The Big Changes Were Over by 1960 : THE PROUD DECADES <i> by John Patrick Diggins (Norton: $19.95; 381 pp.) </i>

The two decades between America’s entry into World War II and the inauguration of John F. Kennedy saw the nation transformed. Even as the war and the ideological conflict that followed it rearranged the political map of Europe and prepared the way for an end to colonial rule in Asia, so the sudden burden of international responsibility thrust on the United States quashed any lingering hope that the country could somehow hold aloof from the woes and demands of the rest of the world. Many Americans have forgotten--or never fully appreciated--how extensively their society was altered during this period.

In his useful and instructive survey, John Patrick Diggins argues that the 1940s and ‘50s were a defining era in the nation’s history, one that told Americans much more about themselves than the agitated decade that was to follow.

Nowhere was the transformation more dramatic than in the social changes produced by spreading economic abundance. As the 1940s opened, the Depression was still a debilitating reality that found 10 million Americans unemployed. As the 1950s closed, critics such as John Kenneth Galbraith were deploring what they saw as the frivolous and unproductive excesses of consumerism that had been encouraged by an unprecedented expansion of affluence. The war not only ended the Depression but, according to Diggins, it brought a greater redistribution of wealth--especially from the upper to the middle classes--than in any comparable period of the 20th Century. Not least, the war put Americans back to work. Among them were 6 million women who found jobs in defense industries.

The enormous swelling of the economic pie in wartime did not, however, assure fairness in the way it was cut up. Women and blacks inevitably experienced the greatest inequities. Unions concerned about traditional male exclusiveness in certain occupations went along with a system that, for example, saw women shipyard workers paid only about one-third the wages of fellow male workers. Even worse was the economic discrimination encountered by blacks. Of the 41,000 workers employed by Boeing Aircraft in Seattle not one was black. Douglas in Los Angeles had 33,000 on its payroll; only 10 were blacks. Revelations of employment abuses such as these finally and momentously led to the presidential executive order that established the first federal Fair Employment Practices Committee.

The fight for civil rights was to deepen and spread as the 1950s progressed, setting the stage for the great legislative and attitudinal leap forward in the 1960s. (In 1958, only a small minority of Southerners polled believed they would someday see whites and blacks attending the same schools, eating at the same restaurants, sharing the same public accommodations. Less than three years later, 76% believed they would see such changes taking place.) Meanwhile the fight against civil liberties, conducted in good part by opportunists in Congress who cynically manipulated the fears engendered by the Cold War, became notably ugly and destructive.

Diggins shows a deft hand in describing the political and social climate of the time, from McCarthyism through the gathering civil rights movement. His section on Castro and Cuba is especially valuable for its scrupulous separation of myth from reality. The central chapters of his book, dealing with popular culture and literary, intellectual and artistic events, are clear and informative.

Less so is Diggins’ narratives of World War II and Korea, which together cover more than one-third of the years he surveys, but which in both cases are handled in a curiously flat and perfunctory style.

What must be noted, too, are the minor but irritating errors of fact that are peppered throughout the book. The warning about “entangling alliances” is not from Washington’s Farewell Address but from Jefferson’s first inaugural. More than 100,000 women joined the uniformed services in World War II, not 100,000 “nurses.” American battle deaths in that war are overstated by about 35%. The Battle of the Coral Sea was fought in May, not the summer, of 1942. The Korean War lasted three years, not four. Capt. James Jabara was not the “chief air officer of the United Nations forces in Korea.” Pierre Mendes-France was a prime minister of France, not a president. India and Burma achieved independence in 1947 and 1948 respectively, not in the 1950s. The “witty warning” attributed to Somerset Maugham in fact was penned by the Earl of Chesterfield.

“The Proud Decades” is not a deeply analytical book, but for the most part it is a solidly descriptive one, attentive not only to the major events of the time but to those small details that can do so much to illuminate an era. The historian Eric Goldman once described the 1950s as “the dullest and dreariest (years) in all our history.” Here is convincing evidence that he was wrong.