Origins of the Cold War

• At the heart of the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1940s was a fundamental difference in the ways the great powers envisioned the postwar world

Wartime Diplomacy

• Most important was the question of the future of Poland. Roosevelt and Churchill were willing to agree to a movement of the Soviet border westward

Yalta

• In February 1945, Roosevelt joined Churchill and Stalin for a peace conference in the Soviet city of Yalta—a resort on the Black Sea that was once a summer palace for the tsars.

• On a number of issues, the “Big Three,” as Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were known, reached agreements.

• In return for Stalin’s renewed promise to enter the Pacific war, Roosevelt agreed that the Soviet Union should receive some of the territories in the Pacific that Russia had lost in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War.

• The negotiators also agreed to a plan for a new international organization, a plan that had been hammered out the previous summer at a conference in Washington, D.C.,

• On other issues, however, the Yalta Conference produced no real accord.

• Basic disagreement remained about the postwar Polish government.

• Roosevelt seemed to want a reconstructed and reunited Germany.

• Stalin wanted to impose heavy reparations on Germany and to ensure a permanent dismemberment of the nation.

• The Yalta accords, in other words, were less a settlement of postwar issues than a set of loose principles that sidestepped the most difficult questions.

• Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin returned home from the conference each apparently convinced that he had signed an important agreement.

• But the Soviet interpretation of the accords differed so sharply from the Anglo-American interpretation that the illusion endured only briefly.

• In the weeks following the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt watched with growing alarm as the Soviet Union moved systematically to establish pro-communist governments in one Central or Eastern European nation after another and as Stalin refused to make the changes in Poland that the president believed he had promised.

27.1: The Collapse of the Peace

The Failure of Potsdam

• Truman had been in office only a few days before he decided to, as he put it, “get tough” with the Soviet Union.

• Truman met on April 23 with Soviet foreign minister Molotov and sharply chastised him for violations of the Yalta accords.

• Truman reluctantly accepted the adjustments of the Polish-German border that Stalin had long demanded; he refused, however, to permit the Russians to claim any reparations from the American, French, and British zones of Germany.

• This stance effectively confirmed that Germany would remain divided, with the western zones united into one nation, friendly to the United States, and the Russian zone surviving as another nation, with a Soviet-dominated, communist government.

The China Problem

• Central to American hopes for an open, peaceful world “policed” by the great powers was a strong, independent China. But even before the war ended, the American government was aware that those hopes faced a major, perhaps insurmountable, obstacle: the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.

• Some Americans urged the government to find a “third force” to support as an alternative to either Chiang or Mao.

• A few argued that the United States should try to reach some accommodation with Mao

• Instead, the American government was beginning to consider an alternative to China as the strong, pro-Western force in Asia: a revived Japan

The Containment Doctrine

• The American commitment ultimately helped ease Soviet pressure on Turkey and helped the Greek government defeat the communist insurgents.

• More importantly, it established a basis for American foreign policy that would survive for more than forty years.

The Marshall Plan

• An integral part of the containment policy was a proposal to aid in the economic reconstruction of Western Europe

• In June 1947, therefore, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced a plan to provide economic assistance to all European nations (including the Soviet Union) that would join in drafting a program for recovery.

• Although Russia and its Eastern satellites quickly and predictably rejected the plan

Mobilization at Home

• The National Security Act of 1947 reshaped the nation’s major military and diplomatic institutions.

• It created a new Department of Defense to oversee all branches of the armed services, combining functions previously performed separately by the War and Navy Departments.

The Road to NATO

• At about the same time, the United States was moving to strengthen the military capabilities of Western Europe.

• The crisis in Berlin accelerated the consolidation of what was already in effect an alliance among the United States and the countries of Western Europe.

• On April 4, 1949, twelve nations signed an agreement establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and declaring that an armed attack against one member would be considered an attack against all.

Reevaluating Cold War Policy

• A series of events in 1949 propelled the Cold War in new directions.

• An announcement in September that the Soviet Union had successfully exploded its first atomic weapon, years earlier than predicted, shocked and frightened many Americans

• In this atmosphere of an escalating crisis, Truman called for a thorough review of American foreign policy.

• The result was a National Security Council report, issued in 1950 and commonly known as NSC-68, which outlined a shift in the American position

The Conservative Opposition to Containment

• The containment doctrine for dealing with the Cold War attracted broad bipartisan support.

• But not everyone believed that containment was the right approach to take.

• The opposition to containment reached some of the highest levels of the government.

• John Foster Dulles, who would become secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration, wrote the foreign policy plank of the Republican platform in 1952

27.2: American Society and Politics After the War

The Problems of Reconversion

• The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war months earlier than almost anyone had predicted and propelled the nation precipitously into a process of reconversion.

• This flood of consumer demand ensured that there would be no new depression, but it contributed to more than two years of serious inflation, during which prices rose at rates of 14 to 15 percent annually.

• In the summer of 1946, President Truman vetoed an extension of the authority of the wartime Office of Price Administration, thus eliminating price controls

• Compounding the economic difficulties was a sharp rise in labor unrest, driven in part by the impact of inflation.

• By the end of 1945, there had already been major strikes in the automobile, electrical, and steel industries.

• Reconversion was particularly difficult for the millions of women and minorities who had entered the workforce during the war.

• With veterans returning home and looking for jobs in the industrial economy, employers tended to push women, blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and others out of the plants to make room for white males.

• Some of the war workers, particularly women, left the workforce voluntarily, out of a desire to return to their former domestic lives.

• But as many as 80 percent of women workers, and virtually all black, Hispanic, and Asian males, wanted to continue working.

• The postwar inflation, the pressure to meet the rising expectations of a high consumption society, the growing divorce rate, which left many women responsible for their own economic well-being— all combined to create among women a high demand for paid employment.

• As they found themselves excluded from industrial jobs, therefore, women workers moved increasingly into other areas of the economy (above all, the service sector).

The Fair Deal Rejected

• Days after the Japanese surrender, Truman submitted to Congress a twenty-one-point domestic program outlining what he later termed the “Fair Deal.”

• It called for expansion of Social Security benefits, the raising of the legal minimum wage from 40 to 65 cents an hour, a program to ensure full employment through aggressive use of federal spending and investment, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Act, public housing, and slum clearance, long-range environmental and public works planning, and government promotion of scientific research.

• But many of the Fair Deal programs fell victim to the same public and congressional conservatism that had crippled the last years of the New Deal

• The new Republican Congress quickly moved to reduce government spending and chip away at New Deal reforms

• The Taft-Hartley Act did not destroy the labor movement, as many union leaders had predicted.

The Election of 1948

• Truman and his advisers believed the American public was not ready to abandon the achievements of the New Deal, despite the 1946 election results.

• The president traveled nearly 32,000 miles and made 356 speeches, delivering blunt, extemporaneous attacks.

• He had told Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, his running mate, “I’m going to fight hard. I’m going to give them hell.”

• He called for the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, increased price supports for farmers, and strong civil rights protections for blacks

The Fair Deal Revived

• Despite the Democratic victories, the Eighty-First Congress was little more hospitable to Truman’s Fair Deal reform than its Republican predecessor.

• Truman did win some important victories.

• Congress raised the legal minimum wage from 40 cents to 75 cents an hour.

• Truman did proceed on his own to battle several forms of racial discrimination.

• He ordered an end to discrimination in the hiring of government employees.

The Nuclear Age

• Such images resonated with the public because awareness of nuclear weapons were increasingly built into their daily lives.

• Schools and office buildings had regular air raid drills, to prepare people for the possibility of nuclear attack.

• Radio stations regularly tested the emergency broadcast systems.

• Fallout shelters sprang up in public buildings and private homes, stocked with water and canned goods.

• America was a nation filled with anxiety

27.3: The Korean War

The Divided Peninsula