When first published in 1976, Godfrey Hodgson’s America in Our Time won immediate recognition as a major interpretive study of the postwar era. In The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered, leading scholars—including Hodgson himself—confront his long-standing theory that a “liberal consensus” shaped the United States after World War II. These essays offer new insights into the era and diverging opinions on one of the most influential interpretations of mid-twentieth-century U.S. history.
Content
Introduction: Reconsidering the Liberal Consensus 1
Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan
1. Revisiting the Liberal Consensus 12
Godfrey Hodgson
2. Historians and the Postwar Liberal Consensus 29
Michael Heale
3. The Reach and Limits of the Liberal Consensus 52
Gary Gerstle
4. The 1930s Roots of the Postwar “Consensus” 67
Wendy L. Wall
5. The Keynesian Consensus and Its Limits 86
Iwan Morgan
6. Social Welfare in the United States, 1945–1960 108
David Stebenne
7. Red-Hunting and Internal Security: Conflict in the Age
of Consensus 127
Alex Goodall
8. Containment: A Consensual or Contested Foreign Policy? 148
Andrew Preston
9. Sunbelt Patriarchs: Lyndon B. Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the New Deal Dissensus 167
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
10. “Down the Middle of the Road”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican Party, and the Politics of Consensus and Conflict, 1949–1961 186
Robert Mason
11. “We Have Run Out of Poor People”: The Democratic Party’s Crisis of Identity in the 1950s 208
Jonathan Bell
12. Billy Graham’s Neo-evangelical Triumph and the Limits of the Liberal Consensus 227
Uta A. Balbier
13. Gender in an Era of Liberal Consensus 245
Helen Laville
14. Memories of the Movement: Civil Rights, the Liberal Consensus, and the March on Washington Twenty Years Later 262
George Lewis
Contributors 283
Index 287
