Chapter 35 Vocab

IBM

IBM

From its incorporation in 1911, computer manufacturer IBM rose to the pinnacle of America’s soaring postwar economy. It became the very emblem of managerial capitalism and technological innovation. Boasting five Nobel Prize winners among its employees, IBM helped to catalyze the transition to a computerized world.

The Feminine Mystique

Best-selling book by feminist thinker Betty Friedan. This work challenged women to move beyond the drudgery of suburban housewifery and helped launch what would become second-wave feminism

rock n roll

“Crossover” musical style that rose to dominance in the 1950s, merging black rhythm and blues with white bluegrass and country. Featuring a heavy beat and driving rhythm, rock ‘n’ roll music became a defining feature of the 1950s youth culture.

Checkers Speech

Nationally televised address by vice-presidential candidate Richard Nixon during which he defended himself against allegations of corruption. Using the new mass medium of television shortly before the 1952 election, the vice-presidential candidate saved his place on the ticket by saying the only campaign gift he had received was a cocker spaniel named Checkers.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

Protest by black Alabamians against segregated seating on city buses, sparked by Rosa Parks’s defiant refusal to move to the back of the bus. The bus boycott lasted from December 1, 1955, until December 26, 1956, and became one of the foundational moments of the civil rights movement. It led to the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr., and ultimately to a Supreme Court decision opposing segregated busing.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas

Landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and abolished racial segregation in public schools. The Court reasoned that “separate” was inherently “unequal,” rejecting the foundation of the Jim Crow system of racial segregation in the South. This decision was the first major step toward the legal end of racial discrimination and a major accomplishment for the civil rights movement.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Youth organization founded by southern black students in 1960 to promote civil rights. Drawing on its members’ youthful energies, SNCC in its early years coordinated demonstrations, sit-ins, and voter registration drives.

Operation Wetback

A government program to round up and deport as many as 1 million illegal Mexican migrant workers in the United States. The program was promoted in part by the Mexican government and reflected burgeoning concerns about non-European immigration to America.

Federal Highway Act of 1956

Federal legislation signed by Dwight D. Eisenhower to construct thousands of miles of modern highways in the name of national defense. Officially called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, this bill dramatically increased the move to the suburbs, as white middle-class people could more easily commute to urban jobs.

Policy of Boldness

Foreign-policy objective of Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles, who believed in changing the containment strategy to one that more directly engaged the Soviet Union and attempted to roll back communist influence around the world. This policy led to a buildup of America’s nuclear arsenal to threaten “massive retaliation” against communist enemies, launching the Cold War’s arms race.

Hungarian Uprising

Series of demonstrations in Hungary against the Soviet Union. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev violently suppressed this pro-Western uprising, highlighting the limitations of America’s power in Eastern Europe.

Battle of Dien Bien Phu

Military engagement in French colonial Vietnam in which French forces were defeated by Viet Minh nationalists loyal to Ho Chi Minh. With this loss, the French ended their colonial involvement in Indochina, paving the way for America’s entry.

Suez Crisis

International crisis launched when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been owned mostly by French and British stockholders. The crisis led to a British and French attack on Egypt, which failed without aid from the United States. The Suez crisis marked an important turning point in the post-colonial Middle East and highlighted the rising importance of oil in world affairs.

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)

Cartel comprising Middle Eastern states and Venezuela first organized in 1960. OPEC aimed to control access to and prices of oil, wresting power from Western oil companies and investors. In the process, it gradually strengthened the hand of non-Western powers on the world stage

Sputnik

Soviet satellite first launched into earth orbit on October 4, 1957. This scientific achievement marked the first time human beings had put a man-made object into orbit and pushed the USSR noticeably ahead of the United States in the space race. A month later, the Soviet Union sent a larger satellite, Sputnik II, into space, prompting the United States to redouble its space exploration efforts and raising American fears of Soviet superiority.

kitchen debate

Televised exchange in 1959 between Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and American vice president Richard Nixon. Meeting at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, the two leaders sparred over the relative merits of capitalist consumer culture versus Soviet state planning. Nixon won applause for his staunch defense of American capitalism, helping lead him to the Republican nomination for president in 1960.

military-industrial complex

Term popularized by President Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 Farewell Address, referring to the political and economic ties between arms manufacturers, elected officials, and the U.S. armed forces that created self-sustaining pressure for high military spending during the Cold War. Eisenhower also warned that this powerful combination left unchecked could “endanger our liberties or democratic process,” favoring defense concerns over more peaceful goals that balanced security and liberty.

Abstract Expressionism

An experimental style of mid-twentieth-century modern art exemplified by Jackson Pollock’s spontaneous “action paintings,” created by flinging paint on canvases stretched across the studio floor.

International Style

Archetypal, post–World War II modernist architectural style, best known for its “curtain-wall” designs of steel-and-glass corporate high-rises.

Beat Generation

A small coterie of mid-twentieth-century bohemian writers and personalities, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, who bemoaned bourgeois conformity and advocated free-form experimentation in life and literature.

Southern Renaissance

A literary outpouring among mid-twentieth-century southern writers, begun by William Faulkner and marked by a new critical appreciation of the region’s burdens of history, racism, and conservatism.

New Frontier

President Kennedy’s nickname for his domestic policy agenda. Buoyed by youthful optimism, the program included proposals for the Peace Corps and efforts to improve education and health care.

Peace Corps

A federal agency created by President Kennedy in 1961 to promote voluntary service by Americans in foreign countries. The Peace Corps provides labor power to help developing countries improve their infrastructure, health care, educational systems, and other aspects of their societies. Part of Kennedy’s New Frontier vision, the organization represented an effort by postwar liberals to promote American values and influence through productive exchanges across the world.

Apollo

Program of manned space flights run by America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The project’s highest achievement was the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Berlin Wall

Fortified and guarded barrier between East and West Berlin erected on orders from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 to stop the flow of people to the West. Until its destruction in 1989, the wall was a vivid symbol of the divide between the communist and capitalist worlds.

European Economic Community

Free-trade zone in Western Europe created by Treaty of Rome in 1957. Often referred to as the “Common Market,” this collection of countries originally included France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The body eventually expanded to become the European Union, which by 2005 included twenty-seven member states.

Bay of Pigs invasion

CIA plot in 1961 to overthrow Fidel Castro by training Cuban exiles to invade and supporting them with American airpower. The mission failed and became a public relations disaster early in John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

Cuban missile crisis

Standoff between John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in October 1962 over Soviet plans to install nuclear weapons in Cuba. Although the crisis was ultimately settled in America’s favor and represented a foreign-policy triumph for Kennedy, it brought the world’s superpowers perilously close to the brink of nuclear confrontation.

Freedom Riders

Organized mixed-race groups who rode interstate buses deep into the South to draw attention to and protest racial segregation, beginning in 1961. This effort to challenge racism, which involved the participation of many northern young people as well as southern activists, proved a political and public relations success for the civil rights movement.

Voter Education Project

Effort by SNCC and other civil rights groups to register the South’s historically disenfranchised black population. The project typified a common strategy of the civil rights movement, which sought to counter racial discrimination by empowering people at grassroots levels to exercise their civic rights through voting.

March on Washington

Massive civil rights demonstration in August 1963 in support of Kennedy-backed legislation to secure legal protections for American blacks. One of the most visually impressive manifestations of the civil rights movement, the march was the occasion of Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech

Richard M. Nixon

(1913-1994) Thirty-seventh president of the United States, 1969-1974. Nixon rose to national prominence as a "communist hunter" and member of HUAC in the 1950s. He was vice president under Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961 and defended American capitalism in the 1959 kitchen debate with Khrushchev. Nixon ran unsuccessfully for president against John F. Kennedy in 1960 but was elected to the presidency in 1968 and 1972. He resigned the presidency amid the Watergate scandal in 1974.

Betty Friedan

(1921-2006) Feminist author of The Feminine Mystique in 1960. Friedan’s book sparked a new consciousness among suburban women and helped launch the second-wave feminist movement.

Elvis Presley

(1935-1977) Memphis-born singer whose youth, voice, and sex appeal helped popularize rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s. Commonly known by only his first name, Elvis was an icon of popular culture, in both music and film.

Rosa Parks

(1913-2005) NAACP leader in Montgomery, Alabama, who inaugurated that city’s famous bus boycott in 1955 by refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger. Parks remained a living symbol of the spirit of the civil rights movement and the cause of racial equality throughout her long life.

Martin Luther King Jr

(1929-1968) Civil rights leader and Baptist preacher who rose to prominence with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. King was an outspoken advocate for black rights throughout the 1960s, most famously during the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech. He was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike.

Earl Warren

1891-1974) Liberal California politician appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, serving until 1969. Warren was principally known for moving the Court to the left in defense of civil and individual rights in such cases as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), and Miranda v. Arizona (1966).

John Foster Dulles

(1888-1959) American politician principally known for serving as Eisenhower’s secretary of state. An ardent cold warrior, he drafted the "policy of boldness" designed to confront Soviet aggression with the threat of "massive retaliation" via thermonuclear weapons, and he supported American intervention in Vietnam.

Nikita Khrushchev

(1894-1971) Premier of the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev was a Communist party official who emerged from the power struggle after Stalin’s death in 1953 to lead the USSR. As Soviet premier, he notably renounced Stalin’s brutality in 1956, the same year that he crushed a pro-Western uprising in Hungary. In 1958, he issued an ultimatum for Western evacuation of Berlin, from which he backed down a year later. Khrushchev defended Soviet-style economic planning in the kitchen debate with American vice president Richard Nixon in 1959, and he attempted to send missiles to Cuba in 1962 but backed down when confronted by President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis.

Ho Chi Minh

(1890-1969) Vietnamese revolutionary nationalist leader. Beginning in 1941, Ho organized Vietnamese opposition to foreign occupation, first against the Japanese and then, after World War II, against the French. His Viet Minh forces were victorious against French colonialists in 1954, after which Ho became the leader of North Vietnam. He led the war to unify the country in the face of increased military opposition from the United States.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

(1918-1970) President of Egypt from 1956 to 1970. Nasser was known for his pan-Arab nationalism and opposition to colonialism, specifically in his decision to nationalize the Suez Canal in 1956. Although his reputation was tarnished somewhat by his country’s military failure against Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, he remained a popular leader in Egypt and throughout the Arab world.

Fidel Castro

(1926-) Cuban revolutionary who overthrew the Batista dictatorship in 1958 and assumed control of the island country. Castro’s connections with the Soviet Union led to a cessation of diplomatic relations with the United States and such international affairs as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis. A controversial figure, Castro oversaw his country through the end of the Cold War, when financial and military support from the Soviet Union dissipated, and through nearly a half-century of a trade embargo with the United States. He remained the head of Cuba’s government until his retirement in February 2008.

John F. Kennedy

(1917-1963) Thirty-fifth president of the United States, 1961-1963. A navy hero from World War II and son of a prominent Boston businessman, Kennedy won election to the House of Representatives in 1946 and to the Senate in 1952. In 1960, he narrowly defeated incumbent vice president Richard Nixon in 1960 to become the youngest person ever elected president. As president, he launched New Frontier programs and urged legislation to improve civil rights. He assumed blame for the Bay of Pigs invasion and was credited for impressively handling the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

(1908-1973) Thirty-sixth president of the United States, 1963-1969. A Texas Democrat who rose to tremendous power in the Senate during the New Deal, Johnson was tapped to be John F. Kennedy’s running mate in 1960. Chosen largely to help solidify support for the Democratic ticket in the anti-Catholic South, he assumed the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. As president, he was responsible for liberal programs such as the Great Society, War on Poverty, and civil rights legislation, as well as the escalation of the Vietnam War. After a series of challenges from within his party, he chose not to run for reelection in 1968.

Jackson Pollock

(1912-1956) New York-based painter who became the father of abstract expressionism with his spontaneous "action paintings."

Andy Warhol

(1928-1987) Pioneering "pop" artist known for his iconic portraits of Cold War America’s material objects, including soup cans and soda bottles.

Jack Kerouac

(1922-1969) Frenetic novelist and progenitor of the bohemian Beat Generation (a term he coined). He gained celebrity after publishing the group’s unofficial bible, On the Road.

Allen Ginsberg

(1926-1997) New Jersey-born poet who served as spokesman of the Beat Generation. The 1956 publication of his Howl and Other Poems sparked a San Francisco literary renaissance and a local obscenity trial that brought nationwide publicity to the bohemian Beat movement.

Arthur Miller

(1915-2005) New York-born playwright who dramatized the pitfalls of postwar American materialism in Death of a Salesman and Cold War hysteria in The Crucible, among other plays.

Ralph Ellison

(1914-1994) Oklahoma-born and Tuskegee-educated novelist best known for writing Invisible Man, one of the great novels of the twentieth-century African American experience.

Robert F. Kennedy

(1925-1968) Younger brother of John F. Kennedy who entered public life as U.S. attorney general during the Kennedy administration. Later elected senator from New York, he became an antiwar, pro-civil rights presidential candidate in 1968, launching a popular challenge to incumbent President Johnson. Amid that campaign, he was assassinated in California on June 6, 1968.

Robert S. McNamara

(1916-2009) Businessman turned secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968. McNamara was the author of the "flexible response" doctrine, which created a variety of military options and avoided a stark choice between nuclear warfare and none at all. As defense secretary, he was the chief architect of the Vietnam War.

Ngo Dinh Diem

(1901-1963) First president of South Vietnam, where he took power following the Geneva Accords in 1954. Diem was propped up by the United States until he was overthrown and assassinated by a coup in 1963.

James Meredith

(1933-) In 1962 he became the first black American to attend the University of Mississippi after being blocked several times by segregationist politicians. An icon of the civil rights movement, Meredith receded from public view following his brave steps toward educational integration.