History Quiz #30

Free Speech Movement

led by Mario Savio it protested on behalf of students rights. It spread to colleges throughout the country discussing unpopular faculty tenure decisions, dress codes, dormitory regulations, and appearances by Johnson administration officials.

Women's Movement

refers to a series of campaigns for reforms on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, women's suffrage, sexual harassment, and sexual violence

Detente

relaxation of tensions between the United States and its two major Communist rivals, the Soviet Union and China

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty

series of meetings in the 70s, in which leaders of the US and the Soviet Union agreed to limit their nations' stocks of nuclear weapons

the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

which had once seemed a straightforward assertion of equal opportunity was stymied in several state legislatures by conservatie groups. by 1982, it had died, three states short of ratification.

Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education

(1969) Case fifteen years after the Brown decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ordered an immediate end to segregation in public schools.

Stonewall Riots

- New York city - Triggered activist protests among gays and lesbians - police raided gay bar - people fought back - became symbol of oppression of gays, began the gay pride movement

The Conservative Backlash

Alabama's Democratic governor, Wallace, led the conservative counterattack. He was a fierce champion of states' rights and the voice of the white backlash against civil rights and cultural rebellion. Wallace repeatedly lashed out as welfare queens, unmarried women he claimed were breeding children as a cash crop to receive federal child-support checks.

Native American Rights

American Indians many of whom had begun calling themselves Native Americans also emerged as a political force in the late sixities. Two conditions combined to make Indian rights a priority. First, many whites felt guilty for the destructive actions of their ancestors toward a people who had been first. Second Native Americans faced desperate times: Indian unemployment was ten times the national rate, life expectancy was twenty years lower than the national average, and the suicide rate was a hundred times higher than the rate for whites.

Rebellion and Reaction

As Nixon entered the White House in early 1969, he too charge of a nation whose social fabric was in tatters. The traumatic events of 1968 had been like a knife cutting the past away from the future, revealing how deeply divided American society had become and how difficult a task Nixon faced in carrying out his campaign pledge to restore social harmony. Ironically, many of the same forces that had contributed to the war complacent prosperity of the crew-cut fifties, the baby boom, the cold war, and the consumer culture, helped generate the social upheaval of the sixties and early seventies.

Nixon's Domestic Agenda

As President, Nixon, shared with his predecessors, JFK and LBJ, an urge to increase presidential power. They believed that the presidency had become the central source of governmental action, that foreign policy should be managed from the White House rather than the State Department, and that the President had the authority to wage war without a congressional declaration of war. Nixon was less a rigid conservative ideologue than a crafty politician. Forced to deal with a Congress controlled by Democrats, he chose his battles carefully and showed surprising flexibility.

The Ford Years

As president, Ford, soon adopted the posture he had developed as the minority leader in the HOuse of Representatives: naysaying head of the opposition who believed that the federal government exercised too much power. In his first fifteen months as president, he vetoed 39 bills passed by the Democratic controlled Congress, outstripping Hoover's all-time veto record in less than half the time. The most important development during his presidency was the struggling economy. During the fall of 1974, the nation had entered its deepest recession since the Great Depression.

New Left

Coalition of younger members of the Democratic party and radical student groups. Believed in participatory democracy, free speech, civil rights and racial brotherhood, and opposed the war in Vietnam.

An Unelected President

During Nixon's last year in office, the Watergate crisis so dominated national politics that major domestic and foreign problems received little attention. Ford was sworn in as the nation's first politically appointed chief executive, the only person in history to serve as both VP and President without having been elected to those offices.

Nixon and Civil Rights

During his first term, Nixon followed through on campaign pledges to blunt the momentum of the civil rights movement. He appointed no African Americans to his cabinet and refused to meet with the all-Democratic Congressional Black Caucus. Nixon also launched a concerted effort to block congressional renewsal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and to delay implementation of federal court orders requiring the racial desegregation of school districts in Mississippi. The Supreme Court also thwarted Nixon's efforts to slow desegregation. In its first decision under the new chief justice, Warren Burger a nixon appointee the Court ordered the racial intergration of the Mississippis public schools.

The Nixon Doctrine

During the Vietnam War, the Nixon Doctrine was created. It stated that the United States would honor its exisiting defense commitments, but in the future other countries would have to fight their own wars without support of American troops.

Radical Feminism

During the late sixties, a new wave of younger and more radical feminists emerged. They sought women's liberation from all forms of sexism. The new feminists, often called 'womens libbers', were more militant than those who had established NOW. Many were veterans of the civil rights movement and the anti-war crusade who had come to realize that male revolutionaries could be sexists too. The women began meeting in small groups to discuss their opposition to the war and racism, only to discover at such 'consciousness-raising' sessions that what bound them together was their shared grievances as women in a man's world.

Uncovering the Cover-up

During the trial of the accused Watergate burglars in 1973, relentless questioning by a federal judge. The trail of evidence pursued first by Siricia, then by a grand jury, and then by a Senate committee headed by Democrat Ervin of North Carolina, led directly to what White House legal counsel John Dean called a cancer close to the presidency.

Communes

For some, the counterculture involved experimenting with alternative living arrangements, especially 'intentional communities' or 'communes'. Communal living in urban areas such as San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, NY's Greenwich Village, Chicago's Uptown, and Atlanta's 14th Street neighborhood were popular for a time, as were rural communes. Thousands of hippie romantics flocked to the countryside, eager to liberate themselves from parental and institutional restraints, live in harmony with nature, and coexist in love and openness.

Students for a Democratic Society

Founded in 1962, the SDS was a popular college student organization that protested shortcomings in American life, notably racial injustice and the Vietnam War. It led thousands of campus protests before it split apart at the end of the 1960s.

Watergate and the Presidency

If there was a silver lining in the dark cloud of Watergate, it was the vigor and resilience of the institutions that had brought a rogue president to justice, the press, Congress, the courts, and public opinion.

Nixon's Appointments

In his first term, Nixon selected for his cabinet and staff only white men who would blindly carry out his orders. Secretary of state his old friend William Rogers. Kissinger became his National Security Adviser and in 1973 Kissinger became secretary of state.

Shuttle Diplomacy

In the 1970s, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger began an intensive campaign in which he moved back and forth from Israel to Egypt to Syria to try to reach a peace settlement

War Without End

In the Summer of 1972, Kissinger renewed private meetings with the Nort Vietnamese negotiators in Paris. He now dropped his insistence upon the removal of all North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam before the withdrawal of the remaining US troops. As it turned out this was a cynical ploy to win votes. Several days earlier, the thieu, regime in South Vietnam had rejected the Kissinger plan for a cease-fire fearful that allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain in the south would virtually guarantee a Communist victory. The peace talks broke off on December 16, and two days later the newly reelected Nixon ordered massive bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong.

Embracing The Soviet Union

In truth, China welcomed the breakthrough, in relations because of tensions with the SU, with which it shared a long but contested border. By 1972, the Chinese leadership had become mroe fearful of the Su than the US. The soviets troubled by the agreements between China and the US, were also eager to ease tensions with the Americans. Once again Nixon surprised the world by announcing that he would visit Moscow in 1972 for discussions with Brezhnev, the soviet premier.

The Southern Strategy

President Nixon's attempt to attract the support of Southern conservative Democrats who were unhappy with federal desegregation policies and the liberal Supreme Court.

Vietnamization

President Richard Nixons strategy for ending U.S involvement in the Vietnam war, involving a gradual withdrawal of American troops and replacement of them with South Vietnamese forces

Divisions at Home

Strident public opposition to the war and Nixon's slow withdrawal of combat forces had a devastating effect on the military's morale and reputation. Revelations of atrocities committed by US soldiers caused even the staunchest supporters of the war to wince. Late in 1969, the story of the My Lai Massacre plunged the country into two years of exposure to the tale of Rusty Calley, a 26 year old army lieutenant who ordered the murder of 347 Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai in 1968.

Roe v Wade

The 1973 Supreme Court decision holding that a state ban on all abortions was unconstitutional. The decision forbade state control over abortions during the first trimester of pregnancy, permitted states to limit abortions to protect the mother's health in the second trimester, and permitted states to protect the fetus during the third trimester.

Eight Miles High

The Byrds' song was heralded as the first drug tune and led 60's music to the psychedelic period - aka "Acid Rock".

Gradual Withdrawal

The Vietnam policy implemented by Nixon and Kissinger moved along three fronts. US negotiators in Paris demanded the withdrawal of Viet Cong forces from South Vietnam and the preservation of the US backed government of President Van Thieu. Second, Nixon sought to defuse the anti-war movement by reducing the number of US troops in Vietnam, justifying the reduction as the natural result of Vietnamization. Third, Nixon and Kissinger greatly expanded the bombing of North Vietnam in hopes of pressuring the Communist leaders to end the war.

Environmental Protection Agency

an independent federal agency established to coordinate programs aimed at reducing pollution and protecting the environment

Watergate

1972; Nixon feared loss so he approved the Commission to Re-Elect the President to spy on and espionage the Democrats. A security gaurd foiled an attempt to bug the Democratic National Committe Headquarters, exposing the scandal. Seemingly contained, after the election Nixon was impeached and stepped down

War Powers Act

1973. A resolution of Congress that stated the President can only send troops into action abroad by authorization of Congress or if America is already under attack or serious threat.

Woodstock

3 day rock concert in upstate N.Y. August 1969, exemplified the counterculture of the late 1960s, nearly 1/2M gather in a 600 acre field

Affirmative-Action

A policy designed to redress past discrimination against women and minority groups through measures to improve their economic and educational opportunities

The Election of 1976

Both political parties were in disarray as they prepared for the 1976 presidential election. At the Republican convention, Ford had to fend off a powerful challenge from the darling of the party's growing conservative wing, Ronald Regan. The Democrats chose Carter. To the surprise of many, Carter revived the New Deal voting allliance of southern whites, blacks, urbana labor unionists, and ethinc groups. The most significant story of the elction was the low voter turnout. It was not a good omen for the incoming Democratic President.

Fractured Feminism

By the end of the seventies, sharp disputes between moderate and radical feminists had fractured the women's movement in ways similar to the fragmentation experienced by civil rights organizations a decade earlier. The movement's failure to broaden its appeal much beyond the confines of the white middle class also caused reform efforts to stall.

Dirty Tricks

By the spring of 1972, Nixon was overseeing a secret team of agents who performed various acts fo sabotage against Democrats, such as falsely accusing Democratic senators Humphrey and Jackson of sexual improprieties, forging press releases, setting off stink bombs at Democratic campaign events, and planting spies.

Peace with Honor: Ending the Vietnam War

By the time Nixon entered the White House in January 1969, he and Henry Kissinger had developed a comprehensive vision of a new world order. The result was a dramatic transformation of US foreign policy. Since 1945, the US had lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons, its overwhelming economic dominance, and much of its geopolitical influence. The rapid rise of competing powers centers in Europe, China, Japan further complicated the cold war as well as international relations in general.

The Nixon Doctrine and a Thawing Cold War

Despite the frustrations associated with his efforts to end the Vietnam war, Nixon, like JFK, greatly preferred foreign policy over domestic policy. And his greatest successes were in international relations. Nixon was an expert in foreign affaris and had traveled abroad frequently as Eisenhower vp during the 1950s. As president, Nioxn benefited greatly from the expertise and strategic vison of Henry Kissinger.

Nixon and Environmental Protection

Duirng the seventies, dramatic increases in the price of oil and gasoline fueled a major energy crisis in the US. Natural resources grew limited and increasingly precious. The first was a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California when an enormous slick of crude oil contaminated 200 mile of California beaches, killing thousands of sea birds and marine animals. Six months later, the Cuyahoga River, an 80 mile long stream that slices through Cleveland Ohio spontaneously caught fire. Fouled with oil and grease, bubbling with subsurface gases and littered with debris.

The Counterculture

Looking back over the 1960s, Tom Hayden, the founder of SDS, recalled that most rebellious young Americans 'were not narrowly political. Most were not so interested in being opinion makers as in changing the climate of opinion.' Hayden acknowledged that the shocking events of 1968 led disaffected young rebels so called hippies to embrace the counterculture, an unorganized rebellion against mainstream institutions, values, and behavior that focused more on cultural change that political activism.

The United Farm Workers

Mexican American organize for better working conditions under leader Cesar Chavez

Richard Nixon

Nixon appealed to the working and middle-class whites who feared America was being corrupted by permissiveness, anarchy, and the tyranny of the rebellious minority. He explicitly appealed to voters who did not break the law, people who pay their taxes and go to work. Above all, he promised to restore law and order. Nixon was smart, shrewd, cunning, and doggedly determined to succeed in politics. He was also famously hard to get to know. Throughout his career, Nixon displayed violent mood swings punctuated by raging temper tantrums, profanity, and anti-Semitic outbursts. He was driven as much by anger and resentment as by civic duty.

The People's Republic of China

Nixon had a genius for surprise. In 1971 Kissinger to make a secret trip to Bejiing to explore the possiblity of US recognition of Communist China, the most populous nation in the world, with over 800 million people. Kissinger was flabbergasted. He had earlier told his staff that our leader has taken leave of reality. He thinks this is the moment to establish normal relations with Communist China."

Hispanic Rights

The activism of student revolts, the civil rights movement, and the crusade for women's rights soon spread to various ethnic minority groups. The word Hispanic, referring to people who trace their ancestry to Spanish-speaking Latin America or Spain, came into increasing use after 1945 in conjunction with growing efforts to promote economic and social justice. Labor shortages during WWII had led defense industries to offer Hispanic Americans their first significant access to skilled-labor jobs. And as with African Americans, service in the military helped to heighten an American identity among Hispanic Americans and increase their desire for equal rights and social opportunities. Social equality remained elusive. After WWII Hispanic Americans still faced widespread discrimination in hiring, housing and education, and in 1960, the median income of a Mexican American family was only 62 percent of the national average. Hispanic American activists denounced segregation, called for improved public schools, and struggled to increase Hispanic political influence, economic opportunities, and visibility in the curricula of schools and colleges.

Do Your Own Thing

The counter cultural rebels were primarily middle-class whites deeply alienated by the Vietnam War, racism, political corruption, and parental authority. They were determined to break away from conventional behavior. For many, the preferred pathway to freedom was that recommended by former Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary: 'Tune in, turn on, drop out." He added that 'your only hope is dope.' If it had not been for marijuana, said one hippie, "I'd still be wearing a crew cut and saluting the flag."

The Sexual Revolution and the Pill

The feminist movement coincided with the so-called sexual revolution. Americans became more tolerant of premairtal sex, and women became more sexually active. Between 1960 and 1975, the number of college women engaging in sex doubled, to 50 percent. Enabling this change, in large part war a scientific breakthrough: the birth-control pill, approved for public use by the FDA in 1960. Widespread access to the pill gave women a greater sense of sexual freedom and led to more-open discussion of birth control, reproduction, and sexuality in general. By 1990, the world would have 400 million fewer people as a result of the pill.

Anti-War Protests

The goals and tactics of FSM and SDS soon spread across the country. By 1965, however, the groawing US involvement in Vietnam had changed the rebellious students' agenda. Millions of young med suddenly faced the grim prospect of being drafted to fight in the increasingly unpopular conflict. The Vietnam War was primarily a poor man's fight. Most college students were able to postpone military service until they received their degree or reached the age of twenty-four; in 1965-1966m college students made up only 2 percent of military inductees. African Americans and Hispancis were twice as likely to be drafted as whites. As the war dragged on, Americans divided into 'hawks' and 'doves' those who supported the war and those who opposed it.

The Collapse of South Vietnam

The last US combats troops left Vietnam. The same day, almost 600 American prisoners of war, most of them downed pilots, were released from Hanoi. Within months, the cease-fire collapsed, the war between North and South resumed, and Communist forces gained the upper hand. In 1975, the North Vietnamese launched a full-scale invasion of South Vietnam, send the South Vietnamese army and civilians into headlong panic. In the end, peace with honor, had given the US just enough time to remove itself before the collapse of the South Vietnamese government. The longest, most controversial, and least successful war in American history to that point was finally over. It left a bitter legacy. During the period of US involvement , the combined death count for combatants and civilians reached nearly 2 million.

The New Feminism

The women's movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had focused on gaining the right to vote. The feminist movement of the sixties and seventies aimed to challenge the conventional ideal of female domesticity and ensure that women were treated equally in the workplace. Most women in the early sixties did not view gender equality as desirable or even possible.

Gay Rights

The liberationist impulses of the sixties also encouraged homosexuals to assert their right to equal treatment. Throughout the sixties, gay men and lesbians were treated with disgust, cruelty, and violence.

Stagflation

The major domestic development during the Nioxn administration was a floundering economy. The accumulated expense of the Vietnam War and the Great Society programs helped quadruple the annual inflation rate from 3 percent in 1967 to 12 percent in 1974. Meanwhile, unemployment at 3.3 percent when Nixon took office, nearly doubled to 6 percent by the end of 1970. Economists coined the term stagflation to describe the simultaneous problems of stalled economic growth, rising inflation, and high unemployment rates.

Red Power

The movement among American Indians during the late 1960s, and early 1970s, that sought to end the federal policy of termination and to revitalize Indians communities and cultures, often though direct action.

The New Left

The political arm of the youth revolt originated when Tom Hayden and Alan Haber, two University of Michigan students, formed Students for a Democratic Society. Their goal was to remake the US a more democratic society. Several of the participants were the children of former leftists or Communists; even more, were Jewish.

Social Activism Spreads

The same liberationist ideals that prompted young people to revolt against the Vietnam War also led them many of them to embrace other causes. Women; Mexican Americans; Native Americans; gays; elderly; physically and mentally disabled to demand equal opportunities and equal rights.

"Forever Young": The Youth Revolt

The sit-ins in 1960 not only launched a decade of civil rights activism but also signaled an end to the carefree complacency that had characterized the fifties. The sit-ins, marches, protests, ideals, and sacrifices, associated with the civil rights movements inspired other minority groups, women, Native Americans, Hispanics, gays, and the disabled, to demand justice, freedom, and equality.

Nixon and the Revival of Conservatism

The turmoil of the sixities spawned a cultural backlash among what Richard Nixon called the great silent majority of middle-class Americans that propeeled him to a marrow election victory in 1968. He had been elected president as the representative of middle-america voters fed up with liberal politics, hippies, radical feminism, and affirmative-action programs giving preferential treatment to minorities and women to atone for past injustices.

Rising Violence

Throughout 1967 and 1968, the anti-war movement grew more violent as inner-city ghettos in Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, and other large cities were exploding in flames fanned by racial injustice. Frustration over deeply entrenched patterns of discrimination in employment and housing, as well as staggering rates of joblessness among inner-city African American youth, ignited the rage. During the eventful spring of 1968 when LBJ announced that he would not run for reelection and MLK and Robert Kennedy were assassinated-campus unrest boiled over. The turmoil reached a climax at Columbia University, where SDS student radicals and black militants occupied the president's office and classroom buildings. They renamed the administration building Malcolm X Hall.

The CIA in Chile

To prevent rise of another Castro, the Nixon administration's CIA supported Chile's right-wing military, led by Pinochet, to topple popularly-elected socialist president Allende. He and many followers executed, others jailed.

The Weather Underground

US radical left group consisting of splintered -off member and leader of the student for a democratic society which formed on the campus of university of michigan in 1960

The Yippies

Youth International Party; anarchist party headed by Abbie Hoffman that opposed the Vietnam War & conformity; poured bags of dollars onto the New York Stock Exchange and carried pictures of LBJ upside down