The United States in a World of Conflict and Revolt

Abstract

In the nineteenth century Atlantic civilization had a frontier of expansion in the Mississippi valley; by 1950 it maintained, under American leadership, a defensive frontier in Germany. In the nineteenth century the stabilizing factor was British naval power, in the twentieth it has become the power of the United States. As late as 1870 America was feared in Europe as the symbol of radical democracy and the ‘pro-Americans’ were to be found in the lower and middle classes; by the middle of the twentieth century America had become the symbol of capitalist conservatism and anti-Americanism was one of the hall-marks of left wing opinion. In the nineteenth century the flow of capital and culture was to the West; in the twentieth vast sums have been lent or permanently donated by Americans to the countries of Europe and their former colonies, the great American Universities have taken their places at the forefront of learning and an indigenous literary culture is now among the most lively in the world.