Reviews in American History

America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. It’s one of the first things American schoolchildren learn, and the last thing fans sing before the ballgame starts. Whatever you may think about the deep roots of this national myth, in Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy, Elaine Tyler May argues that, at least since the Second World War, it’s all been a bunch of nonsense. Far from the bold, independent, self-reliant people that many Americans imagine themselves to be, they, in fact, have been a people ruled by fear: fear of the bomb in the atomic age, fear of Reds during the Cold War, fear of racial minorities and independent women in the 1960s and ’70s, and fear of criminals, particularly black male criminals, ever since.

Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, May is a leading figure in the cultural history of post-World War II America. She uses this expertise to reveal surprising links between a variety of cultural and political phenomena that have shaped the America we live in today. Take, for example, her discussion of the American romance with vigilantes. In an era marked by rising concerns over lawlessness and the inability of established authorities to contain it, antisocial loners who in another context would be viewed as threats to order and the common good come to be seen as heroes. They are fearless individualists unconstrained by societal norms who act to establish rough justice.

American moviemakers have always adored such figures, and May traces their popularity in the postwar period from Mickey Spillane through Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson to the endless parade of blockbuster superhero films today. It might seem innocent enough, an updating of the centuries-old American fascination with cowboys and outlaws, until one considers how such ideas have influenced American law and society. May discusses the controversies around real-life vigilantes such as Bernie Goetz, the subway murderer turned folk hero of the 1980s, and George Zimmerman, who shot and killed African American teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012, and links them to the controversy surrounding “stand your ground laws,” which have been [End Page 119] passed in dozens of American states. “Vigilantism has moved from lawless terrorism to lawful self-protection,” May writes. “Fear now provides a legitimate rationale for murder, whether or not there is any real threat” (p. 123).

Another exaggerated danger that May discusses is the threat of endangered children. Child safety is at an all-time high, she points out, and yet parents today obsess much more than previous generations about the possibility of child abduction. She approaches this problem historically, showing how by the end of the 1970s increasing numbers of women held jobs that made it impossible for them to supervise their children all day. That historic shift in the labor market roughly coincided with a growing panic in the 1980s over kidnappings and missing children. Popular anxiety played out in advertising campaigns such as the Missing Children Milk Carton Program as well as in television and film. May’s arguments bring historical perspective to an issue that Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have written about in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). May shares those authors’ concern about how overly fearful parents have harmed the “well-being, health, and self-confidence” of children (p. 159).

The biggest gap between fear and reality for May involves violent crime. Fortress America dovetails with a large number of recent studies that examine the history of the War on Crime, its bipartisan origins, and the deleterious impact it has had on American politics in the last half century. May’s book is useful for showing how the fear of crime became an evergreen issue in American politics, one completely divorced from actual crime rates. This development is seen most egregiously today in conservative politics. May quotes Newt Gingrich in 2016 discussing how the “average American” fails to understand low crime rates today. “The average...