Reviewed by Laurence I. Barrett

Americans who survived the Depression and savored triumph with V-E and V-J Days hoped, even expected, that their travails had earned them an extended period of serene prosperity. Instead, with the celebratory confetti barely collected, new anxieties and hardships beset them.  In The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War, Richard Lingeman takes readers through the five years following conquest of the Axis. In an elegiac tone, he mourns the vanished hopes he shared during that roiled time.

Economic dislocation prompted rumors of another depression. Violent labor unrest flared. Many veterans found it difficult to integrate into a rapidly changing society. The Red-beneath-your-bed syndrome spread suspicion, ruined careers, fractured the unity created during World War II. Fear of a new war—perhaps nuclear war—set in. Americans learned scary new terms such as Cold War and Iron Curtain. In 1950 they suddenly heard of an Asian peninsula supposedly worth dying for. “How pathetically ignorant we Americans really were of Korea, its history, the causes of and alternatives to war!” he says, counting himself among the uninformed. Though that lament is specific to the “police action,” Lingeman evidently feels that way about the whole period.

A journalist of eclectic accomplishment who has spent most of his career at The Nation, Lingeman is at home with his subject. One of his several well-received books was Don’t You Know There’s a War On: the American Home Front, 1941 - 1945. The new work is, in part, a sequel – a narrative describing the evolving popular mood as foreign and domestic politics played out. But The Noir Forties contains what amounts to a second book: a history of the noir genre and a complex argument that the dark crime melodramas reflected Cold War psychology. Lingeman, after all, is a cultural historian fascinated with movies. He tells us he could never get enough of black-and-white films in which loner heroes and brassy heroines seemed always to be darting down rain-slicked streets at night.

The author’s conventional narrative, particularly for readers under 50 whose awareness of the period ranges from dim to non-existent, is likely to be more useful than his erudite thesis on films noir. Even before the war ended, Lingeman reminds us, a vital debate was taking form. Wendell Willkie, the liberal Republican who had run for President in 1940, published a manifesto in 1945 called One World, in which he warned Americans against “narrow nationalism” and “international imperialism.” Victory should create “equality of opportunity for every race and every nation.” Henry Wallace, while still Vice President, limned “the century of the common man.”  One goal, he said, should be a quart of milk available daily to each citizen on earth. Conservatives like James Witherow of the National Association of Manufacturers scoffed at the notion of “milk for Hottentots and TVA’s on the Danube.”  Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce called the Willkie-Wallace approach “globaloney” while her publisher husband, Henry, looked forward to a muscular “American Century.” Charles Wilson of General Motors urged that the country remain on a permanent war footing.

For a brief time, the “one world” proponents seemed to have some traction. Opinion polls immediately after the war showed lingering regard for the Soviet Union. Organizations such as the Federation of American Scientists, the United World Federalists and the American Veterans Committee framed imaginative schemes promoting international cooperation. With a dollop of retrospective idealism, Lingeman says: “From whatever angle, some form of world government looked like an idea whose time had come.”

Harry Truman, who would ultimately fly with the hawks, did not start that way.  Under his leadership, military spending plummeted despite strong objections from Navy Secretary James Forrestal, among other advisers. The draft ended. Washington acquiesced, however reluctantly, to Moscow’s initial power grabs from the Baltic to the Balkans. Truman hoped to extend the New Deal, proposing a variety of domestic innovations including – guess what? – universal health insurance. He was not a president bent on military confrontation.

Lingeman acknowledges that Truman faced heavy pressure to change course. Republicans who had inhabited the political wilderness since 1933 stormed back in the 1946 mid-term election. Revelations of Soviet espionage lent some credence to the rants of commie hunters.  Even George Kennan, the administration’s leading Soviet expert and an opponent of military confrontation, observed that the U.S. had been making “one concession after another” to Moscow.

In response, the Stalin regime continued to act the brute. Its overthrow of the democratic Czech government and its blockade of Berlin aroused memories of Munich, which the Truman administration exploited to rally support for rearmament and the Marshall plan. Polls showed rapidly growing apprehension about Soviet intentions. When Henry Wallace ran on a peace platform in 1948, he came in a dismal fourth behind Truman, Thomas Dewey and Strom Thurmond.

Lingeman’s account of the 1948 campaign and the events immediately following is gripping and poignant. A devout Christian and the only practicing capitalist in the field (thanks to his successful seed business), Wallace bridled at the commie label affixed by critics. What he sought was vindication of FDR’s temperate approach to the Soviets, along with an effort to take the New Deal global. Yet it was clear then, and Wallace ruefully acknowledged later, that Communists heavily influenced his Progressive Party and ruined his effort to make it a durable force.

A tragic confluence of misperceptions preceded the Korean conflict. Both Kim Il-sung in the north and Syngman Rhee in the south yearned to rule the entire peninsula. Each side pin-pricked the other.  Kim repeatedly sought Stalin’s blessing to invade. Washington, believing that North Korea would never have the nerve, and seeking to restrain Rhee, kept military preparedness light. Stalin, coming to the belief that the U.S. would never intervene, finally acquiesced. Truman, concluding he had no alternative, rallied the U.S. and the United Nations.

The result was a frustrating conflict that confirmed the status quo ante. And the Cold War became a glacier requiring 40 years to melt.

Lingeman contends – though not with much vigor – that Truman might have pursued diplomacy first, that Korea was not really vital to American security, that he fell into a trap of outdated thinking. At the same time, the author acknowledges that “most of the peace organizations climbed on the war train” once combat started. So did Wallace, Kennan, and the left-leaning press (including Lingeman’s future home, The Nation).  While Lingeman’s account of the long preface to the Korean tragedy is informative and briskly told, his scolding of Truman isn’t persuasive.

Much the same can be said about Lingeman’s discourse on films noir. He points out that the style can be traced back to movies made during the Weimar Republic; some important artists such as Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger found new careers in Hollywood after fleeing Hitler.  They brought with them a “sense of loss and cultural despair” often palpable in movies they made in the United States. Hard-boiled crime novels by James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett supplied much of the grist, though a now-forgotten novelist, Cornell Woolrich, had the distinction of seeing 15 of his tales adapted for the screen, including “Fear in the Night,” “Night Has a Thousand Eyes” and “Rear Window.”  These films were “steeped in dread, a sense of the psychological terror of ordinary life,” Lingeman says.

Lingeman describes scores of films, and tries to put each in social context. Lovers of period movies (like this reviewer, who saw two double features weekly as a kid) will find these chapters engaging. But the idea that films noir, as distinct from other movies, reflect much about the popular psyche during the Cold War is, to put it charitably, a stretch. When the author claims that the noir genre was “born at the end of the war,” one’s skepticism antenna quivers. “The Maltese Falcon,” one of the great noirs of all time, was made before Pearl Harbor. Lesser specimens, such as “Public Enemy” and “Little Caesar,” date back to 1931. Others appeared through the 1930s.

America’s descent into the Cold War during the late 1940s should offer enough complexity and melodrama to satisfy any historian fascinated with the period. And the time was bleak enough to warrant the adjective noir without giving much attention to movies.

Laurence I. Barrett spent three dozen years in print journalism, first at the New York Herald Tribune, then at TIME. His first byline in a non-campus publication, however, appeared in The Nation in 1956, when he was a college senior. Later he contributed occasional articles as well. Lingeman came to The Nation after Barrett stopped writing for it.