09-25-98:  HOW AMERICA CAME TO DOMINATE THE 20TH CENTURY 




By Robert Brickhouse



The 20th century, now in its twilight, has been tagged the "American century" ever since former Time and Life publisher Henry Luce proclaimed it so in an editorial in 1941.

In a broad new interpretation of America's 20th-century rise to world power, to be published next month, History professor Olivier Zunz argues that U.S. international dominance didn't simply result from a World War II military victory and Europe's self-destruction, but had its foundations laid upon far-reaching social-engineering strategies of an elite liberal group at the century's start.  

In Why the American Century?, being published by the University of Chicago Press, Zunz, a social historian, argues that much of America's international clout came from the creation of a science-based economy and a large, middle-class, consumer-oriented "center," however flawed by discrimination it was. The creators were the managers, policy-makers and other professionals of a new partnership of government, corporations and research universities who devised and promoted new methods of mass social control, including advertising, polling and educational testing, Zunz writes. They promoted a social contract that stressed "abundance," democracy and consumerism, and that made Americans feel they were morally justified to intervene on the world scene.

Americans "constructed the necessary ideology of an 'American century'" long before "imposing it on a world recovering from the Second World War," says Zunz, the French-born and -educated author of two previous highly praised studies of the United States' early 20th-century development, The Changing Face of Inequality and Making America Corporate.

While historians of the last 30 years have focused important attention on inequalities and discrimination against minorities and women in American life and have argued that there are numerous viewpoints and models for viewing U.S. history, Zunz says he hopes to reconcile the many interpretations of the country's past century by drawing new attention to the role of this vast, middle-class, conformist center defined by its buying behavior. He argues that "we can learn much for our times" by understanding the successes and failures of the largely well-meaning policy-makers and social engineers who strove to create a strong center capable of major achievements.

With a civil war behind them and new waves of immigrants entering, America began the new century "with two large but unfinished projects," Zunz says. The first was the creation of an industrial economy, which involved inventing technologies for exploiting America's natural resources, building a large industrial plant, relocating millions of workers to industrial locales, investing in research and devising organizational strategies to improve the ways Americans produced national and individual wealth. A new concept of production and everyday life was being created, based on assembly lines and consumerism.

The second project Americans pursued at the start of the new century was expanding the scope of their democratic institutions.

Since the late 19th century, big business, government and the expanding sector of higher education had been building a partnership to manage American life, Zunz says. This newly created matrix allowed producers and users of knowledge to interact fully for the first time in history. It was this reorganization of knowledge, not merely the power of capital accumulation, that gave Americans the means both to generate prosperity at home and expand their presence into the world, Zunz says. With new organizational techniques and principles of social order, the liberal elites who led these institutional sectors "positioned America for hegemony in a global mass society."

"As its size increased and its standard of living improved, the middle class became the hallmark of the 'American century,'" Zunz writes. Middle-class expansion became a national project, seen as the alternative to Marxism.

The elites who created the American century were mostly liberals from many fields, including government, business, journalism and education, and "they possessed a self-assurance that today's experts have largely lost," Zunz says.  

But their confident creation broke down in the 1960s when its deficiencies became all too clear. Minorities, immigrants and women demanded fairness and the systemUs homogenizing approach proved far too abstract and mechanical. 

Zunz says his aim in examining "the center" is not to reinstate it "as a fixed place we all can visit comfortably but as a lost idea we need to reconstruct to understand our century."

As the century closes, he says, and "as we find ourselves again in the midst of self-doubt," the early 20th-century spirit of uncertainty and of searching for creative new paths "is more important for our times than the mechanized certainties of the mid-20th century."