In 1941, even before the United States had entered World War II, the publisher Henry Luce, whose Time, Life, and Fortune magazines had become mainstays of American popular culture, repeated the claim of Senator Beveridge that the twentieth century would be "the American Century." "Our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technological skills" would be shared by all peoples, he declared. The United States must become the "training center for the skilled servants of mankind."[10] To what extent has the latter half of the twentieth century fulfilled Luce's prediction? What kind of role has America played in the world? And how has that global involvement shaped American life and institutions at home? These are central questions in understanding America's place in modern world history as the twentieth century draws to a close.

By the end of the war, the "American Century" seemed to have arrived. The industrial, military, and political power of the United States was unmatched anywhere in the world. Large portions of Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan lay in ruins, while the American flag flew triumphantly in Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo. Great Britain and France, along with the Dutch and Portuguese, were in the process of losing their colonial empires. The United States, in contrast, was the world's largest creditor, controlled two-thirds of the world's gold, and accounted for half the world's manufacturing and shipping. Of all the world's currencies, only the U.S. dollar was universally trusted.

American postwar diplomacy was in marked contrast to the aftermath of World War I. In 1919, the U.S. Senate rejected the League of Nations; in 1945, there was little opposition to American membership in the new United Nations. Indeed, its permanent headquarters was soon established in New York City. Far from withdrawing from international affairs, the United States took advantage of both its own strength and the weakness of its allies and enemies to expand its political and economic influence to a degree far surpassing that of any previous great power.

In western Europe, the United States took the lead in aiding recovery through the Marshall Plan, which provided loans and credits to those war-torn nations that chose to participate. In Japan, Americans virtually dictated the rebuilding of that shattered nation, imposing a Western-style constitution on the existing economic system. In Latin America, untouched by the war, the power and influence of American banking, mining, agricultural, and petroleum interests remained unchallenged.

In the wake of American influence came heavy doses of American culture as well. American movies attracted and influenced millions. The works of American anthors were translated into dozens of languages. American music, particularly jazz and later rock and roll, became a major form of entertainment for young people the world over. And the brand names of American products, such as Jeeps, Spam, Kleenex, and Coca-Cola, entered the vocabulary of many languages as common nouns. While the masses tended to embrace these American cultural exports, a vocal minority of writers, intellectuals, and political leaders in Europe and elsewhere objected to the new "cultural imperialism" and to the "Americanization" of their countries.

The growing U.S. role in the world was sustained by unparalleled economic growth and middle-class prosperity at home. Private spending for housing, automobiles, and durable goods, as well as public spending for schools, superhighways, and the Cold War armaments industry spurred this remarkable growth. The suburbanization of America, begun in the 1920s by Henry Ford and his Model T but delayed by the Great Depression and World War II, resumed in the 1950s. Low-cost modular housing and an explosion in new thruway construction separated more and more Americans from their place of work. American women reentered the work force at a rate that eventually surpassed that of the World War II years. Baby boomers--children born during or just after the war--began moving through the elementary and secondary schools.

There was one serious challenge to the "American Century": the apparently spreading ideology of communism backed by the growing power of the Soviet Union. From Berlin to Korea, from Cuba to Vietnam, the two superpowers, with their various allies and surrogates, confronted one another in what quickly came to be known as the Cold War. The Soviet Union's insistence on protecting itself from a real or imagined threat from the Western powers by dominating Eastern Europe--and the ruthlessness with which the Soviets were prepared to do so--was incompatible with the American view of expanding liberal capitalism throughout the world. Furthermore, the growing attraction and influence of communist development models among some of the new nations of Africa and Asia raised the stakes to global dimensions. And the possession of nuclear weapons by both sides set the stage for confrontation and potential catastrophe.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, the U.S. posture toward the Cold War and the Soviet Union was guided by the doctrine of containment, which assumed that Moscow was the hub of a vast and coordinated revolutionary expansionism aimed at Western institutions and interests, not unlike Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Accordingly--and in contrast to 1930s' diplomacy--that expansionism had to be confronted at every opportunity.

Containment emerged first in the Truman Doctrine of 1947, in which the United States pledged support for virtually any government threatened by Communist aggression or subversion. The Marshall Plan soon followed, as did the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), designed to counter any Soviet military threat to Western Europe. In 1950, after Communist North Korea attempted to overrun South Korea, Americans again took the lead in combatting Communist expansion. For the next three years, American and South Korean forces, under the U.N. flag, engaged the armies of both North Korea and China. The Korean War ended in a stalemate, but with the loss of over 54,000 American lives.

In the 1950s, the containment policy led to the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954, and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in 1959. In addition, the United States actively engaged in the overthrow of democratically chosen but leftist governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954). Yet containment had its limits. It did not, for example, challenge Soviet control over nations adjacent to the Soviet Union itself. In Eastern Europe, when anti-Soviet Hungarians temporarily overthrew their goveinment in 1956, they received no aid from the United States. Nor did Czechoslovakians in 1968.

Most Americans agreed with the goals of containment. There seemed to be consensus on domestic policy as well. The Republican Eisenhower administration (1953-1961) accepted most of the New Deal reforms and a correspondingly larger role for the state in public life. Throughout the 1950s, political discourse was largely limited to which party or candidate could best maintain prosperity at home and containment abroad.

No one summed up the containment philosophy better than the young Democratic President John F. Kennedy in his stirring l961 Inaugural Address, in which he pledged that Americans would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty." It was during Kennedy's brief administration that the Cold War came the closest to ignition. In 1961, Soviet and East German forces faced Americans and West Germans across the newly built Berlin Wall, erected to halt the flow of refugees from the Communist sector of that divided city. In 1962, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev confronted one another over the placement of Soviet strategic missiles in Cuba. Though neither crisis escalated to war, the world had come perilously close to nuclear holocaust.

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