Library Journal
If liberalism has become a dirty word in today's politics, Mattson demonstrates how the liberalism of the post-World War II generation shaped the course of American and world history, placing the United States at the center of world affairs. Mattson (Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History, Ohio Univ.) provides a brief intellectual history of modern liberalism by looking at the leading thinkers and writers of the age as well as the politicians who practiced this brand of muscular liberalism. Focusing on the postwar period up to the death of John F. Kennedy, the author looks at liberalism's heyday, demonstrating how at that time it was the middle-ground approach, flanked on the Left by communism and on the Right by conservatism. Mattson calls liberalism "a public philosophy that demands citizens think of themselves as members of a national community committed to greatness" and "a humanist project committed to pushing people to think beyond the interests of self." Thought-provoking and important, this work challenges us to reexamine what we were, what we have lost, and where we wish to go as a nation. Highly recommended.-Michael A. Genovese, Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Time was, in the antediluvian years before Reagan, that "liberal" was a handle a fighting man could cop to. Its devaluation into the much-maligned "L word," writes the author, owes as much to left as right. There's not much new in those observations or in the others Mattson (History/Ohio Univ.) makes here, which amounts to a quite readable survey of the golden age of America's policy-oriented public intellectuals: men (and a men's club it was) such as Arthur Schlesinger, Archibald MacLeish, Bernard De Voto, and John Kenneth Galbraith. They cut their teeth on WWII, when they found themselves playing influential roles in outfits like the Office of War Information (from which one memo sternly reprimanded Hollywood for its racist portrayal of Japanese soldiers: "This is not a racial war") and the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, which taught Schlesinger, for one, that American power needed to be projected into the world. After the war, working through messengers such as the New York Post (now anything but liberal) and various journals of opinion, they offered close analyses of government policy and promoted social service and responsibility: thus their rejection of consumer culture for giving "priority to private satisfaction while denigrating public life." Their opinions were so diverse, writes Mattson, that their ideas of what constituted a "realistic" foreign policy could allow both for America's taking the lead in otherwise untrustworthy international organizations and for its taking pains to build international alliances-an ambivalence that played out in what has been called (unfairly, the author argues) the "liberals' war," Vietnam, but more recently in Iraq aswell. Without playing the counterfactual card too explicitly, the author suggests that the world might have a much different shape today had the increasingly liberal-leaning JFK not been killed; then, perhaps, the New Left would not have turned against the Old Left, liberal anticommunism might have prevailed, and Reagan might not have arisen to call liberals bad names. A slight work about a bygone era, but with lessons to offer for our own time.
