IN THE SHADOW OF WAR: The United States Since the 1930s

by Michael S. Sherry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 1995

A critical history of the US from the mid-1930s on, in which militarization serves as an organizing principle if not a determinant of geopolitical and socioeconomic events. From a viewpoint that's at least as antimilitary as antimilitarist, Sherry (History/Northwestern Univ.) offers a dour account of the many ways in which the exigencies of war and national security appear to have shaped not only the collective mindset of Americans but also their very culture. Nor were Americans merely reacting to history's bad guys; they themselves helped create their war-centered society. Sherry assigns more blame for the Cold War to Beltway hardliners than Kremlin commissars, surveying the recurrent crises--Afghanistan, Berlin, Cuba, Grenada, Korea, Vietnam--that marked this protracted confrontation. He points out that as American presidents and lesser lights became accustomed to a constant level of conflict and tension on the international front, they began declaring war on drugs, energy waste, poverty, racism, tobacco, and other perceived ills. While martial injunctions were in the tradition of FDR's call to economic arms in his inaugural address, the author observes, domestic problems proved appreciably more abstract and less susceptible to decisive solutions than foreign foes. Among other outcomes, Sherry concludes, the failure to achieve clear-cut victories in putatively collective campaigns on the home front has fostered internal conflict and undermined trust in the authority of a big central government that relied on belligerencies to provide a unifying force in the first place. At the close, he questions whether Americans can overcome their loss of faith in the institutions of a sometime warfare state whose record is not such as to inspire confidence. An exercise in academic revisionism evidently intended to challenge the conventional wisdom of the political right and (to a lesser extent) left on the lessons of the recent past.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1995

ISBN: 0300072635

Page Count: 624

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

Categories: NONFICTION