Modern US History 4th Nine Weeks

Labor unions also grew during the war as the government adopted pro-union policies, continuing the New Deal's sympathetic treatment of organized labor.

Presidential power expanded enormously during World War II, anticipating the rise of what postwar critics termed the "imperial presidency." (Roosevelt serves as president from 1932-1945—dies of a stroke)

The Democrats reaped a political windfall from the war. (Won all the wartime elections-1942-1945)

Roosevelt rode the wartime emergency to unprecedented third and fourth terms.

For most Americans, the war had a disruptive influence (changed people’s lives)--separating families, overcrowding housing, and creating a shortage of consumer goods could not buy common household items.

The war accelerated the movement from the countryside (farms) to the cities.

Watch Japan A Bomb movie

It also challenged gender (male female) and racial roles, opening new opportunities for women and many minority groups (Get better paying factory jobs).

The Allies prevailed (win) in World War II because of the United States' astounding productive capacity.

During the Depression year of 1937, Americans produced 4.8 million cars, while the Germans produced 331,000 and the Japanese 26,000.

By 1945, the United States was turning out 88,410 tanks to Germany's 44,857; the U.S. manufactured 299,293 aircraft to Japan's 69,910.

The American ratio of toilet paper was 22.5 sheets per man per day, compared with the British ration of 3 sheets.

In Germany, civilian consumption (buying and using goods) fell by 20 percent; in Japan by 26 percent; in Britain by 12 percent.

But in the United States, personal consumption rose by more than 12 percent.

During World War II, the federal government took an even larger economic role than it did during the World War I.

To gain the support of business leaders, the federal government suspended competitive bidding, offered cost-plus contracts, guaranteed low-cost loans for retooling, and paid huge subsidies for plant construction and equipment.

Lured by huge profits, the American auto industry made the switch to military production.

In 1940, some 6,000 planes rolled off Detroit's assembly lines; production of planes jumped to 47,000 in 1942; and by the end of the war, 1945, it exceeded 100,000. Miracle of mass production.

To encourage agricultural production, the Roosevelt administration set crop prices at high levels.

Cash income for farmers jumped from $2.3 billion in 1940 to $9.5 billion in 1945.

Meanwhile, many small farmers, saddled with huge debts from the depression, abandoned their farms for jobs in defense plants or the armed services.

Over 5 million farm residents left rural areas during the war.

Overall, the war brought unprecedented prosperity to Americans.

Per capita ( per person) income rose from $373 in 1940 to $1,074 in 1945.

Workers never had it so good.

Rising incomes, however, created shortages of goods and high inflation (prices go up).

Prices soared 18 percent between 1941 and the end of 1942.

Apples sold for 10 cents apiece; the price of a watermelon soared to $2.50; and oranges reached an astonishing $1.00 a dozen.

Many goods were unavailable regardless of price.

To conserve steel, glass, and rubber for war industries, the government halted production of cars in December 1941.

A month later, production of vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, radios, sewing machines, and phonographs ceased.

Altogether, production of nearly 300 items deemed nonessential to the war effort was banned or curtailed, including coat hangers, beer cans, and toothpaste tubes.

Congress responded to surging prices by establishing the Office of Price Administration (OPA) in January 1942, with the power to freeze prices and wages, control rents, and institute rationing of scarce items.

The OPA quickly rationed food stuffs.

Every month each man, woman, and child in the country received two ration books--one for canned goods and one for meat, fish and dairy products.

Meat was limited to 28 ounces per person a week; sugar to 8-12 ounces; and coffee, a pound every five weeks.

Rationing was soon extended to tires, gasoline, and shoes.

Drivers were allowed a mere 3 gallons a week; pedestrians were limited to two pairs of shoes a year.

DAY 2

Mar 16

MUSH

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Pageant Lectures

World War II and the Atomic Bomb

Opener:

Read:

Case Study pg. 516-519

Dropping the Atomic Bomb

August 6, 1945

The United States “island hopping” strategy is effective in getting our bombers close enough to Japan to get there and back.

Island of Tinian is where our B-52’s take off from to bomb Japan.

Franklin Roosevelt dies—he knew about the Manhattan Project—project to build an atomic bomb.

Harry S Truman takes over—has no idea we had atomic bomb.

Henry Stimson informs Truman that we have this weapon that will probably end the war in the Pacific if we use it.

Truman forms a committee to study if we should use this weapon.

The Soviet-Russians are going to enter the war against Japan in August.

Truman is told if we invade Japan…we and they will lose “millions” of lives.

What is Truman going to do?

The Pacific War
After General Douglas MacArthur's forces had been driven out of the Philippines by the Japanese, the United States had pursued a two-front strategy in the Pacific.

Using Australia as a base, MacArthur was determined to reclaim the Philippines, secure the southeast coast of China, and then launch air attacks on Japan.

General Douglas MacArthur wades ashore “Returns”

At the same time, Admiral Chester Nimitz set out to destroy the Japanese fleet while conducting a series of amphibious landings on island chains across the Pacific (a slow and costly strategy termed "island-hopping").

In May 1942 an American naval task force won a major victory in the Coral Sea (south of New Guinea).

The tide of the war turned in June 1942 at Midway Island.

Tipped off by naval intelligence, Nimitz surprised the Japanese fleet and U.S. planes sank four Japanese carriers before their planes could take off.

A hard-fought Allied victory followed at Guadalcanal two months later.

Before long, American B-29 bombers were attacking cities in the home islands of the Japanese Empire.

By the end of 1944, the combined sea and air strategy had brought Japan to the brink of total defeat, but tough fighting lay ahead at Iwo Jima (February 1945) and Okinawa (April-June 1945).

In a final, desperate show of determination, the Japanese resorted to fierce kamikaze attacks on American ships.*

Franklin Roosevelt, who had led the nation through most of the economic depression and war (twelve years in the White House), was in the first months of his fourth term as president when he suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945.

Vice President Harry Truman became the nation's new commander in chief.

In July he met in the German city of Potsdam with British Prime Minister Clement Attlee (who replaced Winston Churchill that same month) and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin in the final "Big Three" conference of the war.

One result of the meeting was the Potsdam Declaration [see text], an ultimatum to Japan threatening surrender or "prompt and utter destruction."

The Atomic Bombing of Japan
It is often said that the atomic bombs saved "a million casualties."

Let's examine this claim closely. The first A-bomb (a uranium device nicknamed Little Boy)

was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Truman was delighted with the success of the new weapon. "He was not actually laughing," wrote his aide Merriman Smith, "but there was a broad smile on his face." Truman announced that Japan had been "repaid many fold" for Pearl Harbor [see announcement].

Three days later, on August 9, a second A-bomb (a plutonium device nicknamed Fat Man)

instantly wiped out most of Nagasaki.

In a statement to the press, Truman declared that the weapon was used to "shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans."

The assumption was that Japan would not otherwise surrender, and that an invasion of the home islands would be costly.

However, no land invasion of these islands had been planned to take place before November 1945.

The U.S. government knew, furthermore, that the Japanese government was negotiating for conditional surrender through intermediaries a month before the first a-bomb was dropped.

The notion of "a million casualties" is part of the mythology of history, a figure that has been repeated over and over, to the point that it has become a pseudo-fact.

Why were atomic bombs dropped on Japan?

In short, to end the war and save American lives.

We should acknowledge that saving lives was not the main reason that Truman gave a green light to dropping atomic bombs on Japan.

The purpose was (1)to push the Japanese government to accept the inevitability of defeat and agree to surrender "unconditionally." It was understood that the A-bomb would destroy whatever city it hit, instantly killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians.

That was the point.

That is why heavily-populated cities that had been largely unscathed by prior American bombing were on the A-bomb hit list: to maximize the impact.

The tricky question is this: Why did Japan surrender?

Since 1940, U.S. military intelligence had been intercepting and decoding Japanese communications.

Under the cover name of "Magic," classified briefings were provided to President Roosevelt (later Truman) and the cabinet.

Thus, in the summer of 1945, U.S. officials had a secret "window" into the frantic decision-making of the Japanese high command as revealed through coded telegrams.

As early as June, Truman and his advisers recognized that civilian leaders of Japan (not necessarily the military leaders) were ready to capitulate if the Allies showed more flexibility on the demand for unconditional surrender.

For reasons that are unclear, Truman decided to assure Japan that they need not worry about the fate of Emperor Hirohito after the two atomic bombs were dropped (also after the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria).

Perhaps Truman finally came to the realization that his hard line on the fate of the emperor served no purpose, and that on the contrary it was needlessly prolonging Japanese resistance to surrender.

Allowing the Japanese people that small but important bit of national honor also probably facilitated peaceful acceptance of U.S. military occupation.

We need to keep in mind that the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria simultaneous with the dropping of the second A-bomb.

How influential were (a) the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki three days later, compared to (b) the impact of the Soviet declaration of war on August 9, on the Japanese decision to surrender has been the subject of controversy among historians. Likewise (c) the assurance about the "continuance of their Emperor’s dynasty." Likely all three developments played an important role.

Even after "a" and "b" the third issue was the sticking point.

On August 10, Japan issued a surrender offer on the condition that the Potsdam Declaration “not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler.”

The Japanese prime minister and his divided cabinet were deadlocked over whether or not to surrender with the uncertain fate of the emperor.

Shaken by the two atomic bombs, frightened about the rapid movement of Soviet forces into Manchuria, and worried that the army might launch a coup, the peace faction set in motion a plan to persuade Emperor Hirohito to meet with the cabinet to resolve the stalemate over the response to the Potsdam ultimatum.

On the morning of August 14, the emperor met with the leadership at the bomb shelter in his palace.

Hirohito argued that continuing the war would reduce the nation "to ashes."

Hirohito's language about "bearing the unbearable" and sadness over wartime losses and suffering prefigured the language he would use in his public announcement the next day.

Hirohito said that he would make a recording of the surrender announcement so that the nation could hear it.

That evening army officers tried to seize the palace and find Hirohito's recording, but the coup failed.

Early the next day, General Anami, leader of the coup, committed suicide.

Hirohito's message was broadcast to the nation on August 15.

Back to the question of "lives saved," according to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, "certainly prior to 31 December 1945, Japan would have surrendered, even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

So we are contemplating weeks or possibly a few months until the end of the war, with or without atomic bombs.

In the unlikely event of an invasion to conquer the main islands of Japan, best estimates are that the number of U.S. casualties might have been as high as 120,000 (including 25,000 deaths).

Less than 300,000 Americans died in the entire war, from 1942-1945, including North Africa, Europe, and Asia.

The notion of "a million" U.S. casualties in the invasion of Japan is preposterous.

After all, by August 1945 the Japanese navy, air force, and army had been destroyed; Japan had no resources for waging war.

Surely a high number of Japanese would have died in defense of their homeland, although the notion of them fighting "to the last man, woman and child" is absurd.

Whether or not Little Boy and Fat Man actually saved any significant number of U.S. casualties is entirely speculative.

One thing is certain: the two bombs killed over 300,000 Japanese.

Primary Source Documents:

Truman’s Diary

July 25 1945

We met at 11 A.M. today. That is Stalin, Churchill, and the U.S. President. But I had a most important session with Lord Mountbatten and General Marshall before that. We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire distruction [destruction] prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark. Anyway we think we have found the way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexican desert was startling--to put it mildly. Thirteen pounds of the explosive caused the complete disintegration of a steel tower 60 feet high, created a crater 6 feet deep and 1200 feet in diameter, knocked over a steel tower 1/2 mile away and knocked men down 10,000 yards away. The explosion was visible for more than 200 miles and audible for 40 miles and more.

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol or the new.

He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I'm sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.

Public Explanation

Statement by the President Announcing the Use of the A-Bomb at Hiroshima

August 6, 1945

SIXTEEN HOURS AGO an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam" which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.

It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy. But no one knew any practical method of doing it. By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. But they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the V-1's and V-2's late and in limited quantities and even more grateful that they did not get the atomic bomb at all.

The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.

Beginning in 1940, before Pearl Harbor, scientific knowledge useful in war was pooled between the United States and Great Britain, and many priceless helps to our victories have come from that arrangement. Under that general policy the research on the atomic bomb was begun. With American and British scientists working together we entered the race of discovery against the Germans.

The United States had available the large number of scientists of distinction in the many needed areas of knowledge. It had the tremendous industrial and financial resources necessary for the project and they could be devoted to it without undue impairment of other vital war work. In the United States the laboratory work and the production plants, on which a substantial start had already been made, would be out of reach of enemy bombing, while at that time Britain was exposed to constant air attack and was still threatened with the possibility of invasion. For these reasons Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt agreed that it was wise to carry on the project here. We now have two great plants and many lesser works devoted to the production of atomic power. Employment during peak construction numbered 125,000 and over 65,000 individuals are even now engaged in operating the plants. Many have worked there for two and a half years. Few know what they have been producing. They see great quantities of material going in and they see nothing coming out of these plants, for the physical size of the explosive charge is exceedingly small. We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history-and won.

But the greatest marvel is not the size of the enterprise, its secrecy, nor its cost, but the achievement of scientific brains in putting together infinitely complex pieces of knowledge held by many men in different fields of science into a workable plan. And hardly less marvelous has been the capacity of industry to design, and of labor to operate, the machines and methods to do things never done before so that the brain child of many minds came forth in physical shape and performed as it was supposed to do. Both science and industry worked under the direction of the United States Army, which achieved a unique success in managing so diverse a problem in the advancement of knowledge in an amazingly short time. It is doubtful if such another combination could be got together in the world. What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history. It was done under high pressure and without failure.

We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.

It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.

The Secretary of War, who has kept in personal touch with all phases of the project, will immediately make public a statement giving further details.

His statement will give facts concerning the sites at Oak Ridge near Knoxville, Tennessee, and at Richland near Pasco, Washington, and an installation near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although the workers at the sites have been making materials to be used in producing the greatest destructive force in history they have not themselves been in danger beyond that of many other occupations, for the utmost care has been taken of their safety.

The fact that we can release atomic energy ushers in a new era in man's understanding of nature's forces. Atomic energy may in the future supplement the power that now comes from coal, oil, and falling water, but at present it cannot be produced on a basis to compete with them commercially. Before that comes there must be a long period of intensive research.

It has never been the habit of the scientists of this country or the policy of this Government to withhold from the world scientific knowledge. Normally, therefore, everything about the work with atomic energy would be made public.

But under present circumstances it is not intended to divulge the technical processes of production or all the military applications, pending further examination of possible methods of protecting us and the rest of the world from the danger of sudden destruction.

I shall recommend that the Congress of the United States consider promptly the establishment of an appropriate commission to control the production and use of atomic power within the United States. I shall give further consideration and make further recommendations to the Congress as to how atomic power can become a powerful and forceful influence towards the maintenance of world peace.

NOTE: This statement was released in Washington. It was drafted before the President left Germany, and Secretary of War Stimson was authorized to release it when the bomb was delivered. On August 6, while returning from the Potsdam Conference aboard the U.S.S. Augusta, the President was handed a message from Secretary Stimson informing him that the bomb had been dropped at 7:15 p.m. on August 5.

If the Atomic Bomb Had not been used

If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used

by Karl T. Compton

.....

About a week after V-J Day I was one of a small group of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent, well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major move if the war had continued. He replied: "You would probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack would have been made on such and such beaches."

"Could you have repelled this landing?" we asked, and he answered: "It would have been a very desperate fight, but I do not think we could have stopped you."

"What would have happened then?" we asked.

He replied: "We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated," by which he meant that they would not have been disgraced by surrender.

It is easy now, after the event, to look back and say that Japan was already a beaten nation, and to ask what therefore was the justification for the use of the atomic bomb to kill so many thousands of helpless Japanese in this inhuman way; furthermore, should we not better have kept it to ourselves as a secret weapon for future use, if necessary? This argument has been advanced often, but it seems to me utterly fallacious.

I had, perhaps, an unusual opportunity to know the pertinent facts from several angles, yet I was without responsibility for any of the decisions. I can therefore speak without doing so defensively. While my role in the atomic bomb development was a very minor one, I was a member of the group called together by Secretary of War Stimson to assist him in plans for its test, use, and subsequent handling. Then, shortly before Hiroshima, I became attached to General MacArthur in Manila, and lived for two months with his staff. In this way I learned something of the invasion plans and of the sincere conviction of these best-informed officers that a desperate and costly struggle was still ahead. Finally, I spent the first month after V-J Day in Japan, where I could ascertain at first hand both the physical and the psychological state of that country. Some of the Japanese whom I consulted were my scientific and personal friends of long standing.

From this background I believe, with complete conviction, that the use of the atomic bomb saved hundreds of thousands—perhaps several millions—of lives, both American and Japanese; that without its use the war would have continued for many months; that no one of good conscience knowing, as Secretary Stimson and the Chiefs of Staff did, what was probably ahead and what the atomic bomb might accomplish could have made any different decision. Let some of the facts speak for themselves.

Was the use of the atomic bomb inhuman? All war is inhuman. Here are some comparisons of the atomic bombing with conventional bombing. At Hiroshima the atomic bomb killed about 80,000 people, pulverized about five square miles, and wrecked an additional ten square miles of the city, with decreasing damage out to seven or eight miles from the center. At Nagasaki the fatal casualties were 45,000 and the area wrecked was considerably smaller than at Hiroshima because of the configuration of the city.

Compare this with the results of two B-29 incendiary raids over Tokyo. One of these raids killed about 125,000 people, the other nearly 100,000.

Of the 210 square miles of greater Tokyo, 85 square miles of the densest part was destroyed as completely, for all practical purposes, as were the centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; about half the buildings were destroyed in the remaining 125 square miles; the number of people driven homeless out of Tokyo was considerably larger than the population of greater Chicago. These figures are based on information given us in Tokyo and on a detailed study of the air reconnaissance maps. They may be somewhat in error but are certainly of the right order of magnitude.

Was Japan already beaten before the atomic bomb? The answer is certainly "yes" in the sense that the fortunes of war had turned against her. The answer is "no" in the sense that she was still fighting desperately and there was every reason to believe that she would continue to do so; and this is the only answer that has any practical significance.

General MacArthur's staff anticipated about 50,000 American casualties and several times that number of Japanese casualties in the November 1 operation to establish the initial beachheads on Kyushu. After that they expected a far more costly struggle before the Japanese homeland was subdued. There was every reason to think that the Japanese would defend their homeland with even greater fanaticism than when they fought to the death on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. No American soldier who survived the bloody struggles on these islands has much sympathy with the view that battle with the Japanese was over as soon as it was clear that their ultimate situation was hopeless. No, there was every reason to expect a terrible struggle long after the point at which some people can now look back and say, "Japan was already beaten."

A month after our occupation I heard General MacArthur say that even then, if the Japanese government lost control over its people and the millions of former Japanese soldiers took to guerrilla warfare in the mountains, it could take a million American troops ten years to master the situation.

That this was not an impossibility is shown by the following fact, which I have not seen reported. We recall the long period of nearly three weeks between the Japanese offer to surrender and the actual surrender on September 2. This was needed in order to arrange details: of the surrender and occupation and to permit the Japanese government to prepare its people to accept the capitulation. It is not generally realized that there was threat of a revolt against the government, led by an Army group supported by the peasants, to seize control and continue the war. For several days it was touch and go as to whether the people would follow their government in surrender.

The bulk of the Japanese people did not consider themselves beaten; in fact they believed they were winning in spite of the terrible punishment they had taken. They watched the paper balloons take off and float eastward in the wind, confident that these were carrying a terrible retribution to the United States in revenge for our air raids.

We gained a vivid insight into the state of knowledge and morale of the ordinary Japanese soldier from a young private who had served through the war in the Japanese Army. He had lived since babyhood in America, and had graduated in 1940 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This lad, thoroughly American in outlook, had gone with his family to visit relatives shortly after his graduation. They were caught in the mobilization and he was drafted into the Army.

This young Japanese told us that all his fellow soldiers believed that Japan was winning the war. To them the losses of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were parts of a grand strategy to lure the American forces closer and closer to the homeland, until they could be pounced upon and utterly annihilated. He himself had come to have some doubts as a result of various inconsistencies in official reports. Also he had seen the Ford assembly line in operation and knew that Japan could not match America in war production. But none of the soldiers had any inkling of the true situation until one night, at ten-thirty, his regiment was called to hear the reading of the surrender proclamation.

Did the atomic bomb bring about the end of the war? That it would do so was the calculated gamble and hope of Mr. Stimson, General Marshall, and their associates. The facts are these. On July 26, 1945, the Potsdam Ultimatum called on Japan to surrender unconditionally. On July 29 Premier Suzuki issued a statement, purportedly at a cabinet press conference, scorning as unworthy of official notice the surrender ultimatum, and emphasizing the increasing rate of Japanese aircraft production. Eight days later, on August 6, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; the second was dropped on August 9 on Nagasaki; on the following day, August 10, Japan declared its intention to surrender, and on August 14 accepted the Potsdam terms.

On the basis of these facts, I cannot believe that, without the atomic bomb, the surrender would have come without a great deal more of costly struggle and bloodshed.

Exactly what role the atomic bomb played will always allow some scope for conjecture. A survey has shown that it did not have much immediate effect on the common people far from the two bombed cities; they knew little or nothing of it. The even more disastrous conventional bombing of Tokyo and other cities had not brought the people into the mood to surrender.

The evidence points to a combination of factors. (1) Some of the more informed and intelligent elements in Japanese official circles realized that they were fighting a losing battle and that complete destruction lay ahead if the war continued. These elements, however, were not powerful enough to sway the situation against the dominating Army organization, backed by the profiteering industrialists, the peasants, and the ignorant masses. (2) The atomic bomb introduced a dramatic new element into the situation, which strengthened the hands of those who sought peace and provided a face-saving argument for those who had hitherto advocated continued war. (3) When the second atomic bomb was dropped, it became clear that this was not an isolated weapon, but that there were others to follow. With dread prospect of a deluge of these terrible bombs and no possibility of preventing them, the argument for surrender was made convincing. This I believe to be the true picture of the effect of the atomic bomb in bringing the war to a sudden end, with Japan's unconditional surrender.

If the atomic bomb had not been used, evidence like that I have cited points to the practical certainty that there would have been many more months of death and destruction on an enormous scale. Also the early timing of its use was fortunate for a reason which could not have been anticipated. If the invasion plans had proceeded as scheduled, October, 1945, would have seen Okinawa covered with airplanes and its harbors crowded with landing craft poised for the attack. The typhoon which struck Okinawa in that month would have wrecked the invasion plans with a military disaster comparable to Pearl Harbor.

These are some of the facts which lead those who know them, and especially those who had to base decisions on them, to feel that there is much delusion and wishful thinking among those after-the-event strategists who now deplore the use of the atomic bomb on the ground that its use was inhuman or that it was unnecessary because Japan was already beaten. And it was not one atomic bomb, or two, which brought surrender; it was the experience of what an atomic bomb will actually do to a community, plus the dread of many more, that was effective.

If 500 bombers could wreak such destruction on Tokyo, what will 500 bombers, each carrying an atomic bomb, do to the City of Tomorrow? It is this deadly prospect which now lends such force to the two basic policies of our nation on this subject: (1) We must strive generously and with all our ability to promote the United Nations' effort to assure future peace between nations; but we must not lightly surrender the atomic bomb as a means for our own defense. (2) We should surrender or share it only when there is adopted an international plan to enforce peace in which we can have great confidence.

Controversy Continues

Fifty years after the United States ended World War II by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, a major public controversy erupted over plans to exhibit the fuselage of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum. As originally conceived, the exhibit, titled "The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II," was designed to provoke debate about the decision to drop atomic bombs. Museum visitors would be encouraged to reflect on the morality of the bombing and to ask whether the bombs were necessary to end the war.

The proposal generated a firestorm of controversy. The part of the script that produced the most opposition stated: "For most Americans, this...was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism." Another controversial section addressed the question: "Would the bomb have been dropped on the Germans?" The answer began: "Some have argued that the United States would never have dropped the bomb on the Germans, because Americans were more reluctant to bomb 'white people' than Asians."

Veterans groups considered the proposed exhibit too sympathetic to the Japanese, portraying them as victims of racist Americans hell-bent on revenge for Pearl Harbor. They called the exhibit an insult to the U.S. soldiers who fought and died during the war and complained that it paid excessive attention to Japanese casualties and suffering and paid insufficient attention to Japanese aggression and atrocities. The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling a revised version of the exhibit "unbalanced and offensive" and reminding the museum of "its obligation to portray history in the proper context of its time."

In the end, the Smithsonian decided to scale back the exhibit, displaying the Enola Gay's fuselage along with a small plaque. In announcing the decision, a Smithsonian official explained, "In this important anniversary year, veterans and their families were expecting, and rightly so, that the nation would honor and commemorate their valor and sacrifice. They were not looking for analysis and, frankly, we did not give enough thought to the intense feelings such an analysis would evoke."

The decision to use atomic bombs against Japan was the most controversial decision in military history.

Early in 1946, the Federal Council of Churches called the bombings "morally indefensible" because Japan had received no specific advancing warning. In July, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that Japan would have surrendered "certainly prior to December 31, 1945, and in all probability prior to November 1, 1945...even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion [of Japan] had been planned or contemplated." An account of six survivors of the Hiroshima bombing by John Hersey published in the New Yorker magazine in August 1946, which helped to humanize the bomb's victims, led the influential magazine Saturday Review to describe the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a crime.

Henry Stimson, the 78-year-old former secretary of war, publicly defended the U.S. decision to drop the bombs. He argued that the Japanese were determined to fight to the death and that, without the bombings, it would have cost at least a million American and many more Japanese causalities to achieve victory. Stimson also explained why the U.S. had refused to warn Japan about the new weapon or to stage a demonstration of the bomb's destructive power. Engineers were unable to assure the government that the bombs would work, and officials feared that a failure would have disastrous effects on American morale. Further, they noted that even if a successful demonstration was carried out, the Japanese government might suppress the news.

In 1949, Stimson's arguments were challenged by a British physicist, P.M.S. Blackett. Blackett claimed that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was intended, at least in part, to intimidate the Soviet Union.

Why did the United States drop the bomb when it did? On July 29, a U.S. Navy ship, the Indianapolis, was sunk and 883 lives were lost. A U.S. invasion of Southeast Asia was scheduled for September 6, in which case, it was likely that 100,000 British, Dutch, and American Prisoners of War would be executed by the Japanese.

Decrypted Japanese military cables indicated that Japan was building-up its defenses in preparation for an American invasion, and many Japanese leaders testified that they were confident that they could have stopped at least the first wave of an American invasion. Decoded diplomatic cables indicated that Japan's leaders were seeking to persuade the Soviet Union to negotiate an armistice on favorable terms that would have allowed Japan to retain conquered territory. A three-time Japanese premier, Prince Konoye Fumimaro, said that had the atomic bombs not been dropped, the war would have continued into 1946: "The army had dug themselves caves in the mountains and their idea of fighting on was fighting from every little hole or rock in the mountains."

Questions on the case study pgs. 516-519 questions are on 519

· The course of history hinged on Truman’s decision to use the bomb on Japan.

· Years of research by German ex-patriots and American scientists made the bomb available

· The best minds in the world had worked on this (Albert Einstein)

· Gave the United States and not Germany the capability to use this weapon

· Truman needed to make a quick decision, Why?

o Russia soon would get involved in the Pacific War

o We did not want the Russians (our next “enemy”) to have a significant say in what happened in post-war Asia

o Save American and Japanese lives—full out invasion was going to kill “a million or more men”

“I told him (Stimson) I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.” Dwight D. Eisenhower…Supreme Allied Commander

Henry Stimson

· Got to use it to accomplish the bi-fold goal:

o End the war in the Pacific

o Do this with the least loss of (American) lives

Do not want this on America’s Hands!

Absent do the simulation (take notes on what you learn):

NetSimulations: World War II and the Atomic Bomb

The War in the Pacific

On December 7, 1941, Japan had launched an offensive incredible in its scale. A thousand Japanese warships attacked an area comprising one-third of the earth's surface, including Guam, Hong Kong, Malaya, Midway Island, the Philippine Islands, and Wake Island. The offensive was a stunning success. Hong Kong was overrun in 18 days; Wake Island in two weeks; Singapore held out for two months. By May, the Japanese had also captured the islands of Borneo, Bali, Sumatra, and Timor. In addition, Japan had taken Rangoon, Burma's main port, and seized control of the rich tin, oil, and rubber resources of Southeast Asia.

By mid-summer of 1942, however, American forces had halted the Japanese advance. In May, a Japanese troop convoy was intercepted and destroyed by the U.S. Navy at Coral Sea, preventing a Japanese attack on Australia. In early June, at Midway Island in the Central Pacific, the Japanese launched an aircraft carrier offensive to cut American communications and to isolate Hawaii to the east. In a three-day naval battle, the Japanese lost three destroyers, a heavy cruiser, and four carriers. The Battle of Midway broke the back of Japan's navy.

To defeat Japan, Allied forces pursued two strategies. General Douglas MacArthur pushed northward from Australia through New Guinea and from the Philippines towards Japan. Meanwhile, Admiral Chester Nimitz advanced on Japan by attacking Japanese-held islands in the Central Pacific in a leap-frog fashion--invading strategic islands and bypassing others. By late 1944, the United States was able to bomb the Japanese islands.

DAY 3

Mar 21

MUSH

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Pageant Lectures

Opener:

17.1 The Cold War Begins—students do multiple choice questions and write page numbers down when they find the answers.

Read and do worksheet on Chapter 17 Section 1 The Cold War...

Lecture notes on the Cold War

Cold War 1945-1991 Fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond

Victory in 1945 brought peace and prosperity to Americans but also a tense preoccupation with Communism.

Stalinism threatened the freedom of Europe, promoting President Truman to vigorously prosecute a policy of "containment" to keep Soviet power in check.

Truman framed it as more than a geopolitical conflict between rival superpowers: it was a struggle for the defense of the "Free World."

"The Buck Stops Here"

Harry the Haberdasher

Having led the nation through economic depression and war for twelve years, Franklin Roosevelt suddenly died on April 15, 1945.

Vice President Harry Truman had not been part of Roosevelt's inner circle of advisors and he was relatively unknown to most Americans.

Read an eyewitness account of the death of President Franklin Roosevelt

The day after taking the oath of office, Harry Truman told a group of reporters, "Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now."

Truman was faced with the daunting challenges of concluding the Second World War, demobilizing the U.S. economy, and helping to establish peace and stability in the postwar world.

Truman was born in rural Missouri on May 8, 1884.

He farmed, served as an artillery officer in France during World War I, dabbled in business (opening a haberdashery in Kansas City in 1919), became a judge, and entered politics.

He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1934, led an investigation of war profiteering, and became Roosevelt's vice president in 1944.

Truman was a folksy and feisty, straight-talking man who seldom minced words.

He popularized two phrases associated with leadership: "the buck stops here," and "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

The Fair Deal
Truman tried to extend the domestic programs of the New Deal but the Republican-controlled Congress rejected all but one of his "Fair Deal" proposals (the Housing Act of 1949).

In 1947 Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which limited the power of labor unions, over Truman's veto.

When Congress failed to act on civil rights, Truman issued executive orders in 1948 to desegregate the armed forces and promote fair employment practices.

Truman managed to persuade Congress to expand Social Security, raise the minimum wage, and extend the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the "GI Bill of Rights."

The GI Bill provided World War II veterans with funds for college, a no-money-down loan for a house, small business loans, farm loans, job training, medical care, and up to one year of unemployment checks.

By 1956, when it expired, the education/training portion of the GI Bill had provided $15 billion to 8 million veterans, and $33 billion had been provided for over 4 million home loans.

A total of 16 million veterans received assistance from the GI Bill.

By 1948 Truman's election was in doubt.

Running against what he called the "Do-nothing Congress," Truman won a surprising upset.

Dewey Defeats Truman Newspaper Truman displaying Dewey Defeats Truman newspaper

By 1949 the Truman Administration had established the Truman Doctrine, European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), CIA, SAC and NATO to keep Soviet Communism in check.

Though unable to achieve most of his domestic agenda, he demonstrated a successful balance between restraint and toughness in the postwar diplomatic challenges that were termed the Cold War.

The emerging rivalry preoccupied much of Truman's presidency.

At a meeting in the White House on November 10, 1945, he told envoys to Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt: "I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.

In 1948 the nation of Israel was formed, with the endorsement of the UN and the United States, establishing a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Palestinian Arabs who were displaced in the process joined forces with Israel’s Arab neighbors in the first of several Arab-Israeli wars.

Truman's firm support for Israel was balanced with a compelling economic consideration: Middle East oil.

For example, the U.S. has maintained close ties with the Saudi government since 1948, having sold over $500 billion in arms to help keep the oil-rich regime secure.

Today Saudi Arabia is the world's leading petroleum exporter.

In 1953 Truman's successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, authorized a coup in Iran that drove out the anti-American prime minister and replaced him with a pro-American Shah.

In each of the Arab-Israeli wars the U.S. tried to balance the security needs of Israel with America’s need for Arab oil; thus in both the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kipper War (1973), the U.S. pressured Israel to accept a cease-fire.

The precarious position of Israel, surrounded by mostly hostile Arab nations, was exacerbated by the disruption of Palestinian refugees displaced by Israeli occupation of the west bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and elsewhere.

This volatile situation was destined to continue as a source of seemingly irreconcilable conflict into the 21st century.

Stop here today
Origins of the Cold War

Conflicting Soviet and American views of the new world order came to a head in 1946, but the roots of Soviet-American rivalry ran as far back as Wilson's failed military intervention in the Russian Revolution (Wilson sent troops to help the White Army defeat the Bolshevik Red Army) in 1919 and Lenin's Communist International ("Comintern").

The central policy of the Comintern under Lenin's leadership was that communist parties should be established across the world to aid the international proletarian revolution.

Among the primary targets of Lenin's rhetoric were British and French colonialism and American capitalism.

Comintern officially dissolved in 1943 when the Soviet Union and United State were allies and plans were underway for establishment of the United Nations after the war.

Whatever Lenin may have envisioned, his regime was preoccupied with struggles inside the emerging Soviet Union.

Lenin and his successors lacked the capacity to threaten the dominant capitalist regimes with anything beyond words.

This reality did not keep the U.S. from an intense Red Scare after the First World War and a continuing policy of "quarantine" (later termed "containment") to isolate and threaten the Soviet Union.

The need for unity in the common effort to defeat Hitler's Third Reich provided a brief intermission in the middle of Soviet-American hostility from 1919 to 1991.

The Yalta Conference

After putting aside their differences to defeat the common enemy of Nazi Germany, conflicts between the Big Three began to emerge when Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin met at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.

The leaders agreed to the creation of an international organization to maintain peace (the United Nations), a permanent division of Germany, freely-elected democratic governments in Europe (with specific arrangements about boundary lines, the make-up of new governments, and other important details postponed), and Soviet entry into the war against Japan after the surrender of Germany (in return for the recovery of Russian territory lost to Japan in earlier wars).

Critics later would charge that Roosevelt "sold out" Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. Considering Soviet security needs, Stalin's repressive and paranoid regime, the presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, and need for a peaceful balance of power respecting regional "spheres of influence" between the emerging superpowers, Soviet domination of its weak neighbors appears to have been virtually inevitable.

Moreover, in February 1945 Roosevelt was mainly focused on winning the war against Germany and Japan, and the Soviet Union was the strongest American Ally.

FDR was looking ahead to the postwar world and determined to get the United Nations off the ground with Soviet participation.

The Potsdam Conference
Truman's first encounter with Soviet leader Josef Stalin came in July 1945 at the Potsdam Conference.

Unlike Yalta, the Potsdam agenda was full of detailed issues about boundaries, reparations, and the like, mostly involving Germany.

Nonetheless, for the American delegation, securing Soviet cooperation in the defeat of Japan was of primary importance.

Despite receiving news of the successful atomic test at Los Alamos, Truman still believed that an invasion of Japan might be necessary.

Truman walked up to Stalin at the close of the July 24 session and informed him that the United States had recently come into possession of a weapon of unusual power.

Stalin calmly replied, "I hope you make good use of it."

Some historians have alleged that Truman was playing "atomic diplomacy" in a thinly-veiled attempt to intimidate Stalin.

It seems likely that Stalin already knew about the atomic bomb.

The potential threat to Soviet security was something that he could not ignore.

After the devastating effect on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was revealed, the Soviets launched a determined effort to escalate their own atomic weapons program in order to end the American monopoly.

Hastening the conclusion of the war with Japan achieved an important U.S. objective: curtailment of Soviet expansion into Manchuria, China and Korea.

Even before the Second World War had ended, the architects of American foreign policy had become convinced that Soviet expansionism was the greatest threat to postwar peace.

In retrospect, it seems clear that a serious miscalculation--indeed, the root of most subsequent mistakes made by the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, was the strange unawareness of America's enormous strength and Russia's relative weakness.

In fact, at the moment of victory in 1945, Russia was devastated on a scale unprecedented by countries defeated in a major war.

Indeed, it could be argued that the United States could have conferred no greater favor on the Soviets during the early Cold War than taking their militaristic bluster and propaganda seriously at a time when they were in no position to pose a serious threat outside their sphere of influence.

The Man of Steel

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who later took the name Stalin ("man of steel"), was a Georgian peasant who studied theology as a young seminary student.

By the time he left the seminary he had become a committed Marxist revolutionary. After the Bolsheviks gained power in Russia, Stalin became one of the leaders of the Soviet Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Within a few years he became general secretary of the party.

Stalin rose to the top, when Lenin died, through the qualities that came to characterize his leadership from 1924 until his death in 1953: he was relentless, cunning, and cruel.

He executed countless enemies, incompetents, and "traitors" within his own ranks.

His secret police terrorized the Soviet people and crushed any hint of unrest.

People either praised Stalin or they disappeared into prisons or unmarked graves.

The ideology of Marxism was important to him, but his thinking was always fluid, shifting, tactical, and expedient.

As a Marxist, he believed that communism was the wave of the future, change was inevitable, and class struggle was essential.

Power had to be seized and maintained to protect Soviet progress from capitalist threats.

He pushed for agricultural collectivism and industrialization to ensure his country's economic independence, power, and success.

This caused millions of Soviet people to suffer.

The defining moment in Stalin's leadership of the Soviet Union was in the summer of 1941.

America had not yet entered the war as a Soviet ally.

The Germans had invaded Russia.

During the first six months of war, the Germans killed 3 million Soviet soldiers in combat, took 4 million prisoner, and shot half a million or more.

Eventually the Germans murdered at least 7 million civilians and allowed an additional 4 million people to die from hunger and sickness.

They destroyed more than 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages, leaving more than 25 million Soviet people homeless.

The Germans captured and deported as slave labor another 5 million adults.

Overall, wartime deaths on the Soviet side amounted to at least 9 million soldiers and perhaps as many as 30 million people in total.

As the Germans closed in on Moscow, Stalin ordered the city evacuated, but he did not leave.

He personally assumed overall command of the war effort. He ordered soldiers to fight for the homeland.

Those who retreated were shot.

Those who surrendered were not to be forgiven; their wives were arrested and imprisoned. (His own son was captured by the Germans, and Stalin refused to make a prisoner exchange. His son's wife was arrested and sent to a labor camp for two years.)

He purged and shot officers who he blamed for allowing the Germans to penetrate so deeply into Soviet territory.

His Red Army fought fiercely and heroically in the Great Patriot War (what we call World War II), eventually defeating the Germans.

Afterwards, he was determined to establish a buffer zone of secure border states through territorial gains.

President Roosevelt understood this and accepted it at Yalta as inevitable.

President Truman did not see it that way.

Stalinism and the Soviet Iron Curtain
Following the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was only natural that many Americans, including President Truman, regarded Josef Stalin as “another Hitler” when the dictator revealed his determination to dominate much of Eastern Europe.

Truman vowed to contain him with tough diplomacy, political and economic aid to pro-American (anti-Soviet) governments around the world, and a military alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

All of this probably had the unintended consequence of feeding Stalin’s insecurity, making him increasingly ruthless in suppression of his internal enemies and neighbors, and inflexible as a diplomat.

Hitler set the standard for modern dictators.

He started a world war that wrecked most of Europe.

He was a brutal tyrant whose secret police killed millions of people.

Hitler was a strong nationalist but not really much of an ideologue.

His regime was built on a vision of an Arian "master race" and he cultivated a fanatical faith in Germany destiny.

Hitler's political system was national socialism, an alliance of government and the business class, not the working class. He was a passionate enemy of Communism.
      Stalin, on the other, did not start any wars and it was not in his nature to do that. He rose to power in the Russian Revolution, as a protégé of Lenin, and most of his attention was focused on internal "reform" (collectivizing farms and pushing industrialization) and national security: silencing critics and getting rid of political rivals, building up a loyal army, demanding total obedience to the Communist Party and him personally.
      Stalin believed in a Marxist vision of worldwide socialist revolution by which the "people" (working class laborers) would rise up, seize power, and share the fruits of their labor, but this was ideology and Stalin was a conservative, practical man. Whereas Hitler dreamed of ruling the world, Stalin was obsessed with destroying his internal enemies ("kulaks," enemies of agricultural collectivism, and "capitalists"). Stalin probably killed more of his own people than Hitler.  It is estimated that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of about 10 million Soviet people. He moved the Soviet Union forward to become a major world power, second only to the United States in economic and military strength, but at a heavy price mostly suffered by his own people. (Far worse was Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party that won the Chinese civil war in 1949. It is estimated that 40 million of his people died as a result of Chairman Mao’s forced collectivism and industrialism in China.)
      Stalin was a clever, devious, and ruthless dictator arguably worse than Hitler. He rose to the top of the Soviet Union, won control of the Communist Party and Soviet government, led the Soviet people through the dark days of World War II, and solidified his power in the dangerously unstable aftermath of the war, earning his place as one of the most extraordinary leaders of the twentieth century.

Truman and the Containment Policy
      At the end of the war, when Stalin's Soviet Union was recovering from the devastation of the Great Patriot War, Truman could reflect on a very different wartime experience. Most American soldiers came home. Young American children and old men were not slaughtered by enemy occupation; sisters, wives, daughters and mothers were not raped. Homes were not bombed; villages and cities were not ruined. American GNP increased 60 percent during the war; total earnings increased 50 percent. The war inaugurated the greatest era of prosperity in American history. American military forces were not just successful, they seemed unstoppable. And the American A-bomb had been dropped on two enemy cities.
      Both Truman and Stalin were tough men, by nature disinclined to bend or back down, with conflicting ideologies and national interests; but they shared a common desire to get along. Neither leader wanted a hot war or a cold one. Yet it came. Why? In short, the postwar world had risks that neither leader could accept or evade and opportunities they could not resist. Both leaders were torn between an obsession with national security and a compulsion to promote their ideology throughout the world. Thus, conflict was inevitable.
      The American policy of "containment" that began to take take shape in 1947 was heavily influenced by a State Department expert on Russia named George Kennan. He argued that the Soviet government's insecurity would lead to a "cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power." In short, the Soviet regime would threaten its neighbors as long as there was a power vacuum. Kennan recommended a "long term, patient but firm and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy." Convinced that Soviet Communism contained "the seeds of its own decay," Kennan believed that Soviet Russia "might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest" nations. (Forty years later it would seem that Kennan was perhaps vindicated, however belatedly.) Kennan's original containment thesis called for flexibility, adaptability, and versatility. Moreover, it stressed economic and political aid as much as military muscle. At first this seemed to be the basic strategy of containment, with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 (promising U.S. support to anti-Communist factions in Greece, Turkey and elsewhere), followed by the Marshall Plan (providing a massive infusion of financial assistance, totaling over $12 billion, to rebuild war torn Western Europe). Regional collective-security alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (formed in April 1949), along with the Strategic Air Command for nuclear deterrence and the Central Intelligence Agency (created in 1947), eventually formed the backbone of the containment strategy.
      Once institutionalized and tied to atomic diplomacy, containment became rigid and passive. Containment in practice meant a policy of drawing a line in the sand--an enormous perimeter from Norway down through the heart of Europe, across the Middle East, then up around Asia--and daring the Soviets to go no further. As Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson said (March 1949), "If the free nations do not stand together, they will fall one by one." Eventually it became largely a formula for the waste of energy and resources, with the central tactical consideration one of deterrence, increasingly based on the threat of "massive retaliation." That the Soviets never seriously contemplated a military invasion of Western Europe is now academic, although probably true. Kennan himself later wrote (in 1956), "The image of a Stalinist Russia poised and yearning to attack the West, and deterred only by our possession of atomic weapons, was largely a creation of Western imagination." (Interestingly, many years later, after his retirement from public service, Kennan became an outspoken critic of American Cold War policy, in particular the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and the refusal to renounce the first-strike option.)
        The Cold War had a profound influence on American politics. With public anxiety rising, anticommunism became a powerful tool for ambitious Congressmen. In fairness, loyalty and security concerns were sometimes genuine. Many Americans benignly flirted with communism in the 1930s and this came back to haunt them in the postwar years. In addition, real instances of espionage associated with the Manhattan Project, such as Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg, provided ammunition for zealous red-hunters. (Rosenberg and his wife were executed in 1953.)   The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) started an investigation of the Hollywood motion picture industry in 1947, leading to the blacklisting of suspected "reds" who refused to confess and renounce their alleged disloyalty.

The Berlin Blockade and Airlift
An early test of Soviet-American diplomacy occurred in Berlin in 1948. The United States, France and Britain merged their occupied sectors of Germany. A united West Germany and the economic revitalization of West Berlin, located deep within Soviet-controlled East Germany, alarmed Stalin. He ordered a blockade to starve West Berlin into submission. For nearly a year (321 days) American and British planes flew daily missions, bringing 2.5 million tons of food, fuel and other essential supplies to the city. Known as "Operation Vittles," the Berlin Airlift was a tense showdown that ended peacefully. Conceding failure, Stalin finally lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949. Nonetheless, as Communist elements tried to seize power in vulnerable parts of the postwar world, the Truman administration came to view these developments as part of an organized conspiracy to enslave the "free world" under a Red tide of Soviet Communism. This view had been articulated publicly by Britain's Winston Churchill in a March 5, 1946 speech delivered in the presence of President Truman at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe" [see Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech].

The Rise of Red China
It could be said that America's containment policy in Western Europe succeeded inasmuch as nothing happened: Soviet aggression, assuming that it was ever planned, never occurred. Yet, the success of American policy may also have spelled its undoing. First, in a striking instance of the reversal of cause and effect, America's very success in the containment of the Soviet Union in Western Europe went far toward creating the necessity for containment by forcing the Soviets to continue building their own armed forces and strengthening their grip on Eastern Europe. Second, the success of containment in Europe ensured its adoption in other areas--most notably Southeast Asia--where it did not fit. The "fall" of China to Communist forces led by Mao Zedong in 1949, and the invasion of South Korea in 1950, were seen by the Truman administration as part of a worldwide Communist offensive directed from Moscow. With references to Hitler's demands at the Munich Conference, the Truman administration dogmatically accepted the assumption that aggression met by appeasement inevitably bred more aggression until ultimately it grew into another world war. This rationale, later known as the domino theory, was the basis for a military commitment to a fragile government in South Vietnam that would ultimately prove disastrous.
The United States found itself in the untenable position of sponsoring undemocratic and unwanted governments in unstable regions, often through underhanded means, in order to maintain the illusion of protecting the "free world" from the spread of Communism. As a result, the credibility of American foreign policy principles and power inevitably suffered. Internally, the poisonous effect of the Cold War on domestic politics became evident in 1947 when the Truman administration and House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) attempted to weed out disloyal government employees and private citizens. Hollywood caved in to political pressure and blacklisted alleged "Reds" from the movie industry. At a time of peace and prosperity, many Americans felt increasingly insecure. By 1952, when Republicans asked voters, "Had enough?" the nation turned to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican president in twenty years.

DAY 4

MUSH

Mar 23

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Pageant Lectures

Opener:

Cold War Power point

Watch Movie “Not so Long Ago”

Day 5

MUSH

Mar 25

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Pageant Lectures

Go over worksheet on 17.1

Do work sheets on 16.2 and 16.3

Podcast on Post WWII

Podcast notes:

Major legacies of the war

· 61,000,000 casualties/deaths

· This will shape political decisions for years to come

· Tragic and devastating events

· We are trying to avoid this happening again

· Legacies

· Holocaust

o Creation of Israel

o Anti Semitism--prejudice against Jewish people—not as common

· Loosen racial ideology (Racism)

o Jackie Robinson—1^st black to play MLB, April, 1947

· Atomic Age—bombing of Japan with nukes

o Changes relations between nations

o Changes how we act in the United States

· Turns the United States into a “super power”

o America only “big country” left standing

o Willingness of the US to take over the mantle of super power

· Our world is born out of WWII

o Situation in the Middle East

o How we deal with atomic energy

o What is our role in the world now that we are the most strong—economically, militarily…etc.

Cold War

· Cold war influences almost everything—politics, literature, movies

· Artists even highlight the dangers of nuclear weapons

· Civil rights proponents are standing for America

· Balance of power issues—between us and the USSR (Russians)

· Proxy wars—wars between smaller countries—but really big countries are behind them

· 1944—Breton Woods—establishes the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—both of these base the world economy on the American Dollar.

· Working together in international cooperation is the way to avoid conflicts—very controversial—Countries do not want to be reliant on other countries—we want to be independent

· What happens when independence leads to global war? 61,000,000 deaths—shouldn’t we do something different?

· Best example is the United Nations—set up in San Francisco, California

· 51 nations represented—to set up international organization—like League of Nations after WWI—but America is going to participate…we host and take part/support

Podcast on Post WWII

Stop at 13:00 minutes

Introduction lecture:

After WWII we have “the Uneasy Peace”

The “Cold War” came close to being “hot” in October of 1962—Cuban Missile Crisis

America had “discovered” that the Russians (our allies during WWII—our enemies during the Cold War) were placing atomic missiles in Cuba---90 miles from Key West, Florida. These missiles would be in range of Washington, DC and the entire East Coast of the United States.

What should we do about this?

Cold War starts in 1945—immediately after the Germans surrender—we don’t trust the Russians and the Russians don’t trust us.

Russians get the Atom bomb shortly after WWI—we know they do because we can monitor the air over Russia and the air becomes radioactive enough for us to know they have the capability to do to us what we did to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan.

Cold War is this idea that we can’t fight the Russians straight up—because we would be exchanging atom bombs which would kill everyone—so we fight with money and diplomacy and in proxy wars.

Wars in third countries where we support one side and the Russians or other Communists support the other…Korea and Vietnam.

Cuban Missile Crisis—when America and USSR (Russia) came as close as ever to nuclear war.

Vocabulary The Cold War and the American Dream--Flipcard Activity

Topic: The Cold War

DAY 6

Mar 29

MUSH

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Pageant Lectures

Topic: —1950’s

Power point on Truman Presidency

Post WWII/Cold War Vocabulary (Schweikert…look up)

1. Harry S Truman p. 636

2. Fair Deal p. 649-50

3. Cold War p. 634-37

4. Containment p. 641-44

5. Berlin p. 639-40

6. NATO p. 639-40

7. Marshall Plan p. 638

8. Mao Zedong (Mao Tse Tung) p. 641-642

9. 38^th Parallel 643

10. Korean War p. 641-44

11. Dwight D. Eisenhower p. 647-49

12. Joseph McCarthy p. 645-47

13. Brinksmanship

14. Arms Race (ICBM’s) p. 652-53

15. H-Bomb p. 626-630

16. Space Race p. 652-53

17. Suburb

18. Baby Boom p. 655-56

19. Sun Belt

20. Rock ‘N’ Roll p. 702-04

The Cold War

The Origins of the Cold War --Interactive Sheet

Topic 37 - The Cold War Begins

The Coils of the Cold War--Topic 23—WI 102

DAY 7

Mar 31

MUSH

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Pageant Lectures

Origins of the Cold War Sheet: http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/gcselinks/modern/Cold_War/origins.pdf

Fill in the Blank for the Cold War Begins

Ideological differences Interactive Sheet—handed out

WWII_Cold War_Civil_Rights

(Hanson 122-Lecture 10)

Notes:

Truman, Stalin and the Start of the Cold War

Victory in 1945 brought peace and prosperity to Americans, but also an unnerving preoccupation with Communism. Stalinism threatened the freedom of Europe, promoting President Harry Truman to vigorously prosecute a policy of "containment" to keep Soviet power in check. Truman also found himself frustrated by a conservative Congress. [Photo: Harry Truman]

Harry Truman: The Buck Stops Here
Having led the nation through economic depression and war for 12 years, Franklin Roosevelt suddenly died on April 15, 1945. The day after taking the oath of office, Harry Truman told a group of reporters, "Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now." Truman was faced with the daunting challenges of concluding the Second World War, demobilizing the U.S. economy, and helping to establish peace and stability in the postwar world. As vice president, Truman had not been part of Roosevelt's inner circle of advisors and he was relatively unknown to most Americans. Before long, his mixture of humility and feistiness made him a popular figure. The Republican-controlled Congress would block most of his domestic policies and by 1948 his election was in doubt. Running against what he called the "do-nothing Congress," Truman won the 1948 presidential election in a remarkable upset. By 1949 the Truman Administration had established the Truman Doctrine, European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), CIA, SAC and NATO to keep Soviet Communism in check. A straight-talking, no-nonsense man, Truman was by nature cheerful but he could also be abrasive, sometimes threatening to punch his critics in the nose. His first major decision was approval of using atomic bombs to hasten the surrender of Japan in August 1945. He expressed no second-thoughts or regrets. Truman is still famous for his saying, "The buck stops here."

Truman's Fair Deal
After the war, Truman tried to extend the domestic programs of the New Deal with several proposals but the Republican-controlled Congress rejected most of his "Fair Deal." In 1947 Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which limited the power of labor unions, over Truman's veto. When Congress failed to act on civil rights, Truman issued executive orders in 1948 to desegregate the armed forces and promote fair employment practices. Truman managed to get Congress to expand Social Security, raise the minimum wage, and extend the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (also known as the "GI Bill of Rights") which provided funds for housing, employment and college to WWII veterans. The GI Bill was a landmark piece of legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 22, 1944 [read FDR's signing statement]. It provided World War II veterans with funds for college (tuition, books and a monthly stipend), a no-money-down loan for a house, small business loans, farm loans, job training, medical care, and up to one year of unemployment checks. By 1956, when it expired, the education/training portion of the GI Bill had provided $15 billion to 8 million veterans, and $33 billion had been provided for 4.3 million home loans. A total of 16 million veterans received assistance from the GI Bill.

DAY 8

Apr 1

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Finish Ideological differences Interactive Sheet—handed out

Watch Einstein’s Letter—10 Things that Unexpectedly Changed America

Josef Stalin
Stalinism and the Soviet Iron Curtain
        Following the death of Adolf Hitler and the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was only natural that many Americans, including President Truman, regarded Josef Stalin as “another Hitler” when the dictator revealed his determination to subjugate not just the Soviet people but also much of Eastern Europe. Truman vowed to contain him with tough diplomacy, political and economic aid to pro-American (anti-Soviet) governments around the world, and a military alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. All of this probably had the unintended consequence of feeding Stalin’s insecurity, making him increasingly ruthless in suppression of his internal enemies and neighbors, and inflexible as a diplomat.
        Hitler has become the "standard" for evil dictators because he was peculiar and his regime was very destructive. He started a world war that wrecked most of Europe. He was a brutal tyrant whose secret police killed millions of people. Hitler was a strong nationalist but not really much of an ideologue. His regime was built on a vision of an Arian "master race" and he cultivated a fanatical faith in Germany destiny. Hitler's government was national socialism, which was sort of an alliance of government and the business class, not the working class. He was a passionate enemy of Communism (Marxist Socialism). Hitler was responsible for the deaths of approximately six million Jews (mostly) and also communists, gypsies, homosexuals, etc., in his infamous work camps (death camps). Hitler was also responsible for the millions of people killed in his invasion of Europea and the Soviet Union during World War II. So we could put his death count at about 30 million people, directly or indirectly as a consequence of the war.
        Stalin did not start any wars and it was not in his nature to do that. He rose to power in the Russian Revolution, as a protégé of Lenin, and most of his attention was focused on internal "reform" (collectivizing farms and pushing industrialization) and national security: silencing critics and getting rid of political rivals, building up a loyal army, demanding total obedience to the Communist Party and to him personally. He believed in a Marxist vision of worldwide socialist revolution by which the "people" (working class laborers) would rise up, seize power, and share the fruits of their labor, but this was ideology and Stalin was a conservative, practical man. Where as Hitler dreamed of ruling the world, Stalin was obsessed with destroying his internal enemies. (His enemies were "kulaks," enemies of agricultural collectivism, and "capitalists.") Stalin probably killed more of his own people than Hitler.  It is estimated that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of about 8-12 million Soviet people. He moved the Soviet Union forward to become a major world power, second only to the United States in economic and military strength, but at a heavy price mostly suffered by his own people. (Far worse was Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party that won the Chinese civil war in 1949. It is estimated that 40 million of his people died as a result of Chairman Mao’s forced collectivism and industrialism in China.)
        Stalin was an exceptional leader. Much of his success can be attributed to the fact that he was clever, devious, and ruthless. He rose to the top of the Soviet Union, won control of the Communist Party and Soviet government, led the Soviet people through the dark days of World War II, and solidified his power in the dangerously unstable aftermath of the war, earning his place as one of the most extraordinary leaders of the twentieth century.

The Man of Steel—Joe Stalin
        Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who later took the name Stalin (man of steel), was a Georgian peasant who studied theology as a young seminary student. By the time he left the seminary he had become a committed Marxist revolutionary. After the Bolsheviks gained power in Russia, Stalin became one of the leaders of the Soviet Central Committee of the Communist Party. Within a few years he became general secretary of the party. He rose to the top, when Lenin died, through the qualities that came to characterize his leadership from 1924 until his death in 1953: he was relentless, cunning, and cruel. He executed countless enemies, incompetents, and "traitors" within his own ranks. His secret police terrorized the Soviet people and crushed any hint of unrest. People either praised Stalin or they disappeared into prisons or unmarked graves.
        Stalin believed in Marxist Socialism--theory and ideology were very important to him--but his thinking was always fluid, shifting, tactical, and expedient. As a Marxist, he believed that communism was the wave of the future, change was inevitable, and class struggle was essential. Power had to be seized and maintained to protect the revolutionary movement from capitalist threats. He pushed for agricultural collectivism and industrialization to ensure his country's economic independence, power, and success. This caused millions of Soviet people to suffer.
        The defining moment in Stalin's leadership of the Soviet Union was in the summer of 1941. America had not yet entered the war as a Soviet ally. The Germans had invaded Russia. During the first six months of war, the Germans killed 3 million Soviet soldiers in combat, took 4 million prisoner, and shot half a million or more. Eventually the Germans murdered at least 7 million civilians and allowed an additional 4 million people to die from hunger and sickness. They destroyed more than 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages, leaving more than 25 million Soviet people homeless. The Germans captured and deported as slave labor another 5 million adults. Overall, wartime deaths on the Soviet side amounted to at least 9 million soldiers and perhaps as many as 30 million people in total. As the Germans closed in on Moscow, Stalin ordered the city evacuated, but he did not leave. He personally assumed overall command of the war effort. He ordered soldiers to fight for the homeland. Those who retreated were shot. Those who surrendered were not to be forgiven; their wives were arrested and imprisoned.  (His own son was captured by the Germans, and Stalin refused to make a prisoner exchange. His son's wife was arrested and sent to a labor camp for two years.) He purged and shot officers who he blamed for allowing the Germans to penetrate so deeply into Soviet territory. His Red Army fought fiercely and heroically in the Great Patriot War (what we call World War II), eventually defeating the Germans. Afterwards, he was determined to establish a buffer zone of secure border states through territorial gains. President Roosevelt understood this and accepted it at Yalta as inevitable. President Truman did not see it that way.

Truman and the Containment Policy
        Harry Truman was born in rural Missouri on May 8, 1884. He farmed, dabbled in business, served in the First World War, and entered politics. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1934 and then became Roosevelt's vice president in 1944. At the end of the war, when Stalin's Soviet Union was recovering from the devastation of the Great Patriot War, Truman could reflect on a very different wartime experience. Most American soldiers came home. Young American children and old men were not slaughtered by enemy occupation; sisters, wives, daughters and mothers were not raped. Homes were not bombed; villages and cities were not ruined. American GNP increased 60 percent during the war; total earnings increased 50 percent. The war inaugurated the greatest era of prosperity in American history. American military forces were not just successful, they seemed unstoppable. And the American A-bomb had been dropped on two enemy cities.
        Both Truman and Stalin were tough men, by nature disinclined to bend or back down, with conflicting ideologies and national interests; but they shared a common desire to get along. Neither leader wanted a hot war or a cold one. Yet it came. Why? In short, the postwar world had risks that neither leader could accept or evade and opportunities they could not resist. Both leaders were torn between an obsession with national security and a compulsion to promote their ideology throughout the world. Thus, conflict was inevitable.
        The American policy of "containment" that began to take take shape in 1947 was heavily influenced by a State Department expert on Russia named George Kennan. He argued that the Soviet government's insecurity would lead to a "cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power." In short, the Soviet regime would threaten its neighbors as long as there was a power vacuum. Kennan recommended a "long term, patient but firm and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy." Convinced that Soviet Communism contained "the seeds of its own decay," Kennan believed that Soviet Russia "might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest" nations. (Forty years later it would seem that Kennan was perhaps vindicated, however belatedly.) Kennan's original containment thesis called for flexibility, adaptability, and versatility. Moreover, it stressed economic and political aid as much as military muscle. At first this seemed to be the basic strategy of containment, with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 (promising U.S. support to anti-Communist factions in Greece, Turkey and elsewhere), followed by the Marshall Plan (providing a massive infusion of financial assistance, totaling over $12 billion, to rebuild war torn Western Europe). Regional collective-security alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (formed in April 1949), along with the Strategic Air Command for nuclear deterrence and the Central Intelligence Agency (created in 1947), eventually formed the backbone of the containment strategy.
        Once institutionalized and tied to atomic diplomacy, containment became rigid and passive. Containment in practice meant a policy of drawing a line in the sand--an enormous perimeter from Norway down through the heart of Europe, across the Middle East, then up around Asia--and daring the Soviets to go no further. As Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson said (March 1949), "If the free nations do not stand together, they will fall one by one." Eventually it became largely a formula for the waste of energy and resources, with the central tactical consideration one of deterrence, increasingly based on the threat of "massive retaliation." That the Soviets never seriously contemplated a military invasion of Western Europe is now academic, although probably true. Kennan himself later wrote (in 1956), "The image of a Stalinist Russia poised and yearning to attack the West, and deterred only by our possession of atomic weapons, was largely a creation of Western imagination." (Interestingly, many years later, after his retirement from public service, Kennan became an outspoken critic of American Cold War policy, in particular the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and the refusal to renounce the first-strike option.)
        The Cold War had a profound influence on American politics. With public anxiety rising, anticommunism became a powerful tool for ambitious Congressmen. In fairness, loyalty and security concerns were sometimes genuine. Many Americans benignly flirted with communism in the 1930s and this came back to haunt them in the postwar years. In addition, real instances of espionage associated with the Manhattan Project, such as Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg, provided ammunition for zealous red-hunters. (Rosenberg and his wife were executed in 1953.)   The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) started an investigation of the Hollywood motion picture industry in 1947, leading to the blacklisting of suspected "reds" who refused to confess and renounce their alleged disloyalty.

The Berlin Blockade and Airlift
An early test of Soviet-American diplomacy occurred in Berlin in 1948. The United States, France and Britain merged their occupied sectors of Germany. A united West Germany and the economic revitalization of West Berlin, located deep within Soviet-controlled East Germany, alarmed Stalin. He ordered a blockade to starve West Berlin into submission. For nearly a year (321 days) American and British planes flew daily missions, bringing 2.5 million tons of food, fuel and other essential supplies to the city. Known as "Operation Vittles," the Berlin Airlift was a tense showdown that ended peacefully. Conceding failure, Stalin finally lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949. Nonetheless, as Communist elements tried to seize power in vulnerable parts of the postwar world, the Truman administration came to view these developments as part of an organized conspiracy to enslave the "free world" under a Red tide of Soviet Communism. This view had been articulated publicly by Britain's Winston Churchill in a March 5, 1946 speech delivered in the presence of President Truman at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe" [see Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech].

Berlin Wall –Interactive Diagram

Notes on the Berlin Wall 1961:

Text Sheet:

Cold War in the Atomic Age 17.3 pg. 576

Fear of Communism --Interactive Sheet

Today we use:

Day 9

Apr 11

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Pageant Lectures

Opener: Read from pgs. 652-656 The Eisenhower Years and do the Questions on pg. 656.

Hanson Lecture—start with Red China and concentrate on people places and things

Living in a Bi Polar World

Red China
      It could be said that America's containment policy in Western Europe succeeded inasmuch as nothing happened: Soviet aggression, assuming that it was ever planned, never occurred. Yet, in a striking instance of the reversal of cause and effect, America's success in the containing the Soviet Union in Western Europe went far toward creating the continuing necessity for containment by forcing the Soviets to continue building their own armed forces and strengthening their grip on Eastern Europe. Second, the success of containment in Europe ensured its adoption in other areas--most notably Southeast Asia--where it did not apply as well.
      After a long civil war, on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong (Mao Tse Tung) declared the Communist regime in control as the official government of the People's Republic of China, which himself as ruling Communist Party Chairman. The Soviet Union extended recognition the next day. The Nationalists withdrew from the mainland to the island of Formosa (also known as Taiwan). The United States would refuse to recognize the People's Republic of China until 1979.
      The "fall" of China to Communist forces led by Mao Zedong in 1949, and the invasion of South Korea in 1950, were seen by Truman as part of a worldwide march of Communism controlled from Moscow. With references to Hitler's demands at the Munich Conference, the Truman administration dogmatically accepted the assumption that aggression met by appeasement inevitably bred more aggression until ultimately it grew into another world war. This rationale, later known as the domino theory, was the basis for a military commitment to a fragile government in South Vietnam that would ultimately prove disastrous for the United States.

20^th Century DVD #3

Put TWO bullets between each—write two facts about each event

1944 D-Day Invasion

1945 Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima

1947 Marshall Plan

1950 Truman Sends Military Aid to Korea

1950-53 Korean War

Day 10

Apr 13

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Hanson Modern US History

Chapter 44 Korea and the Eisenhower Era

Explain the historical significance of each of the following:

Adlai Stevenson

Brown Vs Board of Education

Castro

Checkers

Eisenhower Doctrine

Hawaii

Landrum Griffin Act of 1959

McCarthy

Military Industrial Complex

National Defense and Education Act (NDSA)

Organization of American States (OAS)

Rosa Parks/Martin Luther King, Jr.

SEATO—Southeast Asia Treaty Organization

St. Lawrence Seaway

Warren

Warsaw Pact

The Korean War
Truman barely had time to contemplate the strategic implications of Communist China when the army of North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea in June of 1950. Like Germany in Europe, Korea became symbolic of the Cold War struggle. The Soviet Union and United States had temporarily divided Korea at the 38th parallel in 1945. The division was a military one with the goal of driving out the Japanese. The partition cut off the industrialized north from the agricultural south and left the north larger in area but smaller in population.
After the war, the Soviets and Americans failed to reach an agreement on the unification of Korea and the matter was turned over to the United Nations. A temporary commission established by the UN in 1947 sponsored nationwide elections in 1948 but North Korea refused to participate. Syngman Rhee was elected president of the southern Republic of Korea; meanwhile Kim Il-sung was named president of the northern Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

By 1950 the U.S. appeared to have left the South Koreans on their own, as General Douglas MacArthur (regional military commander for the U.S.) and Secretary of State Dean Acheson both voiced their aversion to a land war in Asia. Truman was focused on containment of Soviet Communism in Europe. Perceiving an opportunity, and with Stalin's approval, Kim Il-sung attempted to overpower his southern rival and unite Korea.

          American policy toward East Asia rested on three false assumptions that were problematic in Korea and later in Vietnam. First, it was assumed that communism in China, Korea, and everywhere else was a single movement directed from Moscow. In fact, there were many communist movements, some more or less controlled by the Kremlin and others not. The second assumption was that communist ideology was the driving force in these revolutionary movements, when in fact they tended to be driven by nationalism. Despite its policy of anti-imperialism, the U.S. generally supported British and French colonialism. The third assumption was the belief that "limited war" by proxy was a viable method of deterring the spread of communism without a large-scale commitment of American troops.
      In response to Kim Il-sung's invasion of South Korea, Truman ordered American combat forces into action. He did not ask Congress for a declaration of war, instead calling the operation a "police action." With the Soviet delegate absent, the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling on the North Koreans to withdraw and calling upon member nations to join a peacekeeping force.
      Both Stalin and Kim Il-sung had miscalculated the quickness and strength of the U.S. in reacting to the North Korean offensive. American and South Korean troops were driven to the southeastern tip of the peninsula in September 1950 and nearly forced to evacuate, but U.S. forces commanded by General MacArthur made a surprise amphibious landing at Inchon, trapping the North Korean army below the 38th parallel. MacArthur drove the Communist forces back and appeared to be on the verge of total victory by November. Stalin was prepared to accept the loss, but Mao was not. There was concern in Washington about the possibility of Chinese intervention, and MacArthur was ordered not to advance all the way to the border (the Yalu River). MacArthur confidently assured Truman that the Chinese would keep out.

On November 26th, 400,000 Chinese troops entered Korea. MacArthur's forces were driven below the 38th parallel in January 1951, and then pushed back in March. At this point, Truman was ready for a cessation of hostilities and a negotiated settlement, with restoration of the boundary at the 38th parallel. MacArthur had other ideas. He openly called for a blockade of the Chinese coast, bombing China's major cities, and "laying a field of radioactive waste" across China. As if that was not enough, he accused Truman of appeasement. Truman promptly fired "the son of a bitch." MacArthur returned home as a hero, and Truman's approval ratings fell to historic low. Republicans in Congress called for his impeachment.
Dwight Eisenhower was elected President in November 1952. His first priority was ending the military stalemate in Korea. Ike went to Korea for a firsthand assessment. He hinted that the U.S. might escalate the war and that nuclear weapons were being considered. On July 27, 1953, the North Koreans agreed to an armistice that ended the three-year UN "police action" in which 54,000 Americans had died (including 36,000 from combat). China lost 600,000 soldiers, and approximately 2 million Koreans died. Korea remained divided where the war had begun in 1950.

The Red Tide
The United States found itself in the untenable position of sponsoring undemocratic and unwanted governments in unstable regions, often through underhanded means, in order to maintain the illusion of protecting the "free world" from the spread of Communism. As a result, the credibility of American foreign policy principles and power inevitably suffered. Internally, the poisonous effect of the Cold War on domestic politics became evident in 1947 when the Truman administration and House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) attempted to weed out disloyal government employees and private citizens. Hollywood caved in to political pressure and blacklisted alleged "Reds" from the movie industry. At a time of peace and prosperity, many Americans felt increasingly insecure. By 1952, when Republicans asked voters, "Had enough?" the nation turned to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican president in twenty years.

"I Like Ike"
      After losing the New Hampshire presidential primary in March 1952, Truman announced that he would not seek another term. The choice for Republicans in the 1952 election was General Dwight Eisenhower. He was well-known by the public and immensely popular for his leadership of American armed forces in Europe during the war. In 1948 he was courted by Republicans to challenge Truman for the White House (Truman offered him second place on the Democratic ticket); but he declined. Then in 1952 he agreed to accept the Republican nomination. Campaigning with staunch anti-Communist Senator Richard Nixon as his running mate, Eisenhower won by a comfortable margin.
      Eisenhower was a professional soldier for most of his life. In this capacity he was knowledgeable, disciplined, decisive, dedicated, courageous, and liked by superiors and subordinates. Ike was was considerate, loyal to his friends and family, modest, thin-skinned and sensitive to criticism but tolerant and patient, curious about the world around him, personable, tactful, and good-natured.
      Born on October 14, 1890 in Denison, Texas, he grew up in Abilene, Kansas. He attended West Point, graduated in 1915, and served the army during both world wars. No one man was more responsible for the success of the Normandy invasion in June 1944 than Ike. He had been a player's coach in football, and he was a soldier's commander in war.
      A capable military administrator, he improved the executive management of the White House by surrounding himself with the best available staff, delegating responsibility, and holding them accountable. His meetings were short, his orders clear and crisp, and his policies simple. He was conservative but not an ideologue, smart but not brilliant, steady but not creative, likeable but not charismatic. Above all, he was reasonable, fair-minded and upbeat. He seemed to be what Americans wanted in the White House in the 1950s.

McCarthyism
      Harry Truman's last years as president were overshadowed by bitter Republican charges that both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were deliberately "soft on Communism" (and possibly traitorous). Foreign policy setbacks and a few celebrated spy cases in 1949-50 were cited by Republicans as evidence that the State Department had "sold out" American allies and interests.
      Leading the anticommunist crusade was Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. Noting the superiority of U.S. military power at the end of World War II, McCarthy asked, how could this happen? Rather than acknowledge that the defeat of China's weak and corrupt government of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) by Mao's Communist forces probably was beyond the control of the U.S., McCarthy blamed subversives within the Truman administration.
      The Soviet Union's domination of its weak Eastern Europe neighbors, similarly, was seen as the bitter fruit of a betrayal by Roosevelt and his advisors at the Yalta Conference. The fact that a State Department official present at Yalta, Alger Hiss (far right in photo), was convicted of perjury in 1950 for denying involvement in a Communist spy ring, seemed to confirm the McCarthy's conspiracy theory. Also in 1950, a British physicist named Klaus Fuchs was found to have spied for the Russians while working on the Manhattan Project.
      An effort by Truman's Loyalty Review Board to calm public fears and silence Republican critics by weeding out potential security risks backfired by fueling the fires of suspicion. Public hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating the film industry netted a few "Fifth-Amendment Communists" but no evidence of significant Communist influence in Hollywood. In 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Act over Truman's veto, requiring Communists to register with the Justice Department or face imprisonment. Anticommunist fever rose as sensational cases were prosecuted by the Justice Department. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted of espionage--passing secrets from the Manhattan Project to Soviet spies--and executed in the electric chair in 1953.
      The election of Eisenhower in 1952 began to take the wind out of McCarthy's sails. Going after Democrats while Truman was in the White House was one thing, but now Republicans were in power. In the fall of 1953 McCarthy began an investigation of the Pentagon, alleging that the U.S. Army was coddling communists. In nationally televised hearings in 1954, McCarthy revealed his crude and superfluous tactics, the public became disillusioned, and his colleagues in the Senate were embarrassed. Shortly after the 1954 elections, Republicans joined Democrats in a censure resolution. Now discredited by his own actions, chastened by his peers, and ignored by the press, McCarthy grew ill from alcoholism and died in 1957. "McCarthyism" became a part of the language: the reckless smearing of a person's character with innuendos of disloyalty and "guilt by association."

Flipcard IDS

United Nations

Containment

Iron Curtain

Cold War

Marshall Plan

NATO

Chang Kai Shek

38^th Parallel

Korean War (Police Action)

HUAC

Black List

Alger Hiss

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg

McCarthyism

H (Hydrogen) Bomb

Brinksmanship

Central Intelligence Agency

Warsaw Pact

Nikita Khrushchev

U-2 Incident (Gary Powers)

Cold War Flip Cards

Sputnik
      The American monopoly on nuclear weapons was not expected to last forever, and it was no secret that the Soviets were working feverishly on their own version of the Manhattan Project since the end of the war. Still, Americans were stunned when the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb in Kazakhstan on August 29, 1949. Known as "First Lightning" to the Russians and "Joe" to the Americans, the weapon had roughly the equivalent in yield to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The successful Soviet test came as a shock because U.S. intelligence believed that the Soviets were several years away from being able to detonate a nuclear device. Truman responded by urging U.S. atomic scientists to accelerate the development of a hydrogen "super bomb" with 1,000 times the explosive power. The American H-bomb "Mike" was detonated on November 1, 1952, vaporizing an island in the Pacific. (Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, was the equivalent of 15 kilotons of TNT; Mike was 10 megatons.)
      Truman also created the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) not long after the Soviet atomic test. A pedagogical propaganda agency, FCDA developed curricula for public schools and distributed brochures, films, and radio segments. Home-economics classes taught girls how to furnish bomb shelters. Advertising firms lent their experts to the mission, newspapers offered free placement of FCDA ads, and celebrities from Orson Welles to Ozzie and Harriet signed up to help pitch the cause. Most famously, the FCDA popularized the cartoon figure Bert the Turtle, star of comic-book pamphlets and short classroom films such as Duck and Cover.
      Throughout the 1950s, the U.S. steadily enlarged its arsenal of nuclear weapons and maintained an airborne attack force of long-range bombers under the Strategic Air Command (SAC). Because bombers were reliable and they could reach any location on the planet, development of an American rocket program was not a high priority. The leading rocket scientist was Wernher von Braun, who had led the German V-2 rocket program during the war. As part of a military operation called Project Paperclip, he and his rocket team were scooped up from Germany and sent to America where they were installed at Fort Bliss, Texas. There they worked on rockets for the U.S. Army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun’s team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. Lacking adequate funds and staff, von Braun grew frustrated. Then the Soviets provided the spark he needed to for his rocket program.
      Sputnik was launched on October 4, 1957. Eisenhower was publicly calm and congratulatory to the Soviets. Privately he was furious. Congress created the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) and passed the National Defense Education Act. The "space race" was on. After the Soviets launched their second satellite a month later, Sputnik II, (which carried a dog named Laika), Eisenhower's overeager press secretary announced that an American satellite was almost ready. Unfortunately, the launch vehicle fizzled. The foreign press chuckled. "U.S. Calls It Kaputnik" read one headline. "Oh, What a Flopnik!" said another paper. Finally on January 31, 1958, the first American satellite was successfully put into orbit.

Dominoes
A year after the war in Korea ended, Eisenhower took over the defense of South Vietnam from the beleaguered French at Dien Bien Phu. He outlined his "domino theory" at a press conference: "You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go very quickly." The United States installed a Catholic mandarin named Ngo Dinh Diem in an ill-fated attempt to hold the line against Vietminh forces led by the popular Vietnamese nationalist (and Communist) Ho Chi Minh. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA (and brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles), actively worked behind the scenes to topple anti-American governments throughout the "Third World" and install friendly rulers in countries (e.g., Iran and Guatemala).
John Foster Dulles was a proponent of nuclear brinkmanship: "the ability to get to the verge without getting into war is the necessary art." Mostly dismissed as rhetorical "saber-rattling" this nonetheless added to Cold War tensions and fueled the arms race. To calm the public, Civil Defense bulletins encouraged air raid drills and designated public shelters in civic buildings. Many Americans built personal bomb shelters.

Francis Gary Powers
Eisenhower's most embarrassing moment in foreign affairs came near the end of his presidency when a CIA spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory. For years the Soviets had been protesting U-2 flights over their airspace while the State Department denied the charges. On the eve of an important summit with the French, British, and Russians in Paris--to be followed by a visit to Moscow--Eisenhower reluctantly approved a risky U-2 flight from Pakistan all the way across the Soviet Union to Norway (a 9-hour flight covering nearly 4,000 miles). On May 1, Eisenhower was told that the plane was missing. Allen Dulles had assured the president that if the Soviets shot down a U-2, however unlikely, the pilot would not survive the crash. Moreover, this time he reassured Ike that if the plane had been hit, the pilot would have blown up the plane and taken his own life.
On May 5, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Russians had shot down an American spy plane over Sverdlovsk. Confident that Khrushchev had no proof, the administration claimed that a weather plane had flown off course. On May 7, Khrushchev announced that he had the wreckage of the plane, pilot Francis Gary Powers, and the film. The summit was a disaster, the trip to Moscow was called off, and plans for a nuclear test-ban treaty were scrapped. Powers was tried in August 1960 and sentenced to ten years in prison by the Soviet Supreme Court's Military Cases Collegium. He spent 21 months in a Soviet prison and was then exchanged in February 1962 for Soviet intelligence officer Rudolph Abel, who had been arrested in New York in 1957.

Cultural Comfort and Conflict
      Despite the anticommunist tensions at home and abroad that preoccupied Americans in the 1950s, it was a decade of prosperity characterized by rapid growth of consumer spending and suburban life. The Fifties was an era of tremendous business expansion, generally consisting of two trends: conglomeration and diversification. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, the former president of General Motors, told a Senate committee that he believed "What's good for our country is good for General Motors and vice versa." Millions of Americans seemed to agree. With prosperity came a soaring birth rate ("baby boom") and a demand for new housing (especially in the suburbs).
      As white-collar workers and housewives took to the roads for commuting, shopping, and leisure travel, highways became essential features proliferating across the countryside. Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act--$25 billion to construct over 40,000 miles of interstate highways over a ten-year period--and raised the minimum wage from 75 cents to $1 an hour. Motels and restaurants popped up: Howard Johnson's, Holiday Inn, McDonalds. Soon suburban shopping centers occupied more land than the nation's urban business districts.
      The mass communication media helped to shape the new American consumerism of the postwar generation. Radio and television played a major role in the new consumer culture--by 1955 advertisers were spending over $10 billion annually for TV time--enabling popular music to become a powerful part of an emerging youth subculture. Leading this Rock 'n Roll Revolution was a young white singer from Mississippi named Elvis Presley.
      Drawing heavily from black rhythm-and-blues musicians, early Rock 'n Roll had a pulsating, sensual rhythm and hard-edged lyrics that appealed to white youth (and often horrified their parents). The rapid rise and popularity of Rock was aided by the radio and television industry as well as the recording industry. Similar to what jazz had done a generation earlier, Rock helped define youth culture and exacerbate the inevitable conflict between teenagers and their parents. Other musicians, actors, and writers contributed to a growing restlessness and tension just beneath the placid surface of the "Ozzie and Harriet" life portrayed on television.
      While few black faces were seen on new television screens in the 1950s, pressure for civil rights reform was also rising to the surface. The landmark decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education in May 1954 rocked the foundations of Dixie. Eisenhower, a social and political conservative, considered his appointment of Earl Warren to the Supreme Court--who many conservatives wanted to impeach after the Brown decision--"the biggest damn fool mistake" of his presidency. Resistance to court-ordered desegregation sparked a series of civil rights protests rising from a trickle to a tidal wave of social revolution.
      Another part of this restlessness in the 1950s was the early rumblings of the Feminist Movement that erupted in the 1960s. Many women who had worked during the war now found a frustrating conflict between social expectations, emphasizing their role as submissive housewife/mother, and their underlying sense of empowerment and ambition. Journalist Betty Friedan tapped into this frustration in The Feminine Mystique (published in 1963). Just as the decade of the Twenties was like an economic lull before the volcano erupted, the decade of the Fifties a social calm before the storm.

Day 11

Apr 15

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Vocabulary Einstein’s Letter

¨ Cogent

¨ Efficacy

¨ Euphemism

¨ Fascism

¨ German War Machine

¨ Intolerant

¨ Intrepid

¨ Malaise

¨ Mundane

¨ Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)

¨ Nobel Peace Prize

¨ Pontificate

¨ Posit

¨ Salutary

Eisenhower power point exp

Cold War Turning Points

Critical Thinking Exercises

Read each summary and answer the questions.

1. BERLIN, 1948

Berlin was more or less the center of the Soviet-American conflict following World War II, and the first crisis there was the blockade ordered by Stalin in 1948. Russia had been attacked twice by Germany, in WWI and again in WWII, and Stalin was determined to never allow that to happen again. The answer, he believed, was a permanently occupied and demilitarized Germany. In 1948 the U.S., Britain and France agreed to unite their three sectors into what became West Germany. Stalin controlled East Germany, and he was alarmed by this development. It was complicated by the fact that Berlin is located in what was then East Berlin, and Berlin, too, was divided between East and West partitions. So this meant that West Berlin was a little piece of the anti-communist, pro-American West, located right in the middle of East Germany. A steady steam of people crossed into West Berlin and then on to freedom (West Germany, across Western Europe, and to America). Stalin wanted to stop this by squeezing the U.S. out of Berlin, so he imposed a blockade around the city. Truman's response was "Operation Vittles," the Berlin Airlift. For nearly a year the U.S. flew shipments of food and other vital supplies into West Berlin. Finally Stalin gave up the blockade. Berlin remained a sore spot and eventually (1961) the Berlin Wall was constructed to close the hole in the "Iron Curtain." Question: why didn't the U.S. simply get out of Berlin in 1946?

2. NATO, 1949

The U.S., Canada and ten Western European nations joined NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in 1949, which essentially was a collective-security alliance build around U.S. military might. This meant that any threat to a NATO member might start another world war. The obvious point was to keep Stalin from doing what Hitler had done to provoke World War II (assuming he had thoughts about doing something like that, which was possible but far from certain). Stalin responded with the Warsaw Pact in 1955, officially named the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, comprised of the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European neighbors. NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries never engaged each other in armed conflict. Question: Why didn’t the U.S. let the United Nations do its job as the world's peacekeeping organization? Was NATO really necessary? Was it helpful to our national security, or did it unnecessarily provoke the Soviet Union into an arms race?

3. THE SOVIET A-BOMB, 1949

The American monopoly on nuclear weapons was not expected to last forever, and it was common knowledge that the Soviets were working feverishly on their own version of the Manhattan Project since the end of the war. Still, Americans were stunned when the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb in Kazakhstan on August 29, 1949. Known as "First Lightning" to the Russians and "Joe" (a cheeky reference to Joseph Stalin) to the Americans, the weapon had roughly the equivalent in yield to the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki four years earlier. The successful Soviet test came as a profound shock because U.S. intelligence believed that the Soviet Union was at least several years away from being able to detonate a nuclear device. President Truman responded by urging U.S. atomic scientists to accelerate the development of a hydrogen "super bomb." The American H-bomb ("Mike") was detonated on November 1, 1952, entirely vaporizing an island in the Pacific. Question: Why didn't the U.S. renounce nuclear weapons instead stockpiling them? Should the U.S. have turned over its nuclear weapons to the United Nations?

4. CHINA, 1949

In 1949 the civil war in China that began as soon as the Japanese were driven out in 1945 was finally settled by the victory of the Nationalist (communist) forced led by Mao Zedong. The rival faction was driven off the mainland to the island of Formosa (a.k.a. Taiwan). The U.S. was alarmed about this because a valuable trading partner now had fallen to the "Red Tide." President Truman was determined to contain communism in Asia as well as Europe. Richard Nixon visited China 23 years later and shook hands with Mao. Question: Why did the U.S. not extend a hand of friendship to Mao right from the start, in 1949, instead of waiting until 1972?

5. KOREA, 1950

With the blessing of Stalin (Russia) and Mao (China), North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950 in an effort to unite the divided country under a communist regime. Truman got the United Nations Security Council to endorse a U.S. counterattack to drive the North Koreans out of South Korea. Truman bypassed Congress (which has the constitutional power to declare war) and ordered military intervention in Korea as a "police action" by the United Nations. General Douglas MacArthur, commander of UN forces in Korea, resolved to take all of Korea. He sent his forces beyond the 38th parallel and dangerously close to the Manchurian border, confident that China would not intervene. In November 1950, 30,000 Chinese soldiers crossed into Korea. With UN forces in retreat, Truman held a news conference and stated, in response to a question, that he would not rule out the use of atomic bombs. But privately Truman made it clear that he did not want the Korean war to escalate, even if that meant an indefinite stalemate. MacArthur openly criticized the president's policy of limited war, declaring "there is no substitute for victory." He welcomed a war with China. For this insubordination, and his poor judgment in managing the military situation on the ground in Korea, MacArthur was fired by Truman in April 1951. A total of 36,574 American soldiers died from combat in Korea. The war ended in a stalemate, divided the 38th parallel where it had been since 1945 and where it remains divided to this day. Should the U.S. have simply allowed North Korea to overrun South Korea and unite the country under communist rule? Or, conversely, should the U.S. have pushed ahead and tried to unify Korea under an anti-communist government?

6. VIETNAM, 1954

In 1940, Ho Chi Mihn led the Vietnamese in a fight for liberation from Japanese occupation. In the end, his Communist forces, aided by the Soviet Union, solidified their grip on the northern half of Vietnam, and France held on to the southern half. In 1954 the French were driven out of Vietnam by the Vietnamese Communists. President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed that the U.S. would defend South Vietnam because of what he termed his "domino theory" of containing communism. President Kennedy sent in Green Beret and Navy Seal special forces to train the South Vietnamese. Then President Johnson sent in more and more U.S. troops. By 1968 there were over 500,000 U.S. ground troops in 'Nam. The light at the end of the tunnel remained out of sight. In the end, President Richard Nixon ordered a total withdrawal in 1973, proclaiming "peace with honor." Within two years the country was forcibly united under communist rule. A total of 58,193 Americans were killed in Vietnam, essentially for nothing. Question: What if the U.S. had simply stayed out of 'Nam? Once in, why didn't the U.S. "cut its loses" and pull out sooner? Or, conversely, should the U.S. have stayed and worked harder until victory was achieved?

7. SPUTNIK, 1957

The Soviets successfully sent a satellite called Sputnik into orbit on October 4, 1957. This caused many Americans to fear Soviet attack from outer space. The U.S. got hopping on its own missile development program (which up to that point had been a low priority). In addition to building trillions of dollars worth of nuclear missiles that we never used (thankfully), the U.S. sent a manned spacecraft to the moon at a total cost of $20 billion (1969). American astronauts planted the American flag, walked around, some came back with a dune buggy and hit a few golf balls, and brought back some rocks. What was the point? Was it a colossal waste of money, or a tremendous benefit to the quality of life on Earth

8. CUBA, 1959

A lawyer and popular guerilla leader named Fidel Castro led a revolution in Cuba in 1959. He quickly overthrew the repressive, corrupt, pro-American dictator Fulgencio Batista. (Many Cubans loyal to Batista fled to South Florida). Then Castro announced that he was setting up a Marxist government, and he nationalized American-owned companies in Cuba (seized their assets). President Eisenhower was alarmed. The U.S. began an embargo banning foreign trade with Cuba (that remains in effect to this day). He also approved the planning of a CIA operation to overthrow Castro. Castro, feeling isolated and threatened, quickly formed an economic, political and military partnership with the Soviet Union. The CIA invasion to liberate Cuba, carried out by Cuban refugees in 1961, was an embarrassing failure. Question: Should the U.S. have accepted Castro and worked with him instead of rejecting, isolating and threatening him? Or, conversely, should the U.S. have "taken out" Castro?

9. SVEDLOVSK, USSR, 1960

An American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet airspace, near the town of Svedlovsk, on May 1, 1960. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was apprehended (alive) and paraded in from of Soviet television cameras. The Eisenhower administration insisted it was a weather plane. Then the Soviets produced photographs from Powers' camera: proof that the U.S. was spying on Soviet military installations. A summit meeting planned between President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev was cancelled. (Powers was tried in August 1960 and sentenced to ten years in prison by the Soviet Supreme Court's Military Cases Collegium. He spent 21 months in a Soviet prison and was then exchanged in February 1962 for a captured Soviet spy.) Question: Should the U.S. have been flying spy planes over the Soviet Union? Should the Eisenhower administration have admitted what Powers was doing instead of lying about it? Should the summit have been held anyway?

10. CUBA (AGAIN), 1962

In October of 1962, the U.S. discovered that Soviet nuclear missile sites were being constructed in Cuba. President Kennedy demanded their immediate removal. Apparently at the brink of nuclear war, with behind the scenes diplomacy desperately working toward a compromise (Kennedy promised not to attack Cuba and agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey), Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove his missiles from Cuba. Question: Given the fact that the U.S. had nuclear missiles surrounding the Soviet Union, what difference did it make that Khrushchev slipped some into Cuba? Was Kennedy wisely tough or foolishly confrontational?

Hanson Information

Virginia Western Modern History

Failure of Containment

The Rise of Red China

Mao Zedong in 1949

Leads to hot wars

Korean War 1950-1953

Day 12

Apr 19

MUSH

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Opener 17.3 Pageant Questions Cold War in the Atomic Age

Hanson Lecture 10—Korean War and Following topics

Living in a Bipolar World

Lecture 10. Living in a Bipolar World

Victory in 1945 brought peace and prosperity to Americans but also a tense preoccupation with Communism. Stalinism threatened the freedom of Europe, promoting President Truman to vigorously prosecute a policy of "containment" to keep Soviet power in check. Truman framed it as more than a geopolitical conflict between rival superpowers: it was a struggle for the defense of the "Free World" that continued for forty years.

"The Buck Stops Here"_____________________

Harry the Haberdasher
Having led the nation through economic depression and war for twelve years, Franklin Roosevelt suddenly died on April 15, 1945. Vice President Harry Truman had not been part of Roosevelt's inner circle of advisors and he was relatively unknown to most Americans. The day after taking the oath of office, Harry Truman told a group of reporters, "Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now." Truman was faced with the daunting challenges of concluding the Second World War, demobilizing the U.S. economy, and helping to establish peace and stability in the postwar world.
Truman was born in rural Missouri on May 8, 1884. He farmed, served as an artillery officer in France during World War I, dabbled in business (a haberdashery in Kansas City), became a judge, and entered politics. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1934, led an investigation of war profiteering, and became Roosevelt's vice president in 1944. A folksy and feisty, straight-talking man who seldom minced words, Truman popularized two phrases associated with leadership: "the buck stops here," and "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

The Fair Deal
      Truman tried to extend the domestic programs of the New Deal but the Republican-controlled Congress rejected all but one of his "Fair Deal" proposals (the Housing Act of 1949). In 1947 Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which limited the power of labor unions, over Truman's veto. In 1848 when Congress failed to act on civil rights, Truman issued executive order 9981 to desegregate the armed forces and promote fair employment practices in the federal government. He persuaded Congress to expand Social Security, raise the minimum wage, and extend the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the GI Bill of Rights.
      The GI Bill provided World War II veterans with funds for college, housing loans, small business loans, farm loans, job training, medical care, and up to one year of unemployment checks. By 1956, when it expired, the education portion of the GI Bill had provided $15 billion to 8 million veterans, and $33 billion had been provided for over 4 million home loans. A total of 16 million veterans received assistance from the GI Bill.
      By 1948 Truman's election was in doubt. Running against what he called the "Do-nothing Congress," Truman won a surprising upset. By 1949 the Truman Administration had established the Truman Doctrine, European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), CIA, SAC and NATO to keep Soviet Communism in check. Though unable to achieve most of his domestic agenda, he demonstrated a successful balance between restraint and toughness in the postwar diplomatic challenges that were termed the Cold War. The emerging rivalry preoccupied much of Truman's presidency.

The Arab-Israeli Conflict
      Rejecting Arab, British, and U.S. State Department warnings that Jewish immigration to Palestine and a Jewish state would destabilize the Middle East, Truman urged Congress to support the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people. At a meeting in the White House on November 10, 1945, he told envoys to Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt: "I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents
      In 1948 the nation of Israel was formed, with the endorsement of the UN and the United States, establishing a Jewish state in the Middle East. Palestinian Arabs who were displaced in the process joined forces with Israel’s Arab neighbors in the first of several Arab-Israeli wars.
      Truman's support of Israel was balanced with a compelling economic consideration: oil. The U.S. has maintained close ties with the Saudi government since 1948, having sold over $500 billion in arms to help keep the oil-rich regime secure. Today Saudi Arabia is the world's leading petroleum exporter. In 1953 Truman's successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, authorized a coup in Iran that drove out the anti-American prime minister and replaced him with a pro-American Shah. Why Iran? It has the world's fourth largest oil supply.
      In each of the Arab-Israeli wars the U.S. tried to balance the security needs of Israel with the need for oil; thus in both the Six-Day War (1967) and the Yom Kipper War (1973), the U.S. pressured Israel to accept a cease-fire. The precarious position of Israel, surrounded by hostile neighbors, was exacerbated by the disruption of Palestinian refugees displaced by Israeli occupation of the west bank of the Jordan River, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights. This volatile situation was destined to continue as a source of seemingly irreconcilable conflict.

Containment____________________________

	Origins of the Cold War Conflicting Soviet and American views of the new world order came to a head in 1946, but the roots of Soviet-American rivalry ran as far back as Wilson's failed military intervention in the Russian Revolution (Wilson sent troops to help the White Army defeat the Bolshevik Red Army) in 1919. and Lenin's Communist International ("Comintern"). The central policy of the Comintern under Lenin's leadership was that communist parties should be established across the world to aid the international proletarian revolution. Among the primary targets of Lenin's rhetoric were British and French colonialism and American capitalism. Comintern officially dissolved in 1943 when the Soviet Union and United State were allies and plans were underway for establishment of the United Nations after the war. Whatever Lenin may have envisioned, his regime was preoccupied with struggles inside the emerging Soviet Union. Lenin and his successors lacked the capacity to threaten the dominant capitalist regimes with anything beyond words. This reality did not keep the U.S. from an intense Red Scare after the First World War and a continuing policy of "quarantine" (later termed "containment") to isolate and threaten the Soviet Union. The need for unity in the common effort to defeat Hitler's Third Reich provided merely a brief intermission in the middle of Soviet-American hostility from 1919 to 1991. The Yalta Conference Conflicts between the Big Three began to emerge when Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin met at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. The leaders agreed to the creation of an international organization to maintain peace (the United Nations), a permanent division of Germany, freely-elected democratic governments in Europe (with specific arrangements about boundary lines, the make-up of new governments, and other important details postponed), and Soviet entry into the war against Japan after the surrender of Germany (in return for the recovery of Russian territory lost to Japan in earlier wars). Critics later would charge that Roosevelt "sold out" Eastern Europe to Stalin Considering Soviet security needs, Stalin's paranoid nature, the presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, and need for a peaceful balance of power respecting regional spheres of influence between the emerging superpowers, Soviet domination of its weak neighbors was perhaps inevitable. Moreover, in February 1945 Roosevelt was mainly focused on winning the war, and the Soviet Union was the strongest American Ally. FDR was looking ahead to the postwar world and determined to get the United Nations off the ground with Soviet participation. The Potsdam Conference Truman's first encounter with Stalin came in July 1945 at the Potsdam Conference. Unlike Yalta, the Potsdam agenda was full of detailed issues about boundaries, reparations, and the like, mostly involving Germany. Nonetheless, for the American delegation, securing Soviet cooperation in the defeat of Japan was of primary importance. Despite receiving news of the successful atomic test at Los Alamos, Truman still believed that an invasion of Japan might be necessary. Truman walked up to Stalin at the close of the July 24 session and informed him that he had recently come into possession of a weapon of unusual power. Stalin calmly replied, "I hope you make good use of it." Some historians have alleged that Truman was playing "atomic diplomacy" in a thinly-veiled attempt at intimidation. It seems likely that Stalin already knew about the atomic bomb. The potential threat to Soviet security was something that he could not ignore. After the devastating effect on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was revealed, the Soviets launched a determined effort to escalate their own atomic weapons program in order to end the American monopoly. Hastening the conclusion of the war with Japan achieved an important U.S. objective: curtailment of Soviet expansion into Manchuria, China and Korea. Even before the Second World War had ended, the architects of American foreign policy had become convinced that Soviet expansionism was the greatest threat to postwar peace. In retrospect, it seems clear that a serious miscalculation--indeed, the root of most subsequent mistakes made by the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, was the strange unawareness of America's enormous strength and Russia's relative weakness. In fact, at the moment of victory in 1945, Russia was devastated on a scale unprecedented by countries defeated in a major war. Indeed, it could be argued that Truman could have conferred no greater favor on the Soviets during the early Cold War than taking their militaristic bluster and propaganda seriously at a time when they were in no position to pose a serious threat outside their sphere of influence. The Man of Steel Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who later took the name Stalin ("man of steel"), was a Georgian peasant who studied theology as a young seminary student. By the time he left the seminary he had become a committed Marxist revolutionary. After the Bolsheviks gained power in Russia, Stalin became one of the leaders of the Soviet Central Committee of the Communist Party. Within a few years he became general secretary of the party. Stalin rose to the top, when Lenin died, through the qualities that came to characterize his leadership from 1924 until his death in 1953: he was cunning and ruthless; he ordered the execution of countless enemies, incompetents, and "traitors" within his own ranks. His secret police terrorized the Soviet people and crushed any hint of dissent. People either praised Stalin or they disappeared into prisons or unmarked graves. The ideology of Marxism was important to Stalin, but his thinking was always tactical and expedient. As a Marxist, he believed that communism was the wave of the future, change was inevitable, and class struggle was essential. Power had to be seized and maintained to protect Soviet progress from capitalist threats. He pushed for agricultural collectivism and industrialization to ensure his country's economic independence, power, and success. This caused millions of Soviet people to suffer. Stalin believed in a Marxist vision of worldwide socialist revolution by which the "people" (working class laborers) would rise up, seize power, and share the fruits of their labor, but this was ideology and Stalin was a conservative, practical man. Whereas Hitler dreamed of ruling the world, Stalin was obsessed with destroying his internal enemies ("kulaks," enemies of agricultural collectivism, and "capitalists"). He moved the Soviet Union forward to become a major world power, second only to the United States in economic and military strength, but at a heavy price mostly suffered by his own people. It is estimated that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of about 10 million Soviet people. His Red Army fought fiercely and heroically in the Great Patriot War, eventually defeating the Germans. Afterwards, he was determined to establish a buffer zone of secure border states through territorial gains. Roosevelt understood this and accepted it at Yalta as inevitable. Truman did not see it that way. Following the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was only natural that many Americans, including President Truman, regarded Josef Stalin as “another Hitler” when the dictator revealed his determination to dominate much of Eastern Europe. Truman vowed to contain him with tough diplomacy, political and economic aid to pro-American (anti-Soviet) governments around the world, and a military alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. All of this probably had the unintended consequence of feeding Stalin’s insecurity, making him increasingly ruthless in suppression of his internal enemies and neighbors, and inflexible as a diplomat. The Iron Curtain At the end of the war, when Stalin's Soviet Union was recovering from the devastation of the Great Patriot War, Truman could reflect on a very different wartime experience. Most American soldiers came home. American civilians were not slaughtered by enemy occupation; sisters, wives, daughters and mothers were not raped. Cities were not destroyed. American GNP increased 60 percent during the war; total earnings increased 50 percent. The war inaugurated the greatest era of prosperity in American history. American military forces were not just successful, they seemed unstoppable. And the American A-bomb had been dropped on two enemy cities. Both Truman and Stalin were tough men, by nature disinclined to bend or back down, with conflicting ideologies and national interests; but they shared a common desire: neither leader wanted a war. The postwar world had risks that neither leader could accept or evade and opportunities they could not resist. Both leaders were torn between an obsession with national security and a compulsion to promote their ideology throughout the world. Thus, conflict was inevitable. In a speech delivered in the presence of President Truman on March 5, 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, former British Prime Minister Churchill referred to an "iron curtain" that separated the East and West: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Containment The American policy of "containment" that began to take take shape in 1947 was heavily influenced by a State Department expert on Russia named George Kennan. He argued that the Soviet government's insecurity would lead to a "cautious, persistent pressure toward the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power." In short, the Soviet regime would threaten its neighbors as long as there was a power vacuum. Kennan recommended a "long term, patient but firm and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy." Convinced that Soviet Communism contained "the seeds of its own decay," Kennan believed that Soviet Russia "might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest" nations. Kennan's original containment thesis called for flexibility, adaptability, and versatility. Moreover, it stressed economic and political aid as much as military muscle. At first this seemed to be the basic strategy of containment, with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 (promising U.S. support to anti-Communist factions in Greece, Turkey and elsewhere), followed by the Marshall Plan (providing a massive infusion of financial assistance, totaling over $12 billion, to rebuild war torn Western Europe). Regional collective-security alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949), along with the Strategic Air Command for nuclear deterrence and the Central Intelligence Agency (1947), eventually formed the backbone of the containment strategy. Containment in practice meant a policy of drawing a line in the sand--an enormous perimeter from Norway down through the heart of Europe, across the Middle East, then up around Asia--and daring the Soviets to go no further. As Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson said (March 1949), "If the free nations do not stand together, they will fall one by one." Eventually it became largely a formula for the waste of energy and resources, with the central tactical consideration one of deterrence, increasingly based on the threat of nuclear "massive retaliation." That the Soviets never seriously contemplated a military invasion of Western Europe is now academic, although probably true. In 1956 Kennan later wrote: "The image of a Stalinist Russia poised and yearning to attack the West, and deterred only by our possession of atomic weapons, was largely a creation of Western imagination." Many years later, after his retirement from public service, Kennan became an outspoken critic of American Cold War policy, in particular the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and the refusal to renounce the first-strike option. The Cold War had a profound influence on American politics. With public anxiety rising, anticommunism became a powerful tool for ambitious Congressmen. In fairness, loyalty and security concerns were sometimes genuine. Many Americans benignly flirted with communism in the 1930s and this came back to haunt them in the postwar years. In addition, real instances of espionage associated with the Manhattan Project, such as Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg, provided ammunition for zealous red-hunters. (Rosenberg and his wife were executed in 1953.) The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) started an investigation of the Hollywood motion picture industry in 1947, leading to the blacklisting of suspected "reds" who refused to confess and renounce their alleged disloyalty. The Berlin Blockade/Airlift An early test of Soviet-American postwar diplomacy occurred in Berlin in 1948. The U.S., France and Britain merged their occupied sectors of Germany. A united West Germany and the economic revitalization of West Berlin, located deep within Soviet-controlled East Germany, alarmed Stalin. He ordered a blockade to starve West Berlin into submission and close the Iron Curtain. For nearly a year (321 days) American and British planes flew daily missions, bringing 2.5 million tons of food, fuel and other essential supplies to the city. Known as "Operation Vittles," the Berlin Airlift was a tense showdown that ended peacefully. Conceding failure, Stalin finally lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949. Nonetheless, as Communist elements tried to seize power in vulnerable parts of the postwar world, Americans came to view these developments as part of a conspiracy to enslave the "free world" under a Red Tide of Communism. Red China It could be said that America's containment policy in Western Europe succeeded inasmuch as nothing happened: Soviet aggression, assuming that it was ever planned, never occurred. Yet, in a striking instance of the reversal of cause and effect, America's success in the containing the Soviet Union in Western Europe went far toward creating the continuing necessity for containment by forcing the Soviets to continue building their own armed forces and strengthening their grip on Eastern Europe. Second, the success of containment in Europe ensured its adoption in other areas--most notably Southeast Asia--where it did not apply as well. After a long civil war, on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong declared the Communist regime in control as the official government of the People's Republic of China, which himself as ruling Communist Party Chairman. The Soviet Union extended recognition the next day. The Nationalists withdrew from the mainland to the island of Formosa (also known as Taiwan). The United States would refuse to recognize the People's Republic of China until 1979. The "fall" of China to Communist forces led by Mao Zedong in 1949, and the invasion of South Korea in 1950, were seen by Truman as part of a worldwide march of Communism controlled from Moscow. With references to Hitler's demands at the Munich Conference, the Truman administration dogmatically accepted the assumption that aggression met by appeasement inevitably bred more aggression until ultimately it grew into another world war. This rationale, later known as the domino theory, was the basis for a military commitment to a fragile government in South Vietnam that would ultimately prove disastrous for the United States. The Korean War Truman barely had time to contemplate the strategic implications of Communist China when the army of North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea in June of 1950. Like Germany in Europe, Korea became symbolic of the Cold War struggle in Southeast Asia. The Soviet Union and United States had temporarily divided Korea at the 38th parallel in 1945. The division was a military one with the goal of driving out the Japanese. The partition cut off the industrialized north from the agricultural south and left the north larger in area but smaller in population. After the war, the Soviets and Americans failed to reach an agreement on the unification of Korea and the matter was turned over to the United Nations. A temporary commission established by the UN in 1947 sponsored nationwide elections in 1948 but North Korea refused to participate. Syngman Rhee was elected president of the southern Republic of Korea; meanwhile Kim Il-sung was named president of the northern Democratic People's Republic of Korea. By 1950 the U.S. appeared to have left the South Koreans on their own, as General Douglas MacArthur (regional military commander for the U.S.) and Secretary of State Dean Acheson both voiced their aversion to a land war in Asia. Truman was focused on containment of Soviet Communism in Europe. Perceiving an opportunity, and with Stalin's approval, Kim Il-sung attempted to overpower his southern rival and unite Korea. American policy toward East Asia rested on three false assumptions that were problematic in Korea and later in Vietnam. First, it was assumed that communism in China, Korea, and everywhere else was a single movement directed from Moscow. In fact, there were many communist movements, some more or less controlled by the Kremlin and others not. The second assumption was that communist ideology was the driving force in these revolutionary movements, when in fact they tended to be driven by nationalism. Despite its policy of anti-imperialism, the U.S. generally supported British and French colonialism. The third assumption was the belief that "limited war" by proxy was a viable method of deterring the spread of communism without a large-scale commitment of American troops. In response to Kim Il-sung's invasion of South Korea, Truman ordered American combat forces into action. He did not ask Congress for a declaration of war, instead calling the operation a "police action." With the Soviet delegate absent, the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling on the North Koreans to withdraw and calling upon member nations to join a peacekeeping force. Both Stalin and Kim Il-sung had miscalculated the quickness and strength of the U.S. in reacting to the North Korean offensive. American and South Korean troops were driven to the southeastern tip of the peninsula in September 1950 and nearly forced to evacuate, but U.S. forces commanded by General MacArthur made a surprise amphibious landing at Inchon, trapping the North Korean army below the 38th parallel. MacArthur drove the Communist forces back and appeared to be on the verge of total victory by November. Stalin was prepared to accept the loss, but Mao was not. There was concern in Washington about the possibility of Chinese intervention, and MacArthur was ordered not to advance all the way to the border (the Yalu River). MacArthur confidently assured Truman that the Chinese would keep out. On November 26th, 400,000 Chinese troops entered Korea. MacArthur's forces were driven below the 38th parallel in January 1951, and then pushed back in March. At this point, Truman was ready for a cessation of hostilities and a negotiated settlement, with restoration of the boundary at the 38th parallel. MacArthur had other ideas. He openly called for a blockade of the Chinese coast, bombing China's major cities, and "laying a field of radioactive waste" across China. As if that was not enough, he accused Truman of appeasement. Truman promptly fired "the son of a bitch." MacArthur returned home as a hero, and Truman's approval ratings fell to historic low. Republicans in Congress called for his impeachment. Dwight Eisenhower was elected President in November 1952. His first priority was ending the military stalemate in Korea. Ike went to Korea for a firsthand assessment. He hinted that the U.S. might escalate the war and that nuclear weapons were being considered. On July 27, 1953, the North Koreans agreed to an armistice that ended the three-year UN "police action" in which 54,000 Americans had died (including 36,000 from combat). China lost 600,000 soldiers, and approximately 2 million Koreans died. Korea remained divided where the war had begun in 1950. The Red Tide The United States found itself in the untenable position of sponsoring undemocratic and unwanted governments in unstable regions, often through underhanded means, in order to maintain the illusion of protecting the "free world" from the spread of Communism. As a result, the credibility of American foreign policy principles and power inevitably suffered. Internally, the poisonous effect of the Cold War on domestic politics became evident in 1947 when the Truman administration and House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) attempted to weed out disloyal government employees and private citizens. Hollywood caved in to political pressure and blacklisted alleged "Reds" from the movie industry. At a time of peace and prosperity, many Americans felt increasingly insecure. By 1952, when Republicans asked voters, "Had enough?" the nation turned to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican president in twenty years.

The Eisenhower Presidency_________________

		"I Like Ike" After losing the New Hampshire presidential primary in March 1952, Truman announced that he would not seek another term. The choice for Republicans in the 1952 election was General Dwight Eisenhower. He was well-known by the public and immensely popular for his leadership of American armed forces in Europe during the war. In 1948 he was courted by Republicans to challenge Truman for the White House (Truman offered him second place on the Democratic ticket); but he declined. Then in 1952 he agreed to accept the Republican nomination. Campaigning with staunch anti-Communist Senator Richard Nixon as his running mate, Eisenhower won by a comfortable margin. Eisenhower was a professional soldier for most of his life. In this capacity he was knowledgeable, disciplined, decisive, dedicated, courageous, and liked by superiors and subordinates. Ike was was considerate, loyal to his friends and family, modest, thin-skinned and sensitive to criticism but tolerant and patient, curious about the world around him, personable, tactful, and good-natured. Born on October 14, 1890 in Denison, Texas, he grew up in Abilene, Kansas. He attended West Point, graduated in 1915, and served the army during both world wars. No one man was more responsible for the success of the Normandy invasion in June 1944 than Ike. He had been a player's coach in football, and he was a soldier's commander in war. A capable military administrator, he improved the executive management of the White House by surrounding himself with the best available staff, delegating responsibility, and holding them accountable. His meetings were short, his orders clear and crisp, and his policies simple. He was conservative but not an ideologue, smart but not brilliant, steady but not creative, likeable but not charismatic. Above all, he was reasonable, fair-minded and upbeat. He seemed to be what Americans wanted in the White House in the 1950s. McCarthyism Harry Truman's last years as president were overshadowed by bitter Republican charges that both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were deliberately "soft on Communism" (and possibly traitorous). Foreign policy setbacks and a few celebrated spy cases in 1949-50 were cited by Republicans as evidence that the State Department had "sold out" American allies and interests. Leading the anticommunist crusade was Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. Noting the superiority of U.S. military power at the end of World War II, McCarthy asked, how could this happen? Rather than acknowledge that the defeat of China's weak and corrupt government of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) by Mao's Communist forces probably was beyond the control of the U.S., McCarthy blamed subversives within the Truman administration. The Soviet Union's domination of its weak Eastern Europe neighbors, similarly, was seen as the bitter fruit of a betrayal by Roosevelt and his advisors at the Yalta Conference. The fact that a State Department official present at Yalta, Alger Hiss (far right in photo), was convicted of perjury in 1950 for denying involvement in a Communist spy ring, seemed to confirm the McCarthy's conspiracy theory. Also in 1950, a British physicist named Klaus Fuchs was found to have spied for the Russians while working on the Manhattan Project. An effort by Truman's Loyalty Review Board to calm public fears and silence Republican critics by weeding out potential security risks backfired by fueling the fires of suspicion. Public hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating the film industry netted a few "Fifth-Amendment Communists" but no evidence of significant Communist influence in Hollywood. In 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Act over Truman's veto, requiring Communists to register with the Justice Department or face imprisonment. Anticommunist fever rose as sensational cases were prosecuted by the Justice Department. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted of espionage--passing secrets from the Manhattan Project to Soviet spies--and executed in the electric chair in 1953. The election of Eisenhower in 1952 began to take the wind out of McCarthy's sails. Going after Democrats while Truman was in the White House was one thing, but now Republicans were in power. In the fall of 1953 McCarthy began an investigation of the Pentagon, alleging that the U.S. Army was coddling communists. In nationally televised hearings in 1954, McCarthy revealed his crude and superfluous tactics, the public became disillusioned, and his colleagues in the Senate were embarrassed. Shortly after the 1954 elections, Republicans joined Democrats in a censure resolution. Now discredited by his own actions, chastened by his peers, and ignored by the press, McCarthy grew ill from alcoholism and died in 1957. "McCarthyism" became a part of the language: the reckless smearing of a person's character with innuendos of disloyalty and "guilt by association." Sputnik The American monopoly on nuclear weapons was not expected to last forever, and it was no secret that the Soviets were working feverishly on their own version of the Manhattan Project since the end of the war. Still, Americans were stunned when the Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb in Kazakhstan on August 29, 1949. Known as "First Lightning" to the Russians and "Joe" to the Americans, the weapon had roughly the equivalent in yield to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The successful Soviet test came as a shock because U.S. intelligence believed that the Soviets were several years away from being able to detonate a nuclear device. Truman responded by urging U.S. atomic scientists to accelerate the development of a hydrogen "super bomb" with 1,000 times the explosive power. The American H-bomb "Mike" was detonated on November 1, 1952, vaporizing an island in the Pacific. (Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, was the equivalent of 15 kilotons of TNT; Mike was 10 megatons.) Truman also created the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) not long after the Soviet atomic test. A pedagogical propaganda agency, FCDA developed curricula for public schools and distributed brochures, films, and radio segments. Home-economics classes taught girls how to furnish bomb shelters. Advertising firms lent their experts to the mission, newspapers offered free placement of FCDA ads, and celebrities from Orson Welles to Ozzie and Harriet signed up to help pitch the cause. Most famously, the FCDA popularized the cartoon figure Bert the Turtle, star of comic-book pamphlets and short classroom films such as Duck and Cover. Throughout the 1950s, the U.S. steadily enlarged its arsenal of nuclear weapons and maintained an airborne attack force of long-range bombers under the Strategic Air Command (SAC). Because bombers were reliable and they could reach any location on the planet, development of an American rocket program was not a high priority. The leading rocket scientist was Wernher von Braun, who had led the German V-2 rocket program during the war. As part of a military operation called Project Paperclip, he and his rocket team were scooped up from Germany and sent to America where they were installed at Fort Bliss, Texas. There they worked on rockets for the U.S. Army, launching them at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun’s team moved to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. Lacking adequate funds and staff, von Braun grew frustrated. Then the Soviets provided the spark he needed to for his rocket program. Sputnik was launched on October 4, 1957. Eisenhower was publicly calm and congratulatory to the Soviets. Privately he was furious. Congress created the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) and passed the National Defense Education Act. The "space race" was on. After the Soviets launched their second satellite a month later, Sputnik II, (which carried a dog named Laika), Eisenhower's overeager press secretary announced that an American satellite was almost ready. Unfortunately, the launch vehicle fizzled. The foreign press chuckled. "U.S. Calls It Kaputnik" read one headline. "Oh, What a Flopnik!" said another paper. Finally on January 31, 1958, the first American satellite was successfully put into orbit. Dominoes A year after the war in Korea ended, Eisenhower took over the defense of South Vietnam from the beleaguered French at Dien Bien Phu. He outlined his "domino theory" at a press conference: "You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go very quickly." The United States installed a Catholic mandarin named Ngo Dinh Diem in an ill-fated attempt to hold the line against Vietminh forces led by the popular Vietnamese nationalist (and Communist) Ho Chi Minh. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA (and brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles), actively worked behind the scenes to topple anti-American governments throughout the "Third World" and install friendly rulers in countries (e.g., Iran and Guatemala). John Foster Dulles was a proponent of nuclear brinkmanship: "the ability to get to the verge without getting into war is the necessary art." Mostly dismissed as rhetorical "saber-rattling" this nonetheless added to Cold War tensions and fueled the arms race. To calm the public, Civil Defense bulletins encouraged air raid drills and designated public shelters in civic buildings. Many Americans built personal bomb shelters. Francis Gary Powers Eisenhower's most embarrassing moment in foreign affairs came near the end of his presidency when a CIA spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory. For years the Soviets had been protesting U-2 flights over their airspace while the State Department denied the charges. On the eve of an important summit with the French, British, and Russians in Paris--to be followed by a visit to Moscow--Eisenhower reluctantly approved a risky U-2 flight from Pakistan all the way across the Soviet Union to Norway (a 9-hour flight covering nearly 4,000 miles). On May 1, Eisenhower was told that the plane was missing. Allen Dulles had assured the president that if the Soviets shot down a U-2, however unlikely, the pilot would not survive the crash. Moreover, this time he reassured Ike that if the plane had been hit, the pilot would have blown up the plane and taken his own life. On May 5, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Russians had shot down an American spy plane over Sverdlovsk. Confident that Khrushchev had no proof, the administration claimed that a weather plane had flown off course. On May 7, Khrushchev announced that he had the wreckage of the plane, pilot Francis Gary Powers, and the film. The summit was a disaster, the trip to Moscow was called off, and plans for a nuclear test-ban treaty were scrapped. Powers was tried in August 1960 and sentenced to ten years in prison by the Soviet Supreme Court's Military Cases Collegium. He spent 21 months in a Soviet prison and was then exchanged in February 1962 for Soviet intelligence officer Rudolph Abel, who had been arrested in New York in 1957. Cultural Comfort and Conflict Despite the anticommunist tensions at home and abroad that preoccupied Americans in the 1950s, it was a decade of prosperity characterized by rapid growth of consumer spending and suburban life. The Fifties was an era of tremendous business expansion, generally consisting of two trends: conglomeration and diversification. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, the former president of General Motors, told a Senate committee that he believed "What's good for our country is good for General Motors and vice versa." Millions of Americans seemed to agree. With prosperity came a soaring birth rate ("baby boom") and a demand for new housing (especially in the suburbs). As white-collar workers and housewives took to the roads for commuting, shopping, and leisure travel, highways became essential features proliferating across the countryside. Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act--$25 billion to construct over 40,000 miles of interstate highways over a ten-year period--and raised the minimum wage from 75 cents to $1 an hour. Motels and restaurants popped up: Howard Johnson's, Holiday Inn, McDonalds. Soon suburban shopping centers occupied more land than the nation's urban business districts. The mass communication media helped to shape the new American consumerism of the postwar generation. Radio and television played a major role in the new consumer culture--by 1955 advertisers were spending over $10 billion annually for TV time--enabling popular music to become a powerful part of an emerging youth subculture. Leading this Rock 'n Roll Revolution was a young white singer from Mississippi named Elvis Presley. Drawing heavily from black rhythm-and-blues musicians, early Rock 'n Roll had a pulsating, sensual rhythm and hard-edged lyrics that appealed to white youth (and often horrified their parents). The rapid rise and popularity of Rock was aided by the radio and television industry as well as the recording industry. Similar to what jazz had done a generation earlier, Rock helped define youth culture and exacerbate the inevitable conflict between teenagers and their parents. Other musicians, actors, and writers contributed to a growing restlessness and tension just beneath the placid surface of the "Ozzie and Harriet" life portrayed on television. While few black faces were seen on new television screens in the 1950s, pressure for civil rights reform was also rising to the surface. The landmark decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education in May 1954 rocked the foundations of Dixie. Eisenhower, a social and political conservative, considered his appointment of Earl Warren to the Supreme Court--who many conservatives wanted to impeach after the Brown decision--"the biggest damn fool mistake" of his presidency. Resistance to court-ordered desegregation sparked a series of civil rights protests rising from a trickle to a tidal wave of social revolution. Another part of this restlessness in the 1950s was the early rumblings of the Feminist Movement that erupted in the 1960s. Many women who had worked during the war now found a frustrating conflict between social expectations, emphasizing their role as submissive housewife/mother, and their underlying sense of empowerment and ambition. Journalist Betty Friedan tapped into this frustration in The Feminine Mystique (published in 1963). Just as the decade of the Twenties was like an economic lull before the volcano erupted, the decade of the Fifties a social calm before the storm.

Lecture 11

20^th Century DVD #3

1951 Alan Freed introduces Rock and Roll

1953 John Foster Dulles—Cold War Warrior

1954 Joseph McCarthy condemned by the US Senate

1954 Brown vs. Board of Education

1955 Rosa Parks Arrested

1960 Nixon Kennedy TV Presidential Debate

1962 John Glenn 1^st American to orbit the Earth in space

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

1963 M.L. King “I Have a Dream Speech”

Watch movie and fill in the bullets

Day 13

Apr 21

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Pageant Lectures

Civil Rights and Martin Luther King, Jr.

King’s Dream

Day 14

Apr 27

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Pageant Lectures

Worksheets 20.1 Challenging Segregation and 20.2 Freedom Now

Day 15

Apr 29

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Pageant Lectures

1. Who was Francis Gary Powers and how did fate cause him to become an embarrassing complication in Soviet-American relations?

Francis Gary Powers
Eisenhower's most embarrassing moment in foreign affairs came near the end of his presidency when a CIA spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory. For years the Soviets had been protesting U-2 flights over their airspace while the State Department denied the charges. On the eve of an important summit with the French, British, and Russians in Paris--to be followed by a visit to Moscow--Eisenhower reluctantly approved a risky U-2 flight from Pakistan all the way across the Soviet Union to Norway (a 9-hour flight covering nearly 4,000 miles). On May 1, 1960 Eisenhower was told that the plane was missing. Allen Dulles had assured the president that if the Soviets shot down a U-2, however unlikely, the pilot would not survive the crash. Moreover, this time he reassured Ike that if the plane had been hit, the pilot would have blown up the plane and taken his own life.
On May 5, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that the Russians had shot down an American spy plane over Sverdlovsk. Confident that Khrushchev had no proof, the administration claimed that a weather plane had flown off course. On May 7, Khrushchev announced that he had the wreckage of the plane, pilot Francis Gary Powers, and the film. The summit was a disaster, the trip to Moscow was called off, and plans for a nuclear test-ban treaty were scrapped. Powers was tried in August 1960 and sentenced to ten years in prison by the Soviet Supreme Court's Military Cases Collegium. He spent 21 months in a Soviet prison and was then exchanged in February 1962 for Soviet intelligence officer Rudolph Abel, who had been arrested in New York in 1957.

Watch: Eye on the Prize Website

Civil Rights

Rights we have just because we are human—we do not have to “earn” these rights—no requirement needs to be met.

Life

Liberty/Freedom

Pursuit of happiness

Equality

No one has the permission to tell you that you are not as good as someone else

Denied a job—based on….

Told where you can and can not go to school

Told you can not talk to certain people

Forced to sit in certain areas

Can not go to certain places—hotels, restaurants, movie theaters and waiting rooms

Rules where you have to sit—public transportation

Rules about how you are to act towards the “superior” race

Your court testimony is not as respected as others

You are not able to use the courts

Emmett Louis Till

Chicago, IL

13 years old—went to spend a summer at his uncle’s house in Money, Mississippi

Mississippi—one of the most racist states in the Union

Emmett Till—is hanging out with his cousins—outside a drug store

He graduated from 8^th grade and had pictures of his classmates and showed them to his cousins

White classmates in Chicago schools—white girls

13 year old boys—the southern black boys started teasing him

Dared him to speak with the white woman who was working at the store

Till takes the dare

He speaks to the white woman clerk

That night her husband and brother take him from his uncle’s house and kill him

Body found weeks later—bloated and unrecognizable—except for a ring his mom gave him

Last to see him—Roy Bryant and J.W, Milam (white relatives of the clerk)

Trial is a joke

Only witness to the disappearance is Mose Wright—Till’s Uncle

At that time blacks did not testify in court—especially against white men

Mose Wright said he would identify the men who took his nephew

Rosa Park Montgomery Bus Boycott

Brown decision emboldened the black community

Seeds of the Civil Rights Revolution

· Hearing of the lynching of black war veterans in 1946, President Harry S Truman commissioned a report titled "To Secure These Rights."

· Truman ended segregation in federal civil service and order "equality of treatment and opportunity" in the armed forces in 1948.

· When Congress and new President Eisenhower ignored the racial issues, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren stepped up to confront important social issues-especially civil rights for African Americans.

· In the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unequal and thus unconstitutional.

· The decision reversed the previous ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

· Plessy Ruling—separate but equal is OK.

· States in the Deep South resisted the ruling, and more than 100 senators and congressman signed the "Declaration of Constitutional Principles" in 1956, pledging their unyielding resistance to desegregation.

Blacks get home from WWII—(1945)

· In Europe…people did not care about color…just happy to see Americans

· 1941-1945—treated as liberated heroes

· When these black soldiers got home…they were not going to be treated as second class citizens in their own country.

· Even the President (Truman) thinks it is wrong when a black men are lynched 1946

· This “empowerment” the refusal to think of yourself as second class citizens is very important

· Slaves freed 1865—we are talking about Civil Rights movement in 1954, 89 years later.

· People must stand up and demand equal treatment

· Brown vs. Board—the mere act of separation tells one group that they are not equal

Gave black folks hope—they had someone on their side—Supreme Court

An unelected group of influential people that took their side

Led Mose Wright to do what he did in Money, Mississippi

Day 16

May 3

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Episode 1 Notes

Ask Not What You Can Do
In his inaugural address, President Kennedy promised to fight against "the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war." He exhorted Americans to "ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country." The stylish elegance that Jack Kennedy and his wife Jackie brought to the White House were idealized by the press with references to Camelot. His charm, grace and wit were legendary, but Kennedy had little success advancing his "New Frontier" legislative agenda through Congress.
His first program, the Peace Corps, was approved by Congress in 1961; but his civil rights and education bills became hopelessly bottled up in Congress. In the White House, Kennedy surrounded himself with highly-regarded intellectuals, close friends, and family members. His brother Robert was appointed Attorney-General. (Bobby Kennedy, as he was known, later served as Senator from New York until his assassination during the 1969 presidential campaign.)

Kennedy and Civil Rights
In the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had argued for a new civil rights law. His phone call to the wife of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a call to the Georgia judge who had sentenced King to a six months in a maximum security prison for a minor traffic violation, may have won him the presidency. After the election it was discovered that over 70 percent of the African-American vote went to Kennedy. However, during the first two years of his presidency, Kennedy failed to put forward his promised legislation.
Then, in the summer of 1963, Southern resistance to integration and voter registration in Alabama and Mississippi shocked the conscience of the nation. His civil rights bill was brought before Congress in 1963 following a televised speech on June 11. Kennedy pointed out:

The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day; one third as much chance of completing college; one third as much chance of becoming a professional man; twice as much chance of becoming unemployed; about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year; a life expectancy which is seven years shorter; and the prospects of earning only half as much.

      Kennedy's civil rights bill was still being debated by Congress when he was assassinated in November, 1963. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had a poor record on civil rights issues, took up the cause. His main opponent was his long-time friend and mentor, Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia, who told the Senate: "We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our [Southern] states." Russell organized 18 Southern Democratic senators in filibustering this bill.
      On June 15, 1964, Senator Russell succumbed to intense pressure from Johnson and agreed to end the filibuster that was blocking the vote on the civil rights bill. It was passed by a vote of 73 to 27. The 1964 Civil Rights Act made racial discrimination in public places, such as theaters, restaurants and hotels, illegal. It also required employers to provide equal employment opportunities. Projects involving federal funds could now be cut off if there was evidence of discrimination based on color, race or national origin.
      The Civil Rights Act also attempted to deal with the problem of blacks being denied the vote in the Deep South. The legislation stated that uniform standards must prevail for establishing the right to vote. Schooling to sixth grade constituted legal proof of literacy and the attorney general was given power to initiate legal action in any area where he found a pattern of resistance to the law.

2. What was Sputnik and what was the American reaction? Who was the first passenger in a Soviet rocket into space?

3. What was the driving force behind the effort to put a Man on the M oon by the end of the 1960s, how and when was this goal achieved, and what were the costs and benefits of the space race?

Race to the Moon
           Four years after the Soviets had launched Sputnik, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. The Soviets were beating the Americans to every milestone off the planet. Feeling a sense of urgency in finding a way to overtake the Soviets in the space race, in 1961 Kennedy huddled with Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his science advisers to come up with a plan. He decided that safely landing a man on the moon, though technologically daunting, was a goal that the U.S. could reach before the Soviet Union.
      On May 25, 1961, Kennedy proclaimed: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Kennedy had no illusions about the challenge: "No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish." He warned Congress that the cost would be significant, more than $9 billion. While steeped in Cold War rhetoric, Kennedy's address also noted that the push to explore space transcended national rivalries: "This is not merely a race. Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share."
      Kennedy's vision guided NASA's human space flight program from the beginning. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions were designed with his objective in mind. Despite skeptics who thought it could not be accomplished, Kennedy's dream became a reality on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong took a small step for himself and a giant step for humanity, leaving a dusty trail of footprints on the moon, and crewmate Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin planted the flag for the United States. After more than 21 hours on the lunar surface, they returned to Earth. The two Moon-walkers had left behind scientific instruments, an American flag and other mementos, including a plaque bearing the inscription: "Here Men From Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon. Jul. 1969 A.D. We came in Peace For All Mankind."
      A total of twelve Apollo astronauts would reach the lunar surface over the next three years. The Soviet Union scrapped its lunar manned mission program before one cosmonaut reached the moon. In July 1975 a new era of space cooperation, rather than competition, began as a part of Soviet-American détente: Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft executed a successful rendezvous and docking. Joint space projects continued, off and on, for years.
      The United States and Russia still compete on many fronts, but the race to the Moon, like the Cold War, is nearly forgotten except in the pages of history. Most Americans can no longer remember "duck and cover" air raid drills, the fun of drinking Tang, or the excitement of men walking on the Moon. But the quality of life on Earth has been improved immeasurably as a result of the Space Race. Satellites are a vital part of our global communication system. Today we take for granted the use of digital cameras, microwaves, microcomputers, and cell phones. In addition, knowledge learned from manned space travel has led to countless improvements in medical care. Many developments in so-called "space age" technology probably would have occurred without the impetus of the American-Soviet race to the moon, but the competition surely accelerated the pace with the major investment of human resources and government funds.

4. When and why was the Berlin Wall constructed? What did the U.S. do about it? Why was it such an important symbol of the Cold War?

5. How did Cuba become the center of the Cold War (instead of Berlin), beginning with the revolution led by Fidel Castro, followed by the Bay of Pigs Fiasco?

Ninety Miles off the Coast
Kennedy's worst foreign policy embarrassment and his greatest triumph both involved Cuba. The former will forever be remembered as the Bay of Pigs Fiasco. Near the end of the Eisenhower presidency, the CIA hatched a scheme to depose Fidel Castro by deploying a small army of fourteen hundred Cuban exiles loyal to Fulgencio Batista, the U.S.-supported dictator overthrown by Castro in 1959. The landing site was the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) on the southern coast of Cuba. Naively optimistic intelligence reports from the CIA predicted that thousands of Cubans would rise up and support the "liberation army" of fourteen hundred men launched from nearby Nicaragua.
What little hope of success there might have been for the "secret" operation was not helped by the fact that the Associated Press and CBS News had been reporting on the preparations for weeks and announced that the invasion was imminent. Kennedy fumed, "Castro doesn't need agents over here, all he has to do is read our papers." Castro rounded up and detained thousands of potential "traitors" and mobilized his loyal troops to repel the invasion. Kennedy approved the operation nonetheless, which took place on April 18, 1961, but he insisted that there be no direct involvement of U.S. armed forces. Overwhelmingly outnumbered and outgunned, "Brigade 2506" never had a chance. More than a thousand surrendered, a few escaped, and the remainder were killed.

Eyeball to Eyeball
      The defining moment of Kennedy's presidency occurred in October 1962, when Soviet missile installations in Cuba were discovered by American U-2 aerial photographs. Kennedy pressured Soviet premier Khrushchev into backing down (apparently), in a tense showdown. In fact, frantic behind-the-scenes negotiations resolved the crisis. Kennedy made a public announcement on television, ordered a blockade of Cuba (technically a "quarantine" to avoid a war with the Soviet Union), and demanded the prompt removal of soviet missiles [read transcript]. Though generally praised for his tough stance, critics have charged that Kennedy needlessly pushed the confrontation to the brink of nuclear war.
      Back in 1961, following the botched Bay of Pigs invasion which made Kennedy look bad, the Soviets had abruptly sealed off East Berlin by constructing the Berlin Wall, and Kennedy's inability to stop it was perceived by his critics (and possibly by Khrushchev) as weakness. Some historians believe Khrushchev's motive in Cuba was to force Kennedy out of Berlin. (In 1963 Kennedy made a symbolic visit to the Berlin Wall, proclaiming that "we are all citizens of Berlin.") This time Kennedy stood firm.
      The Cuban Missile Crisis essentially ended in a draw. Kennedy publicly pledged not to invade Cuba and privately agreed to remove U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey threatening the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, his popularity soared and Khrushchev's political power began to crumble (he was deposed two years later). Feelings of relief and elation were tempered by a sobering realization that nuclear "brinksmanship"--the diplomatic "art" of pushing a Cold War dispute to the brink of thermonuclear war--had gone too far. Speaking at American University's commencement in June 1963, Kennedy stated, "Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to the choice of either a humiliating defeat or a nuclear war." [Refer to essay: Cuban Missile Crisis.]

6. What was the Cuban Missile Crisis? What did Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev hope to accomplish by sneaking missiles into Cuba in 1962? How did President Kennedy resolve the crisis?

7. What were the main components of Kennedy's New Frontier and what did Kennedy accomplish?

An Unfinished Life
        For years Kennedy had talked of dying young and violently, and since his election he confided on numerous occasions that he did not expect to leave the White House alive. Outwardly relaxed and often smiling, casually joking with buddies, staff, and reporters, the inner man was grimly somber, stoic and fatalistic. Despite his youthful appearance, he was a sick man, tortured by chronic back pain and Addison's disease (an endocrine disorder characterized by weight loss, muscle weakness, fatigue, and low blood pressure). He privately spoke of a premonition of "a crowd. . . a man with a rifle. . . . Do you think I'll be assassinated?"
        In November 22, 1963, Kennedy made a visit to Texas to kickoff his 1964 reelection campaign. In Dallas, Jack Kennedy and First Lady Jackie rode in an open car, a Lincoln Continental convertible. "If you're going out to see the people, the people ought to be able to see you," he said. (Still, he also remarked, "If someone wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it.")
      Lee Harvey Oswald, a dishonorably discharged marine who had lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962, watched from a sixth-floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, aimed, and fired several shots. Kennedy was struck in the back of the neck and then in the head. The second wound was mortal. The nation's shock and sorrow of Kennedy's death was followed by a dark feeling of anxiety and disillusionment.
      Kennedy was not the first American president to be assassinated (he was the fourth), but he was the first one to have the moment captured on film. News of the shooting was instantaneous, but still photos were not published until November 29 in Life magazine. The famous Zapruder film, made on the afternoon of November 22 by a private citizen named Abraham Zapruder, was first aired on network television in March 1975. The initial public response was shock and outrage. It also ignited widespread skepticism of the 1964 Warren Commission findings that Oswald acted alone. Conspiracy theories continued to circulate for many years.
      After Kennedy's death, allegations of extramarital affairs surfaced (including Mafia moll Judith Campbell Exner, painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, and actress Marilyn Monroe), as have facts about his various health problems. It's unflattering but fair to say he was a compulsive womanizer. Kennedy likely rationalized it as a diversion from his painful illnesses and stressful duties, in his mind not much different from golf, sailing, fishing, or hunting. The press discretely respected the line between Kennedy's private life and presidency, and the Kennedy mystique captivated the nation without the tarnish of a public scandal.
      Kennedy's unfinished presidency left many questions: Would he have deepened American involvement in Vietnam or pulled out? Would Kennedy and his vice-president, former Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, have somehow found the votes in Congress to pass his New Frontier legislation? Would Kennedy and Khrushchev have continued down the road to nuclear arms control? How much of Kennedy's enduring popularity is based on style rather than substance is debatable; but unquestionably he made a powerful mark on history in his short time as America's young "King Arthur

Day 17

May 5

MUSH

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Power point Slides-VIETNAM

Notes today:

Eye on the Prize Episode 1 Questions

Emmett Till and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Key Questions

1. Segregation, a social system based on a long history of prejudices and discrimination, was deeply

entrenched in people’s minds as well as in the culture. How did segregation manifest itself in daily life in

the South? How did segregation disenfranchise black Americans?

2. Why do you think the lynching of Emmett Till became a catalyst in the national movement for civil rights?

3. What choices did the family of Emmett Till and their supporters make in exposing the brutality of his

murder? How did these choices shape public reaction to the murder?

4. In what ways did the media educate the nation about the events in Mississippi and Montgomery?

5. What means were available to disenfranchised blacks in America to fight segregation?

6. How did people summon the courage to confront the intimidation, brutality, and injustice they faced

under the Jim Crow system?

7. This series is called “Eyes on the Prize.” What is the prize being sought in this episode?

CONNECTIONS

1. What did the reactions to the brief interaction between Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant, the white

woman in the store, expose about the social system that supported segregation? Why do you think

Till’s actions sparked such violence?

2. Curtis Jones was playing checkers with an older man who warned him that Bryant was likely to react

violently to Till’s innocent comments. What did he know that the two boys did not? How do people

learn the rules and customs of a society? How are these rules and customs enforced?

3. What is the role of intimidation, lynching, and fear in a segregated society?

4. Till’s uncle, Mose Wright, would not go to the police. In a democracy, what institutions are responsible

for protecting the vulnerable? What options do individuals and groups have when these institutions

cannot be trusted?

CONNECTIONS

1. Why do you think Mamie Till-Mobley decided to show the public her son’s mutilated body?

2. What was the role of the black press in exposing the violence of the Jim Crow system? Why do you

think the mainstream press was initially reluctant to publish the photographs of Emmett Till?

3. What role can the press play in exposing injustice? Are there news stories that have led you to

express outrage or influenced you to take action?

CONNECTIONS

1. Why were black Americans afraid to testify against whites in the South? What does their fear reveal

about justice in the South at that time?

2. What, in your opinion, compelled Wright, who knew the dangers of speaking out, to step up and

testify against the murderers?

3. How did Wright’s actions and testimony make him a symbol of the emerging civil rights movement?

CONNECTIONS

1. Often Rosa Parks’s motivation for her refusal to relinquish her seat has been trivialized as “Rosa

Parks was tired.” How did she explain her decision?

2. Why did the early struggle against segregation focus on buses and other forms of public accommodations?

What leverage were protesters in Montgomery able to use against the bus company?

3. Why do you think Parks became a symbol of the civil rights movement? Why did so many people

identify with her cause? How did that identification build support for the emerging movement?

CONNECTIONS

1. What words, phrases, or images stand out in King’s speech? What did King mean by a transformation

from “thin paper to thick action”?

2. What kind of struggle did King propose? What principles did King cite as a foundation for the struggle?

3. Why was the church so central to the struggle for black freedom?

4. What was the role of religion and faith in the arguments King presented? To what religious values

and democratic principles did he appeal in his speech?

5. Lillian Smith, the author of Killers of the Dream and an outspoken white supporter of civil rights,

wrote to King in the early months of the Montgomery boycott. In her letter, she shared her thoughts

about the role of religion in the struggle for black freedom:

Dear Dr. King:

I have with a profound sense of fellowship and admiration been watching your work in

Montgomery. I cannot begin to tell you how effective it seems to me, although I must confess I

have watched it only at long distance.

It is the right way. Only through persuasion, love, goodwill, and firm nonviolent resistance

can the change take place in our South. Perhaps in a northern city this kind of nonviolent, persuasive

resistance would either be totally misinterpreted or else find nothing in the whites which

could be appealed to. But in our South, the whites, too, share the profoundly religious symbols

you are using and respond to them on a deep level of their hearts and minds. Their imaginations

are stirred: the waters are troubled.

You seem to be going at it in such a wise way. I want to come down as soon as I can and talk

quietly with you about it. For I have nothing to go on except television reports and newspaper

reports. But these have been surprisingly sympathetic to the 40,000 Negroes in Montgomery who

are taking part in this resistance movement. But I have been in India twice; I followed the

Gandhian movement long before it became popular in this country. I, myself, being a Deep South

white, reared in a religious home and the Methodist church, realize the deep ties of common songs,

common prayer, common symbols that bind our two races together on a religio-mystical level, even

as another brutally mythic idea, the concept of White Supremacy, tears our two people apart.10

6. Why does Smith believe that religion and nonviolence would be useful strategies for change? What

impact did she suggest that King’s religious symbolism would have on white Southerners?

7. What ideology did the White Supremacists espouse? Who were they? Why did Smith and many others

believe that this ideology tears blacks and whites apart?

CONNECTIONS

1. According to Durr, what tensions in the white community did the bus boycott expose? Why did some

whites choose to help the boycotters?

2. Durr argued that as children, Southern whites were encouraged to develop loving relationships with

blacks who cared for them. As adults, however, they were told to refrain from interacting with blacks

because, it was argued, blacks were inferior. What conflicts and tensions did this message create?

What does this message tell us about whites in the South at that time?

3. What did Durr mean by the “pure hypocrisy” that ruled relationships between blacks and whites?

Episode 2 Notes

Day 18

May 9

MUSH

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Pageant Lectures

The Fog of War

Eleven Lessons from the life of Robert McNamara

Watch: The Fog of War

The Fog of War

Eleven Lessons from the life of Robert McNamara

Seven years as Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War

Try to learn…understand what happened

Develop the lesson and pass it on

· All in John Kennedy’s cabinet (advisors) had a paperweight on their desk with the month of October 1962 engraved on it so they would never forget the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis—when the US and USSR (Russia) came close to nuclear exchange

#1 Empathize with your enemy

—try to think about the world as they do

#2 Rationality will not save us

Castro willing to use nukes that were already in Cuba against us...he knew that would result in the end of Cuba he didn’t care!

LeMay urging that we should attack when we were stronger…we were going to have to have a nuclear war in the future eventually…

#3 There is something beyond one self

#4 Maximize efficiency

#5 Proportionality should be a guideline for war

14/28 Dominoes in Fog of War

#6 Get the data

#7 Belief and seeing are both often wrong

Tonkin Gulf Resolution as a result of the “attack” on our ships in Tonkin Gulf

Were not really attacked “twice” but maybe once

We see what we want to believe

Introduce “Operation Rolling thunder”

Agent Orange

#8 Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning

#9 In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil

#10 Never say never

#11 You can't change human nature

POWERPOINT VIETNAM Part 2

Kent State Information

The Stormy Sixties

Go over 23 3 and 23 4 sheets

Take 23.1 and 23.2 quiz in groups—check on Wednesday

Intro- Check 23.1 and 23.2 quizzes

Day 19

MUSH

May 11

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Pageant Lectures

Why did President Dwight Eisenhower send the army into Little Rock, Arkansas?

During the Emmett Till trial and the Montgomery, (Alabama) bus boycott (sparked by Rosa Park’s arrest) the President did not come out to support the Blacks calling for equal treatment or the Whites denying the Blacks equal treatment.

Country looks for “moral leadership”—President

Cold War—making the world “safe for Democracy”

Eisenhower afraid that going for Black equal rights would be unpopular…Supreme Court in the Brown decision saying that segregation was wrong.

Who is going to support/enforce this decision…racists are not just going to give in!

A word from the President would help the cause of Blacks

Instead he was forced to act…at a High School…Little Rock Central High

Sept 1957 9 Black kids (8 Juniors and 1 Senior) were selected to attend the all white L.R.C.H.S.

On the first day of school the Arkansas National Guard was positioned outside the school to stop the Black kids from entering.

On National TV Americans witnessed armed troops preventing kids from attending school. Yelled at, spit on and ridiculed as they tried to get back to their transportation.

Federal Judge ordered Governor Orville Faubus—stop preventing the kids from going to school.

Faubus removed the National Guardsmen…only local police (some of whom were racist) were protecting the kids on the second day.

Did not work…kids were almost killed…for going to school!

President send the “real” United States Army into Little Rock Central High and protects the Black kids.

White folks are going to be FORCED to obey the desegregation laws.

College at the University of Mississippi—James Meredith

Civil Rights Information—Find and read about at Hanson site below

Civil Rights Lecture—(Click 12. Civil Rights)

Mose Wright: He went all the way

Civil Rights Website

American Odyssey Chapter 20 Sections 1 and 2 Work Sheets

Watch Eyes on the Prize

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/about/pt.html

Day 20

MUSH

May 13

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Pageant Lectures

Watch the Ernest Green Story

Day 21

MUSH

May 17

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Pageant Lectures

Finish The Ernest Green Story

The Sixties—The Counterculture Chapter 22 Section 4 pg. 748

1. What did the majority of American youth do during the 1950’s?

2. What was one important instrument of communication within the young generation during the 1960’s?

3. Write down three descriptions of the counter culture…

4. How did some young people search for emotional high’s during the 1960’s?

5. What was the main thing young people were rejecting during the 1960’s?

6. What was one similarity between the Unification Church and the Hare Krishna movements?

7. What was a common living practice that took hold for individuals during the 1960’s?

8. What was a major focus of the counter-culture in the field of health?

9. What was the most important ingredient in the rock and roll music of the 1960’s?

10. What inspired Roy Lichtenstein’s art work?

Notes

Day 22

MUSH

May 19

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Pageant Lectures

Topic: Watergate—A Crisis in the Presidency

The Seventies

Watergate Timeline

Watergate Power Point

Lecture:
America Sinking through a Watergate: The Crisis of the Modern Presidency

Nixon on the Home Front

Nixon expanded the Great Society programs by increasing funding for Medicare, Medicaid, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). He also created the Supplemental Security Income (SSI), giving benefits to the poor aged, blind, and disabled.

Nixon's Philadelphia Plan of 1969 required construction-trade unions working on the federal pay roll to establish "goals and timetables" for black employees. This plan changed the definition of "affirmative action" to include preferable treatment on groups, not individuals; the Supreme Court's ruling on Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) upheld this. Whites protested to this decision, calling it "reverse discrimination."

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OHSA) were created.

In 1962, Rachel Carson boosted the environmental movement with her book Silent Spring, which exposed the disastrous effects of pesticides. By 1950, Los Angeles had an Air Pollution Control Office.

The Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 both aimed at protecting and preserving the environment.

Worried about inflation, Nixon imposed a 90-day wage freeze and then took the nation off the gold standard, thus ending the "Bretton Woods" system of international currency stabilization, which had functioned for more than a quarter of a century after WWII.

The Nixon Landslide of 1972

In the spring of 1972, the North Vietnamese burst through the demilitarized zone separating the two Vietnams. Nixon ordered massive bombing attacks on strategic centers, halting the North Vietnamese offensive.

Senator George McGovern won the 1972 Democratic nomination. He based his campaign on pulling out of Vietnam in 90 days. President Nixon, though, won the election of 1972 in a landslide.

Bombing North Vietnam to the Peace Table

Nixon launched the heaviest assault of the war when he ordered a two-week bombing of North Vietnam in an attempt to force the North Vietnamese to the conference table. It worked and on January 23, 1973, North Vietnamese negotiators agreed to a cease-fire agreement. The shaky "peace" was in reality little more than a thinly disguised American retreat.

Watergate Woes

On June 17, 1972, five men working for the Republican Committee for the Re-election of the President were caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel and bugging rooms.

Following was a great scandal in which many prominent members of the president's administration resigned. Lengthy hearings proceeded, headed by Senator Sam Erving. John Dean III testified of all the corruption, illegal activities, and scandal.

Watergate Interactive

The Great Tape Controversy

When conversations involving the Watergate scandal were discovered on tapes, President Nixon quickly refused to hand them over to Congress, despite denying any participation in the scandal. In 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign due to tax evasion. In accordance with the newly-passed 25^th Amendment (1967), Nixon submitted to Congress, for approval as the new vice president, Gerald Ford.

On October 20, 1973 ("Saturday Night Massacre"), Archibald Cox, the prosecutor of the Watergate scandal case who had issued a subpoena of the tapes, was fired. Both the attorney general and deputy general resigned because they, themselves did not want to fire Cox.

The Secret Bombing of Cambodia and the War Powers Act

Despite federal assurances to the American public that Cambodia's neutrality was being respected, it was discovered that secret bombing raids on North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia had taken place since March of 1969; this caused the public to question trust of the government. Nixon ended the bombing in June 1973.

However, Cambodia was soon taken over by the cruel dictator Pol Pot, who later committed genocide of over 2 million people over a span of a few years.

In November 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, requiring the president to report all commitments of U.S. troops to foreign exchanges within 48 hours. A new feeling of "New Isolationism" that discouraged U.S. troops in other countries began to take hold, yet Nixon stood strong.

The Arab Oil Embargo and the Energy Crisis

Following U.S. support of Israel during Israel's war against Syria and Egypt to regain territory lost during the Six-Day War, the Arab nations imposed an oil embargo, strictly limiting oil in the United States. A speed limit of 55 MPH was imposed, the oil pipeline in Alaska was approved in 1974 despite environmentalists' cries, and other forms of energy were researched.

OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) lifted the embargo in 1974, yet it then quadrupled the price of oil.

The Unmaking of a President

On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that President Nixon had to submit all tapes to Congress. Late in July 1974, the House approved its first article of impeachment for obstruction of justice. On August 5, 1974, Nixon released the three tapes that held the most damaging information-the same three tapes that had been "missing." On August 8 of the same year, Nixon resigned, realizing that he would be convicted if impeached, and with resignation, he could at least keep the privileges of a president.

Day 23

MUSH

May 23

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Pageant Lectures

Topic: Carter—The Seventies

The First Unelected President

Gerald Ford became the first unelected president; his name had been submitted by Nixon as a vice-presidential candidate. All other previous vice presidents that had ascended to presidency had at least been supported as running mates of the president that had been elected.

President Ford's popularity and respect sank when he issued a full pardon of Nixon, thus setting off accusations of a "buddy deal."

In July 1975, Ford signed the Helsinki accords, which recognized Soviet boundaries and helped to ease tensions between the two nations.

Defeat in Vietnam

Early in 1975, the North Vietnamese made their full invasion of South Vietnam. President Ford request aid for South Vietnam, but was rejected by Congress. South Vietnam quickly fell. The last of Americans were evacuated on April 29, 1975.

The United States had fought the North Vietnamese to a standstill and had then withdrawn its troops in 1973, leaving the South Vietnamese to fight their own war. The estimated cost to America was $188 billion, with 56,000 dead and 300,000 wounded. America had lost more than a war; it had lost face in the eyes of foreigners, lost its own self-esteem, lost confidence in its military power, and lost much of the economic strength that had made possible its global leadership after WWII.

The Bicentennial Campaign and the Carter Victory

In the election of 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter beat Republican Gerald Ford to win the presidency. Carter promised to never lie to the American public.

In 1978, President Carter convinced Congress to pass an $18 billion tax cut. Despite this, the economy continued to tumble.

Although early in his presidency he was relatively popular, the popularity of President Carter soon dropped as world events took a turn for the worse.

Carter's Humanitarian Diplomacy

Carter championed for human rights, and in Rhodesia (known today as Zimbabwe) and South Africa, he championed for black rights.

On September 17, 1978, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel signed peace accords at Camp David. Mediated by Carter after relations had strained, this was a great success. Israel agreed to withdraw from territory gained in the 1967 war as long as Egypt respected Israel's territories.

In Africa, though, many communist revolutions were taking place; although not all were successful, the revolutions did cause disheartenment and spread fear.

President Carter pledged to return the Panama Canal to Panama by the year 2000 and resume full diplomatic relations with China in 1979.

Carter Tackles the Ailing Economy

Inflation had been steadily rising, and by 1979, it was at 13%. Americans learned that they could no longer hide behind their ocean moats and live happily.

Carter diagnosed America's problems as stemming primarily from the nation's costly dependence on foreign oil. He called for legislation to improve energy conservation, without much public support.

Carter's Energy Woes

In 1979, Iran's shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, who had been installed by America in 1953 and had ruled Iran as a dictator, was overthrown and succeeded by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Iranian fundamentalists were very opposed Western customs, and because of this, Iran stopped exporting oil; OPEC also raised oil prices, thus causing another oil crisis.

In July 1979, Carter retreated to Camp David and met with hundreds of advisors to contemplate a solution to America's problems. On July 15, 1979, Carter chastised the American people for their obsession of material woes ("If it's cold, turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater."), stunning the nation. A few days later, he fired four cabinet secretaries and tightened the circle around his advisors.

Foreign Affairs and the Iranian Imbroglio

In 1979, Carter signed the SALT II agreements with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, but the U.S. senate refused to ratify it.

On November 4, 1979, a group of anti-American Muslim militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took hostages, demanding that the U.S. return the exiled shah who had arrived in the U.S. two weeks earlier for cancer treatments.

On December 27, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which ended up turning into the Soviet Union's own Vietnam. Because of the invasion of Afghanistan however, the Soviet Union posed a threat to America's precious oil supplies. President Carter placed an embargo on the Soviet Union and boycotted the Olympic Games in Moscow. He also proposed a "Rapid Deployment Force" that could quickly respond to crises anywhere in the world.

The Iranian Hostage Humiliation

During the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the American hostages languished in cruel captivity while news reports showed images of Iranian mobs burning the American flag and spitting on effigies of Uncle Sam. Carter first tried economic sanctions to force the release of the hostages, but this failed. He then tried a commando rescue mission, but that had to be aborted. When two military aircraft collided, eight of the would-be rescuers were killed.

The stalemate hostage situation dragged on for most of Carter's term, and the hostages were never released until January 20, 1981-the inauguration day of Ronald Reagan.

Iran Hostage

Topic: Reagan—The 1980’s

Impact of Gorbachev—IA

The Triumph of Conservatism

President Jimmy Carter's administration appeared to be stumped and faltering when it was unable to control the rampant inflation or handle foreign affairs. It also refused to remove hampering regulatory controls from major industries such as airlines.

Late in 1979, Edward Kennedy ("Ted") declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the election of 1980. His popularity sputtered and died when the suspicious 1969 accident in which a young female passenger drowned arose.

As the Democrats ducked out, the Republicans, realizing that the average American was older and more mature than during the stormy sixties and was therefore more likely to favor the right, chose conservative and former actor Ronald Reagan, signaling the return of conservatism. New groups that later spearheaded the "new right" movement included Moral Majority and other conservative Christian groups.

In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled in Milliken v. Bradley that desegregation plans could not require students to move across school-district lines. This reinforced the "white flight" that pitted the poorest whites and blacks against each other, often with explosively violent results.

Affirmative action was another burning issue, but some whites used this to argue "reverse discrimination." In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in University of California v. Bakke that Allan Bakke had not been admitted into U.C. because the university preferred minority races only; the Court ordered the college to admit Bakke. The Supreme Court's only black justice, Thurgood Marshall, warned that the denial of racial preferences might sweep away the progress gained by the civil rights movement.

The Election of Ronald Reagan, 1980

Ronald Reagan backed a political philosophy that condemned federal intervention in local affairs, favoritism for minorities, and the elitism of arrogant bureaucrats. He drew on the ideas of the "neoconservatives"-supporting free-market capitalism, questioning liberal welfare programs and affirmative-action policies, and calling for reassertion of traditional values of individualism and the centrality of family.

Ronald Reagan won the election of 1980, beating Democratic president Jimmy Carter.

The Regan Revolution

The Iranian's released the hostages on Reagan's Inauguration Day, January 20, 1981, after 444 days of captivity.

Reagan assembled a conservative cabinet when he took office. Much to the dismay of environmentalists, James Watt became the secretary of the interior.

A major goal of Reagan was to reduce the size of the government by shrinking the federal budget and cutting taxes. He proposed a new federal budget that called for cuts of $35 billion, mostly in social programs like food stamps and federally-funded job-training centers. On March 6, 1981, Reagan was shot. 12 days later, Reagan recovered and returned to work.

The Battle of the Budget

The second part of Reagan's economic program called for tremendous tax cuts, amounting to 25% across-the-board reductions over a period of 3 years. In August 1981, Congress approved a set of tax reforms that lowered individual tax rates, reduced federal estate taxes, and created new tax-free saving plans for small investors. With the combination of budgetary discipline and tax reduction, the "supply-side" economics would stimulate new investment, boost productivity, promote dramatic economic growth, and reduce the federal deficit.
The economy slipped into its deepest recession since the 1930s as unemployment rose and banks closed. The anti-inflationary polices that caused the recession of 1982 had actually been initiated by the Federal Reserve Board in 1979, during Carter's presidency.

For the first time in the 20^th century, income gaps widened between the rich and the poor. Some economists located the sources of the economic upturn in the massive military expenditures. Reagan gave the Pentagon nearly $2 trillion in the 1980s. He plunged the government into major deficit that made the New Deal look cheap.

Reagan Renews the Cold War

Reagan's strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union was simple: by enormously expanding U.S. military capabilities, he could threaten the Soviets with an expensive new round in the arms race. The American economy could better bear this new financial burden than could the Soviet system. In March 1983, Reagan announced his intention to pursue a high-technology missile-defense system called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as Star Wars. The plan called for orbiting battle satellites in space that could fire laser beams to vaporize intercontinental missile on liftoff.

In 1983, a Korean passenger airliner was shot down when it flew into Soviet airspace. By the end of 1983, all arms-control negotiations were broken, and the Cold War was intensified.

Troubles Abroad

In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, seeking to destroy the guerrilla bases from which Palestinian fighters attacked Israel. Reagan sent peacekeeping troops, but after a suicide bomber killed 200 marines, he withdrew the force. In 1979, Reagan sent "military advisors" to El Salvador to prop up the pro-American government. In October 1983, he dispatched a heavy-fire-power invasion force to the island of Grenada, where a military coup had killed the prime minister and broth Marxists to power. Overrunning the island and ousting the insurgents, American troops demonstrated Reagan's determination to assert the dominance of the United States in the Caribbean.

Round Two for Reagan

Ronald Reagan overwhelmingly won the election of 1984, beating Democrat Walter Mondale and his woman vice presidential nominee, Geraldine Ferraro.

Foreign policy issues dominated Reagan's second term. Mikhail Gorbachev became the chairman of the Soviet Communist party in March 1985. Committed to radical reforms in the Soviet Union, he announced two policies, Glasnost and Perestroika, aimed at ventilating the Soviet society by introducing free speech and a measure of liberty, and reviving the Soviet economy by adopting many of the free-market practices, respectively. The two policies required the Soviet Union to reduce the size of its military and concentrate aid on the citizens. This necessitated an end to the Cold War. In December 1985, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the IFN treaty, banning all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. The two leaders capped their friendship in May 1988 at a final summit in Moscow.

The Iran-Contra Imbroglio

Two foreign policy problems arose to Reagan: the continuing captivity of a number of American hostages seized by Muslim extremist groups in battered Lebanon; and the continuing grip on power of the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Money from the payment for arms to the Iranians was secretly diverted to the contras, who fought the Sandinista government, although it violated a congressional ban on military aid to the Nicaraguan rebels. In November 1986, news of the secret dealings broke and ignited a firestorm of controversy. Reagan claimed he had no idea of the illicit activities. Criminal indictments were brought against Oliver North, Admiral John Poindexter, and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. The Iran-contra affair cast a shadow over the Reagan record in foreign policy, tending to obscure the president's achievements in establishing a new relationship with the Soviets.

Reagan's Economic Legacy

Ronald Reagan had taken office vowing to stimulate the American economy by rolling back government regulations, lowering taxes, and balancing the budget. Supply-side economic theory had promised that lower taxes would actually increase government revenue because they would stimulate the economy as a whole. The combination of tax reduction and huge increases in military spending caused $200 billion in annual deficits. The large deficits of the Reagan years assuredly constituted a great economic failure. By appearing to make new social spending both practically and politically impossible for the foreseeable future, though, the economic deficits served their purpose. They achieved Reagan's highest political objective: the containment of the welfare state.

In the early 1990s, median household income actually declined.

The Religious Right

In 1979, Reverend Jerry Falwell founded a political organization called the Moral Majority. He preached with great success against sexual permissiveness, abortion, feminism, and the spread of gay rights. Collecting millions of dollars and members, the organization became an aggressive political advocate of conservative causes.

Conservatism in the Courts

The Supreme Court had become Reagan's principal instrument in the "cultural wars." By the time he had left office, Reagan had appointed 3 conservative-minded judges, including Sandra Day O'Connor, the first women to become a Supreme Court Justice. Reaganism rejected two icons of the liberal political culture: affirmative action and abortion.

Affirmative Action - In two cases in 1989 (Ward's Cove Packing v. Antonia and Martin v. Wilks), the Court made it more difficult to prove that an employer practiced racial discrimination in hiring.

Abortion - In Roe v. Wade (1973), the Court had prohibited states from making laws that interfered with a woman's right to an abortion during the early months of pregnancy. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), the Supreme Court approved a Missouri law that imposed certain restrictions on abortion, signaling that a state could legislate in an area in which Roe had previously forbidden them to legislate. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Court ruled that states could restrict access to abortion as long they did not place an "undue burden" on the woman.

Topic: Reagan—The 1980’s

Referendum on Reagansim in 1988

Corruption in the government gave Democrats political opportunities. Signs of economic trouble seemed to open more political opportunities for Democrats as the "twin towers" of deficits-the federal budget deficit and international trade deficit-continued to mount. On "Black Monday," October 19, 1987, the stock market plunged 508 points-the largest one-day decline in history.

The Republicans nominated George Bush for the election of 1988. Black candidate Jesse Jackson, a rousing speech-maker who hoped to forge a "rainbow collation" of minorities and the disadvantaged, campaigned energetically, but the Democrats chose Michael Dukakis. Despite Reagan's recent problems in office, George Bush won the election.

George Bush and the End of the Cold War

After receiving an education at Yale and serving in World War II, George Bush had gained a fortune in the oil business in Texas. He left the business, though, to serve in public service. He served as a congressman and then held various posts in several Republican administrations, including ambassador to China, ambassador to the United Nations, director of the CIA, and vice president.

In 1989, thousands of prodemocracy demonstrators protested in Tiananmen Square in China. In June of that year, China's autocratic rulers grew angry and brutally crushed the movement. Tanks and machine gunners killed hundreds of protestors. World opinion condemned the bloody suppression of the prodemocracy demonstrators.

In early 1989, the Solidarity movement in Poland toppled the communist regime. Communist regimes also collapsed in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Romania. In December 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and the two Germanies were reunited in October 1990.

In August 1991, a military coup attempted to preserve the communist system by trying to dislodge Gorbachev from power. With support of Boris Yelstin, the president of the Russian Republic (one of the several republics that composed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR), Gorbachev foiled the plotters. In December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president. He had become a leader without a country as the Soviet Union dissolved into its component parts, 15 republics loosely confederated in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), with Russia the most powerful state and Yelstin the dominant leader. The demise of the Soviet Union finished to the Cold War.

Throughout the former Soviet Union, waves of nationalistic fervor and long-suppressed ethnic and racial hatreds were exposed. In 1991, the Chechnyan minority tried to declare its independence from Russia. Boris Yelstin was forced to send in Russian troops. Ethnic warfare in other communist countries was took place as vicious "ethnic cleaning" campaigns against minorities arose. Western Europe was now threatened by the social and economic weakness of the former communist lands.

Now that the Soviet Union had dissolved and there was no longer a Cold War, America's economy suffered. During the Cold War, the U.S. economy had been dependent upon defense spending.

In 1990, the white regime in South Africa freed African leader Nelson Mandela, who had served 27 years in prison for conspiring for overthrow the government. Four years later, he was elected as South Africa's president. In 1990, free elections removed the leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua from power. In 1992, peace came to El Salvador.

The Persian Gulf Crisis

On August 2, 1990, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, seeking oil. The United Nations Security Council condemned the invasion and on August 3, demanded the immediate withdrawal of Iraq's troops. After Hussein refused to comply by the mandatory date of January 15, 1991, the United States spearheaded a massive international military deployment, sending 539,000 troops to the Persian Gulf region.

Fighting "Operation Desert Storm"

On January 16, 1991, the U.S. and the U.N. launched a 37-day air war against Iraq. Allied commander, American general Norman Schwarzkopf, planned to soften the Iraqis with relentless bombing and then send in waves of ground troops and armor. On February 23, the land war, "Operation Desert Storm," began. Lasting only 4 days, Saddam Hussein was forced to sign a cease-fire on February 27. The war had failed to dislodge Saddam Hussein from power.

Bush on the Home Front

President Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, prohibiting discrimination against citizens with physical or mental disabilities. In 1992, he signed a major water projects bill that reformed the distribution of subsidized federal water in the West. In 1990, Bush's Department of Education challenged the legality of college scholarships targeted for racial minorities.

In 1991, Bush nominated conservative African American Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Thomas's nomination was approved by the Senate despite accusations from Anita Hill that Thomas had sexually harassed her.

By 1992, the unemployment rate had exceeded 7%, and the federal budget deficit continued to grow.

Bill Clinton: The First Baby-Boomer President

For the election of 1992, the Democrats chose Bill Clinton as their candidate (despite accusations of womanizing and draft evasion) and Albert Gore, Jr. as his running mate. The Democrats tried a new approach, promoting growth, strong defense, and anticrime policies, while campaigning to stimulate the economy.

The Republicans dwelled on "family values" and selected Bush for the presidency and J. Danforth Quayle for the vice presidency.

Third party candidate, Ross Perot entered the race and ended up winning 19,237,247 votes, although he won no Electoral votes.

Clinton won the election of 1992, by a count of 370 to 168 in the Electoral College. Along with the presidency, Democrats also gained control of both the House and the Senate.

Presidency Clinton placed in Congress and his presidential cabinet minorities and more women, including the first female attorney general, Janet Reno, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the Supreme Court

A False Start for Reform

Upon entering office, Clinton called for accepting homosexuals in the armed forces, but he had to settle for a "don't ask, don't tell" policy that unofficially accepted gays and lesbians.

Clinton appointed his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to revamp the nation's health and medical care system. When the plan was revealed in October 1993, critics blasted it as cumbersome, confusing, and stupid. The previous image of Hillary as an equal political partner of her husband changed to a liability.

In 1993, Clinton passed the Brady Bill, a gun-control law named after presidential aide James Brady, who had been wounded in President Reagan's attempted assassination.

By 1996, Clinton had shrunk the federal deficit to its lowest levels in ten years.

In July 1994, Clinton convinced Congress to pass a $30 billion anticrime bill.

On February 26, 1993, a radical Muslim group bombed the World Trade Center in New York, killing six people. On April 19, 1993, a fiery standoff at Waco, Texas between the government and the Branch Davidian cult took place; it ended in a huge fire that killed 82 people. On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma, killing 169 people. By the time all these events had taken place, few Americans trusted the government.

The Politics of Distrust

In 1994, Newt Gingrich led Republicans on a sweeping attack of Clinton's liberal failures with a conservative "Contract with America." That year, Republicans won eight more seats in the Senate and 53 more seats in the House, where Gingrich became the new Speaker of the House.

The Republicans, however, went too far, imposing federal laws that put new obligations on state and local governments without providing new revenues.

Clinton tried to fight back, but the American public gradually grew tired of Republican conservatism; Gingrich's suggestion of sending children of welfare families to orphanages, and the 1995 shut down of Congress due to a lack of a sufficient budget package aided to this public disliking.

In the election of 1996, Clinton beat Republican Bob Dole. Ross Perot, the third party candidate, again finished third.

Problems Abroad

Clinton sent troops to Somalia, but eventually withdrew them. He also got involved with the conflicts in Northern Ireland, but to no positive effect. Before serving as presidency, Clinton denounced China's abuses of human rights and threatened to punish China. However, as president, Clinton discovered that trade with China was far too important to "waste" over human rights.

Clinton committed American troops to NATO to keep the peace in the former Yugoslavia and sent 20,000 troops to return Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in Haiti. He fully supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that made a free-trade zone surrounding Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. He then helped to form the World Trade Organization, the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). He also provided $20 billion to Mexico in 1995 to help its faltering economy.

Clinton presided over the 1993 reconciliation meeting between Israel's Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Yasir Arafat at the White House. Two years later, though, Rabin was assassinated, ending hopes for peace in the Middle East.

A Sea of Troubles

The end of the Cold War left the U.S. probing for a diplomatic formula to replace anti-Communism, revealing misconduct by the CIA and the FBI.

Political reporter Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors, mirroring some of Clinton's personal life/womanizing. Clinton ran into trouble with his failed real estate investment in the Whitewater Land Corporation.

In 1993, White House councilman, Vincent Foster, Jr. apparently committed suicide, perhaps overstressed at having to (possibly immorally) manage Clinton's legal and financial affairs.

As Clinton began his second term, the first by a Democratic president since FDR, there were Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.

The end of the Cold war-- Interactive

Change in relations since 1945-- Interactive

What was the era of detente?-- Interactive

New Frontier and Great Society—Interactive