APUSH Unit 7: Chapters 24, 25, 26, 27, 28

Assasination of JFK

-November 22, 1963 JFK is shot and killed as his motorcade passed through Dallas Texas -Lyndon B Johnson becomes 36th president -police arrest Lee Harvey Oswald and charge him with the crime -Oswald is killed 2 days later by Jack Ruby Kennedy's youthful image, the trauma of his assassination, and the nation's sense of loss contributed to a powerful Kennedy mystique. His canonization after death capped what had been an extraordinarily stage-managed presidency. An admiring country saw in Jack and Jackie Kennedy an ideal American marriage (though JFK was, in fact, an obsessive womanizer); in Kennedy the epitome of robust good health (though he was actually afflicted by Addison's disease); and in the Kennedy White House a glamorous world of high fashion and celebrity. No other presidency ever matched the Kennedy aura, but every president after him embraced the idea that image mattered as much as reality in conducting a politically effective presidency.

Truman Doctrine

1947, President Truman's policy of providing economic and military aid to any country threatened by communism or totalitarian ideology, mainly helped Greece and Turkey In a speech on March 12, he asserted an American responsibility "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." To that end, Truman proposed large-scale assistance for Greece and Turkey (then involved in a dispute with the Soviet Union over the Dardanelles, a strait connecting the Aegean Sea and the Sea of Marmara). "If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world," Truman declared (AP® Thinking Like a Historian). Congress quickly approved Truman's request for $300 million in aid to Greece and $100 million for Turkey.

National Interstate and Defense Highways Act

1956, in a move that drastically altered America's landscape and driving habits uthorized $26 billion over a ten-year period for the construction of a nationally integrated highway system — 42,500 miles Cast as a Cold War necessity because broad highways made evacuating crowded cities easier in the event of a nuclear attack, the law changed American cities forever. An enormous public works program surpassing anything undertaken during the New Deal, and enthusiastically endorsed by the Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, federal highways made possible the massive suburbanization of the nation in the 1960s. Interstate highways rerouted traffic away from small towns, bypassed well-traveled main roads such as the cross-country Route 66, and cut wide swaths through old neighborhoods in the cities.

Presidential Commission on the Status of Women,

1961 - JFK Commission appointed by President Kennedy in 1961, which issued a 1963 report documenting job and educational discrimination. (p. 852)

Silent Spring

1962 book by Rachel Carson that started the environmental movement a stunning analysis of the pesticide DDT's toxic impact on the human and natural food chains.

Title IX

1972, Congress broadened the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include educational institutions, prohibiting colleges and universities that received federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex. By requiring comparable funding for sports programs, Title IX made women's athletics a real presence on college campuses. Women also became increasingly visible in public life. Congresswomen Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm joined Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, the founder of Ms. magazine, to create the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971. Abzug and Chisholm, both from New York, joined Congresswomen Patsy Mink from Hawaii and Martha Griffiths from Michigan to sponsor equal rights legislation. Congress authorized child-care tax deductions for working parents in 1972 and in 1974 passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which enabled married women to get credit, including credit cards and mortgages, in their own names.

Paris Peace Accords

1973 cease-fire agreement where the US agreed to withdraw their troops from South Vietnam 1973 peace agreement between the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the Vietcong that effectively ended the Vietnam War.

three mile island

1979 - A mechanical failure and a human error at this power plant in Pennsylvania combined to permit an escape of radiation over a 16 mile radius. almost a nuclear meltdown

"Economic growth was indeed the most decisive force in the shaping of attitudes and expectations in the postwar era. The prosperity of the period broadened gradually in the late 1940s, accelerated in the 1950s, and soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s. By then it was a boom that astonished observers. One economist, writing about the twenty-five years following World War II, put it simply by saying that this was a 'quarter century of sustained growth at the highest rates in recorded history.' Former Prime Minister Edward Heath of Great Britain agreed, observing that the United States at the time was enjoying 'the greatest prosperity the world has ever known.'" — James T. Patterson, historian, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974, published in 1996 The increased culture of consumerism during the 1950s was most similar to developments in which of the following earlier periods? A The 1840s B The 1860s C The 1910s D The 1920s

20s

"Economic growth was indeed the most decisive force in the shaping of attitudes and expectations in the postwar era. The prosperity of the period broadened gradually in the late 1940s, accelerated in the 1950s, and soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s. By then it was a boom that astonished observers. One economist, writing about the twenty-five years following World War II, put it simply by saying that this was a 'quarter century of sustained growth at the highest rates in recorded history.' Former Prime Minister Edward Heath of Great Britain agreed, observing that the United States at the time was enjoying 'the greatest prosperity the world has ever known.'" — James T. Patterson, historian, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974, published in 1996 Which of the following factors most directly contributed to the economic trend that Patterson describes? A A surge in the national birthrate B The expansion of voting rights for African Americans C Challenges to conformity raised by intellectuals and artists D The gradual emergence of détente with the Soviet Union

A A surge in the national birthrate

The policy of containment, justified by George Kennan's 1947 analysis of the international situation, called for A blocking the expansion of the Soviet Union's influence B curbing United States foreign investment to limit involvement in world conflict C liberating Eastern Europe form communism D destabilizing the Soviet Union E dividing Germany into zones administered by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union

A blocking the expansion of the Soviet Union's influence

The major objective of the antipoverty programs of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society was to A break the cycle of poverty among poor people through education and job training B provide temporary benefits to the "new poor" during times of recession C transfer the federal government's responsibility for welfare back to the states D simplify welfare by replacing job programs with cash grants for the poor E build a socialist society in the United States

A break the cycle of poverty among poor people through education and job training

1968 Democratic National Convention

A convention held in Chicago during which numerous antiwar demonstrators outside the convention hall were tear-gassed and clubbed by police. Inside the convention hall, the delegates were bitterly divided over Vietnam. Thousands of protesters descended on the city. The most visible group, led by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, a remarkable pair of troublemakers, claimed to represent the Youth International Party (whose members were known as "Yippies"). To mock those inside the convention hall, they nominated a live pig, Pigasus, for president. The Yippies' stunts were geared toward maximum media exposure. But a far larger and more serious group of activists had come to Chicago to demonstrate against the war as well — and they staged what many came to call the Siege of Chicago. Democratic mayor Richard J. Daley ordered the police to break up the demonstrations. Several nights of skirmishes between protesters and police culminated on the evening of the nominations. In what an official report later described as a "police riot," police officers attacked protesters with tear gas and clubs. As the nominating speeches proceeded, television networks broadcast scenes of the riot, cementing a popular impression of the Democrats as the party of disorder. "They are going to be spending the next four years picking up the pieces," one Republican said gleefully. Inside the hall, the party dispiritedly nominated Hubert H. Humphrey, Johnson's vice president. The delegates approved a middle-of-the-road platform that endorsed continued fighting in Vietnam while urging a diplomatic solution to the conflict.

Vietcong

A group of Communist guerrillas who, with the help of North Vietnam, fought against the South Vietnamese government in the Vietnam War.

Medicare

A health plan for the elderly passed in 1965 and funded by a surcharge on Social Security payroll taxes

Medicade

A health plan for the poor passed in 1965 and paid for by general tax revenues and administered by the state

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 twentieth century and in various organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party. The philosophy of black nationalism signified many things in the 1960s. It could mean everything from pride in one's community to total separatism, from building African American-owned businesses to wearing dashikis in honor of African traditions. Historically, nationalism had emphasized black pride, "self-help" (African Americans creating their own community institutions), and black people's right to shape their own destiny. In the late nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass stood as a primary inspiration, and nationalists founded the Back to Africa movement. In the 1920s the nationalist Marcus Garvey inspired African Americans to take pride in their racial heritage

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 (two college students). 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. A militant organization dedicated to protecting African Americans from police violence, the Panthers took their cue from the slain Malcolm X. They vehemently opposed the Vietnam War and declared their affinity for Third World revolutionary movements and armed struggle (Map 26.5). In their manifesto, "What We Want, What We Believe," the Panthers outlined their Ten Point Program for black liberation. The Panthers' organization spread to other cities in the late 1960s, where members undertook a wide range of community-organizing projects. Their free breakfast program for children and their testing program for sickle-cell anemia, an inherited disease with a high incidence among African Americans, were especially popular. However, the Panthers' radicalism and belief in armed self-defense resulted in violent clashes with police. Newton was charged with murdering a police officer, several Panthers were killed by police, and dozens went to prison. Moreover, under its domestic counterintelligence program, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had begun disrupting party activities.

Beyond city limits, suburbanization and the economic crisis combined powerfully in what became known as the tax revolt

A movement to lower or eliminate taxes. California's Proposition 13, which rolled back property taxes, capped future increases for present owners, and required that all tax measures have a two-thirds majority in the legislature, was the result of one such revolt, inspiring similar movements across the country. a dramatic reversal of the postwar spirit of generous public investment. The premier example was California. Inflation pushed real estate values upward, and property taxes skyrocketed. Hardest hit were suburban property owners, along with retirees and others on fixed incomes, who suddenly faced unaffordable tax bills. Into this dire situation stepped Howard Jarvis, a conservative anti-New Dealer and a genius at mobilizing grassroots discontent. In 1978, Jarvis proposed Proposition 13, an initiative that would roll back property taxes, cap future increases for present owners, and require that all tax measures have a two-thirds majority in the legislature. Despite opposition by virtually the entire state leadership, including politicians from both parties, Californians voted overwhelmingly for Jarvis's measure.

Vietnamization

A new U.S. policy, devised under President Nixon in the early 1970s, of delegating the ground fighting to the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. American troop levels dropped and American casualties dropped correspondingly, but the killing in Vietnam continued Far from abating, however, the antiwar movement intensified.

In many ways, Lyndon Johnson was the opposite of Kennedy.

A seasoned Texas politician and longtime Senate leader, Johnson was most at home in the back rooms of power. He was a rough-edged character who had scrambled his way up, with few scruples, to wealth and political eminence. But he never forgot his modest, hill-country origins or lost his sympathy for the downtrodden. Johnson lacked Kennedy's style, but he rose to the political challenge after Kennedy's assassination, applying his astonishing energy and negotiating skills to revive several of Kennedy's stalled programs, and many more of his own, in the ambitious Great Society.

On assuming the presidency, Lyndon Johnson made passing the civil rights bill a priority.

A southerner and former Senate majority leader, Johnson was renowned for his fierce persuasive style and tough political bargaining. By appealing to the white South's conscience, invoking the memory of the slain JFK, and practicing his own brand of hardball politics, Johnson overcame the filibuster. In June 1964, Congress approved the most far-reaching civil rights law since Reconstruction. The keystone of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII, outlawed discrimination in employment on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex. Another section guaranteed equal access to public accommodations and schools. The law granted new enforcement powers to the U.S. attorney general and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to implement the prohibition against job discrimination.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "Snick")

A student civil rights group founded in 1960 under the mentorship of activist Ella Baker. SNCC initially embraced an interracial and nonhierarchical structure that encouraged leadership at the grassroots level and practiced the civil disobedience principles of Martin Luther King Jr. As violence toward civil rights activists escalated nationwide in the 1960s, SNCC expelled nonblack members and promoted "black power" and the teachings of Malcolm X. The sit-ins drew black college students into the movement in significant numbers for the first time. Northern students formed solidarity committees and raised money for bail. SNCC quickly emerged as the most important student protest organization in the country and inspired a generation of students on college campuses across the nation. Baker took a special interest in these students because she found them receptive to her notion of participatory democracy

Winning antidiscrimination legislation depended on coalition politics.

African American activists forged alliances with trade unions and liberal organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker group), among many others. Progress was slow and often occurred only after long periods of unglamorous struggle to win votes in state capitals such as Albany, New York; Springfield, Illinois; and Lansing, Michigan. The first fair employment laws had come in New York and New Jersey in 1945. A decade passed, however, before other states with significant black populations passed similar legislation. Antidiscrimination laws in housing were even more difficult to pass, with most progress not coming until the 1960s. These legislative campaigns in northern states received little national attention, but they were instrumental in laying the groundwork for legal equality outside the South.

As with Germany, American officials believed at the conclusion of World War II that restoring Japan's economy, while limiting its military influence, would ensure prosperity and contain communism in East Asia.

After dismantling Japan's military, American occupation forces under General Douglas MacArthur drafted a democratic constitution and paved the way for the restoration of Japanese sovereignty in 1951. Considering the scorched-earth war that had just ended, this was a remarkable achievement, thanks partly to the imperious MacArthur but mainly to the Japanese, who embraced peace and accepted U.S. military protection. However, events on the mainland of Asia proved much more difficult for the United States to shape to its advantage.

Germany represented the biggest challenge of all.

American officials at Potsdam believed that a revived German economy was essential to ensuring the prosperity of democratic regimes throughout Western Europe — and to keeping ordinary Germans from turning again to Nazism. In contrast, Stalin hoped merely to extract reparations from Germany in the form of industrial machines and goods. In exchange for American recognition of a new German-Polish border, Truman and Secretary of State James Byrnes convinced the Soviet leader to accept German reparations only from the Soviet zone, which was largely rural and promised little wealth or German industry to plunder.

This arms race was another critical feature of the Cold War.

American officials believed the best deterrent to Soviet aggression was the threat of an all-out nuclear response by the United States, which was dubbed "massive retaliation" by Secretary of State Dulles.

Young Lords Organization (YLO)

Among those inspired by the Black Panthers were Puerto Ricans in New York Like the Black Panthers, YLO activists sought self-determination for Puerto Ricans, both those in the United States and those on the island in the Caribbean. In practical terms, the YLO focused on improving neighborhood conditions: city garbage collection was notoriously poor in East Harlem, where most Puerto Ricans lived, and slumlords had allowed the housing to become squalid. Women in the YLO were especially active, protesting sterilization campaigns against Puerto Rican women and fighting to improve access to health care. As was true of so many nationalist groups, immediate victories for the YLO were few, but their dedicated community organizing produced a generation of leaders (many of whom later went into politics) and awakened community consciousness.

Vietminh

An organization of Vietnamese Communists and other nationalist groups that between 1946 and 1954 fought for Vietnamese independence from the French Leader: Ho Chi Minh - communist

The American economy produced an extraordinary postwar record

Annual GDP jumped from $213 billion in 1945 to more than $500 billion in 1960; by 1970, it exceeded $1 trillion (Figure 25.1). This sustained economic growth helped produce a 25 percent rise in real income for ordinary Americans between 1946 and 1959. Even better, the new prosperity featured low inflation. After a burst of high prices in the immediate postwar period, inflation slowed to 2 to 3 percent annually, and it stayed low until the escalation of the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s. Feeling secure about the future, Americans were eager to spend and rightly felt that they were better off than ever before. In 1940, 43 percent of American families owned their homes; by 1960, 62 percent did. In that period, moreover, income inequality dropped sharply. The share of total income going to the top tenth — the richest Americans — declined by nearly one-third from the 45 percent it had been in 1940. American society had become not only more prosperous but also more egalitarian.

Despite Democratic gains in 1974, the electoral realignment that had begun with Richard Nixon's presidential victories in 1968 and 1972 continued.

As liberals proved unable to stop runaway inflation or speed up economic growth, conservatives gained greater traction with the public. The postwar liberal economic formula — sometimes known as the Keynesian consensus — consisted of micro-adjustments to the money supply coupled with federal spending. When that formula failed to restart the economy in the mid-1970s, conservatives in Congress used this opening to articulate alternatives, especially economic deregulation and tax cuts (Chapter 29).

Vietnam and the increasingly radical youth rebellion intersected with the turn toward racial and ethnic nationalism by young African American and Chicano activists.

As we saw in Chapter 26, the Black Power and Chicano movements broke with the liberal "rights" politics of an older generation of leaders. These new activists expressed fury at the poverty and white racism that were beyond the reach of civil rights laws; they also saw Vietnam as an unjust war against other people of color.

"Economic growth was indeed the most decisive force in the shaping of attitudes and expectations in the postwar era. The prosperity of the period broadened gradually in the late 1940s, accelerated in the 1950s, and soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s. By then it was a boom that astonished observers. One economist, writing about the twenty-five years following World War II, put it simply by saying that this was a 'quarter century of sustained growth at the highest rates in recorded history.' Former Prime Minister Edward Heath of Great Britain agreed, observing that the United States at the time was enjoying 'the greatest prosperity the world has ever known.'" — James T. Patterson, historian, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974, published in 1996 Many of the federal policies and initiatives passed in the 1960s address which of the following about the economic trend described in the excerpt? A Affluence had effectively eliminated racial discrimination. B Pockets of poverty persisted despite overall affluence. C A rising standard of living encouraged unionization of industrial workers. D Private industry boomed in spite of a declining rate of federal spending.

B

Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were similar as presidential candidates in that both A articulated the public's desire for less involvement in foreign affairs B capitalized on their status as Washington outsiders C promised Congress increased control over domestic matters D renounced private fund-raising in support of their campaigns E had built national reputations as legislators

B capitalized on their status as Washington outsiders

Jimmy Carter and Ronald Regan were similar as presidential candidates in that both A articulated the public's desire for less involvement in foreign affairs B capitalized on their status as Washington outsiders C promised Congress increased control over domestic matters D renounced private fund-raising in support of their campaigns E had built national reputations as legislators

B capitalized on their status as Washington outsiders

The support for former Alabama governor George Wallace in the 1968 presidential campaign best illustrates the A impact of the economic downturn on the working class B exploitation of race as a national political issue C growing power of the political Left in American politics D persistence of anticommunism as a political force E loss of faith of many Americans in Republican party policies

B exploitation of race as a national political issue

In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about the dangers of A presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon B insufficient federal spending on the needs of the poor C communist subversion of the civil rights movement D the military-industrial complex E the lack of a national health insurance program

B insufficient federal spending on the needs of the poor

Major domestic developments in the United States during President Eisenhower's two terms included all of the following EXCEPT A a rise in the gross national product (GNP) B the dismantling of New Deal welfare programs C the peaking of the postwar baby boom D the exodus of Black families from the rural South E the beginning of construction of an interstate highway system

B the dismantling of New Deal welfare programs

Marriage, family structure, and gender roles had been undergoing significant changes since the turn of the twentieth century

Beginning in the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans increasingly saw marriage as "companionate," that is, based on romantic love and a lifetime of shared friendship. Companionate did not mean equal. In the mid-twentieth century, family life remained governed by notions of gender inequality, in which men provided economic support and controlled the family's financial resources, while women cared for children and occupied a secondary position in public life. The resurgent postwar American middle class was preoccupied with the virtues of this paternalist, or patriarchal, vision of family life. Everyone from professional psychologists to television advertisers and every organization from schools to the popular press celebrated nuclear families. Children were prized, and women's caregiving roles were valorized. This view of family life, and especially its emphasis on female "domesticity," was bolstered by Cold War politics. Americans who deviated from prevailing gender and familial norms were not only viewed with scorn but were also sometimes thought to be subversive and politically dangerous. Yet the model of domesticity so highly esteemed in the postwar middle class hid deeper, longer-term changes in the way marriage, gender roles, women's work, and even sex were understood. To comprehend the postwar decades, we have to keep in mind that while domesticity remained the ideal, in people's daily lives a sometimes different reality held true.

The Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan 1963, it targeted a different audience: college-educated, middle-class women who found themselves not working for wages but rather stifled by their domestic routine. Tens of thousands of women read Friedan's book and thought, "She's talking about me." The Feminine Mystique became a runaway best-seller. Friedan persuaded middle-class women that they needed more than the convenience foods, improved diapers, and better laundry detergents that magazines and television urged them to buy. To live rich and fulfilling lives, they needed education and work outside the home.

During the war fought "to make the world safe for democracy," the United States was far from ready to extend full equality to its own black citizens.

Black workers faced discrimination in wartime employment, and the more than 1 million black troops who served in World War II were placed in segregated units commanded solely by whites. Both at home and abroad, World War II "immeasurably magnified the Negro's awareness of the disparity between the American profession and practice of democracy," NAACP president Walter White observed.

In April 1950, the NSC delivered its report, known as NSC-68

Bristling with alarmist rhetoric, the document marked a decisive turning point in the U.S. approach to the Cold War. The report's authors described the Soviet Union not as a typical great power but as one with a "fanatic faith" that seeks to "impose its absolute authority." Going beyond even the stern language used by George Kennan, NSC-68 cast Soviet ambitions as nothing short of "the domination of the Eurasian landmass." To prevent that outcome, the report proposed "a bold and massive program of rebuilding the West's defensive potential to surpass that of the Soviet world" (AP®America in the World). This included the development of a hydrogen bomb, a thermonuclear device that would be a thousand times more destructive than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, as well as dramatic increases in conventional military forces. Critically, NSC-68 called for Americans to pay higher taxes to support the new military program and to accept whatever sacrifices were necessary to achieve national unity of purpose against the Soviet enemy. Many historians see the report as having "militarized" the American approach to the Cold War, which had to that point relied largely on economic measures such as aid to Greece and the Marshall Plan. Truman was reluctant to commit to a major defense buildup, fearing that it would overburden the national budget. But shortly after NSC-68 was completed, events in Asia led him to reverse course.

In the decade following the Second World War, the Supreme Court decision that had the most widespread consequences concerned which of the following? A Immigration policy B Congressional reappointment C The rights of minority groups D The jurisdiction of courts in determining war guilt E The federal government's powers of taxation

C The rights of minority groups

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a Supreme Court decision that A was a forerunner of the Kansas-Nebraska Act B established free public colleges in the United States C declared racially segregated public schools inherently unequal D established free public elementary and secondary schools in the United States E provided for federal support of parochial schools

C declared racially segregated public schools inherently unequal

The Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT), expanded trade with the Soviet Union, and President Richard Nixon's visit to the People's Republic of China were all facets of the policy of A brinkmanship B deterrence C détente D rollback E liberation

C détente

One of the immediate consequences of the Tet offensive in 1968 was that A President Johnson completed the process of Vietnamization B North Vietnamese troops took control of Saigon C popular support for the war declined in the United States D the South Vietnamese government was overthrown E Congress gave greater support to President Johnson's war policies

C popular support for the war declined in the United States

"Economic growth was indeed the most decisive force in the shaping of attitudes and expectations in the postwar era. The prosperity of the period broadened gradually in the late 1940s, accelerated in the 1950s, and soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s. By then it was a boom that astonished observers. One economist, writing about the twenty-five years following World War II, put it simply by saying that this was a 'quarter century of sustained growth at the highest rates in recorded history.' Former Prime Minister Edward Heath of Great Britain agreed, observing that the United States at the time was enjoying 'the greatest prosperity the world has ever known.'" — James T. Patterson, historian, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974, published in 1996 One significant result of the economic trend described in the excerpt was the A rise of the sexual revolution in the United States B decrease in the number of immigrants seeking entry to the United States C rise of the Sun Belt as a political and economic force D decrease in the number of women in the workforce

C rise of the Sun Belt as a political and economic force

The initial response of the United Stated to the outbreak of war in Korea was to A seek the cooperation of the People's Republic of China to end the fighting B increase American aid to Indochina to meet the threat of communist aggression C seek collective action against North Korea through the United Nations D encourage Japan to rearm E request a summit meeting with the Soviet Union

C seek collective action against North Korea through the United Nations

Students staged a sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 to protest A poverty in the South B cutbacks in student aid C segregation of public facilities D the war in Vietnam E the oppression of women

C segregation of public facilities

The high inflation rates of the late 1960s and early 1970s were due in part to A major state and federal tax increases B increased investment in major industries C spending on social-welfare programs and the Vietnam War D a decline in foreign trade E deregulation of key transportation and defense industries

C spending on social-welfare programs and the Vietnam War

Suburban living, although a nationwide phenomenon, was most at home in the Sunbelt(the southern and southwestern states), where taxes were low, the climate was mild, and open space allowed for sprawling subdivisions (Map 25.2).

CALI, texas, florida A distinctive feature of Sunbelt suburbanization was its close relationship to the military-industrial complex Moreover, the aerospace, defense, and electronics industries were based largely in Sunbelt metropolitan regions. With government contracts fueling the economy and military bases providing thousands of jobs, Sunbelt politicians had every incentive to support vigorous defense spending by the federal government. Sunbelt suburbanization was best exemplified by Orange County, California. Southwest of Los Angeles, Orange County was until the 1940s mostly just that — a land of oranges, groves of them. But during World War II, boosters attracted new bases and training facilities for the marines, navy, and air force (at the time the army air corps). Cold War militarization and the Korean War kept those bases humming, and Hughes Aircraft, Ford Aeronautics, and other defense-related manufacturers built new plants in the sunny, sprawling groves. So did subdivision developers, who built so many new homes that the population of the county jumped from 130,760 in 1940 to 703,925 in 1960. Casting his eye on all this development in the early 1950s, an entrepreneurial filmmaker and cartoonist named Walt Disney chose Anaheim in Orange County as the place for a massive new amusement park. Disneyland was to the new generation of suburbanites what Coney Island had been to an earlier generation of urbanites.

other challenges to traditional morality received national media attention, and the media themselves became a controversial source of these challenges.

Concerned that excessive crime, violence, and sex in comic books were encouraging juvenile delinquency, the U.S. Senate held nationally televised hearings in 1954. The Senate's final report, written largely by the Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver, complained of the "scantily clad women" and "penchant for violent death" common in comic books aimed at teenagers. Kefauver's report forced the comics industry to tame its wildest practices but did little to slow the growing frankness about both sex and violence in the nation's print media and films.

In the late 1940s, American officials developed a clear strategy toward the Soviet Union

Containment convinced that the USSR was methodically expanding its reach, the United States would counter by limiting Soviet influence to Eastern Europe while reconstituting democratic governments in Western Europe. In this anxious context, the strategy of containment emerged in a series of incremental steps between 1946 and 1949

The principal reason for the formation of the Dixiecrat party in 1948 was the opposition of dissident Democrats to President Truman's A establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency B removal of General MacArthur from his military command C support for the Taft-Hartley Act D proposal for civil rights legislation E call for an investigation of the loyalty of all federal employees

D

Kent State University was the site in 1970 of which of the following events? A A rock concert second only to the Woodstock concert in the number of attendees B A highly publicized sit-in advocating women's rights C The first event in observance of Earth Day, which sought to increase public awareness of environmental degradation D An antiwar demonstration in which four students were killed by members of the National Guard E A demonstration by African American, Hispanic, and White students in support of affirmative action that helped draw public attention to the issue

D An antiwar demonstration in which four students were killed by members of the National Guard

During his presidency, Richard Nixon did which of the following? A Supported the use of busing to end racial segregation in public schools. B Intensified conflict between the United States and Japan. C Abolished the Tennessee Valley Authority. D Ended American participation in the war in Vietnam. E Created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

D Ended American participation in the war in Vietnam.

Which of the following is true of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? A It ended the Vietnam War. B It barely passed in Congress, reflecting the bitter division over American involvement in Vietnam. C It was a statement of American policy that followed the Tet offensive. D It allowed the President to deploy combat troops in South Vietnam. E It provided for the first peace negotiations between the United States and North Vietnam.

D It allowed the President to deploy combat troops in South Vietnam.

The Black Power movement of the late 1960s advocated that African Americans A organize political parties sympathetic to communism B establish African American communities in Africa C seek the racial integration of northeastern cities D establish control of their political and economic life E assimilate into White society

D establish control of their political and economic life

As for the Democrats, Watergate granted them a reprieve, a second chance at recapturing their eroding base.

Democratic candidates in the 1974 midterm elections made Watergate and Ford's pardon of Nixon their top issues. It worked. Seventy-five new Democratic members of the House came to Washington in 1975, many of them under the age of forty-five, and the press dubbed them Watergate babies. Young and reform-minded, the Watergate babies solidified huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and quickly set to work. They eliminated the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had investigated alleged Communists in the 1940s and 1950s and antiwar activists in the 1960s. In the Senate, Democrats reduced the number of votes needed to end a filibuster from 67 to 60 — a move intended to weaken the power of the minority to block legislation. In both houses, Democrats dismantled the existing committee structure, which had entrenched power in the hands of a few elite committee chairs. Overall, the Watergate babies helped to decentralize power in Washington and bring greater transparency to American government.

Despite the postwar domestic ideal, financial necessity increasingly took women outside their homes and into the workforce

Despite rising employment rates, occupational segmentation still haunted women. American society steadfastly upheld the domestic ideal even as so many women entered the workforce. When mothers took jobs outside the home, they still bore full responsibility for child care and household management, contributing to the "double day" of paid work and family work. Meanwhile, the pressures of the Cold War made strong nuclear families with breadwinning fathers and domesticated mothers symbols of a healthy nation. Americans wanted to believe they upheld the domestic ideal even if it did not perfectly describe the reality of their lives.

The Democratic majority in Congress and the Republican president generally found common ground on these issues, and Time magazine wondered if the environment was "the gut issue that can unify a polarized nation."

Despite the broad popularity of the movement, however, Time's prediction was not borne out. Corporations opposed environmental regulations, as did many of their workers, who believed that tightened standards threatened their jobs. "IF YOU'RE HUNGRY AND OUT OF WORK, EAT AN ENVIRONMENTALIST," read one labor union bumper sticker. By the 1980s, environmentalism starkly divided Americans, with proponents of unfettered economic growth on one side and environmental activists preaching limits on the other.

The Sharon Statement

Drafted by founding members of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), this manifesto outlined the group's principles and inspired young conservatives who would play important roles in the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

The Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka essentially reversed which of the following earlier Court decisions? A Marbury v. Madison B Dred Scott v. Sanford C Roe v. Wade D Gideon v. Wainwright E Plessy v. Ferguson

E

In an influential 1947 article, diplomat George F. Kennan advocated that the United States should A invade the Soviet Union to establish democracy B adopt a more conciliatory policy toward the Soviet Union C conduct covert activities in underdeveloped countries to undermine communist movements D grant most-favored-nation status to China E focus its foreign policy on containing the spread of Soviet communism

E focus its foreign policy on containing the spread of Soviet communism

The decade after the Second World War was characterized by all of the following EXCEPT A unprecedented prosperity B rapid and extensive suburbanization C a population explosion known as the "baby boom" D the growing strength of the movement for African American civil rights E widespread student opposition to the development of nuclear weaponry

E widespread student opposition to the development of nuclear weaponry

An early foreshadowing of those divisions came in the brewing controversy over nuclear power. Electricity from the atom — what could be better? That was how Americans had greeted the arrival of power-generating nuclear technology in the 1950s. By 1974, U.S. utility companies were operating forty-two nuclear power plants, with a hundred more planned. Given the oil crisis, nuclear energy might have seemed a godsend; unlike coal- or oil-driven plants, nuclear operations produced no air pollutants.

Environmentalists, however, publicized the dangers of nuclear power plants: a reactor meltdown would be catastrophic, and so, in slow motion, would the dumping of radioactive waste, which would generate toxic levels of radioactivity for hundreds of years. These fears seemed to be confirmed in March 1979, when the reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, came close to meltdown. More than 100,000 people fled their homes. A prompt shutdown saved the plant, but the near catastrophe enabled environmentalists to win the battle over nuclear energy. After the incident at Three Mile Island, no new nuclear plants were authorized, though a handful with existing authorization were built in the 1980s. Today, nuclear reactors account for 20 percent of all U.S. power generation — substantially less than several European nations, but still fourth in the world.

The economic downturn of the early 1970s was the deepest slump since the Great Depression.

Every major economic indicator — employment, productivity, growth — turned negative, and by 1973 the economy was in a tailspin. Inflation, brought on in part by military spending on the war in Vietnam, proved especially difficult to control. When a Middle East embargo cut oil supplies in 1973, prices climbed even more. Unemployment remained high and productivity growth low until 1982. Overall, the 1970s represented the worst economic decade of the postwar period — what California governor Jerry Brown called an "era of limits." In this time of distress, Americans were forced to consider other limits to the growth and expansion that had long been markers of national progress. The environmental movement brought attention to the toxic effects of modern industrial capitalism on the natural world. As the urban crisis grew worse, several major cities verged on bankruptcy. Finally, political limits were reached as well: none of the presidents of the 1970s could reverse the nation's economic slide, though each spent years trying.

Britain's influence in the world was declining

Exhausted by the war, facing budget deficits and a collapsing economy at home, and confronted with growing independence movements throughout its empire, particularly in India led by Mohandas Gandhi, Britain was waning as a global power

One of the ironies of the 1960s was the enormous strain that all of this liberal activism placed on the New Deal coalition.

Faced with often competing demands from the civil rights movement, feminists, the poor, labor unions, conservative southern Democrats, the suburban middle class, and urban political machines, the old Rooseveltian coalition had begun to fray. Johnson hoped that the New Deal coalition was strong enough to negotiate competing demands among its own constituents while simultaneously resisting conservative attacks. In 1965, that still seemed possible. It would not remain so for long.

Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin

February 1950, McCarthy delivered a bombshell during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia: List claimed Truman admin filled with communists

Far from abating, however, the antiwar movement intensified when vietnimization was going on

First, in November 1969, half a million demonstrators staged a huge protest in Washington called the Vietnam Moratorium, one of the largest protests ever held in the capital. Then, on April 30, 1970, as part of a secret bombing campaign against Vietcong supply lines, American troops destroyed enemy bases in neutral Cambodia. When news of the invasion of Cambodia came out, American campuses exploded in outrage — and, for the first time, students died. On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, panicky National Guardsmen fired into an antiwar rally, wounding eleven students and killing four. (At least 61 shots were fired in about 13 seconds; of the 13 people hit, the nearest was 60 feet from the Guardsmen.) Less than two weeks later, at Jackson State College in Mississippi, Guardsmen stormed a dormitory, killing two black students. More than 450 colleges closed in protest. Across the country, the spring semester was essentially canceled.

In 1946-1947, three specific issues worried Truman and his advisors.

First, the Soviet Union was pressing Iran for access to oil and Turkey for access to the Mediterranean. Second, a civil war was roiling in Greece, between monarchists backed by England and insurgents supported by the Greek and Yugoslavian Communist parties. Third, as European nations suffered through terrible privation in 1946 and 1947, Communist parties gained strength, particularly in France and Italy. All three developments, as seen from the United States, threatened to expand the influence of the Soviet Union beyond Eastern Europe.

Conflict between Israel and the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan prompted OPEC to take political sides between 1967 and 1973.

Following Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israeli-Arab tensions in the region grew closer to boiling over with each passing year. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Egypt and Syria invaded Israel to regain territory lost in the 1967 conflict. Israel prevailed, but only after being resupplied by an emergency American airlift. In response to U.S. support for Israel, the Arab states in OPEC declared an oil embargo in October 1973. Gas prices in the United States quickly jumped by 40 percent and heating oil prices by 30 percent. Demand outpaced supply, and Americans found themselves parked for hours in mile-long lines at gasoline stations for much of the winter of 1973-1974. Oil had become a political weapon, and the West's vulnerability stood revealed.

Another major civil rights objective — desegregating schools — produced even more controversy and fireworks.

For fifteen years, southern states, by a variety of stratagems, had fended off court directives that they desegregate "with all deliberate speed." In 1968, only about one-third of all black children in the South attended schools with whites. At that point, the federal courts got serious and, in a series of stiff decisions, ordered an end to "dual school systems." Where schools remained highly segregated, the courts increasingly endorsed the strategy of busing students to achieve integration. Plans differed across the country. In some states, black children rode buses from their neighborhoods to attend previously all-white schools. In others, white children were bused to black or Latino neighborhoods. In an important 1971 decision, Swan v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the Supreme Court upheld a countywide busing plan for Charlotte-Mecklenburg, a North Carolina school district. Despite local opposition, desegregation proceeded, and many cities in the South followed suit. By the mid-1970s, 86 percent of southern black children were attending school with whites. (In recent years, this trend toward desegregation has reversed.) In the North, where segregated schooling was also a fact of life — arising from suburban residential patterns — busing orders proved less effective. Detroit dramatized the problem. To integrate Detroit schools would have required merging city and suburban school districts. A lower court ordered just such a merger in 1971, but in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Supreme Court reversed the ruling, requiring busing plans to remain within the boundaries of a single school district. Without including the largely white suburbs in busing efforts, however, achieving racial balance in Detroit, and other major northern cities, was all but impossible. Postwar suburbanization had produced in the North what law had mandated in the South: entrenched racial segregation of schools. As the 1972 election approached, President Nixon took advantage of rising discontent over "law and order" and busing. In so doing, he was the political beneficiary of a growing reaction against liberalism that had begun to take hold between 1968 and the early 1970s.

In the 1970s, the U.S. economy was hit simultaneously by unemployment, stagnant consumer demand, and inflation — a combination called stagflation — which contradicted a basic principle taught by economists: prices were not supposed to rise in a stagnant economy (Figure 28.2)

For ordinary Americans, stagflation meant a noticeable decline in purchasing power, as discretionary income per worker dropped 18 percent between 1973 and 1982. None of the three presidents of the decade — Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter — had much luck tackling stagflation. Nixon's New Economic Policy was perhaps the most radical attempt. Nixon imposed temporary price and wage controls in 1971 in an effort to curb inflation. Then he took an even bolder step: removing the United States from the gold standard, which allowed the dollar to float in international currency markets and effectively ended the Bretton Woods monetary system established after World War II. The underlying weaknesses in the U.S. economy remained, however, and neither Ford nor Carter had more luck finding a solution. The fruitless search for a new economic order was a hallmark of 1970s politics (AP® Interpreting the Past).

Organized labor also expanded the ranks of the middle class

For the first time ever, trade unions and collective bargaining became major factors in the nation's economic life. In the past, organized labor had been confined to a narrow band of craft trades and a few industries, primarily coal mining, railroading, and the building and metal trades. The power balance shifted during the Great Depression, and by the time the dust settled after World War II, labor unions overwhelmingly represented America's industrial workforce (Figure 25.2). By the beginning of the 1950s, the nation's major industries, including auto, steel, clothing, chemicals, and virtually all consumer product manufacturing, were operating with union contracts.

Marshal Plan

George Marshal the US secretary of state saw Europe as very important to the USA, he saw the best way to keep them out of communism is to help restore their countries in 1947, June, and he proposed a plan to provide massive economic aid to Europe Secretary of State George C. Marshall came up with a remarkable proposal: a massive infusion of American capital to rebuild the European economy. In a June 1947 speech, Marshall urged the nations of Europe to work out a comprehensive recovery program based on U.S. aid. huge "international WPA." in the midst of the congressional stalemate, on February 25, 1948, Stalin supported a communist-led coup in Czechoslovakia. Congress rallied and voted overwhelmingly to approve it. Over the next four years, the United States contributed nearly $13 billion to a highly successful recovery effort that benefitted both Western Europe and the United States. intensified Cold War tensions. U.S. officials invited the Soviets to participate but insisted on restrictions that virtually guaranteed Stalin's refusal. An embittered Stalin rejected participation and ordered Soviet client states to do so as well.

Indians of All Tribes (IAT)

Group that occupied Alcatraz Island from 1969-1971 with the intent of claiming the land and opening an "American Indian Museum"; IAT declared that the island, as unused federal property, belonged to the Indian tribes as a provision of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.

Offended by the antiwar movement and the counterculture, and disturbed by urban riots, northern blue-collar voters, especially Catholics, had drifted away from the Democratic Party.

Growing up in the Great Depression, these families were admirers of FDR and perhaps even had his picture on their living-room wall. But times had changed over three decades. To show how much they had changed, the social scientists Ben J. Wattenberg and Richard Scammon profiled blue-collar workers in their study The Real Majority (1970). Wattenberg and Scammon asked their readers to consider people such as a forty-seven-year-old working-class woman from Dayton, Ohio: "[She] is afraid to walk the streets alone at night. ... She has a mixed view about blacks and civil rights." Moreover, they wrote, "she is deeply distressed that her son is going to a community junior college where LSD was found on campus." Such northern blue-collar families were once reliable Democratic voters, but their political loyalties were increasingly up for grabs — a fact Republicans knew well.

Southeast of Palestine, Egypt began to assert its presence in the region

Having gained independence from Britain several decades earlier, Egypt remained a monarchy until 1952, when Gamal Abdel Nasser led a military coup that established a constitutional republic. Caught between the Soviet Union and the United States, Nasser sought an independent route: a pan-Arab socialism designed to end the Middle East's colonial relationship with the West. When negotiations with the United States over Nasser's plan to build a massive hydroelectric dam on the Nile broke down in 1956, he nationalized the Suez Canal, which was the lifeline for Western Europe's oil. Britain and France, in alliance with Israel, attacked Egypt and seized the canal. Concerned that the invasion would encourage Egypt to turn to the Soviets for help, Eisenhower urged France and Britain to pull back and applied additional pressure through the UN General Assembly. When the Western nations backed down, however, Egypt reclaimed the Suez Canal and built the Aswan Dam on the Nile with Soviet support. Eisenhower had likely avoided a larger war, but the West lost a potential ally in Nasser. In early 1957, concerned about Soviet influence in the Middle East, the president announced the Eisenhower Doctrine nvoking the doctrine later that year, Eisenhower helped King Hussein of Jordan put down a Nasser-backed revolt and propped up a pro-American government in Lebanon.

Nixon offered a subtler version of Wallace's populism in a two-pronged approach to the campaign.

He adopted what his advisors called the "southern strategy," which aimed at attracting southern white voters still smarting over the civil rights gains by African Americans. Nixon won over the key southerner, Democrat-turned-Republican senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential nominee. Nixon informed Thurmond that while formally he had to support civil rights, his administration would go easy on enforcement. He also campaigned against the antiwar movement, urban riots, and protests, calling for a strict adherence to "law and order." He pledged to represent the "quiet voice" of the "great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators." Here Nixon was speaking not just to the South, but to the many millions of anxious suburban voters across the country concerned that social disorder had gripped the nation. These political strategies — southern and suburban — worked. Nixon received 43.4 percent of the vote to Humphrey's 42.7 percent, defeating him by a scant 500,000 votes out of the 73 million that were cast (Map 27.3). But the numerical closeness of the race could not disguise the devastating blow to the Democrats. Humphrey received almost 12 million fewer votes than Johnson had in 1964. The white South largely abandoned the Democratic Party, an exodus that would accelerate in the 1970s. In the North, meanwhile, Nixon and Wallace made significant inroads among traditionally Democratic voters. The result was that New Deal Democrats lost the unity of purpose that had served them for thirty years. A nation exhausted by months of turmoil and violence had chosen a new direction. Nixon's victory in 1968 foreshadowed — and helped propel — a national electoral realignment in the coming decade.

Stirred by turmoil in the cities, and seeing the limitations of his civil rights achievements, Martin Luther King Jr. began to expand his vision beyond civil rights to confront the deep-seated problems of poverty and racism in America as a whole.

He criticized President Johnson and Congress for prioritizing the war in Vietnam over the fight against poverty at home, and he planned a massive movement called the Poor People's Campaign to fight economic injustice. To advance that cause, he went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a strike by predominantly black sanitation workers. There, on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated by escaped white convict James Earl Ray. King's death set off a further round of urban rioting, with major violence breaking out in more than a hundred cities.

On assuming the presidency, Johnson promptly pushed for civil rights legislation as a memorial to his slain predecessor.

His motives were complex. As a southerner who had previously opposed civil rights for African Americans, Johnson wished to prove that he was more than a regional figure — he would be the president of all the people. He also wanted to make a mark on history, telling Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders to lace up their sneakers because he would move so fast on civil rights they would be running to catch up. Politically, the choice was risky. Johnson would please the Democratic Party's liberal wing, but because most northern African Americans already voted Democratic, the party would gain few additional votes. Moreover, southern white Democrats would likely revolt, dividing the party at a time when Johnson's legislative agenda most required unanimity. But Johnson pushed ahead, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act stands, in part, as a testament to the president's political risk-taking.

governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace

I believe the term to describe him would be a total jerkface running in 1968 as a third-party presidential candidate, Wallace traded on his fame as a segregationist governor. He had tried to stop the federal government from desegregating the University of Alabama in 1963, and he was equally obstructive during the Selma crisis of 1965. Appealing to whites in both the North and the South, Wallace called for "law and order" and attacked welfare programs; he claimed that mothers on public assistance were, thanks to Johnson's Great Society, "breeding children as a cash crop." Wallace's hope was that by carrying the South, he could deny a major candidate an electoral majority and force the election into the House of Representatives. He fell short of that objective, finishing with just 13.5 percent of the popular vote. But he had defined hot-button issues — liberal elitism, welfare policies, and law and order — that became hallmarks for the next generation of mainstream conservatives.

As the accelerating rights revolution placed strain on the Democratic coalition, the war in Vietnam divided the country.

IM BORED SO IM NOT GONNA FINISH THIS ONE I hate this so much The president let it be known in Saigon that the United States would support a military coup. Kennedy's hope was that if Diem, reviled throughout the South because of his brutal repression of political opponents, could be replaced by a popular general or other military figure, a stable government would emerge — one strong enough to repel the South Vietnam National Liberati on Front (NLF), or Vietcong. That calculation proved overly optimistic. Emboldened by Kennedy's approval of their plan, a handful of South Vietnamese generals overthrew Diem on November 1, and then brutally killed him and his brother. Rather than stability, the coup brought chaos. South Vietnam fell into a period of turmoil marked by the increasing ungovernability of both the cities and countryside. Kennedy himself was assassinated in late November and would not live to see the grim results of Diem's murder: American engagement in a long and costly civil conflict in the name of fighting communism.

Hispanic and Asian Civil Rights Activists also pushed for legal change.

In 1947, five Mexican American fathers in California sued a local school district for placing their children in separate "Mexican" schools. The case, Mendez v. Westminster School District, never made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the Ninth Circuit Court ruled such segregation unconstitutional, laying the legal groundwork for broader challenges to racial inequality. Among those filing briefs in the case was the NAACP's Thurgood Marshall, who was then developing the legal strategy to strike at racial segregation in the South. In another significant legal victory, the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 — just two weeks before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision — that Mexican Americans constituted a "distinct class" that could claim constitutional protection from discrimination. Also on the West Coast, Japanese Americans accelerated their legal challenge to discrimination. Undeterred by rulings in the Hirabayashi (1943) and Korematsu (1944) cases upholding wartime imprisonment (Chapter 23), the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) filed lawsuits in the late 1940s to regain property lost during the war. The JACL also challenged the constitutionality of California's Alien Land Law, which prohibited Japanese immigrants from owning land, and successfully lobbied Congress to enable those same immigrants to become citizens — a right they were denied for fifty years. These efforts by Mexican and Japanese Americans enlarged the sphere of civil rights and laid the foundation for a broader notion of racial equality in the postwar years.

Despite having to perform a balancing act, Truman and progressive Democrats forged ahead.

In 1949, reaching ambitiously to extend the New Deal, Truman proposed the Fair Deal he same conservative coalition that had blocked Roosevelt's initiatives in his second term stymied Truman's as well. Cold War pressure shaped political arguments about domestic social programs, while the nation's growing paranoia over internal subversion weakened support for bold extensions of the welfare state. Truman's proposal for national health insurance, for instance, was a popular idea, with strong backing from organized labor. But it was denounced as "socialized medicine" by the American Medical Association and the insurance industry. In the end, the Fair Deal's only significant breakthrough, other than improvements to the minimum wage and Social Security, was the National Housing Act of 1949, which authorized the construction of 810,000 low-income units.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott catapulted King to national prominence.

In 1957, along with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and dozens of black ministers from across the South, he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta to coordinate civil rights activity in the south. The black church, long the center of African American social and cultural life, now lent its moral and organizational strength to the civil rights movement. Black churchwomen were a tower of strength, transferring the skills they had honed during years of church work to the fight for civil rights. The SCLC quickly joined the NAACP at the leading edge of the movement for racial justice.

Supreme Court decisions and new laws do not automatically produce changes in society. But in the mid-1960s, civil rights advocates confronted a more profound issue: perhaps even protests were not enough.

In 1965, Bayard Rustin wrote of the need to move "from protest to politics" in order to build institutional black power. Some black leaders, such as the young SNCC activists Stokely Carmichael, Frances Beal, and John Lewis, grew frustrated with the slow pace of reform and the stubborn resistance of whites. Still others believed that addressing black poverty and economic disadvantage remained the most important objective. Neither new laws nor long marches appeared capable of meeting these varied and complex challenges. The conviction that civil rights alone were incapable of guaranteeing equality took hold in many communities of color in this period. African Americans were joined by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians. They came at the problem of inequality from different perspectives, but each group asked a similar question: As crucial as legal equality was, how much did it matter if most people of color remained in or close to poverty, if white society still regarded nonwhites as inferior, and if the major social and political institutions in the country were run by whites? Black leaders and representatives of other nonwhite communities increasingly asked themselves this question as they searched for ways to build on the achievements of the civil rights decade of 1954-1965.

Meanwhile, one of the worst atrocities of the war had become public.

In 1968, U.S. Army troops had executed nearly five hundred people in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai, including a large number of women and children. The massacre was known only within the military until 1969, when journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story and photos of the massacre appeared in Life magazine, discrediting the United States around the world. Americans, Time observed, "must stand in the larger dock of guilt and human conscience." Although high-ranking officers participated in the My Lai massacre and its cover-up, only one soldier, a low-ranking second lieutenant named William Calley, was convicted. Believing that Calley had been made a fall guy for official U.S. policies that inevitably brought death to innocent civilians, a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War publicized other atrocities committed by U.S. troops. In a controversial protest in 1971, they returned their combat medals at demonstrations outside the U.S. Capitol, literally hurling them onto the Capitol steps. "Here's my merit badge for murder," one vet said. Supporters of the war called these veterans cowardly and un-American, but their heartfelt antiwar protest exposed the deep personal torment that Vietnam had caused many soldiers.

College students, many of them inspired by the civil rights movement, had already begun to organize and agitate for social change prior to the first antiwar march in 1965

In Ann Arbor, Michigan, they founded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1960. Two years later, they held the first national SDS convention in Port Huron, Michigan. Tom Hayden penned a manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, expressing students' disillusionment with the nation's consumer culture and the gulf between rich and poor. "We are people of this generation," Hayden wrote, "bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." Hayden and SDS sought to shake up what they saw as a complacent nation.

The crisis in Berlin persuaded Western European nations to forge a collective security pact with the United States.

In April 1949, for the first time since the end of the American Revolution, the United States entered into a peacetime military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Vietnam (this one is a long one btw)

In August 1945, at the close of World War II, the Japanese occupiers of Vietnam surrendered to China in the north of the country and to Britain in the south. Vietminh (the nationalist movement that had led the resistance against the Japanese (and the French, prior to 1940)) seized control in the north But their leader, Ho Chi Minh, was a Communist, and this single fact outweighed American and British commitment to self-determination. When France moved to restore its control over the country, the United States and Britain sided with their European ally. President Truman rejected Ho's plea to support the Vietnamese struggle for nationhood, and France rejected Ho's offer of a negotiated independence. Shortly after France returned, in late 1946, the Vietminh resumed their war of national liberation. Eisenhower picked up where Truman left off. If the French failed, Eisenhower argued, all non-Communist governments in the region would fall like dominoes The United States eventually provided most of the financing for the French war, but money was not enough to defeat the determined Vietminh, who were fighting for the liberation of their country. After a fifty-six-day siege in early 1954, the French were defeated at the huge fortress of Dien Bien Phu. The result was the 1954 Geneva Accords United States rejected the Geneva Accords and set about undermining them. With the help of the CIA, a pro-American government took power in South Vietnam in June 1954. Ngo Dinh Diem, an anticommunist Catholic living in exile in the United States, returned to Vietnam as premier. The next year, in a rigged election, Diem became president of an independent South Vietnam. Facing certain defeat by the popular Ho Chi Minh, Diem called off the scheduled reunification elections.

Mexican Americans had something of a counterpart to Martin Luther King Jr.: Cesar Chavez.

In Chavez's case, however, economic struggle in community organizations and the labor movement had shaped his approach to mobilizing society's disadvantaged. He and Dolores Huerta had worked for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a California group founded in the 1950s to promote Mexican political participation and civil rights. Leaving that organization in 1962, Chavez concentrated on the agricultural region around Delano, California. With Huerta, he organized the United Farm Workers (UFW), a union for migrant workers.

In Texas and California, Mexican Americans created new civil rights organizations in the postwar years.

In Corpus Christi, Texas, World War II veterans founded the American GI Forum in 1948 to protest the poor treatment of Mexican American soldiers and veterans. Activists in Los Angeles created the Community Services Organization (CSO) the same year. Both groups arose to address specific local injustices (such as the segregation of military cemeteries), but they quickly broadened their scope to encompass political and economic justice for the larger community. Among the first young activists to work for the CSO were Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, who would later found the United Farm Workers (UFW) and inspire the Chicano movement of the 1960s.

Despite incidents such as Detroit in the Double V Campaign, and to some degree because of them, a generation was spurred into action during the war years.

In New York City, employment discrimination on the city's transit lines prompted one of the first bus boycotts in the nation's history, led in 1941 by Harlem minister Adam Clayton Powell Jr. In Chicago, James Farmer and three other members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a nonviolent peace organization, founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942.

In addition to public investment, another cardinal marker of New Deal and Great Society liberalism had been a remarkable decline in income inequality.

In the 1970s, that trend reversed, and the wealthiest Americans, those among the top 10 percent, began to pull ahead again. As corporations restructured to boost profits during the 1970s slump, they increasingly laid off high-wage workers, paid the remaining workers less, and relocated overseas. Thus upper-class Americans benefitted, while blue-collar families who had been lifted into the middle class during the postwar boom increasingly lost out. An unmistakable trend was apparent by the end of the 1970s. The U.S. labor market was dividing in two: a vast, low-wage market at the bottom and a much narrower high-wage market at the top, with the middle squeezed smaller and smaller.

African Americans were the most prominent, but not the only, group in American society to organize against racial injustice in the 1940s.

In the Southwest, from Texas to California, Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans endured a "caste" system not unlike the Jim Crow system in the South. In Texas, for instance, poll taxes kept most Mexican American citizens from voting. Decades of discrimi-nation by employers in agriculture and manufacturing — made possible by the constant supply of cheap labor from across the border — suppressed wages and kept the majority of Mexican Americans barely above poverty. Many lived in colonias or barrios, neighborhoods separated from Anglos and often lacking sidewalks, reliable electricity and water, and public transportation.

The United States scrambled to meet its energy needs in the face of the oil shortage.

Just two months after the OPEC embargo began, Congress imposed a national speed limit of 55 miles per hour to conserve fuel. Americans began to buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars such as Volkswagens, Toyotas, and Datsuns (later Nissans) — while sales of Detroit-made cars (now nicknamed "gas guzzlers") slumped. With one of every six jobs in the country generated directly or indirectly by the auto industry, the effects rippled across the economy. Compounding the distress was the raging inflation set off by the oil shortage; prices of basic necessities, such as bread, milk, and canned goods, rose by nearly 20 percent in 1974 alone. "THINGS WILL GET WORSE," one newspaper headline warned, "BEFORE THEY GET WORSE."

NASA

Kennedy championed space exploration, as well. In a 1962 speech, he proposed that the nation commit itself to landing a man on the moon within the decade. The Soviets had already beaten the United States into space with the 1957 Sputniksatellite and the 1961 flight of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Capitalizing on America's fascination with space, Kennedy persuaded Congress to increase funding for the government's space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), enabling the United States to pull ahead of the Soviet Union. Kennedy's ambition was realized when U.S. astronauts arrived on the moon in 1969.

n January 1961, the Soviet Union announced that it intended to support "wars of national liberation" wherever in the world they occurred

Kennedy took Soviet premier Khrushchev at his word, especially regarding Cuba, where in 1959 Fidel Castro had overthrown the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista and declared a revolution.

JFK's Promise - Over time, the expectations Kennedy embodied, combined with his ability to inspire a younger generation, encouraged the emerging spirit of liberal reform.

Kennedy's legislative record did not live up to his promising image. This was not entirely his fault; congressional partisanship and resistance stymied many presidents in the twentieth century. Kennedy's domestic advisors devised bold plans for health insurance for the aged, a new antipoverty program, and a tax cut. After enormous pressure from Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders — and pushed by the demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 — they added a civil rights bill. None of these initiatives went anywhere in the Senate, where powerful conservative interests practiced an old legislative art: delay, delay, delay. All Kennedy's bills were at a virtual standstill when tragedy struck.

the New Frontier

Kennedy's term for the challenges the country faced. Relying on an old American trope, Kennedy's New Frontier suggested masculine toughness and adventurism and encouraged Americans to again think of themselves as exploring uncharted terrain. That terrain proved treacherous, however, as the new administration immediately faced a crisis.

Developments within the Mexican American community set the stage for fresh challenges to these conditions in the 1940s.

Labor activism, especially in Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions with large numbers of Mexican Americans, improved wages and working conditions in some industries and produced a new generation of leaders. More than 400,000 Mexican Americans also served in World War II. Having fought for their country, many returned to the United States determined to challenge their second-class citizenship. Additionally, a new Mexican American middle class began to take shape in major cities such as Los Angeles, San Antonio, El Paso, and Chicago, which, like the African American middle class, gave leaders and resources to the cause.

the Taft-Hartley Act (1947)

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. brought changes in procedures and language that, over time, weakened the right of workers to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Unions especially disliked Section 14b, which allowed states to pass "right-to-work" laws prohibiting the union shop. Additionally, the law forced unions to purge communists, who had been among the most successful labor organizers in the 1930s, from their ranks. Trade unions would continue to support the Democratic Party, but the labor movement would not crack the largely non-union South and would not penetrate the many American industries that remained unorganized. In that sense, Taft-Hartley effectively "contained" the labor movement.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

Law that responded to demands of the civil rights movement by making discrimination in employment, education, and public accommodations illegal. It was the strongest such measure since Reconstruction and included a ban on sex discrimination in employment. proved the most far-reaching civil rights law since Reconstruction The law granted new enforcement powers to the U.S. attorney general and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to implement the prohibition against job discrimination. The Civil Rights Act was a law with real teeth, but it left untouched the obstacles to black voting.

Nation of Islam

Leading exponent of black nationalism fused a rejection of Christianity with a strong philosophy of self-improvement. Black Muslims, as they were known, adhered to a strict code of personal behavior; men were recognizable by their dark suits, white shirts, and ties, women by their long dresses and head coverings. Black Muslims preached an apocalyptic brand of Islam, anticipating the day when Allah would banish the white "devils" and give the black nation justice. Although its full converts numbered only about ten thousand, the Nation of Islam had a wide popular following among African Americans in northern cities.

Out of these troubling developments, an antiwar movement began to crystallize

Little opposition had materialized in 1964, even after Johnson won passage of the Tonkin Resolution. But following the escalation in 1965, groups of students, clergy, civil rights advocates, antinuclear proponents, and even Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose book on child care had helped raise many of the younger activists, began to protest. Their launchpad was an April march of 15,000 people in Washington, D.C., that included a picket line around the White House and speeches denouncing what antiwar activist Paul Potter called "this mad war." Despite their diversity, these opponents of the war shared a skepticism about U.S. policy in Vietnam. They charged variously that intervention was antithetical to American ideals; that an independent, anticommunist South Vietnam was unattainable; and that no American objective justified the suffering that was being inflicted on the Vietnamese people. One spur to student protest was the military's Selective Service System, which in 1967 abolished automatic student deferments.

The Civil Rights Act was a law with real teeth, but it left untouched the obstacles to black voting.

MORE PROTESTS In 1964, in what came to be known as Freedom Summer, black organizations mounted a major campaign in Mississippi. The effort drew several thousand volunteers from across the country, including nearly one thousand white college students from the North. Led by the charismatic SNCC activist Robert "Bob" Moses, the four major civil rights organizations (SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC) spread out across the state. They established freedom schools for black children and conducted a major voter registration drive. Yet so determined was the opposition that only about twelve hundred black voters were registered that summer, at a cost of four murdered civil rights workers and thirty-seven black churches bombed or burned.

Why was there significant soviet penetration of the American government

Many of these enlistees in the Soviet cause had been bright young New Dealers in the mid-1930s, when the Soviet-backed Popular Front suggested that the lines separating liberalism, progressivism, and communism were permeable (Chapter 23). At that time, the United States was not at war and never expected to be. And when war did come, the Soviet Union was an American ally. For critics of the informants, however, there remained the time between the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a nearly two-year period during which cooperation with the Soviet Union could be seen in a less positive light. Moreover, passing secrets to another country, even a wartime ally, was simply indefensible to many Americans — particularly when it came to atomic secrets. The lines between U.S. and Soviet interests blurred for some; for others, they remained clear and definite.

Thurgood Marshall

Marshall was the great-grandson of slaves. Of modest origins, his parents instilled in him a faith in law and the Constitution. After his 1930 graduation from Lincoln University, a prestigious African American institution near Philadelphia, Marshall applied to the University of Maryland Law School. Denied admission because the school did not accept black applicants, he enrolled at all-black Howard University. There Marshall met Houston, a law school dean, and the two forged a friendship and intellectual partnership that would change the face of American legal history. Marshall, with Houston's and Hastie's critical strategic input, would argue most of the NAACP's landmark cases. (In 1967, President Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court — the first African American to have that honor.)

The new ethic of consumption appealed to the postwar middle class, the driving force behind the expanding domestic market.

Middle-class status was more accessible than ever before because of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the GI Bill. Government financing of education helped make the U.S. workforce the best educated in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. Better education meant higher earning power, and higher earning power translated into the consumer spending that drove the postwar economy. One observer of the GI Bill was so impressed with its achievements that he declared it responsible for "the most important educational and social transformation in American history."

Cities faced declining fortunes in these years for many reasons, but one key was the continued loss of residents and businesses to nearby suburbs.

New suburban shopping centers opened weekly across the country, and other businesses — such as banks, insurance companies, and technology firms — increasingly sought suburban locations. More and more, people lived and worked in suburbs.

Outraged by the brutality in Birmingham and embarrassed by King's imprisonment for leading a nonviolent march, President Kennedy decided that it was time to act.

On June 11, 1963, after newly elected Alabama governor George Wallace barred two black students from the state university, Kennedy went on television to denounce racism and promise a new civil rights bill. Many black leaders felt Kennedy's action was long overdue, but they nonetheless hailed this "Second Emancipation Proclamation." That night, Medgar Evers, president of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, was shot in the back in his driveway in Jackson by a white supremacist. Evers's martyrdom became a spur to further action (Map 26.3). To marshal support for Kennedy's bill, civil rights leaders took advantage of a long-planned event set for that August. It was the massive demonstration in Washington that had first been proposed by A. Philip Randolph in 1941. Working with Bayard Rustin, Randolph revived the idea and in early 1963 called for a march to mark the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Under the leadership of Randolph and Rustin, thousands of volunteers across the country coordinated car pools, "freedom buses," and "freedom trains," and on August 28, 1963, delivered a quarter of a million people to the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington, officially named the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Murders from Freedom Summer strengthened the resolve of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP

Party founded in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Its members attempted to attend the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, as the legitimate representatives of their state, but Democratic leaders refused to recognize the party Banned from the "whites only" Mississippi Democratic Party, MFDP leaders were determined to attend the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, as the legitimate representatives of their state. Inspired by Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper turned civil rights activist, the MFDP challenged the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party, including President Johnson himself. "Is this America?" Hamer asked party officials when she demanded that the MFDP, and not the all-white Mississippi delegation, be recognized by the convention. Democratic leaders, however, seated the white Mississippi delegation and refused to recognize the MFDP. Demoralized and convinced that the Democratic Party would not change, Bob Moses told television reporters: "I will have nothing to do with the political system any longer." Freedom Summer began with optimism but ended with bitter disappointment.

One of Johnson's first successes was breaking a congressional deadlock on education and health care.

Passed in April 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act authorized $1 billion in federal funds for teacher training and other educational programs. Standing in his old Texas schoolhouse, Johnson, a former teacher, said: "I believe no law I have signed or will ever sign means more to the future of America." Six months later, Johnson signed the Higher Education Act, providing federal scholarships for college students. Johnson also had the votes he needed to achieve some form of national health insurance. That year, he won passage of two new programs: Medicare, a health plan for the elderly funded by a surcharge on Social Security payroll taxes, and Medicaid, a health plan for the poor paid for by general tax revenues and administered by the states.

Freedom of Information Act (1974)

Passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the 1974 act that gave citizens access to federal records.

Spurred by the Black Power slogan, African American activists turned their attention to the poverty and social injustice faced by so many black people.

President Johnson had declared the War on Poverty, and black organizers joined, setting up day care centers, running community job training programs, and working to improve housing and health care in urban neighborhoods. In major cities such as Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, activists sought to open jobs in police and fire departments and in construction and transportation to black workers, who had been excluded from these occupations for decades. Others worked to end police harassment — a major problem in urban black communities — and to help black entrepreneurs receive small-business loans. CORE leader Floyd McKissick explained, "Black Power is not Black Supremacy; it is a united Black Voice reflecting racial pride." The attention to racial pride led some African Americans to reject white society and to pursue more authentic cultural forms. In addition to focusing on economic disadvantage, Black Power emphasized black pride and self-determination. Those subscribing to these beliefs wore African clothing, chose natural hairstyles, and celebrated black history, art, and literature. The Black Arts movement thrived, and musical tastes shifted from the crossover sounds of Motown to the soul music of Philadelphia, Memphis, and Chicago.

Great Society

President Lyndon B. Johnson's domestic program, which included civil rights legislation, antipoverty programs, government subsidy of medical care, federal aid to education, consumer protection, and aid to the arts and humanities. "The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice." Even this, Johnson declared, was just the beginning. He would push to renew American education, rebuild the cities, and restore the natural environment. Ambitious, even audacious, Johnson's vision was a New Deal for a new era. A tragic irony, however, was that he held the presidency at all. commencement address at University of Michigan

Insisting that all nations had to choose sides in the Cold War, the United States drew as many countries as possible into collective security agreements, with the NATO alliance in Europe as a model.

Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) An extensive system of defense alliances eventually tied the United States to more than forty other countries (Map 24.5). The United States also sponsored a strategically instrumental alliance between Iraq and Iran, on the southern flank of the Soviet Union.

Vietnam under LBJ

THE TET OFFENSIVE On January 30, 1968, the Vietcong unleashed a massive, well-coordinated assault in South Vietnam. Timed to coincide with Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the offensive struck thirty-six provincial capitals and five of the six major cities, including Saigon, where the Vietcong nearly overran the U.S. embassy. In strictly military terms, the Tet offensive was a failure, with very heavy Vietcong losses. But psychologically, the effect was devastating. Television brought into American homes shocking live images: the American embassy under siege and the Saigon police chief placing a pistol to the head of a Vietcong suspect and executing him. The Tet offensive made a mockery of official pronouncements that the United States was winning the war. How could an enemy on the run manage such a large-scale, complex, and coordinated attack? Just before Tet, a Gallup poll found that 56 percent of Americans considered themselves "hawks" (supporters of the war), while only 28 percent identified with the "doves" (war opponents). Three months later, doves outnumbered hawks 42 to 41 percent. Without embracing the peace movement, many Americans simply concluded that the war was unwinnable. The Tet offensive undermined Johnson and discredited his war policies. When the 1968 presidential primary season got under way in March, antiwar senators Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and Robert Kennedy of New York, JFK's brother, challenged Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Discouraged, perhaps even physically exhausted, on March 31 Johnson stunned the nation by announcing that he would not seek reelection.

Silent Majority

Term used by President Nixon to describe Americans who opposed the counterculture

Houses

The GI Bill stimulated the economy and expanded the middle class in another way: by increasing home ownership. In cities and suburbs across the country, the Veterans Administration (VA), which helped former soldiers purchase new homes with no down payment, sparked a building boom that created jobs in the construction industry and fueled consumer spending in home appliances and automobiles.

It even became possible, at this moment of reform zeal, to tackle the nation's discriminatory immigration policy.

The Immigration Act of 1965 abandoned the quota system that favored northern Europeans, replacing it with numerical limits that did not discriminate among nations. To promote family reunification, the law also stipulated that close relatives of legal residents in the United States could be admitted outside the numerical limits, an exception that especially benefitted Asian and Latin American immigrants. Since 1965, as a result, immigrants from those regions have become increasingly prominent in American society

Tragically, King was murdered before achieving the transformations he sought: an end to racial injustice and a solution to poverty

The civil rights movement had helped set in motion permanent, indeed revolutionary, changes in American race relations. Jim Crow segregation ended, federal legislation ensured black Americans' most basic civil rights, and the white monopoly on political power in the South was broken. However, by 1968, the fight over civil rights had also divided the nation. The Democratic Party was splitting, and a new conservatism was gaining strength. Many whites felt that the issue of civil rights was receiving too much attention, to the detriment of other national concerns. The riots of 1965, 1967, and 1968 further alienated many whites, who blamed the violence on the inability of Democratic officials to maintain law and order.

The rights revolution had found an ally in an unexpected place: the U.S. Supreme Court.

The decision that stood as a landmark in the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), triggered a larger judicial revolution. Following Brown, the Court increasingly agreed to hear human rights and civil liberties cases — as opposed to its previous focus on property-related suits. Surprisingly, this shift was led by the man whom President Dwight Eisenhower had appointed chief justice in 1953: Earl Warren. A popular Republican governor of California, Warren surprised many, including Eisenhower himself, with his robust advocacy of civil rights and civil liberties. The Warren Court lasted from 1954 until 1969 and established some of the most far-reaching liberal jurisprudence in U.S. history.

Yalta and Potsdam thus set the stage for communist rule to descend over Eastern Europe.

The elections called for at Yalta eventually took place in Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia, with varying degrees of democratic openness. Nevertheless, Stalin got the client regimes he desired in those countries and would soon exert near-complete control over their governments. Stalin's unwillingness to honor self-determination for nations in Eastern Europe was, from the American point of view, the precipitating event of the Cold War.

With the 1964 election safely behind him, Johnson began an American takeover of the war in Vietnam

The escalation, beginning in the early months of 1965, took two forms: deployment of American ground troops and intensive bombing of North Vietnam.

Behind much of U.S. foreign policy in the first two decades of the Cold War lay the memory of appeasementv

The generation of politicians and officials who designed the containment strategy had come of age in the era of Munich, the conference in 1938 at which the Western democracies had appeased Hitler by offering him part of Czechoslovakia, paving the road to World War II. Applying the lessons of Munich, American presidents believed that "appeasing" Stalin (and subsequent Soviet rulers Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev) would have the same result: wider war. Thus in Germany, Greece, and Korea, and later in Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam, the United States staunchly resisted the Soviets — or what it perceived as Soviet influence. The Munich analogy strengthened the U.S. position in a number of strategic conflicts, particularly over the fate of Germany. But it also drew Americans into armed conflicts — and convinced them to support repressive, right-wing regimes — that compromised, as much as supported, stated American principles.

Malcom X

The most charismatic Black Muslim was Malcolm X (the X stood for his African family name, lost under slavery). A spellbinding speaker, Malcolm X preached a philosophy of militant separatism, although he advocated violence only for self-defense. Hostile to mainstream civil rights organizations, he caustically referred to the 1963 March on Washington as the "Farce on Washington." Malcolm X said plainly, "I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don't believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn't want brotherhood with me." Malcolm X had little interest in changing the minds of hostile whites. Strengthening the black community, he believed, represented a surer path to freedom and equality. In 1964, after a power struggle with founder Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam. While he remained a black nationalist, he moderated his antiwhite views and began to talk of a class struggle uniting poor whites and blacks. Following an inspiring trip to the Middle East, where he saw Muslims of all races worshipping together, Malcolm X formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity to promote black pride and to work with traditional civil rights groups. But he got no further. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated while delivering a speech in Harlem. Three Black Muslims were later convicted of his murder.

If Vietnam was still of minor concern, the same could not be said of the Middle East, an area rich in oil and political complexity.

The most volatile area was Palestine, populated by Arabs but also historically the ancient land of Israel and coveted by the Zionist movement as a Jewish national homeland. After World War II, many survivors of the Nazi extermination camps resettled in Palestine, which was still controlled by Britain under a World War I mandate. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine between Jewish and Arab sectors. When the British mandate ended in 1948, Palestinian leaders rejected the partition as a violation of their right to self-determination. When Zionist leaders proclaimed the state of Israel, a coalition of Arab nations known as the Arab League invaded, but Israel survived. Many Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during the fighting. The Arab defeat left these people permanently stranded in refugee camps. President Truman recognized the new state immediately, which won him crucial support from Jewish voters in the 1948 election but alienated the Arab world.

In the late 1960s, however, inspired by the Black Power and women's movements, gay activists increasingly demanded immediate and unconditional recognition of their rights.

The new gay liberation found multiple expressions in major cities across the country, but a defining event occurred in New York's Greenwich Village. - STONEWALL INN Police had raided gay bars for decades, making arrests, publicizing the names of patrons, and harassing customers simply for being gay.

The first civil rights law in the nation's history came in 1866 just after the Civil War. Its provisions were long ignored (Chapter 14). A second law was passed during Reconstruction in 1875, but it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. For nearly ninety years, new civil rights legislation was blocked or filibustered by southern Democrats in Congress. Only a weak, largely symbolic act was passed in 1957 during the Eisenhower administration. But by the early 1960s, with legal precedents in their favor and nonviolent protest awakening the nation, civil rights leaders believed the time had come for a serious civil rights bill. The challenge was getting one through a still-reluctant Congress.

The road to such a bill began when Martin Luther King Jr. called for demonstrations in "the most segregated city in the United States": Birmingham, Alabama. King and the SCLC needed a concrete victory in Birmingham to validate their strategy of nonviolent direct action. In May 1963, thousands of black marchers protested employment discrimination in Birmingham's department stores. Eugene "Bull" Connor, the city's public safety commissioner, ordered the city's police troops to meet the marchers with violent force: snarling dogs, electric cattle prods, and high-pressure fire hoses. Television cameras captured the scene for the evening news.

Since racial injustice had been part of American life for hundreds of years, why did the civil rights movement arise when it did? After all, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, had begun challenging racial segregation in a series of court cases in the 1930s. And other organizations, such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s, had attracted significant popular support (Chapter 21).

These precedents were important, but several factors came together in the middle of the twentieth century to make a broad movement possible. An important influence was World War II. In the war against fascism, the Allies sought to discredit racist Nazi ideology. Committed to fighting racism abroad, Americans increasingly condemned racism at home. Among the most consequential factors was the growth of the black middle class. Historically small, the black middle class experienced robust growth after World War II. Its ranks produced most of the civil rights leaders: ministers, teachers, trade unionists, attorneys, and other professionals. Churches, for centuries a sanctuary for black Americans, were especially important. Moreover, in the 1960s African American college students — part of the largest expansion of college enrollment in U.S. history — joined the movement, adding new energy and fresh ideas (Table 26.1). With access to education and media, this new middle class had more resources than ever before. Less dependent on white patronage, and therefore less vulnerable to white retaliation, middle-class African Americans were in a position to lead a movement for change.

Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC did not share Moses's skepticism.

They believed that another confrontation with southern injustice could provoke further congressional action. In March 1965, James Bevel of the SCLC called for a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital, Montgomery, to protest the murder of a voting-rights activist. As soon as the six hundred marchers left Selma, crossing over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, mounted state troopers attacked them with tear gas and clubs. The scene was shown on national television that night, and the day became known as Bloody Sunday. Calling the episode "an American tragedy," President Johnson went back to Congress.

To be certain, African Americans found a measure of freedom in the North and West compared to the South.

They could vote, participate in politics, and, at least after the early 1960s, enjoy equal access to public accommodations. But we err in thinking that racial segregation was only a southern condition or that poverty and racial discrimination were not also deeply entrenched in the North and West. In northern cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, for instance, white home owners in the 1950s used various tactics — from police harassment to thrown bricks, burning crosses, bombs, and mob violence — to keep African Americans from living near them. Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 25, Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and bank redlining excluded African American home buyers from the all-white suburbs emerging around major cities. Racial segregation was a national, not regional, problem.

In the wake of the Till murder, civil rights advocates needed some good news.

They received it three months later, as southern black leaders embraced an old tactic put to new ends: nonviolent direct action. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a civil rights activist in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. She was arrested and charged with violating a local segregation ordinance. Parks's act was not the spur-of-the-moment decision that it seemed: a longtime NAACP member, she and other female civil rights activists in Montgomery had been contemplating such an act for some time. Parks's arrest became the focal point for the black community's challenge against segregated buses, which were a powerful symbol of the city's racial hierarchy. Soon after Parks's arrest, the black community turned for leadership to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the recently appointed pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Street Baptist Church. The son of a prominent Atlanta minister, King embraced the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. Working closely, but behind the scenes, with Bayard Rustin, King deepened his investment in nonviolent philosophy and the practice of direct action, which Rustin and others in the Fellowship of Reconciliation had first used in the 1940s. King and other black ministers endorsed a plan proposed by a local black women's organization to boycott Montgomery's bus system. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was inspired by similar boycotts that had taken place in Harlem in 1941 and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953.

Beneath the surface of middle-class morality, Americans were less repressed than confused.

They struggled to reconcile new freedoms with older moral traditions. Two controversial studies by an unassuming Indiana University zoologist named Alfred Kinsey forced questions about sexuality into the open. Kinsey and his research team published Sexual Behavior in the Human Malein 1948 and followed it up in 1953 with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female — an 842-page book that sold 270,000 copies in the first month after its publication. Taking a scientific, rather than moralistic, approach, Kinsey, who became known as "the sex doctor," documented the full range of sexual experiences of thousands of Americans.This was especially true with regard to sex. He broke numerous taboos, discussing such topics as homosexuality and marital infidelity in the detached language of science. Both studies confirmed that a sexual revolution, although a largely hidden one, had already begun to transform American society by the early 1950s His studies showed that there was a large portion of the country having sex before/ouside of marriage church and others didn't like him for studing that also not random sampled his research opened a national conversation that helped Americans learn to talk more openly about sex.

African American leaders were uncertain what to expect from President Truman, inheritor of the New Deal coalition but not opposed to using racist language himself.

Though he did not immediately support social equality for African Americans, Truman supported civil rights because he believed in equality before the law. Moreover, he understood the growing importance of the small but often decisive black vote in key northern states such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Civil rights activists Randolph and Powell — along with vocal white liberals such as Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis, and members of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a liberal organization — pressed Truman to act. With no support for civil rights in Congress, Truman turned to executive action. In 1946, he appointed the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights, whose 1947 report, "To Secure These Rights," called for robust federal action to ensure black equality. With the report's recommendations in mind, in 1948 Truman issued an executive order desegregating employment in federal agencies and, under pressure from Randolph's Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service, desegregated the armed forces. Truman then sent a message to Congress asking that every one of the report's recommendations — including the abolition of poll taxes and the restoration of the Fair Employment Practice Committee — be made into law. It was the most aggressive and politically bold call for racial equality by the leader of a major political party since Reconstruction.

Americans did not simply fill their new suburban homes with the latest appliances and gadgets; they also pioneered entirely new forms of consumption.

Through World War II, downtowns had remained the center of retail sales and restaurant dining with their grand department stores, elegant eateries, and low-cost diners. As suburbanites abandoned big-city centers in the 1950s, ambitious entrepreneurs invented two new commercial forms that would profoundly shape the rest of the century: the shopping mall and the fast-food restaurant.

Because the vast majority of southern African Americans were prohibited from voting, state legislatures there were closed to the kind of organized political pressure possible in the North.

Thus activists looked to federal courts for leverage. In the late 1930s, NAACP lawyers Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and William Hastie had begun preparing the legal ground in a series of cases challenging racial discrimination. The key was prodding the U.S. Supreme Court to use the Fourteenth Amendment's "equal protection" clause to overturn its 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. Marshall, Houston, Hastie, and six other attorneys filed suit after suit, deliberately selecting each case from dozens of possibilities. The strategy was slow and time-consuming, but progress came. In 1936, Marshall and Houston won a state case that forced the University of Maryland Law School to admit qualified African Americans — a ruling of obvious significance to Marshall. Eight years later, in Smith v. Allwright (1944), Marshall convinced the U.S. Supreme Court that all-white primaries were unconstitutional. In 1950, with Marshall once again arguing the case, the Supreme Court ruled in McLaurin v. Oklahoma that universities could not segregate black students from others on campus. None of these cases produced swift changes in the daily lives of most African Americans, but they confirmed that civil rights attorneys were on the right track.

This remarkable election (dewey v Truman - 1948) foreshadowed coming political turmoil

Truman occupied the center of FDR's sprawling New Deal coalition. On his left were progressives, civil rights advocates, and peace activists critical of the Cold War. On his right were segregationist southerners, who opposed civil rights and were allied with Republicans on many economic and foreign policy issues. In 1948, Truman performed a delicate balancing act, largely retaining the support of Jewish and Catholic voters in the big cities, black voters in the North, and union voters across the country. But Thurmond's strong showing — he carried four states in the Deep South — demonstrated the fragility of the Democratic coalition and prefigured the revolt of the party's southern wing in the 1960s. As he tried to manage contending forces in his own party, Truman faced mounting pressure from Republicans to denounce radicals at home and to take a tough stand against the Soviet Union.

Truman's boldness in favor of civil rights was too much for southern Democrats.

Under the leadership of Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina, white Democrats from the South formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, known popularly as the Dixiecrats, for the 1948 election (Chapter 24). This brought into focus an internal struggle developing within the Democratic Party and its still-formidable New Deal coalition. Would the civil rights aims of the party's liberal wing alienate southern white Democrats, as well as many suburban whites in the North? It was the first hint of the discord that would eventually divide the Democratic Party in the 1960s.

For the first time ever, trade unions and collective bargaining became major factors in the nation's economic life - DID NOT COME W/OUT A BATTLE

Unions staged major strikes in nearly all American industries in 1945 and 1946, much as they had done after World War I. Head of the UAW Walter Reuther and CIO president Philip Murray declared that employers could afford a 30 percent wage increase, which would fuel postwar consumption. When employers, led by the giant General Motors, balked at that demand, the two sides seemed set for a long struggle. Between 1947 and 1950, however, a broad "labor-management accord" gradually emerged across most industries. This was not industrial peace — the country still experienced many strikes — but a general acceptance of collective bargaining as the method for setting the terms of employment. The result was rising real income. The average worker with three dependents gained 18 percent in spendable real income in the 1950s. In addition, unions delivered greater leisure (more paid holidays and longer vacations) and, in a startling departure, a social safety net. In postwar Europe, America's allies were constructing welfare states. But having lost the bruising battle in Washington for national health care during Truman's presidency, American unions turned to the bargaining table. By the end of the 1950s, union contracts commonly provided pension plans and company-paid health insurance. Collective bargaining, the process of trade unions and employers negotiating workplace contracts, had become, in effect, the American alternative to the European welfare state and, as Reuther boasted, the passport into the middle class. This impressive labor-management accord, however, was never as durable or universal as it seemed. Vulnerabilities lurked. For one thing, the sheltered domestic markets — the essential condition for generous contracts, because without competition firms were not pressured to lower wages — were quite fragile. In certain industries, the lead firms were already losing market share. Second, generally overlooked were the many unorganized workers with no middle-class passport — those consigned to unorganized industries, casual labor, or low-wage jobs in the service sector. A final vulnerability was the most basic: the abiding antiunionism of American employers. At heart, business regarded the labor-management accord as a negotiated truce, not a permanent peace. The postwar labor-management accord turned out to be a transitory event, not a permanent condition of American economic life.

Fed up with second-class status, and well versed in the tactics of organization and protest, women radicals broke away and organized on their own.

Unlike the National Organization for Women (NOW), the women's liberation movement was loosely structured, comprising an alliance of collectives in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and other big cities and college towns. "Women's lib," as it was dubbed by a skeptical media, went public in 1968 at the Miss America pageant. Demonstrators carried posters of women's bodies labeled as slabs of beef — implying that society treated them as meat. Mirroring the identity politics of Black Power activists and the self-dramatization of the counterculture, women's liberation sought an end to the denigration and exploitation of women. "Sisterhood is powerful!" read one women's liberationist manifesto. The national Women's Strike for Equality in August 1970 brought hundreds of thousands of women into the streets of the nation's cities for marches and demonstrations. By that year, new terms such as sexism and male chauvinism had become part of the national vocabulary. As converts flooded in, two branches of the women's movement began to converge. Radical women realized that key feminist goals — child care, equal pay, and reproduction rights — could best be achieved in the political arena. At the same time, more traditional activists, often known as "liberal feminists" and exemplified by Betty Friedan, developed a broader view of women's oppression. They came to understand that women required more than equal opportunity: the culture that regarded women as nothing more than sexual objects and helpmates to men had to change as well. Although still largely white and middle class, feminists began to think of themselves as part of a broad social crusade.

Other influences that assisted the civil rights movement

White labor leaders were generally more equality-minded than the rank and file, but the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, and the Communications Workers of America, among many other progressive trade unions, were reliable allies at the national level. The new medium of television, too, played a crucial role. When television networks covered early desegregation struggles — at Little Rock High School in 1957, for instance — Americans across the country saw the violence of white supremacy firsthand. None of these factors alone was decisive. None ensured an easy path. The civil rights movement faced enormous resistance and required dauntless courage and sacrifice from thousands upon thousands of activists for more than three decades. Ultimately, however, the movement changed the nation for the better and improved the lives of millions of Americans.

With the 1972 presidential election approaching, Nixon sent Kissinger back to the Paris peace talks, which had been initiated under Johnson.

With the 1972 presidential election approaching, Nixon sent Kissinger back to the Paris peace talks, which had been initiated under Johnson. In a key concession, Kissinger accepted the presence of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam. North Vietnam then agreed to an interim arrangement whereby the South Vietnamese government in Saigon would stay in power while a special commission arranged a final settlement. With Kissinger's announcement that "peace is at hand," Nixon got the election lift he wanted, but the agreement was then sabotaged by General Nguyen Van Thieu, the South Vietnamese president. So Nixon, in one final spasm of bloodletting, unleashed the two-week "Christmas bombing," the most intense of the entire war. On January 27, 1973, the two sides signed the Paris Peace Accords

Which of the following statements about the emergence of rock and roll music as a part of 1950's popular culture in the United States is true? A It relied heavily on Black musical traditions. B It adopted many of the big band tunes of the 1940's. C It was a spin-off from British popular music of the time. D It was the first popular music broadcast nationally on radio. E It had little appeal in the South and West.

a

John F. Kennedy

a Harvard alumnus, World War II hero, and senator from Massachusetts, had inherited his love of politics from his grandfathers — colorful, and often ruthless, Irish Catholic politicians in Boston. Ambitious and deeply aware of style, the forty-three-year-old Kennedy made use of his many advantages to become, as novelist Norman Mailer put it, "our leading man." His one disadvantage — that he was Catholic in a country that had never elected a Catholic president — he masterfully neutralized. And thanks to both media advisors and his youthful attractiveness, Kennedy projected a superb television image. At heart, Kennedy was a Cold Warrior who had come of age politically in the era of Munich, Yalta, and McCarthyism. He projected an air of idealism, but his years in the Senate (1953-1960) had proved him to be a conventional Cold War politician. Once elected president, Kennedy would shape the nation's foreign policy by drawing both on his ingenuity and on old-style Cold War power politics. Kennedy's Republican opponent in the 1960 presidential election, Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, was a seasoned politician and Cold Warrior himself - Televised debates tho Despite the edge Kennedy enjoyed in the debates, he won only the narrowest of electoral victories, receiving 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon's 49.5 percent. Kennedy attracted Catholics, African Americans, and the labor vote; his vice-presidential running mate, Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, helped bring in southern Democrats. Yet only 120,000 votes separated the two candidates, and a shift of a few thousand votes in key states would have reversed the outcome. A host of trusted advisors and academics flocked to Washington to join the New Frontier — Kennedy's term for the challenges the country faced. - Relying on an old American trope, Kennedy's New Frontier suggested masculine toughness and adventurism and encouraged Americans to again think of themselves as exploring uncharted terrain. That terrain proved treacherous, however, as the new administration immediately faced a crisis. When Kennedy became president, he inherited Eisenhower's commitment in Vietnam, which he saw in Cold War terms. But rather than practicing brinksmanship — threatening nuclear war to stop communism — Kennedy sought what at the time seemed a more intelligent and realistic, if nevertheless interventionist, approach. In 1961, he increased military aid to the South Vietnamese and expanded the role of U.S. Special Forces ("Green Berets"), who would train the South Vietnamese army in unconventional, small-group warfare tactics.

the Warsaw Pac

a military alliance for Eastern Europe that included Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union. In these parallel steps, the two superpowers formalized the Cold War through a massive division of the continent.

By 1968, a sense of crisis gripped the country. Riots in the cities, campus unrest, and a nose-thumbing counterculture escalated into a general youth rebellion that seemed on the verge of tearing America apart.

alling 1968 "the watershed year for a generation," SDS founder Tom Hayden wrote that it "started with legendary events, then raised hopes, only to end by immersing innocence in tragedy." It was perhaps the most shocking year in all the postwar decades. Violent clashes both in Vietnam and back home in the United States combined with political assassinations to produce a palpable sense of despair and hopelessness

The Affluent Society (1958

analyzed the nation's successful, "affluent" middle class, economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the poor were only an "afterthought" in the minds of economists and politicians, who largely celebrated the new growth.

As it took shape during World War II and the early Cold War, the campaign against racial injustice proceeded along two tracks:

at the grass roots and in government institutions (federal courts, state legislatures, and ultimately the U.S. Congress) Labor unions, churches, and organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) inspired hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens to join the movement. But grassroots protest was not African Americans' only weapon. They also had the Bill of Rights and the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution. Civil rights lived in those documents — especially in the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all U.S. citizens, and in the Fifteenth, which guaranteed the right to vote regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" — but had been ignored or violated for nearly a century. The task was to restore the Constitution's legal force. Neither track, grassroots or legal, was entirely independent of the other. Together, they were the foundation of the fight for racial equality in the postwar decades.

A United States response to the successful orbiting of Sputnik in 1957 was to A increase NATO forces in Europe B expand federal aid into education C withdraw from arms-limitation talks with the Soviet Union D force the resignation of important American scientists from governmental positions E increase cooperation with the Soviet Union in space projects

b

Which of the following was true of women in the five years following the Second World War? A Those working outside the home demanded equality in pay and promotion opportunities. B Large numbers left their industrial jobs to make room for returning soldiers. C They contributed to a sudden decline in the birth rate by employing new family planning techniques. D Large numbers were elected to high office because of their contributions to the war effort. E Young women participated in a revolution in manners and morals that challenged the values of their parents.

b

In 1950 a major factor in President Harry Truman's commitment of American troops to combat North Korean aggression was a desire to A force Congress to appropriate more money for the armed services B preserve South Korea's markets for United States exports C overcome the stigma that the Democratic party had "lost" China to communism D convince Americans that containment was an inefficient way to deal with communist expansion E direct the focus of American postwar foreign policy away from Europe

c

Which of the following statements is correct about the rise of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy to national prominence? A He was the first Republican to emphasize the dangers of communism at home and abroad. B His careful investigations led to the conviction of hundreds of active subversives to whom the Truman administration had turned a blind eye. C He effectively played on the fears of Americans that communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies. D He used the televised Army-McCarthy hearings to his advantage. E He received strong support from president Eisenhower.

c

The Economic Opportunity Act of 196

created a series of programs to reach these Americans, was the president's answer — what he called the War on Poverty. This legislation included several different initiatives. Head Start provided free nursery schools to prepare disadvantaged preschoolers for kindergarten. The Job Corps and Upward Bound provided young people with training and employment. Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), modeled on the Peace Corps, offered technical assistance to the urban and rural poor. An array of regional development programs focused on spurring economic growth in impoverished areas. On balance, the 1964 legislation provided services to the poor rather than jobs, leading some critics to charge the War on Poverty with doing too little. A 1964 act that created a series of programs, including Head Start to prepare disadvantaged preschoolers for kindergarten and the Job Corps and Upward Bound to provide young people with training and employment, aimed at alleviating poverty and spurring economic growth in impoverished areas.

The United States involvement in Vietnam increased dramatically in the 1950s with the withdrawal of the A Japanese B British C Chinese D French E Soviets

d

The 1968 Tet Offensive was significant because it A showed that American soldiers were ill equipped to fight in the jungle B pressured North Vietnam to come to the bargaining table C convinced President Johnson to begin bombing Cambodia D reaffirmed popular support for the South Vietnamese government E led to increased antiwar sentiment in the United States

e

The 1979 incident at Three Mile Island had which of the following effects? A It intensified criticism of the Supreme Court. B It intensified American Indian political activism. C It forced the United States to reconsider the policy of "massive retaliation." D It increased public pressure to free the United States from dependence on foreign energy sources. E It increased support for the movement against nuclear power.

e

The announced purpose of the Marshall Plan was to A stabilize world currencies B promote advanced technology for use in the military defense of Western Europe C reduce the dependence of the European economy on overseas empires D maintain the United States position as the world's leading creditor nation E aid the economic recovery of the war-torn Europe

e

Peace Corps

embodied a call to public service put forth in his inaugural address ("Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"). Thousands of men and women agreed to devote two or more years as volunteers for projects such as teaching English to Filipino schoolchildren or helping African villagers obtain clean water. Exhibiting the idealism of the early 1960s, the Peace Corps was also a low-cost Cold War weapon — and an extension of American "soft power" (Chapter 21) — intended to show the developing world that there was an alternative to communism.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

embraced what his supporters called modern Republicanism, an updated GOP approach that aimed at moderating, not dismantling, the New Deal. much successors of FDR as of Herbert Hoover. Foreign policy revealed a similar continuity. Like their predecessors, Republicans saw the world in Cold War polarities. no political past - never voted bc thought military should stand aside for democracy For eight years, between 1952 and 1960, Eisenhower steered a precarious course from the middle of the party, with conservative Taft Republicans on one side and liberal Rockefeller Republicans on the other. His popularity temporarily kept the two sides at bay, though more ardent conservatives considered him a closet New Dealer. "Ike," as he was widely known, proved willing to work with the mostly Democratic-controlled Congresses of those years signed bills increasing federal outlays for veterans' benefits, housing, highway construction (Chapter 25), and Social Security, and he increased the minimum wage from 75 cents an hour to $1. Like Truman, Eisenhower accepted some government responsibility for the economic security of individuals, part of a broad consensus in American politics in these years. The global power realities that had called forth containment guided Eisenhower's foreign policy. With no end to the Cold War in sight, Eisenhower focused on limiting the cost of containment Although confident in the international arena, Eisenhower started out as a novice in domestic affairs. - tried to set less confrontational tone than Truman - he was reluctant to speak out against Joe McCarthy, and he was not a leader on civil rights Democrats meanwhile maintained a strong presence in Congress but proved weak in presidential elections in the 1950s.

Soviet Union responce to nato

established the German Democratic Republic (East Germany); the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON); and, in 1955, the Warsaw Pact,

During the decade of the 1960's, young people, Black people, American Indians, Hispanic Americans, and women were among the groups protesting various aspects of American society. All of the following were protested against by one or more of these following groups EXCEPT the A excessive cost of the social security system B United States involvement in the Vietnam War C marginal economic status of non-Whites D exclusion of women from the mainstream of American life E increasing bureaucratization and impersonality of American institutions

excessive cost of the social security system

the World Bank

founded to provide loans for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe as well as for the development of former colonized nations — the so-called Third World or developing world.

Demands for justice persisted in the early years of the Cold War.

frican American efforts were propelled by symbolic victories — as when Jackie Robinson broke through the color line in major league baseball by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 — but the growing black vote in northern cities proved more consequential. During World War II, more than a million African Americans migrated to northern and western cities, where they joined the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal (Map 26.1). This newfound political leverage awakened northern liberals, many of whom became allies of civil rights advocates. Ultimately, however, the Cold War produced mixed results, as the nation's growing anticommunism opened some avenues for civil rights while closing others.

The National Defense Education Act of 1958

funneled millions of dollars into American universities, helping institutions such as the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan become the leading research centers in the world.

Warren Court

lasted from 1954 until 1969 and established some of the most far-reaching liberal jurisprudence in U.S. history. Warren surprised many, including Eisenhower himself, with his robust advocacy of civil rights and civil liberties. Right-wing activists fiercely opposed the Warren Court, which they accused of "legislating from the bench" and contributing to social breakdown. They pointed, for instance, to the Court's rulings that people who are arrested have a constitutional right to counsel (1963, 1964) and, in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), that arrestees have to be informed by police of their right to remain silent. Compounding conservatives' frustration was a series of decisions that liberalized restrictions on pornography. Trying to walk the fine line between censorship and obscenity, the Court ruled in Roth v. United States (1957) that obscene material had to be "utterly without redeeming social importance" to be banned. The "social importance" test, however, proved nearly impossible to define and left wide latitude for pornography to flourish. That constitutional test was finally abandoned in 1972, when the Court ruled in Miller v. California that "contemporary community standards" were the rightful measure of obscenity. But Miller, too, little slowed the proliferation of pornographic magazines, films, and live shows in the 1970s. Conservatives found these decisions especially distasteful, since the Court had also ruled that religious ritual of any kind in public schools — including prayers and Bible reading — violated the constitutional separation of church and state. To many religious Americans, the Court had taken the side of immorality over Christian values. Supreme Court critics blamed rising crime rates and social breakdown on the Warren Court's liberal judicial record. Every category of crime was up in the 1970s, but especially disconcerting was the doubling of the murder rate since the 1950s and the 76 percent increase in burglary and theft between 1967 and 1976. Sensational crimes had always grabbed headlines, but now "crime" itself preoccupied politicians, the media, and the public. However, no one could establish a direct causal link between increases in crime and Supreme Court decisions, given a myriad of other social factors, including drugs, income inequality, enhanced statistical record-keeping, and the proliferation of guns. But when many Americans looked at their cities in the 1970s, they saw pornographic theaters, X-rated bookstores, and rising crime rates. Where, they wondered, was law and order?

American Indian Movement (AIM)

led by Dennis Banks and Russell Means; purpose was to obtain equal rights for Native Americans; protested at the site of the Wounded Knee massacre

Yalta and Potsdam demonstrated that in private negotiations the United States and the Soviet Union had starkly different objectives. Public utterances only intensified those differences.

n February 1946, Stalin delivered a speech in which he insisted that, according to Marxist-Leninist principles, "the unevenness of development of the capitalist countries" was likely to produce "violent disturbance" and even another war. He seemed to blame any future war on the capitalist West. Churchill responded in kind a month later. While visiting Truman in Missouri to be honored for his wartime leadership, Churchill accused Stalin of raising an "iron curtain" around Eastern Europe and allowing "police government" to rule its people. He went further, claiming that "a fraternal association of English-speaking peoples," and not Russians, ought to set the terms of the postwar world.

election 1952

nation was embroiled in the tense Cold War with the Soviet Union and fighting a "hot" war in Korea. Republicans won no radical change tho Dwight D Eisenhower

Stung by the West's intention to create a German republic, in June 1948 Stalin blockaded all traffic to West Berlin.

nstead of yielding, as Stalin had expected, Truman and the British were resolute. "We are going to stay, period," Truman said plainly. Over the next year, American and British pilots improvised the Berlin Airlift, which flew 2.5 million tons of food and fuel into the Western zones of the city — nearly a ton for each resident. General Lucius D. Clay, the American commander in Berlin, was nervous and on edge, "drawn as tight as a steel spring," according to U.S. officials. But after a prolonged stalemate, Stalin backed down: on May 12, 1949, he lifted the blockade. Until the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the Berlin crisis was the closest the two sides came to actual war, and West Berlin became a symbol of resistance to communism.

Potsdam Conference

outside Berlin in July 1945 Harry Truman replaced the deceased Roosevelt. Inexperienced in world affairs and thrown into enormously complicated negotiations, Truman's instinct was to stand up to Stalin. "Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language," he said, "another war is in the making." But Truman was in no position to shape events in Eastern Europe, where Soviet-imposed governments in Poland, Hungary, and Romania were backed by the Red Army and could not be eliminated by Truman's bluster. In Poland and Romania, in particular, Stalin was determined to establish communist governments, punish wartime Nazi collaborators, and win boundary concessions that augmented Soviet territory.

Geneva Accords

partitioned Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel and called for elections within two years to unify the strife-torn nation. The United States rejected them and set about undermining them.

loyalty security Program - Executive order 9835

permitted officials to investigate any employee of the federal government (some 2.5 million people) for "subversive" activities. Representing a profound centralization of power, the order sent shock waves through every federal agency. Truman intended the order to apply principally to actions designed to harm the United States (sabotage, treason, etc.), but it was broad enough to allow anyone to be accused of subversion for the slightest reason — for marching in a Communist-led demonstration in the 1930s, for instance, or signing a petition endorsing public housing. Along with suspected political subversives, more than a thousand gay men and lesbians were dismissed from federal employment in the 1950s, victims of an obsessive search for anyone deemed "unfit" for government work. Following Truman's lead, many state and local governments, universities, political organizations, churches, and businesses undertook their own antisubversion campaigns, which often included loyalty oaths.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978

prohibited domestic wiretapping without a warrant.

Executive Order 8802

prohibiting racial discrimination in defense industries, and Randolph agreed to cancel the march. The resulting Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) had few enforcement powers, but it set an important precedent: federal action.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

signed by President Johnson on August 6, outlawed the literacy tests and other devices that prevented African Americans from registering to vote, and authorized the attorney general to send federal examiners to register voters in any county where registration was less than 50 percent. Together with the Twenty-Fourth Amendment (ratified in 1964), which outlawed the poll tax in federal elections, the Voting Rights Act enabled millions of African Americans to vote for the first time since Reconstruction. increase in black registered voters and black elected officials Most of those elected held local offices — from sheriff to county commissioner — but nonetheless embodied a shift in political representation nearly unimaginable a generation earlier.

Cuban Missle Crisis (Oct. 1962)

somber televised address on October 22, Kennedy revealed that U.S. reconnaissanceplanes had spotted Soviet-built bases for intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Some of those weapons had already been installed, and more were on the way. Kennedy announced that the United States would impose a "quarantine on all offensive military equipment" bound for Cuba. As the world held its breath waiting to see if the conflict would escalate into war, on October 25 ships carrying Soviet missiles turned back. After a week of tense negotiations, both sides made concessions: Kennedy pledged not to invade Cuba, and Khrushchev promised to dismantle the missile bases. Kennedy also secretly ordered U.S. missiles to be removed from Turkey, at Khrushchev's insistence. The risk of nuclear war, greater during the Cuban missile crisis than at any other time in the Cold War, prompted a slight thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations.

A month after he took office, Ford stunned the nation by granting Nixon a "full, free, and absolute" pardon. Congress pushed back, passing a raft of laws inspired by the abuses of the Nixon administration and designed to limit the power of future presidents:

the War Powers Act (1973), which reined in the president's ability to deploy U.S. forces without congressional approval; amendments strengthening the Freedom of Information Act(1974), which gave citizens access to federal records; the Ethics in Government Act(1978); and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978), which prohibited domestic wiretapping without a warrant.

The Other America (1962

the left-wing social critic Michael Harrington chronicled "the economic underworld of American life," and a U.S. government study, echoing a well-known sentence from Franklin Roosevelt's second inaugural address ("I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished"), declared "one-third of the nation" to be poorly paid, poorly educated, and poorly housed

The 1970's and the 1980's saw an increase in all of the following EXCEPT A the influence of Christian fundamentalism B the average age of Americans C support for consumer and environmental movements D the number of women holding political office E the percentage of two-parent households

the percentage of two-parent households

Among African Americans, the Black Panther Party and the National Black Antiwar Antidraft League spoke out against the war.

they thought they shouldn't be fighting a war for something they didn't have themselves

The keystone of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,

title VII - outlawed discrimination in employment on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex. Another section guaranteed equal access to public accommodations and schools

With civil rights legislation blocked in Congress by southern Democrats throughout the 1950s, activists looked in two different directions for a breakthrough:

to northern state legislatures and to the federal courts. School segregation remained a stubborn problem in northern states, but the biggest obstacle to black progress there was persistent job and housing discrimination. The states with the largest African American populations, and hence the largest share of black Democratic Party voters, became testing grounds for state legislation to end such discriminatory practices.

Organized labor remained a key force in the Democratic Party and played a central role in championing Cold War liberalism.

tronger than ever, union membership swelled to more than 14 million by 1945. Determined to make up for their wartime sacrifices, unionized workers made aggressive demands and mounted major strikes in the automobile, steel, and coal industries after the war, as they had after World War I. Republicans responded. They gained control of the House in a sweeping repudiation of Democrats in 1946 and promptly passed — over Truman's veto — the Taft-Hartley Act (1947

National Indian Youth Council (NIYC)

under the slogan "For a Greater Indian America," promoted the ideal of Native Americans as a single ethnic group. The effort to both unite Indians and celebrate individual tribal culture proved a difficult balancing act.

The gulf of Tonkin

uring the summer of 1964, the president got reports that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had fired on the U.S. destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. In the first attack, on August 2, the damage inflicted was limited to a single bullet hole; a second attack, on August 4, later proved to be only misread radar sightings. To Johnson, it didn't matter if the attack was real or imagined; the president believed a wider war was inevitable and issued a call to arms, sending his national approval rating from 42 to 72 percent. In the entire Congress, only two senators voted against his request for authorization to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as it became known, gave Johnson the freedom to conduct operations in Vietnam as he saw fit.

Something else would never go back either: the liberal New Deal coalition

y the second half of the 1960s, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had won its battle with the conservative, segregationist wing. Democrats had embraced the civil rights movement and made black equality a cornerstone of a new "rights" liberalism. But over the next generation, between the 1960s and the 1980s, southern whites and many conservative northern whites would respond by switching to the Republican Party. Strom Thurmond, the segregationist senator from South Carolina, symbolically led the revolt by renouncing the Democratic Party and becoming a Republican in 1964. The New Deal coalition — which had joined working-class whites, northern African Americans, urban professionals, and white southern segregationists together in a fragile political alliance since the 1930s — was beginning to crumble.

Popular disdain for politicians, evident in declining voter turnout, deepened with Nixon's resignation in 1974.

"Don't vote," read one bumper sticker in 1976. "It only encourages them." Watergate not only damaged short-term Republican prospects but also shifted the party's balance to the right. Despite mastering the populist appeal to the "silent majority," the moderate Nixon was never beloved by conservatives. His relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union and his visit to communist China, in particular, won him no friends on the right. His disgraceful exit benefitted the more conservative Republicans, who proceeded to reshape the party in their image.

Despite his congressional mandate, Johnson was initially cautious about revealing his plans to the American people.

"I had no choice but to keep my foreign policy in the wings ...," Johnson later said. "I knew that the day it exploded into a major debate on the war, that day would be the beginning of the end of the Great Society." So he ran in 1964 on the pledge that there would be no escalation — no "American boys" fighting Vietnam's fight, he said. Privately, he doubted the pledge could be kept.

While serving a jail sentence for leading the march, King, scribbling in pencil on any paper he could find, composed one of the classic documents of nonviolent direct action: "Letter from Birmingham Jail.

"Why direct action?" King asked. "There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth," he began his answer. The civil rights movement sought, King continued, "to create such a crisis and establish such a creative tension." Grounding his appeal in equal parts Christian brotherhood and democratic liberalism, King argued that Americans confronted a moral choice: they could "preserve the evil system of segregation" or take the side of "those great wells of democracy ... the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."

the rust belt

The once heavily industrialized regions of the Northeast and Midwest that went into decline after deindustrialization. By the 1970s and 1980s, these regions were full of abandoned plants and distressed communities.

Emboldened by SNCC's sit-in tactics, in 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized a series of what were called Freedom Rides on interstate bus lines throughout the South.

The aim was to call attention to blatant violations of recent Supreme Court rulings that had declared segregation in interstate commerce unconstitutional. The activists who signed on — mostly young, both black and white — knew that they were taking their lives in their hands. They found courage in song, as civil rights activists had begun to do across the country, with lyrics such as "I'm taking a ride on the Greyhound bus line. ... Hallelujah, I'm traveling down freedom's main line!" Courage they needed. Club-wielding Klansmen attacked the buses when they stopped in small towns. Outside Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed; the Freedom Riders escaped only moments before it exploded. Some riders were then brutally beaten. Freedom Riders and news reporters were also viciously attacked by Klansmen in Birmingham and Montgomery. Despite the violence, state authorities refused to intervene. "I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble rousers," declared Governor John Patterson of Alabama. Once again, local officials' refusal to enforce the law left the fate of the Freedom Riders in Washington's hands. The new president, John F. Kennedy, was cautious about civil rights. Despite a campaign commitment, he failed to deliver on a civil rights bill. Elected by a thin margin, Kennedy believed that he could ill afford to lose the support of powerful southern senators. But civil rights was unlike other domestic issues. Its fate was going to be decided not in the halls of Congress, but on the streets of southern cities. Although President Kennedy discouraged the Freedom Rides, beatings shown on the nightly news forced Attorney General Robert Kennedy to dispatch federal marshals. Civil rights activists thus learned the tactical value of nonviolent protest that provoked violent white resistance. The victories so far had been limited, but the groundwork had been laid for a civil rights offensive that would transform the nation. The NAACP's legal strategy had been followed by the emergence of a major protest movement. And now civil rights leaders focused their attention on Congress.

Children also encouraged consumption.

The baby boomers born between World War II and the late 1950s have consistently, throughout every phase of their lives, been the darlings of American advertising and consumption.

Younger Mexican Americans grew impatient with civil rights groups such as MAPA and MALDEF, however.

The barrios of Los Angeles and other western cities produced the militant Brown Berets, modeled on the Black Panthers (who wore black berets). Rejecting their elders' assimilationist approach (that is, a belief in adapting to Anglo society), fifteen hundred Mexican American students met in Denver in 1969 to hammer out a new political and cultural agenda. They proclaimed a new term, Chicano(and its feminine form, Chicana), to replace Mexican American, and later organized a political party, La Raza Unida (People United), to promote Chicano interests. Young Chicana feminists formed a number of organizations, including Las Hijas (The Daughters), that organized women both on college campuses and in the barrios. In California and many southwestern states, students staged demonstrations to press for bilingual education, the hiring of more Chicano teachers, and the creation of Chicano studies programs. By the 1970s, dozens of such programs were offered at universities throughout the region.

Bretton Woods System

The chief idea of the Bretton Woods system was to make American capital available, on cheap terms, to nations that adopted free-trade capitalist economies.

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

(CORE) Civil rights organization started in 1944 and best known for its "freedom rides," bus journeys challenging racial segregation in the South in 1961. 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. In 1961 CORE organized a series of what were called Freedom Rides on interstate bus lines throughout the South to call attention to blatant violations of recent Supreme Court rulings against segregation in interstate commerce.

New Look Defense Policy

The defense policy of the Eisenhower administration that stepped up production of the hydrogen bomb and developed long-range bombing capabilities Soviets, however, matched the United States weapon for weapon. This arms race was another critical feature of the Cold War.

The steel industry was the prime example of what became known as deindustrialization.

The dismantling of manufacturing — especially in the automobile, steel, and consumer-goods industries — in the decades after World War II, representing a reversal of the process of industrialization that had dominated the American economy from the 1870s through the 1940s. The country was in the throes of an economic transformation that left it largely stripped of its industrial base. Steel was hardly alone. A swath of the Northeast and Midwest, the country's manufacturing heartland, became the nation's Rust Belt (Map 28.1), strewn with abandoned plants and distressed communities. The automobile, tire, textile, and other consumer durable industries (appliances, electronics, furniture, and the like) all started shrinking in the 1970s. In 1980, Business Week bemoaned "plant closings across the continent" and called for the "reindustrialization of America." Deindustrialization threw many tens of thousands of blue-collar workers out of well-paid union jobs. Deindustrialization dealt an especially harsh blow to the labor movement, which had facilitated the postwar expansion of that middle class. In the early 1970s, as inflation hit, the number of strikes surged; 2.4 million workers participated in work stoppages in 1970 alone. However, industry argued that it could no longer afford union demands, and labor's bargaining power produced fewer and fewer concrete results. In these hard years, the much-vaunted labor-management accord of the 1950s, which raised profits and wages by passing costs on to consumers, went bust. Instead of seeking higher wages, unions now mainly fought to save jobs. Union membership went into steep decline, and by the mid-1980s organized labor represented less than 18 percent of American workers, the lowest level since the 1920s. The impact on liberal politics was huge. With labor's decline, a main buttress of the New Deal coalition was coming undone.

Fair Deal

The domestic policy agenda announced by President Harry S. Truman in 1949. Including civil rights, health care, and education reform, Truman's initiative was only partially successful in Congress n its attention to civil rights, the Fair Deal reflected the growing influence of African Americans in the Democratic Party. Congress, however, remained a huge stumbling block, and the Fair Deal fared poorly.

Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)

1954 linked the United States and its major European allies with Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand.

Which of the following civil rights groups is NOT correctly matched with one of its leading figures? A Southern Christian Leadership Conference . . Marcus Garvey B Black Panthers . . Huey Newton C National Association for the Advancement of Colored People . . Roy Wilkins D Black Muslims . . Malcolm X E Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee . . Stokely Carmichael

A Southern Christian Leadership Conference . . Marcus Garvey

Port Huron Statement,

A 1962 manifesto by Students for a Democratic Society from its first national convention in Port Huron, Michigan, expressing students' disillusionment with the nation's consumer culture and the gulf between rich and poor, as well as a rejection of Cold War foreign policy, including the war in Vietnam.

Community Services Organization (CSO)

A Latino civil rights group founded in Los Angeles in 1947 that trained many Latino politicians and community activists, including Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF)

A Mexican American civil rights organization founded in 1967 and based on the model of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. MALDEF focused on legal issues and endeavored to win protections against discrimination through court decisions

Earlier that year, on the heels of the Santa Barbara oil spill, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

A bipartisan bill with broad support, including that of President Nixon, the law required developers to file environmental impact statements assessing the effect of their projects on ecosystems. A spate of new laws followed: the Clean Air Act (1970), the Occupational Health and Safety Act (1970), the Water Pollution Control Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973).

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)

A cartel formed in 1960 by the Persian Gulf states and other oil-rich developing countries that allowed its members to exert greater control over the price of oil. didn't like US bc we support Israel

Truman and the Democratic Party of the late 1940s and early 1950s forged what historians call Cold War liberalism.

A combination of moderate liberal policies that preserved the programs of the New Deal welfare state and forthright anticommunism that vilified the Soviet Union abroad and radicalism at home. Adopted by President Truman and the Democratic Party during the late 1940s and early 1950s They preserved the core programs of the New Deal welfare state, developed the containment policy to oppose Soviet influence throughout the world, and fought so-called subversives at home. But there would be no second act for the New Deal. The Democrats adopted this combination of moderate liberal policies and anticommunism — Cold War liberalism — partly by choice and partly out of necessity.

Brown had been the law of the land for barely a year when a single act of violence struck at the heart of black America.

A fourteen-year-old African American from the South Side of Chicago, Emmett Till, was visiting relatives in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Seen talking to a white woman in a grocery store, Till was tortured and murdered under cover of night. His mutilated body was found at the bottom of a river, tied with barbed wire to a heavy steel cotton gin fan. Photos of Till's body in Jet magazine brought national attention to the heinous crime Two white men were arrested for Till's murder. During the trial, followed closely in black communities across the country, the lone witness to Till's kidnapping — his uncle, Mose Wright — identified both killers. Feeling "the blood boil in hundreds of white people as they sat glaring in the courtroom," Wright said, "it was the first time in my life I had the courage to accuse a white man of a crime." Despite Wright's eyewitness testimony, the all-white jury found the defendants innocent. This miscarriage of justice — later, the killers even admitted their guilt in a Look magazine article — galvanized an entire generation of African Americans; no one who lived through the Till incident ever forgot it.

stonewall inn

A gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village that was raided by police in 1969; the ensuing two-day riot contributed to the rapid rise of a gay liberation movement. Decades of police repression had taken their toll. Few commentators excused the violence, and the Stonewall riots were not repeated, but activists celebrated them as a symbolic demand for full citizenship. The gay liberation movement grew quickly after Stonewall. Local gay, lesbian, and transgender organizations proliferated, and activists began pushing for nondiscrimination ordinances and consensual sex laws at the state level. By 1975, the National Gay Task Force and other national organizations were lobbying Congress, serving as media watchdogs, and advancing suits in the courts. Despite all the activity, progress was slow; in most arenas of American life, gay men, lesbians, and transgender people did not enjoy the same legal protections and rights as other Americans.

American GI Forum

A group founded by World War II veterans in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1948 to protest the poor treatment of Mexican American soldiers and veterans.

War powers act (1973)

A law that limited the president's ability to deploy U.S. forces without congressional approval. Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973 as a series of laws to fight the abuses of the Nixon administration.

Proposition 13

A measure passed overwhelmingly by Californians to roll back property taxes, cap future increases for present owners, and require that all tax measures have a two-thirds majority in the legislature. Proposition 13 inspired "tax revolts" across the country and helped conservatives define an enduring issue: low taxes. hobbled public spending in the nation's most populous state. Per capita funding of California public schools, once the envy of the nation, plunged from the top tier to the bottom, where it was second only to Mississippi. Moreover, Proposition 13's complicated formula benefitted middle-class and wealthy home owners at the expense of less-well-off citizens, especially those who depended heavily on public services. Businesses, too, came out ahead, because commercial property got the same protection as residential property. More broadly, Proposition 13 inspired tax revolts across the country and helped conservatives define an enduring issue: low taxes.

Black Power

A more secular brand of black nationalism emerged in 1966 when SNCC and CORE activists, following the lead of Stokely Carmichael, began to call for black self-reliance under the banner of Black Power. Advocates of Black Power asked fundamental questions: If alliances with whites were necessary to achieve racial justice, as King believed they were, did that make African Americans dependent on the good intentions of whites? If so, could black people trust those good intentions in the long run? Increasingly, those inclined toward Black Power believed that African Americans should build economic and political power in their own communities. Such power would translate into a less dependent relationship with white America. "For once," Carmichael wrote, "black people are going to use the words they want to use — not the words whites want to hear."

women's liberation

A new brand of feminism in the 1960s that attracted primarily younger, college-educated women fresh from the New Left, antiwar, and civil rights movements who sought to end to the denigration and exploitation of women. other movements' male leaders, they discovered, considered women little more than pretty helpers who typed memos and fetched coffee. Women who tried to raise feminist issues at civil rights and antiwar events were shouted off the platform with jeers such as "Move on, little girl, we have more important issues to talk about here than women's liberation."

To staff their bureaucracies, the postwar corporate giants required a huge white-collar army

A new generation of corporate chieftains emerged, operating in a complex environment that demanded long-range forecasting. Postwar corporate culture inspired numerous critics, who argued that the obedience demanded of white-collar workers was stifling creativity and blighting lives. The sociologist William Whyte painted a somber picture of "organization men" who left the home "spiritually as well as physically to take the vows of organization life." Andrew Hacker, in The Corporation Take-Over (1964), warned that a small handful of such organization men "can draw up an investment program calling for the expenditure of several billions of dollars" and thereby "determine the quality of life for substantial segments of society."

energy crisis

A period of fuel shortages in the United States after the Arab states in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) declared an oil embargo in October 1973. drove home the realization that the earth's resources are not limitless. Such a notion was also at the heart of the era's revival of environmentalism.

collective bargaining

A process of negotiation between labor unions and employers, which after World War II translated into rising wages, expanding benefits, and an increasing rate of home ownership.

Domino Theory

A theory that if one nation comes under Communist control, then neighboring nations will also come under Communist control. which represented an extension of the containment doctrine guided U.S. policy in Southeast Asia for the next twenty years.

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.

environmentalism

Activist movement begun in the 1960s that was concerned with protecting the environment through activities such as conservation, pollution control measures, and public awareness campaigns. In response to the new environmental consciousness, the federal government staked out a broad role in environmental regulation in the 1960s and 1970s. energy crisis made people think, "woah, maybe, like, the world doesn't have, like, everything." an offshoot of sixties activism, but it had numerous historical precedents: the preservationist, conservationist, and wilderness movements of the late nineteenth century; the conservationist ethos of the New Deal; and anxiety about nuclear weapons and overpopulation in the 1940s. Three of the nation's leading environmental organizations — the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, and the Natural Resources Council — were founded in 1892, 1935, and 1942, respectively. Environmental activists in the 1970s expanded on this long history through renewed efforts to ensure a healthy environment and access to unspoiled nature (AP® Thinking Like a Historian). The movement had received a hefty boost back in 1962 when biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a stunning analysis of the pesticide DDT's toxic impact on the human and natural food chains. A succession of galvanizing developments followed in the late 1960s. The Sierra Club successfully fought two dams in 1966 that would have flooded the Grand Canyon. And in 1969, three major events spurred the movement: an offshore drilling rig spilled millions of gallons of oil off the coast of Santa Barbara; the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland burst into flames because of the accumulation of flammable chemicals on its surface; and Friends of the Everglades protested the construction of an airport that threatened plants and wildlife in Florida. With these events serving as catalysts, environmentalism became a certifiable mass movement on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, when 20 million people gathered in communities across the country to express their support for a cleaner, healthier planet.

Political realignments have been infrequent in American history. One occurred between 1932 and 1936, when many Republicans, despairing over the Great Depression, had switched sides and voted for FDR. The years between 1968 and 1972 were another such pivotal moment. This time, Democrats were the ones who abandoned their party.

After the 1968 elections, the Democrats fell into disarray. Bent on sweeping away the party's old guard, reformers took over, adopting new rules that granted women, African Americans, and young people delegate seats at the convention "in reasonable relation to their presence in the population." In the past, an alliance of urban machines, labor unions, and white ethnic groups — the heart of the New Deal coalition — dominated the presidential nominating process. But at the 1972 convention, few of the party faithful qualified as delegates under the changed rules. The crowning insult came when the convention rejected the credentials of Chicago mayor Richard Daley and his delegation, seating instead an Illinois delegation led by Jesse Jackson, a firebrand young black minister and former aide to Martin Luther King Jr. Capturing the party was one thing; beating the Republicans was quite another. These party reforms opened the door for George McGovern, a liberal South Dakota senator and favorite of the antiwar and women's movements, to capture the nomination. But McGovern took a number of missteps, including failing to mollify key party backers such as the AFL-CIO, which, for the first time in memory, refused to endorse the Democratic ticket. A weak campaigner, McGovern was also no match for Nixon, who pulled out all the stops. Using the advantages of incumbency, Nixon gave the economy a well-timed lift and proclaimed (prematurely) a cease-fire in Vietnam. Nixon's appeal to the "silent majority" — people who "care about a strong United States, about patriotism, about moral and spiritual values" — was by now well honed. Nixon won in a landslide, receiving nearly 61 percent of the popular vote and carrying every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia (Map 27.4). The returns revealed how fractured traditional Democratic voting blocs had become. McGovern received only 38 percent of the big-city Catholic vote and lost 42 percent of self-identified Democrats overall. The 1972 election marked a pivotal moment in the country's shift to the right. Yet observers legitimately wondered whether the 1972 election results proved the popularity of conservatism or merely showed that the country had grown weary of liberalism and the changes it had wrought in national life.

Paradoxically, the domesticity described in The Feminine Mystique was already crumbling.

After the postwar baby boom, women were again having fewer children, aided now by the birth control pill, first marketed in 1960. And as states liberalized divorce laws, more women were divorcing. Educational levels were also rising: by 1970, women made up 42 percent of the college population. All of these changes undermined traditional gender roles and enabled many women to embrace The Feminine Mystique's liberating prescriptions.

Influential critics of the 1950's, such as David Riesman, were most concerned with which of the following aspects of the life in the United States following the Second World War?

Alienation and conformity in modern society

Berlin

Already strained by the Bay of Pigs incident, U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated further in June 1961 when Khrushchev stopped movement between Communist-controlled East Berlin and the city's Western sector Kennedy responded by dispatching 40,000 more troops to Europe. In mid-August, to stop the exodus of East Germans fleeing to the West, the Communist regime began constructing the Berlin Wall, policed by border guards under shoot-to-kill orders. Kennedy again responded, though this time rhetorically, by delivering a speech in Berlin criticizing the wall in June 1963. Until the 12-foot-high concrete barrier came down in 1989, it served as the supreme symbol of the Cold War.

Eisenhower Doctrine

American forces would assist any nation in the region that required aid "against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism." further evidence that the United States had extended the global reach of containment, in this instance accentuated by the strategic objective of protecting the West's access to steady supplies of oil.

American global supremacy rested partly on the economic institutions created at an international conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944

An international conference in New Hampshire in July 1944 that established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The first of those institutions was the World Bank A second institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The World Bank and the IMF formed the cornerstones of the Bretton Woods system, which guided the global economy after the war.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

An organization for social change founded by college students in 1960. Michigan baby lol Port Huron Statement referred to their movement as the New Left to distinguish themselves from the Old Left — communists and socialists of the 1930s and 1940s who tended to focus on economic and labor questions rather than cultural issues

By the early 1950s, West and East were the stark markers of the new Europe.

As Churchill had observed in 1946, the line dividing the two stretched "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," cutting off tens of millions of Eastern Europeans from the rest of the continent. Stalin's tactics had often been ruthless, but they were not without reason. The Soviet Union acted out of the sort of self-interest that had long defined powerful nations — ensuring a defensive perimeter of allies, seeking access to raw materials, and pressing the advantage that victory in war allowed.

Atomic developments, too, played a critical role in the emergence of the Cold War.

As the sole nuclear power at the end of World War II, the United States entertained the possibility of international control of nuclear technology but did not wish to lose its advantage over the Soviet Union. When the American Bernard Baruch proposed United Nations oversight of atomic energy in 1946, for instance, the plan assured the United States of near-total control of the technology, which further increased Cold War tensions. America's brief tenure as sole nuclear power ended in September 1949, however, when the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb. Truman then turned to the U.S. National Security Council (NSC), established by the National Security Act of 1947, for a strategic reassessment.

In many ways, the two decades between 1945 and 1965 were a period of cultural conservatism that reflected the values of domesticity.

At the dawn of the 1960s, going steady as a prelude to marriage was the fad in high school. College women had curfews and needed permission to see a male visitor. Americans married young; more than half of those who married in 1963 were under the age of twenty-one. After the birth control pill came on the market in 1960, few doctors prescribed it to unmarried women, and even married women did not enjoy unfettered access to contraception until the Supreme Court ruled it a "privacy" right in the 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut.

1.B 1/1 MC point The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966 in order to A encourage women to believe in the "feminine mystique" B challenge sex discrimination in the workplace C oppose the proposed Equal Rights Amendment D advocate restrictions on access to abortion E advocate equal access for women to athletic facilities

B

Joseph McCarthy's investigative tactics found support among many Americans because A evidence substantiated his charges against the army B there was widespread fear of communist infiltration of the United States C both Truman and Eisenhower supported him D he worked closely with the FBI E he correctly identified numerous communists working in the State Department

B

"Sisterhood" did not unite all women, however.

Black and Latina women continued to work within the larger framework of the civil rights movement, their feminism linked to the crusade for racial justice. New groups such as the Combahee River Collective and the National Black Feminist Organization arose to speak for the concerns of black women. They criticized sexism but were reluctant to break completely with black men and the struggle for racial equality. Mexican American feminists, or Chicana feminists as they called themselves, came from Catholic backgrounds in which motherhood and family were held in high regard. "We want to walk hand in hand with the Chicano brothers, with our children, our viejitos [elders], our Familia de la Raza," one Chicana feminist wrote. Black and Chicana feminists embraced the larger movement for women's rights but carried on their own struggles to address specific needs in their communities.

Johnson gradually grew more confident that his Vietnam policy had the support of the American people.

Both Democrats and Republicans approved Johnson's escalation in Vietnam, and so did public opinion polls in 1965 and 1966. But then opinion began to shift Every night, Americans saw the carnage of war on their television screens, including images of dead and wounded Americans. One such incident occurred in the first months of fighting in 1965. Television reporter Morley Safer witnessed a marine unit burning the village of Cam Ne to the ground. "Today's operation is the frustration of Vietnam in miniature," Safer explained. America can "win a military victory here, but to a Vietnamese peasant whose home is [destroyed] it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side."

As president, Harry Truman cast himself in the mold of his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt, and hoped to seize the possibilities afforded by victory in World War II to expand the New Deal at home.

But the crises in postwar Europe and Asia, combined with the swift rise of anticommunism in the United States, forced him to take a different path. In the end, Truman went down in history as a Cold Warrior rather than a New Dealer. The Cold War consensus that he ultimately embraced — the notion that resisting communism at home and abroad represented America's most important postwar objective — shaped the nation's life and politics for decades to come.

Despite its massive size, the defense industry was only one part of the nation's economy. For over half a century, the consolidation of economic power into large corporate firms had characterized American capitalism. In the postwar decades, that tendency accelerated.

By 1970, the top four U.S. automakers produced 91 percent of all motor vehicles sold in the country; the top four firms in tires produced 72 percent; those in cigarettes, 84 percent; and those in detergents, 70 percent. Eric Johnston, former president of the American Chamber of Commerce, declared that "we have entered a period of accelerating bigness in all aspects of American life." Expansion into foreign markets also spurred corporate growth. During the 1950s, U.S. exports nearly doubled, giving the nation a trade surplus of close to $5 billion in 1960. By the 1970s, such firms as Coca-Cola, Gillette, IBM, and Mobil made more than half their profits abroad. To staff their bureaucracies, the postwar corporate giants required a huge white-collar army

Black Power also inspired African Americans to work within the political system.

By the mid-1960s, black residents neared 50 percent of the population in several major American cities — such as Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. Black Power in these cities was not abstract; it counted in real votes. Residents of Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio, elected the first black mayors of large cities in 1967. Richard Hatcher in Gary and Carl Stokes in Cleveland helped forge a new urban politics in the United States. Their campaign teams registered thousands of black voters and made alliances with enough whites to create a working majority. Many saw Stokes's victory, in particular, as heralding a new day. As one of Stokes's campaign staffers said: "If Carl Stokes could run for mayor in the eighth largest city in America, then maybe who knows. We could be senators. We could be anything we wanted." Having met with some political success, black leaders gathered in Gary for the 1972 National Black Political Convention. In a meeting that brought together radicals, liberals, and centrists, debate centered on whether to form a third political party. Hatcher recalled that many in attendance believed that "there was going to be a black third party." In the end, however, delegates decided to "give the Democratic Party one more chance." Instead of creating a third party, the convention issued the National Black Political Agenda, which included calls for community control of schools in black neighborhoods, national health insurance, and the elimination of the death penalty. Democrats failed to enact the National Black Political Agenda, but African Americans were increasingly integrated into American political institutions. By the end of the century, black elected officials had become commonplace in major American cities. There were forty-seven African American big-city mayors by the 1990s, and blacks had led most of the nation's most prominent cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. These politicians had translated black power not into a wholesale rejection of white society but into a revitalized liberalism that would remain an indelible feature of urban politics for the rest of the century.

Accounts of North Vietnamese torpedo-boat attacks on United States destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin during the summer of 1964 were used to justify which of the following United States actions in Vietnam? A Delivery of a formal diplomatic protest to Hanoi B Discontinuation of American naval involvement C Escalation of the American war effort D Withdrawal of all American military advisers E Introduction of the Vietnamization program

C Escalation of the American war effort

Which of the following is a correct statement about the college-level education in the twentieth-century United States? A State universities increased scholarship aid during the Depression. B Private universities raised admission standards during the 1940's. C The GI Bill financed the education of male students during the post-Second World War era. D The "baby boomers" finished college in large numbers in the 1950's. E There was a sharp decline in college enrollment during the Vietnam War.

C The GI Bill financed the education of male students during the post-Second World War era.

The "graying" of America since the 1970s is widely seen as threatening which of the following? A The American tourist industry B The consumer culture of American society C The long-term viability of the social security system D Voter turnout in local and national elections E Immigration quotas

C The long-term viability of the social security system

In an age of anxiety about nuclear annihilation and the spread of "godless communism," Americans yearned for a reaffirmation of faith.

Church membership jumped from 49 percent of the population in 1940 to 70 percent in 1960. People flocked to the evangelical Protestant denominations, beneficiaries of a remarkable new crop of preachers. Most eloquent was the young Reverend Billy Graham, who made brilliant use of television, radio, and advertising. Hundreds of thousands of Americans attended his massive 1949 revival in Los Angeles and his 1957 crusade at Madison Square Garden in New York, establishing Graham as the nation's leading evangelical. Rather than clashing with the new middle-class ethic of consumption, the religious reawakening was designed to mesh with it. - Preachers such as Graham told Americans that so long as they lived moral lives, they deserved the material blessings of modern life. No one was more influential in this regard than the minister and author Norman Vincent Peale, whose best-selling book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) embodied the therapeutic use of religion as an antidote to life's trials and tribulations. Peale taught that with faith in God and "positive thinking," anyone could overcome obstacles and become a success. Graham, Peale, and other 1950s evangelicals laid the foundation for the rise of the televangelists, who created popular television ministries in the 1970s. The postwar purveyors of religious faith cast Americans as a righteous people opposed to communist atheism. Cold War imperatives drew Catholics, Protestants, and Jews into an influential ecumenical movement that downplayed doctrinal differences. The phrase "under God" was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and U.S. coins carried the words "In God We Trust" after 1956. These religious initiatives struck a distinctly moderate tone, however, in comparison with the politicized evangelism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapter 28).

However, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the hunt for subversives at home also held the civil rights movement back.

Civil rights opponents charged that racial integration was "communistic," and the NAACP was banned in many southern states as an "anti-American" organization. Black Americans who spoke favorably of the Soviet Union, such as the actor and singer Paul Robeson, or had been "fellow travelers" in the 1930s, such as the pacifist Rustin, were persecuted. Robeson, whose career was destroyed by such accusations, told House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) interrogators, "My father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to ... have a part of it just like you." The fate of people like Robeson showed that the Cold War could work against the civil rights cause just as easily as for it.

In Vietnam, Nixon picked up where Johnson had left off.

Cold War assumptions continued to dictate presidential policy. Abandoning Vietnam, Nixon insisted, would damage America's "credibility" and make the country seem "a pitiful, helpless giant." Nixon wanted peace, but only "peace with honor." The North Vietnamese were not about to oblige him. The only reasonable outcome, from their standpoint, was a unified Vietnam under their control.

As permanent mobilization took hold, science, industry, and government became intertwined.

Cold War competition for military supremacy spawned both an arms race and a space race as the United States and the Soviet Union each sought to develop more explosive bombs and more powerful rockets.

The Cold War began on the heels of World War II and ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Cold War rivalry framed the possible answers to both questions as it drew the United States into a prolonged engagement with world affairs unprecedented in the nation's history.

the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

Congressman Martin Dies of Texas and other conservatives had launched in 1938. In 1947, HUAC helped spark the Red Scare by holding widely publicized hearings on alleged Communist infiltration in the movie industry writers and directors dubbed the Hollywood Ten went to jail for contempt of Congress after they refused to testify about their past associations - alot of other actors BLACKLISTED Alger Hiss - investigation that had greater legitimacy

Despite Eisenhower's popularity as the former commander of Allied forces in Europe, divisions in the party persisted.

Conservatives - Robert A. Taft of Hhio - Republican leader in senate who was opponent of the nEw Deal modertates - esienhower liberals - Rockefeller

Meanwhile, women's opportunities expanded dramatically in higher education.

Dozens of formerly all-male bastions such as Yale, Princeton, and the U.S. military academies admitted women undergraduates for the first time. Colleges started women's studies programs, which eventually numbered in the hundreds, and the proportion of women attending graduate and professional schools rose markedly.

To keep baby boom children healthy and happy, middle-class parents increasingly relied on the advice of experts

Dr. Benjamin Spock's Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care urged mothers to abandon the rigid feeding and baby-care schedules of an earlier generation. New mothers found Spock's commonsense approach liberating. Despite his commonsense approach to child rearing, Spock was part of a generation of psychological experts whose advice often failed to reassure women. If mothers were too protective, Spock and others argued, they might hamper their children's preparation for adult life. On the other hand, mothers who wanted to work outside the home felt guilty because Spock recommended that they be constantly available for their children. As American mothers aimed for the perfection demanded of them seemingly at every turn, many began to question these mixed messages. Some of them would be inspired by the resurgence of feminism in the 1960s.

In 1962, which of the following contributed most directly to a crisis in Soviet-American relations over Cuba? A Cuban attacks on the United States naval base at Guantanamo B The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion C Cuban support for leftist guerilla movements in Latin America D Cuban withdrawal from the Organization of American States E The discovery of Soviet missile sites in Cuba

E

All of the following characterized the economy during the Carter administration EXCEPT A high interest rates B inflation C increased government spending D rising unemployment E increased union membership

E increased union membership

On the home front, civil rights activists pushed two strategies

EXECUTIVE ORDER 8820 :First, A. Philip Randolph, whose Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was the most prominent black trade union, called for a march on Washington in early 1941. Randolph planned to bring 100,000 protesters to the nation's capital to call for equal opportunity for black workers in war jobs — then just beginning to expand with President Franklin Roosevelt's pledge to supply the Allies with materiel. To avoid a divisive protest, FDR issued Executive Order 8802 in June of that year, prohibiting racial discrimination in defense industries, and Randolph agreed to cancel the march. The resulting Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) had few enforcement powers, but it set an important precedent: federal action. Randolph's efforts showed that white leaders and institutions could be swayed by concerted African American pressure. It would be a critical lesson for the movement. THE DOUBLE V CAMPAIGN: A second strategy jumped from the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the foremost African American newspapers of the era. It was the brainchild of an ordinary cafeteria worker from Kansas. In a 1942 letter to the editor, James G. Thompson urged that "colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory" — victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. Edgar Rouzeau, editor of the paper's New York office, agreed: "Black America must fight two wars and win in both." Instantly dubbed the Double V Campaign, Thompson's notion, with Rouzeau's backing, spread like wildfire through black communities across the country. African Americans would demonstrate their loyalty and citizenship by fighting the Axis powers. But they would also demand, peacefully but emphatically, the defeat of racism at home. "The suffering and privation may be great," Rouzeau told his readers, "but the rewards loom even greater." The Double V met considerable resistance. In war industries, factories periodically shut down in Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other cities because of "hate strikes": the refusal of white workers to labor alongside black workers. Detroit was especially tense. Referring to the potential for racial strife, Life magazine reported in 1942 that "Detroit is Dynamite. ... It can either blow up Hitler or blow up America." In 1943, it nearly did the latter. On a hot summer day, whites from the city's ethnic European neighborhoods taunted and beat African Americans in a local park. Three days of rioting ensued in which thirty-four people were killed, twenty-five of them black. Federal troops were called in to restore order.

Enforcement of the Supreme Court's decision in brown v board was complicated further by Dwight Eisenhower's presence in the White House — the president was no champion of civil rights.

Eisenhower accepted the Brown decision as the law of the land, but he thought it a mistake. Ike was especially unhappy about the prospect of committing federal power to enforce the decision. A crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, forced his hand. In September 1957, when nine black students attempted to enroll at the all-white Central High School, Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to bar them. Angry white mobs appeared daily to taunt the students, chanting "Go back to the jungle." As the vicious scenes played out on television night after night, Eisenhower finally acted. He sent 1,000 federal troops to Little Rock and nationalized the Arkansas National Guard, ordering them to protect the black students. Eisenhower thus became the first president since Reconstruction to use federal troops to enforce the rights of African Americans. But Little Rock also showed that southern officials had more loyalty to local custom than to the law — a repeated problem in the post-Brown era.

Who ran the Central Intelligence Agency

Eisenhower's secretary of state Dulles's brother - Allen Dulles

Soviet expansionism was but one part of a larger story.

Europe was sliding into economic chaos. Already devastated by the war, in 1947 the continent suffered the worst winter in memory. For both humanitarian and practical reasons, Truman's advisors believed something had to be done. A global depression might ensue if the European economy, the largest foreign market for American goods, did not recover. Worse, unemployed and dispirited Western Europeans might fill the ranks of the Communist Party, threatening political stability.

But when covert operations failed or proved impractical, the American approach to emerging nations could entangle the United States in deeper, more intractable conflicts.

Example - Vietnam

What did issue to insulate his administration against charges of communist infiltration

Executive order 9835 (3-21-1947) - created the loyalty security Program

the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a nonviolent peace organization, founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942.

FOR and CORE embraced the philosophy of nonviolent direct action espoused by Mahatma Gandhi of India.

Yalta Conference

February 1945, Wilsonian principles yielded to U.S.-Soviet power realities. As Allied forces neared victory in Europe and advanced toward Japan in the Pacific, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta, a resort on the Black Sea in southern Ukraine. Roosevelt focused on maintaining Allied unity and securing Joseph Stalin's commitment to enter the war against Japan. But the fate of Eastern Europe divided the Big Three. Stalin insisted that Russian national security required pro-Soviet governments in Eastern European nations. Roosevelt pressed for an agreement, the "Declaration on Liberated Europe," that guaranteed self-determination and democratic elections in Poland and neighboring countries, such as Romania and Hungary. However, given the presence of Soviet troops in those nations, FDR had to accept a lesser pledge from Stalin: to hold "free and unfettered elections" at a future time. The three leaders also formalized their commitment to divide Germany into four zones, each controlled by one of the four Allied powers (including France), and to similarly partition the capital city, Berlin, which was located in the Soviet zone. At Yalta, the Big Three also agreed to establish an international body to replace the discredited League of Nations.

Two unique postwar developments remade the national housing market and gave it a distinctly suburban shape.

First, an innovative Long Island building contractor, William J. Levitt, revolutionized suburban housing by applying mass-production techniques and turning out new homes at a dizzying speed. Levitt's basic four-room house, complete with kitchen appliances, was priced at $7,990 when homes in the first Levittown went on sale in 1947 (about $86,000 today). Levitt did not need to advertise; word of mouth brought buyers flocking to his developments (all called Levittown) in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Dozens of other developers were soon snapping up cheap farmland and building subdivisions around the country. Even at $7,990, Levitt's homes would have been beyond the means of most young families had the traditional home-financing standard — a down payment of half the full price and ten years to pay off the balance — still prevailed. That is where the second postwar development came in. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA) — that is, the federal government — brought the home mortgage market within the reach of a broader range of Americans than ever before. After the war, the FHA insured thirty-year mortgages with as little as 5 percent down and interest at 2 or 3 percent. The VA was even more generous, requiring only a token $1 down for qualified ex-GIs. FHA and VA mortgages best explain why, after hovering around 45 percent for the previous half century, home ownership jumped to 60 percent by 1960. What purchasers of suburban houses got, in addition to a good deal, were homogeneous communities. Levitt's houses came with restrictive covenants prohibiting occupancy "by members of other than the Caucasian Race." (Restrictive covenants often applied to Jews and, in California, Asian Americans as well.) Levittowns were hardly alone. Suburban developments from coast to coast exhibited the same age, class, and racial homogeneity (AP® Thinking Like a Historian)

As protests continued at home, Nixon pursued two strategies to achieve his declared "peace with honor," one diplomatic and the other military

First, he sought détente (a lessening of tensions) with the Soviet Union and a new openness with China. In a series of meetings between 1970 and 1972, Nixon and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev resolved tensions over Cuba and Berlin and signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), the latter a symbolic step toward ending the Cold War arms race. Heavily influenced by his national security advisor, the Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, Nixon believed that he could break the Cold War impasse that had kept the United States from productive dialogue with the Soviet Union. then, he did the thing where he talked to china and the soviets separately playing them against each other His second strategy, however, would prove less praiseworthy and cost more lives.

Two things were noteworthy about the families they formed after World War II

First, marriages were remarkably stable. Not until the mid-1960s did the divorce rate begin to rise sharply. Second, married couples were intent on having babies. Everyone expected to have several children — it was part of adulthood, almost a citizen's responsibility. Far from "normal," all these developments were anomalies, temporary reversals of long-standing demographic trends. From the perspective of the whole of the twentieth century, the 1950s and early 1960s stand out as exceptions to declining birthrates, rising divorce rates, and the steadily rising marriage age.

After World War II, however, most suppliers of information to the Soviets apparently ceased spying.

For one thing, the professional apparatus of Soviet spying in the United States was disrupted by American counterintelligence work. For another, most of the well-connected amateur spies moved on to other careers. Historians have thus developed a healthy skepticism that there was much Soviet espionage in the United States after 1947, but this was not how many Americans saw it at the time. Legitimate suspicions and real fears, along with political opportunism, combined to fuel the national Red Scare, which was longer and more far-reaching than the one that followed World War I

The New Left was not the only political force on college campuses. Conservative students were less noisy but equally numerous.

For them, the 1960s was not about protesting Vietnam, staging student strikes, and idolizing Black Power. Inspired by the group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), conservative students asserted their faith in "God-given free will" and their concern that the federal government "accumulates power which tends to diminish order and liberty."

Many of these "investment programs" relied on mechanization, or automation — another important factor in the postwar boom.

From 1947 to 1975, worker productivity more than doubled across the whole of the economy. American factories replaced manpower with machines, substituting cheap fossil energy for human muscle. As industries mechanized, they could turn out products more efficiently and at lower cost. Mechanization did not come without social costs, however. Over the course of the postwar decades, millions of high-wage manufacturing jobs were lost as machines replaced workers, affecting entire cities and regions. Corporate leaders approved, but workers and their union representatives were less enthusiastic. "How are you going to sell cars to all of these machines?" wondered Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW).

In addition to the energy crisis, the economy was beset by a host of longer-term problems.

Government spending on the Vietnam War and the Great Society made for a growing federal deficit and spiraling inflation. In the industrial sector, the country faced more robust competition from West Germany and Japan. America's share of world trade dropped from 32 percent in 1955 to 18 percent in 1970 and was headed downward. As a result, in a blow to national pride, nine Western European countries had surpassed the United States in per capita gross domestic product (GDP) by 1980. Many of these economic woes highlighted a broader, multigenerational transformation in the United States: from an economy based on industrial manufacturing to one based on provision of services. That transformation, which continues to this day, meant that the United States began to produce fewer automobiles, appliances, and televisions and more financial services, health-care services, and management consulting services — not to mention many millions of low-paying jobs in the restaurant, retail, and tourist industries.

In this spirit, the Chicano Moratorium Committee organized demonstrations against the war.

Group founded by activist Latinos to protest the Vietnam War

A few high-level espionage scandals and the Communist victories in Eastern Europe and China reenergized the Republican Party, which forced Truman and the Democrats to retreat to what historian Arthur Schlesinger called the "vital center" of American politics.

However, Americans on both the progressive left and the conservative right accepted this development only reluctantly. Cold War liberalism was a practical centrist program for a turbulent era. But it would not last.

playboy

Hugh Hefner guys shouldn't spend so much money on their families but on themselves marriage, not swinging bachelorhood, remained the destination for the vast majority of men. Millions of men read Playboy, but few adopted its fantasy lifestyle.

Young Americans for Freedom (YAF),

The largest student political organization in the country, whose conservative members defended free enterprise and supported the war in Vietnam. The YAF, the largest student political organization in the country, defended free enterprise and supported the war in Vietnam. Its founding principles were outlined in "The Sharon Statement," drafted (in Sharon, Connecticut) two years before the Port Huron Statement. Young conservatives, many of whom would play important roles in the Reagan administration in the 1980s, rallied to the YAF's call. young conservatives, many of whom would play important roles in the Reagan administration in the 1980s, rallied to the YAF's call.

In this anxious context, the strategy of containment emerged in a series of incremental steps between 1946 and 1949

In February 1946, American diplomat George F. Kennan first proposed the idea in an 8,000-word cable — a confidential message within the U.S. State Department — from his post at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Kennan argued that the Soviet Union was an "Oriental despotism" and that communism was merely the "fig leaf" justifying Soviet aggression. A year after writing this cable (dubbed the Long Telegram), he published an influential Foreign Affairs article, arguing that the West's only recourse was to meet the Soviets "with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world." Kennan called for "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." Containment, the key word, came to define America's evolving strategic stance toward the Soviet Union.

It did not take long for the reality of Britain's decline to resonate across the Atlantic

In February 1947, London informed Washington that it could no longer afford to support the anticommunists in the Greek civil war. Truman worried that a communist victory in Greece would lead to Soviet domination of the eastern Mediterranean and embolden Communist parties in France and Italy. In response, the president announced what became known as the Truman Doctrine.

With such firsthand knowledge of the war, journalists began to write about a "credibility gap." The Johnson administration, they charged, was concealing bad news about the war's progress.

In February 1966, television coverage of hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (chaired by J. William Fulbright, an outspoken critic of the war) raised further questions about the administration's policy. Johnson complained to his staff in 1966 that "our people can't stand firm in the face of heavy losses, and they can bring down the government." Economic problems put Johnson even more on the defensive. The Vietnam War cost taxpayers $27 billion in 1967, pushing the federal deficit from $9.8 billion to $23 billion. By then, military spending had set in motion the inflationary spiral that would plague the U.S. economy throughout the 1970s.

Cuban War

In January 1961, the Soviet Union announced that it intended to support "wars of national liberation" wherever in the world they occurred Kennedy took Soviet premier Khrushchev at his word, especially regarding Cuba, where in 1959 Fidel Castro had overthrown the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista and declared a revolution. Determined to keep Cuba out of the Soviet orbit, Kennedy followed through on Eisenhower administration plans to dispatch Cuban exiles to launch an anti-Castro uprising - The Bay of Pigs - invaders trained by CIA were ill-prepared - April 17, 1961, the force of 1,400 was crushed by Castro's troops. Kennedy prudently rejected CIA pleas for a U.S. air strike - Accepting defeat, Kennedy went before the American people and took full responsibility for the fiasco

End of Vietnam war

In March 1975, North Vietnamese forces launched a final offensive, and on April 30, Vietnam was reunited. Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, after the founding father of the communist regime. The collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 produced a powerful, and tragic, historical irony: an outcome little different from what would likely have resulted from the unification vote in 1954 (Chapter 24). In other words, America's most disastrous military adventure of the twentieth century barely altered the geopolitical realities in Southeast Asia. The Hanoi regime called itself communist but never intended to be a satellite of any country, least of all China, Vietnam's ancient enemy. The price paid for the Vietnam War was steep. America's Vietnamese friends lost jobs and property, spent years in "reeducation" camps, or had to flee the country. Millions of Vietnamese died in more than a decade of war, which included some of the most intensive aerial bombing of the twentieth century. In bordering Cambodia, the maniacal Khmer Rouge, followers of Cambodia's ruling Communist Party, took power and murdered 1.7 million people in bloody purges. And in the United States, more than 58,000 Americans had given their lives, and 300,000 had been wounded. On top of the war's $150 billion price tag, slow-to-heal internal wounds divided the country, and Americans increasingly lost confidence in their political leaders.

The Cold War both helped and impeded the civil rights movement.

In a time of growing fear of communist expansionism, Truman worried about America's image in the world. He reminded Americans that when whites and blacks "fail to live together in peace," that failure harmed "the cause of democracy itself in the whole world." Indeed, the Soviet Union used American racism to discredit the United States abroad. "We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics," the Committee on Civil Rights wrote. International tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union thus appeared to strengthen the hand of civil rights leaders, because America needed to demonstrate to the rest of the world that its racial climate was improving

Life magazine publisher Henry Luce was so confident in the nation's growing power that during World War II he had predicted the dawning of the "American century.

In economic terms, Luce envisioned U.S. corporations, banks, and manufacturers dominating global markets. That vision came to pass after the war. The preponderance of American economic muscle in the postwar decades, however, was not simply an artifact of the world war — it was not an inevitable development. Several key elements came together, internationally and at home, to propel three decades of unprecedented economic growth.

Difference between the 20s and 50s

In some respects, the postwar decades seemed like the 1920s all over again, with an abundance of new gadgets and appliances, a craze for automobiles, and new types of mass media. Yet there was a significant difference: in the 1950s, consumption became associated with citizenship. Buying things, once a sign of personal indulgence, now meant participating fully in American society and, moreover, fulfilling a social responsibility.

Following Truman's lead, many state and local governments, universities, political organizations, churches, and businesses undertook their own antisubversion campaigns, which often included loyalty oaths.

In the labor movement, charges of Communist domination led to the expulsion of a number of unions by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1949. Civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League also expelled Communists and "fellow travelers," or Communist sympathizers. Thus the Red Scare spread from the federal government to the farthest reaches of American organizational, economic, and cultural life.

The emergence of commercial television in the United States was swift and overwhelming.

In the realm of technology, only the automobile and the personal computer were its equal in transforming everyday life in the twentieth century. Having conquered the home, television would soon become the principal mediator between the consumer and the marketplace. - ADS

Democrats meanwhile maintained a strong presence in Congress but proved weak in presidential elections in the 1950s.

In the two presidential contests of the decade, 1952 and 1956, Eisenhower defeated the admired but politically ineffectual liberal Adlai Stevenson. In the 1952 election, Stevenson was hampered by the unpopularity of the Truman administration. In 1956, Ike won an even more impressive victory over Stevenson, an eloquent and sophisticated spokesman for liberalism but no match for Eisenhower's popularity with the public.

In the new era of liberal reform the women's movement reawakened.

Inspired by the civil rights movement and legislative advances under the Great Society, but frustrated by the lack of attention both gave to women, feminists entered the political fray and demanded not simply inclusion, but a rethinking of national priorities

However, the picture was not as rosy at the bottom, where tenacious poverty accompanied the economic boom

It appeared that in economic terms, as the top and the middle converged, the bottom remained far behind.

Nixon hoped that with massive U.S. aid the Thieu regime might survive. But Congress was in revolt (all after the Paris peace accords)

It refused appropriations for bombing Cambodia after August 15, 1973, and gradually cut back aid to South Vietnam.

In late 1969, following a massive antiwar rally in Washington, President Nixon gave a televised speech in which he referred to his supporters as the silent majority

It was classic Nixonian rhetoric. In a single phrase, he summed up a generational and cultural struggle, placing himself on the side of ordinary Americans against the rabble-rousers and troublemakers. It was an oversimplification, but the label silent majoritystuck, and Nixon had defined a political phenomenon. For the remainder of his presidency, Nixon projected himself to the public as the defender of a reasonable middle ground under assault from the radical left.

Charisma, style, and personality — these, more than platforms and issues, defined a new brand of politics in the early 1960s

JFK's natural environment

Just as Kennedy had inherited Vietnam from Eisenhower, so Lyndon Johnson inherited Vietnam from Kennedy.

Johnson's inheritance was more burdensome, however, for by now only massive American intervention could prevent the collapse of South Vietnam (Map 27.2). Johnson, like Kennedy, was a subscriber to the Cold War tenets of global containment. "I am not going to lose Vietnam," he vowed on taking office. "I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went" (Chapter 24).

Postdam Conference

July 1945 conference in which American officials convinced the Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin to accept German reparations only from the Soviet zone, or far eastern part of Germany. The agreement paved the way for the division of Germany into East and West.

Trade-union women were especially critical in pushing for, and winning, congressional passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act

Law passed in 1963 that established the principle of equal pay for equal work. Trade-union women were especially critical in pushing for, and winning, congressional passage of the law

One of the most important contributions of all the new feminisms was to raise awareness about what feminist Kate Millett called sexual politics.

Liberationists, along with black and Chicana feminists, argued that unless women had control over their own bodies, they could not freely shape their destinies. They campaigned for reproductive rights, especially access to abortion, and railed against a culture that blamed women for their own sexual assault and turned a blind eye to sexual harassment in the workplace.

Vietnam abroad and the antiwar movement at home tore at the fabric of the Democratic coalition.

Lyndon Johnson could not stitch the party back together. Richard Nixon, in contrast, showed himself adept at taking advantage of the nation's unrest through carefully timed speeches and displays of moral outrage. A centrist by nature and temperament, Nixon was not part of the conservative Goldwater wing of the Republican Party. Though he was an ardent anticommunist like Goldwater, Nixon also shared some of Eisenhower's traits, including a basic acceptance of government's role in economic matters. Nixon is thus most profitably viewed as a transitional figure, a national politician who formed a bridge between the liberal postwar era and the much more conservative decades that followed the 1970s.

Youth rebellion was only one aspect of a broader discontent with the sometimes saccharine consumer culture of the postwar years.

Many artists, writers, and jazz musicians embarked on powerful new experimental projects in a remarkable flowering of intensely personal, introspective art forms. Bebop - improv jazz Black jazz musicians found eager fans not only in the African American community but also among young white Beats

Operation Rolling Thunder

Massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam authorized by President Johnson in 1965; against expectations, it ended up hardening the will of the North Vietnamese to continue fighting

Mexican Americans shared many economic circumstances with African Americans — especially access to jobs — but they also had unique concerns: the status of the Spanish language in schools, for instance, and immigration policy.

Mexican Americans had been politically active since the 1940s, aiming to surmount factors that obstructed their political involvement: poverty, language barriers, and discrimination. Their efforts began to pay off in the 1960s, when the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) mobilized support for John F. Kennedy and worked successfully with other organizations to elect Mexican American candidates such as Edward Roybal of California and Henry González of Texas to Congress. Two other organizations, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, carried the fight against discrimination to Washington, D.C., and mobilized Mexican Americans into an increasingly powerful voting bloc.

Labor feminists were responding to the times.

More women — including married women (40 percent by 1970) and mothers with young children (30 percent by 1970) — were working outside the home than ever before. But they faced a labor market that undervalued their contributions. Moreover, most working women faced the "double day": they were expected to earn a paycheck and then return home to domestic labor. One woman put the problem succinctly: "The working mother has no 'wife' to care for her children."

Alarmed that the United States was falling behind in science and technology, Eisenhower persuaded Congress to appropriate additional money for college scholarships and university research.

National Defense Education Act

More cars required more highways, and the federal government obliged.

National Interstate and Defense Highways Act

As the Cold War took shape, the world scene was changing at a furious pace.

New nations were emerging across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, created in the wake of successful anticolonial movements whose origins dated to before World War II. Between 1947 and 1962, the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian empires all but disintegrated in a momentous collapse of European global power. FDR had favored the idea of national self-determination, often to the fury of his British and French allies. He expected emerging democracies to be new partners in an American-led, free-market world system. But colonial revolts produced many independent- or socialist-minded regimes in the so-called Third World, as well. Third World was a term that came into usage after World War II to describe developing or ex-colonial nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East that were not aligned with the Western capitalist countries led by the United States or the socialist states of Eastern Europe led by the Soviet Union.

President Johnson had gambled in 1965 on a quick victory in Vietnam, before the political cost of escalation came due. But there was no quick victory

North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces fought on, the South Vietnamese government repeatedly collapsed, and American casualties mounted. By early 1968, the death rate of U.S. troops had reached several hundred a week. Johnson and his generals kept insisting that there was "light at the end of the tunnel." Facts on the ground showed otherwise.

With the Civil Rights Act passed and his War on Poverty initiatives off the ground, Johnson turned his attention to the upcoming presidential election.

Not content to govern in Kennedy's shadow, he wanted a national mandate of his own. Privately, Johnson saw himself less as akin Kennedy than as the heir of Franklin Roosevelt, whose political skills he had long admired, and the expansive liberalism of the 1930s. He reminded his advisors never to forget "the meek and the humble and the lowly," because "President Roosevelt never did." In the 1964 election, Johnson faced Republican Barry Goldwater of Arizona. An archconservative, Goldwater ran on an anticommunist, antigovernment platform, offering "a choice, not an echo" — meaning he represented a genuinely conservative alternative to liberalism rather than the echo of liberalism offered by the moderate wing of the Republican Party (Chapter 24). Goldwater campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and promised a more vigorous Cold War foreign policy. Among those supporting him was former actor Ronald Reagan, whose speech on behalf of Goldwater at the Republican convention, called "A Time for Choosing," made him a rising star in the party. But Goldwater's strident foreign policy alienated voters. "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," he told Republicans at the convention. Moreover, there remained strong national sentiment for Kennedy. Telling Americans that he was running to fulfill Kennedy's legacy, Johnson and his running mate, Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, won in a landslide (Map 27.1). In the long run, Goldwater's candidacy marked the beginning of a grassroots conservative revolt that would eventually transform the Republican Party. In the short run, however, Johnson's sweeping victory gave him a popular mandate and, equally important, congressional majorities that rivaled FDR's in 1935 — just what he and liberal Democrats needed to push the Great Society forward (Table 27.1).

American Indians, inspired by the Black Power and Chicano movements, organized to address their unique circumstances.

Numbering nearly 800,000 in the 1960s, native people were exceedingly diverse — divided by language, tribal history, region, and degree of integration into American life. As a group, they shared a staggering unemployment rate — ten times the national average — and were the worst off in housing, disease rates, and access to education. Native people also had an often troubling relationship with the federal government. In the 1960s, the prevailing spirit of protest swept through Native communities. Young militants challenged their elders in the National Congress of American Indians. Beginning in 1960, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), under the slogan "For a Greater Indian America," promoted the ideal of Native Americans as a single ethnic group. The effort to both unite Indians and celebrate individual tribal culture proved a difficult balancing act.

March on Washington

Officially named the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 28, 1963, a quarter of a million people marched to the Lincoln Memorial to demand that Congress end Jim Crow racial discrimination and launch a major jobs program to bring needed employment to black communities. To marshal support for Kennedy's bill, civil rights leaders took advantage of a long-planned event set for that August. It was the massive demonstration in Washington that had first been proposed by A. Philip Randolph in 1941. Working with Bayard Rustin, Randolph revived the idea and in early 1963 called for a march to mark the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. Under the leadership of Randolph and Rustin, thousands of volunteers across the country coordinated car pools, "freedom buses," and "freedom trains," and on August 28, 1963, delivered a quarter of a million people to the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington, officially named the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Although Randolph and Rustin planned the event, Martin Luther King Jr. was the public face of the march. It was King's dramatic "I Have a Dream" speech, beginning with his admonition that too many black people lived "on a lonely island of poverty" and ending with the exclamation from a traditional black spiritual — "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!" — that captured the nation's imagination. The sight of 250,000 blacks and whites marching solemnly together marked the high point of the civil rights movement and confirmed King's position as the leading spokesperson for the cause. To have any chance of getting the civil rights bill through Congress, King, Randolph, and Rustin knew they had to sustain this broad coalition of blacks and whites. They could afford to alienate no one. Reflecting a younger, more militant set of activists, however, SNCC member John Lewis had prepared a provocative speech for that afternoon. In his original draft of the speech, Lewis wrote, "The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did." Signaling a growing restlessness among black youth, Lewis warned: "We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together again in the image of democracy." Fearing the speech would alienate white supporters, Rustin and others implored Lewis to tone down his rhetoric. With only minutes to spare before he stepped up to the podium, Lewis agreed. He delivered a more conciliatory speech, but his conflict with march organizers signaled an emerging rift in the movement (AP® Thinking Like a Historian). Although the March on Washington galvanized public opinion, it changed few congressional votes. Southern senators continued to block Kennedy's legislation. Georgia senator Richard Russell, a leader of the opposition, refused to support any bill that would in his words "bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races." Then, tragedies began to pile up, one on another. In September, white supremacists bombed a Baptist church in Birmingham, killing four black girls in Sunday school. Less than two months later, Kennedy himself lay dead, the victim of assassination.

A search for order characterized national politics in the 1970s as well. It began with a scandal. Misbehavior is endemic to politics. Yet what became known as the Watergate affair — or simply Watergate — implicated President Richard Nixon in illegal behavior severe enough to bring down his presidency. Liberals benefitted from Nixon's fall in the short term, but their long-term retreat continued. Politics remained in flux because while liberals were on the defensive, conservatives had not yet put forth a clear alternative. aka WATERGATE

On June 17, 1972, something strange happened at Washington's Watergate office/apartment/hotel complex. Early that morning, five men carrying wiretapping equipment were apprehended there attempting to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Queried by the press, a White House spokesman dismissed the episode as "a third-rate burglary attempt." Pressed further, Nixon himself denied any White House involvement in "this very bizarre incident." In fact, the two masterminds of the break-in, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were former FBI and CIA agents currently working for Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). The Watergate burglary was no isolated incident. It was part of a broad pattern of abuse of power by a White House obsessed with its political enemies. Liddy and Hunt were on the White House payroll, part of a clandestine squad hired to stop leaks to the press. But they were soon arranging illegal wiretaps at DNC headquarters, part of a campaign of "dirty tricks" against the Democrats. Nixon's siege mentality best explains his fatal misstep. He could have dissociated himself from the break-in by firing his guilty aides or even just by letting justice take its course. But it was election time, and Nixon did not trust his political future to such a strategy. Instead, he arranged hush money for the burglars and instructed the CIA to stop an FBI investigation into the affair. This was obstruction of justice, a criminal offense. AP® EXAM TIP Recognize the impact of political scandals on the lack of public confidence in government in the 1970s. Nixon kept the lid on until after the election, but in early 1973, one of the Watergate burglars began to talk. In the meantime, two reporters at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, uncovered CREEP's links to key White House aides. In May 1973, a Senate investigating committee began holding nationally televised hearings, at which administration officials implicated Nixon in the illegal cover-up. The president kept investigators at bay for a year, but in June 1974, the House Judiciary Committee began to consider articles of impeachment. Certain of being convicted by the Senate, Nixon became, on August 9, 1974, the first U.S. president to resign his office. The next day, Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president. Ford, the Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives, had replaced Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had himself resigned in 1973 for accepting kickbacks while governor of Maryland. A month after he took office, Ford stunned the nation by granting Nixon a "full, free, and absolute" pardon. Congress pushed back, passing a raft of laws inspired by the abuses of the Nixon administration and designed to limit the power of future presidents: the War Powers Act (1973), which reined in the president's ability to deploy U.S. forces without congressional approval; amendments strengthening the Freedom of Information Act(1974), which gave citizens access to federal records; the Ethics in Government Act(1978); and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978), which prohibited domestic wiretapping without a warrant. Popular disdain for politicians, evident in declining voter turnout, deepened with Nixon's resignation in 1974. "Don't vote," read one bumper sticker in 1976. "It only encourages them." Watergate not only damaged short-term Republican prospects but also shifted the party's balance to the right. Despite mastering the populist appeal to the "silent majority," the moderate Nixon was never beloved by conservatives. His relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union and his visit to communist China, in particular, won him no friends on the right. His disgraceful exit benefitted the more conservative Republicans, who proceeded to reshape the party in their image.

American involvement w Vietnam

On March 8, 1965, the first marines waded ashore at Da Nang. By 1966, more than 380,000 American soldiers were stationed in Vietnam; by 1967, 485,000; and by 1968, 536,000 (Figure 27.2). General William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces, and Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, pushed Johnson to Americanize the ground war in an attempt to stabilize South Vietnam. "I can't run and pull a Chamberlain at Munich," Johnson privately told a reporter in early March 1965, referring to the British prime minister who had appeased Hitler in 1938.

Richard Nixon

On the Republican side, Richard M. Nixon had engineered a remarkable political comeback. After losing the presidential campaign in 1960 and the California gubernatorial race in 1962, he won the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. Sensing weakness in the Democratic Party, Nixon and his advisors believed there were two groups of voters whose long political loyalty to Democrats was wavering: working-class white voters in the North and southern whites of all social classes.

Modern economies run on oil. If the oil supply is drastically reduced, woe follows. Something like that happened to the United States in the 1970s.

Once the world's leading oil producer, the United States had become heavily dependent on inexpensive imported oil, mostly from the Persian Gulf (Figure 28.1). French, British, and American companies extracted the oil, a legacy of European colonialism, but they did so under profit-sharing agreements with the Persian Gulf states. In 1960, these nations and other oil-rich developing countries, such as Venezuela, formed a cartel (a business association formed to control prices), the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)

Two powerful forces shaped women's relationships to work and family life in the postwar decades

One was the middle-class domestic ideal, in which women were expected to raise children, attend to other duties in the home, and devote themselves to their husbands' happiness. So powerful was this ideal that in 1957 the Ladies' Home Journalentitled an article, "Is College Education Wasted on Women?" The second force was the job market. Most working-class women had to earn a paycheck to help their family. And despite their education, middle-class women found that jobs in the professions and business were dominated by men and often closed to them. For both groups, the market offered mostly "women's jobs" — in teaching, nursing, and other areas of the growing service sector — and little room for advancement (AP® Analyzing Voices).

During Eisenhower's presidency, new political forces on both the right and the left had begun to stir. But they had not yet fully transformed the party system itself.

Particularly at the national level, Democrats and Republicans seemed in broad agreement about the realities of the Cold War and the demands of a modern, industrial economy and welfare state. Below the apparent calm of national party politics, however, lay profound differences among Americans over the direction of the nation. Those differences would starkly divide the country in the 1960s and bring an end to the brief and fragile Cold War consensus

Kennedy also launched a series of bold nonmilitary initiatives

Peace Corps NASA

Without automobiles, suburban growth on such a massive scale would have been impossible

Planners laid out subdivisions on the assumption that everybody would drive. And they did — to get to work, to take the children to Little League, to shop. With gas plentiful and cheap (15 cents a gallon), no one cared about the fuel efficiency of their V-8 engines or seemed to mind the elaborate tail fins and chrome that weighed down their cars. In 1945, Americans owned twenty-five million cars; by 1965, just two decades later, the number had tripled to seventy-five million (AP® America in the World). American oil consumption followed course, tripling as well between 1949 and 1972.

Following the Yalta Conference, developments over the ensuing year further hardened relations between the Soviets on one side and the Americans and British on the other.

Potsdam Conference

On a grander scale, deindustrialization in the Northeast and Midwest and continued population growth in the Sunbelt were changing the political geography of the country.

Power was shifting, incrementally but perceptibly, toward the West and South (Table 28.1). As states with strong trade unions at the center of the postwar liberal political coalition — such as New York, Illinois, and Michigan — lost industry, jobs, and people, states with traditions of libertarian conservatism — such as California, Arizona, Florida, and Texas — gained greater political clout. The full impact of this shifting political geography would not be felt until the 1980s and 1990s, but its effects had become apparent by the mid-1970s.

Government action also made a difference in the women's movement

Presidential Commission on the Status of Women A bigger breakthrough came when Congress added the word sex to the categories protected against discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Women suddenly had a powerful legal tool for fighting gender discrimination.

A civil war had been raging in China since the 1930s as Communist forces led by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) fought Nationalist forces under Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek). Fearing a Communist victory, between 1945 and 1949 the United States provided $2 billion to Jiang's army

Pressing Truman to "save" China, conservative Republican Ohio senator Robert A. Taft predicted that "the Far East is ultimately even more important to our future peace than is Europe." By 1949, Mao's forces held the advantage. Truman reasoned that to save Jiang, the United States would have to intervene militarily. Unwilling to do so, he cut off aid and left the Nationalists to their fate. The People's Republic of China was formally established under Mao on October 1, 1949, and the remnants of Jiang's forces fled to Taiwan. Truman expected Mao to take an independent line, as the Communist leader Tito had just done in Yugoslavia. The new Chinese leader, however, aligned himself with the Soviet Union, partly out of fear that the United States would re-arm the Nationalists and invade the mainland. As attitudes hardened, many Americans viewed Mao's success as a defeat for the United States. The pro-Nationalist "China lobby" held Truman's State Department responsible for the "loss" of China. Sensitive to these charges, the Truman administration refused to recognize "Red China" and blocked China's admission to the United Nations. But the United States pointedly declined to guarantee Taiwan's independence, and in fact accepted the outcome on the mainland. (Since 1982, however, the United States has recognized Taiwanese sovereignty.)

Was there significant Soviet penetration of the American government?

Records opened after the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union, including the Venona Papers made available in 1995 by the National Security Agency, indicate that there was. Among American suppliers of information to Moscow were FDR's assistant secretary of the treasury, Harry Dexter White; FDR's administrative aide Laughlin Currie; a strategically placed midlevel group in the State Department; key scientists and technicians working on the Manhattan Project; and several hundred more, some identified only by code name, working in a range of government departments and agencies.

What really defined the youth culture, however, was its music.

Rejecting the romantic ballads of the 1940s, teenagers discovered rock 'n' roll, which originated in African American rhythm and blues. The Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed took the lead in introducing white America to the black-created sound by playing what were called "race" records. elvis pressly - the white guy who they wanted to play rock Many unhappy adults saw in rock 'n' roll music an invitation to interracial dating, rebellion, and a more flagrant sexuality.

Robert Taft

Republican leader in senate who was opponent of the nEw Deal opposed laborunions criticized Trumans aggressive containment policy and didn't like US participation in NATO ran 3 time for President - never won nomination - did get loyalty of conservatives who saw welfare states as wasteful spending and international affairs as dangerous foreign entanglements

the gulf of Tonkin resolution

Resolution passed by Congress in 1964 in the wake of a naval confrontation in the Gulf of Tonkin between the United States and North Vietnam. It gave the president virtually unlimited authority in conducting the Vietnam War. The Senate terminated the resolution in 1970 following outrage over the U.S. invasion of Cambodia blank check I think?

Racial segregation and economic exploitation defined the lives of the majority of African Americans in the postwar decades.

Segregation, commonly known as Jim Crow (Chapter 17), prevailed in every aspect of life in the southern states, where two-thirds of all African Americans lived in 1950. African Americans could not eat in restaurants patronized by whites or use the same waiting rooms at bus stations. All forms of public transportation were rigidly segregated by custom or by law. Public parks and libraries were segregated. Even drinking fountains were labeled "White" and "Colored."

Ethics in Government Act (1978)

Sets requirements for financial disclosure for elected public officials, and placed restrictions on former government officials lobbying activities(Watergate)

Servicemen's Readjustment Act

Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 22, 1944, this act, also known as the GI Bill, provided veterans of the Second World War funds for college education, unemployment insurance, and housing. Government financing of education helped make the U.S. workforce the best educated in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. Better education meant higher earning power, and higher earning power translated into the consumer spending that drove the postwar economy. One observer of the GI Bill was so impressed with its achievements that he declared it responsible for "the most important educational and social transformation in American history." The GI Bill stimulated the economy and expanded the middle class in another way: by increasing home ownership.

the world's first satellite

Sputnik, in 1957 startled United States went into high gear to catch up in the Cold War space competition

New developments, however, altered the tone of the Cold War.

Stalin's death in March 1953 precipitated an intraparty struggle in the Soviet Union that lasted until 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev emerged as Stalin's successor. Khrushchev soon startled communists around the world by denouncing Stalin and detailing his crimes and blunders. He also surprised many Americans by calling for "peaceful coexistence" with the West. But the new Soviet leader had his limits, and when Hungarians rose up in 1956 to demand independence from Moscow, Khrushchev crushed the incipient revolution.

Democrats would have dumped Truman in 1948 had they found a better candidate. But the party fell into disarray.

The left wing split off and formed the Progressive Party, nominating Henry A. Wallace, an avid New Dealer whom Truman had fired as secretary of commerce in 1946 because Wallace opposed America's actions in the Cold War. A right-wing challenge came from the South. When northern liberals such as Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey of Minneapolis pushed through a strong civil rights platform at the Democratic convention, the southern delegations bolted and, calling themselves Dixiecrats, nominated for president South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, an ardent supporter of racial segregation. The Republicans meanwhile renominated Thomas E. Dewey, the politically moderate governor of New York who had run a strong campaign against FDR in 1944.

Television advertisers mastered the art of manufacturing consumer desire.

TV stations, like radio stations before them, depended entirely on advertising for profits. The first television executives understood that as long as they sold viewers to advertisers they would stay on the air. By creating powerful visual narratives of comfort and plenty, television revolutionized advertising and changed forever how products were sold to American, and global, consumers.

By the late 1950s, what Americans saw on television, both in the omnipresent commercials and in the programming, was an overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant world of nuclear families, suburban homes, and middle-class life.

Television was never a showcase for the breadth of American society, but in the second half of the 1950s broadcasting lost much of its ethnic, racial, and class diversity and became a vehicle for the transmission of a narrow range of middle-class tastes and values.

While the New Left organized against the political and economic system and the YAF defended it, many other young Americans embarked on a general revolt against authority and middle-class respectability.

The "hippie" — identified by ragged blue jeans or army fatigues, flowing skirts, shirts, and blouses, beads, and long unkempt hair — symbolized the new counterculture. With roots in the 1950s Beat culture of New York's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's North Beach, the 1960s counterculture was composed largely of white youth alienated from the staid predictability and formality of an older generation. Seeking an ethic of personal freedom and authenticity, they initially turned to folk music for inspiration. Pete Seeger set the tone for the era's idealism with songs such as the 1961 antiwar ballad "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" In 1963, the year of the civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham and President Kennedy's assassination, Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" reflected the impatience of people whose faith in America was wearing thin. Judy Collins and Joan Baez emerged alongside Dylan and pioneered a folk sound that inspired a generation of female musicians.

Who marked the first apex and finale of the Red Scare

The meteoric career of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

The NAACP's legal strategy achieved its ultimate validation in a case involving Linda Brown, a black pupil in Topeka, Kansas, who had been forced to attend a distant segregated school rather than the nearby white elementary school. In his argument before the court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Marshall contended that such segregation was unconstitutional because it denied Linda Brown the "equal protection of the laws" guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment (Map 26.2). In a unanimous decision on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court agreed, overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine at last. Writing for the Court, the new chief justice, Earl Warren, wrote: "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." In an implementing 1955 decision known as Brown II, the Court declared that desegregation should proceed "with all deliberate speed."

Increased educational levels, growing home ownership, and higher wages all enabled more Americans than ever before to become members of what one historian has called a "consumer republic." But what did they buy?

The postwar emphasis on nuclear families and suburbs provides the answer. In the emerging suburban nation, three elements came together to create patterns of consumption that would endure for decades: houses, cars, and children. HOME STUFF Consumption for the home, including automobiles, drove the postwar American economy as much as, or more than, the military-industrial complex did.

The idea that a woman's place was in the home was, of course, not new

The postwar obsession with femininity and motherhood bore a remarkable similarity to the nineteenth century's notion of domesticity. The updated version drew on new elements of twentieth-century science and culture. Psychologists equated motherhood with "normal" female identity and suggested that career-minded mothers needed therapy. The postwar consumer culture also emphasized women's domestic role as purchasing agents for home and family. "Can a woman ever feel right cooking on a dirty range?" asked one advertisement.

More than civil rights, what drove Johnson hardest was his determination to "end poverty in our time."

The president called it a national disgrace that in the midst of plenty, one-fifth of all Americans — hidden from most people's sight in Appalachia, urban ghettos, migrant labor camps, and Indian reservations — lived in poverty. But, Johnson declared, "for the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty." The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created a series of programs to reach these Americans, was the president's answer — what he called the War on Poverty.

The Great Society enjoyed mixed results.

The proportion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 20 percent to 13 percent between 1963 and 1968 (Figure 27.1). Medicare and Medicaid, the most enduring of the Great Society programs, helped millions of elderly and poor citizens afford necessary health care. Further, as millions of African Americans moved into the middle class, the black poverty rate fell by half. Liberals believed they were on the right track. Conservatives, however, gave more credit for these changes to the decade's booming economy than to government programs. Indeed, conservative critics accused Johnson and other liberals of believing that every social problem could be solved with a government program. In the final analysis, the Great Society dramatically improved the financial situation of the elderly, reached millions of children, and increased the racial diversity of American society and workplaces. However, entrenched poverty remained, racial segregation in the largest cities worsened, and the national distribution of wealth remained highly skewed. In relative terms, the bottom 20 percent remained as far behind as ever. In these arenas, the Great Society made little progress.

The most breathtaking development in the postwar American economy was the dramatic expansion of the domestic consumer market.

The sheer quantity of consumer goods available to the average person was without precedent.

labor feminists

The women's movement had not languished entirely in the postwar years. Feminist concerns were kept alive in the 1950s and early 1960s by working women, who campaigned for such policies as maternity leave and equal pay for equal work. One historian has called these women "labor feminists," because they belonged to trade unions and fought for equality and dignity in the workplace. "It became apparent to me why so many employers could legally discriminate against women — because it was written right into the law," said one female labor activist. Trade-union women were especially critical in pushing for, and winning, congressional passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act, which established the principle of equal pay for equal work.

Nixon placed himself on the side of what he called "the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators." But moderate and conservative Americans were not in the mood to simply remain silent.

They increasingly spoke out. During Nixon's first presidential term, those opposed to the direction liberalism had taken since the early 1960s focused their discontent on what they believed to be the excesses of the "rights revolution" — the enormous changes in American law and society initiated by the civil rights movement and advanced by feminists and others thereafter.

Education and home ownership were more than personal triumphs for the families of World War II veterans (and Korean and Vietnam War veterans, after a new GI Bill was passed in 1952)

They were financial assets that helped lift more Americans than ever before into a mass-consumption-oriented middle class.

The Johnson administration gambled that American superiority in personnel and weaponry would ultimately triumph in Vietnam

This strategy was inextricably tied to political considerations. For domestic reasons, policymakers searched for an elusive middle ground between all-out invasion of North Vietnam, which included the possibility of war with China, and disengagement. "In effect, we are fighting a war of attrition," said General Westmoreland. "The only alternative is a war of annihilation."

Before their deaths, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had spoken eloquently against the Vietnam War.

To antiwar activists, however, bold speeches and marches had not produced the desired effect. "We are no longer interested in merely protesting the war," declared one. "We are out to stop it." They sought nothing short of an immediate American withdrawal. Their anger at Johnson and the Democratic Party — fueled by news of the Tet offensive, the murders of King and Kennedy, and the general youth rebellion — had radicalized the movement.

Black Power was not, fundamentally, a violent political ideology. But violence did play a decisive role in the politics of black liberation in the mid-1960s

Too many Americans, white and black, had little knowledge or understanding of the rage that existed just below the surface in many poor northern black neighborhoods. That rage boiled over in a wave of riots that struck the nation's cities in mid-decade. The first "long hot summer" began in July 1964 in New York City when police shot a black criminal suspect in Harlem. Angry youths looted and rioted there for a week. Over the next four years, the volatile issue of police brutality set off riots in dozens of cities. In August 1965, the arrest of a young black motorist in the Watts section of Los Angeles sparked six days of rioting that left thirty-four people dead. "There is a different type of Negro emerging," one riot participant told investigators. "They are not going to wait for the evolutionary process for their rights to be a man." The riots of 1967, however, were the most serious, engulfing twenty-two cities in July and August. Forty-three people were killed in Detroit alone, nearly all of them black, and $50 million worth of property was destroyed. President Johnson called in the National Guard and U.S. Army troops, many of them having just returned from Vietnam, to restore order. Johnson, who believed that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had immeasurably helped African Americans, was stunned by the rioting. Despondent at the news from Watts, "he refused to look at the cables from Los Angeles," recalled one aide. Virtually all black leaders condemned the rioting, though they understood its origins in poverty and deprivation. At a meeting in Watts, Martin Luther King Jr. admitted that he had "failed to take the civil rights movement to the masses of the people." His appearance appeased few. "We don't need your dreams; we need jobs!" one heckler shouted at King. Following the gut-wrenching riots in Detroit and Newark in 1967, Johnson appointed a presidential commission, headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, to investigate the causes of the violence. Released in 1968, the Kerner Commission Report was a searing look at race in America, the most honest and forthright government document about race since the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights' 1947 report "To Secure These Rights." "Our nation is moving toward two societies," the Kerner Commission Report concluded, "one black, one white — separate and unequal." The report did not excuse the brick-throwing, firebombing, and looting of the previous summers, but it placed the riots in sociological context. Shut out of white-dominated society, impoverished African Americans felt they had no stake in the social order.

Despite American rhetoric, the United States was often concerned less with democracy than with stability.

Truman and Eisenhower administrations tended to support governments, no matter how repressive, that were overtly anticommunist. Eisenhower's secretary of state Dulles often resorted to covert operations against governments that, in his opinion, were too closely aligned with the Soviets. - CIA

The United States took a stronger stance in Korea than the Chinese civil war

Truman and Stalin had agreed at the close of World War II to occupy the Korean peninsula jointly, temporarily dividing the former Japanese colony at the 38th parallel. As tensions rose in Europe, the 38th parallel hardened into a permanent demarcation line. The Soviets supported a Communist government, led by Kim Il Sung, in North Korea; the United States backed a right-wing Nationalist, Syngman Rhee, in South Korea. The two sides had waged low-level war since 1945, and both leaders were spoiling for a more definitive fight. However, neither Kim nor Rhee could launch an all-out offensive without the backing of his sponsor. Washington repeatedly said no, and so did Moscow. But Kim continued to press Stalin to permit him to reunify the nation. Convinced by the North Koreans that victory would be swift, the Soviet leader finally relented in the late spring of 1950. On June 25, 1950, the North Koreans launched a surprise attack across the 38th parallel (Map 24.2). Truman immediately asked the UN Security Council to authorize a "police action" against the invaders. The Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council to protest China's exclusion from the United Nations and therefore could not veto the request. With the Security Council's approval of a "peacekeeping force," Truman ordered U.S. troops to Korea. The rapidly assembled UN army in Korea was overwhelmingly American, with General Douglas MacArthur in command. At first, the North Koreans held a distinct advantage, but MacArthur's surprise amphibious attack at Inchon gave the UN forces control of Seoul, the South Korean capital, and almost all the territory up to the 38th parallel.The impetuous MacArthur then ordered his troops across the 38th parallel and led them all the way to the Chinese border at the Yalu River. It was a major blunder, certain to draw China into the war. Sure enough, a massive Chinese counterattack forced UN forces into headlong retreat back down the Korean peninsula. Then stalemate set in. With weak public support for the war in the United States, Truman and his advisors decided to work for a negotiated peace. MacArthur disagreed and denounced the Korean stalemate, declaring, "There is no substitute for victory." On April 11, 1951, Truman relieved MacArthur of his command. Truman's decision was highly unpopular, especially among conservative Republicans, but he had likely saved the nation from years of costly warfare with China. Notwithstanding MacArthur's dismissal, the war dragged on for more than two years. An armistice in July 1953, pushed by the newly elected president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, left Korea divided at the original demarcation line. North Korea remained firmly allied with the Soviet Union; South Korea signed a mutual defense treaty with the United States. It had been the first major proxy war between the Soviet Union and United States, in which they took sides in a civil conflict without directly confronting one another militarily. It would not be the last. The Korean War had far-reaching consequences. Truman's decision to commit troops without congressional approval set a precedent for future undeclared wars. His refusal to unleash atomic bombs, even when American forces were reeling under a massive Chinese attack, set ground rules for Cold War conflict. The war also expanded American involvement in Asia, transforming containment into a truly global policy. Finally, the Korean War ended Truman's resistance to a major military buildup (Map 24.3). Defense expenditures grew from $13 billion in 1950, roughly one-third of the federal budget, to $50 billion in 1953, nearly two-thirds of the budget (Figure 24.1). American foreign policy had become more global, more militarized, and more expensive. Even in times of peace, the United States now functioned in a state of permanent military mobilization.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Under the NATO pact, twelve nations — Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States — agreed that "an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all." In May 1949, those nations also agreed to the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), which eventually joined NATO in 1955.

In one of the great ironies of American political history, however, the post-Watergate reforms made government less efficient and more susceptible to special interests — the opposite of what had been intended.

Under the new committee structure, smaller subcommittees proliferated, and the size of the congressional staff doubled to more than 20,000. A diffuse power structure actually gave lobbyists more places to exert influence. As the power of committee chairs weakened, influence shifted to party leaders, such as the Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader. With little incentive to compromise, the parties grew more rigid, and bipartisanship became rare. Finally, filibustering, a seldom-used tactic largely employed by anti-civil rights southerners, increased in frequency. The Congress that we have come to know today — with its partisan rancor, its army of lobbyists, and its slow-moving response to public needs — came into being in the 1970s.

This system of segregation underlay economic and political structures that further marginalized and disempowered black citizens.

Virtually no African Americans were allowed to work for city or state government, and the best jobs in the private sector were reserved for whites. Black workers labored "in the back," cleaning, cooking, stocking shelves, and loading trucks for the lowest wages. Rural African Americans labored in a sharecropping system that kept them stuck in poverty, often prevented them from obtaining an education, and offered no avenue of escape. Politically, less than 20 percent of eligible black voters were allowed to vote, the result of poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, fraud, and the "white primary" (elections in which only whites could vote). This near-total disfranchisement gave whites power disproportionate to their numbers — black people were one-third of the residents of Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia but had basically no political voice in those states. In the North, racial segregation in everyday life was less acute but just as tangible. Northern segregation took the form of a spatial system in which whites increasingly lived in suburbs or on the outskirts of cities, while African Americans were concentrated in declining downtown neighborhoods. The result was what many called ghettos: all-black districts characterized by high rents, low wages, and inadequate city services. Employment discrimination and their exclusion from job training left many African Americans without any means of support. Few jobs other than the most menial were open to African Americans; journalists, accountants, engineers, and other highly educated men from all-black colleges and universities often labored as railroad porters or cooks because jobs commensurate with their skills remained for whites only. These conditions produced a self-perpetuating cycle that kept far too many black citizens trapped on the social margins.

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

When Iran's democratically elected nationalist premier, Mohammad Mossadegh, seized British oil properties in 1953, CIA agents helped depose him and installed the young Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah of Iran. Iranian resentment of the coup, followed by twenty-five years of U.S. support for the shah, provided fuel for the 1979 Iranian Revolution engineered a coup in Guatemala against the democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who had seized land owned by the American-owned United Fruit Company. Arbenz Guzmán offered to pay United Fruit the declared value of the land, but the company rejected the offer and sought help from the U.S. government. Eisenhower specifically approved those CIA efforts and expanded the agency's mandate from gathering intelligence to intervening in the affairs of sovereign states.

Kennedy's Commitment to Vietnam

When Kennedy became president, he inherited Eisenhower's commitment in Vietnam, which he saw in Cold War terms. But rather than practicing brinksmanship — threatening nuclear war to stop communism — Kennedy sought what at the time seemed a more intelligent and realistic, if nevertheless interventionist, approach. In 1961, he increased military aid to the South Vietnamese and expanded the role of U.S. Special Forces ("Green Berets"), who would train the South Vietnamese army in unconventional, small-group warfare tactics. South Vietnam's corrupt and repressive Diem regime, propped up by Eisenhower since 1954, was losing ground in spite of American aid. By 1961, Diem's opponents, with backing from North Vietnam, had formed a revolutionary movement known as the National Liberation Front (NLF). NLF guerrilla forces — the Vietcong — found allies among peasants alienated by Diem's "strategic hamlet" program, which had uprooted entire villages and moved villagers into barbed-wire compounds. Furthermore, Buddhists charged Diem, a Catholic, with religious persecution. Starting in May 1963, militant Buddhists staged dramatic demonstrations, including self-immolations (burning to death) recorded by reporters covering the activities of the 16,000 U.S. military personnel then in Vietnam. The self-immolations, broadcast on television to a shocked global audience, powerfully illustrated the dilemmas of American policy in Vietnam. To ensure a stable southern government and prevent victory for Ho Chi Minh and the North, the United States had to support Diem's authoritarian regime. But the regime's repression of its political opponents made Diem more unpopular. He was assassinated on November 3, 1963. Whether one supported U.S. involvement in Vietnam or not, the elemental paradox remained unchanged: in its efforts to achieve victory over the North, the United States brought defeat ever closer.

The flash point for a hot war remained Germany, the most important industrial economy and the key strategic nation in Europe

When no agreement could be reached with the Soviet Union to unify the four zones of occupation into a single state, the Western allies consolidated their three zones in 1947. They then prepared to establish an independent federal German republic. Marshall Plan funds would jump-start economic recovery. Some of those funds were slated for West Berlin, in hopes of making the city a capitalist showplace 100 miles inside the Soviet zone.

The United States enjoyed enormous economic advantages at the close of World War II.

While the Europeans and Japanese were still clearing the war's rubble, America stood poised to enter a postwar boom. As the only major industrial nation not devastated by war, the United States enjoyed an unprecedented global position. The American economy also benefitted from an expanding internal market and heavy investment in research and development. Two additional factors stood out: First, for the first time in the nation's history, employers generally accepted collective bargaining, which for workers translated into rising wages, expanding benefits, and an increasing rate of home ownership. Second, the federal government's outlays for military and domestic programs gave a huge boost to the economy.

The United States was wedded to the notion — dating to the Wilson administration — that communism and capitalism were incompatible on the world stage.

With Britain faltering, American officials saw little choice but to fill its shoes.

World War II set the basic conditions for the Cold War.

With Germany and Japan defeated and Britain and France weakened by years of war, only two geopolitical powers remained standing in 1945. Even had nothing divided them, the United States and the Soviet Union would have jostled each other as they moved to fill the postwar power vacuum. But, of course, the two countries were divided — by geography, history, ideology, and strategic interest. Little united them other than their commitment to defeating the Axis powers. President Franklin Roosevelt understood that maintaining the U.S.-Soviet alliance was essential for postwar global stability. But he also believed that permanent peace and long-term U.S. interests depended on the Wilsonian principles of collective security, self-determination, and free trade

The cities and fields of Europe had thus barely ceased to run with the blood of World War II before they were menaced again by the tense standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States.

With Stalin intent on establishing client states in Eastern Europe and the United States equally intent on reviving Germany and ensuring collective security throughout Europe, the points of agreement were few and far between. Among the Allies, anxiety about a Nazi victory in World War II had been quickly replaced by fear of a potentially more cataclysmic war with the Soviet Union.

National Organization for Women (NOW)

Women's civil rights organization formed in 1966. Initially, NOW focused on eliminating gender discrimination in public institutions and the workplace, but by the 1970s it also embraced many of the issues raised by more radical feminists. used to force compliance w civil rights act of 1964 founded by Friedan and others, including many labor feminists from around the country, Modeled on the NAACP, NOW intended to be a civil rights organization for women, with the aim of bringing "women into full participation in ... American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men." Under Friedan's leadership, membership grew to fifteen thousand by 1971, and NOW became a powerful voice for equal rights.

America's economic woes struck hardest at the industrial sector, which suddenly — shockingly — began to be dismantled.

Worst hit was the steel industry, which for seventy-five years had been the economy's crown jewel. Unscathed by World War II, U.S. steel producers had enjoyed an open, hugely profitable market since the 1940s. But lack of serious competition left them without incentives to replace outdated plants and equipment. When West Germany and Japan rebuilt their steel industries, these facilities incorporated the latest technology. Foreign steel flooded into the United States during the 1970s, and the American industry was simply overwhelmed. Formerly titanic steel companies began a massive dismantling; virtually the entire Pittsburgh region, once a national hub of steel production, lost its heavy industry in a single generation. By the mid-1980s, downsizing, automation, and investment in new technologies made the American steel industry competitive again — but it was a shadow of its former self. The steel industry was the prime example of what became known as deindustrialization.

One of the reasons for the baby boom was a drop in the average marriage age

Younger parents meant a bumper crop of children Such a dramatic turnaround reflected couples' decisions during the Great Depression to limit childbearing and couples' contrasting decisions in the postwar years to have more children. The baby boom peaked in 1957 and remained at a high level until the early 1960s. The passage of time revealed the ever-widening impact of the baby boom. When baby boomers competed for jobs during the 1970s, the labor market became tight. When career-oriented baby boomers belatedly began having children in the 1980s, the birthrate jumped. And in our own time, as baby boomers begin retiring, huge funding problems threaten to engulf Social Security and Medicare. The intimate decisions of so many couples after World War II continued to shape American life well into the twenty-first century.

The Great Society's agenda included environmental reform as well

an expanded national park system, improvement of the nation's air and water, protection for endangered species, stronger land-use planning, and highway beautification. Hardly pausing for breath, Johnson oversaw the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); won funding for hundreds of thousands of units of public housing; made investments in urban rapid transit such as the new Washington, D.C., Metro and the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco; ushered child safety and consumer protection laws through Congress; and helped create the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the work of artists, writers, and scholars.

Vietminh

an organization whose goal it was to win Vietnam's independence from foreign rule US :)

United Nations

ased on plans drawn up at the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks conference in Washington, D.C would have both a General Assembly, in which all nations would be represented, and a Security Council composed of the five major Allied powers — the United States, Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union — and seven other nations elected on a rotating basis. The Big Three determined that the five permanent members of the Security Council should have veto power over decisions of the General Assembly. They announced that the United Nations would convene for the first time in San Francisco on April 25, 1945.

The Truman administration had legitimized the vague and malleable concept of "disloyalty." Others proved willing to stretch the concept even further,

beginning with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

early tv shows

father knows best, leave it to beaver, the honeymooners, the life of Riley, Amos 'n' Andy

Beats

group of (young white) writers and poets centered in New York and San Francisco who disdained middle-class materialism. manifesto for Beat Generation: "Howl" (1956) by Allen Ginsberg - "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix." In works such as Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road (1957), the Beats glorified spontaneity, sexual adventurism, drug use, and spirituality. The Beats were apolitical, but their cultural rebellion would, in the 1960s, inspire a new generation of young rebels disenchanted with both the political and cultural status quo.

The NIYC had substantial influence within tribal communities, but two other organizations, the militant Indians of All Tribes (IAT) and the American Indian Movement (AIM), attracted more attention in the larger society.

hese groups embraced the concept of Red Power, and beginning in 1968 they staged escalating protests to draw attention to Indian concerns, especially the concerns of urban Indians, many of whom had been encouraged, or forced, to leave reservations by the federal government in earlier decades. In 1969, members of the IAT occupied the deserted federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and proclaimed: "We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man's purchase of a similar island [Manhattan] about 300 years ago." In 1972, AIM members joined the Trail of Broken Treaties, a march sponsored by a number of Indian groups. When AIM activists seized the headquarters of the hated Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., and ransacked the building, older tribal leaders denounced them. However, AIM managed to focus national media attention on Native American issues with a siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in February 1973. The site of the infamous 1890 massacre of the Sioux by the U.S. military, Wounded Knee was situated on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where young AIM activists had cultivated ties to sympathetic elders. For more than two months, AIM members occupied a small collection of buildings, surrounded by a cordon of FBI agents and U.S. marshals. Several gun battles left two dead, and the siege was finally brought to a negotiated end. Although upsetting to many white onlookers and Indian elders alike, AIM protests attracted widespread mainstream media coverage and spurred government action on tribal issues.

The battle for civil rights entered a new phase in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, when four black college students took seats at the whites-only lunch counter at the local Woolworth's drugstore, which had a diner-style lunch counter, as most southern drugstores in that era did.

his simple act was entirely the brainchild of the four students, who had discussed it in their dorm rooms over several preceding nights. A New York-based spokesman for Woolworth's said the chain would "abide by local custom," which meant refusing to serve African Americans at the lunch counter. The students were determined to "sit in" until they were served. For three weeks, hundreds of students inspired by the original foursome took turns sitting at the counters, quietly eating, doing homework, or reading. Taunted and beaten by groups of whites, pelted with food and other debris, the black students — often occupying more than sixty of the sixty-six seats — held strong. Although many were arrested, the tactic worked: the Woolworth's lunch counter was desegregated, and sit-ins quickly spread to other southern cities (AP® Analyzing Voices).

Among the most controversial of Kinsey's claims was that homosexuality was far more prevalent than most Americans believed.

homophiles were a small but determined collection of activists who sought equal rights for gays and lesbians. Building on the urban gay and lesbian communities that had coalesced during World War II, homophiles sought to change American attitudes about same-sex love.

With no end to the Cold War in sight, Eisenhower focused on limiting the cost of containment

hoped to economize by relying on a nuclear arsenal and deemphasizing expensive conventional forces. - NEW LOOK DEFENCE POLICY

Prosperity

how much an economy produces, how much people earn more easily measured than is quality of life a high value on consumption, a devotion to family and domesticity, and a preference for suburban living

Alger Hiss

intensified the anticommunist crusade in 1948 former New Dealer and State Department official who had accompanied Franklin Roosevelt to Yalta A former Communist, Whitaker Chambers, claimed that Hiss was a member of a secret Communist cell operating in the government and had passed him classified documents in the 1930s. Hiss denied the allegations, but California Republican congressman Richard Nixon doggedly pursued the case against him. In early 1950, Hiss was found guilty not of spying but of lying to Congress about his Communist affiliations and was sentenced to five years in federal prison. Many Americans doubted at the time that Hiss was a spy. But the Venona transcripts in the 1990s corroborated a great deal of Chambers's testimony, and though no definitive proof has emerged, many historians now recognize the strong circumstantial evidence against Hiss.

Truman surprised everyone

launched a strenuous cross-country speaking tour and hammered away at the Republicans for opposing progressive legislation and, in general, for running a "do-nothing" Congress. By combining these issues with attacks on the Soviet menace abroad, Truman began to salvage his troubled campaign. At his rallies, enthusiastic listeners shouted, "Give 'em hell, Harry!" Truman won, receiving 49.6 percent of the vote to Dewey's 45.1 percent

One of the most striking developments in American life in the postwar decades was the emergence of the teenager as a cultural phenomenon.

marketing area hollywood - music - rock and roll - what really defined youth culture

Resistance to integration

more people in KKK and White Citizens' Councils dedicated to blocking school integration

the International Monetary Fund (IMF)

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

Rockefeller

supported international initiatives - like the marshal plan and nato and tolerated labor unions and welfare state Cold War internationalist variety of capacities under Eisenhower, including as an advisor on foreign affairs. elected the governor of New York in 1959 and became the de facto leader of the liberal wing of the Republican Party.

Shelley v. Kraemer

the Supreme Court outlawed restrictive covenants, but racial discrimination in housing changed little. The practice persisted long after Shelley, because the FHA and VA continued the policy of redlining: refusing mortgages to African Americans and members of other minority groups seeking to buy in white neighborhoods. Indeed, no federal law — or even Court decisions like Shelley — actually prohibited racial discrimination in housing until Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

Among women, 1968 also marked a break with the past. The late 1960s spawned new expressions of feminism:

women's liberation and black and Chicana feminisms