Chapter 25 history

The Soviet Union began cutting off all land and river transit between West Berlin and West Germany. The Western Allies responded with a massive airlift to come to West Berlin's aid.

Berlin Blockade

The Second World War, however, did improve America's overall racial landscape. As a New York Times editorial explained in early 1946, "This is a particularly good time to campaign against the evils of bigotry, prejudice, and race hatred because we have witnessed the defeat of enemies who tried to found a mastery of the world upon such cruel and fallacious policy." African American veterans had fought in large numbers to overthrow the Nazi regime of government-sponsored racism, and returning veterans were unwilling to put up with continuing racial abuse at home. In addition, the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union gave American leaders added incentive to improve race relations. In the ideological contest with communism for influence among the newly emerging nations of Africa, the Soviets often compared racism in the South to the Nazis' treatment of the Jews. Yet Truman's outlook on racial issues evolved with the times-and with his growing desire to court African American voters once in office. Black veterans often risked their lives when protesting racial bigotry. In 1946, a White mob gunned down two African American couples in rural Georgia. One of the murderers explained that George Dorsey, one of the victims, was "a good [Negro]" until he went into the army. "But when he came out, he thought he was as good as any White people." In the fall of 1946, a delegation of civil rights activists urged President Truman to condemn the Ku Klux Klan and the lynching of African Americans. The delegation graphically described incidents of torture and intimidation against Blacks in the South. Such horrific racial incidents so shocked Truman that he appointed a Committee on Civil Rights to investigate violence against African Americans and strengthen and safeguard their civil rights. Southern Democrats were infuriated. A Mississippi congressman claimed that Truman "had seen fit to run a political dagger into our backs" by intervening in southern race relations.

Civil rights during the Cold War

Historians have long debated the unanswerable question: Was the United States or the Soviet Union more responsible for starting the Cold War? The conventional view argues that the Soviets, led by Josef Stalin, set out to dominate the globe after 1945, and the United States had no choice but to defend democratic capitalist values. Historians critical of this explanation insist that the United States unnecessarily antagonized the Soviet Union. Instead of continuing Franklin Roosevelt's collaborative efforts with the Soviets, President Truman pursued a confrontational foreign policy focused on stopping the spread of communism, a policy that only aggravated tensions. In retrospect, the onset of the Cold War seems to have been an unavoidable result of the ideological competition between opposing views of what the postwar world should become. America's commitment to free-enterprise capitalism, political self-determination, and religious freedom conflicted with the Soviet Union's preference for controlling its neighbors, ideological conformity, and prohibiting religious practices.

Conflicting visions of postwar Europe

One of the thorniest postwar problems, the Chinese civil war, was fast coming to a head. Chinese Nationalists, led by the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek, had been fighting Mao Zedong and the Communists since the 1920s. After the Secon World War, the Communists won over most of the peasants. By the end of 1949, the Nationalist government was forced to flee to the island of Formosa, which it renamed Taiwan. President Truman's critics-mostly Republicans-aske "Who lost China to communism?" What they did not explain was how Truman could have prevented a Communist victory without a massive U.S. military intervention, which would have been risky, unpopular, and expensive.

Defeat of democracy in China.

The G.I. Bill, provided World War II veterans with funds for college education, unemployment insurance, and housing

G.I. Bill

In late 1950, the UN forces rallied. By January 1951, they had secured their lines below Seoul and launched a counterattack. When President Truman began negotiations with North Korea to restore the prewar boundary, General MacArthur undermined him by issuing an ultimatum for China to make peace or suffer an attack. On April 5, on the floor of Congress, the Republican minority leader read a letter from MacArthur that criticized the president and said that "there is no substitute for victory." Such public insubordination and MacArthur's refusal to follow numerous orders left Truman only two choices: he could accept MacArthur's aggressive demands or fire him. Secretary of State Dean Acheson warned Truman, "If you relieve MacArthur, you will have the biggest fight of your administration." On April 11, 1951, with civilian control of the military at stake, President Truman removed General MacArthur and replaced him with General Matthew B. Ridgway, who better understood how to conduct a modern war in pursuit of limited objectives. That the top military leaders supported Truman's decision deflected much of the criticism.

General Douglas MacArthur crossing the line.

The Korean War excited another Red Scare at home, as people grew fearful that Soviet-directed Communists were infiltrating American society. Since 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had claimed thi Communist agents had infiltrated the federal government. On March 21, 1947, just nine days after he announced the Truman Doctrine, the president signed an executive order (also known as the Loyalty Order) requiring federal government workers to go through a background investigation to ensure they were not Communists or even associated with Communists (as well as other "subversive" groups).

House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives formed in 1938; originally tasked with investigating Nazi subversion during the Second World War and later focused on rooting out Communists in the government and the motion-picture industry.

The wartime military alliance against Nazism disintegrated after 1945 as the Soviet Union violated the promises it had made at the Yalta Conference. Instead of allowing the people living in Eastern European nations Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania-to vote in democratic elections to choose their governments, the Soviets imposed military control and a Communist political system on the nations of Eastern Europe that it had liberated from Nazi control. Iron curtain On May 12, 1945, four days after victory in Europe, Winston Churchill asked Harry Truman: "What is to happen about [Eastern] Europe? An iron curtain is drawn down upon [the Russian] front. We do not know what is going on behind [it]." Churchill and Truman wanted to lift the iron curtain and help those nations develop democratic governments. But Soviet actions soon dashed those expectations. Beginning in the spring of 1945 and continuing for the next two years, the Soviet Union installed puppet governments across Central and Eastern Europe. The Soviets eliminated all political parties except the Communists; created secret police forces; took control of intellectual and cultural life, including the mass media; and organized a process of ethnic cleansing Spread of the Soviet Union and communism whereby whole populations-12 million Germans, as well as Poles and Hungarians-were relocated, usually to West Germany or to prisons. Opponents were exiled, silenced, executed, or imprisoned.

Iron curtain- Term coined by Winston Churchill to describe the cold war divide between Western Europe and the Soviet Union's Eastern European satellite nations.

Meanwhile, racial segregation was being dismantled in a much more public area: professional baseball. In April 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers roster included the first African American to play major league baseball: Jack Roosevelt "Jackie" Robinson. He was born in 1919 in a Georgia sharecropper's cabin, the grandson of enslaved people. Six months later, his father left, never to return. Robinson's mother moved the family to Pasadena, California, where Jackie became a marvelous all-around athlete. After serving in the army during World War II, Robinson began playing professional baseball in the so-called Negro Leagues. Major league scouts reported that he could play in the big leagues. Branch Rickey, president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, interviewed Robinson on August 28, 1945. Rickey asked Robinson if he could face racial abuse without losing his temper. Robinson was shocked: "Are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?" Rickey replied that he needed a "Negro player" with "guts enough not to fight back." Robinson assured him he was the best candidate to integrate baseball. After signing Robinson to a contract for $600 a month, Rickey explained to his critics that he had found a terrific player of incomparable courage capable of looking the other way when provoked. And Robinson was often provoked on the field and on the road. Soon after Robinson arrived for preseason practice, many of his White teammates refused to take the field with him. Manager Leo Durocher told the team, "I don't care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes. ... I'm the manager of this team, and I say he plays."

Jackie Robinson

In the Far West, Mexican Americans (often grouped together with other Spanish-speaking immigrants as Hispanics or Latinos) continued to experience ethnic prejudice after the war. Schools in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California routinely segregated Mexican American children from Whites. After the war, the 500,000 Hispanic military veterans were especially frustrated that their efforts in the armed forces did not bring equality at home. "We had paid our dues," said one war veteran, yet nothing had changed. Hispanics were frequently denied access to the educational, medical, and housing benefits made available to White veterans. In fact, some mortuaries even denied funeral services to Mexican Americans killed in combat. As a funeral director in Texas explained, "The Anglo people would not stand for it." To fight such prejudicial treatment, Mexican American war veterans led by Dr. Hector Perez Garcia, a U.S. Army major, organized the American GI Forum in Texas in 1948, with branches throughout Texas and across the nation. Garcia, born in Mexico in 1914 and raised in Texas, stressed the importance of formal education to Mexican Americans. The new organization's motto proclaimed: "Education Is Our Freedom and Freedom Should Be Everybody's Business." At a time when Mexican Americans in Texas averaged no more than a third-grade education, Garcia and five of his siblings were exceptional, each having completed medical school and become physicians. Yet upon Major Garcia's return from the war, he encountered "discrimination everywhere. We had no opportunities. We had to pay [poll taxes] to vote. We had segregated schools. We were not allowed to go into public places."

Latin Americans during the Cold War

While giving a graduation speech at Harvard University in May, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, building upon suggestions given to him by George Kennan, called for massive financial and technical assistance to rescue war ravaged Europe, including the Soviet Union. What came to be known as the Marshall Plan was "directed not against country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos." The Marshall Plan sought to reconstruct the European economy, neutralize Communist insurgencies, and build up secure foreign markets for American products. As Truman said, "The American [capitalist] system can survive only if it is part of a world system." In December 1947, Truman submitted Marshall's proposal to Congress, saying that "if Europe fails to recover" from the war's devastation, voters might be won over by Communist parties, which would deal a "shattering blow to peace and stability." The Marshall Plan was about more than economics, however. It was also part of Truman's effort to contain the expansionist tendencies of the Soviet Union by building up a strong Western Europe. The Americans, said a British official, "want an integrated Europe looking like the United States of America."

Marshall Plan/Dollar Plan (1948). Secretary of State George C. Marshall's post-World War II program providing massive U.S. financial and technical assistance to war-torn European countries.

NATO focused on collective defence and the protection of its members from potential threats emanating from the Soviet Union. NATO's fundamental goal is to safeguard the Allies' freedom and security by political and military means.

Nato during the cold war. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-Defensive political and military alliance formed in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and ten Western European nations to deter Soviet expansion in Europe.

Anti-Mexican sentiment simmered throughout the postwar era until it boiled over in 1955, during the Eisenhower presidency. Texas residents fastened onto the racial slur "wetbacks" to refer to Mexicans who entered the United States illegally by crossing the Rio Grande. Although employing undocumented immigrants was technically illegal, authorities often turned a blind eye to violations. Texan Harlon Carter, head of the Border Patrol, who as a youth had killed a Mexican teen after an argument, convinced President Eisenhower to launch a massive effort-"Operation Wetback"-to capture and deport undocumented Mexicans. Led by General Joseph Swing, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the operation was planned like a military assault. Some 750 Border Patrol agents swept through factories, farms, ranches, restaurants, and other workplaces employing Mexicans, arresting some 300,000 undocumented Operation Wetback takes aggressive steps against undocumented immigrants workers and trucking them to detention camps for deportation.

Operation "wetback"

No sooner did the Second World War end than a prolonged "cold war" began between East and West. The awkward wartime alliance between the capitalist United States and the Communist Soviet Union collapsed during the spring and summer of 1945. With the elimination of Nazism, their common enemy, the two strongest nations to emerge from the war became intense ideological rivals who could not bridge their differences over the basic issues of human rights, individual liberties, democratic elections, and religious freedom. Mutual suspicion and a race to gain influence over the "nonaligned" nations of the world in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America further distanced the two former allies. The defeat of Japan and Germany had created power vacuums in Europe and Asia that sucked the Soviet Union and the United States into an unrelenting war of words fed by clashing strategic interests and political ideologies.

Origins of the Cold War

In April 1945, less than three months after Harry S. Truman had begun his new role as vice president, Eleanor Roosevelt calmly informed him, "Harry, the President is dead." When Truman asked how he could help her, the First Lady replied: "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now." Born in 1884 in western Missouri, Truman grew up in Independence, near Kansas City. During the First World War, he served in France as captain of an artillery battery. After the war, he and a partner started a clothing business, but it failed and left him in debt for twenty years. Truman, the only twentieth-century president who did not attend college, then entered politics as a Democrat. In 1934, Missouri voters sent him to the U.S. Senate. There was nothing extraordinary about Harry Truman except his integrity, decisiveness, and courage. Neither charming nor brilliant, he was impulsive and quick to take offense at critics. Truman was a poor public speaker devoid of eloquence and charisma. He was so nearsighted that he never took his eyes off his text when giving a speech.

President Harry S. Trumans

The onset of the Cold War and the emergence of nuclear weapons led Truman to sign the National Security Act (1947), which centralized control of the military establishment. It created a Department of Defense to oversee the three separate military branches-the army, navy, and air force—and the National Security Council (NSC), a group of the government's top specialists in international relations who advised the president. The act made permanent the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a wartime innovation bringing together the leaders of the military branches, and it established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to coordinate global intelligence-gathering activities.

Recognizing the Military during the origins of the Cold War

Harry Truman viewed his victory in 1948 as a mandate for expanding the social welfare programs established by Franklin Roosevelt. "Every segment of our population and every individual," he declared, "has a right to expect from our government a fair deal." Truman's Fair Deal promised "greater economic opportunity for the mass of the people." Yet there was little new in Truman's Fair Deal proposals. Most of them were simply extensions or enlargements of New Deal programs: a higher minimum wage, expansion of Social Security coverage to 10 million workers not included in the original 1935 bill, and a large slum-clearance and public-housing program. Despite enjoying Democratic majorities in Congress, Truman ran up against the same alliance of southern Democrats and Republicans who had worked against Roosevelt in the late 1930s. The bipartisan conservative coalition rejected several civil rights bills, national health insurance, federal aid to education, and a new approach to subsidizing farmers.

Rejection of the Fair Deal

As the Communists gained control of China in 1949, news that the Soviets had detonated a nuclear bomb led Truman to accelerate the design of a hydrogen "superbomb," far more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. That the Soviets now possessed atomic weapons intensified every Cold War confrontation. "There is only one thing worse than one nation having an atomic bomb," said Nobel Prize-winning physicist Harold C. Urey, who helped develop the first atomic bomb. "That's two nations having it."

Soviets create their own atomic Bomb

The best way for the United States to deal with such an ideological foe, Kennan advised, was not military confrontation. Instead, he called for patient, persistent, and firm "strategic" efforts to "contain" Soviet expansionism over the long term, without resorting to war. Creating such "unalterable counterforce," he predicted, would eventually cause "either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power" because communism, in Kennan's view, was an unstable system that would eventually collapse if Americans were patient and helped postwar Europe rebuild its economies. New secretary of state George C. Marshall, the commander of the U.S. armed forces during the war, was so impressed by

The Cold War attempts made by the U.S.

At the same time that the United States was forming new alliances, it was helping to form a new nation. Palestine, the biblical Holy Land, had been a British protectorate since 1919. For hundreds of years, Jews throughout the world had dreamed of returning to their ancestral Israeli homeland and its ancient capital Zion, a part of Jerusalem. Many Zionists-Jews who wanted a separate Jewish nation-had migrated there. More arrived during and after the Nazi persecution of European Jews. Hitler's effort to exterminate Jews convinced many that their only hope for a secure future was to create their own nation. Late in 1947, the United Nations voted to divide (partition) Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Jews agreed to the partition, but the Arabs opposed it. Palestine was their ancestral home, too; Jerusalem was as holy to Muslims and Christians as it was to Jews.

The Creation of Israel.

The creation of the Dixiecrats, also called States' Rights Democrat, member of a right-wing Democratic splinter group in the 1948 U.S. presidential election organized by Southerners who objected (Opposed) to the civil rights program of the Democratic Party.

The Democrats split and formation of the Dixiecrats over racial concerns. Dixiecrats - Breakaway faction of White southern Democrats who defected from the national Democratic party in 1948 to protest the party's increased support for Black civil rights and to nominate their own segregationist candidates for elective office.

By early 1948, after three years in the White House, Truman had yet to shake the widespread impression that he was a hapless successor to the celebrated Franklin Roosevelt. Predictions of a Truman defeat in 1948 did not faze the combative president. He mounted an intense campaign. His first step was to shore up the major elements of the New Deal coalition of working-class voters: farmers, labor unionists, and African Americans. In his 1948 State of the Union message, Truman announced that the programs that he would later call his "Fair Deal" (to distinguish his new domestic program from Roosevelt's New Deal) would offer something to nearly every group the Democrats hoped to attract as voters. The first goal, Truman said, was to ensure civil rights for all Americans. He added Truman's "Fair Deal" proposals to increase federal aid to education, expand unemployment and retirement benefits, create a system of national health insurance, enable more rural people to connect to electricity, and increase the minimum wage. The Republican-controlled Congress dismissed President Truman's proposals, an action it would later regret. At the Republican convention, moderate New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, who had lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, won the presidential nomination. While the party's platform endorsed most New Deal reforms and approved the administration's bipartisan foreign policy, Dewey promised to run things more efficiently and promote civil rights for all.

The Fair Deal Proposal and President Truman's reelections. Fair Deal (1949). President Truman's proposals to build upon the New Deal with national health insurance, the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, new civil rights legislation, and other initiatives; most were rejected by the Republican-controlled Congress.

On June 25, 1950, with the encouragement of the Soviet Union and Communist China, the Soviet-equipped North Korean People's Army-135,000 strong-invaded the Republic of South Korea and sent the South Korean army reeling in a headlong retreat. Within three days of fighting, the North Korean army had captured Seoul, the South Korean capital. When asked how he would respond to the invasion, President Truman declared: "By God, I'm going to let them have it!" He then made a critical decision: without consulting the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Congress, Truman decided to wage war through the backing of the United Nations rather than seeking a declaration of war from Congress. The Korean conflict was the first military action fought under the banner of the United Nations, and some twenty other nations participated. The United States provided the largest contingent of non-Korean forces by far, some 330,000 troops. The American military defense of South Korea set a worrisome precedent: war by order of a president rather than by a vote of Congress, which the U.S. Constitution requires. Truman dodged the constitutional issue by officially calling the conflict in Korea a "police action" rather than a war.

The U.S. enters war in North Korea.

The Korean War was a proxy war for the Cold War. The West—the United Kingdom and the U.S., supported by the United Nations—supported South Korea, while communist China and the Soviet Union supported North Korea. Complicating that effort was the presence of Soviet troops in northern Korea. They had accepted the surrender of Japanese forces above the 38th parallel, which divides the Korean peninsula, while U.S. forces had overseen the surrender south of the line. The Soviets quickly organized a Communist government, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). The Americans countered by helping to establish a democratic government in the more populous south, the Republic of Korea (South Korea). By the end of 1948, Soviet and U.S. forces had withdrawn, and some 2 million North Koreans had fled to South Korea.

The War of Korea during the Cold War

Marriage rates soared at war's end. So, too, did population growth, which had dropped off sharply in the 1930s. Americans born during this postwar period (roughly 1946-1964) composed what came to be called the baby boom generation, a disproportionately large group that would shape the nation's social and cultural life throughout the The Baby Boom second half of the twentieth century and after.

The baby boom

In 1946, civil war broke out in Greece between the monarchy backed by the British and a Communist-led insurgency supported by the Soviets. On February 21, 1947, the British informed the U.S.government that they could no longer provide economic and military aid to Greece and would withdraw their 40,000 troops in five weeks. Truman quickly conferred with congressional leaders. One of them, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a powerful Republican from Michigan, warned the president that he would need to "scare the hell out of the American people" about the menace of communism to gain public support for any new aid program.

The war in Greece

On March 12, 1947, President Truman responded to the crisis in the eastern Mediterranean by asking Congress for $400 million to assist Greece and Turkey. More important, the president announced what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine. Because the Communist challenge was worldwide, he declared, it had to be confronted everywhere around the globe. Like a row of dominoes, he predicted, the fall of Greece to communism would spread to the other nations of the Middle East, then to Western Europe. To prevent such a catastrophe, the United States must "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." In this single sentence, the president established the foundation of U.S. foreign policy for the next forty years. In Truman's view, shared by later presidents, the assumptions of the "domino theory" made an aggressive "containment" strategy against communism a necessity.

Truman Doctrine (1947). - President Truman's program of "containing" communism in Eastern Europe and providing economic and military aid to any nations at risk of Communist takeover.

In September 1945, Truman called Congress into a special emergency session at which he presented a twenty-one-point program to guide the nation's "reconversion" from wartime to peacetime. His greatest challenge was to ensure that the economy absorbed the millions of men and women who had served in the armed forces and were now seeking civilian jobs. That would not be easy. On the day the war with Japan ended, the federal government canceled 100,000 contracts for military supplies and weaponry. Within hours, the Springfield Armory, which had manufactured weapons for the army, fired every worker. Other military-dependent companies also announced layoffs. The nation faced a crisis as some 12 million men and women left military service and returned to an economy careening into recession. Truman's program to ensure a smooth transition to a peacetime economy included proposals for unemployment insurance to cover more workers, a higher minimum wage, the construction of massive low-cost public housing projects, regional development projects modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority to put military veterans to work, and much more. A powerful Republican congressman named Joseph W. Martin was stunned by the scope of Truman's proposals. "Not even President Roosevelt," he gasped, "ever asked for so much at one sitting."

Truman's efforts to make the transition from war to peace in America's economy.

In the new postwar world, the report argued, the United States could no longer retreat toward isolationism without encouraging the aggressive expansion of communism across the globe. NSC-68 (1950) Top-secret policy paper approved by President Truman that outlined a militaristic approach to combating the spread of global communism.

Truman's efforts to prevent the spread of communism.

Like Theodore Roosevelt before him, Truman grew frustrated with the stubbornness of both management and labor leaders. He took federal control of the coal mines, whereupon the mine owners agreed to union demands. Truman also seized control of the railroads and won a five-day postponement of a strike. When the union leaders refused to make further concessions, however, the president decried their "obstinate arrogance" and threatened to draft striking railroad workers into the armed forces. A few weeks later, the unions backed down and returned to work, having won healthy improvements in wages and benefits.

Union strikes and federal intervention

Labor unions had emerged from the war with more power than ever, for blue-collar workers were essential to military victory. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 had also helped ensure the rights of workers to form and join unions. As a consequence, by 1945 some 14.5 million workers, more than a third of the workforce, were now unionized. Members had tended to vote Democratic, but not in the 1946 elections. Their votes gave the Republicans majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928. Even many Democrats had soured on Truman, circulating a slogan that expressed their frustration: "I'm just Mild about Harry." The new Republican-controlled Congress that convened in early 1947 sought to curb the power of unions by passing the Taft-Hartley Labor Act (officially called the Labor-Management Relations Act). The law gutted many provisions of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 by allowing employers to campaign against efforts to form unions. The Taft-Hartley Act also required union leaders to take "loyalty oaths" declaring that they were not members of the Communist party, banned strikes by federal government employees, and imposed a "cooling-off" period of eighty days on any strike that the president deemed Taft-Hartley Labor Act dangerous to the public welfare.

Union, Labor, and Politics Taft-Hartley Labor Act (1947) Congressional legislation that banned "unfair labor practices" by unions, required union leaders to sign anti-Communist "loyalty oaths," and prohibited federal employees from going on strike.

The end of the war initially wreaked havoc with the economy. Many women working in defense industries were shoved out as men took off uniforms and looked for jobs. At a shipyard in California, the foreman gathered the women workers and told them to go welcome the troop ships as they pulled into port. "We were thrilled. We all waved," recalled one of the women. Then, the next day, the women working at the shipyard were let go to make room for male veterans.

Women after the war