From The End of the Myth (Greg Grandin, 2019) pp197-200
Nelson Rockefeller, who had served as Roosevelt’s and Truman’s top Latin American envoy, wanted to believe there were. “With the closing of our own frontiers,” he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1951, “there is hope that other frontiers still exist in the world.” There was “frustration,” he said, among the young people he had spoken with, a fear that there was no way to fulfill traditional individual initiative:
These young people are seeking new opportunity, the chance to move out, to go to other parts of the world. Our country was settled by people with that dynamic urge to find new opportunities, and they found them for many years in the country. Now the opportunity seems to be in other parts of the world. . . . The young people of this country naturally assume that we are an integral part of a world scene, and they want to be identified positively with that world scene. I think they want to feel that we are not just working for our own limited interests as a Nation, but that we are working for interests plus the interest of the people of the world as a whole. I think psychologically that is a very important factor. I feel the same myself.
Postwar internationalism – the opening of the global economy under U.S. leadership – could be a new frontier, Rockefeller told Congress, allowing the next generation an opportunity to be ambitious and to believe itself good, to see no daylight between the pursuit of self-interest and the pursuit of a better world.
Dissents, doubts, and frustrations aside, postwar technological advances, especially in agricultural production, were spectacular. Many old New Dealers didn’t imagine the promise of “growth” to stand in opposition to their efforts to establish an ethic of social solidarity. FDR’s vice president, Henry Wallace – who would later break with the Democratic Party over its postwar turn toward anti-communism and launch a third-party bid for the White House – had worked with Nelson Rockefeller in the early 1940s to set up a program of agricultural research in Mexico. That program dramatically improved corn and wheat yields in Mexico and then expanded into the broader Green Revolution to triple grain production in Asia. Walt Whitman’s long ago prediction that the United States would “feed the world” had, it seemed, come true, with progress achieved not by waging class war on property relations but by innovation, technology, and trials and errors that increased production. “The task before us,” the historian Arnold Toynbee said in 1964, “is to reopen the West’s economic frontier at a new moral level,” and to use the “technological precocity” of the United States to help the whole world reap a “golden harvest?”
Harry Truman often invoked the country’s frontier history in his battle against McCarthyite reactionaries to argue that the United States could both spend lavishly on a Cold War armaments program and continue funding New Deal social programs. This double challenge, of fighting oppression abroad and advancing progress at home, he said, was part of the frontier tradition. The country was up to the task, Truman said shortly after winning the 1948 presidential election, “because there are now, as there have always been, more Americans who look ahead toward the broad horizon than who look backward toward times and places left behind.” The nation had crossed a new meridian, Truman said, where it learned from “experience that we cannot leave the forces of a huge and complicated economy to take care of themselves.” As long as that lesson wasn’t lost, it would be possible to create a postwar world of uninterrupted progress, with “a steady growth in the standards of living” and an “ever-expanding economy” freed from cyclical crises. Conservative critics who said otherwise were living in the past. Endless innovations and never-ending growth were opening up new roads and “today’s frontiers call for the same pioneering vision, the same resourcefulness, the same courage that were displayed by the men and women who challenged our geographical frontiers a century ago.”
To be sure, U.S.-led internationalism during its golden age was profoundly skewed. Henry Luce won the political or public relations argument. But Clare’s “race realism,” as some today would call her kind of geopolitical white supremacism, was closer in truth to how the world’s resources were actually distributed. With “less than 5 percent of world population,” the United States, according to one analysis, consumed “one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper.” Between 1900 and the end of the Cold War, resource consumption in the United States “increased by a factor of 17,” vastly outpacing “that of people living in the developing world.” It took an enormous amount of violence, including the staging of serial coups in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America to maintain those numbers, and the pretense of calling this arrangement “universalism” or “multilateralism” could only be maintained so long as the promise of endless economic growth remained credible. “Our watchword is not ‘holding our own,’” Truman said. “Our watchwords are ‘growth,’ ‘expansion,’ ‘progress.’ . . . There are still frontier days.”
At the end of World War II, an ascendant United States, its dust storms behind it, had a claim to being a different kind of world power. It seemed to many as if the nation had overcome its obsession with laissez-faire to embrace a modern conception of citizenship – not, surely, social rights or social democracy, but still something close to the reforming spirit of the New Deal. Abroad, postwar reconstruction proved it was willing to spill blood saving the economies of potential commercial rivals (Great Britain and France) and spend its treasure rebuilding those of enemies (Germany and Japan). The Marshall Plan extended billions of dollars to restore Europe’s economy, serving as the calling card of a foreign policy that justified itself with a credible conflation of selfishness and selflessness. “Mankind,” Truman said as he reached the end of his presidency, “for the first time in human history can wipe poverty and ignorance and human misery clean off the face of the earth.”
The Henry Luces and Harry Trumans won the postwar debate. The idea of the frontier was reborn and the United States would work to create an open world and to bring down barriers. Still, in 1945, at the end of the war, the first significant physical barrier went up along the Mexican border: “4,500 lineal feet of chain link fencing,” ten feet high and “woven of No. 6 wire,” near Calexico, California. The fence-posts and wire mesh had been recycled from California’s Crystal City Internment Camp, which had been used to hold Japanese Americans during World War II.
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