The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered : American Politics and Society in the Postwar Era

When first published in 1976, Godfrey Hodgson’s America in Our Time won immediate recognition as a major interpretive study of the postwar era. Although the term liberal consensus, or its approximation, had received some previous expression, Hodgson was responsible for its entry into the lexicon of American history. Yet what he considered a substantive phenomenon would inevitably become a controversial paradigm as a massive outpouring of literature cited evidence of a significant conservative presence at the grassroots level from the 1930s to the 1960s. Here, leading scholars―including Hodgson himself―confront the longstanding theory that a liberal consensus shaped the United States after World War II. The essays draw on fresh research to examine how the consensus related to key policy areas, how it was viewed by different factions and groups, what its limitations were, and why it fell apart in the late 1960s. They find that although elite politicians from both parties did share certain principles that gave direction to postwar America, the nation still experienced major political, cultural, and ideological conflict. Identifying the forces at work that gave rise to a newly confident conservatism promoted by corporate leaders, Sunbelt boosters, and religious activists, the contributors offer new insights into the era and diverging opinions on one of the most influential interpretations of mid-twentieth-century U.S. history. Cover The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Reconsidering the Liberal Consensus 1. Revisiting the Liberal Consensus 2. Historians and the Postwar Liberal Consensus 3. The Reach and Limits of the Liberal Consensus 4. The 1930s Roots of the Postwar “Consensus” 5. The Keynesian Consensus and Its Limits 6. Social Welfare in the United States, 1945–1960 7. Red-Hunting and Internal Security: Conflict in the Age of Consensus 8. Containment: A Consensual or Contested Foreign Policy? 9. Sunbelt Patriarchs: Lyndon B. Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the New Deal Dissensus 10. “Down the Middle of the Road”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican Party, and the Politics of Consensus and Conflict, 1949–1961 11. “We Have Run Out of Poor People”: The Democratic Party’s Crisis of Identity in the 1950s 12. Billy Graham’s Neo-evangelical Triumph and the Limits of the Liberal Consensus 13. Gender in an Era of Liberal Consensus 14. Memories of the Movement: Civil Rights, the Liberal Consensus, and the March on Washington Twenty Years Later Contributors Index The paradigm of the 'liberal consensus' has critically shaped scholarly understanding of the United States during the two decades after World War II. Both influential and controversial, it remains the subject of lively debate among scholars seeking to explain the political and social transformations of that era. Some historians contest the existence of consensus in post-1945 America, while others employ the term, sometimes unreflectively, as a shorthand descriptor of the contemporary mood. In contrast, this work argues that a revised, nuanced, and dynamic definition of consensus liberalism provides a compelling way to appreciate how the vitality of the postwar economy and the external challenges of the early Cold War shaped the United States in profound ways, both politically and socially The paradigm of the “liberal consensus” has critically shaped scholarly understanding of the United States during the two decades after World War II. Both influential and controversial, it remains the subject of lively debate among scholars seeking to explain the political and social transformations of that era. Some historians contest the existence of consensus in post-1945 America, while others employ the term—sometimes unreflectively—as a shorthand descriptor of the contemporary mood. In contrast, this book argues that a revised, nuanced, and dynamic definition of consensus liberalism provides a compelling way to appreciate how the vitality of the postwar economy and the external challenges of the early Cold War shaped the United States in profound ways, both politically and socially. This work interrogates the idea that a "liberal consensus" uniformly shaped the United States after World War II. The volume's findings indicate that political, cultural, and ideological conflict was never extinguished and that whatever liberal consensus existed was elitist and limited. These limitations included the seeds of its own destruction in the late 1960s and beyond Confronting Godfrey Hodgson's long-standing theory that a ""liberal consensus"" shaped the United States after World War II, this volume finds that although elite politicians from both parties did share certain principles that gave direction to postwar America, the nation still experienced major political, cultural, and ideological conflict during this time.