By the fall of 1943, World War II, for the United States, was half over and so the contours of what the war was like was well established and what would have to ensue was foreseen. It was two years since Pearl Harbor but it was clear that the Axis powers were in retreat. The Japanese were no longer expansive, the pivotal battle in Guadalcanal an American victory, and the ever increasing American armada moving up the island chains in the Pacific to deal with the eventual defeat of Japan, however problematic whether that would need invasion rather than isolation, and not considering what would eventually happen, which was an atomic bomb. What was also forecast were very bloody campaigns, the United States having recently conquered what might seem the inconsequential island of Tarawa in a battle that devastated the U. S. Marine Second Division, but was a stepping stone to the East. Iwo Jima and Okinawa would follow. And in Europe, it was also the case that Germany had spent its strength, sure to be defeated unless Hitler came up with new wonder weapons, such as sufficient numbers of jet planes and rockets, so as to make up the difference of ever growing American armament. Hitler had already by then failed at Stalingrad, and in a slow but definite retreat on the Italian boot, but everyone knew that a cross channel landing and progress to Berlin would neccesitate great casualties. The war was not over even if the Allies were clearly winning. The question is what was the state of the nation in the midst of the war and what did it foretell about what post-war America would be like, whether the war was transformative as it would show itself to be rather than to fall back into a pre-war mode, which is what had happened in the South after the end of the Civil War, or destabilized, as happened to Germany after the First World War, or having surprisingly few consequences after the Vietnam War, and England, the victor of the First World War, not really changed until after the Second World War when Labor created the nationalization of industry and social services, such as education and health. Can we see into the crystal ball of 1943 so as to predict its future?
The economic projections are easier to see. The ability of the United States to turn itself into “the arsenal of democracy”, as it was called, had already borne fruit. Assembly lines of the big auto industries were able in short time to change from making automobiles to making tanks, and so it was to be expected that after the end of the war those assembly lines could be ripped out and new ones put in to make automobiles again. The industry that allowed new cargo ships to be built in ninety days so as to replace the loss of ships to U-Boats could be turned to making appliances to suit the women who returned to being homemakers after stints as war workers, though the trend of labor saving devices for the wives predated the war and can be traced back to the Twenties when refrigerators and sewing machines and the like had become popular. There would also be pent up demand because money was being saved because products were no longer available, money sopped up with Liberty Bonds that were not really designed to pay for a bomb or a tank but to combat inflation. Government helped by allowing soon enough long term no down payment mortgages for the returning GI’s and the 1944 legislation for the G.I. Bill of Rights allowed veterans to go to college and become middle class and buy the new suburbs that were being built, Long Island replaced by potato farms with cookie cutter homes.
But was there something deeper than economics which explained the ability to transform itself in the few decades after the war ended that made it a very different place? What happened that might, with some insight, have been expected? The answer to that, what would transform America as a social entity rather than just the social consequences of economic prosperity, the middle class world expanding to all the industrialized nations when they recovered from the war, was a crystal ball wherein could be seen in America also the future integration of Black and white castes into being a single nation where Blacks were turned from a separate caste to becoming another ethnic group, it like other ethnic groups taking pride in the extent that its own boys and girls were making it. The man who looked into the future was Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist commissioned by the Carnegie Corperation to look deeply into what was then called “the Negro Problem” (an investigation that Congress would not at all touch at the time) and a scholar wise enough to use the Black intellegensia of its time ro assist in his undertaking. Published in January, 1944, hardly a time to be thinking about anything else but the War, though British Labor was indeed thinking of reshaping its society and introducing nationalization in major industries and also in health and education, Myrdal set the explanation and the formula that would eventuate in the course of the next generation that would manage to revolutionize America without a revolution, its accomplishment one of those shining hours that are to be looked at as having defined the nation for evermore, as having turned division into cooperation even if the social plight of inner city blacks remain a residue of the bad old days, and there are retrograde politicians who are not pleased with the progress. But, all in all, even Southerners are integrated enough so that there is no desire to turn the clock back to where it was in 1944.
Here is what Myrdal proposed. First of all, the problems Black people faced were not of their own doing but the result of prejudice, discrimination and law which prohibited them from making economic and social progress. That seems obvious enough today, but back then many thought that Black poverty and lack of education were the result of genetic inferiority, and crime and laziness as ways of life, and the only solution was to exert sufficient social control so that Black people could be kept in their place. Remember that lynching was at the time a prominant feature of social control and that racial progress was accomplished in reducing the need for lynching, an outraged and in the South justified method of execution on the pretext that Black men were abusing white women. Second of all, the paradoxical solution of the problem, according to Myrdal, was to get whites to ease their social restrictions on Blacks, to become more benevolent towards what were their oppressors, something which does not usually happen in the history of the world. It is no wonder that the young Ralph Elison, already a Black intellectual, reviewed “An American Dilemma” and thought Myrdal’s proscription much too mild and that a necessary role for the process had to include Black activism. That follows from the usual historical premise that the powerful do not give up their privilege until forced to. And yet what Myrdal prophesied was precisely what came to pass. A generation after the publication of the book, the all white Senate, led by a white Texan President, passed the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Accommodations Act that freed Black people from, respectively, political and economic bondage, even if the leading figure of the movement was a southern Black preacher who had trained in the North, but who self admitted that he had been intimidated by his long heritage of inferiority for being intimidated by confronting white judges and lawyers. The whole process, this transformation, was stranger than fiction in that a deeply ingrained system of caste that had lasted for three hundred years had been and would be overcome without major violence. Astonishing, even if Black advocates carp about microaggressions when not so long ago there was real and general violent aggression agaainst them, and even if revisionists will say that there must have been interests whereby white elitists and activists must have supported the social and economic revolution. This, too, had been a Greatest Generation.
How did that happen? This is deeper than economics and politics and far more uncertain to satisfactorily answer and therefore to be explored in literature even if the best one can do is indicative rather than definitive or certain. The most well known movie of 1943 is, of course, “Casablanca '', which won all the Academy Awards, and was a paeon to patriotism, even if a wag might suggest that staying with Ingrid Bergman rather than supporting the war effort was an easy choice. A second movie of that year was by Alfred Hitchkock, “Shadow Of A Doubt”, a thriller about a city criminal who runs away to a small town in California to hide from those pursuing him. The movie is full of suspense, which is what brought Hitchcock fame as a British director and then, starting in World War II, as an American one, sustaining suspense all the way through “Marnie”. He applies his wiles to his protagonist’s character, played by Joseph Cotten, who comes to Santa Rosa, California, where the real town is elaborately photographed in the plein air style of real streets and buildings, which replaced sets as settings. That was becoming dominant at that time, though Hitchkock had already pioneered it while still in Great Britain in “The Thirty Nine Steps”. Cotten’s niece, Teresa Wright, playing a teenager, seems smitten with him or at least preoccupidd with him, and after she discovers his murders she tries to allow him to escape even after he tries to kill her. Something is not quite right in the idealized small town family in that the father and his friend are amused in planning how to murder one of them and the niece is a bit over the top, very high strung, too enthusiastic abut her uncle, immature until she learns the truth about her uncle and, I suppose, about life.
But the screenplay was by Thornon Wilder, and so given with the sentimentality of what was considered small town life, even if Santa Rosa seems more substantial than that--no Grover’s Corners in “Our Town”. The main point, before Hitchcock unravels things, is that small town life is idyllic largely because people are honorable and decent, characteristic of Americans, and only rarely touched by evil, even if a war is going on, that suggested in the movie because there are soldiers in a bar that the uncle takes her niece and where she protests that she has never been in such a place before. Bad things, including the crimes of the uncle, are suppressed and so decency as well as prosperity are the American order. After the War, Orson Welles will appear as “The Stranger”, who is an escaped war criminal who also tries to hide in a small American town and is temporarily deceived by Lorreta Young until he is tracked down by Edward G. Robinson. Hitchcock does not turn it into an anti-Nazi movie, only having the uncle say that people are generally awful and of no bother, contrary as it is to this American creed, his view a startling and not credible belief that just shows how evil he is. Evil is in the shadows and with the deviants, not with ordinary people, however many ordinary people are fascinated with it as long as it is at a distance.
It is very impressive how well Hitchcock adapted to the American view, so much a portrayer of the American point of view that when he remade some of his British films, as happened when “The Man Who Knew Too Much” was remade, the British setting hierarchical in that the religious group was sectarian rather than in the later version cultish. Hitchcock, a foreigner just as Nabakov was, also dwelling on the fears and nature of motels, Hitchcock’s “Psycho” a version of “Lolita”. The point is that being American was to embrace good sense and decency as its creed, as that was based on its middle class values, while other nations see those characteristics as sidebars, as when the peasants playfully court one another to give a bit of relief from the grim business of war in “Alexander Nevsky”, or when British decency is the consequence of aristocratic stoicism, That is why, I suggest, it might be that Myrdal thought decency would prevail even so far as to overcome a caste system. “The American Dilemma” ‘s view was that people deserve fairness and opportunity whatever their station in life, and so they would learn to overcoming prejudice and discrimination.
It is therefore a mistake to think of the Civil Rights Movement and the federal legislation that followed as just making whole for another group that ventured or was forced to make the voyage to America. This was, instead, one of its signal achievements, something so radical that it has been rarely matched in other nations, and something vital to its history, just as was the case in the original framing of the Constitution or the incorporation of territories as states rather than dependencies, and the expansion of the nation to becoming a continent, something only now beginning to accomplish in Europe, or being open to immigration for large parts of its history. In that case, America lived up to its words and, as the time passes, for all the backsliding, this was a signal moment, a signal generation, and literature told us it might happen, even if Hitchcock was not talking about race.