Chapter 19
In This Chapter:
● Prospering like never before after World War II
● Thrusting Harry S Truman into the Presidential spotlight
● Fighting a Cold War of nerves (and entering a couple of real ones) under the shadow of the bomb
● Worrying about Communism
● Stabilizing and changing with Dwight D. Eisenhower
From the outside, the United States seemed like the place to be in the autumn of 1945.
With the help of its allies, the nation had won a stunning victory in battles beyond both its oceans’ shores (see Chapter 18).
Unlike every other industrialized nation in the world, the U.S. suffered little damage to its cities. American farms and factories were in full production, and labor had never been so highly paid. People finally felt safe. The bad guys from overseas had been vanquished, and the U.S. was the only country with the biggest bat in history: the atomic bomb. Prosperity continued, but the feeling of safety didn’t last for long. This chapter covers the years after World War II, particularly the Cold War and its effects on the nation and the rest of the world.
Doing Well but Feeling Nervous
World War II had been a four-year roller coaster ride of war for the U.S. As exciting and wonderful as it felt to be victorious, however, Americans couldn’t forget that before those four years had come more than ten years of economic uncertainty in the Great Depression. With no more wartime jobs, folks had to wonder whether hard times were going to return.
President Harry S Truman had taken over when Franklin Roosevelt died just as the war with Germany was ending; nobody knew whether he could fill Roosevelt’s shoes. Even more worrisome was the Soviet Union; that country seemed to be going from ally to enemy even before the last round of toasts at the victory party.
Enjoying a victory bonus
The baby boom started after World War II — war families were reunited, and people felt optimistic enough about the future to want to bring more children into the world. During the Depression years before the War, birth rates had been down and suicide rates were up (because the economic depression made people emotionally depressed).
After victory and years of good pay, people felt much better. The postwar baby boom formed a ten-year population bulge that helped invent ’50s rock-and-roll, ’60s protest, ’70s attitude, ’80s yuppies, and at the beginning of the 21st century the baby boomers were poised to make retirement an active sport.
After the removal of wartime government price management, costs shot up to match higher wages. The annual inflation rate went from 2 percent in 1945 to 9 percent in 1946 and 14 percent in 1947 before it started to level off. Higher costs meant wages bought less, and that led to strikes: More work stoppages occurred in 1946 than during all of World War II.
The Taft-Hartley Act
Although the country still had a Democratic president, it had elected the first Republican-controlled Congress since Herbert Hoover. Those Republicans managed to pass a bill over President Truman’s veto that they said would get strikes under control.
The Taft-Hartley Act (1947) prohibited unions from putting pressure on their employers by picketing other companies that did business with their own company. The act also forbid unions from requiring that an employer hire only union members (called a closed shop) but allowed union shops, in which everybody had to join the union after they were hired.
The Taft-Hartley Act is still in effect. It allows states to forbid union shops: Several states have established right to work laws that prohibit all workers from having to join a union. Additionally, unions have to give 60 days’ notice when they’re threatening to strike, and the president can put a hold on strikes that he feels will cause a national emergency.
Switching blue collars to white
At the high point of union membership in the early ’50s, a third of the population was involved in some sort of union; by the early 21st century, that number had declined to less than 15 percent. The Taft-Hartley Act itself didn’t cause unions to lose membership — a change in the kind of work Americans were doing did.
In the 1950s, America experienced a decrease in the number of blue-collar manual laborers and an increase in the number white-collar service workers; for the first time, the white-collar workers outnumbered the manual laborers. This abundance of service workers has increased over the years, and the number of union members has decreased accordingly.
One obstacle for unions is the fact that service workers stay in jobs for a shorter period of time than they used to; the average American now spends less than four years at one job. This rapid turnover makes union organizing difficult.
In addition, unions are victims of their own success. Employment practices and wages have improved so much that many workers don’t think they need the kind of protection unions can bring.
The Employment Act
After the war, the Truman administration sold unneeded defense plants and equipment at bargain prices to help employers grow civilian businesses. Congress passed the Employment Act (1946), which set a goal of maintaining full employment and required the president to submit an annual economic report along with the federal budget. The act established the Council of Economic Advisers, who was responsible for supplying the smarts to keep the economy and the job market rolling.
Roosevelt's final New Deal: The Gl Bill
A bigger, more immediate payoff than the theories of the Economic Advisers was the benefits of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill (1944). The GI Bill provided for college or vocational education as well as one year of unemployment compensation for returning World War II veterans, whom everybody called GIs (short for Government Issue). It also provided loans for returning veterans to buy homes and start businesses.
The GI Bill was the last piece of New Deal legislation endorsed and signed by Franklin Roosevelt. (See Chapter 17 for more on the New Deal.) Ex-soldiers couldn’t believe their good fortune: The bill paid for education and offered low-interest loans. Although most veterans attended vocational schools to learn a trade, enough GIs opted for college that many universities doubled in size. The proportion of the population with a college degree grew from 5 percent before the war to more than 25 percent in the early 21st century.
Question: What most influenced the number of men going to college in the United States during the 20th century?
Answer: The GI Bill, which paid for the education of veterans.
Millions of young American families moved to small houses in the suburbs thanks to zero-down-payment loans from the GI Bill. This started a housing revolution that took home ownership from 44 percent in 1940 to almost 70 percent in the early 21st century. All this education and house-building also helped stimulate the economy by making more jobs. The GI Bill provided up to one year of unemployment coverage, but few ex-soldiers could resist getting one of the plentiful jobs before that year was up.
Truman, the Unexpected President
Nobody expected Harry S Truman to be president, least of all Truman. A last-minute compromise candidate as Franklin Roosevelt’s third vice president, Truman had only a few months on the job when Roosevelt died. Truman said to reporters: “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know if you fellas ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”
Truman was an honest man elected by a political machine, a failed men’s clothing store owner who joined George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson as a president who never went to college. When the love of his life turned him down when he first asked her to marry him, Truman went off, earned some money, fought in World War I, came back, asked her again, and she said yes.
As a senator before World War II, Truman took it upon himself to visit defense plants and push them to be more productive. The sign on his desk said, “The buck stops here”; Truman wouldn’t stand for blame-passing. Counted out politically, he ran a give-’em-hell campaign and surprised everybody by winning the presidential election in his own right in 1948.
In his second term, Truman faced an icy freeze of relationships with the Soviet Union, who had still been America’s warm wartime allies when he first took office. More on those relationships in the following section.
Stepping into Icy Waters: Beginning the Cold War
The division of the world into Soviet Union Communist buddies against the United States capitalist team happened seemingly overnight at the end of World War II. People called it the Cold War (1950), although it got pretty hot in Korea and Vietnam.
World War II ended with the Soviet Union in control of Eastern Europe. The Soviets established Communist governments backed by Soviet troops in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other Eastern European nations. Westerners on the capitalist side said that an iron curtain had descended across Europe, dividing the free countries that had real elections from the Communist countries ruled by party officials.
Don’t get all confused when countries change names. The Soviet Union, also known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known as the U.S.S.R., was really just the big old Russian bear with a few captive cubs. When Russia went Communist after World War I, it took a few (sometimes independent) provinces or countries with it and became the Soviet Union. When it got over the Communist thing in the 1990s, it let the provinces go and went back to just being Russia.
Shifting from Allies to enemies
Paranoia struck deep after World War II. The Soviet Union was torn apart by German troops and had lost millions of people fighting alone in Europe for three long years before Britain and the U.S. finally got around to the D-day invasion.
The Soviets saw the world as an anti-Communist conspiracy, and they were on a selfprotective and ideological crusade to turn other countries Communist. They especially wanted a protective barrier of Communist satellite countries between themselves and Germany, a country that had torn into Russia twice in 25 years.
The Soviets knew that the West had put up with Hitler for years partly because Western countries thought Hitler could kill off Communism. During the War (before he was vice president), Truman had said the U.S. should let the Germans and the Soviets kill each other off and help whichever side seemed to be losing to keep the bloody fight going. Having lost 27 million people (and almost their country) in World War II, the Soviets had reasons to worry.
So did the United States. Not only did its so-called Soviet allies become increasingly hostile, but within a few years the Soviets also got the atomic bomb, and lots of countries, especially China, went Communist. To people in the U.S., it looked like a conspiracy was afoot in the world; how else could the Communists become so powerful?
Renewing the sport of distrusting Communists
Like any argument, push came to shove pretty fast between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. because each side was sure that it was right and the other side was cheating. The United States shut off Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets and refused to include the Communist countries of Eastern Europe in the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. The Soviets refused the rebuilding aid that was offered by the U.S.
The Soviets clamped a lid on Eastern Europe and supported any country who said it was Communist. In response, the United States supported all countries who said they were antiCommunist. The showdown lead to a dangerous arms race, plus a showdown in jointly controlled Germany and shooting wars (sorry, officially conflicts) in Korea and Vietnam.
A diplomat named George Kennan saw it coming. In his influential 1947 paper “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” he maintained that Russian policy, whether from the tsar or from the Communist Party is relentlessly expansionistic but cautious, and he recommended a policy of firm and vigilant containment. The United States followed Kennan’s policy.
Question: What was George Kennan’s 1947 policy recommendation?
Answer: Kennan recommended a policy of firm containment of Soviet Communist expansion.
Starting the United Nations
Despite the postwar tensions, at least one peaceful organization popped up. The United Nations (1945) got going at the end of the war; President Roosevelt was getting ready to speak to the first U.N. session when he died.
Unlike the similarly themed League of Nations (see Chapter 16), the U.N. began with the full support of the United States. The U.N. has a Security Council controlled by the big powers and a General Assembly of all nations. Able to act only when the big powers agree, the U.N. has become an organizing center for peacekeeping missions around the world.
The International Monetary Fund
In other international news, the Western Allies established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (1944) during a meeting at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, toward the end of the War. The IMF is an international organization consisting of just about every country in the world. The IMF oversees the global financial system by controlling exchange rates and making loans.
Although IMF international policy has its critics, cooperation tied a more prosperous world together and helped to lift countries out of poverty to some extent.
Putting the final wraps on World War II
The Allies wrapped up World War II by occupying Japan and Germany. They divided Germany into zones controlled by Britain, France, the U.S., and the U.S.S.R. Although Berlin was technically in the Soviet zone, the parties divided it separately; the Soviets got East Berlin, and the West took West Berlin (go figure). Japan was an all-American show, with General Douglas MacArthur dictating a democratic constitution.
The Nuremberg trials
In both Japan and Germany, 20 or so major war criminals went on trial, and a few were executed. In Germany, these postwar hearings were called the Nuremberg trials (1946), and they established the principle that people have the responsibility not to follow orders if those orders violate international law.
The Berlin Airlift
As Cold War tensions rose, the Soviets cut off Western ground access to the West’s part of Berlin by closing the road that ran across the Soviet governed part of Germany. The Americans responded with a giant airlift of supplies that kept Berlin alive for almost a year until the Soviets relented and allowed ground access again. The Berlin Airlift (1949) landed a plane every minute, using some of the same aircraft that had recently been trying to kill Berliners.
The Truman Doctrine
President Truman got Congress to approve loans to Greece and Turkey to counter Soviet moves to turn those countries Communist. He launched the Truman Doctrine (1947) of containing Communism by supporting capitalist countries with money and arms if necessary.
The Marshall Plan
The U.S. supplied a much bigger financial support package to Europe through the Marshall Plan (1947), which lent billions of dollars to rebuild Western Europe. It worked. By the end of the 1950s, Western European economies were well on the way to recovery, and the region had begun plans for the European Community.
Truman also threw American support behind the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
The National Security Act and NATO
America’s anti-Communist jitters led to the creation of super agencies to fight the Cold War. The National Security Act (1947) established the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which brought together top military leaders, and the National Security Council, which brought together intelligence information gathered by the new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The next year, Congress reinstituted the peacetime draft, and in 1949 the nation swallowed hard and entered into the very kind of “entangling alliance” George Washington had warned about.
With the birth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (1949), the U.S. allied itself with European nations and pledged to respond to an attack on any one of them as an attack on all. NATO kept a wary eye on the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact treaty buddies. The Warsaw Pact was the Soviet equivalent of NATO, made up of Eastern European nations under the control of Moscow.
Fretting over China
While MacArthur helped Japan turn into a peaceful and prosperous democracy, the Chinese were fighting among themselves. In 1949, Communist leader Mao Tse-tung was triumphant, pushing the non-Communist Chinese off the mainland and on to the island of Formosa.
The Republicans roundly blamed Truman for “losing” China, but in fact the huge country had never had a democratic government to defend. The Soviet Union’s detonation of its first atomic bomb around this same time didn’t really help America’s nervous feelings, either.
Growing Communist paranoia in the U.S.
President Truman actually launched the anti-Communist hysteria in the United States by appointing a Loyalty Review Board in 1947 that checked to see whether any of the 3 million federal employees were members of supposedly subversive organizations. About 3,000 federal workers resigned under pressure, although none of them was charged with a crime.
By 1949, supporting those so-called subversive groups was a crime, and members of the U.S. Communist Party went to jail for supposedly advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had a field day uncovering suspected Communists everywhere, led by an ambitious young congressman named Richard Nixon who didn’t mind calling anyone who got in his way a Communist sympathizer.
In 1950, Truman vetoed a bill that would have given the president power to arrest and lock up any suspicious person during a security emergency because it sounded too much like a police state.
In the midst of paranoia, however, Truman did manage to build some public housing, raise the minimum wage, and extend Social Security. Any further social programs were held hostage by the Cold War.
Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism
Senator Joseph McCarthy made outrageous claims that Communists had infiltrated the federal government. He said that hundreds of known Communists worked in the State Department, and he pretended to have a list of their names. He accused respected officials of being “fellow travelers” with Communists, even picking on former army chief of staff George Marshall (author of the Marshall Plan) and President Eisenhower.
Communist actions in China and Korea and the speed with which the Soviets had gotten the atomic bomb scared Americans enough that they supported McCarthy’s wild accusations. Every time he made a charge that proved false, he simply came up with a new charge. His witch hunt was called McCarthyism (1952).
McCarthy finally went overboard when he attacked the United States Army. In the great tradition of journalists who would not be frightened away from telling the truth, television’s Edward R. Murrow took on McCarthy while politicians were afraid to act. After 35 days of televised hearings, many Americans saw who McCarthy really was: a mean-spirited liar who twisted the people’s worries to get power. He was censured by the Senate and died of chronic alcoholism three years later.
McCarthyism showed the power of fear connected to conspiracy theory; it still serves as a useful example of the danger of hysteric leadership.
Fighting in Korea
Korea was divided between Communist North Korea and capitalist South Korea after World War II. In 1950, the North invaded the South and the Korean War (1952) was underway. The United States called the fighting a “conflict” since war was not officially declared, but it certainly seemed like a war to the people who were getting shot. The Communist North, armed with Soviet weapons, pushed the South Koreans back to a small pocket on the edge of the peninsula.
Taking command from Japan, Douglas MacArthur engineered a brilliant landing way behind Communist lines and pushed the North Koreans back across their border. The U.S. then made the mistake of taking over all of Korea, right up to its border with Communist China.
The Chinese sent in huge waves of soldiers and pushed the Americans and South Koreans back to the South’s border.
After years of sniping, both Koreas signed a peace treaty, putting things back the way they were before the invasion.
The Korean War got a U.S. military buildup going that eventually ate up 10 percent of the gross national product. With Communism in the past, the U.S. defense figure is now less than 5 percent of the GNP.
In the 1950s, the U.S. spent money and lives to defend its democratic capitalist system, but it avoided touching off a nuclear war that could destroy the world. When Chinese Communist troops stormed into Korea, General MacArthur wanted to use atomic bombs and risk a global meltdown. President Truman fired him.
Truman was aggressive in Korea in part to answer critics that his administration had been soft in letting China go Communist. Nonetheless, he wasn’t going to let Korea lead to World War III. Paranoia of both sides caused the Cold War, but when the war turned hot in both Korea and Vietnam, the U.S. took hits rather than use weapons that could destroy the world.
Question: What influenced President Truman in responding with toughness to Communist aggression in Korea?
Answer: Truman wanted to correct the impression that his administration had turned soft on Communism because it had watched the Communists take over China without launching military opposition.
Stepping into the fray: Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Democrats had a five-term run in the White House; now it was time for a Republican. Actually, the Democrats were thinking of nominating Eisenhower themselves, but after some reflection he decided he was a Republican. To give Ike a tough anti-Communist ticket, the Republicans ran Richard Nixon as vice president.
When there was some controversy about Nixon, Ike almost dumped him. Nixon made the first dramatic use of national television as a political tool by going on the air to speak about how his wife had only a respectable Republican cloth coat (no minks for her) and how next the Communist sympathizers would attack the fact that his kids had been given a dog named Checkers. The Checkers speech saved his nomination, and Eisenhower won the election by an overwhelming majority.
Eisenhower had been a mediator of often-contentious military units as the overall head of the Allied forces in Europe in World War II. He used these talents to lead by consensus during the 1950s. This knack meant that although he was seldom in the forefront on important issues, he usually came through with reasonable compromise solutions.
Ending the Korean War
The Korean War finally ended after Ike visited the front and threatened to use atomic weapons. Korea had cost more than 30,000 U.S. lives and hundreds of thousands of Korean and Chinese deaths. Troops still guard the border to this day.
Liking Ike in the Prosperous 1950s
Americans were ready for some grandfatherly reassurance. The Depression and World War II had been a strain, and the Communists, Korea, and the Cold War didn’t give anybody much of a chance to relax. Electing Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, a balding, kindly leading general from World War II, as president in 1952 was a relief.
Real income grew at a rapid rate in the 1950s and beyond. Americans — only 5 percent of the world’s population — controlled almost 40 percent of the world’s wealth. Money was the biggest story in the history of the United States since World War II.
Not all Americans profited equally from the affluence of their country, and the nation experienced both recession and inflation, but overall the economic course was up for most of the people most of the time.
The seeds of future trouble were contained in some aspects of American affluence. Defense spending stayed high, fully 10 percent of the gross national product (GNP) (value of goods and services) during the 1950s. President Eisenhower also warned about the bad influence of the military industrial complex on U.S. society.
Doubling the middle class
Cars, houses, and too many stomachs got bigger. The proportion of the population in the middle class doubled from the Roaring ’20s; by the end of the 1950s, two-thirds of Americans were comfortably middle class. Prosperity gave people the space to improve education, civil rights, and medical care. It also gave the country the income necessary to outspend the Soviet Union in the arms race and Cold War.
By 1960, one out of four homes in America was less than 10 years old. People could afford new homes because their jobs were better — more than likely white collar or sales. The first 707 jet passenger planes launched the travel revolution; before the 1950s, most people had never been on a plane.
Television takes over American households
The 1950s saw the birth of television and fast food. Many now look down on both, but both provided a rich option of experience and convenience that people wanted. Only 3 million people in the country had televisions in 1950; by the end of the decade, they were in nearly every home. In the 1950s, TVs got only three channels; people had to choose from one of the three shows broadcast by the major networks. Originally, television was only black and white on tiny screens — color television was a big deal when it came out in the mid-’50s — and a 21-inch picture tube was considered large.
Rocking in the U.S.A.
Rock-and-roll changed music and culture starting in 1954. Elvis Presley may not have had the first rock record, but he was there at the beginning with Little Richard, Ike Turner, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Rock-and-roll spread like wildfire, bridging the gap between black rhythm and white melody. The open sexuality didn’t hurt, either; rock was in the sexy company of Marilyn Monroe, Playboy magazine, and the Kinsey report, which detailed how normal lust could be. Victorian times were gone forever.
Examining alienation and conformity in literature
Literature was actually more dramatic and upbeat in the happy 1950s than in the roaring 1920s. Early-decade social critics like David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd, William Whyte in The Organization Man, and Sloan Wilson in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit saw the future in alienation and conformity. Later, the 1960s would show them how wrong they could be.
Hemingway and Steinbeck turned out career-capping work and won well-deserved Nobel prizes. Tennessee Williams (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman) wrote searing drama. J.D. Salinger captured adolescent angst and its answer forever in Catcher in the Rye.
People like Joseph Heller (Catch-22), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five), and Philip Roth (Goodbye, Columbus) wrote wittily and meaningfully at the same time. Television wasn’t killing off culture, at least not yet.
Question: What did social critics like David Riesman warn was a coming social problem?
Answer: Social critics in the 1950s often warned about conformity and alienation from community.
Women in the Workforce
Of the 40 million new jobs that started between 1950 and 1980, 30 million were in clerical and service work — jobs that women often filled. Women didn’t displace men in the job market; they just found jobs that were never there before. Working women were nothing new — women had worked as hard as men on the farm for years. The real anomaly in history was the first hundred years of the Industrial Revolution, during which time middle-class women were supposed to just stay home and be domestic goddesses.
Women moved from being less than one quarter of the work force at the end of World War II to being about half the workers in the early 21st century. This change allowed families to stretch their incomes, but it caused some wrenching readjustments at first as women tried to cover being wife, mother, and full-time worker all at the same time (and men learned some parenting skills to take up the slack).
At least the children were in school; in 1950s America, most kids finished high school. This number contrasts with the time before World War I, when only half of school-age children regularly attended classes.
Getting addicted to energy
America began its energy addiction in the 1950s; oil consumption doubled and electric energy usage increased 600 percent in the two decades after World War II. Big cars burned more gas and commutes got longer as people moved out to the suburbs, which were home to 25 percent of the population by the end of the 1950s and more than 50 percent of the people by the 21st century.
The growth of Sunbelt living in the warm Southern climate made air conditioning a regular part of many people’s lives. Productivity increased with energy usage on the farm: using petroleum based fertilizers, hybrid crops and gasoline powered harvesters allowed one farmer to feed ten times as many people at the turn of the 21st century as his grandfather could at the turn of the 20th century.
The first computer
The first commercial computer appeared in the United States in 1951. The UNIVAC (for universal automatic computer) was the size of a small house and used 5,200 vacuum tubes and 125 kilowatts of power to store its full capacity of 1,000 words. With less computing power than a cheap digital watch, the UNIVAC sold for a nice even $1 million.
The ultimate cost of affluence
One downside of affluence was distance. People moved every few years; adult children often lived thousands of miles from their parents, grandparents, sisters, and brothers. Airplanes could bring people together for a few hours at the holidays, but the sense of extended family was gone. Self-help advice books and psychological counseling barely filled in the gaps. Affluence could cost a lot in isolation and loneliness.
Because people were cut off from their family roots anyway, they chose to live where it was sunny; Florida boomed and one out of eight Americans ended up in California. Every elected President for the last 40 years has come from the Sunbelt.
Changing politics under Ike
Eisenhower’s legislative record was mild like his personality. He often worked with a Congress controlled by Democrats, and he had to put up with some boneheads in his own administration. When scientists invented a drug to prevent the horrible childhood disease of polio, Eisenhower’s secretary of the federal department of health, education, and welfare condemned the free distribution of the vaccine as “socialized medicine.”
Old soldier that he was, Eisenhower knew the waste that goes with military spending. He reduced Truman’s military buildup, although costs remained high during the tense Cold War years.
The administration participated in a major roundup of illegal aliens called Operation Wetback and tried to set back the cause of American Indian identity by temporarily revoking the tribal rights of the Indian New Deal. Otherwise, Eisenhower kept the programs from the New Deal without trying to dismantle or change them. By continuing these programs in a Republican administration, he helped make them a permanent part of American society.
Ike made his biggest change to the American landscape by starting the huge freeway-building program that linked the whole country together under the Interstate Highway Act (1956). With climate change and oil politics, those smooth roads that make people slaves to their cars now look dangerous, but when Ike started to build them they were just practical.
Continuing tensions with the U.S.S.R.
Eisenhower tried to start peace talks, but the timing just wasn’t right. In 1955, the Soviet Union rejected Ike’s proposal at a summit conference for open skies over both countries as an obvious espionage trick. The open skies idea got embarrassing when the Soviets shot down a U.S. spy plane over the U.S.S.R. in 1960, just in time to shoot down another summit conference. The U.S. also had to stand by and watch as the Soviet Union brutally crushed a 1956 uprising in Hungary.
Worst of all, Vietnam was on the horizon. The U.S. tried funding the French fight against Vietnamese Communist rebels, but the French lost. After the French left, Vietnam was divided, and the U.S. supported South Vietnam because although it was a dictatorship, it wasn’t Communist. America made the same mistake in Iran, using the CIA to put the brutal Shah in power. Both cynical moves would later come back to haunt the U.S.; I discuss that further in Chapter 20.
Question: Why did the U.S. increase its involvement in Vietnam?
Answer: When the French left Vietnam, the U.S. tried to shore up the anti-Communist
South Vietnamese regime.
On the friendly side, Ike proclaimed the Eisenhower Doctrine (1957), which offered aid to Middle Eastern nations. (Because everybody since Monroe had to have their own doctrine.) Under Eisenhower, the U.S. put a stop to the joint Israeli, British, and French takeover of the Suez Canal, winning some thanks from the Egyptians. Ike landed troops to help the government of Lebanon and got out without a single U.S. death. With the GNP and economy up, sunny Ike carried almost the whole country in his 1956 reelection.
Working for Civil Rights
Although many blacks had migrated North for better jobs during World War II, more than half still lived in the South under Jim Crow laws that kept them prisoners of segregated schools, trains, parks, and hotels.
African Americans died because they couldn’t be treated at whites-only hospitals. The only place for Martin Luther King Jr. to stay with his bride on their honeymoon was a blacks-only funeral parlor. Only a few African Americans were registered to vote in the South; the rest were disenfranchised by poll taxes, rigged literacy tests, and flat-out threats. The lives of blacks in the South in the 1940s and 1950s weren’t much better than they had been in 1880.
The Democratic Party helped poor people, but it had trouble letting go of its historic base of support among white Southern racists — ugly, but handy for winning close elections. This support dated all the way back to the fact that the Democrats were not the party that led the North in the Civil War.
Dixiecrats
Franklin Roosevelt had made the first move for fairness when he ordered an end to discrimination in defense employment during the War. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled that whites-only primary elections in the South were illegal.
When Harry Truman, a Democratic president from a Southern state, heard about the murder of six black servicemen returning from the war, he was outraged. Truman supported the first civil rights legislation in years and desegregated the federal civil service.
Southerners opposed to civil rights walked out of the Democratic Party in 1948 to start the short lived Dixiecrat Party, but Truman won reelection anyway. Because millions of blacks had moved to the North and West where they could vote, their voices began to be heard. Jackie Robinson became the first black player in professional sports in 1947.
Question: Why did some Southerners form the Dixiecrat Party in 1948?
Answer: Dixiecrats opposed President Truman’s civil rights legislation.
Chapter 19: Cold War Wind at the Victory Dance: 1946-1960 257
Rosa Parks
On a cold day in the winter of 1955, Rosa Parks (1955), a college-educated 42-year-old black seamstress, refused to get up from her seat near the front of a Montgomery city bus to make way for a white man, and she was arrested. The protests that began with that arrest started the modern civil rights movement. An early leader of the Montgomery movement was a young Christian minister named Martin Luther King Jr. (1960).
Brown Versus the Board of Education
The civil rights movement had legal and social support. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregated schools are “inherently unequal” and that desegregation must proceed with “all deliberate speed.”
Although Southern representatives initially resisted, desegregation has moved ahead with the deliberate speed of any major social change, which means it’s taken generations. Legal forms of discrimination were abolished one by one in the decade after the civil rights movement began in the mid-1950s. These cases were the legal decisions that had the most impact on American society.
Question: What kind of legal decisions had the most impact following the Second
World War?
Answer: Court cases involving civil rights were the most important in changing society.
The Civil Rights Commission
Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t a revolutionary. He had grown up in the white Midwest and spent his career in the segregated army. But Eisenhower knew his duty. When the governor of Arkansas threatened to use force to keep black students from enrolling in Little Rock, Arkansas’s Central High School (1957), Ike called out the army to protect the Little Rock Nine as they walked into class. Eisenhower also supported legislation to establish a permanent Civil Rights Commission (1957) to investigate and report on discrimination.
Question: What is the main purpose of the Civil Rights Commission?
Answer: The Civil Rights Commission is responsible for investigating and reporting on discrimination in the United States.
Sit-in demonstrations
In 1960, four black college students sat down to have lunch in a North Carolina store. Under orders, the servers refused to wait on them. The students refused to leave, starting the first sit-in demonstration (1960). The next day, they came back with 19 classmates, the day after, 85 — by the end of the week, a thousand protestors had converged on the store.
Sit-ins spread to segregated lunch counters all over the country; although the protestors often met with violence, they kept coming. Eventually, national laws outlawed public discrimination.
Question: What are some of the major domestic events during the Eisenhower administration?
Answer: During Ike’s terms the gross national product (GNP) was up, the baby boom continued to increase population, black families moved from the rural South to the North and West, the civil rights movement got started, and the interstate freeway system was begun.
Firing Up the Space Race with Sputnik
In 1957, the nation got its second technological shock from the Soviet Union. Just eight years after the Soviets developed an atomic bomb, they launched Sputnik (1957), the world’s first satellite. The supposedly backward and politically challenged Soviets now seemed dangerously ahead of the U.S. Although an early attempt to loft a tiny American satellite blew up on the launching pad, the Soviets brazenly sent up another tin moon; this one contained a dog astronaut named Laika.
Science fever swept the U.S.; the nation had to catch up. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (1958) to coordinate a program that would take the U.S. from launching pad zero to moon walking hero in just over ten years. In addition, the National Defense Education Act (1958) offered almost a billion dollars in science and other scholarships.
Castro: Communism Comes Closer to Home
The Yankees got another bad surprise when Fidel Castro (1959) took over as head of Cuba from a corrupt, U.S.-supported dictator. Castro was a Communist who allied himself with the Soviet Union, and the Soviets threatened a missile attack if the U.S. messed with Castro.
Almost a million Cubans left their island for the United States, where many of them worked without end to keep American policy vehemently anti-Castro.
Ushering in the 1960s with Kennedy
Despite the Cold War and other problems during his administration, Eisenhower tried to stay positive. In his eight years as president, the country enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and a national unity of purpose that’s hard to imagine in the 21st century. Eisenhower was a successful old soldier who as president ended one war and avoided all the others. He left trouble on the horizon, but there was peace on his watch.
The 1960 Presidential election featured Ike’s Vice President Richard Nixon against dashing young Senator John F. Kennedy. The nation picked Kennedy in a close race, showing that it had become unprejudiced enough to elect an Irish Catholic. Television, the medium that had saved Nixon through his Checkers speech eight years before, now did him in. In the first televised presidential debates, Kennedy looked fresh and Nixon looked jowly. The visual was enough to swing a few thousand votes, and that swung the election.