Many a U.S. citizen felt as though he had just walked out of a triple horror feature, and had found the sun shining and the streets crowded with sunny people. As spring merged into summer the world seemed to have become, at least for the present, an astonishingly cheerful place.
Nobody expected Joe Stalin to go on forever giving his imitation of a benign Cheshire cat. U.S.-British relations were cloudy (see INTERNATIONAL). But the global crisis, which had prompted enormous U.S. expenditures for arms only a few weeks ago, had eased off.
The cost-of-living raise which General Motors gave the United...