Two policy crises, along with the programmatic responses to them, were central to the political order existing in the United States in the immediate postwar years. The first crisis was the Great Depression, and its policy response was the New Deal, bringing to the United States an extensive collection of welfare programs – its first real “welfare state.” The second crisis was World War II, and its policy response was total mobilization, bringing in its wake a standing military establishment plus an array of “entangling alliances,” also really for the first time in American history. Perhaps inevitably, the four presidential elections preceding the postwar era, those involving Franklin Delano Roosevelt from 1932 through 1944, were centrally focused on one or the other of these grand policy concerns.

At the time, observers could not know where each policy realm would go as World War II came to an end. As it turned out, a formal end to armed conflict was followed not by international quietude but by the succession of foreign crises that resulted in the Cold War. Relief at the ending of World War II was thus insistently coupled with anxiety about the international future in ways that few could escape. For many, however, the domestic future was an even greater worry. Many feared that the domestic economy would merely fall back into depression, having been supported principally by mobilization for war.