For a lot of people, the 1950's and 1960's are touted as some kind of American golden age. U.S. manufacturing was at its peak with exports galore worldwide, widespread union membership kept wages high enough to ensure a healthy middle class, and the U.S. government was well enough funded to pump huge amounts of money into education and the sciences. Yes, it was truly a golden age, as long as one ignores the rampant racism, sexism, and pollution. However, we're not here to talk about those bad things, we're here to talk about how that world was created, not by American exceptionalism, but by pure dumb luck.
At the start of the twentieth century, nobody considered the United States a super power. Rather, it was more of a strange land across the ocean full of well off hicks. Real power rested in Europe, with the old industrialized super powers of Britain, France, and Russia, facing off against rising stars like Germany and Japan. These nations dominated trade in the world, as well as wide swaths of territory in order to guarantee their access to the natural resources needed to feed their industrial machines. Thanks to its abundance of natural resources, the U.S. had little aspiration to expand beyond its sphere of influence. Though increasingly industrialized, most of the goods the U.S. manufactured were consumed by its own relatively large population. For the industrialized nations of Europe, the U.S. was not seen as a rival, but rather a good place to invest money.
This view first started changing during World War I. As Europe shifted its focus from manufacturing goods people around the world wanted to buy to weapons to kill each other with, a hole was left in the global economy which the U.S. gladly filled. U.S. industry expanded rapidly, starting an economic boom that lasted until a little something called the Great Depression just took a big shit on everybody.
That might have been it for the idea of U.S. exceptionalism, but luckily it turned out that the nations of Europe weren’t ready to stop beating the crap out of each other. The outbreak of World War II again created a hole in the global economy as Europe concentrated its manufacturing toward murdering people, a hole the U.S. was more than happy to exploit again. However, this time around, things got pretty out of hand. By the end of the war, pretty much every industrialized nation in the world that wasn’t the United States was totally and completely fucked up. With millions of people dead, and their industrial capacity bombed back to the stone age, the old superpowers were all out of the game. The only major industrial nation to come out of the war unscathed was the good old U.S. of A., with the Soviet Union a distant second (hence the whole Cold War thing).
It cannot be emphasized enough how World War II completely altered the economic landscape of the world. With nobody else to compete with them, the U.S. basically became the manufacturing center of the western world. Exports poured out, money poured in, and the U.S. economy went crazy. When the returning American G.I.’s joined unions and demanded better pay, the companies gave in pretty much without a fight. Part of it was because you don’t want to fuck with a whole generation of men with military training, but it was also because it just didn’t matter. The companies were making so much money that they could afford to be generous to their workers. The middle class grew by leaps and bounds, and the entire idea of what we today call the American Dream was born.
Well, fast forward a couple of decades and things began to change. Europe and Japan finally recovered from the war and started being major competitors again on the world market. Other developing nations began to emerge as well. The U.S. found itself no longer the only player in town. It was the beginning of the end for the golden age, a decline that stretched itself over decades. The U.S. shifted from an exporter to an importer. Its power over the global economy became based no longer upon its ability to produce, but by its ability to consume. Other countries slowly but surely took its place, countries where the workers were more desperate and nobody cared if a river or two caught fire. The so-called good times faded away. A bountiful time created by the dumb luck of being the only major player to come out of the worst war in world history relatively untouched.
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