The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin

Author:Greg Grandin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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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.”28

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.29 The fence’s 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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