The American Century [antikvár]

PREFACE The origins of this study lie in the experience and éducation of a post-World War II youth. When I was a boy, I learned in school from textbooks depicting skyscrapers, wheat fields, mile-long factories, oil derricks, and the other symbols of prosperity, supported by the statistics of industrial production and standard of living. They called America an affluent society and the most powerful of world powers. America had its faults—racial ségrégation and pockets of poverty— but, the textbooks implied, these failings could be overcome by men and women of good will using the resources at their command. When I traveled by railroad from a suburban home in the northern New Jersey hills to New York City, I passed from streams and fields to factones with smoking stacks, power-generating plants, and great fuel tanks, over multilevel engineering feats combining tunnels and tressels, and beneath the soaring New Jersey Tumpike, until beyond a tunnel, there appeared the skyline of New York City domi-nated by the spire of the Empire State Building. Crossing the Hudson River by ferry, I saw in the harbor océan liners and freighters entering or departing with commerce of the world's greatest port. I wondered why. Why did America—as one book declared at the time—have the greatest national industrial output on earth; the largest merchant marine at sea; the largest number of transport and commercial airplanes in the sky; an agri-cultural plant capable of contributing to feeding hungry peoples; the greatest national production of steel, petro-leum, cotton, and other vital products; vast holdings of monetary gold and silver; the most powerful navy that had ever sailed the five océans; and the biggest and hardest-hitting air force the world had ever known? I was never satisfied with the lists of these assets that sufficed for the explanations in textbooks. The answers were not that easy. It was not just because of America's talents, and it was not just because other centers of power in a war-weary world had fallen on hard times. The significance of an elusive mixture of elements was uncertain to me. When I went to college, I began to direct my studies toward understanding how nations had achieved exceptional world positions. But by the time I had written a prospective senior thesis on the theories of history to which were attri-buted the rise and expansion of nations, I had to adjust my thinking to new realities—to deal with the décliné of power.