APUSH Ch. 24,25,26

Chapter 24: The Cold War Dawns – 1945-1963

EQ: Why did the international rivalry of the Cold War create a climate of fear at home and how did it affect politics and society in the United States?

• Cold War and containment in Asia

Origins of the Cold War

• Cold War: period of intense political, military, and ideological tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union after WWII

• United Nations: An international body founded in SF in 1945, consisting of a General Assembly representing all nations, and a Security Council of the United States, Britain, France, China, the Soviet Union, and 6 other nations elected on a rotating basis

• Yalta and Potsdam Conferences: A meeting in Yalta of President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in February 1945, in which the leaders discussed the treatment of Germany, the status of Poland, the creation of the United Nations, and Russian entry into the war against Japan

  • Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin accepted German reparations only from the Soviet zone, the eastern part of Germany, in exchange for American recognition of the Soviet-drawn Polish border. The agreement paved the way for the division of Germany into East and West

• Communism vs. Capitalism:

  • Communism: aims to replace private property and a profit-based economy with public ownership and communal control of at least the major means of production (e.g., mines, mills, and factories) and the natural resources of a society

  • Capitalism: system where private individuals and businesses own and control the means of production. The primary goal of capitalism is to make a profit

• Democracy vs. Authoritarian:

  • Democracy: government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives

  • Authoritarian: characterized by highly concentrated and centralized government power maintained by political repression and the exclusion of potential or supposed challengers by armed force

The Containment Strategy

• Containment: The basic U.S. policy of the Cold War, which sought to contain communism within its existing geographic boundaries

  • Initially focused on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but in the 50s it included China, Korea, and the postcolonial world

Toward an Uneasy Peace

• Truman Doctrine: President Harry S. Truman’s commitment to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” 

  • 1st applied to Greece and Turkey in 1947, it became the justification for U.S. intervention into several countries during the Cold War

• Marshall Plan: Aid program begun in 1948 to help European economies recover from WWII

East and West

• NATO vs. Warsaw Pact:

  • North Atlantic Treaty Organization: Military alliance formed in 1949 among the United States, Canada, and Western European nations to counter any possible Soviet threat

  • Warsaw Pact: A military alliance established in Eastern Europe in 1955 to counter the NATO alliance; it included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union

• Iron Wall: metaphorical political and ideological barrier that separated Western Europe from the Soviet Union and its communist allies in Eastern Europe following WWII

• NSC-68: Top-secret government report of April 1950 warning that national survival in the face of Soviet communism required a massive military buildup

Containment in Asia

• MacArthur Plan: strategy implemented by General Douglas MacArthur to occupy and rebuild Japan after WWII, focusing on demilitarization, democratization, and economic reforms, essentially transforming Japan into a pro-American, Western-style nation

• 38th Parallel: the line of latitude that divides North Korea and South Korea, established at the end of World War II as a temporary dividing line between the Soviet-occupied north and the American-occupied south

The Korean War

• Korean War: a conflict that began in 1950 when communist North Korea invaded South Korea, prompting the United States and its allies to intervene in defense of South Korea

Truman and the End of Reform

• Cold War Liberalism: A combination of liberal policies that preserved the New Deal welfare state, anticommunism vilifying the Soviet Union abroad, and radicalism at home

  • Adopted by the Democratic Party after WWII

• Taft-Hartley Act: Law passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in 1947 that overhauled the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, placing restrictions on organized labor that made it more difficult for unions to organize workers

The Fair Deal

• Fair Deal: The domestic policy agenda announced by Truman in 1949, which included civil rights, health care, public housing, and education funding

  • Congress rejected most of it

  • national health insurance, civil rights legislation, education funding, a housing program, expansion of Social Security, a higher minimum wage, and a new agricultural program

Red Scare: Hunt for Communists

• 2nd Red Scare: The suspicion of subversives that helped to thwart the Fair Deal turned into a much wider 2nd Red Scare

  • Many Americans believed that Communists and Communist sympathizers posed a significant threat to American life so they attacked anyone under suspicion

• Loyalty-Security Program: A program created in 1947 by Truman that permitted officials to investigate any employee of the federal government for “subversive” activities

• McCarthyism: The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence 

  • Many cases against possible communists but many had contentious means

  • His name became the symbol of a period of political repression of which he was only the most flagrant manifestation

HUAC

• House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): Congressional committee especially prominent during the early years of the Cold War that investigated Americans who might be disloyal to the government or might have associated with communists or other radicals

Modern Republicanism and the Liberal State

• Lavender Scare: thousands of gay employees were fired or forced to resign from the federal workforce because of their sexuality

• Limited War: Truman favored limiting military combat to Korea

  • didn't want the war to get bigger but wanted total defeat

• “New Look”: The defense policy of the Eisenhower administration that stepped up production of the hydrogen bomb and developed long-range bombing capabilities

Vietnam

• Domino Theory: Pres. Eisenhower’s theory of containment, warned that the fall of a non-Communist government to communism in Southeast Asia would trigger the spread of communism to neighboring countries

The Middle East

• Suez Crisis:Egyptian President nationalized the canal, prompting Britain, France, and Israel to invade in an attempt to regain control.

  • International pressure, especially from the US and USSR, forced them to withdraw, marking a major victory for Egypt and weakening British and French influence in the region

• Eisenhower Doctrine: President Eisenhower’s 1957 declaration that the United States would actively combat communism in the Middle East

Cold War

• Arms Race: a pattern of competitive acquisition of military capability between two or more countries

  • Ex: nuclear arms race was an arms race competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union

• Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD): Military strat. When U.S. and USSR both had nuclear bombs that could destroy each other

  • effectively deterring either side from initiating such a conflict due to the guaranteed catastrophic retaliation they would face

• Brinkmanship: a policy of risking war in order to protect national interests

  • Used during the Cold War to force an opponent to back down by escalating tensions

• JFK: 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963, known for major events like the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his early involvement in the Civil Rights Movement

• Berlin Wall: A physical barrier constructed in 1961 by East Germany that divided the city of Berlin into East and West sectors

  • Airlift: United States and Britain used airplanes to deliver food and supplies to West Berlin after the Soviet Union blockaded the city by land

• Bay of Pigs: a failed military operation in 1961 where the U.S. supported a group of Cuban exiles in an attempt to overthrow the communist gov. of Fidel Castro in Cuba by landing at the Bay of Pigs

• Cuban Missile Crisis: a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1962, where the Soviets secretly deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba

  • Almost created nuclear warfare until USSR decided to remove missiles

• Central Intelligence Agency(CIA): agency primarily responsible for gathering, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence on foreign countries to protect national security

• Peace Corps: Volunteer program established by JFK in 1961, where American citizens serve abroad in developing countries to assist with education, healthcare, and infrastructure development, aiming to promote international understanding and peace through direct community engagement

Chapter 25: Triumph of the Middle Class – 1945-1963

EQ: Why did consumer culture become such a fixture of American life in the postwar decades, and how did it affect politics and society?

• Consumerism and the rise of the middle class

• Effects of the Cold War

The Bretton Woods System 

• Bretton Woods: An international conference in New Hampshire in July 1944 that established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

• World Bank: An international bank created to provide loans for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe as well as for the development of former colonized nations

• International Monetary Fund (IMF): A fund established to stabilize currencies and provide a predictable monetary environment for trade, with the U.S. dollar serving as the benchmark 

• General Agreement onTariffs and Trade (GATT): bolstered Bretton Woods by creating an international framework for overseeing trade rules and practices

The Military-Industrial Complex

• Military-Industrial Complex: A term Eisenhower used to refer to the military establishment and defense contractors who, he warned, exercised undue influence over the national government

• Sputnik: The world’s first satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957

  •  After its launch, the United States funded research and education to catch up in the Cold War space competition

• Space Race: Cold War competition between the US and the USSR during the mid-20th century, where both nations aimed to achieve technological superiority in spaceflight, usually w/ satellites 

• National Defense Education Act: A 1958 act that funneled millions of $ into American universities, helping institutions such as Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, become leading research centers

• NASA: a US government agency responsible for the nation's civilian space program, including aeronautics and aerospace researched

  •  established in 1958 during the Cold War primarily in response to the USSRs early lead in space exploration

The Economic Record

• The Affluent Society v. The Other America:

  • The Affluent Society: A 1958 book by John Kenneth Galbraith that analyzed the nation’s successful middle class and argued that the poor were only an “afterthought” in the minds of economists and politicians

  • The Other America: A 1962 book by left-wing social critic Michael Harrington, chronicling the persistence of poverty in the US what he called the nation’s “economic underworld”

A Nation of Consumers

• The GI Bill: 1944 legislation authorizing the government to provide WWII veterans with funds for education, housing, and health care, as well as loans to start businesses and buy homes

• Veterans Administration (VA): A federal agency that assists former soldiers

  •  Following WWII, helped veterans purchase new homes with no down payment, sparking a building boom that created construction jobs and fueled consumer spending on home appliances and automobiles 

• Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining: the process of trade unions and employers negotiating workplace contracts — became widespread factors in the nation’s economic life

  • unions delivered greater leisure and a social safety net

  • Worker Productivity: the amount of goods or services a worker produces per unit of time

  • Service Sectors: part of the economy that provides services rather than tangible goods, including industries like healthcare, education, finance, and hospitality

• Baby Boom: The surge in the American birthrate between 1945 and 1965, which peaked in 1957 with 4.3 million births

• Nuclear Families: household of a mother, father, and their children, living together

  • Hand in hand with suburbs

  • American Dream, Middle class

Youth Culture

• Teenagers: A term for a young adult. American youth culture, focused on the spending power of the “teenager,” emerged as a cultural phenomenon in the 1950s

• Mass Culture: a widespread, standardized set of cultural ideas, values, and entertainment that became accessible to a large portion of the population due to advancements in media like radio, movies, etc.

• Consumerism: consumption took on an association with citizenship

  • social and economic phenomenon where Americans increasingly focused on buying goods and services 

  • Helped economy after WWII

• Rock n’ Roll: Teens rejected romantic pop ballads and favored louder and faster sounds with roots in African American rhythm and blues, known as R&B. 

  • R&B developed into Rock n’ Roll

• Television: “consumers’ republic” arrived through television and transformed everyday life with astonishing speed

Religion and the Middle Class

• Billy Graham: Used the television, radio, and advertising to spread his message of religion

  • Preacher during post-WWII

• Suburbanization: The large-scale population shift from urban centers to suburban areas on the outskirts of cities

The Post-War Housing Boom

• Federal Housing Administration: Aimed to improve housing standards by insuring loans for home purchases, making it easier for people, particularly those with lower incomes, to buy homes

• Levittown: A Long Island, New York, suburb, built by William J. Levitt in the late 1940s, that used mass-production techniques to build modest, affordable houses

  •  Other Levittowns were built in Pennsylvania and New Jersey

• Housing Discrimination: formal and informal agreements barred African Americans from owning or renting homes in most suburban areas — in some places, Jews, Latinos, and Asian Americans

• Redlining: refusing to insure mortgages in mixed race neighborhoods, on the grounds that such areas were “blighted” — marked on maps by a red line

Interstate Highways

• National Interstate and Defense Highways Act: A 1956 law authorizing the construction of 42,500 miles of new highways and their integration into a single national highway system

Rise of the Sunbelt

• Sunbelt: Name applied to the Southwest and South, which grew rapidly after World War II as a center of defense industries and non-unionized labor

Two Societies: Urban and Suburban

• Kerner Commision: The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which investigated the 1967 urban riots

  •  Its 1968 report warned of the dangers of “two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.”

Chapter 26: The Civil Rights Movement – 1941-1973

EQ: Why did the civil rights movement change over time, and how did competing ideas and strategies evolve within the movement itself?

• Civil Rights Movement

• Protest and Equality

Life Under Jim Crow

• Rights Liberalism: a political ideology that strongly emphasizes individual civil rights and liberties, often advocating for government intervention to ensure equality, particularly in areas like racial justice

• Jim Crow Laws: enforced racial segregation in all aspects of public life, including schools, transportation, restrooms, and restaurants, effectively disenfranchising African Americans and denying them equal rights

WWII: The Beginnings 

• Congress of Racial Equality (CORE): Civil rights organization founded in 1942 in Chicago by James Farmer and other members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) that espoused nonviolent direct action

Civil Rights and the New Deal Coalition

• “To Secure These Rights”: The 1947 report by the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights that called for robust federal action to ensure equality for African Americans.

  • President Truman asked Congress to make all of the report’s recommendations — including the abolition of poll taxes and the restoration of the Fair Employment Practice Committee — into law, leading to discord in the Democrats

• States’ Rights Democratic Party: Known popularly as the Dixiecrats, a breakaway party of white Democrats from the South that formed for the 1948 election

  • formation hinted at a potential long-term schism within the New Deal coalition

• George Wallace: Politician in Alabama who would later become prominent in the Civil Rights Movement

  • known for his staunch opposition to desegregation and his famous "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" stance

Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans

• American GI Forum: A group founded by WWII veterans in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1948 to protest the poor treatment of Mexican American soldiers and veterans

• Mendez v. Westminster: Never made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the 9th Circuit Court ruled the segregation unconstitutional, laying the legal groundwork for broader challenges to racial inequality

Fighting for Equality Before The Law

• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka: Supreme Court ruling of 1954 that overturned the “separate but equal” precedent established in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896

  • Court declared that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal and thus violated the 14th Amendment

• Thurgood Marshall: growing NAACP lawyer, fought against racial segregation

Nonviolent Direct Action

• Emmet Till: 14 yr. old African American from the South Side of Chicago, visited relatives in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 then was tortured and killed by whites for talking to a white woman

• Montgomery Bus Boycott: year boycott of Montgomery’s segregated bus system in 1955–1956 by the city’s African American population. 

  • brought Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence and ended in victory when the Supreme Court declared segregated seating on public transportation unconstitutional

• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): civil rights organization founded in 1909 that actively fought against racial discrimination and advocated for the rights of African Americans

• Rosa Parks: Black Women that refused to surrender her seat on the bus to a white man. Used this action – with other NAAC members (mostly women) – to protest 

• MLK Jr.: prominent leader in the American Civil Rights Movement who advocated for nonviolent resistance to combat racial injustice and discrimination

• Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC): After the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. and other black ministers formed the SCLC in 1957 to coordinate civil rights activity in the South

• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): A student civil rights group founded in 1960, under the mentorship of Ella Baker, that conducted sit-ins, voter registration drives, and other actions to advance racial equality throughout the 1960s

  • Ella Baker: prominent African American civil rights activist who played a key role in the movement, particularly known for her grassroots organizing efforts with the SNCC

    • John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, Anne Moody, Diane Nash: New generation of SNCC leaders inspired by baker

• Freedom Rides: A series of multiracial sit-ins conducted on interstate bus lines throughout the South by CORE in 1961

  • An early and important civil rights protest

Legislating Civil Rights, 1963-1956

• March on Washington: March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 28, 1963, ¼ of a million people marched to the Lincoln Memorial to demand that Congress end Jim Crow laws and launch a major jobs program to bring needed employment to black communities

  • Bayard Rustin: prominent civil rights activist, known for his role as a key organizer of nonviolent protests

• Civil Rights Act of 1964: Law that responded to civil rights movement by making discrimination illegal in employment, education, and public accommodations on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex

• Voting Rights Act of 1965: Law passed during Lyndon Johnson’s administration that outlawed measures designed to exclude African Americans, and other people of color, from voting

Black Nationalism

• Black Nationalism: A major strain of African American thought that emphasized black racial pride and autonomy. 

  • Present in black communities for centuries, it periodically came to the fore, as in Marcus Garvey’s pan-Africanist movement in the early 20th century and in various organizations in the 60s and 70s, such as the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party

• Malcom X: Black Muslim that preached militant separatism, although he advocated violence only for self-defense. 

  • had little interest in changing the minds of hostile whites and saw strengthening the black community as a surer path to true equality

• Black Power Movement: Those inclined toward Black Power increasingly felt that African Americans should build economic and political power in their own communities. Such power would reduce dependence on whites

• Black Panther Party: A militant organization dedicated to protecting African Americans from police violence, founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

  • In the late 1960s the organization spread to other cities, where members undertook a wide range of community-organizing projects, but the Panthers’ radicalism and belief in armed self-defense resulted in violent clashes with police

• Young Lords Organization (YLO): An organization that sought self-determination for Puerto Ricans in the United States and in the Caribbean

  • Though immediate victories for the YLO were few, their dedicated community organizing produced a generation of leaders and awakened community consciousness

Rise of the Chicano Movement

• Chicano Movement: social and political movement primarily by Mexican Americans in the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s, focused on achieving civil rights, cultural recognition, and community empowerment by combating systemic racism

  • United Farm Workers (UFW): A union of farmworkers founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta that sought to empower the mostly Mexican American migrant farmworkers who faced discrimination and exploitative conditions, especially in the Southwest

  • Cesar Chavez: prominent Mexican-American labor leader and civil rights activist who dedicated his life to improving the working conditions of farmworkers through nonviolent activism

  • Dolores Huerta: prominent labor activist and leader of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement

• La Raza Unida: A political party founded in Texas in 1970 by Mexican Americans as an alternative to the two major political parties; La Raza Unida (The United Race) ran candidates for state and local governments and expanded to other states

The American Indian Movement

• American Indian Movement: Were inspired by the Black Power and Chicano movements, organized to address their unique circumstances

  • Young militants challenged their elders in the National Congress of American Indians. Beginning in 1960, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) making them a single ethnic group

Gay Rights Movement

• Gay Liberation Movement: a social and political movement, primarily occurring in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where lesbian and gay individuals actively protested against societal discrimination and demanded equal rights, often through radical direct action

  • Harvey Milk: prominent gay rights activist and politician who became the first openly gay elected official in California