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• W2008575596 abstract "Plowshares into Swords and Vice Versa Michael E. Parrish (bio) Michael S. Sherry. In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. xii + 595 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. In the hands of a less gifted historian, a book on the spread of military institutions and values throughout American society since the Great Depression could have degenerated easily into a traditional polemic on the rise and fall of the Pax Americana or a narrow monograph on the institutional evolution of the nation’s war-making capabilities from Roosevelt to Clinton. Instead, with a sharp eye for paradox and irony, Michael Sherry has given us an absolutely fresh perspective on our last half-century in a volume notable for its intellectual reach, subtle analysis, and graceful exposition. The militarization of America produced, above all, profound contradictions. Federal expenditures for hot and cold wars fueled economic prosperity and promoted technological advance, while simultaneously eroding our competitive edge in many world markets and deepening the nation’s fiscal crisis. Militarization fomented both social unity and social conflict. It galvanized longstanding campaigns against racism, for example, but produced the most racially and class-segregated war in modern America—Vietnam. And the fury often directed at the nation’s external foes soon contaminated social relations at home by injecting war’s metaphors and war’s intensity into virtually all domestic conflicts among Americans. Sherry has written a broad synthesis to equal Richard Polenberg’s One Nation Divisible (1980) as well as a sweeping history of the Cold War that will stand comparison with such classics as Walter LaFeber’s America, Russia, and the Cold War (1980) or Stephen Ambrose’s The Rise to Globalism (1976). Given his command of military, diplomatic, and political history displayed in two earlier works, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (1987) and Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941–1945 (1977), it is not surprising that Sherry has a sure grasp of such matters here and that they often dominate his narrative. But he remains ever alert to how militarization shaped social and cultural relations as well, especially with respect to race, gender, and class. Among his more arresting insights: [End Page 537] The GI Bill showed how war sanctioned initiatives in social welfare ordinarily unacceptable to many Americans, a sanction that would endure long after the war. National power, never absent even in the 1930s as a rationale, justified action more than social justice and economic stability. (p. 110) Did peace endure because of the balance of [nuclear] terror or despite it? The answer may be both: the terror that stayed the nuclear powers from plunging into the abyss also drove them to its edge. It also encouraged them to tolerate, promote, or enter non-nuclear wars that scarred many other nations; this was a ‘long peace’ only by the essential but singular standard of avoiding nuclear war. (p. 225) During the Vietnam War, most Americans seemed to hate each other more than the enemy. In this, Nixon was not alone. As President, however, he offered a peculiarly dangerous example. (p. 319) Anti-gay policies were valuable to male authorities seeking to curb the expanding roles of women in uniform and to counteract women’s frequent charges of sexual abuse and harassment by male personnel. . . . Hostility to women was an important factor behind the tightening of anti-gay policies. (p. 369) Changes in America’s social composition did not just happen, however; they were partly driven by the nation’s militarized history, at times by the very people who now bewailed the resulting social changes. Immigration into the United States, for example, was stirred by hot and cold wars abroad, with American responses to them serving as the sieve excluding some and inviting others. (p. 428) Militarization was quixotic, capricious, and contingent because war itself, in the sense of bombs and bullets and destruction, remained a shadowy presence in the lives of most Americans. They imagined war floridly, they transposed its words and images and emotions to their own struggles in striking ways. . . . But war remained largely an arena not..." @default.
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• W2008575596 title "Plowshares Into Swords and Vice Versa" @default.
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