place on the
blacklist. Soon the witch-hunt spread to New York City, where it contami-
nated the burgeoning television industry. After refusing to cooperate with
HUAC, actor Zero Mostel said, “I am a man of a thousand faces, all of them
blacklisted.”
While red-baiters in Congress were laboring to rid the entertainment
industry of subversive influences, the courts were moving against the CPUS
itself. In July 1948, a federal grand jury indicted Gus Hall, Eugene Dennis,
and 10 other party officials on charges of violating the Smith Act. Passed
in 1940 and then directed primarily against fascists, the Smith Act made
it a federal crime to conspire to overthrow the government or to belong
to a group advocating its overthrow. The trial, which began in January
1949, quickly degenerated into a shouting match between the defendants
and the prosecution. Hall, Dennis, and their lawyers argued that the court
had no right to try them because the jury excluded racial minorities and
poor people. In the fall, Judge Harold Medina sentenced not only the CPUS
officials to prison for violating the Smith Act, but also their lawyers for not
curbing their courtroom outbursts.
In a landmark civil liberties decision, in 1951, the Supreme Court upheld
the conviction of the Communist party officials. Writing for the majority
in Dennis v. United States, Chief Justice Fred Vinson ruled that citizens
of the United States had no right to advocate violent rebellion when av-
enues for peaceful change were open to them. Justices Hugo Black and
William O. Douglas argued in vain that the CPUS did not advocate force-
ful overthrow of the federal authority. Determined to leave no room for
doubt, Congress in 1950 passed the McCarran or Internal Security Act. That
measure proclaimed the existence of an international communist conspir-
acy, which posed an immediate threat to the United States. Members of
communist-affiliated organizations were required to register with the fed-
eral government or face a fine of up to $10,000 and imprisonment for up
to four years. Registrees could be denied passports and were barred from
The Republic in Transition 23

holding jobs with the federal government or in the defense industry. The
McCarran Act authorized the government to deport naturalized citizens
and alleged subversives during periods of national emergency. President
Truman denounced the McCarran Act as a gross violation of civil liberties
and vetoed it. “In a free country we punish men for the crimes they com-
mit,” Truman charged, “but never for the opinions they have.” Congress
promptly overrode his veto in 1951.
In an effort to safeguard the “purity” of American culture and society,
nativists attempted to maintain and even strengthen the nation’s already
rigorous immigration statutes. They were only partially successful, how-
ever, because the war had caused tens of thousands of American service
people to become intertwined with peoples of other cultures. That inter-
mingling, in turn, had created a refugee problem of horrific proportions.
In 1946, Congress passed the War Brides Act, which over the next four
years opened America’s doors to some 100,000 wives and children of U.S.
veterans. Congress was more divided about the 1 million displaced people
living in squalid refugee camps in Europe.
World War II had ripped the fabric of European society, uprooting mil-
lions of French, Dutch, Belgians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Italians, and
Russians from their homes. Many died, many others were able to return
home, and others simply had no place to go. As of 1946, Allied occupation
authorities in Western Europe operated squalid camps that housed Poles,
Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians who had fled in the wake of Soviet
occupation; Russians who did not want to return home to imprisonment
or death; Germans expelled from Eastern Europe; and some 200,000 Jews,
many of them survivors of Nazi death camps. In an effort to relieve the
suffering of these victims of Nazi and Soviet persecution, Congress in 1948
passed the Displaced Persons Act, which increased immigration quotas by
2,000. Anti-Semites in Congress added restrictive language intended to bar
Jewish immigration. A defiant President Truman ordered immigration and
naturalization agents to bend the rules as far as possible, but the result
was negligible. By the time Congress got around to passing a more liberal
displaced persons measure in 1950, a majority of the death camp survivors
had immigrated to Israel. Relatively few of the 400,000 people who came
to America under the displaced persons legislation were Jewish. In 1952,
Congress passed the McCarran–Walter Act, which restored the restrictive
provisions of the 1920s immigration legislation, including a quota of 100
for each Pacific and Asian nation.

The Election of 1948

With Harry Truman’s popularity plummeting and the Democrats divided,
Republicans approached the 1948 presidential election with high expecta-
tions. If they could avoid stupid mistakes, the White House seemed to be
theirs for the taking. Conservatives favored Robert Taft for the nomination,
24 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

but many of the rank and file feared that his dour, humorless personality
would turn off voters. The eastern wing of the party, moderately progres-
sive in domestic affairs and internationalist in foreign policy, struggled to
develop an alternative. They approached the immensely popular Dwight D.
Eisenhower, the hero of the Normandy invasion then serving as president
of Columbia University, but he had not yet decided whether he was a Re-
publican or a Democrat. Although Thomas E. Dewey had lost to Franklin
Roosevelt in 1940, anti-Taftites decided that he deserved another chance.
His progressive record as governor of New York and his advocacy of
military alliances and foreign aid seemed to put him in the political main-
stream, while his attractive appearance and sophistication seemed to make
him the perfect alternative to Truman. The Republican convention nomi-
nated Dewey on the first ballot and chose California governor Earl Warren
as his running mate. The platform endorsed most New Deal reforms as well
as the bipartisan foreign policy the Truman administration was then im-
plementing. Like Alfred M. Landon, the Republican presidential candidate
in 1936, Dewey just promised to run things more efficiently.
Meanwhile, internecine warfare was wrecking the Democratic Party. The
chief rebel in the field was former vice president and secretary of com-
merce, Henry A. Wallace. During World War II, Wallace had become the
preeminent champion of social justice within the Democratic Party. He had
declared that the era following the end of hostilities would be “the century
of the common man.” No longer would government be dominated by polit-
ical and economic elites. Democracy and equality of opportunity would at
long last become realities and, as a result, the good life would come within
the reach of everyone. Falling out with the Truman administration over its
efforts to discipline organized labor and to resist the spread of communism
in Europe, Wallace organized the Progressive Citizens of America in 1947
and worked to rally former New Dealers to his banner.
As the date for the Democratic National Convention approached, lib-
erals struggled to choose between Wallace and Truman. In the end, labor
leaders and former New Dealers decided they could not embrace the Pro-
gressive Party. Many agreed with Wallace’s call for nationalization of basic
industries and full and immediate civil rights for African Americans, but
they could not tolerate his stand on foreign policy. Wallace’s 1946 Madison
Square Garden speech, in which he had called for free trade with Eastern
Europe and accommodation with the Soviet Union, had convinced many
hard-line anticommunists within the Democratic Party that he could not be
trusted. Indeed, Cold War liberals had formed their own organization, the
Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), to fight for social justice at home
and freedom and democracy abroad. This organization included social
justice advocates such as Eleanor Roosevelt, intellectuals such as Reinhold
Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and labor leaders like CIO chief Walter
Reuther. After briefly casting about for an alternative to the unpopular
The Republic in Transition 25

Truman, they approached Eisenhower, but he had still not decided on a

party affiliation. Reluctantly, the ADA and CIO decided to cast their lot
with the man from Missouri.
In 1948, the Democrats somewhat ironically chose to meet in
Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. By the time the delegates assem-
bled in July, the rebellious left wing of the party had already broken away
under Wallace. The task at hand was to keep southerners, up in arms over
the president’s civil rights program, in the fold. In an effort to avoid an
open breach with the sons of Dixie, the administration proposed a plank
in the platform that opposed discrimination only in general terms. Civil
rights activists, however, wanted to call on Congress for specific action
to end lynching, eliminate discrimination in the workplace and housing,
and ensure the right to vote to all regardless of color. Speaking for this
group, Minneapolis Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey electrified the delegates
and set off a 10-minute demonstration when he urged the Democratic Party
“to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the
bright sunshine of human rights.” Indignant delegates from Alabama and
Mississippi got up and walked out of the convention. Exhausted and dispir-
ited, the remainder of the convention renominated Truman and selected
Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky as his running mate.
It was two o’clock in the morning before Truman had a chance to ad-
dress the convention, but his performance proved worth waiting for. In
a rousing acceptance speech, he promised an all-out effort and victory in
the end. He was glad to see, he said, that the Republican platform had en-
dorsed many of the programs he had been advocating. To the delight of his
audience, Truman announced that he was calling the Republican Eightieth
Congress into special session on July 26, the day Missourians planted their
turnips. The GOP could make good on their promises, and the American
people could then compare its record with his. Taft accused Truman of dirty
pool, but the president kept to his course. Congress met for two weeks in
late July and early August; as Truman anticipated, it accomplished exactly
nothing.
Unbeknownst to the Republicans and most Democrats, Truman had de-
veloped a sound strategy for winning the 1948 election. Guided by pres-
idential aide Clark Clifford, the president’s advisers recognized that for
him to win, he had to capture the midwestern and western farm belts. His
strong advocacy of agricultural price supports and his Missouri origins
stood him in good stead with this constituency. In metropolitan areas, the
Democratic candidate would have to carry labor and African Americans.
Truman’s veto of Taft–Hartley and his February civil rights recommenda-
tions to Congress gave him a leg up with those voters. Finally, the president’s
inner circle counted on the “Solid South” remaining within the Democratic
fold. With the South, Midwest, and West, Truman could afford to lose some
traditionally New Deal strongholds in the East which might lean toward
26 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

Wallace. The principal problem with this strategy, as it turned out, was the
fidelity of the South.
Alienated southerners met in Birmingham, Alabama, “the cradle of the
Confederacy,” on July 17, waved the stars and bars, consumed immense
amounts of bourbon and branch water, paid homage to John C. Calhoun,
and formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, subsequently labeled “Dix-
iecrats” by the press. The new party pledged to do whatever was necessary
to preserve the South’s “unique” social system and nominated Governor
J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for the presidency and Governor
Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi for the vice presidency. The Dixiecrats
hoped to capture enough electoral votes to deny either of the major parties
an electoral college victory, thus throwing the election into the House of
Representatives where, they hoped, they would be the deciding factor.
Republican confidence mounted as the left and right wings of the Demo-
cratic Party pummeled the center. Governor Dewey conducted a mild and
dignified campaign, avoiding controversy whenever possible. Disgusted
with the GOP candidate’s blandness, the Louisville Courier-Journal ob-
served that Dewey’s four major speeches could be condensed into four
“historic” sentences: “Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish.
You cannot have freedom without liberty. The future lies ahead.” As his
campaign began, Harry Truman was one of the few people in the United
States in 1948 who believed that he could win. He set out on a 31,000-mile
whistle stop campaign, during which he discarded his prepared speeches –
he tended to deliver set-pieces in a rather wooden fashion – and employed
instead short, fiery, off-the-cuff talks in which he invariably castigated the
“do-nothing” Eightieth Congress. “Give ‘em hell Harry” became the first
presidential candidate to campaign in Harlem. Meanwhile, Clifford, Hu-
bert Humphrey, and various ADA members did their best to link Henry
Wallace with communism. He obligingly played into their hands by re-
fusing to criticize Stalin and the Soviet Union, attacking Democrats who
had supported the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, and refusing to
repudiate the Communist Party of the United States (CPUS) when it of-
fered to aid his candidacy. Late in the campaign, conservative journal-
ists, picking up on the alleged mystical strain in Wallace’s personality,
asked the independent candidate if he were not the author of the so-called
“guru letters,” correspondence between Wallace and a Russian theosophist
that were filled with references to the occult and referred to Franklin D.
Roosevelt as “The Flaming One.” When Wallace refused to deny authorship,
he became something of a laughingstock.
On election eve, all observers picked Dewey to win; the Chicago Tribune
went so far as to print extras with a banner headline proclaiming “Dewey
Defeats Truman.” In one of the most stunning political upsets in Ameri-
can history, Truman captured 303 electoral votes to Dewey’s 189. He gar-
nered 24 million popular votes to his Republican challenger’s 22 million.
The Republic in Transition 27

8 4
4
11
5
4 12 3
6 4 4
3 19 47 16
10
6
35 4
28 13 25 8
3 4 16
6 8 15 8
11 11 3
25 1 11 8
10 14
9
4 4 8
9 11 12
10
23

1 8
11 Divided

Electoral Popular Percentage of

Vote Vote Popular Vote

Democratic
303 24,105,812 49.5%
Harry S. Truman

Republican
189 21,970,065 45.1%
Thomas E. Dewey

States’ Rights
39 1,169,063 2.4%
Strom Thurmond

Minor parties – – 1,442,667 3.0%

Map 1–1. The election of 1948.

Wallace and Thurmond trailed far behind with 1 million each. The Dix-
iecrats captured the electoral votes of Mississippi, Alabama, South Car-
olina, and Louisiana, but their total fell far short of the number needed to
throw the election into the House. The revolt of right and left had actually
worked to Truman’s advantage. The Dixiecrat rebellion reassured black vot-
ers who had questioned the Democrat’s commitment to civil rights, while
the existence of the Progressive Party made it difficult to accuse Truman of
being “soft on communism.” The Republicans were bitter and frustrated;
never again, they swore, would they wage a “metoo” campaign.

The Fair Deal

In his annual State of the Union message in 1949, President Truman un-
veiled the domestic program for his second term. Every American, he
told the House and Senate, which had brand-new, although razor-thin,
Democratic majorities, was entitled to a “fair deal” from their government.
28 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

Truman’s Fair Deal included an increase in the minimum wage from $0.40
to $0.75 per hour, an extension of Social Security benefits, repeal of Taft–
Hartley, a federal health insurance plan, civil rights legislation, federal
funds for the construction of low-cost housing, and a guaranteed income
for farmers. Although the president was fresh from a stunning victory and
could count on Democratic majorities, a number of factors cast long shad-
ows on the prospects for enactment of his program. Southern Democrats
were alienated from the party leadership and were much more likely to
cooperate with Taft and the Republicans on domestic legislation than
the White House. Harry Truman lacked the political skills of his illus-
trious predecessor. Perhaps most importantly, despite pockets of poverty,
Americans were enjoying an unparalleled period of prosperity. The depriva-
tion and social insecurity that had fueled the New Deal were almost entirely
lacking in 1948 and 1949. Finally, Congress and the public were increas-
ingly distracted by Cold War crises abroad and the search for communist
subversives at home.
The administration’s campaign to repeal Taft–Hartley quickly stalled,
primarily because the White House, fearful of losing union support, was un-
willing to accept a compromise bill. One of the few areas in which Truman
and Taft saw eye to eye was federal aid to education, but even their power-
ful alliance was not enough to overcome the conflict between Protestants
and Catholics over whether aid should be extended to private, parochial
schools as well as to public institutions. A $300 million bill that would have
made direct grants to the states for the support of public education died in
the House. The administration’s health insurance plan called for prepaid
medical, dental, and hospital care to be funded through payroll deductions,
employer contributions, and federal subsidies. As in 1945, the American
Medical Association (AMA) chose to view the plan as a conspiracy to limit
doctors’ incomes and their freedom of action. It denounced Truman’s health
care scheme as “socialized medicine” and launched a multimillion dol-
lar lobbying campaign. Congress once again succumbed to AMA pressure
and, as a result, one of the principal goals of the social justice movement
remained unfulfilled.
In April 1949, Secretary of Agriculture Charles F. Brannan presented
the administration’s farm security plan to Congress. With the goal of main-
taining a minimum income for American farm families, the Brannan plan
would keep high, fixed subsidies for basic commodities in place. For other
perishable products, the Agriculture Department would make up the differ-
ence between the market price and what it deemed a fair price. Opponents,
including the major farm organizations, criticized the quota provisions of
the program, and charged that it would regiment and “socialize” Amer-
ican farming. Even small farmers were concerned because the adminis-
tration’s approach would abandon the concept of “parity,” the practice of
The Republic in Transition 29

using the relatively prosperous period from 1909 to 1914 to measure farm
supports. Similar to the administration’s health care scheme, the Brannan
Plan died aborning. The only things that prevented a major farm reces-
sion in the late 1940s were huge demands for food and fiber created by
the Marshall Plan and the Korean War. The administration’s plans for a
Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) with the power to penalize
job discrimination in both the public and the private sectors foundered
on the opposition of former Dixiecrats who referred to the proposed new
employment commission as a “Democratic version of Reconstruction.”
Relying on Senate Rule XXII, which required a two thirds vote to shut
off debate, the Upper House filibustered FEPC bills to death in 1949 and
1950.
The second Truman administration achieved some isolated victories.
The National Housing Act of 1949, passed in July with the help of Senator
Taft, provided funds for slum clearance and for the construction of 810,000
units of low-cost housing. Although it rejected the administration’s health
care program, Congress approved the Hill–Burton Act, which made federal
matching grants available to the states for the construction of nonprofit
clinics and hospitals. In August 1950, Congress expanded the Social Se-
curity Act, raising benefits and bringing more than 10 million additional
people under its umbrella.
Virtually nothing of significance was accomplished on the home front
from 1950 to 1952. The conservative coalition continued to hold the bal-
ance of power in Congress, and the persistence of prosperity eliminated the
economic impetus for social justice. The very poor – blacks, Hispanics, and
whites – tended to be disfranchised through law, custom, or apathy. In ad-
dition, the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 diverted the nation’s
attention and resources away from domestic reform. Finally, the Truman
administration was buffeted by charges of corruption and cronyism
throughout the second half of its second term in office. Fueled by Repub-
lican partisanship and the disgust of members of Truman’s own party, the
anticorruption campaign blossomed as congressional committee after con-
gressional committee investigated wrongdoing in high places. Although
Truman was never personally implicated in “the mess in Washington,”
many of his closest associates were. Congressional investigators uncov-
ered a nest of “five percenters” – individuals who sold actual or pretended
influence to would-be government contractors. A committee headed by
Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright revealed that officials of the Recon-
struction Finance Corporation regularly granted or obtained loans for fi-
nancially shaky business concerns and then quit and went to work for those
same firms at lucrative salaries. Truman, as usual, stuck by his friends. One
Gallup poll conducted in the midst of the scandals gave the president a pal-
try 23% approval rating.
30 Quest for Identity: America Since 1945

Summary
The years immediately following World War II were ones of recovery, con-
solidation, prosperity, and limited social progress. Victory over the Axis
powers drew the United States together, instilled an unparalleled sense of
confidence, and fostered a desire to enjoy the fruits of victory. But a return
to normality meant different things to different people. The successful and
upwardly mobile wanted to return to the old ways. Because prosperity bred
by the war continued throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, and hun-
dreds of thousands of former working-class Americans were able to move
into the middle class, this meant that a majority of Americans were conser-
vative, committed to the status quo. For others – some women, minorities,
unorganized industrial workers, and sharecroppers – the good life meant
change. African Americans and Hispanics acted individually and collec-
tively to enter the mainstream economically and politically. Although they
made some gains, they were largely frustrated by the white power struc-
ture. These rising, disappointed expectations created pent-up energy that
would burst forth during the 1950s and 1960s. The same was true of those
women who sought careers outside the home or for those who simply de-
sired a choice, a choice as to whether to be a mother and housewife, to
have a career, or to have both; to have sex on their own terms; or to bear
unwanted children.
The GI generation that emerged from World War II was upwardly mo-
bile but generally conservative. Some 2 million Americans were educated
under the GI bill, leading to the greater democratization of higher edu-
cation and of American society in general. Young men and women who
entered the professional work force were interested in security, not risk
taking – an attitude that dovetailed not coincidentally with unprecedented
growth and consolidation in the corporate world. Young people married
earlier and at a higher rate. They also had more children. The resulting
baby boom laid the basis for the consumerism and youth culture of the
1950s and 1960s. Increasingly affluent, educated whites moved to subur-
bia leaving much of urban America inhabited by the chronically poor and
disadvantaged.
Politically, the post–World War II years were ones of consolidation
and modest advance. Republicans and Democrats were committed to the
preservation of the basic New Deal structure and, as a result, the federal
government continued to play a large role in the economic and social life of
the United States. Harry Truman pressed for extension of Social Security
and other New Deal programs as well as the establishment of new initia-
tives in agriculture, housing, education, medical insurance, and civil rights.
However, he was generally contained by the conservative coalition, a com-
bination of Republicans and southern Democrats that dominated Congress
during these years. Although periodically reviled during his nearly eight
years of office, Truman remained president and was able to lead the nation
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 Bullet in brain: Crises; cortical blindness; vertigo;
hallucinations.

Case 105. (Lereboullet and Mouzon, July, 1917.)

An invalided soldier, 40, was sent to be observed, Oct. 23, 1916,

because he wanted his pension renewed. He had been retired a year
before for diminution of binocular vision with impaired perspective of
objects in the right half of the visual field. He had now become
completely blind.
He had been wounded, March 12, 1915, in the Argonne, without
losing consciousness. He was wounded at ten o’clock at night and
waited until the next day to walk to the ambulance and was at this
time able to see perfectly. Arriving at the ambulance he lost
consciousness. He was trephined but remembers nothing about the
trephining.
His memory grew better from his arrival at a hospital in the rear in
April. An attempt was made to remove the bullet in May, 1915.
Though the surgeon’s finger was pushed as far as the tentorium the
patient did not lose consciousness or sight, but on leaving the
operating room he fainted and, after a few days of restlessness and
delirium, he became completely blind. There was a cerebral hernia
difficult to reduce. Vision became a little better and light and persons
could be distinguished at the time when he was retired. A month
after the operation there was a convulsive crisis beginning in the left
arm, affecting the legs and ending in unconsciousness. Several
similar crises occurred in August, sometimes with and sometimes
without loss of consciousness. Later these crises began to be limited
to the left side and then to be ushered in by visual hallucinations. At
home he was unable to care for, clothe or feed himself. The crises
became more frequent. The visual hallucinations began to dominate.
This situation lasted to February, 1916, when the blindness which
had been increasing since the onset of the hallucinations became
complete. The crises now became less frequent and intense.
Headaches not severe were exaggerated after seizures. The patient
acted like a totally blind person and said that he had before him a
uniform and constant gray without any light or dark spots or any
color. Upon this background bizarre pictures, caricatures, disguised
persons, animals or nameless things appeared colorless without
relief, in silhouette, but highly suggestive of reality to such a degree
that at first, according to the patient, he had made gestures to
reach, or push aside these pictures. The crises were Jacksonian.
Pallor, perspiration, shivering, irresponsiveness, clonic spasms of
left arm followed. The patient always had a premonition permitting
him to get into bed if he was sitting, for example, in his chair.
Sometimes there was a dizzy sensation as if the body were being
rotated to the left. This sensation did not occur at the beginning of
the seizure and the patient fought against it, turning to the right.
Sometimes he felt as if he were sliding at great speed down an
inclined plane. Headaches and sleepiness followed, but there was
never any complete loss of consciousness of memory.
The eye grounds proved normal and all the photomotor reflexes
were normal, though there was no pupil reflex to pain. The patient
could write readily to dictation printed letters. It would seem that
these printed letters mean that he had visual memories, as he traced
the characters as if from a design. Speech was monotonous with
some stuttering; but his speech had always been of this sort
according to information. He walked with difficulty, not merely on
account of his visual but on account of his equilibration disorders.
Outside of his seizures he always turned to the right and if left to
himself standing he turned to the right. If asked to walk straight
ahead, he always turned to the right. Silent and uncommunicative,
he was amiable and sometimes even gay. He often had troublous
dreams, sometimes seeing his relatives. He said he could bring up in
his mind the faces of his relatives and even the appearance of the
Salpêtrière. Reflexes and sensations were normal. There was a
traumatic rupture of the tympanum. Lumbar puncture showed a
slight excess of albumin and 1.8 lymphocytes to the cubic millimeter.
The Mauser bullet was found by X-ray in the left calcarine region
with its base touching the median line, and applied to the inner table
of the skull about a centimeter above the internal occipital
protuberance pointing forward, outward, and upward. He was
treated on a salt free diet with bromides. The seizures grew fewer
and at the time of report two months had elapsed with nothing but a
slight vertigo and frequent nightmares. Intellectually also the patient
had improved.
The case is one of cortical blindness. The seizures are explained
by the vicinity of the right Rolandic region to the lesion. The rotatory
vertigo is to be explained by the contact of the Mauser bullet with
the tentorium and vermis of the cerebellum, which may also explain
the difficulties in orientation that occurred between the crises. The
visual hallucinations are doubtless due to lesion of the calcarine
region.
 Tunisian theopath with mystical hallucinations; gun-shot
wound of occiput (bullet extracted): After the trauma, Lilliputian
hallucinations and micro-megalopsia.

Case 106. (Laignel-Lavastine and Courbon, 1917.)

A. ben S. was sent to Villejuif with the diagnosis: “depression,

feeling of impotence, discouragement,” having been found on the
public street. He was indifferent, almost completely mute, and was
at first considered not to understand French. In a fortnight, however,
he was talking freely and was then found to be afflicted with
hallucinations, melancholia, and delusions, apparently following
trauma to the skull.
A. ben S. might have been about thirty years old, and was of a
rich family, indigenous in Tunis, well educated in the Koran and
Arabic literature.
Upon examination, this Tunisian gunner showed contraction of
visual fields, poor color vision, and general hypalgesia. During
examination, the man seized the needle and plunged it deeply under
his skin, exclaiming that a prophet felt nothing and that he could be
cut into bits without feeling pain.
It seems that he had had divine visions from early childhood. In
his youth he had once gone to a mountain near his home and talked
with Mohammed and Allah. Of course, Allah did not appear in
human form, but he appeared like a ball or a wheel of fire, slowly
turning. Mohammed was a tall man, with a long white beard, his
eyes darting rays of fire, and his forehead bearing a gleaming bright
body. Allah was heard talking to Mohammed. Orders were given
concerning the sun and stars. Subterranean treasures were
displayed, as well as Paradise full of yellow, blue, and green houris,
transparent, such that, when food was taken, it could be seen going
down their throats. Hell too was visible, and the devil very tall and
black, an eye behind and another on top. There were also many
genii—little men who climbed over the Tunisian’s body. Sometimes in
dreams, Allah carried him to all countries of the earth. It was hard to
tell whether these effects were hallucinations or vivid imaginings.
The Tunisian had been wounded after several months of service by
two bullets in one day: the one causing an insignificant lip-wound;
the other entering the skull behind. After several months the bullet
had been extracted by trephining.
His further history was obscured by the fact that he wove
delusional elements into his story. He said, for example, that he had
been court-martialed, though there was no evidence that this was a
fact. It is probable that after his wound the patient in a delirium felt
that he was going to be shot. The visual hallucinations were very
interesting, being Lilliputian. He would see three or four hundred
Tunisian gunners walking along, knee-high or taller. Sometimes they
all would stop and aim at him. He also showed micromegalopsia,
real objects changing their height under his eyes. Both the Lilliputian
hallucinations and the micromegalopsia dated from the trauma to
the skull. There was no change whatever in the mystical delusions
concerning Allah and Mohammed. These he had before the trauma.
 Meningococcus meningitis with apparent recovery: Dementing
psychosis.

Case 107. (Maixandeau, 1915.)

A soldier in the Heavy Artillery, 42, developed occipital headaches

and Kernig’s sign, December 27, 1915.
December 31, at the Hôtel-Dieu, he showed myosis, slight
photophobia, meningitic tâche, temperature 39.6, pulse 84, heart
sounds dull. Lumbar puncture: hemorrhagic fluid.
January 1, the headache was intense, neck stiffness increased,
Kernig’s sign less marked; morning and afternoon temperature 39.2.
Lumbar puncture yielded hypertensive cloudy fluid and 30 cubic
centimeters of serum were administered.
This dose was repeated January 2 and January 3, on which date
there was no headache.
January 4, Kernig’s sign and neck stiffness were diminished; fine
râles at the bases without dulness. 30 cubic centimeters of electragol
were injected intravenously.
January 5, Kernig and neck stiffness slight. Meningitic tâche;
exaggerated knee-jerks; unequal pupils; temp. 36.6 morning, 39.4
afternoon; respiration 36; pulse 120; no râles; splenic enlargement.
6, no headache or photophobia; constipation; fine râles, right
base; spartein; meningococci found in hypertensive spinal fluid. 30
cc. serum.
7, more râles; exaggerated heart sounds; intestinal worms in
stools.
 8, temperature fell to 37; pulse to 90.
9, patient worse; involuntary stools; Kernig’s sign; stiff neck; fever.
30 cc. serum injected.
10, 20 cc. injected.
11, delirious all night; tetaniform stiffness of neck; more râles.
12, delirious, incoherent words, Cheyne-Stokes breathing.
13, less stiffness, Kernig almost absent; pupils normal; Romberg
sign slightly developed; pulse 120.
14, a few râles at right base.
15, pains in elbows, knees and hands with joint swelling; moist
râles; temp. 38.4; pulse 140. Digitalon.
16 and 17, serum erythema of thorax; edema of left knee; pulse
150; spartein 16.
17, ice pack over heart.
18, edema of knee diminished; no headache, delirium or pupillary
sign.
19, improvement. Temperature normal thereafter.
20 and 21, fine râles. Then all symptoms disappeared.
Recovery was predicted, but on January 28 it was observed that
the patient was untidy, made mistakes in dressing, such as trying to
put his legs into the armholes of his shirt, and denied the most
evident facts: His képi on his head, he said it was not. Face drawn;
skin yellow. Appearance of asthenia. Deep depression and hebetude.
At this time the knee-jerks were exaggerated, pupils unequal,
vermicular tremor of tongue; the patient walked on a broad base
with tremulous legs suggesting contracture and weakness.
February 8, in a similar state the patient wandered about his
room, moving his bed and chairs about, answering questions with an
absent air. He had now been taught to be less untidy.
 March 5, stiff neck and Kernig’s sign were distinct. He made
believe he was on his farm. Ecchymosis of right upper eyelid: he had
fallen (his sheep had pushed him over!). The improbability of this
idea did not persuade him to think it had not happened. He walked
after the manner of a tabetic.
In April he became bedridden, unable to walk, with marked
stiffness and Kernig’s sign. He had at this time periods of excitement
in which he would tear the bedclothes. He was invalided as
demented.
 Meningococcus meningitis.

Case 108. (Eschbach and Lacaze, November, 1915.)

During his eleven months captivity at Grafenwöhr, Eschbach and

Lacaze had the opportunity of observing the case of a soldier, 24,
who sustained a shell-wound in the left lung and was made prisoner
August 20, 1914, at Chateau Salins. He got well of his wound, but
February 16, 1915, began to cry out and was restless in the night.
He was found on the straw muttering words among which only the
word, “Head, head,” could be distinguished. He was irresponsive,
possibly deaf. Suddenly he had a convulsive crisis and whenever
touched he would have jactitations and cry out. Otherwise, he was
calm and stuporous. The pupils were widely dilated. In short, he
showed a mental confusion associated with paroxysmal excitement
due to cerebral and cutaneous hyperesthesia. The first symptoms
had occurred the morning before, when he leaned his head against a
wall and complained.
Lumbar puncture yielded intra- and extracellular meningococci.
The patient was isolated. In the afternoon he became less agitated,
kept his eyes closed, mumbled, repeated gestures, would spit in his
hands, rub his hands together, rub his neck, shoulders and body, or
else he would pass his hands over his forehead and through his hair.
Occasionally he would seize the straw and draw it to him with all his
strength. Once when asked, “What is your name?” he said, “Not
true. Not true.” Hallucinations appeared to have been added to the
situation. The neck was a little stiff to forced flexion. Temperature
37.8. Lumbar puncture under chloroform anesthesia;
antimeningococcus serum was injected. Next day quieter; able to
get up and walk. Slept, mumbled less, was able to answer simple
questions, desired to urinate and finally succeeded.
February 19, no mental disorder. Headache and lassitude. Neck
stiff, Kernig’s sign marked. Lumbar puncture yielded a fluid now
puriform; antimeningococcus serum injected. February 20, lifting the
head produced opisthotonos. Labial herpes. The fluid yielded,
besides meningococci, also endothelial cells. Serum injected.
February 21, fibrin in fluid; serum injected. February 22, no head
symptoms. Herpes more intense, involving also arms. Tongue
coated. Temperature 37.5, evening 38.3. February 23, meningococci
and lymphocytes in fluid. February 24, left knee swollen. Serum
injected; puncture fluid showed meningococci and polynucleosis.
Fluid from knee showed polynuclear cells without organisms.
February 25, patient reached evening temperature of 39.5; serum
injected. A few meningococci, altered polynuclear leucocytes.
February 26, patient rigid, tongue coated, serum injection. Rare
meningococci, degenerated polynuclear leucocytes. February 27,
rigidity decreased, evening temperature 37.7. February 28, Kernig’s
sign absent. Herpes dry. Serum injection. Fluid clear; lymphocytes
and polynuclear cells; no meningococci. March 6, painful inguinal
gland on the left side. March 7, epididymitis left (mumps two years
before, with headache two weeks and double orchitis). March 9,
serum eruption. March 17, epididymitis practically absent. Lymph
node painful. Later data impossible to get, except that there was
apparently an arthritis of the hip and a sacral decubitus with
eventual recovery.
 Shell-explosion: Meningitic syndrome, fourteen months.

Case 109. (Pitres and Marchand, November, 1916.)

A soldier sustained shell-shock at the distance of a meter at Saint-

Hilaire, September 26, 1915. He lost consciousness and blood flowed
from his ears. He arrived, September 28, at the neurological center
in Bordeaux in a semistupor, knowing that he had been shocked and
had lost consciousness. He groaned, cried out, and kept stroking his
head with his right hand; lay on the right side; showed Kernig’s sign
right, ptosis, and stiff neck. Headache was increased on moving and
noises. Patient constantly asked for food, but refused to drink.
Lumbar puncture yielded a yellowish fluid, due to laked blood.
October 3, headache, ptosis, left internal strabismus, temperature
38.5. October 4, lumbar puncture, slightly blood-tinted fluid. October
5, improvement; gap in memory for period since shock. No
strabismus, ptosis diminished, temperature normal, improvement
continued. Kernig’s sign and headache persisted. He lay doubled up
on the right side, eyes closed, right hand on pillow. Defense
movements on touching the neck or occipital region. The condition
of semistupor often passed off in the afternoon, when he could talk,
write or play cards. He had always smoked, even at the beginning of
his disease. Lumbar puncture yielded a normal fluid December 12,
1915. He was sent February 23, 1916, to a hospital in the country,
but came back May 9.
It seems that several days after transfer he had had an attack of
delirium in the night, having lost consciousness, and tried continually
to get up out of bed, saying that he wanted to go to Verdun to fight.
This spell lasted several hours and on the days following came
mutism, refusal of food, and a state of stupor. Nutritive enemata
were given. As he grew better he sometimes ate a great deal,
sometimes nothing, even wanted poison from his family, and wrote
to a comrade that he wanted to commit suicide.
May 9, he was clearer, told of seeing the shell, which he said he
had not heard, nor did he know how he had gotten to a hospital. His
head and spine had hurt him ever since the shock. He had had
difficulty in urination for two days after the shock. He could not
remember the delirious attack in the country hospital. He gave
various data about his life, but not fully. He refused to lie on the left
side, or to walk, because of pain. He could lift either leg from the
bed, but hardly both. There was an irregular coarse tremor of the
extremities. The right hand was weaker than the left; there were no
reflex disorders; no change in the eye grounds. There was a patchy
analgesia. May 26, stupor reappeared as before, with semimutism.
June, the patient presented the appearance of a dementia praecox
in stupor, with stereotyped gestures and attitudes, without catatonia.
The patient was sent to a hospital for the insane at Cadillac.
November 9, 1916, he returned to the neurological center, as mental
and cerebral disorder had disappeared. There still persisted a
difficulty in remembering facts since the shock and there was still a
functional paresis of the legs.
We here deal with a case of a meningitic syndrome following shell-
shock and lasting fourteen months.
 Brain abscess in a syphilitic: Matutinal loss of knee-jerks.

Case 110. (Dumolard, Rebierre, Quellien, 1916.)

An unmarried subaltern officer, 30, entered an army

neuropsychiatric center, April 8, 1915, looking exhausted and
bearing a ticket “nervous asthenia, evacuated for neurological
examination.” He said he had had scarlet fever at ten; strongly
denied syphilis, of which he presented no trace; had not been
excessively alcoholic and had had no nervous seizures. Detailed
information showed that he had been a normal child. He left his two
years’ military service with promotion and was a man of above the
ordinary intelligence.
He was wounded in the right buttock with a shrapnel bullet about
the end of September, 1914. He went back to his regiment two
months later and had shared in a number of actions up to the time
of his evacuation. He said he had been very tired for several weeks,
and had finally been sent to the physician. There were pains in the
kidney region and in the head, especially on the right side. The head
felt empty. He could not sleep, but did not dream. Ideas were not
distinct. Memory had become impaired. He could not keep his
accounts right, and was afraid something might go wrong.
There was no pain or nervous or reflex disorder of any sort except
for the knee-jerks and Achilles jerks (see below). A special
examination proved complete normality of eyes. There was a slight
hesitation in words, but no dysarthria. There was a slight tremor of
the tongue and fingers.
As to the tendon reflexes, April 9, on waking, the knee-jerks were
absent, but later in the day gradually came in evidence again. The
Achilles jerks were also absent at first, but could be obtained after a
prolonged examination and after percussion of the calf. In the
afternoon, after exercise, the knee-jerks and Achilles jerks were
easily demonstrable. The left Achilles jerk was always a little weaker
than the right. Massage brought these jerks out to virtual normality.
April 10 and thereafter, similar findings; percussion of the muscular
masses of the thighs and calves always brought out the reflexes.
Lumbar puncture yielded a clear fluid with hyperalbuminosis, 20
cells per c.mm. (lymphocytes and mononuclear cells 95 per cent)
and a positive W. R. Iodide of mercury treatment was given April 18.
April 23, the patient went into a coma, with trismus, stiff neck,
Kernig’s sign, sluggish pupils, incontinence. He was transferred to a
special hospital, showed on lumbar puncture, April 23, 85 per cent
polynuclear leucocytes, and died April 27. The autopsy showed a
yellowish, quasidiffluent softening of the size of a small egg in the
first occipital gyrus on the right side. The authors comment on the
fact that the only objective sign in this case was the variable tendon
reflexes of the lower extremities, “l’unique cri de souffrance des
centres nerveux.”
 Early recovery from a spinal cord lesion.

Case 111. (Mendelssohn, January, 1916.)

Mendelssohn reports a soldier, who was sent to a Russian hospital,

April 12, 1915, with a diagnosis of chronic appendicitis. Operated on
next day, the patient appeared to be passing through a normal
convalescence, when ten days later, he had an intense headache and
some trouble in vision, which disappeared the next day, only to be
followed, two days later, by the patient’s complaint that he could no
longer urinate or rise from bed.
In fact, Mendelssohn found a complete flaccid paraplegia with
urinary retention, without fever or pain. Knee-jerks and Achilles jerks
were absent, and there was a slight extension of the great toe on
plantar stimulation. There was disorder of sensation, with heat
sensibility abolished, painful points poorly localized, and position
sense poor. Electric reactions normal. Pain on pressure in and about
the lumbar vertebral region. Cerebrospinal fluid showed
lymphocytosis and an excessive albuminosis.
This paraplegia lasted six weeks. At the end of May, the patient
began to be able to move his toes and to lift his heel. Improvement
was gradual and progressive. Early in June he could walk if
supported. The weak knee-jerk then began to reappear and the
urinary retention gradually disappeared.
This patient was not hysterical, although a bit emotional. Perhaps,
according to Mendelssohn, an organic lesion was grafted on a
neurosis. Perhaps the spinal lesion was infectious. At any rate, a
presumably organic paraplegia had recovered in two months and a
half.
 Shell-explosion: Meningeal hemorrhage: Pneumococcus
meningitis.

Case 112. (Guillain and Barré, August, 1917.)

An infantryman, 20, came to the Sixth Army Neurological Center,

October 13, 1916, as a case of “choluria, due to shell explosion;
epistaxis needs watching.” He was somnolent, had waked vomiting,
pulse 108. Kernig’s sign, defensive movements of the legs on
stimulation, with flexion of leg on thigh and of thigh on pelvis,
plantar reflexes flexor. Puncture showed typical meningeal
hemorrhage. Two days later, temperature 40, pulse 70, that is to say,
a bradycardia in proportion to the fever. Vomiting, pulse persisted.
Next day the patient was moaning and semi-delirious and showed
stiff neck, Kernig’s sign, accentuation of vasomotor disorder, plantar
response flexor with leg retracted, thigh flexion both homolateral
and contralateral. The spinal fluid upon the next day, that is, four
days after his arrival at the clinic, showed a purulent fluid in which
there was an excess of albumin, no sugar, diplococci extracellular
(proving on culture to be pneumococci and able to kill a mouse in
twenty-four hours).
As a rule such hemorrhages remain aseptic, and in fact meningeal
hemorrhage is said by Guillain and Barré to have, as a rule, a
favorable prognosis. The above described case was the only one of
infected meningeal hemorrhage that had occurred in the Sixth Army
Neurological Center.
 ANTEBELLUM cortex lesion: right hemiplegia; recovery. Struck
by shrapnel on right shoulder: Athetosis.

Case 113. (Batten, January, 1916.)

A British soldier, aged 27, showed a somewhat remarkable

phenomenon. It appears that at five years of age, this man had had
poliomyelitis, affecting the left leg. At 20 years of age, he had had
pneumonia, and this had been followed by a paralysis of the right
arm and leg with a loss of speech. The man recovered from this
illness, although he never quite regained full control of the right
hand. It is evident that this lack of control was not marked, else the
man would not have been enlisted, and it is Dr. Batten’s opinion that
at all events he could not have shown pathological movements of
the right hand at the time of enlistment.
However this may be, in October, 1914, the soldier was struck on
the right shoulder with shrapnel. Apparently he was not wounded,
but thereafter he was not able to use the right arm well, and in two
months’ time he had become unable to manipulate his rifle. On
January 13, 1915, he was sent home. The remnants of the old
poliomyelitis of the left leg were shown in a general weakness of
that leg as compared with the right. The movements of the right
hand were those seen in athetosis. The movements were
independent of volition. The patient had difficulty in releasing his
grasp. He improved rapidly during the six weeks he was in hospital,
although the movements of the right hand never became entirely
normal.
In this case, according to Batten, “the stress was sufficient to
bring into prominence the symptoms due to an old cerebral lesion.”
 Hysterical versus thalamic hemianesthesia.

Case 114. (Léri, October, 1916.)

A soldier, 40, had been suffering for a number of months with

pains in the left side of the trunk and feelings of weakness in the left
arm and leg. In the summer of 1915 he was on leave and while
walking, fell, lay down, and found he could hardly move his left arm
and leg. Two or three weeks later he got up, walking with a stick.
After some time in hospital, he was sent back to the trenches, a little
weak.
He had shortly, however, to be examined neurologically again. He
could hardly raise the left leg and his passive resistance was poor on
this side. The left side was almost completely anesthetic to all forms
of stimulus, although an intense faradic current yielded a feeling like
that of a fly. Nor was the tactile sensation absolutely nil, as it could
be got with a flat finger on the upper arm and thigh. Cold and heat
sensations not well localized. The hemianesthesia was sharply
limited at the median line and affected the buccal, lingual and nasal
mucosa. Deep sensibility was almost abolished on the left side.
Stereognostic sense was lost and the sense of position was lost
absolutely for hand and foot.
The patient said that he heard less well on the left side. There was
also a slight contraction of the left visual field. The reflexes were
lively, but equal on both sides. A diagnosis of hysterical
hemianesthesia was apparently called for, but psychoelectric
treatment failed. The plantar reflex was, in fact, completely absent
on the left side, as well as the corneal reflex. The faradic current
failed to produce as marked a dilatation of the pupil on the left side
as on the right. The forehead wrinkles were less marked on the left
side. The mouth deviated slightly to the right. The left nasolabial fold
was a little less marked. The tongue did not deviate, but was a little
narrow on the left side. The palate deviated a little to the left. The
left side of the trunk seemed a little less developed than the right,
and the scapula stuck a little less closely to the body on the left side,
when the arms were raised. The left buttock was a little narrower
than the right and the left gluteal fold was less marked. In combined
flexion of thigh and trunk the left foot readily left the floor. There
was a left-sided hypotonia in forced flexion of the forearm. There
were no tremors of the limbs in repose, except a few contractions of
the left lower extremity. In movement, however, there was a marked
tremor and in coördination the finger to nose test could not be
performed. Speech was slow and hesitant, sometimes stuttering.
Food was sometimes taken into the air passages. Headaches were
localized on the right side. They had begun when the first symptoms
began. There was mental disorder, with gaps in memory. In short,
the case is probably one of thalamic disease, though there were no
pains except a few in the left side of the trunk at the beginning of
the disease. The diagnosis of hysteria was at first made in this case,
but the rule that hysterical hemianesthesia is never found without
auto- or hetero-suggestion caused the alteration of diagnosis to
thalamic.
 Shell-explosion: Syndrome suggesting multiple sclerosis.

Case 115. (Pitres and Marchand, November, 1916.)

A soldier, 40, carriage painter, underwent shell-shock at Voquois,

May 2, 1915, following ten hours’ bombardment. At the time he felt
tinglings. The bombardment had just ceased when he fainted
suddenly while repairing a telegraph line. There was no loss of
consciousness. He could not move his arms or legs, was able to spit,
and did not suffer at all except for the tingling. He was evacuated to
the interior, where the diagnosis of psychopathic double paraplegia,
Kernig’s sign, zones of anesthesia in the legs, was made. He was
immediately treated with gray oil, and got an injection of
neosalvarsan, and iodides. He grew slowly better. He could lift a leg
from the bed, but then both legs began to tremble. The arms had
recovered their movement, before the legs, but always trembled in
movement.
November, 1915, he was able to get up; two months later, he
walked alone.
At the neurological center, which he entered December 17, his
gaze was fixed and there was a slight exophthalmos. The folds of
the face were smoothed out. The nose was deep set (as a result of a
fall at the age of eight). In the upright position he could not remain
still, but trembled markedly on the left side, so that he had to make
a few steps to keep his balance. He was unable to stand on his left
leg. He walked on a broad base, in little steps, and rather unsteadily
on account of tremors augmenting upon movement. General
muscular weakness; left hand slightly weaker than right. He could
not lift both legs more than 20 cm. from the bed and in the process
they both trembled, trembling together. There was also intention-
tremor of the arms, a little less marked than that of the legs, of an
irregular rhythm. The arms trembled as a whole. In a state of rest
there was no tremor. There was a slight muscular stiffness and the
patient himself felt difficulty in relaxing. Patellar reflexes absent,
even on reinforcement; Achilles jerks absent. Speech monotonous
and tremulous, but not scanning; syllable doubling observed by the
patient. Manuscript tremulous and, on account of tremors, illegible.
Hypalgesia of legs, more marked distally. Deep sensibility of tendo
Achillis and patellar reflexes lost. Pain on compression of eyes
diminished. Formication in arms. W. R. of blood negative. Slow
improvement followed and the patient left the neurological service
May 4, 1916, able to walk more easily and without tremor. The knee-
jerks and Achilles jerks were still absent.
We here deal with a syndrome in part that of a multiple sclerosis,
that is, the intention-tremor, gait disturbance, muscular rigidity, and
weakness.
Re multiple sclerosis, Lépine remarks that there are numerous
army cases of pseudo multiple sclerosis which are actually hysterical
or hystero-traumatic cases of hypertonus and tremor. The true cases
of multiple sclerosis, according to Lépine, are of interest inasmuch as
they are usually found in officers. These men have apparently at first
but a slight motor disorder, quite compatible with desk work. We
have usually under-rated the cortical element in multiple sclerosis.
Spells of confusion, delusional ideas, sometimes grandiose, start up
without warning in these cases. To be sure, alcohol and syphilis
sometimes also enter these cases etiologically. Any case of localized
tremor ought to be carefully examined psychically, and such cases in
general ought not to be given responsibility.
 Coexistence of hysterical and organic symptoms in two cases
of mine explosion.

Cases 116 and 117. (Smyly, April, 1917.)

A soldier was blown up by a mine and rendered unconscious.

Upon recovery of consciousness, he was dumb, unable to work, very
nervous, paralyzed as to left arm and leg. The paralysis improved so
that in the hospital at home the patient became able to get about.
However, he threw his legs about in an unusual fashion. Several
months later, the patient was much improved.
Shortly, however, there was a relapse. Transferred to a hospital for
chronic cases, the patient was unable to walk without assistance on
account of complete paralysis of the leg. Insomnia, general tremor,
and a bad stuttering developed, with a habit of starting in terror at
the slightest noise.
Hypnotic treatment was followed by almost complete
disappearance of the tremor. The patient began to sleep six or seven
hours a night; nervousness diminished, and the stuttering slowly
improved; but neither the paralysis nor the anesthesia of the left leg
was affected by suggestion. The leg remained cold, livid, anesthetic,
and flaccidly paralyzed to the hip. Though a slight improvement has
since been produced by faradization, the patient still can walk only
with assistance.
A man was injured in 1906 by the fall of a heavy weight on his
back. In 1914 he went to France as a soldier, and eight months later
was hurled into a shell hole so that his back struck the edge. He was
rendered unconscious. Upon recovery of consciousness, the right leg
was found to be swollen, and there were severe pains in the legs
and back.
Since return home the patient had gone from one hospital to
another, for the most part unable to walk, suffering from agonizing
pain in the head and eyes, unable to sleep, and in the night subject
to horrible waking dreams.

Chart 6

MINOR SIGNS OF ORGANIC HEMIPLEGIA

(LHERMITTE)

I. Hyperextension of forearm (hypotonia).

II. Platysma sign: Contraction absent on paralyzed
side.
III. Babinski’s flexion of thigh on pelvis (spontaneous,
upon suddenly throwing seated subject into
dorsal decubitus).
IV. Hoover’s sign: Complementary opposition (on
request to raise paralyzed arm, presses
opposite arm strongly against mattress).
V. Heilbronner’s sign of the broad thigh (hypotonia).
VI. Rossolimo’s sign: flexion of toes on slight
percussion of sole.
VII. Mendel-Bechterew sign: flexion of small toes on
percussion with hammer of dorsal surface of
cuboid bone.
VIII. Oppenheim’s sign (extension of great toe on deep
friction of calf muscles); or Schaefer, or
Gordon (on pinching tendo Achillis).
 IX. Marie-Foix sign: withdrawal of lower leg on
transverse pressure of tarsus or forced
flexion of toes, even when leg is incapable of
voluntary movement.

At first able only to bring himself to an upright position and to

rush a few steps, he later acquired considerable control of his feet
and legs through crutches. The insomnia persisted.
Smyly regards this case, like Case 116, as more neurological than
mental.
Re organic neurology, much of great value has been reported.
Sargent and Holmes say that, contrary to expectation, there have
been few war cases of bad sequelae of cerebral injuries, such as
insanity and epilepsy. During early stages, after infection of the head
wounds, there is dulness and amnesia, irritability and childishness,—
symptoms which disappear during and after repair of the wounds.
Mental disorder requiring internment is surprisingly rare. During 12
months only eight cases were transferred from the head hospital in a
year to the Napsbury war hospital, where cases of insanity
attributable to the service are sent; and in but two of these could
the persisting mental symptoms be attributed to head injury.
Col. F. W. Mott confirms the opinion of Col. Sargent and Col.
Holmes, remarking that from all the London County Council Asylums,
only one case of insanity associated with gunshot head wound had
been admitted, and that this was one of a Belgian who died from
septic infection of the cerebral ventricles. Yet all cases of insanity in
invalided soldiers belonging to the London County Council area
(about one-seventh of the population of the United Kingdom) are
transferred to these asylums.
Again Sargent and Holmes point out that both generalized and
Jacksonian epileptiform seizures are comparatively rare in patients
suffering from recent head wounds; even convulsions in later stages
have been as yet less common than was feared. Thus, after
evacuation to England, fits occurred in 37 (6 per cent) of 610 cases
with complete notes, and in only eleven of these 37 cases were the
convulsions frequent. Sargent and Holmes remark, however, that the
practice of giving bromides regularly to all serious cranial injuries
until the wound is healed, and for some months afterwards, seems
advisable. In 33 of the 37 convulsive cases there have been severe
compound fractures of the skull, and in four of these a missile was
still present in the brain. Five secondary operations were performed
with good results, after drainage of small abscesses in two and
removal of spicules of bone in three. The In-patient and Out-patient
records of the National Hospital for the Paralyzed and Epileptic were
searched for epileptics already discharged from the army, but notes
of but two patients attending this hospital for epilepsy were found.
As for other neurological complications aside from septic infection
and hernia formation, there are a few subjective symptoms that may
necessitate the invaliding of soldiers. The most common of these is
headache, usually in the form of a feeling of weight, pressure, or
throbbing in the head, which headache is increased by noise,
fatigue, exertion, or emotion. Attacks of dizziness also occur, and
nervousness or deficient control over emotions and feelings.
Changes of temperament are found in some soldiers, who become
depressed, moody, irritable, or emotional, and unable to concentrate
attention.
Foix, under the direction of P. Marie, worked upon aphasia in 100
cases, reporting results at a surgical and neurological meeting, May
24, 1916, in Paris. Only lesions on the left side of the brain have
produced important and lasting speech disorder, although lesions on
the left side may leave behind them a little dysarthria or difficulty in
finding words in conversation. It is, of course, hard to tell speech
disorder from stupor or clouding of consciousness. Foix notes certain
specialties in speech defect according to which region of the left
brain is affected.
 First: Prefrontal lesions produce a transient dysarthria, lasting but
a few weeks, and right-sided prefrontal lesions produce just as much
disorder.
Occipital lesions produce no speech disorder.
Second: Patients with right-sided hemianopsia due to lesions of
occipital regions were not aphasic and could read or write perfectly.
Lesions of the left visual centers certainly do not affect reading. If,
however, the injury is not to the visual centers, but is upon the
lateral part of the occipital lobe, then alexic phenomena appear, and
these the more the lesion approaches the temporal-parietal region.
Third: Central convolutional lesion produces a variety of disorders
according to the site and extent of the lesion. There is no aphasia
with the crural monoplegia due to superior paracentral disorder. But
slight aphasic disorder accompanies the brachial monoplegia of
middle central lesion, though writing, reading, and calculation are
slightly affected, and the more so the more the lesion extends
posteriorly to the stereognostic regions. The lower down in the
precentral region the lesion appears, the more likely is the Broca
syndrome to be observed. But if the hemiplegia is chiefly a brachial
monoplegia, the aphasic disorder may remain slight, involving
reading, writing, understanding of words, the spoken word,
articulation, and calculation.
Fourth: Lesions of the lateral-frontal region produce more or less
marked aphasic disorder, just as do those of the inferior part of the
precentral gyrus. This aphasia is more apt to occur when the wound
is deep. However, no case of permanent aphasia has been observed
in cases of lesion of the lateral-frontal region (termed in Foix’s
nomenclature, the precentral region, but referring to the tissues in
front of the precentral (or ascending frontal) gyrus of the more
familiar nomenclature). Almost absolute, or absolute, anarthria
follows the wound, and the patient is hemiplegic. This hemiplegia
may last from ten days to two or three months. After a time there is
no longer more than a slight dysarthria, and writing becomes good
again; reading remains, perhaps, a little difficult. A complete or
almost complete cure is the rule.
Fifth: When the retrocentral region is injured, various aphasic
syndromes appear. The retrocentral region is the parietal-temporal
lobe except the superior part of the parietal lobe and the anterior
part of the temporal lobe, which latter two regions when injured do
not allow any marked aphasic disorder. Lesions of the middle or
posterior temporal region are particularly important for speech, and
produce more marked disorder than lesions of the angular gyrus or
the supramarginal gyrus. At first, words cannot be spoken, for a
period of a fortnight to three months. Speech returns progressively,
with an increased power of comprehension. At the same time, the
patients begin to read and write. But there is no further spontaneous
progress after a period of six or eight months, and then special
reëducation must be started. These speech disorders of retrocentral
(parietal-temporal) origin are either aphasic syndromes or slight
remains of psychical disorders, or again, a disorder practically limited
to alexia. The true aphasic syndromes concern the spoken word,
understanding the words, writing, and calculation. The disorder is
not especially dysarthric and consists particularly in loss of
vocabulary. It might be called an amnestic aphasia (Pitres). These
cases have well-marked intellectual disorder and their power of
calculation is especially poor. As to the aphasic traces, which are
more important to understand than they are extensive in point of
fact, they relate particularly to calculating power, to vocabulary
(slowness in finding words), and to reading (reading without
comprehension). As to the cases of alexia, these are cases of lesions
of the posterior part of the parietal-temporal lobe, and are usually
accompanied by a hemi- or a quadrantanopsia.
To sum up, cases with central lesions (precentral and postcentral
gyrus) have hemiplegia and a Broca aphasia without much tendency
to cure. Cases with lesions anterior to the central convolutions have
a transient anarthria and their recovery is ordinarily complete. Cases
with retrocentral lesions have an aphasia suggestive of Wernicke’s
aphasia, and ordinarily leave behind them extensive defects in
intelligence and language. These cases should be taken account of
from the standpoint of compensation, since they are much worse off
for work than many cases with amputations; and though their
disorder looks slight, it quite interferes with working at a trade. From
the point of view of military effectiveness, the retrocentral cases are
not very good soldiers, and especially not good officers, as they do
not understand commands completely.
 Neuropsychiatric phenomena in rabies.

Case 118. (Grenier de Cardenal, Legrand, Benoit, September, 1917.)

A farmer, 34, mobilized in veterinary work, fell sick at a station for

sick horses, April 25, 1917. He breakfasted well, drank coffee, and
went to the abreuvoir at eleven o’clock. He told his mates that he
felt bad in his head. He fainted over a table at the eating house,
refused to eat or drink. At noon he went out into the court, vomited
and went to lie down. A physician thought he was suffering from
angina because of the pronounced dysphagia. He entered the
hospital at eleven o’clock at night on the 25th. He was found next
morning on his back, with a fixed and haggard look, crimson face,
masseter and phalangeal spasm at times. Respiration irregular,
interrupted by moans. The pulse would go up to 120 during
agitation and then go down to 50 as soon as the patient lay down
again. Pupils slightly dilated and unequal. As the patient came from
a sick horse dépôt, the first question was that of tetanus, suggested
somewhat by the jactitation of the limbs and the trismus. A violent
headache began and the patient cried out, “My head! My head!”
Painful vomiting movements, with very slight bilious material.
Convulsive movements increased. The pulse was slow. The diagnosis
“meningitis” was suggested, despite the absence of fever and the
absence of Kernig’s sign. Lumbar puncture gave limpid fluid with a
normal lymphocytosis, without increase of albumin or reducing
substance. The bacteriological smear and culture were negative.
Soon another sort of symptoms appeared. The patient would rise,
cry out, threaten his neighbors. He was calmed with morphine.
There were periods of excitement alternating with periods of
calmness, during which he would reply sharply but accurately, being
somewhat vexed by the questions, and would walk up and down
without offering a word. When a glass of water was offered to him,
as soon as his glance met the glass his eyes expressed fear. He drew
back in repulsion and cried out in terror. When the liquid was out of
his sight the hydrophobic spasm ceased. This hyperesthesia of the
sensorium was so intense that the mere sight of the shining
glassware of the laboratory brought out a sharp crisis.
He was sent that evening to the neuropsychiatry center, walking
jerkily and as if slightly drunk, with a number of small gesticulations
and murmurings. He was immediately isolated, undressed himself
and went to bed. He did not move in his bed, and seemed to sleep.
The next day he got up, dressed and had a small spell of
excitement, but was quiet enough on the medical visit, though the
floor was soiled with urine and vomitus and the clothing was in
disorder. He now had a pronounced phase, deep sunk eyes, drawn
features and anxious look; dilated pupils and an expression of mixed
fear and anger. His breathing was hard and he kept his hand on his
heart. He was oriented. He suddenly rose and said, “I am thirsty.” A
glass of milk was given him. He hesitated a moment, plunged his
mouth and hands into it and aspirated the drink without making any
swallowing movements. He pushed away the glass, spat a little, and
vomited a small quantity of a black liquid. Then followed an anxious
crisis, and he fell upon his side, absolutely immobile, without
breathing for a few seconds. Again in the sitting posture, he was
taken with contractions of the limbs and face. The tendon reflexes
were at this time normal.
A quarter of an hour later the attendant found him dead, in the
sitting posture, leaning against the wall, mouth open, arms
dependent, hands extended, pupils dilated—a death in syncope. The
brain was found congested. There was a slight effusion of blood over
the posterior aspect of the brain. There were no hemorrhages or
softenings in the brain substance. The muscles were of a dark red to
black. The adherent lungs were very slightly congested at the base.
The stomach contained a quarter of a liter of black, inodorous fluid
in which there was much bile and little blood. There were numerous
small hemorrhages of the mucosa near the great curvature. The
spleen was large, the liver congested. The Pasteur Institute
confirmed the diagnosis of rabies. There is no history of the man’s
having been bitten by a dog.
 Tetanus: Psychosis.

Case 119. (Lumière and Astier, 1917.)

A soldier wounded May 18, 1916, was given antitetanic serum May
26th. The wounds healed, but on June 16, that is, 29 days after the
trauma, contractures began, at first localized. There had been
numerous wounds of legs and scrotum by shell fragments and the
contractures were limited to the right leg and scrotum. There was no
trismus or any lumbar symptom.
During the next few days the contractures became general, the
temperature rose, a shell fragment was found by X-ray at the root of
the thigh and was surgically extracted. B. tetani was found upon
inoculation of media with material from the shell fragment.
Persulphide of soda and antitetanic serum 90 cc. in three days were
given intravenously. The temperature fell and the general health was
greatly improved. July 6, hallucinations and terrors, worse at night,
set in. The man believed himself surrounded by flames, that daggers
were being plunged into his old wounds, that his hair was being
pulled. These symptoms lasted a fortnight only, whereupon the
patient recovered.
This case and six others accompanied by cerebral disturbances all
recovered, and all the patients retained a perfect memory of their
delirium and of their hallucinations.
The chronological distribution of these cases was odd. One case
was found early in the war; then no other cases of cerebral disorder
presented themselves until the group observed at the end of 1916.
Besides flames and daggers, zoöpsia was several times observed.
One of the cases showed these symptoms without having been
given antitetanic serum.
Re tetanus in the war, see in the Collection Horizon a book by
Courtois-Suffit and Giroux on Les formes anormales du tétanos.
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