In the Shadow of War
The United States Since the 1930s
By Michael S. Sherry
Yale University Press, 567 pages, $35
Militarization is not a word to come tripping off American tongues, and when it does it is wrongly inflected, to decry militarism and jingoism. But as Michael Sherry demonstrates in this brilliant book, it is an exacting (if elastic) term of analysis that explains much, too much, of recent American history. The Cold War may be over, but the “Shadow of War” remains, and the “warlike states of mind” that loom large in this spiral-down of culture wars and identity battles are steeped in six decades of martial consciousness. Indeed, the caissons bearing the legacy of a militarized society keep rolling along.
Militarization-in-America is a loaded subject that Sherry, a professor of history at Northwestern University but writing against the academic grain, has turned into a herculean reckoning with the American Experience. Winner of the Bancroft Prize for “The Rise of American Air Power,” Sherry puts microscholarship to shame with his grand generalizing based on a close reading of the vast literature. In this indispensable work of analysis and reflection, Sherry reworks the national narrative, arguing powerfully for the primacy of militarization, and in so doing rephrases the question of national identity that besets an America in the throes of fragmentation.
Militarization (like industrialization before it) was a late arrival to these shores, but when it did come, Sherry writes, it “loomed large and persistently enough to give unity to a half-century of history.” For Sherry, the history of militarization in this country is about how “war and national security became consuming anxieties and provided the memories, models and metaphors that shaped broad areas of national life.” Arguing that this martial engineering made America a “profoundly different nation,” Sherry takes the reader on a march through the decades, from the New Deal to the Contract With America. Focused on the “national state and the political culture (that militarization) helped to construct and express,” “In the Shadow of War” recounts how a laggard America made a great leap forward to become the “primary motor, triumphant practitioner, and chief beneficiary” of this global historical process.
“War’s place in the nation’s history was large,” Sherry writes in his prologue, “but its militarization–the large and sustained focus of anxieties and resources on military power–was evident only in teasing outline.” At pains to differentiate war from militarization, which proceeds from “dynamics internal to the nation as well as from challenges beyond,” Sherry argues that American militarization begins its “ragged, quixotic course” only with the advent of the New Deal. Indeed, it is his thesis that militarization was the vehicle for firmly establishing–for authorizing–the modern American state. And above and beyond the serial wars that were, as Sherry puts it, “overlapped” by this state-building enterprise, militarization also shaped the national consciousness. Until l966, and Vietnam, America battened on wars real and imagined, its trajectory sent soaring by impulses it could only accommodate, never fully acknowledge.
While militarization, according to Sherry, is a “diffuse phenomenon” with multiple sources, his first chapter emphasizes the demiurgic powers of one man, Franklin Roosevelt. Before the runup to World War II introduced the expansive claims of “national security,” the “war analogy” was invoked by FDR to dramatize (and sanction) the measures of the New Deal. Sherry cites the ensuing civilian mobilizations as the ur-events in the Americanization of the martial template:
“(U)se of war as metaphor and model did help prepare Americans materially and psychologically for war. And by allowing them to avoid the central dilemma of the state’s legitimacy, it eased political conflict in the l930s at the price of strengthening the habit, destined to reappear over the next half century, of harnessing politics and state initiatives to the imperatives and models of war. In those indirect but powerful ways it furthered the transition to a militarized America.”
As he delineates the social, political, economic, cultural and psychological consequences of that “dramatic historical change” in Part One of “In the Shadow of War,” Sherry argues that from l940 until l966 militarization met little or no resistance in its partial conquest of the nation. Both World War II and the Cold War (the continuation of World War II by militarized means) were good wars, indeed the best of all possible wars, because they weren’t really (for the vast majority of Americans) wars at all. Instead, they were mighty engines of global power and unparalleled prosperity, underwriting imperialism abroad and dynamism at home.
World War II set American society in motion, nationalizing regional identities, confounding social folkways, challenging the color line. The GI Bill of l944 only wrote this mass movement into law. Likewise, the Cold War propelled Americans down the national highway system into the subdivisions of the suburban horn-of-plenty.
Militarization was no plague on the land; quite the contrary. During the ’40s and ’50s, Sherry argues, militarization answered to necessity, remained in mufti, marched to no single drummer, observed the rule of law and secured the growth economy. As a result it remained an invisible process, outside scrutiny and vigilance, working its magic behind the backs of the American people, turning fear of doomsday into faith in deliverence. Under the aegis of national security the American people had embarked on a great adventure, one of great peril but even greater reward.
Sherry traces the luxuriant guns-and-butter logic of militarization to its crisis in the ’60s, citing Eisenhower as one of the very few to break ranks and assail its double-bind of the political culture, before the Kennedy-Johnson years brought American militarization to its self-defeating apotheosis. Eisenhower, the hero of World War II, sought to disabuse the nation of victory in the Cold War, while Kennedy and Johnson looked back to World War II as the “baseline experience” in order to rally the nation to great deeds both at home and abroad.
“Only if the United States fought tough battles, not just easy ones,” Sherry writes, “could it show that it could prevail over communism.” And in both a bombed-over Vietnam, and in the burned-over cities of America, one could see with great precision where the activist state of the liberal technocrats, with its constant rhetoric of war, had led.
In Part Two, Sherry brings this narrative to the present, arguing that from l966–the “turning point”–to l995–the “farewell”?–militarization underwent a slow-motion demise, becoming an interior drama that reconceived war as “something waged within America.” Turned inward, and inside-out, militarization brought a plague to the land, in the form of civil strife, failed presidencies, polarizing cultures and decadent spectacles.
For the most part, Sherry reads this present history as one of abject failure–failure to demilitarize. Richard Nixon, he argues, had the mind but not the will: He refused to admit defeat in Vietnam. Jimmy Carter had the will but not the mind: He couldn’t make the case to the American people. And while Ronald Reagan had neither, he did have the good sense to back away from his “illusory remilitarization.”
Vietnam had lifted the scales, and for a brief period in the mid-’70s demilitarization seemed a real possibility. But a “renewed but oddly hollow Cold War” followed instead. Sherry reads this “show of war making, military might, and patriotic zeal without their substance” as a compromise between contending sensibilities, noting that under Reagan militarization had reached the stage where “making Americans feel good was more important than shaping the world.”
In Reagan’s saga, militarization functioned as a kind of national therapy, and no war made Americans feel better than World War II. Indeed, if there is a national identity (and Sherry examines America’s identity battles and culture wars in great detail) it remains imprinted by that mythohistorical war–a “pleasant memory” that Reagan turned into a trillion dollar retrospective.
As “In the Shadow of War” makes clear, militarization was a real, if limited, force for reform and progress. “The most persistent impulse behind militarization,” Sherry writes, “was its leaders’ and citizens’ inability to trust and justify collective national action except when it occured in war or a warlike mode.”
By now, though, the American people have been mobilized too many times, been enlisted in too many “wars,” real and putative. The age of militarization came to an end in a “distinctly fitful, rancorous, uncertain fashion,” as the identity politics of George Bush and Bill Clinton demonstrate, while the wholesale flight from politics–and collective national action–that followed has thrown into question the identity of the nation as a whole.
With Michael Sherry as our guide, we can see that the political culture has come full circle, except that now the “national emergency” is one for which the “war analogy” can only lead to fratricide. For those presuming to enter the American labyrinth there is no more important guide than “In the Shadow of War.” It is a remarkable achievement.
