Unit 8 Flashcards: Cold War

Cold War Liberalism

Preserved the core programs of the New Deal welfare state, developed a containment policy to oppose Soviet influence throughout the world and fought subversives at home.

What reenergized the Republican party?

Espionage trials and Communist scandals

Taft-Hartley Act of 1947

This Act was passed by the Republican party over Truman’s veto in order to overhaul the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. This Act brought procedures and language that weakened the right of workers to organize and engage in collective bargaining.

The split of the Democratic Party.

Dixiecrats (racial segregationists) and Northern liberals (civil rights platforms)

Fair Deal (1949)

Hoping to extend the New Deal. Would give national health insurance, civil rights legislation, aid to education, a housing program, expansion of Social Security, a higher minimum wage, and a new agricultural program

The National Housing Act of 1949

Authorized construction of 810,000 low-income units

Loyalty-Security Program

Executive Order 9835 on March 21, 1947 which permitted officials to investigate any employee of the federal government for “subversive” activities. Centralization of power Intended to target sabotage, treason, etc. but targeted everyone including more than a thousand gay men and lesbians because they were deemed “unfit” to work. Many state and local governments, universities, political organizations, churches, and businesses undertook their own anti-subversion campaigns

House Un-American Activities Committees (HUAC)

Launched by Congressmen Martin Dies of Texas and other conservatives in 1938. In 1947, it helped spark the Red Scare by holding highly publicized hearings on alleged Communist infiltration in the movie industry. Hollywood Ten, group of writers and directors, went to jail for contempt of Congress after they refused to testify their past associations. Others were unable to get work through blacklisting

Alger Hiss (1948)

He accompanied FDR to Yalta, accused by Whitaker Chambers, a former Communist, of being a part of a secret Communist cell operating in the government and that Hiss had passed Chambers classified documents in the 1930s. Hiss denied these claims but was pursued in a case by Richard Nixon. Hiss was found guilty not of spying but of lying to Congress about his Communist affiliations and was sentenced to 5 years in federal prison.

McCarthyism

Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin February 1950, McCarthy claimed he had the names of 205 Communists that were still working for the government, though he kept changing the numbers and never gave names or proof Through his position as the chair of the Senate of Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, McCarthy led a smear campaign. He mostly targeted Democrats

What helped McCarthy gain traction?

The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (accused of sharing atomic secrets) and the trials of American communists for violation of the 1940 Smith Act

What made McCarthy lose traction?

After a series of publicized trials on television after trying to find subversive activities in the U.S. Army, the public turned on McCarthy and then Congress censured him.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Won the 1952 election. He embraced modern Republicanism and an updated GOP approach that aimed to moderate but not dismantle the New Deal

Taft vs. Rockefeller Republicans

Taft focused on limited government and isolationism, while Rockefeller championed progressive social policies and internationalism, with Eisenhower’s "Modern Republicanism" bridging the two

New Look Policy

Limit the cost of containment by economizing and relying on the nuclear arsenal, deemphasizing expensive conventional forces. The Eisenhower Administration stepped up production of the hydrogen bomb and developed long-range bombing capabilities

Third World

Used to describe developing or ex-colonial nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East that were not aligned with the Western Capitalist countries led by the US or the socialist states of Eastern Europe led by Stalin

John Foster Dulles

Created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO, 1954) which linked the US and its European allies to Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand. Dulles often led covert operations against governments that were too closely aligned with the Soviets aka the CIA.

CIA operation examples

• The CIA helped depose Iran’s democratically elected nationalist premier Mohammad Mossadegh for Mohammed Reza Pahalvi, which would eventually lead to the 1979 Iranian Revolution

• the CIA engineered a coup against the democratically elected Jacobo Arbez Guzman who had seized land owned by the American United Fruit Company despite Guzman offering to pay United Fruit the declared value of the land

Domino Theory

Eisenhower argued if the French failed in Vietnam, then all non-Communist governments in the region would fall like dominoes. It was an extension of containment policy and led policy in Southeast Asia for the next twenty years.

1954 Geneva Accords

Partitioned Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel and called for elections within two years to unify the nation. US rejected the Geneva Accords and sent the CIA to put a pro-American government into power in Vietnam (Ngo Dinh Diem was sent there, he called off reunification elections and was paid $220 million a year in aid from the Eisenhower administration)

Gamal Abdel Nasser

Led a military coup which established a constitutional republic. He advocated pan-Arab socialism designed to end the Middle East’s colonial relationship with the West. Negotiations with the US over Nasser’s plan to build a massive hydroelectric dam on the Nile broke in 1951 and in response he nationalized the Suez Canal which was the source of Western Europe’s oil and eventually support from the Soviets led Egypt to reclaim the Suez Canal.

Eisenhower Doctrine

Stated American forces would assist any nation in the region that required aid against Communism

Bay of Pigs (April 17, 1969)

Kennedy wanted to keep Cuba, which had been taken over by Castro in 1959, from the Soviet orbit by dispatching Cuban exiles to launch an anti-Castro uprising. The invaders were ill-prepared, the force of 1,400 was crushed by Castro’s troops but Kennedy rejected CIA pleas for a US air strike and instead took responsibility for the fiasco

Berlin Wall

Shortly after June 1961 when Khrushchev stopped movement between Communist-controlled East Berlin and the city’s Western sector and Kennedy responded by dispatching 40,000 more troops to Europe, the Berlin wall was policed by shoot-to-kill orders to stop fleeing East Germans

Cuban Missile Crisis

October 22, 1962: Kennedy revealed that US reconnaissance planes had spotted Soviet-built bases for intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Kennedy announced the US would impose a quarantine on all military equipment to Cuba and on October 25, ships carrying Soviet missiles were turned back.

Cuban Missile Crisis Negotiations

Kennedy pledged not to invade Cuba and Khrushchev promised to dismantle the missile base. Kennedy also secretly ordered US missiles to be removed from Turkey at Khrushchev’s request

Peace Corps

Embodied public call to service. Thousands of men and women agreed to devote two or more years as volunteers on projects such as teaching English to Filipino school children or helping African villagers obtain clean water. Also an extension of American “soft power”

Green Berets

Example of increased aid to the south Vietnamese. Would train the South Vietnamese army in small-group warfare tactics, in 1961.

Bretton Woods

In New Hampshire, economic institutions were created at the international conference in July of 1944. The chief idea of the Bretton Woods system was to make American capital available, on cheap terms, to nations that adopted free-trade capitalist economies.

World Bank

Founded to provide loans for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe as well as for the development of formerly colonized nations (called the “Third World” or “developing world”)

International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Set up to stabilize currencies and provide a predictable monetary environment for trade, with the U.S. dollar serving as the benchmark

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) of 1947

Established an international framework for overseeing trade rules and practices

Military Industrial Complex

From President Eisenhower, the economy and the government operated in a state of perpetual readiness for war. The Defense Department evolved into a massive bureaucracy

Sputnik

1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite which spurred the US to catch up to Cold War space competition

The National Defense Education Act of 1958

After Eisenhower convinced Congress to appropriate additional money for scholarships and university research. It funneled millions of dollars into American universities, helping institutions such as the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, MIT, and UMich to become some of the leading research centers in the world

Yalta Conference

Big three deciding post-war conditions. FDR wanted liberal, democratic world center. Soviet Union wanted to create a buffer between democracy and the Soviet Union. Divided Germany and set up the UN

May 1945

Soviets captured Berlin

Potsdam Conference

FDR was now dead and Churchill voted out. Truman wanted compromise. Puppet regimes all over east Europe and a deteriorating relationship with Japan. The A-bomb worsened the relationship because the Soviet Union was fearful and accelerated their atomic project

Bolshoi Speech

Stalin’s speech talking about how capitalism always leads to uneven development. Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech about it falling over because of the Soviet Union was a response

Truman Doctrine

The Truman Doctrine was a 1947 U.S. foreign policy pledge to provide military and economic aid to nations resisting communist subversion, primarily aimed at containing Soviet expansion. $4 million dollars.

Marshall Plan

Was a U.S. initiative that provided over billion in economic aid to 16 Western European nations to rebuild their postwar economies, prevent the spread of communism, and establish stable democracies that were strong trading partners

NATO

Fundamentally a mutual defense pact. Article 5, if one country was attacked, others help (conflicts with Washington’s ideas).

Warsaw Pact

Soviet Union counter pact in response to NATO. By 1960, most joined one or the other.

Japan post-WWII

Crippled after the US. US government decided it would be better as an ally to counter the Soviet Union. Crafted a democracy and assumed protective responsibility over Japan to reconstruct

What happened to companies post-war?

They consolidated into major firms and used “investment programs” that relied on mechanization

The Affluent Society (1958)

Analyzed the nation’s successful, “affluent”, middle class as economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the poor were only an “afterthought” in the minds of economists and politicians

The Other America (1962)

The left-wing social critic Micheal Harrington chronicled the economic underworld of American life and a US government study to declare that ⅓ of the nation was poorly paid, poorly educated, and poorly housed

Veterans Administration (VA)

Helped former soldiers purchase new homes with no down payment, sparking a building boom that created jobs in the construction industry and fueled consumer spending in home appliances and automobiles

Collective bargaining

The process of trade unions and employers negotiating workplace contracts

Labor-Management Accord

Not industrial peace but a general acceptance of collective bargaining as the method for settling the terms of employment. Result was rising real income. Unions delivered more paid holidays, longer vacations, and a social safety net. Union contracts commonly provided pension plans and company-paid health insurance

Vulnerabilities of the Labor-Management Accord

Sheltered domestic markets (condition for generous contracts because without competition these firms were not pressured to lower wages) were fragile. Unorganized workers with no middle-class passport (casual labor or low wage jobs in the service sector). The anti-unionism of American employers, they viewed the accord as a negotiated truce not a permanent peace.

Planned obsolescence

The encouragement of consumers to replace appliances and cars every few years

What was happening on tv?

• TV stations depended on advertising for their profits There were early corporate sponsored shows (General Electric Theater and U.S. Steel Hour)

• product jingles (7-Up your thirst away)

• Advertising campaigns used popular music, movie stars, sports figures, or graphics to capture viewers

• After an ad for Anacin aspirin, where a tiny hammer pounded inside the skull of a headache suffered, sales for Anacin increased by 50 percent

• Programming was overwhelmingly white and showcased nuclear middle class families

Teenager

A cultural phenomenon, with roots in the lengthening years of education, the roles of peer groups, and the consumer tastes of young people. Hollywood movies like “Rebel without a Cause” and music played a role.

Rock’n’Roll

Many adults saw it as an invitation to interracial dating, rebellion, and flagrant s*xuality. Originated with African American rhythm and blues.

Beats

Young white writers and poets in NY and San Fran. who disdained middle-class materialism. “Howl” (1956) by Allen Ginsberg and On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac Beats glorified spontaneity, sexual adventurism, drug use, and spirituality. They were apolitical

Reverend Billy Graham

Made use of tv, radio, and advertising for religion. Hundreds of thousands attended his revival in 1949 in LA and his 1957 crusade in Madison Square Garden (NYC) Graham told Americans that so long as they lived moral lives, they deserved the material blessings of modern life

The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)

Norman Vincent Peale. Embodied the therapeutic use of religion as an antidote to life’s trials and tribulations. He taught that with faith in G-d and positive thinking, anyone could overcome obstacles and become a success

Baby boom

More babies born. Caused by a drop in the average marriage age (22 for men and 20 for women) The baby boom benefitted from advances in public health and medical practice in postwar years. “Miracle drugs” like penicillin (1943), streptomycin (1945), and cortisone (1946) as well as the Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine in 1954

Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care

Sold a million copies every year after its publication in 1946. Spock encouraged mothers to abandon rigid feeding and baby-care schedules which women found liberating. Also argued mothers should be less protective but constantly available for their children. Conflicting ideas.

Middle class domestic ideal vs. reality

Middle class domestic ideal: women were expected to raise children, attend to other duties in the home, and devote themselves to their husband’s happiness. Most working-class women had to earn paychecks to help their families (lifted them to middle class) but despite their education found many jobs weren’t open to them (occupational segmentation)

Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)

Birth control pill came on the market in 1960 but few doctors prescribed it to unmarried women. Married women didn’t get unfettered access to contraception until the Supreme Court ruled it a “privacy” right.

Alfred Kinsey

Published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). He took a scientific rather than moralistic approach and broke taboos by discussing homosexuality and marital infidelity. He was criticized by statisticians because his figures were not randomly selected and condemned by religious leaders

Homophile movement

A group of gay and lesbian activists that sought for equal rights. Organized primarily in the Mattachine Society (the first gay rights organization in the country, est. 1951) and the Daughters of Bilitis (lesbian organization, est. 1955).Homophile organizations cultivated a respectable, middle-class image meaning they avoided nightclubs and bars, dressed in conservative shirts and ties (men) and modest skirts and blouses (women), and sought out professional psychologists that would speak to their normalcy

Levitt Towns

William J. Levitt revolutionized suburban housing by applying mass-production techniques and turning out new homes quickly. Four-room house with kitchen appliances and beyond the means of many Americans. Levitt’s houses had restrictive covenants (prohibiting occupancy from people that weren’t “Caucasian” aka Jews, African Americans, and Asian Americans)

Shelley v. Kramer (1948)

Supreme Court outlawed restrictive covenants (racial discrimination changed very little). The FHA and the VA still refused mortgages to African Americans and other minority groups seeking to buy in white neighborhoods

How did the FHA and the VA aid in homeownership?

Insured thirty year mortgages with as little as 5 percent down and an interest of 2 or 3 percent while the VA only required $1 for qualified ex-GIs

National Interstate and Defense Highways Act (1956)

Authorized $26 billion over a ten year period for the construction of a nationally integrated highway system (42,500 miles). Rerouted traffic away from small towns and bypassed well-travelled main roads like Route 66

Sunbelt

(the southern and southwestern states) was the most suburban with low taxes, mild climates, and open space for sprawling subdivisions. Florida (lots of retired people), Texas (petrochemical and defense industries), and California (air-craft and electronics). Sunbelt suburbanization was linked with the military-industrial complex aka aerospace, defense, and electronics.

Kerner Commission

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, formed by the president to investigate the causes of 1967 urban riots, made a report in 1968 that told President Johnson that the nation was moving into two societies, black and white, separate and unequal

Urban crisis

The intensification of poverty, the deterioration of older housing stock, and the persistence of racial segregation

Institutional Racism

Housing restrictions, increasingly segregated schools, and an urban infrastructure that was underfunded and decaying. Politicians and real estate developers wanted to revitalize declining city centers by razing ‘blighted’ neighborhoods to make way for modern construction projects

Programs towards immigration post-war

• The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 permitted the entry of approximately 415,000 Europeans, many of them Jewish refugees

• Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943

• The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act ended the exclusion of Japanese, Koreans, and Southeast Asians

• Revived the Bracero Program in 1951 during the Korean War (ended in 1964) but around 350,000 permanently settled in the US

• Mexicans gravitated towards major cities like LA, Long Beach, San Jose, etc. but many also went north like Chicago and Kansas City

• Puerto Ricans were another major immigrant group, American citizens since 1917 so they enjoyed the unrestricted right to move to the mainland US

• Increased after WWII when mechanization of the sugarcane agriculture rendered many jobless First to arrive en masse by air

• Went to New York like East (“Spanish”) Harlem Cuban Refugees fleeing Castro (seized power in 1959) settled in Miami and grew it into a cosmopolitan, bilingual city Spanish speaking communities were also segregated

Grassroots

Labor unions, churches, and organizations like CORE inspired thousands of citizens to join the movement

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

Chicago, founded by James Farmer and three other men that were a part of a nonviolent peace organization (Fellowship of Reconciliation) FOR and CORE embraced Gandhi’s nonviolent protest ideas

Examples of racism post-war

• African Americans couldn’t eat in restaurants patronized by whites or use the same waiting rooms at bus stations

• All forms of public transportation were rigidly segregated by custom or law

• Everything was segregated

• Virtually no African Americans were allowed to work for city or state government or private sector jobs Sharecropping persisted and kept people economically disadvantaged

• Less than 20 percent of black voters were allowed to vote because of poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, fraud, and the “white primary” (elections were only whites could vote)

• Northern segregation took the form of a spatial system where whites increasingly lived in suburbs or the outskirts of cities while African Americans lived in declining downtown areas

• Ghettos: all-black districts characterized by high rents, low wages, and inadequate city services Employment discrimination meant many black people weren’t prepared for the job market or weren’t offered jobs because they were reserved for white people

“To Secure These Rights”

Presidential Committee on Civil Rights wrote this 1947 report which called for robust federal action to ensure black equality. Truman used the report and in 1948 issued an executive order (9981) desegregating employment in federal agencies and the armed forces (under pressure from Randolph’s Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service). Abolition of poll taxes and the restoration of the Fair Employment Practice Committee

State’s Rights Democratic Party

Dixiecrats, under the leadership of Strom Thurmond for the 1948 election

American GI Forum

1948, WWII veterans founded it to protest the poor treatment of Mexican American soldiers and veterans. Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans experienced a caste system in the Southwest Poll taxes and discrimination in agriculture and manufacturing in order to keep cheap labor Many Mexican Americans lived in colonias or barrios (neighborhoods) separated from Anglos and often lacking sidewalks, reliable electricity and water, and public transportation

Community Services Organization

Sought to address specific local injustices like segregation of military cemeteries

Mendez v. Westminster School District (1947)

Five Mexican American fathers in California sued the local school district for placing their children in separate Mexican schools. The case never made it to the Supreme Court but the Ninth Circuit Court ruled such segregation unconstitutional

What did the Supreme Court rule about Mexican Americans?

That Mexican Americans constituted a “distinct class” that would claim constitutional protection from discrimination

How did the Japanese fight nativism?

Japanese American Citizens League filed lawsuits in the late 40s to regain property lost during the war and challenged the California’s Alien Land Law (prohibited Japanese immigrants from owning land) and lobbied Congress to enable these immigrants to become citizens

Smith v. Allright (1944)

Marshall convinced the US Supreme Court that all-white primaries were unconstitutional

McLaurin v. Oklahoma (1950)

Supreme Court ruled that universities could not segregate black students from others on campus

Brown v. Board of Education

Linda Brown, a black pupil in Topeka, Kansas was forced to attend a distant segregated school rather than a nearby white elementary school. Marshall contended that such segregation was unconstitutional because it denied Linda Brown equal protection of the laws, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Southern Manifesto

Signed in 1956 by 101 members of Congress denounced the Brown decision as an abuse of judicial power and encouraged officials to deny it Eisenhower accepted the decision but thought it was a mistake

Little Rock, Arkansas

Forced Eisenhower to act when in September 1957, nine black students attempted to enroll in the all-white Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus called for the National Guard to bar them and there were white mobs, Eisenhower sent 1,000 federal troops to Little Rock and nationalized the Arkansas National Guard to protect the black students

Emmett Till

A 14 year old boy was murdered and tortured in the summer of 1955 after being seen talking to a white woman, he was found at the bottom of a river (mutilated). Two white men arrested for the murder, caused national attention, they were found innocent by an all-white jury despite eyewitness testimony

The Montgomery Bus Boycott

December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested and charged with violating a local segregation ordinance. It was not a spur of the moment act but it became a focal point for the challenge against segregated buses. MLK Jr. preached nonviolence and the practice of direct action. For 381 days, African Americans formed car pools or walked to work. The transit company neared bankruptcy and downtown stores complained about loss of business.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

Est. 1957 by MLK alongside Reverend Ralph Abernathy and other black ministers. Lent moral and organizational strength to the civil rights movement through its religious connections to the community.

Greensboro Sit-Ins

February 1, 1960: four black college students took seats at the whites-only lunch counter in the local Woolworth’s drugstore. New York spokesperson said Woolworth’s would “abide by local custom” aka segregation. Although many students (that had joined the ogs) were arrested, they peacefully sat and made a difference, getting the counter desegregated

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, “snick”)

Ella Baker in 1960 helped facilitate student sit-ins Sit-ins in 126 cities including in North Carolina and Virginia, etc. More than 50,000 people participated and 3,600 went to jail. Northern students formed solidarity committees and raised money for bail. Baker encouraged students because they were open to the idea of participatory democracy

Freedom Rides

In 1961, CORE organized these on interstate bus lines across the South Aim to call attention to blatant violations of recent Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in interstate commerce unconstitutional. Klansmen attacked buses when they stopped Authorities refused to intervene JFK was hesitant about civil rights and didn’t fulfill his promise to deliver a civil rights bill. Attorney General Robert Kennedy dispatched federal marshals when beatings of the Freedom Riders were shown on nightly television

Birmingham

May 1963: marchers protested employment discrimination in Birmingham’s department stores Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s public safety commissioner, order the city’s police troops to meet marchers with violent force: snarling dogs, electric cattle prods, and high-pressure fire hoses Television captured these images. In response, MLK wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” appeal grounded in Christian brotherhood and democratic liberalism, argued Americans were confronted with a moral choice to preserve segregation or choose democracy

Why did Kennedy promise the Civil Rights Bill?

June 11, 1963: after Governor George Wallace of Alabama barred two black students from the state university, Kennedy went on tv to denounce racism and promise a new civil rights bills. “Second Emancipation Proclamation”

March on Washington (August 28, 1963)

• led by Randolph and Rustin, freedom buses and freedom trains took people (a quarter of a million) to the Lincoln Memorial

• MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech

• Couldn’t alienate anyone to make their point, causing SNCC member John Lewis to tone down his critical speech of the South to something more conciliatory speech (signalling the beginning rift)

• Changed public opinion but not congressional votes

• Southern Senators continued to block Kennedy’s legislation Georgia Senator Richard Russell, leader of the opposition, refused to support any bill that would bring racial equality

Civil Rights Act of 1964

Title VII, outlawed discrimination in employment on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex. Another section guaranteed equal access to public accommodations and schools. Granted new enforcement powers to the US attorney general and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to implement the prohibition against job discrimination.

Freedom Summer

• (the summer of 1964)

• black organizations mounted a major campaign in Mississippi, drawing thousands of volunteers including one thousand white college students from the North

• Led by Robert “Bob” Moses, the four major civil rights organizations (SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC) spread out across the state and established freedom schools for children and conducted a major voting registration drive

• The opposition was so determined that only 12,000 black voters were registered and four civil rights leaders were murdered alongside the burning of black churches

Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)

Founded during Freedom Summer. Banned from the “whites only” Mississippi Democratic Party, the MFDP leaders were determined to attend the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey as legitimate representatives from their state