Probably most Americans looking back fifty years from the end of the century would perceive much that seemed entirely familiar. Clothing, language, architecture, and in general the overall aspect of the country would seem much the same. City high-rises, suburban tract homes, telephones, air travel, radio, and even television were all in place by mid-century. Old movies would show rather less urban traffic, and the autos and airplanes would betray their vintage; perhaps strangest to the modern eye would be how easily automobile drivers found curbside parking spaces. In fact, although it would not be readily evident, America was a far less crowded society back then. The nation's population in 1940, 132 million, was slightly less than half what it became by the end of the century.

On the whole, most modern Americans would comfortably recognize the United States of the 1940s as “their own” country. Only the absence of personal computers and push-button cellular telephones would seem clearly to separate the America of the forties and fifties from the nation in the last decade of the century. Yet the sense of familiarity would be misleading. Quite apart from the fantastic achievements of science and technology, a closer look at the America of the forties and fifties would reveal a society that was virtually an alien country.

Contemplate an America in which tens of thousands of U.S. citizens of Japanese background were interned for years in detention camps and were forced to dispose of their property at a great loss, without trial, without charges of any kind, without compensation, and without serious protest from other Americans; in which the very army that defeated fascism in Europe and the very navy…