ABSTRACT
The progressive temper was increasingly challenged during and after the 1930s by world events. By the late ’forties it was evident that a new mood was dominant in the United States. The hopes of revolution came to be soured for most Americans, in short, by the outcome of the twentieth-century Communist and Fascist revolutions. Even the appeal of reform, as distinguished from revolution, was tarred by the same brush in the minds of many Americans during the late 1940s and 1950s. Stability rather than change, existing imperfections rather than the cost of reforms, seemed to be preferred. Daniel Boorstin, professor of history at the University of Chicago who as a young man in the 1930s had been critical of the United States and sympathetic to the political Left, expressed most fully in his post-war scholarship the national mood of self-approbation.
