ABSTRACT
Americans had to engineer economic growth, rework the intense and highly ideological politics of the late 1940s and early 1950s into a more inclusive and less fractured political culture, and manage the international tensions of the Cold War. The contours of the postwar settlement were firmly and visibly set by the early 1950s. But contemporaries had as yet little basis for believing that the Cold War international order would function or persist. Few would have dared predict that it would produce not war but a prolonged era of relative peace between the superpowers and their major allies. The onset of the Cold War threatened to disrupt the coalition by forcing political rhetoric to become much more ideological. Prosperity served as well to sustain the newly expanded US role in world politics without placing too great a strain upon either the loyalties or the resources of citizens.
