THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES
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like Wall Streeters, might be natural allies in the new epoch, and
that military issues would become at least as important as the do–
mestic economic issues of the New Deal era. What could be more
crucial today than the outcome of the struggle between the Strategic
Air Command and the Army Ground Forces? Yet who concerns him–
self with it? (The self-styled conservatives, being so often isolationists
with overtones of manifest-destiny jingoism, have been on the whole
even less well prepared to consider such issues.)
By our own very rough count, there were at the 10 a.m. sessions
of the American Historical Association one day last December, nearly
1,000 at the colloquium on methodology, an overflow crowd of several
hundred to hear Richard Niebuhr and Max Lerner talk about Chris–
tian doctrine and American democracy, possibly 150 at a session
on mid-nineteenth-century France-and about half a dozen at a
meeting on recent military history. Perhaps this lack of interest in
warfare has something to do with the "new" way history is taught.
This way marks in some respects an advance, and we do not mean
in these pages to argue that scholars and intellectuals should shift
their interests, as a matter of course, with swings in the political situ–
ation-but rather that those devoting themselves to "policy" matters
take a more penetrating and prophetic view.
Another new factor in the postwar situation disconcerts the old
New Dealers in their search for domestic issues. Thus, it would seem
that the political scientists should study, in addition to federal-state
or executive-congressional relations, intra-service rivalries and tradi–
tions; and, along with government-business relations, the intricate ties
between the several armed services and "their" prime contractors.
Aside from a few journalists like the Alsops, several able magazine
editors, and a handful of academic people like Bernard Brodie and
the late Edward Mead Earle, only atomic scientists (and their oc–
casional sociological counselors such as Edward
A.
Shils) have made
serious efforts to grapple with such factors.
Today, the federal defense budget is so large as to leave little
room for major socio-cultural argument. As Eliot Janeway has pointed
out, we are now in a defense cycle rather than a business cycle; and
Daniel Bell, tracing this out in terms of the capital expansion conse–
quences of military commitments, has emphasized how many of the
conventional areas of business and social decision are foreclosed.
If
