American political leaders confronted two important questions in the late 1940s and early 1950s.[1]  On the one hand, where did the central front in the Cold War lie, in Western Europe or in East Asia?  After 1945, the presence of the Red Army rendered democratic government in Eastern Europe a lost cause.  Western Europe, including the most heavily industrialized parts of Germany, formed an essential part of American security.  Economic revival in Western Europe would stabilize democratic government as a bulwark against further Soviet expansion.  From 1947 to 1949, the United States had dueled with the Soviet Union over the fate of Western Europe.  First the Marshall Plan had provided critical aid to Western European economic recovery.  Then the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) offered an American guarantee of military security.  Without firing a shot, the Americans had slapped the Soviets silly. 

            Yet there were critics of this policy of “enlightened self-interest.”  Most of the post-war Western European governments leaned distinctly to the left.  Marshall Plan aid seemed to be subsidizing a Socialism far to the left of anything the New Deal had done.  Paradoxically, it also sought to revive trading partners who would soon enough become competitors on world markets.  At the same time, some people saw America’s future in an orientation toward Asia.  Hence, the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War (1949), combined with insurgencies in Indochina, the Philippines, and Malaya threatened future interests. 

            On the other hand, had the New Deal sated the American public’s appetite for expanded government and reform, or did there remain important things that should and could be done?  President Harry Truman, like his eventual successor Lyndon Johnson, ardently supported the accomplishment of the New Deal, yet saw it as incomplete.  After his election as president in his own right in November 1948, Truman sought to complete the New Deal by establishing national health insurance, repealing the Taft-Hartley law restraining labor unions, regulating agricultural prices, further shifting income from the wealthy to the working class, and taking steps against racial discrimination.  From 1945 to 1952, Truman would press for this “Fair Deal.” 

            Here, too, the Truman policy met critics.  Worse, the president misjudged his times.  The New Deal had rested upon a coalition of liberal Eastern Democrats with conservative Democrats in the South and West.  Some wildly mistaken actions by Franklin D. Roosevelt had weakened that coalition.[2]  The war had forced a degree of national unity; peace allowed the divisions to re-emerge.  The “Fair Deal” was dead by mid-1950: the New Deal would not advance. 

            In June 1950, Communist North Koreans invaded South Korea.  A Cold War that Americans had believed to be European; politico-economic, rather than military; and in the process of being won, revealed itself to be global and centered in Asia; military; and on the edge of being lost.  It was not what many people had hoped. 

            The New Deal would stand, being neither expanded nor rolled back.  America would fight wars in Asia against Chinese proxies.  Basic American policies into the 1960s were set in cement during 1950. 

[1] Aaron Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Strategy (2000).  Nick Bunker, In the Shadow of Fear: America and the World in 1950 (2023) offers a recent popular take. 

[2] Notably his attempt to pack the Supreme Court and his attempted “purge” of Democratic legislators who had opposed him.