Time was, in the antediluvian years before Reagan, that "liberal"
was a handle a fighting man could cop to. Its devaluation into the
much-maligned "L word," writes the author, owes as much to left as
right. There's not much new in those observations or in the others
Mattson (History/Ohio Univ.) makes here, which amounts to a quite
readable survey of the golden age of America's policy-oriented
public intellectuals: men (and a men's club it was) such as Arthur
Schlesinger, Archibald MacLeish, Bernard De Voto, and John Kenneth
Galbraith. They cut their teeth on WWII, when they found themselves
playing influential roles in outfits like the Office of War
Information (from which one memo sternly reprimanded Hollywood for
its racist portrayal of Japanese soldiers: "This is not a racial
war") and the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the
CIA, which taught Schlesinger, for one, that American power needed
to be projected into the world. After the war, working through
messengers such as the New York Post (now anything but liberal) and
various journals of opinion, they offered close analyses of
government policy and promoted social service and responsibility:
thus their rejection of consumer culture for giving "priority to
private satisfaction while denigrating public life." Their opinions
were so diverse, writes Mattson, that their ideas of what
constituted a "realistic" foreign policy could allow both for
America's taking the lead in otherwise untrustworthy international
organizations and for its taking pains to build international
alliances-an ambivalence that played out in what has been called
(unfairly, the author argues) the "liberals' war," Vietnam, but
more recently in Iraq as well. Without playing the counterfactual
card too explicitly, the author suggests that the world might have
a much different shape today had the increasingly liberal-leaning
JFK not been killed; then, perhaps, the New Left would not have
turned against the Old Left, liberal anticommunism might have
prevailed, and Reagan might not have arisen to call liberals bad
names. A slight work about a bygone era, but with lessons to offer
for our own time. (Kirkus Reviews)
A sweeping intellectual history that will make us rethink postwar
politics and culture, When America Was Great profiles the thinkers
and writers who crafted a new American liberal tradition in a
conservative era -- from historians Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and C.
Vann Woodward, to economist John Kenneth Galbraith and theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr.
A compelling tale that will redefine the word "liberal" for a new
generation, Mattson retraces the intellectual journey of these
towering figures. They served in the Second World War. They opposed
communism but also wanted to make America's poor visible to the
affluent society. Contrary to those who characterize liberals as
naive or sentimental "bleeding hearts," they had a tough-minded and
nuanced vision that stressed both human limitations and hope. They
felt America should stand for something more than just a strong
economy.
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