APUSH CHAPTER 30

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) policy, 1950s

A U.S. nuclear policy that called for a massive and unstoppable nuclear attack if the Soviet Union were to launch an attack on the U.S. Such nuclear reciprocation would result in the total annihilation of both countries and was consequently viewed as a policy of nuclear deterrence.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 1957

A civil rights organization formed after the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders. The SCLC was an umbrella organization formed to coordinate civil rights activity in the South. • King was chosen as the first leader of the SCLC and remained its head until his assassination in 1968.

Beat Generation, 1950s

A small group of artists and writers based in New York City and San Franciso who rejected mainstream culture and instead celebrated personal freedom, which often included drug consumption and casual sex. • Members were influenced by psychedelic drugs and Eastern beliefs, such as Zen Buddhism. They rejected regular work and preferred communal living • Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were two well-known Beatnik writers. (see below) • The rebelliousness of the Beat Generation provided a model for the much larger youth rebellion in the 1960s. • The significance of the Beat Generation was it demonstrated a challenge to the conformity of the 1950s.

Rock and roll, 1950s

A unique music genre that began in the United States. Rock was popular music that combined country-and-western music, rhythm and blues, gospel, and jazz. The term "rock and roll" was coined by Alan Freed, a Cleveland disc jockey, who produced the first rock and roll concert. • White rock and roll performers such as Elvis Presley dramatically increased its popularity with white audiences in the 1950s. Other early artists included Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly.

Central High School / Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957

After federal courts ordered the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Governor Orval Faubus sent the National Guard to bar nine black students from entering the school. • Eisenhower, who did not really support the Brown decision, was still determined this challenge to federal authority would not go unanswered. • To carry out the court ordered integration Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army flown into Little Rock and the Arkansas National Guard placed on Federal Duty. • On September 25, the nine black students were escorted into Central High School under military protection. • The military force was gradually cut in number and increasingly consisted of Arkansas Guardsmen. The last Federal troops were quietly withdrawn in late November.

French Indochina / North Vietnam / South Vietnam, 1954-1961

After the French agreed to give up French Indochina, the former French colony was divided into the independent nations of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. • Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel by the terms of the Geneva Convention and North Vietnam became a Communist dictatorship under Ho Chi Minh. • The South Vietnam government was headed by Ngo Dihn Diem, who drew support from anticommunist and Catholic Vietnamese. • The U.S. gave over $1 billion in economic and military aid to South Vietnam between 1955-1961. So the U.S. was heavily involved in French Indochina / South Vietnam before Lyndon Johnson became president in 1964.

Allen Ginsberg / Howl, 1956

American poet viewed as the spokesman of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg's best-known book of poetry was Howl. It was initially seized by the government under obscenity charges, although the charges were eventually dropped. Howl was an indictment of America's false hopes and broken promises and was the first important poem of the Beatnik movement.

Jack Kerouac / On The Road, 1957

American writer, who was the first to use the term, Beat Generation (see above). His best-known book was On The Road, a largely autobiographical account of the Beat experience in America, which described the hitchhiking adventures of several characters who embraced drugs, sex, and music. • On The Road became a handbook for the Beatnik generation.

Rev. Martin Luther Ling Jr., 1955-1968

An African-American leader whose leadership in the Montgomery Bus Boycott brought him national prominence in the emerging civil rights movement. • King was elected Chairmen of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which was an umbrella organization for other African-American organizations. • He believed in nonviolence civil disobedience. King's tactics drew on the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Thoreau's doctrine of civil disobedience. He was a key member of the 1963 March on Washington. • His most famous speech was "I Have A Dream" which described an America untainted by racism and was given on the occasion of the 1963 March on Washington. • King was assassinated in 1968 by James Earl Ray.

Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care, 1946

Best-selling self-help book on bringing up children, which reaffirmed the traditional view of a woman's role as a wife and mother caring for her home, and children. Spock's book redefined childcare after World War II and by 1998 sold over 50 million copies. • Spock encouraged parents to be flexible with their children and show them greater affection. • Conservative critics in the 1960s-1970s blamed Spock's advice for the breakdown in traditional morality and argued his "permissive" approach to childcare created revolutionary attitudes among the baby boomers.

Fidel Castro / Cuba, 1959

Castro, a revolutionary, overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. He then nationalized American owned businesses and property in Cuba. In retaliation, Eisenhower cut off U.S. trade with Cuba. At that point, Castro turned to the Soviet Union for aid and announced he was a Communist. • Eisenhower then approved a CIA mission to train Cuban exiles to retake Cuba, but the final decision to go ahead with the project was left up to the next president, John Kennedy.

Alaska, 1958 / Hawaii, 1959

Congress approved Alaska as the forty-ninth state of the Union in June and Eisenhower signed the Alaska statehood bill on July 7, 1958. Congress approved giving Hawaii statehood in March of 1959 and it was admitted to the Union on August 21, 1959. The entry of Alaska and Hawaii brought the total number of states to its present-day total of fifty.

Eisenhower Doctrine, 1957

Created as a partial response to the Suez Canal crisis, the doctrine pledged economic and military aid to any Middle Eastern country threatened by communism. Some Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt and Syria, denounced the doctrine.

Dien Bien Phu, 1954

Disastrous defeat of a French army by Vietnamese Communists led by Ho Chi Minh. The U.S. was already involved in Indochina even before the defeat - giving U.S. military aid to the French. • When the French then tried to convince the U.S. to send troops to Vietnam, Eisenhower refused. • After the defeat, the French agreed to give up Indochina at the Geneva Conference of 1954.

Elvis Presley, 1950s

Early white rock star whose music drew a great deal from black rhythm and blues tradition. Presley and other performers such as Buddy Holly and Bill Haley popularized rock n roll with white audiences. • Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" became a great hit in 1956 and from then until his death in 1977 he was a central figure in American culture. Presley's singing and dancing was scorned by many older Americans as sexually suggestive. • Presley was a central figure in the emergence of rock and roll music in American culture.

Economic Growth, 1950s

Economic growth began in 1949 and lasted nearly twenty years. The phenomenal economic growth made the 1950s the most prosperous decade to date. The GNP grew by 250% between 1945-1960. Unemployment during this time was about 5% and inflation was 3% or less a year. Causes of the economic growth included government spending (esp. on the $100 billion interstate highway program and military spending), technological progress, the baby boom, and the growth of suburbs

Creation of Israel, 1947

Efforts to establish a Jewish state in Palestine had been ongoing since the early 1900s. The Holocaust and the large immigration of European Jews gave new world support for such a state. Britain governed Palestine and following World War II turned the issue over to the United Nations. • The United Nations partitioned Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The U.S. immediately recognized the new state of Israel and eventually became a strong supporter of the new nation. • Arabs rejected the partition and, in the first of seven Arab-Israeli Wars, the new state of Israel defeated the Arabs in 1948.

Eisenhower / Modern Republicanism, 1952-1960

Eisenhower provided Americans with the stability they craved and labeled his credo "Modern Republicanism." In general, he was conservative on monetary issues and liberal "when it came to human beings." • During his term as president, he backed the most extensive public-works program in U.S. history -- the Federal Interstate Highway Act and also extended Social Security benefits and raised the minimum wage

Lebanon, 1958

Eisenhower's first application of the Eisenhower Doctrine. He sent 14,000 marines to Lebanon to prevent a civil war between Christians and Muslims. U.S. Marines landed on beaches south of Beirut in mid-July. The U.S. troops helped to end the conflict, but not before an estimated 2000 to 4000 people were killed.

"Massive Resistance," 1954-1960s

Extremely strong, local resistance in the South against the 1954 Brown decision that ordered an end to school segregation. This resistance used every conceivable means at their disposal and produced interminable delays and bitter conflicts over desegregation, e.g. closing schools . . .

Norman Rockwell, 1950s

Famous American illustrator best known for his covers for the magazine The Saturday Evening Post. His pictures were extremely popular and depicted sentimental scenes of everyday life in small-town America.

Thurgood Marshall, 1950s

First African American justice of the Supreme Court whose previous legal career included a long fight against segregation. • Marshall was part of the NAACP legal team who spent years filing challenges to segregation. This team filed the suits against the school board of Topeka, Kansas, which became the grounds for the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education decision and Marshall took the case to the Supreme Court. • Marshall was appointed by Lyndon Johnson in 1967 to the Supreme Court.

Geneva Conference / "Open Skies" / "Spirit of Geneva," 1955

Following the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Eisenhower called for a decrease in tensions between the Soviet Union and the U.S. The Soviets indicated interest and the result was a summit held between Eisenhower and the new Soviet premier, Nikolai Bulganin. • Eisenhower wanted both countries to adopt "open skies" letting each nation take aerial photographs of the other nation's military bases to lessen the chance of a surprise nuclear attack. • The Soviets turned that down, but the "Spirit of Geneva" brought the first thaw in the Cold War. • Even better, in the U.S. view was the denunciation of Stalin's crimes and a proposal for "peaceful coexistence" in a speech made by the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in early 1956.

Brinkmanship / John Foster Dulles, 1950s

Foreign policy advocated by John Foster Dulles, a hard-line Cold Warrior, who was Eisenhower's Secretary of State. • Dulles' brinkmanship theory argued that if the U.S. pushed Communist powers to the brink of war, they would back down because of American nuclear superiority. Thus, Dulles' policy relied on nuclear weapons rather than conventional forces. More reliance on atomic weapons, in turn, meant, "more bang for the buck" and less money on military spending. • Dulles argued that the U.S. should "liberate the captive nations" of Eastern Europe and encourage the Nationalist government of Taiwan to stand up to Communist China. • Despite Dulles' belligerent rhetoric, Eisenhower tempered Dulles' actions as demonstrated in the President's refusal to intervene in Hungary when Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.

Jimmy Hoffa / Teamster Union, 1957

Hoffa was president of the powerful Teamster Union. The Teamsters came under a congressional investigation for corruption and Hoffa was under investigation for almost ten years before he was finally convicted of tax evasion. • The Teamsters exemplified the corruption and violence found in some powerful labor organizations in the 1950s and 1960s.

Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks, 1955-1956

In 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat on the public bus to a white man, and was therefore arrested. The African American community decided the time was right to use this case to rally community support for a bus boycott to force the desegregation of public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama. • The boycott, in tandem with a Supreme Court decision in late 1956 that ruled segregation on public transportation was illegal, ended in a victory in Montgomery. • The boycott began in December 1955 and ended on December 20, 1956. The boycott was an important event in the modern Civil Rights Movement.

"Kitchen Debate" in Moscow, 1959

Nixon visited the Soviet Union to open a U.S. exhibition. When he and Khrushchev were viewing a model kitchen, Nixon engaged in an impromptu debate on the comparative benefits of capitalist and communist governments. The debate was captured live on television.

Nasser / Suez Canal crisis, 1956

On Dec. 17, 1955, the U.S. offered Egypt a loan to build the Aswan High Dam. The offer was withdrawn after Egypt also accepted Soviet Union aid. • Egyptian leader Nasser then nationalized the Suez Canal with the intent of using money from the tolls to build the dam. • On Oct 31, Israel invaded Egypt with French and British aircraft. This was done without advance U.S. knowledge because the three countries knew the United States would not approve of the military action. The U.S. supported a United Nations resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal. • Eisenhower feared the Suez Crisis would move the Arab states toward the Soviet Union and bring on a new world war. To prevent this the U.S. pressured France, Britain, and Israel to withdraw their troops from Egypt.

National Defense Education Act, 1958

Passed in reaction to Sputnik, the act increased funding to science, math, and foreign language education. This was deemed necessary because many Americans believed the launching of Sputnik showed the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union in the sciences.

Hungarian Revolt, 1956

Popular uprising that overthrew the current Hungarian government backed by Moscow. It was replaced for a short time by liberals who wanted to pull Hungary of the Warsaw Pact. At that point, the Soviet Union sent in tanks to restore control over Hungary. The U.S. did nothing to help the Hungarian rebels because Eisenhower was afraid of a world war. • This clearly told the Soviet Union that the United States recognized Eastern Europe as part of the Soviet sphere of influence and it would not interfere in those countries. • This also ended the first thaw in the Cold War (which followed the "spirit of Geneva").

James Dean, early 1950s

Popular young movie star who became an icon of the new youth culture. Dean played alienated teenagers and self- destructive young men in movies such as Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, and Giant. His death in a car accident in 1955 reinforced his screen image.

Integration of Armed Services, 1948

President Truman signed Executive Order 9981 that abolished segregation in the armed forces and ordered full integration of all the services. • The order created an advisory committee to suggest recommendations to make desegregation a reality. • Considerable resistance to the order was offered by the military, but by the end of the Korean War almost all of the military was integrated.

Fast-food Chains / Franchises, 1950s

Reflecting America's love affair with the car, drive-in restaurants starting appearing in the 1950s. Many of these became fast-food chains. The first McDonald's was opened by Ray Kroc in Illinois and southern California in 1955 - by 1960, there were 228 McDonalds. Holiday Inn, which became the nation's largest hotel chain, opened its first hotel in 1952. • Fast-food chains and franchises were a prominent trend in the 1950s-1960s.

Jackie Robinson, 1947

Robinson was the first African-American baseball player to break the color barrier and play professional sports. He was recruited from the Kansas City Monarchs, a team in the Negro Leagues, to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was able to break the color barrier and seemed to successfully overcome the racism so prevalent in his sport. • Robinson helped the Dodgers to win the pennant and got Rookie of the Year in his first year of playing.

J.D. Salinger / Catcher in the Rye, 1951

Salinger's book chronicled the tribulations of teenager Holden Caulfield who could not fit in anywhere. • The book criticizes the 1950s obsession with conformity and the "phoniness" of American life. It was also strongly criticized at the time for its use of profanity and its depiction of teenage sexuality.

Jonas Salk / Polio Vaccine, 1955

Saulk was responsible for the vaccine and the federal government provided it free to the public and it almost eliminated the disease in a few years.

Covert interventions / Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 1950s

Secret undertakings by a country or an organization in pursuit of foreign policy goals. The Central Intelligence Agency, begun in the 1950s, regularly undertook covert interventions that included the following. • Participation in the 1954 overthrow of a leftist Guatemalan government deemed potentially communist by the United Fruit Company, an American firm who was a major investor in Guatemala. • Participation in a 1953 coup in Iran that toppled Mossadegh, a nationalist prime minister, who started to resist the influence of Western corporations in the country. The coup shifted the Shah of Iran from a token constitutional monarch to a virtually absolute ruler. Knowledge of these acts was kept from the American people and most members of Congress.

Bricker Amendment, 1954

Senator John W. Bricker proposed a constitutional amendment to limit the treaty-making power of the president. The amendment was co-sponsored by 63 senators and had so much initial success it received nationwide attention. • Initial support for the amendment signaled the misgivings many Senators had about the power the president had to negotiate "executive agreements" (often in lieu of a treaty) with the heads of other nations. • Eisenhower opposed the amendment and successfully worked to get it defeated.

Michael Harrington / The Other America, 1962

Social critic who pointed out in the affluent American society, that the "other America" still had thousands of people mired in poverty, and that this including many elderly who struggled to survive on fixed incomes and without medical insurance. • In 1960, over one-fifth of Americans lived below the poverty line and millions more lived just above it.

William Whyte / The Organization Man, 1956

Social scientist Whyte argued corporations and government bureaucracies had stripped employees of their individuality. The ability to "be part of the team" and "get along" was valued more than self-reliance. • Whyte's work was another critique of the conformity of the 1950s.

David Reisman / Lonely Crowd, 1950

Sociologist Riesman's critique of the conformity of postwar America. Riesman argued that in the past Americans had been "inner-directed" and judged themselves on how they measured up to their own values and the esteem of their family and it was being replaced by individuals who were "other-directed" conformists who were only eager to win approval from the larger organization or community.

Second Berlin Crisis, 1958

Soviet Premier Khrushchev gave the U.S. six months to pull its troops out of West Berlin before turning the city over to the East Germans. • The U.S. refused to do so and Eisenhower invited Khrushchev to visit the U.S. in 1959 to defuse the crisis. The two men agreed to put off the crisis and scheduled another conference in Paris for 1960.

Yuri Gagarin / Alan Shepard, 1961

Soviet cosmonaut who was the first human launched into space. Gagarin is followed several months later in May 1961 by astronaut Alan Shepard, who became the first American launched into space.

Election of 1956: Stevenson (D) vs. Eisenhower (R)

Stevenson (D) vs. Eisenhower (D). This is a rematch of the 1952 election. There were questions about Eisenhower's health since he had a heart attack in 1955 and major surgery in 1956. But four years of peace and prosperity made Eisenhower more popular than ever. • Eisenhower won by an even greater margin than his victory in 1952. The Democrats, however, kept control of both houses of Congress.

Election of 1952: Stevenson (D) vs. Eisenhower (R)

Stevenson (D) vs. Eisenhower (R). Truman decided not to seek reelection so the Democrats drafted Adlai Stevenson, who was unsuccessful. The Republicans decided to back the war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower. • Eisenhower won a sweeping victory with 55% of the popular vote to Stevenson's 44%. The GOP also won control of both houses of Congress.

TV, 1950s

Television was invented in the 1930s and introduced to the public at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The first TV's in homes appeared after World War II and the U.S. went from 17,000 sets in 1946 to over 40 million sets by 1957. Groundbreaking shows of the 1950s and 1960s included The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, and The Ed Sullivan Show. • The overall image of American life portrayed on TV shows was white, middle-class, and suburban in which the father went off to the office and the wife was a full-time homemaker. Such shows as Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriett, and Leave It to Beaver reinforced societal gender roles.

Military - Industrial Complex, 1961

Term first used by President Eisenhower to describe the close relationship of military spending and defense contractors that emerged during World War II and grew with the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, federal defense spending had a tremendous influence on the national economy, particularly in the South and West where many defense contractors were located. • In his farewell address in 1961, Eisenhower raised troubling questions about the influence of this new power in a democracy and warned the nation to be vigilant.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas II, 1955

The Court, in a phrase that became infamous, ordered school systems to desegregate with "all deliberate speed," but set up no deadline and left it up to local courts to enforce the ruling. • Many southerners saw it as "an abuse of judicial power" and reacted with "massive resistance."

Sputnik, 1957

The Soviet Union launched the first satellite into orbit on October 4, 1957. Humiliated at being upstaged by the Russians, the U.S. reshaped the educational system in an effort to produce more scientists and engineers. • In addition, to improve scientific advancements, NASA was created in 1958. Created by Congress, NASA was a national aeronautics space agency to administer nonmilitary space research and exploration.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 1954

The Supreme Court reversed Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) in 1954 by ruling in favor of the desegregation of schools. • The court held that "separate but equal" violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and was unconstitutional.

National Interstate and Defense Highway Act, 1956

The act expanded the interstate highway system to 41,000 miles. The federal government paid ninety percent of the cost of the expansion. Eisenhower signed the bill and $25 billion was authorized from 1957-1969: $114 billion was gradually spent over thirty-five years. • The act contributed to the economic growth of the 1950s as well as suburban growth. • In addition to allowing for easier travel throughout the country, the interstate highway system also allowed for troop movement and evacuation routes in the event of war.

Urban Renewal, 1950s-1960s

The federal government tore down buildings in the poorest parts of cities and in some cases built new public housing for the urban poor. This was the primary policy used to try to eliminate the poverty of inner cities. • The results were mixed: some of the new housing was much better than what was torn down, but some was shoddy construction and became new slums. • In many cases, urban renewal tore down "slums" and put up upper and middle class housing or businesses and the urban poor could no longer afford to live in the area.

Suburban growth / Levittown, 1950s

The first suburb (mass-produced and low-priced family homes) was Levittown that was built on Long Island, New York. Low interest mortgages, mass production of cars, the growth of the road system, and better living conditions, caused this migration from cities to suburbs. • The suburban building boom helped fuel the economic growth of the 1950s-1960s. • As African- Americans started to move to northern cities, whites began to move to the suburbs ("white flight"). By the 1960s, American cities were growing poorer and racially divided. • In one generation the majority of middle class Americans became suburbanites

Massive Retaliation / Deterrence / 1950s

The lynchpin of U.S. military strategy during the Cold War that dictated the U.S. would maintain a nuclear arsenal so large that the Soviet Union would not attack the U.S. and its allies out of fear that the U.S. would retaliate with an assault of devastating proportions. The Soviets pursued a similar strategy of building a large nuclear arsenal.

Baby boom, 1945-1960

The number of babies being born rose substantially between 1945-1960. • 50 million babies were born between 1945-1960 and the mortality rate dramatically dropped allowing for a 20% increase in the population. • This generation was able to fuel the economy and widen the realm of education.

Sunbelt, 1950s

The term refers to the southern and southwestern states from North Carolina to California and the post World War II population shift from the Northeast and Midwest to those states. The result of the population change was a swing in political power from the Northeast and Midwest to the Sunbelt.

AFL-CIO merger, 1955

This brought 85% of all union members into a single administrative unit, which promised aggressive unionism under the leadership of AFL's George Meany as president and CIO's Walter Reuther as vice-president. However, the movement was unable to achieve its old level of success.

U-2 Spy Plane Flight / Francis Gary Powers / 1960

Two weeks before the planned Paris summit, the Soviets shot down a high-altitude U.S. spy plane (the U-2) over the Soviet Union. The flights gathered information about the Soviet Union's missile program (the Soviet had already rejected Eisenhower's "open skies" proposal). • After the plane was shot down, Eisenhower took full responsibility for the flights, but Soviet Premier Khrushchev then called off the upcoming Paris summit. • The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, survived and served eighteen months in a Soviet jail.

Peaceful coexistence, 1956

Used by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to call for diminished tension between capitalist and communist nations in the Cold War. As a sign of the reduced hostility, Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon exchanged official visits.