This article ran in the Tallahassee Democrat on December 8, 1991.

Saturday's commemoration of Pearl Harbor will be a prelude to a flood of similar events to follow--which will mark World War II landings, battles, victories and defeats, Potsdam, Yalta, and finally, five years from now, the bomb. Most of these anniversaries will be somber moments, indeed.

But we should not lose sight of the immensity of World War II in our commemoration of its smaller moments, important as they are. The beginning of these anniversaries is now a fitting time to remember the impact of the war as a whole on the American social and cultural landscape. World War II changed us as a nation in countless and complex ways. Three areas, however, were centrally important and continue to have important effects today. It brought an end to a tradition of isolationism; it fostered a sense of America's invulnerability; it launched an era of astounding prosperity.

America had been isolationist, keeping to itself in global matters, for most of its history. George Washington, in his Farewell Address of 1796, had warned the country to take advantage of the unique protection provided by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and to avoid foreign entanglements. With only a few exceptions, the US followed his advice for over a century. Yes, we bought much of the current US from France and took most of the rest from Mexico in a war that we started--to say nothing of the land taken from the previous inhabitants, the native Americans.

But until our naval adventures in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and our entry into World War I in 1917, the US had not assumed a role in global affairs. Then, when America found itself unable to achieve an idealistic peace between European countries after World War I, Americans became more convinced than ever that foreign adventure was a disastrous policy. American isolationism was renewed with a vengeance. It remained so strong in the 1930s that Americans even opposed any move to stop the rise of fascism in Europe. It was this long tradition of isolationism that was finally broken by World War II.

Two days after the Japanese bombing of the American navy in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote a letter to an aide of President Franklin Roosevelt that indicated the public mood. "The Japanese," MacLeish reported, "expected to knock us out of the war with one treacherous blow. Instead they have aroused and awakened us as a people.... And they have written in letters of treachery their own final and inescapable doom."

One of the most striking indications of the abandonment of isolationism was the popularity of Henry Luce's February 17, 1941 editorial in Life magazine entitled "The American Century." Luce, the founder and editor of the Time and Life empire, was an enthusiastic supporter of intervening in the European war against Hitler. Those, like Luce, who argued for an international role for the US were labeled interventionists, or, more broadly, internationalists.

Luce suggested that the US for decades already had been the strongest nation in the world, and now it was time to accept the responsibilities of that power. He proposed that we "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." The arrogance of his statement was hard to miss.

But Luce advised the US to be a force for good. How? He believed that America should insure global free enterprise, provide free technical and artistic training to those nations that wanted it, feed and clothe the world as a Good Samaritan, and spread the ideals of democracy, freedom, and justice around the globe.

This would be the American century, Luce told his readers, because it would the century in which the US was the most powerful. And although the US had remained isolationist, he pointed out that American culture already bound the world: American jazz, movies, slang, and products were "the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common."

America already had become a world power accidentally, and now, in his view, it had to live up to its global responsibility. The enthusiastic response Luce's editorial received across the country marked the death of American isolationism.

The second effect of the war on America is related to the first. The unique conditions that immediately followed the war fueled an American overconfidence about itself that has lasted until today. We might call this a belief in American "exceptionalism," for reasons that will be evident.

Beginning with the Puritans in New England in the 1630s, many Americans have considered themselves agents of a special mission from God. At first it was a religious mission to provide a holy model for Europe. In later centuries this was transformed into a secular mission to bring democracy and freedom to the world. As those chosen to perform God's mission, some believed, Americans were not subject to the same historical laws as others. Unlike the rest of the world, we would not run out of land, food, resources, or opportunity. We were exempt from history, exceptions to the rule. We were the American exception, and so the outlook was American exceptionalism.

The special global circumstances that accompanied the end of World War II fueled this belief in our uniqueness. The US had the only significant economy and military left standing after the war, largely because our land had not been bombed. This put us in a position of special and unequalled power. Our military could not be challenged, and our economy had open global markets with no competition.

But instead of seeing these circumstances as unique and temporary products of recent history, Americans believed that the country, specially blessed by God, could do whatever it wanted, at whatever cost, for an infinite period of time. The global collapse at the end of World War II, that is, fueled an American overconfidence that has been a problem in the decades since.

US military overconfidence led the country to believe that it could win any war in any place and at any cost. This was a lesson that large countries had to revise in the wake of the American experience in Vietnam and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.

American economic overconfidence bred the notion that each successive generation would surpass the affluence of the one before. In the 1960s, as the real wages of the working class began to level off and thereafter began slowly to fall, Americans realized that they had to live by the same economic rules that bound all nations. Americans could not ignore reinvestment, education, and productivity without paying a price. We could not forever live on the economic capital of the late 1940s.

So these illusions of overconfidence and exceptionalism, of invincibility and special providence, were one of the important effects of World War II. The process of breaking these illusions and returning to reality was at the heart of much of the social conflict and unrest of the 1960s. It is never a happy process to learn to live within limits, but it is required of all of the world's inhabitants to do so.

The third major impact of World War II on American society was the affluence it produced. It was not the New Deal that cured the deep economic depression of the 1930s, although it helped. The preparation for war is what reheated the American economic engine. In the 1940s and 1950s the US economy was a wonder.

One indication of this growth was the yearly Gross National Product (GNP), the value of all the goods and services the country produced. In 1940, before the war, the GNP was $100 billion. By the end of the war in 1945 the GNP had more than doubled to $212 billion. The 1955 figures reached $400 billion, or exactly four times the output of 1940 within fifteen years. In 1965 GNP stood at $691 billion, and by 1970 it had risen to $943 billion--after which point the American economy began to decelerate. These figures are not corrected for inflation, but inflation was relatively low in this period.

Another indication of postwar affluence is that personal income rose dramatically. In constant 1954 dollars, corrected for inflation, a family of four earned an average of $3,343 per year in 1936. In 1946 that same average family earned $5,150. By 1960 that family brought in $6,193 and had nearly doubled its 1936 income. The per capita income in Harlem in 1960 would have ranked it fifth in the world among nations. This is not to say that people in Harlem were being treated fairly within the American system. It's merely to show that against the standards of the world, even America's poor were relatively affluent.

As we might expect, this enormous growth of wealth had a transforming effect on the country. It produced a mass society in which the institutions of the economy, government, media, education, entertainment, and housing were overwhelmingly large and, for the most part, identical from town to town and region to region.

In housing, for example, suburbanization was accelerated. In order to satisfy a growing population with an increased ability to buy a house, standardized residential tracts expanded over the American landscape. This living arrangement was such a part of the postwar world that the terms "American" and "suburban" were thought to be two sides of the same coin. Suburbanization even was felt to be part of the very process that helped Americans resist the Soviets. In 1948 William Levitt, a leading suburban developer, declared that "No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do."

The growth of suburbs helped fuel the rest of the economy. What could be called a "suburban-industrial complex" created a consumption multiplier: more automobiles were needed to reach the suburbs, more appliances to furnish them, the construction of more shopping centers to provide for them. At midcentury, televisions were being installed in 1,000 homes every twenty-four hours. Children, both a byproduct of and the reason for the suburbs, created their own demand for products. An important area of consumption for the younger generation was music, including records and the high-fidelity systems required to play them.

Following the war, the number of privately owned cars more than doubled in a decade. In 1956 Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act, and in the ensuing two decades the US government spent $100 billion on roads. Highway construction, tied to the growth of suburbs, further increased economic growth. The GI Bill of Rights, enacted by Congress in 1944, provided loans to returning servicemen for business and school. It helped spur the growth of the economy and the university system.

This affluent mass society after the war was also characterized by more centralization and organization. Fewer people worked for themselves, and instead were mid-level white collar workers in large organizations: in corporations, government offices, universities, or the media. Yet while the postwar mass society brought affluence, it also raised some doubts. Was the cherished American individualism being threatened by the sameness of life in the suburbs and organizations?

The Beats were one collection of writers who raised their voices against the new mass affluence. They resented the loss of what they considered an older and better America, one not driven by mass standards, mechanism, and affluence. America, Allen Ginsberg declared in 1956, "Your machinery is too much for me./ It makes me want to be a saint." The Beats represented a reaction against the mass society in the 1950s, a reaction that would blossom into a wider counterculture in the following decade.

Sociological critics constituted another group who questioned postwar mass society. David Riesman, in his book The Lonely Crowd (1950), was alarmed by the conformity mass society produced. Individuals were no longer independent persons who had moral standards and made up their own minds, a type he called "inner-directed." In postwar America, individuals were now influenced by peer pressure. People were now "other-directed." Unwilling to make their own moral decisions and exercise their own standards, individuals followed the direction of their friends.

Other American thinkers were not so worried by conformity. The philosopher Sidney Hook, for example, pointed out that unthinking conformity was no worse than unthinking nonconformity. So it was irrelevant whether a person conformed or not. Instead it was important whether that person had thought through the issue properly.

So let us take stock of the influence that World War II exerts on America today. How are these three changes resulting from the war--internationalism, exceptionalism, and affluence--influencing the US currently?

Has the end of isolationism continued? Yes. If Henry Luce were to wander back into public life in 1991, he would be happy to see that America is still shouldering a responsibility for world order. Internationalism is alive and well.

But this is not to say that isolationism is dead, even if it sometimes seems to be so in George Bush's America. There are indications that isolationism is now stronger than it has been in decades. The strongest strain of isolationism remains scattered throughout the remnants of the 1960s' generation. It is an isolation that was bred in revulsion to the Vietnam War. Former student followers of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern maintained their liberal isolationism in the decades after the 1960s--by opposing American involvement in Central America, Grenada, Libya, Lebanon, and Iraq.

What about conservatives? Before World War II, when isolation ruled the country, conservatives were among the most committed isolationists, among the most strident voices for keeping out of the world's business. Then the shadow of global communism rose, and in the 1940s conservatives found that they hated communism more than they hated internationalism. So conservatives changed, and, in the decades following the war, they became internationalists and supported strong intervention against communism. But when the communist threat began to unravel and disintegrate in the past several years, many American conservatives returned to their former isolationism. Why, they asked, should we spread economic and military aid around the world when the American business community could use that money at home? Why send our children off to die in a Gulf War to save Kuwait's political system?

Indeed, there has been a quite fascinating convergence between old liberal and conservative enemies, who now find a common ground in isolationism. The conservative journalist Patrick Buchanan once was a top Nixon adviser who recommended that the president repress students radicals. Then, during the Gulf War earlier this year, when conservatives began speaking loudly against American involvement, Buchanan and many of his conservative colleagues woke groggily one morning to find themselves snuggled up tightly to the former student activists they despised.These old antagonists were brought together by a common isolationism. It was an entertaining political spectacle.

Will the US continue its internationalism in the world? Will it continue along Bush's path of trying to shape the world into the form Americans would like? Will it continue ahead with Luce's vision? That is difficult to say, but it will be an issue in the 1992 presidential election. The answer will depend at least partly on whether we meet continued success and limited resistance abroad in our foreign policy. Much will also hinge on whether as a nation we can continue to afford this luxury of serving as constable of the global neighborhood.

What are the current effects of American exceptionalism, that overconfident sense of special mission that was escalated by World War II? For a short time it looked as though the illusion that America was exempt from normal historical rules had been smashed in the 1960s. Both the bitter reality of the Vietnam War and the angry backlash of the working class in that decade were a result of facing our military and economic limits. In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter tried to solidify our belief that we had to live in the real world.

But the process of coming to terms with the real contingencies we face in the world was reversed again in the Reagan and Bush years. Reagan was popular because he told Americans what they wanted to hear. We could do whatever we desired, Reagan reported, whether economically, militarily, or environmentally. We were a special country. Other nations might have to guard their environments, reinvest in their economies, be cautious about the wars they entered, or fund their educational systems. We could prosper without those measures. We were the chosen, the carriers of a mission and a special dispensation. We would be the perpetually affluent, regardless of our policies.

It is true that today the US military is unchallengeable, but at a severe cost to the domestic economy. And would our military power have brought us such a quick victory if it had been used in other circumstances? Which of us would have wanted to see, recently, the celebrated American military machine match its will with another indigenous guerilla movement in Southeastern jungles rather than the army of an unpopular ruler in the deserts of the Middle East?

Reagan's belief that our economy is exempted from the normal historical rules looks rather pathetic today. Those who disagreed with him for a decade have an unwelcome vindication these days in the sagging economy. So, like the question of continued internationalism, the question of whether the US should continue to behave as though the well is bottomless and we will be perpetually invincible will be decided by voters in future elections.

Finally, what about the American affluence that was created so dramatically by World War II? Can it continue? Must it decline? Likely, we will be as affluent as we work and sacrifice to be. Perhaps, as the Beats and other critics along the way have felt, there are better blessings to hope for than affluence. But American society has always been materialistic and there is no reason to assume it will change now. So if it is affluence we all want as a nation, we must earn it and insure it in the same way other countries do. We cannot suppose that we are again living in the late 1940s when the US had no economic competition and a world of hungry markets to exploit.

Americans must relearn old traits. We must remember how to work hard. Like other countries that prosper, Americans must save to reinvest in our productive capital. Similarly, we need to be willing to sacrifice to fund our educational system, a reinvestment in human capital. We must teach our children to work hard in their studies, and to think of school as more than athletics. There will be no special exemptions for America in this global game as there were in the late 1940s.

Ten months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Henry Luce proclaimed this the American century. He was right. In these past ten decades, since that point when the American industrial revolution hit high gear, the world has lived through an American era. The US has been the most powerful, influential, and affluent nation throughout the twentieth century. But will the next hundred years also be an American century? That is much more doubtful. Despite the global power the US now holds in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, our power and potential are not what they were at midcentury. Immediately following World War II there was in this country a giddy Leave-it-to-Beaver mood of rising suburban affluence and a belief in our growing potential.

That feeling is now gone. There's a persistent fear these days, haunting in the back of our minds whether we admit it or not, that we are following the course of Britain's economic decline, as once we followed its rise. That descent is apparent in our anemic state and city budgets, our starved public university systems, and a private sector that is having increasing trouble with foreign competition. We hear footsteps of other countries about to surpass us.

We better have enjoyed the American century, the twentieth century, while we had it, because it is not so certain that our dominance will prevail in the future. If the next century is also to be ours, we won't capture it quite so easily. We will need to work hard for it. The impact of World War II provided temporary benefits to American power that we are not likely to see repeated soon.