Part IV
In this part . . .
With the end of World War II, America found itself as the richest and most powerful country in the world. But almost as soon as the “hot war” was over, it was replaced by a tense and perilous “cold war.” This was not just a struggle among nations, but between the political ideologies of capitalism and communism. It would last for 50 years and at times get very warm.
The half-century after World War II also saw Americans embrace the medium of television, which would allow them to watch history as it unfolded: assassinations, a war in Southeast Asia, a generational revolution, a president’s fall — and a television actor become president.
As the twentieth century ends, America gets an unpleasant taste of domestic terrorism, suffers the modern plagues of drug addiction and AIDS, and marvels at the miracles wrought by the silicon chip and at a communications revolution.
This part ends with the dawning decade of the new century: A historically close presidential election, a historically diverse presidential election, the worst terrorist attack in modern history, one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, and a beleaguered economy. Oh, and a couple of wars, fought simultaneously. The next nine decades will have a tough act to follow.
Chapter 17
In This Chapter
● Cooling down relations with Russia and heating things up in Korea
● Testing Americans’ loyalty
● Letting the good times roll (and rock)
● Working against segregation
If you had asked most Americans in 1945 how they felt about Russia, they probably would’ve responded with warm and fuzzy statements about our brave ally against Hitler. Had you asked them in 1950, however, you would have received a very different answer.
In this chapter, Americans combat communism at home and abroad, real and imagined. They move to the suburbs, eat in their cars, and discover a new medium/religion called television. They also embrace a form of music with its roots in the African-American culture — but are much less willing to embrace African Americans themselves.
A Cold War and a Hot “Police Action"
Just who was to blame for the Cold War depends on how you look at it. From the Soviet perspective, America was too powerful to be trusted. It hadn’t suffered nearly as much during World War II and was the only country with the atomic bomb (at least until 1949, when the Russians successfully tested their own bomb). And the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was determined to surround itself with countries that would not be a threat to it in future wars.
From the U.S. point of view, the Soviet Union was uncooperative, pushy, and uncomfortably interested in spreading its influence by working to create communist governments in other countries.
Heavy drapes
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an 'iron curtain' has descended across the continent."
— Winston Churchill, referring to the spread of Soviet influence across Europe in a March 5, 1946, speech in Fulton, Missouri.
Gauging the United Nations
After World War I, the U.S. Senate voted against joining the League of Nations. The second time around, however, on July 28, 1945, the Senate voted 89 to 2 in favor of joining the United Nations (UN), which had its first meeting in 1946 in London and then moved to its permanent home in New York City.
The UN’s two main bodies were the General Assembly, where every member nation had a seat, and the Security Council, which had five permanent members — the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China — and six seats that rotated among other countries. Each of the permanent members could veto council actions, which meant it was impossible for the UN to do anything the top powers didn’t like.
While the United Nations did have some success in international cooperation when it came to subjects like health and education, it could do little to slow down the nuclear arms race or prevent the Super Powers from interfering in other countries.
The World as a chessboard
The first big test of will between the United States and the Soviet Union came in the Mediterranean. Communist-backed rebels in Greece and Turkey were trying to overthrow the governments in those two countries. Britain had been assisting the Greek and Turkish governments, but was in deep economic trouble at home and couldn’t continue.
So Harry Truman went to Congress. Truman was a former U.S. senator from Missouri who had been made vice president in 1944 and succeeded Franklin Roosevelt as president when Roosevelt died in 1945. Truman was blunt, honest, and outspoken. He often complained about what a tough job it was to be president. But most of the time he wasn’t shy about doing it — and to hell with anyone who didn’t like the way he did it.
In March 1947, Truman asked Congress for $400 million to help the Greek and Turkish governments. He also asked to send U.S. military advisors to both countries, at their request. In what became known as the “Truman Doctrine,” Truman drew a sharp distinction between the communist way of life and the Free World. Congress went along, sending more than $600 million to the two countries by 1950.
Truman’s doctrine was part of an overall strategy to contain communism.
The idea was to make other countries prosperous enough that they wouldn’t be tempted to go red. Other elements of the containment strategy included
● The Marshall Plan: Named after General George C. Marshall, who became Truman’s secretary of state, the plan provided about $12 billion in U.S. aid to 16 countries in Western Europe to help them recover from the ravages of the war. The plan was a rousing success, and by 1952, much of Western Europe was well on its way to economic recovery.
● The Four Point Program: This was sort of a junior Marshall Plan. Proposed by Truman in 1949, it provided about $400 million to underdeveloped countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa for developing industry, communications, and technological systems.
● NATO: In 1949, the United States and 11 Western nations formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The countries agreed to come to the aid of any member nation that was attacked, and to develop an international security force that would help discourage aggression by non-NATO countries.
The Berth airlift
Of course, the Soviet Union didn’t watch all this U.S. activity from a hammock. After the war, temporary governance of Germany had been divided among France, Britain, the United States, and Russia. The city of Berlin was deep in the Russian sector but run by all four nations. So when the Soviets became irritated at all the containment in 1948, they blockaded Berlin, hoping to force the Western countries out of the city completely.
Instead, the Western countries mounted a huge airlift, shipping food and other supplies over the blockade and into the city. In May 1949, the Soviets lifted the blockade. But the tensions made both sides realize that there would be no easy solution to reestablishing a new Germany. So the Western powers agreed to create one country out of their half and the Soviets created another country out of the other half. East Germany and West Germany would not be just Germany for more than 40 years.
Big Red in the corn
One reason behind the distrust between the United States and the Soviet Union was that the countries didn't really know each other very well. So it was big news in 1959 when leaders of the two countries exchanged visits.
In July, Vice President Richard Nixon went to Moscow to attend an exhibit of American products, including a six-room, ranch-style model home. Nixon and Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev got into a heated — and televised — quarrel over the relative merits of each country's economic system.
In September, Khrushchev came to America. Among his stops were Hollywood, San
Francisco, Franklin Roosevelt's grave — and Coon Rapids, Iowa. It seems the chairman had been invited to visit the farm of a fellow named Roswell Garst, who had been selling corn seed to the Soviet Union since 1955, and fancied himself a bit of a diplomat as well as a farmer.
After a tour of Garst's farm, Khrushchev offered what could have been a summary of his whole trip. Garst, the chairman said, was a "class enemy," but was generously willing "to trade secrets with others — even us."
The "miracle of '48"
Despite some success overseas, Truman was considered a political dead duck as the 1948 elections drew near. The Republicans had gained seats in Congress in 1946. Truman’s former secretary of commerce, Henry Wallace, had decided to run as a liberal third-party candidate, sure to take votes from Truman. Segregationist Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina, also decided to run as an independent candidate. The Republicans were running Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, a man who was considered solid, if a bit dull (someone suggested he looked like the little plastic guy on wedding cakes).
But true to form, Truman decided to “give ’em hell.” He stumped around the country, ragging on the Republican-controlled Congress as a bunch of do-nothings and pledging to change things at home and abroad if given another term. When the votes were counted, Truman had pulled off the biggest upset in presidential political history, and the Democrats had taken back Congress. Their reward was another war.
The Korean War
The Cold War was at its hottest in Korea. After World War II ended, the Russians controlled the northern part of the country and the United States the south. In 1949, the Soviets left a communist government in charge in the north and the United States left a pro-Western government in the south. China, meanwhile, finished its civil war and was now firmly in the control of communists.
On June 24, 1950, the North Koreans invaded South Korea. A few days later, Truman ordered U.S. troops to the aid of South Korea and convinced the UN to send military aid as well, in what was referred to in diplomatic circles as a “police action.”
The UN troops, which were mostly American, were under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. Because the North Korean attack was such a surprise, the U.S. and South Korean forces were pushed into the far southern corner of the Korean peninsula by September. But MacArthur pulled off a risky but brilliant amphibious landing behind the North Koreans. By November, he had driven the enemy deep into North Korea and was poised to push them into China.
Then the Chinese army poured troops into the fight and forced the UN troops back into South Korea. But the UN forces reorganized and counterattacked, forcing the Chinese back behind the 38th parallel of latitude, where the war had started in the first place.
For the next 18 months, an uneasy truce, sporadically interrupted by skirmishing, was in place. Finally, in July 1953, an agreement to call the whole mess a draw was reached.
The Korean War cost more than $50 billion and 33,000 U.S. lives, plus another 110,000 or so were wounded. It also cost Truman politically. When MacArthur publicly disagreed with Truman over Truman’s decision not to invade China, the general was fired. MacArthur returned to a hero’s welcome in America, and Truman was unfairly pilloried as being soft on communism.
Truman didn’t run for reelection in 1952. Instead, the country turned to its most popular military figure in decades, Dwight David Eisenhower. “Ike” was so apolitical he didn’t even decide which political party to join until shortly before accepting the Republican nomination. He had been a great military leader in World War II. But as a president, his greatest attribute may have been that he didn’t screw things up too much.
Uncle Sam's big stick
One thing Eisenhower’s administration wasn’t shy about was injecting itself into other countries’ internal affairs. In 1953, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives helped topple a communist-influenced government in Iran and reinstate the dictatorial Shah. The following year, the CIA aided a coup in Guatemala, ousting a communist-backed but constitutionally elected leader and replacing him with a U.S.-friendly president.
It wasn’t only ideology that motivated America. In Iran, the United States made sure Iranian oil was kept flowing toward America and not the Soviet Union. In Guatemala, the interests of American fruit companies were being protected.
"Doominoes"
"You have a row of dominoes set up, and you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly."
— President Eisenhower, explaining why the United States needed to stop the communists in Vietnam, April 7, 1954.
In Asia, the United States was busy providing aid to France to help it fight a communist rebellion in its colony of Vietnam. By 1954, the French had lost the northern half of the country, and by 1956, the United States was steadily increasing the amount of aid it was sending to South Vietnam.
Finding Commies under the Bed
Not all the world’s communists were in other countries. Since the 1920s, there had been a communist party in the United States that had taken orders from party leaders in the Soviet Union. But the average American didn’t pay much attention.
After World War II, however, “communist” became a much dirtier word. U.S. government officials helped fuel the fire by talking almost daily about spies and the dangers of communists and communist sympathizers.
Part of the reason for the anti-communist fears was that communists ran America’s biggest post-war rivals, the Soviet Union and China. Part was bewilderment over the success the communists were having in Asia and Eastern Europe. And part was the failure to keep the atomic bomb the exclusive property of America.
Whatever the reason, commie hunting became a national pastime. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) — dominated by Republicans who included a freshman member from California named Richard M. Nixon — began searching for communists within and without government. One place they looked was Hollywood. Actors, directors, and writers were called before the committee, and 10 who refused to testify were jailed. Others were “blacklisted” and couldn’t get jobs in the industry for years afterward. But no great plot to undermine America through the movies was ever uncovered.
Helen Gahagan Douglas
Helen Gahagan Douglas was the "pink lady" of American politics. Douglas was born in New Jersey in 1900. She left college in 1922 to become an opera singer and a leading Broadway actress. With her husband, actor Melvyn Douglas, Helen moved to California and became active in Democratic politics. After working to better the plight of migrant farm workers, she won a seat in Congress in 1944, representing a heavily African-American district in Los Angeles.
In 1950, Helen ran for the U.S. Senate against another member of Congress, Richard Nixon.
Nixon had won a national reputation as a communist hunter and wasted little time implying that Helen was, if not an outright commie, "pink right down to her underwear."
Helen's liberalism did not play well with voters, especially after the Korean War broke out, and Nixon easily defeated her. She left politics, became an author, and died in 1980. As part of her legacy, she left behind a nickname she gave Nixon that stuck with him all the way to the White House: "Tricky Dick."
Casting suspicion on Hiss
The committee caught a bigger fish in 1948. Whittaker Chambers, a Time magazine editor who said he had been a communist until 1937, told the committee that a former member of Roosevelt’s State Department, Alger Hiss, had passed information to Russian spies.
Hiss denied the charges, even after Chambers produced from a hollowed-out pumpkin what he said was microfilm passed between the men. Neither could be prosecuted for espionage because too much time had passed. But Hiss was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to five years in prison. The Hiss conviction helped Nixon get elected to the Senate in 1950 and win a place as Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952.
Leaking scientific secrets: The Rosenbergs
Hiss wasn’t the only trophy for the commie hunters. In February 1950, it was revealed that a British scientist had given atomic secrets to the Soviets. Among his allies, it was announced, were a New York couple named Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were charged with getting information from Ethel’s brother, who worked on the U.S. bomb project in New Mexico. They were convicted of treason and executed in 1953.
A shot at polio
Every summer it showed up: a crippling disease that most often struck children and left them paralyzed or dead. In 1952 alone, more than 21,000 U.S. children were infected.
Jonas Salk wanted to do something about the poliomyelitis virus. Salk, a University of Pittsburgh Medical School researcher, worked for almost eight years to develop a vaccine. Finally, after exhaustive trials, the government licensed the vaccine on April 12, 1955. Salk refused to become rich by patenting the vaccine and hoped the federal government would take over its distribution. The Eisenhower Administration greeted the idea icily. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby called it "socialized medicine by the back door."
But Salk's vaccine, delivered via injections, eventually was distributed free by the government and saved thousands of children from the disease. In 1961, an oral vaccine developed by Dr. Albert Sabin was licensed and administered around the world. Polio is now virtually unknown in the United States, and by 2006, it was considered endemic in only six countries.
Checking the loyalty of federal workers
Despite some reservations that things were getting out of hand, President Truman didn’t leave all the ferreting out of communists to Congress. In 1947, Truman ordered a government-wide “loyalty” review. By the time it was done, more than 3 million federal workers had been reviewed. More than 2,000 workers resigned and about 200 were fired.
Not to be outdone, Congress passed bills in 1950 and 1952 — over Truman’s vetoes — that made it illegal to do anything “that would substantially contribute to the establishment . . . of a totalitarian dictatorship.” The bills also required “communist front organizations” to register with the Justice Department and denied admission to the country to aliens who had been members of “totalitarian” groups, even as children.
Telling tall tales: “Tail-Gunner Joe”
He was a liar and a drunk — and for a few years he was one of the most powerful men in America. In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin gave a speech in West Virginia. In the speech, McCarthy said he had a list of 205 known communists working in the State Department. It was nonsense, but it made national headlines, and McCarthy repeated it and similar charges over the next four years.
Shut up, Senator
"Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?"
— Army counsel Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy during hearings on suspected communists in the U.S. Army, June 9, 1954.
McCarthy, who claimed to have been a tail gunner who saw lots of action during World War II, actually had never seen any combat. But he was a formidable opponent in the commie-hunting field. He ripped even General George Marshall and President Eisenhower. Every time he made a charge that proved to be untrue, McCarthy simply made a new charge. The tactic became known as “McCarthyism.”
By the summer of 1954, however, McCarthy’s antics were wearing thin. When he began a series of attacks on the Army for “coddling” communists during congressional hearings, they were televised. Many Americans got their first look at McCarthy in action and were repulsed. In December 1954, the Senate censured him. He died in obscurity three years later of problems related to alcoholism.
Having It All
After World War II, the American economy hummed along. There were plenty of jobs for returning servicemen. There was also the G.I. Bill of Rights, which passed Congress in 1944 and provided veterans more than $13 billion in the decade after the war for college tuition, vocational training programs, or money to start a business.
A booming economy
Thanks to a $6 billion tax cut and all the savings from buying bonds during the war, Americans had plenty to spend. The high consumer demand for goods triggered high inflation — 14 to 15 percent the first two years after the war for goods in general, and a painful 25 percent for food. Such high costs in turn triggered a lot of labor unrest, with 5,000 strikes in 1946 alone, and major troubles in the coal and rail industries. President Truman reinstated wartime price controls to deal with inflation, and the Republican Congress passed a bill called the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 that restricted labor union power.
The Golden Age of grease
Brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald were bored with the drive-in barbeque joint they had opened in 1940 in San Bernardino, California, and they were tired of all the teens that hung around the place after they ate, as if it were a clubhouse.
So in 1948, the McDonalds fired their carhops, cut their menu to nine items, dropped the price of a hamburger from 30 cents to 15 cents, replaced tableware with paper bags and cups, and pre-assembled much of the food. The "fast food" was perfect for the speeded-up post-war society.
A Chicago milkshake machine salesman named Ray Kroc loved the idea. Kroc convinced the McDonalds to make him their franchising agent and then bought the brothers out in 1961. By the time he died in 1984, there were 7,500 McDonald's outlets. Today, there are more than 31,000, serving 47 million people a day in 119 countries.
And why did Kroc stick with the brothers' name even after he bought them out? Because, he once explained, no one was going to buy a "Kroc burger." Or a "Big Kroc," for that matter.
By 1949, the economy had adjusted to the ending of the war, and the country entered an almost unprecedented economic boom. From 1945 to 1960, the Gross National Product (the amount of goods and services produced) increased from $200 billion to $500 billion per year. Thousands of smaller companies merged or were gobbled up by large corporations. So were many family farms, by large “company” farms.
The economy wasn’t the only thing growing. The birth rate boomed as men and women pushed apart by the war made up for lost time. The population grew 20 percent in the 1950s, from 150 million to 180 million, and the generation born between 1946 and 1960 became known as the Baby Boomers. Along with the economy and the population, Americans’ appetite for the good life (the number of private cars purchased doubled in the 1950s) and the perceived need to “keep up with the Joneses” also grew.
Moving to the burbs
Having your own car meant you could live farther away from where you worked. The suburbs grew 47 percent in the 1950s as more and more Americans staked out their own little territory. New housing starts, which had dropped to 100,000 a year during the war, climbed to 1.5 million annually. To fill the need, homebuilders turned to assembly-line techniques. The leading pioneer was a New York developer named William J. Levitt. A former
Navy Seabee who knew how to build things in a hurry, Levitt bought 1,500 acres on Long Island, and on March 7, 1949, opened a sales office — with more than 1,000 customers already waiting. A basic Levitt four-room house on a 6,000-square-foot lot sold for $6,900, about 2 1/2 years’ wages. The cookie-cutter approach in Island Trees (later changed to Levittown) was criticized as stifling individuality. But to the 82,000 people living in 17,000 new houses, it was home. Other builders followed suit all over the country, and 13 million new homes were sold during the decade.
“No man who owns his own house and a lot can be a communist,” Levitt said. “He has too much to do.” Of course, his sentiments didn’t extend to African Americans: They were excluded from buying homes at his developments for fear they would scare away white buyers.
Tuning in to the tube
There was less discrimination when it came to selling consumer products, and one of the most popular products in the 1950s was the television (see Figure 17-1). At the start of the decade, there were about 3 million TV owners; by the end of it, there were 55 million, watching shows from 530 stations. The average price of TV sets dropped from about $500 in 1949 to $200 in 1953.
Figure 17-1: A family gathers around a TV to watch their favorite program.
Like radio before it, the spread of television had a huge cultural impact. Beginning with the 1948 campaign, it made itself felt in U.S. politics. One wonderful effect was that it made speeches shorter. Politicians and commentators alike began to think and speak in “sound bites” that fit the medium. By 1960, the televised debates between candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were considered a crucial element in Kennedy’s narrow victory. Television also helped make professional and college sports big businesses, and sometimes provided excellent comedy and dramatic shows to vast audiences that might not otherwise have had access to them.
But much television programming was mindless junk:
● It was designed to sell products.
● It homogenized cultural tastes.
● It created feelings of inadequacy in some who felt their real lives should compare with the insipidly happy characters they saw on Leave It to Beaver.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Newton Minnow called it “a vast wasteland.” Nonetheless, it was a popular wasteland: Comedian Milton Berle’s show was so loved, for example, that movie theaters in some towns closed down Tuesday nights because everyone was home watching “Uncle Miltie.”
Rockin' 'n' rollin'
America had 13 million teenagers by the mid-1950s, and they had a lot of money to spend — an average of about $10 a week. One of the things they spent it on was their own music. It was a mix of blues and country that was as much about youthful rebellion as it was the sound, and it was called rock ’n’ roll, a term coined by a Cleveland radio personality named Alan Freed, who became its Pied Piper.
Adult backlash was fierce. Ministers decried it as satanic, racists called it “jungle music,” and law enforcement officials deemed it riot-inciting. And the more adults squawked about it — surprise! — the more their kids wanted it. In 1954, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” by Bill Haley and the Comets sold more than 1 million records. Scores of rock stars came and went almost overnight. Others, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, were stars with more staying power.
An American king
And then there was Elvis. Born in Mississippi and raised in Tennessee by poor, working-class parents, Elvis Presley became perhaps the most recognized personality in the world during the decade. In 1956 alone, he was selling $75,000 worth of records per day and a staggering 54 million people tuned in to see him on the Ed Sullivan television show.
One effect of the new music was to open up new audiences for African-American performers. Chuck Berry became the first black rock star to have a hit on the mainstream charts. More than 90 years after the end of slavery, music was one of the few fields that were open to African Americans.
Riding at the Back of the Bus
By the 1950s, after fighting through two world wars and struggling through the Depression, many African Americans had had enough of running in place. The result was a series of events that added up to the beginning of the civil rights movement.
Brown against the board
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued one of its most important decisions. In a case called Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the court ruled that the segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.
It overturned an 1896 Supreme Court decision that had said schools could be segregated if the facilities that were offered different groups were equal (which of course they never were). “We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren.
The court followed its decision a year later with broad rules for desegregating America’s schools, but they included no timetable. Some communities moved quickly. But others, mostly in the South, made it clear they were in no hurry to comply with the court’s ruling. By 1957, only about 20 percent of Southern school districts had even begun the process.
In September 1957, a federal court ordered Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, desegregated. A white mob decided to block the admission of nine black students, and Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus refused to do anything about it. So a reluctant President Eisenhower sent in 1,000 federal troops and activated 10,000 members of the National Guard to protect the students and escort them to class.
Fair ball
Branch Rickey needed an African American who was smart, had the ability to play baseball at the major league level — and could keep his mouth shut under trying circumstances.
Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, thought he had found him in John Roosevelt Robinson. Known to his friends as "Jackie," Robinson was a 28-year-old UCLA graduate and former Army officer whom Rickey had signed to play for Montreal in the minor leagues in 1945. Robinson was irritated when Rickey kept telling him about all the virulent hatred he would face as the first African-American player in the major leagues.
"Mr. Rickey, do you want a ballplayer who's afraid to fight back?" Robinson asked.
Rickey replied, "I want a player with guts enough not to fight back."
On April 15, 1947, Robinson stepped to the plate for the first time in a major league game. By the end of the year, he was the National League's best rookie, and two years later, its most valuable player. Robinson opened the gates for thousands of African Americans in professional sports and inspired millions of Americans of all races with his dignity, courage, and refusal to lose.
In the same month, Congress passed a bill that
● Authorized the attorney general to stop Southern elected officials from interfering with African Americans registering to vote
● Established a federal Civil Rights Commission
● Created a civil rights enforcement division within the U.S. Justice Department.
The sad fact, however, was that in many places in the South, the laws went largely unenforced.
Boycotting the bus
Like a rock dropped in a still pond, the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation started ripples of change throughout the country. One of them hit Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955. A 42-year-old African-American woman named Rosa Parks was tired after a long day working, and she was tired of being treated as a second-class human being. So Parks refused to get up from her seat on the bus when the driver demanded she give it to a white man. That was against the law, and Parks was arrested.
Sput-what?
Frankly, it didn't look like much: a little blip of a light in the evening sky that appeared to be moving much slower than its 18,000 miles per hour.
But to Americans watching on October 5, 1957, the blip represented a terrible thought: The commies might someday rule the world from outer space. That's because the little blip was a Soviet satellite called "Sputnik" (Russian for "fellow traveler"). It was the first such object, and within a few weeks it was followed by Sputnik II.
Americans were shocked. Fears of super weapons orbiting above the United States competed with the feeling that a new day was dawning for humanity. During the next year, the United States launched four satellites of its own, and within two years, U.S. efforts to catch up with the Soviet Union in space were in full gear. The Space Race had joined the Arms Race in the political Olympics between the Super Powers.
Her arrest sparked a boycott of the bus system by the black community. Facing the highly damaging boycott and a 1956 Supreme Court decision that declared segregation on public transportation unconstitutional, the Montgomery bus company dropped its race-based seating plan in 1957.
More important than getting to ride in the front of the bus was the example the boycott set as to how effective organized demonstrations against segregation could be. Equally important was the emergence on the national scene of the boycott’s leader, an eloquent, charismatic son of a well-known Atlanta minister, who admired the non-violent protest philosophies of India’s Mohandas Gandhi. His name was Martin Luther King Jr., and he was to become one of the most important men in America in the coming decade.