In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s.

In his 1958 State of the Union Address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that Americans "could make no more tragic mistake than merely to concentrate on military strength" in their global struggle against communism. "What makes the Soviet threat unique in history is its all-inclusiveness," Ike explained. "Every human activity is pressed into service as a weapon of expansion. Trade, economic development, military power, arts, science, education, the whole world of ideas--all are harnessed to this same chariot of expansion."

Alarmed at perceiving a similar dynamic at work in the United States, which had been "compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions," the war hero who had ridden his glistening military record into the White House issued a final warning two days before leaving office in 1961. In that famous farewell speech Eisenhower described his fear of "the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." Militarization was a potentially boundless process, he believed, capable of consuming the nation's best minds, squandering its precious natural resources, dominating its political and economic agenda, flattening its social diversity, and confining public-policy decisions to a scientific-technological elite--capable, in short, of eroding the democratic foundations that set the United States apart from its totalitarian cold-war enemy.

In the Shadow of War, Michael Sherry's compelling history of U.S. militarization since the Great Depression, can be read as an extensive meditation and commentary upon this rare presidential expression of doubt in the wisdom of subordinating all other worthy claims on American resourcefulness to the hyperbolic imperatives of national security. In the end, Sherry's comprehensive overview suggests, America's militarization avoided the totalizing, single-minded course associated with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Stalinist Soviet Union. U.S. democratic institutions and civil society were too well developed to permit total control--or even, at times, coherent direction--to be exercised from the top. Militarization was the tool rather than the objective of diverse interests, Sherry writes, and thus it followed a "peculiarly ragged, quixotic course."

Defining militarization sweepingly as "the process by which war and national security became consuming anxieties and provided the memories, models, and metaphors that shaped broad areas of national life" allows Sherry, a professor of history at Northwestern University, to explore its cultural and social as well as its political and military aspects. Thus he examines the role of popular culture--including American movies, best-selling novels, advertising, and lifestyle trends--in reflecting and shaping national attitudes about war and preparedness for war in each of nine discrete phases of the overarching period from 1933 to 1995; and he similarly explores the implications militarization held for women, African-Americans, homosexuals, and other marginalized social groups.

On occasion the author, in his desire to be inclusive and overcome what he sees as the limitations of traditional military and diplomatic history, overstates the reach of militarization and thus weakens his central thesis about its diffuse character, as when he argues that "the nation's ecology, economy, politics, cultural life, and social relations--everything that defines a nation--became annexed to this historical process." Characteristically, however, Sherry offers balanced judgments and nuanced interpretations of the mounds of evidence he has compiled from copious secondary sources and supplemental primary documents.

In discussing the situation of African-Americans, for example, Sherry demonstrates that advances in civil rights during the period from the New Deal to the mid-1960s were legitimated not by the self-evident demands of social justice but largely by arguments based on national security considerations. Embarrassing reports of systematic racial discrimination and riots in the United States, one such argument ran, would hand the Soviets a useful propaganda victory in the global competition for the allegiance of developing post-colonial nations (with their own vivid memories of repressive Western regimes). Or, as FDR put it in announcing his 1941 executive order barring racial discrimination by employers and labor unions engaged in defense business, a nation facing totalitarianism needed all its workers and sought to strengthen its "unity and morale by refuting at home the very theories which we are fighting abroad." Only when Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged to lead the civil rights movement in the '60s were cold-war imperatives displaced--and discredited--by outright moral claims.

Among the social and cultural forces shaping America within the paradigm of militarization, religion receives relatively short shrift. Unlike the treatment of women, blacks, and gays, consistent attention is given to religion's role and fate in the process of militarization only for the most recent period, and then with disproportionate emphasis on the New Religious Right and its baptism of "culture wars" ideology.

For all his awareness of social diversity and the call to "decenter" American history, Sherry chooses to organize his narrative around a rather traditional theme: the growth of the national state and the political culture which usually served and sometimes thwarted its ambitions. He is most authoritative when describing political calculations and military operations; the opening chapters, on the ways FDR used the memory of World War I to help sell the New Deal, and the New Deal to sell the notion of an activist state and mobilize the nation for entry into World War II, are particularly masterly. Indeed, they demonstrate a major theme of the book: militarization preceded and shaped the cold war, not vice-versa.

Significantly, the appeal to World War II as the model for comprehensive militarization backfired during the Kennedy-Johnson years, when the traumatic experience of Vietnam painfully dismantled the assumption of American invincibility (and unqualified virtue) that had been sustained even throughout the Korean conflict. By the midsixties, with the nation internally divided along class, gender, racial (and religious) lines, and militarization no longer capable of stimulating economic prosperity at home and justifying American interventionism abroad, the patriotic canopy collapsed and the nation plunged into a dismal era of soul-searching, failed presidencies, and identity politics.

After fifteen years of disenchantment, the Reagan era, Sherry argues, was not so much "morning in America" as a twilight reverie on the good old days of American innocence and undisputed military might; the resulting arms build-up was an expensive stroll down memory lane, however, which made Americans feel good about themselves again but left them with a swollen deficit that threatened to undermine the nation's economic security. The glory days did not return for long: the unifying effects of both cold and hot wars proved transient, as Bush's defeat after the stunning Gulf War victory demonstrated.

If militarization has failed to provide the present generation of Americans with a sense of shared purpose and identity, it also served for earlier generations as a vehicle for limited social reform, sustained periods of economic growth, and concerted national action on a variety of fronts not directly linked to warmaking. Indeed, Sherry argues in summarizing the complex themes of this remarkable book, "the most persistent impulse behind militarization was its leaders' and citizens' inability to trust and justify collective national action except when it occurred in war or in a warlike mode." The search for a suitable alternative continues.