Crash, Bang, Boom: How war and depression launched the American Century

Crash, Bang, Boom: How War and Depression Launched the American Century argues that to understand the sudden American embrace of world leadership and the creation of a host of new institutions that structured the world after 1945, we must look closely at the lessons drawn from the chain of disasters that began with World War I, continued with a failed peace, global economic collapse, the rise of fascism, and the unleashing of a second apocalyptic world war. The book reconnects the years of interwar “isolation” with post-1941 internationalism by demonstrating that the hard years of war, depression and more war led policymakers and ordinary Americans to accept a new international role for the United States even before the Cold War began. A bipartisan consensus emerged from the catastrophic decades before 1945 and coalesced around the idea that global economic and political strategies were inseparable. That conviction gave shape to a host of new American-dominated structures launched from 1941 to 1949, including the IMF, World Bank, and fixed gold-dollar standard; the United Nations with its headquarters in New York; the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; the Marshall Plan and the revival of Japan’s economy; the Truman Doctrine and the National Security Act, which established the CIA; the Rio Pact and the Organization of American States, and the NATO alliance. Thus from the crash and bang of the decades before 1945 the United States helped lay the basis for the boom of the postwar years, in the process creating the modern United States and to a large degree the world we live in today.