The United States from 1865, Essay Example

The Twentieth Century: America’s Century

Many historians have referred to the 20th century as the American Century, meaning that during this one hundred year-long period, the United States experienced tremendous growth and expansion to become a major world power. As Donald W. White relates, shortly after the Second World War in 1945, the United States entered a period of unprecedented wealth and prosperity which enabled it to rise to the summit of power, even while contending with its greatest adversary, the Soviet Union, during the years of the Cold War. ¹ Therefore, it would be safe to say that the 20th century was indeed America’s century.

Economically, the United States experienced what some call “Boom Times” after World War II which came about as a direct result of winning the war. When America’s soldiers returned from Europe and Asia, the U.S. economy began to change in many significant ways, especially related to housing, jobs, and a build-up of America’s industrial base via new factories and manufacturing plants that needed hundreds of thousands of workers. Millions of these new jobs were filled by war veterans and as a result, new homes were built, roads were constructed, and the auto industry went into high gear, producing automobiles and trucks which as a consequence created more jobs and more opportunities for working Americans. Of course as White points out, this burgeoning economic environment increased consumer spending which in many ways helped to create the American middle class. As a consequence, the United States became

Politically, the people elected some of the most influential Presidents of the 20th century, such as Theodore Roosevelt who brought the nation into the Progressive Era of Manifest Destiny; John F. Kennedy whose “extensive program of social legislation in 1963 strengthened voting rights, created federal programs intended to control pollution, and provided appropriations to encourage the construction and modernization” of hospitals, schools, and federal buildings in major cities; ³ and especially Franklin Delano Roosevelt who brought the country back from the brink of economic collapse through his New Deal program which ultimately brought an end to the Great Depression of the 1930’s. As Roosevelt once remarked in 1944, the results of his New Deal will provide America with “the greatest material power of any nation in the world” and will help America to “rise to an expanding economy of peaceful production, richer than any other in skilled workers, and advanced in engineering, farming, business, and technological knowhow.” ⁴ Of course, all that Roosevelt spoke of did come to pass, particularly America’s rise as a major technological innovator during the 1960’s.

As to foreign policy, two main areas of concern include America’s stormy relationship with the Soviet Union which lasted some forty years until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 during the Reagan Administration, and America’s efforts to bring to a close the so-called “Iron Curtain” which divided Allied-controlled Western Europe from Communist-controlled Eastern Europe, symbolized by the Berlin Wall. Therefore, due to the position of the United States as a world power and its economic and political strength, the fall of the Soviet Union brought about a new era of international cooperation  in the early 1990’s which helped to increase America’s resolve to bring peace to the world. In essence then, the 20th century was indeed America’s Century which was highlighted by great economic expansion, political influence, and the creation of a society based on freedom and the principles of democracy.

Bibliography

Bradley, Harold W. The United States from 1865. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,  1995.

White, Donald W. The American Century: The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.