APUSH-chapter36_terms

Dixiecrats

The States' Rights Democratic Party (usually called the Dixiecrats) was a short-lived segregationist political party in the United States in 1948. It originated as a breakaway faction of the Democratic Party in 1948, determined to protect what they portrayed as the southern way of life beset by an oppressive federal government,[1] and supporters assumed control of the state Democratic parties in part or in full in several Southern states. The States' Rights Democratic Party opposed racial integration and wanted to retain Jim Crow laws and white supremacy in the face of possible federal intervention. Members were called Dixiecrats. (The term Dixiecrat is a portmanteau of Dixie, referring to the Southern United States, and Democrat.) The party did not run local or state candidates, and after the 1948 election its leaders generally returned to the Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats had little short-run impact on politics. However, they did have a long-term impact. The Dixiecrats began the weakening of the "Solid South" (the Democratic Party's total control of presidential elections in the South). When Roosevelt died, the new president Harry Truman established a highly visible President's Committee on Civil Rights and ordered an end to discrimination in the military in 1948. Additionally, the Democratic National Convention in 1948 adopted a plank proposed by Northern liberals led by Hubert Humphrey calling for civil rights; 35 southern delegates walked out. The move was on to remove Truman's name from the ballot in the South. This required a new party, which the Southern defectors chose to name the States' Rights Democratic Party, with its own nominee: Governor of South Carolina J. Strom Thurmond. The Dixiecrats held their convention at Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama,[7] where they nominated Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, Governor of Mississippi, for vice president. The Dixiecrats did not expect to win the presidency outright; rather, they thought that if they could win enough Southern states then they would have a good chance of forcing the election into the House of Representatives, where they believed Southern bargaining power could determine the winner. To this end Dixiecrat leaders worked to have Thurmond-Wright declared the official Democratic ticket in Southern states. They succeeded in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket. In Arkansas, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Sid McMath vigorously supported Truman in speeches across the state, much to the consternation of the sitting governor, Benjamin Travis Laney, an ardent Thurmond supporter. Laney later used McMath's pro-Truman stance against him in the 1950 gubernatorial election, but McMath won re-election handily. Efforts by Dixiecrats to paint other Truman loyalists as turncoats generally failed, although the seeds of discontent were planted which in years to come took their toll on Southern moderates. On election day 1948, the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried the previously solid Democratic states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, receiving 1,169,021 popular votes and 39 electoral votes. Progressive Party nominee Henry A. Wallace drew off a nearly equal number of popular votes (1,157,172) from the Democrats' left wing, although he did not carry any states. The splits in the Democratic Party in the 1948 election had been expected to produce a victory by GOP nominee Dewey, but Truman defeated Dewey in an upset victory.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

also called the (North) Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. The organization constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party. NATO's headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium, one of the 28 member states across North America and Europe, the newest of which, Albania and Croatia, joined in April 2009. An additional 22 countries participate in NATO's "Partnership for Peace", with 15 other countries involved in institutionalized dialogue programs. The combined military spending of all NATO members constitutes over 70% of the world's defence spending. For its first few years, NATO was not much more than a political association. However, the Korean War galvanized the member states, and an integrated military structure was built up under the direction of two US supreme commanders. The course of the Cold War led to a rivalry with nations of the Warsaw Pact, which formed in 1955. The first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay, stated in 1949 that the organization's goal was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."[4] Doubts over the strength of the relationship between the European states and the United States ebbed and flowed, along with doubts over the credibility of the NATO defence against a prospective Soviet invasion—doubts that led to the development of the independent French nuclear deterrent and the withdrawal of the French from NATO's military structure in 1966. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the organization became drawn into the breakup of Yugoslavia, and conducted their first military interventions in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 and later Yugoslavia in 1999. Politically, the organization sought better relations with former Cold War rivals, which culminated with several former Warsaw Pact states joining the alliance in 1999 and 2004. The September 2001 attacks signalled the only occasion in NATO's history that Article 5 of the North Atlantic treaty has been invoked as an attack on all NATO members.[5] After the attack, troops were deployed to Afghanistan under the NATO-led ISAF, and the organization continues to operate in a range of roles, including sending trainers to Iraq, assisting in counter-piracy operations[6] and most recently in 2011 enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1973. The less potent Article 4, which merely invokes consultation among NATO members has been invoked three times, and only by Turkey: once in 2003 over the Second Iraq War, and twice in 2012 over the Syrian civil war after the downing of an unarmed Turkish F-4 reconnaissance jet and after a mortar was fired at Turkey from Syria. The creation of NATO brought about some standardization of allied military terminology, procedures, and technology, which in many cases meant European countries adopting U.S. practices. The roughly 1300 Standardization Agreements codified many of the common practices that NATO has achieved. Hence, the 7.62×51 NATO rifle cartridge was introduced in the 1950s as a standard firearm cartridge among many NATO countries. Fabrique Nationale de Herstal's FAL became the most popular 7.62 NATO rifle in Europe and served into the early 1990s.[citation needed] Also, aircraft marshalling signals were standardized, so that any NATO aircraft could land at any NATO base. Other standards such as the NATO phonetic alphabet have made their way beyond NATO into civilian use. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 was crucial for NATO as it raised the apparent threat of all Communist countries working together, and forced the alliance to develop concrete military plans.[11] SHAPE, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, was formed as a consolidated command structure, and began work under Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower in January 1951.[12] The 1952 Lisbon conference, seeking to provide the forces necessary for NATO's Long-Term Defence Plan, called for an expansion to ninety-six divisions. However this requirement was dropped the following year to roughly thirty-five divisions with heavier use to be made of nuclear weapons. At this time, NATO could call on about fifteen ready divisions in Central Europe, and another ten in Italy and Scandinavia.[13][14] Also at Lisbon, the post of Secretary General of NATO as the organization's chief civilian was created, and Lord Ismay was eventually appointed to the post. In September 1952, the first major NATO maritime exercises began; Exercise Mainbrace brought together 200 ships and over 50,000 personnel to practice the defence of Denmark and Norway.[16] Other major exercises that followed included Exercise Grand Slam and Exercise Longstep, naval and amphibious exercises in the Mediterranean Sea,[17] Italic Weld, a combined air-naval-ground exercise in northern Italy, Grand Repulse, involving the British Army on the Rhine (BAOR), the Netherlands Corps and Allied Air Forces Central Europe (AAFCE), Monte Carlo, a simulated atomic air-ground exercise involving the Central Army Group, and Weldfast, a combined amphibious landing exercise in the Mediterranean Sea involving British, Greek, Italian, Turkish, and U.S. naval forces. Greece and Turkey also joined the alliance in 1952, forcing a series of controversial negotiations, in which the United States and Britain were the primary disputants, over how to bring the two countries into the military command structure.[12] While this overt military preparation was going on, covert stay-behind arrangements initially made by the Western European Union to continue resistance after a successful Soviet invasion, including Operation Gladio, were transferred to NATO control. Ultimately unofficial bonds began to grow between NATO's armed forces, such as the NATO Tiger Association and competitions such as the Canadian Army Trophy for tank gunnery. In 1954, the Soviet Union suggested that it should join NATO to preserve peace in Europe.[18] The NATO countries, fearing that the Soviet Union's motive was to weaken the alliance, ultimately rejected this proposal. The incorporation of West Germany into the organization on 9 May 1955 was described as "a decisive turning point in the history of our continent" by Halvard Lange, Foreign Affairs Minister of Norway at the time.[19] A major reason for Germany's entry into the alliance was that without German manpower, it would have been impossible to field enough conventional forces to resist a Soviet invasion.[20] One of its immediate results was the creation of the Warsaw Pact, which was signed on 14 May 1955 by the Soviet Union, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and East Germany, as a formal response to this event, thereby delineating the two opposing sides of the Cold War. Three major exercises were held concurrently in the northern autumn of 1957. Operation Counter Punch, Operation Strikeback, and Operation Deep Water were the most ambitious military undertaking for the alliance to date, involving more than 250,000 men, 300 ships, and 1,500 aircraft operating from Norway to Turkey.

Taft-Hartley Act

is a United States federal law that restricts the activities and power of labor unions. The act, still effective, was sponsored by Senator Robert Taft and Representative Fred A. Hartley, Jr. and became law by overcoming U.S. President Harry S. Truman's veto on June 23, 1947; labor leaders called it the "slave-labor bill" while President Truman argued that it was a "dangerous intrusion on free speech", and that it would "conflict with important principles of our democratic society". Nevertheless, Truman would subsequently use it twelve times during his presidency. The Taft-Hartley Act amended the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA; informally the Wagner Act), which Congress passed in 1935. The principal author of the Taft-Hartley Act was J. Mack Swigert of the Cincinnati law firm Taft, Stettinius & Hollister. Taft-Hartley was one of more than 250 union-related bills pending in both houses of Congress in 1947.[4] The bill was a conscious effort to decrease the gains made by the labor movement, particularly by the National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA/Wagner Act, which was established as Constitutional despite Republican efforts in 1937 to destroy it. With this failure, the Republicans turned to crafting their own bill to mitigate the influence of labor unions. The architect of the bill, Fred Hartley, was known for his dislike of unions. After World War II, 25 percent of the workforce was unionized (around 14.8 million workers had union contracts, 10 million of them being union security agreements), and with the war now over, their promise not to strike so as not to impede the war effort had expired. As a response to the rising union movement and Cold War hostilities, the bill could be seen as a response by business to the post-World War II labor upsurge of 1946. During the year after V-J Day, more than five million American workers were involved in strikes, which lasted on average four times longer than those during the war. The Taft-Hartley Act was seen as a means of demobilizing the labor movement by imposing limits on labor's ability to strike and by prohibiting radicals from their leadership. The law was promoted by large business lobbies including the National Association of Manufacturers. The amendments enacted in Taft-Hartley added a list of prohibited actions, or unfair labor practices, on the part of unions to the NLRA, which had previously only prohibited unfair labor practices committed by employers. The Taft-Hartley Act prohibited jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. It also required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government. Union shops were heavily restricted, and states were allowed to pass right-to-work laws that outlawed closed union shops. Furthermore, the executive branch of the federal government could obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike imperiled the national health or safety, a test that has been interpreted broadly by the courts. Though smaller unions were negatively affected as a result of the act, the labor movement as a whole was not greatly impeded by Taft-Hartley. Arguably, the controversial act also helped President Harry Truman get reelected, given that the act galvanized labor unions into opposing Republicans. The amendments required unions and employers to give 80 days' notice to each other and to certain state and federal mediation bodies before they may undertake strikes or other forms of economic action in pursuit of a new collective bargaining agreement; it did not, on the other hand, impose any "cooling-off period" after a contract expired. The Act also authorized the President to intervene in strikes or potential strikes that create a national emergency, a reaction to the national coal miners' strikes called by the United Mine Workers of America in the 1940s. Presidents have used that power less and less frequently in each succeeding decade. President George W. Bush invoked the law most recently in connection with the employer lockout of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union during negotiations with West Coast shipping and stevedoring companies in 2001. The Act also prohibited federal employees from striking. The amendments required union leaders to file affidavits with the United States Department of Labor declaring that they were not supporters of the Communist Party and had no relationship with any organization seeking the "overthrow of the United States government by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means" as a condition to participating in NLRB proceedings. Just over a year after Taft-Hartley passed, eighty-one thousand (81,000) union officers from nearly 120 unions had filed the required affidavits. In 1965, The Supreme Court held that this provision was an unconstitutional bill of attainder. The amendments expressly excluded supervisors from coverage under the act, and allowed employers to terminate supervisors engaging in union activities or those not supporting the employer's stance. The amendments maintained coverage under the act for professional employees, but provided for special procedures before they may be included in the same bargaining unit as non-professional employees.

H-bomb

is a nuclear weapon design that uses the heat generated by a fission bomb to compress a nuclear fusion stage. This indirectly results in a greatly increased energy yield—explosive "power". It is colloquially referred to as a hydrogen bomb or H-bomb because it employs hydrogen fusion, though in most applications the majority of its destructive energy comes from uranium fission, not hydrogen fusion alone. The fusion stage in such weapons is required to efficiently cause the large quantities of fission characteristic of most thermonuclear weapons. The concept of the thermonuclear weapon was first developed and used in 1952 and has since been used in most of the world's nuclear weapons.[2] The modern design of all thermonuclear weapons in the United States is known as the Teller-Ulam design for its two chief contributors, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, who developed it in 1951 for the U.S., with certain concepts developed with the contribution of John von Neumann. The first test of this principle was the "Ivy Mike" nuclear test in 1952, conducted by the United States. In the Soviet Union, the design was independently developed and known as Andrei Sakharov's "Third Idea", first tested in 1955. Similar devices were developed by the United Kingdom, China, and France, though no specific code names are known for their designs. The idea of a thermonuclear fusion bomb ignited by a smaller fission bomb was first proposed by Enrico Fermi to his colleague Edward Teller in 1941 at the start of what would become the Manhattan Project. Teller spent most of the Manhattan Project attempting to figure out how to make the design work, to some degree neglecting his assigned work on the Manhattan Project fission bomb program. His difficult and devil's advocate attitude in discussions led Robert Oppenheimer to sidetrack him and other "problem" physicists into the super program to smooth his way. Stanislaw Ulam, a coworker of Teller's, made the first key conceptual leaps towards a workable fusion design. Ulam's two innovations which rendered the fusion bomb practical were that compression of the thermonuclear fuel before extreme heating was a practical path towards the conditions needed for fusion, and the idea of staging or placing a separate thermonuclear component outside a fission primary component, and somehow using the primary to compress the secondary. Teller then realized that the gamma and X-ray radiation produced in the primary could transfer enough energy into the secondary to create a successful implosion and fusion burn, if the whole assembly was wrapped in a hohlraum or radiation case. Teller and his various proponents and detractors later disputed the degree to which Ulam had contributed to the theories underlying this mechanism. Indeed, shortly before his death, and in a last-ditch effort to discredit Ulam's contributions, Teller claimed that one of his own "graduate students" had proposed the mechanism. The "George" shot of Operation Greenhouse in 1951 tested the basic concept for the first time on a very small scale, raising expectations to a near certainty that the concept would work. On November 1, 1952, the Teller-Ulam configuration was tested at full scale in the "Ivy Mike" shot at an island in the Enewetak Atoll, with a yield of 10.4 megatons (over 450 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II). The device, dubbed the Sausage, used an extra-large fission bomb as a "trigger" and liquid deuterium—kept in its liquid state by 20 short tons (18 metric tons) of cryogenic equipment—as its fusion fuel, and weighed around 80 short tons (70 metric tons) altogether. The liquid deuterium fuel of Ivy Mike was impractical for a deployable weapon, and the next advance was to use a solid lithium deuteride fusion fuel instead. In 1954 this was tested in the "Castle Bravo" shot (the device was code-named the Shrimp), which had a yield of 15 megatons (2.5 times higher than expected) and is the largest U.S. bomb ever tested. Efforts in the United States soon shifted towards developing miniaturized Teller-Ulam weapons which could easily outfit intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. By 1960, with the W47 warhead[16] deployed on Polaris ballistic missile submarines, megaton-class warheads were as small as 18 inches (0.5 m) in diameter and 720 pounds (320 kg) in weight. It was later found in live testing that the Polaris warhead did not work reliably and had to be redesigned. Further innovation in miniaturizing warheads was accomplished by the mid-1970s, when versions of the Teller-Ulam design were created which could fit ten or more warheads on the end of a small MIRVed missile (see the section on the W88 below). The first Soviet fusion design, developed by Andrei Sakharov and Vitaly Ginzburg in 1949 (before the Soviets had a working fission bomb), was dubbed the Sloika, after a Russian layer cake, and was not of the Teller-Ulam configuration. It used alternating layers of fissile material and lithium deuteride fusion fuel spiked with tritium (this was later dubbed Sakharov's "First Idea"). Though nuclear fusion might have been technically achievable, it did not have the scaling property of a "staged" weapon. Thus, such a design could not produce thermonuclear weapons whose explosive yields could be made arbitrarily large (unlike U.S. designs at that time). The fusion layer wrapped around the fission core could only moderately multiply the fission energy (modern Teller-Ulam designs can multiply it 30-fold). Additionally, the whole fusion stage had to be imploded by conventional explosives, along with the fission core, multiplying the bulk of chemical explosives needed substantially. The Soviets demonstrated the power of the "staging" concept in October 1961, when they detonated the massive and unwieldy Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb that derived almost 97% of its energy from fusion. It was the largest nuclear weapon developed and tested by any country.

Sunbelt

is a region of the United States generally considered to stretch across the South and Southwest (the geographic southern United States). Another rough boundary of the region is the area south of the 36th parallel, north latitude. The main defining feature of the Sun Belt is its warm-temperate climate with extended summers and brief, relatively mild winters; Florida, the Gulf Coast, and southern Texas, however, have a true subtropical climate. The Belt has seen substantial population growth since the 1960s due to an influx of immigrants, both legal and illegal, a surge in retiring baby boomers, and the attractiveness of a mild winter climate. This population boom has been less substantial in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama compared with their western and eastern neighbor states. Also, over the past several decades, air conditioning has made it easier for people to deal with the heat in portions of the region during the summertime. Water shortages, droughts and drug trafficking are becoming a common problem in the region. The Belt comprises the southern tier of the United States and is usually considered to include the states of Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, roughly half of California (up to Greater Sacramento), and at least parts of Arkansas, North Carolina, and southern Nevada. A more expansive definition includes the states of Colorado, Oklahoma, Virginia, Utah, and all of California and Nevada. The term "Sun Belt" became synonymous with the southern third of the nation in the early 1970s. There was a shift in this period from the previously economically and politically important northeast to the south and west. Events such as the huge migration of immigrant workers from Mexico, warmer climate, and a boom in the agriculture industry allowed for the southern third of the United States to grow economically. The climate spurred not only agricultural growth, but also saw many retirees move into retirement communities in the region, especially in Florida and Arizona. Industries such as aerospace, defense, and oil boomed in the Sun Belt as companies took advantage of the low involvement of labor unions in the south (due to more recent industrialization; 1930s to 1950s) and enjoyed the proximity to many U.S. military installations who were the major consumers of their products. The oil industry helped propel southern states such as Texas and Louisiana forward, and tourism grew in Florida and southern California as well. In more recent decades high tech and new economy industries have been major drivers of growth in California, Florida and some other parts of the Sun Belt. Texas and California rank among the top five states in the nation with the most number of Fortune 500 companies, with New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania rounding out the top five. Since 1970 Sun Belt states have gained 25 electoral votes. Since Lyndon B. Johnson's election in 1964, every elected United States President, with the exception of Barack Obama from Illinois, has been from the Sun Belt. (Gerald Ford, who was from Michigan, became president following Richard Nixon's resignation, but was not elected as president, and lost to Georgia's Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.)

UNESCO

is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN). Its purpose is to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and human rights along with fundamental freedom proclaimed in the UN Charter. It is the heir of the League of Nations' International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation. UNESCO has 195 Member States[2] (it recently added Palestine in November 2011) and eight Associate Members.[3][4] Most of the field offices are "cluster" offices covering three or more countries; there are also national and regional offices. UNESCO pursue its objectives through five major programs: education, natural sciences, social and human sciences, culture, and communication and information. Projects sponsored by UNESCO include literacy, technical, and teacher-training programmes; international science programmes; the promotion of independent media and freedom of the press; regional and cultural history projects; the promotion of cultural diversity; translations of world literature; international cooperation agreements to secure the world cultural and natural heritage (World Heritage Sites) and to preserve human rights, and attempts to bridge the worldwide digital divide. It is also a member of the United Nations Development Group. UNESCO's aim is "to contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of poverty, sustainable development and intercultural dialogue through education, the sciences, culture, communication and information". Other priorities of the Organization include attaining quality education for all and lifelong learning, addressing emerging social and ethical challenges, fostering cultural diversity, a culture of peace and building inclusive knowledge societies through information and communication. The broad goals and concrete objectives of the international community—as set out in the internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—underpin all UNESCO's strategies and activities. UNESCO and its mandate for international intellectual co-operation can be traced back to the League of Nations resolution on 21 September 1921, to elect a Commission to study the question.[8] The International Committee on Intellectual Co-operation (ICIC) was officially created on 4 January 1922, as a consultative organ composed of individuals elected based on their personal qualifications. The International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) was then created in Paris on 9 August 1925, to act as the executing agency for the ICIC. On 18 December 1925, the International Bureau of Education (IBE) began work as a non-governmental organization in the service of international educational development. However, the work of these predecessor organizations was largely interrupted by the onset of World War II. After the signing of the Atlantic Charter and the Declaration of the United Nations, the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME) began meetings in London which continued between 16 November 1942 to 5 December 1945. On 30 October 1943, the necessity for an international organization was expressed in the Moscow Declaration, agreed upon by China, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the USSR. This was followed by the Dumbarton Oaks Conference proposals of 9 October 1944. Upon the proposal of CAME and in accordance with the recommendations of the United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO), held in San Francisco in April-June 1945, a United Nations Conference for the establishment of an educational and cultural organization (ECO/CONF) was convened in London 1-16 November 1945 with 44 governments represented. A prominent figure in the initiative for UNESCO was Rab Butler, the Minister of Education for the United Kingdom. At the ECO/CONF, the Constitution of UNESCO was introduced and signed by 37 countries, and a Preparatory Commission was established. The Preparatory Commission operated between 16 November 1945, and 4 November 1946—the date when UNESCO's Constitution came into force with the deposit of the twentieth ratification by a member state. The first General Conference took place from 19 November to 10 December 1946, and elected Dr. Julian Huxley to the post of Director-General.[14] The Constitution was amended in November 1954 when the General Conference resolved that members of the Executive Board would be representatives of the governments of the States of which they are nationals and would not, as before, act in their personal capacity.[15] This change in governance distinguished UNESCO from its predecessor, the CICI, in terms of how member states would work together in the Organization's fields of competence. As member states worked together over time to realize UNESCO's mandate, political and historical factors have shaped the Organization's operations in particular during the Cold War, the decolonization process, and the dissolution of the USSR. Among the major achievements of the Organization is its work against racism, for example through influential statements on race starting with a declaration of anthropologists (among them was Claude Lévi-Strauss) and other scientists in 1950 and concluding with the 1978 Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice. In 1956, the Republic of South Africa withdrew from UNESCO claiming that some of the Organization's publications amounted to "interference" in the country's "racial problems." South Africa rejoined the Organization in 1994 under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. An intergovernmental meeting of UNESCO in Paris in December 1951 led to the creation of the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN] in 1954.

baby boom

is any period marked by a greatly increased birth rate. This demographic phenomenon is usually ascribed within certain geographical bounds and when the number of annual births exceeds 2 per 100 women (or approximately 2% of the total population size). People born during such a period are often called baby boomers; however, some experts distinguish between those born during such demographic baby booms and those who identify with the overlapping cultural generations. Conventional wisdom states that baby booms signify good times and periods of general economic growth and stability. The term "baby boom" most often refers to the post-World War II baby boom (1946-1964). There are an estimated 78.3 million Americans who were born during this demographic boom in births. The term is a general demographic one and is also applicable to other similar population expansions. The end of World War II brought a baby boom to many countries, especially Western ones. There is some disagreement as to the precise beginning and ending dates of the post-war baby boom, but it is most often agreed to begin in the years immediately after the war, ending more than a decade later; birth rates in the United States started to decline in 1957. In areas that had suffered heavy war damage, displacement of people and post-war economic hardship, such as Poland and Germany, the boom began some years later. In 1946, live births in the U.S. surged from 222,721 in January to 339,499 in October. By the end of the 1940s, about 32 million babies had been born, compared with 24 million in the 1930s. In 1954, annual births first topped four million and did not drop below that figure until 1965, when four out of ten Americans were under the age of twenty. In the years after the war, couples who could not afford families during the Great Depression made up for lost time; the mood was now optimistic. During the war unemployment ended and the economy greatly expanded; afterwards the country experienced vigorous economic growth until the 1970s. The G.I. Bill enabled record numbers of people to finish high school and attend college. This led to an increase in stock of skills and yielded higher incomes to families. Returning G.I.s were getting married, starting families, pursuing higher education and buying their first homes. With veteran's benefits, the twenty-somethings found new homes in planned communities on the outskirts of American cities. This group, whose formative years covered the Great Depression, were a generation hardened by poverty and deprived of the security of a home or job. Now thriving on the American Dream, life was simple, jobs were plentiful, and a record number of babies were born. Many Americans believed that lack of post-war government spending would send the United States back into depression. However, consumer demand fueled economic growth. The baby boom triggered a housing boom, consumption boom and a boom in the labor force. Between 1940 and 1960, the nation's GDP jumped more than $300 million. The middle class grew and the majority of America's labor force held white-collar jobs. This increase led to urbanization and increased the demand for ownership in cars and other 1950s and 1960s inventions. Family size increased sharply throughout the baby boom: the average woman bore 3.09 children in 1950 which increased to 3.65 children per family in 1960; the peak was in 1957, when the figure stood at 3.77. Most couples became pregnant with their first child within 7 months of their wedding; between 1940 to 1960, the number of families with three children doubled and the number of families having a fourth child quadrupled.

Cold War

often dated from 1947 to 1991, was a sustained state of political and military tension between powers in the Western Bloc, dominated by the United States with NATO among its allies, and powers in the Eastern Bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union along with the Warsaw Pact. This began after the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. A neutral faction arose with the Non-Aligned Movement founded by Egypt, India, and Yugoslavia; this faction rejected association with either the US-led West or the Soviet-led East. The Cold War was so named because the two major powers—each possessing nuclear weapons and thereby threatened with mutual assured destruction—never met in direct military combat. Instead, in their struggle for global influence they engaged in ongoing psychological warfare and in regular indirect confrontations through proxy wars. Cycles of relative calm would be followed by high tension, which could have led to world war. The tensest times were during the Berlin Blockade (1948-1949), the Korean War (1950-1953), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Vietnam War (1959-1975), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979-1989), the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (1983), and the "Able Archer" NATO military exercises (1983). The conflict was expressed through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to client states, espionage, massive propaganda campaigns, conventional and nuclear arms races, appeals to neutral nations, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race. The US and USSR became involved in political and military conflicts in the Third World countries of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. To alleviate the risk of a potential nuclear war, both sides sought relief of political tensions through détente in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ("reorganization", 1987) and glasnost ("openness", ca. 1985). Pressures for national independence grew stronger in Eastern Europe, especially Poland. They reached a breaking point when Gorbachev refused to use Soviet troops to support the faltering government of East Germany in late 1989. Within weeks all the satellite states broke free from Moscow in a peaceful wave of revolutions (there was some violence in Romania). The pressures escalated inside the Soviet Union, where Communism fell and the USSR was formally dissolved in late 1991. The United States remained as the world's only superpower. The Cold War and its events have left a significant legacy, and it is often referred to in popular culture, especially in media featuring themes of espionage and the threat of nuclear warfare. Following the Cold War, Russia cut military spending dramatically. Restructuring of the economy left millions throughout the former Soviet Union unemployed. The capitalist reforms culminated in a recession more severe than the US and Germany had experienced during the Great Depression. The aftermath of the Cold War continues to influence world affairs. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War world is widely considered as unipolar, with the United States the sole remaining superpower. The Cold War defined the political role of the United States in the post-World War II world: by 1989 the US held military alliances with 50 countries, and had 526,000[282] troops posted abroad in dozens of countries, with 326,000 in Europe (two-thirds of which in west Germany) and about 130,000 in Asia (mainly Japan and South Korea). The Cold War also marked the apex of peacetime military-industrial complexes, especially in the USA, and large-scale military funding of science. These complexes, though their origins may be found as early as the 19th century, have grown considerably during the Cold War. The military-industrial complexes have great impact on their countries and help shape their society, policy and foreign relations. Military expenditures by the US during the Cold War years were estimated to have been $8 trillion, while nearly 100,000 Americans lost their lives in the Korean War and Vietnam War. Although the loss of life among Soviet soldiers is difficult to estimate, as a share of their gross national product the financial cost for the Soviet Union was far higher than that incurred by the United States. In addition to the loss of life by uniformed soldiers, millions died in the superpowers' proxy wars around the globe, most notably in Southeast Asia.Most of the proxy wars and subsidies for local conflicts ended along with the Cold War; interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, as well as refugee and displaced persons crises have declined sharply in the post-Cold War years. The aftermath of Cold War conflict, however, is not always easily erased, as many of the economic and social tensions that were exploited to fuel Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute.] The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by Communist governments has produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. In Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an era of economic growth and an increase in the number of liberal democracies, while in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, independence was accompanied by state failure.

U. N. Security Council

is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations and is charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. Its powers, outlined in the United Nations Charter, include the establishment of peacekeeping operations, the establishment of international sanctions, and the authorization of military action. Its powers are exercised through United Nations Security Council resolutions. There are 15 members of the Security Council. This includes five veto-wielding permanent members—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—based on the great powers that were the victors of World War II.[1] There are also 10 non-permanent members, with five elected each year to serve two-year terms. This basic structure is set out in Chapter V of the UN Charter. The current non-permanent members are Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Luxembourg, Morocco, Pakistan, Rwanda, South Korea, and Togo. The Security Council held its first session on 17 January 1946 at Church House, Westminster, London. Since its first meeting, the Council, which exists in continuous session, has travelled widely, holding meetings in many cities, such as Paris and Addis Ababa, as well as at its current permanent home at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Security Council members must always be present at UN headquarters in New York so that the Security Council can meet at any time. This requirement addresses a weakness of the League of Nations: that organization was often unable to respond quickly to a crisis. At the UN's founding in 1946, the five permanent members of the Security Council were the French Republic, the Republic of China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union. The five permanent members of the Security Council were the victorious powers in World War II and have maintained the world's most powerful military forces ever since. They annually top the list of countries with the highest military expenditures; in 2011, they spent over US$1 trillion combined on defense, accounting for over 60% of global military expenditures (the U.S. alone accounting for over 40%). They are also five of the world's six largest arms exporters, along with Germany and are the only nations officially recognized as "nuclear-weapon states" under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), though there are other states known or believed to be in possession of nuclear weapons.

Yalta Conference

sometimes called the Crimea Conference and codenamed the Argonaut Conference, held February 4-11, 1945, was the World War II meeting of the heads of government of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin, respectively, for the purpose of discussing Europe's post-war reorganization. The conference convened in the Livadia Palace near Yalta, in the Crimea. The meeting was intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe. Within a few years, with the Cold War dividing the continent, Yalta became a subject of intense controversy. To some extent, it has remained controversial. Yalta was the second of three wartime conferences among the Big Three (Britain, United States, and Soviet Union) which were represented by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, respectively. It had been preceded by the Tehran Conference in 1943, and was followed by the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, which was attended by Stalin, Churchill (who was replaced midpoint by the newly elected British Prime Minister Clement Attlee), and Harry S Truman, who had replaced the late President Roosevelt. All three leaders were trying to establish an agenda for governing post-war Germany. Churchill's attitude towards the Soviet Union differed vastly from that of Roosevelt, with the former believing Stalin to be a "devil"-like tyrant leading a vile system. In 1942, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union William Christian Bullitt, Jr.'s thesis prophesied the "flow of the Red amoeba into Europe". On the Eastern Front, the front line at the end of December 1943 remained in the Soviet Union, but, by August 1944, Soviet forces were inside Poland and parts of Romania in their relentless drive west. By the time of the Conference, Red Army Marshal Georgy Zhukov's forces were 65 km (40 mi) from Berlin. Stalin's position at the conference was one which he felt was so strong that he could dictate terms. Premier Stalin, insisting that his doctors opposed any long trips, rejected Roosevelt's suggestion to meet at the Mediterranean.[5] He offered, instead, to meet at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, in the Crimea. Each leader had an agenda for the Yalta Conference: Roosevelt asked for Soviet support in the U.S. Pacific War against Japan, specifically invading Japan; Churchill pressed for free elections and democratic governments in Eastern and Central Europe (specifically Poland); and Stalin demanded a Soviet sphere of political influence in Eastern and Central Europe, an essential aspect of the USSR's national security strategy. All three leaders ratified previous agreements about the post-war occupation zones for Germany: three zones of occupation, one for each of the three principal Allies: The Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They also agreed to give France a zone of occupation, carved out of the US and the UK zones. Also, the Big Three agreed that all original governments would be restored to the invaded countries (with the exception of the French government, which was regarded as collaborationist; in Romania and Bulgaria, where the Soviets had already liquidated most of the governments; the Polish government-in-exile was also excluded by Stalin) and that all civilians would be repatriated. The Big Three further agreed that democracies would be established, all liberated European and former Axis satellite countries would hold free elections and that order would be restored. In that regard, they promised to rebuild occupied countries by processes that will allow them "to create democratic institutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter - the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live". The report that resulted stated that the three would assist occupied countries to form interim government that "pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of the Governments responsive to the will of the people" and to "facilitate where necessary the holding of such elections." The Declaration contained no mechanisms for the enforcement of its principles. The agreement called on signatories to "consult together on the measures necessary to discharge the joint responsibilities set forth in this declaration." During the Yalta discussions, Molotov inserted language that weakened the implication of enforcement of the declaration. Regarding Poland, the Yalta report further stated that the provisional government should "be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot." The agreement could not conceal the importance of acceding to pro-Soviet short-term Lublin government control and of eliminating language calling for supervised elections. When the Second World War ended, a Communist government was installed in Poland. Most Poles felt betrayed by their wartime allies. Many Polish soldiers refused to return to Poland, because of the Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939-1946), the Trial of the Sixteen and other executions of pro-Western Poles, particularly the former members of the AK (Armia Krajowa). The result was the Polish Resettlement Act 1947, Britain's first mass immigration law. The fraudulent Polish elections, held on January 16, 1947, resulted in Poland's official transformation to communist state by 1949.

iron curtain

symbolized the ideological conflict and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. The Iron Curtain was erected by the Soviet Union to block itself and its dependent and central European allies off from open contact with the west and non-communist areas. On the East side of the Iron Curtain were the countries that were connected to or influenced by the former Soviet Union. The events that demolished the Iron Curtain started in discontent in Poland, and continued in Hungary, German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Romania was the only country in Europe to violently overthrow its communist regime. During the summer of 1939, after conducting negotiations both with a British-French group and with Germany regarding potential military and political agreements, the Soviet Union and Germany signed the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement (which provided for the trade of certain German military and civilian equipment in exchange for Soviet raw materials and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (signed in late August 1939), named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries (Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop), which included a secret agreement to split Poland and Eastern Europe between the two states. The Soviets thereafter occupied Eastern Poland (September 1939), Latvia (June 1940), Lithuania (1940), northern Romania (Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, late June, 1940), Estonia (1940) and eastern Finland (March 1940). From August 1939, relations between the West and the Soviets deteriorated further when the Soviet Union and Germany engaged in an extensive economic relationship by which the Soviet Union sent Germany vital oil, rubber, manganese and other materials in exchange for German weapons, manufacturing machinery and technology. Nazi-Soviet trade ended in June 1941 when Germany broke the Pact and invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. In the course of World War II, Stalin determined[citation needed] to acquire a buffer area against Germany, with pro-Soviet states on its border in an Eastern bloc. Stalin's aims led to strained relations at the Yalta Conference (February 1945) and the subsequent Potsdam Conference (August 1945). People in the West expressed opposition to Soviet domination over the buffer states, and the fear grew that the Soviets were building an empire that might be a threat to them and their interests. Nonetheless, at the Potsdam Conference, the Allies assigned parts of Poland, Finland, Romania, Germany, and the Balkans to Soviet control or influence. In return, Stalin promised the Western Allies that he would allow those territories the right to national self-determination. Despite Soviet cooperation during the war, these concessions left many in the West uneasy. In particular, Churchill feared that the United States might return to its pre-war isolationism, leaving the exhausted European states unable to resist Soviet demands. (President Franklin D. Roosevelt had announced at Yalta that after the defeat of Germany, U.S. forces would withdraw from Europe within two years. Much of the Western public still regarded the Soviet Union as a close ally in the context of the recent defeat of Nazi Germany and of Japan. Although not well received at the time, the phrase iron curtain gained popularity as a shorthand reference to the division of Europe as the Cold War strengthened. The Iron Curtain served to keep people in and information out, and people throughout the West eventually came to accept and use the metaphor. The majority of European states to the east of the Iron Curtain developed their own international economic and military alliances, such as COMECON and the Warsaw Pact. To the west of the Iron Curtain, the countries of Western Europe, Northern Europe and Southern Europe - along with Austria, West Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland - operated market economies. With the exception of a period of fascism in Spain (until the 1970s) and Portugal (until 1974) and military dictatorship in Greece (1967 - 1974), democratic governments ruled these countries. Most of the states of Europe to the west of the Iron Curtain - with the exception of neutral Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Malta and Ireland - allied themselves with the United States and Canada within NATO. Economically, the European Community and the European Free Trade Association represented Western counterparts to COMECON. Most of the nominally neutral states were economically closer to the United States than they were to the Warsaw Pact. Following a period of economic and political stagnation, the Soviet Union decreased intervention in Eastern Bloc politics. Mikhail Gorbachev decreased adherence to the Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that if socialism were threatened in any state then other socialist governments had an obligation to intervene to preserve it, in favor of the "Sinatra Doctrine." He also initiated the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring). A wave of Revolutions occurred throughout the Eastern Bloc. In April 1989, the Solidarity organization was legalized in the People's Republic of Poland and captured 99% of available parliamentary seats. These elections, in which anti-communist candidates won a striking victory, inaugurated a series of peaceful anti-communist revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe that eventually culminated in the fall of communism. On August 19, 1989, more than 600 East Germans attending the "Pan-European Picnic" on the Hungarian border broke through the Iron Curtain and fled into Austria. Hungarian border guards had threatened to shoot anyone crossing the border, but when the time came, they did not intervene and allowed the people to cross. In a historic session from October 16 to October 20, the Hungarian parliament adopted legislation providing for multi-party parliamentary elections and a direct presidential election. The Berlin Wall officially remained guarded after 9 November 1989, although the inter-German border had become effectively meaningless. The official dismantling of the Wall by the East German military did not begin until June 1990. In July 1990, the day East Germany adopted the West German currency, all border controls ceased and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl convinced Gorbachev to drop Soviet objections to a reunited Germany within NATO in return for substantial German economic aid to the Soviet Union.

NSC-68

was a 58-page top secret policy paper issued by the United States National Security Council on April 14, 1950, during the presidency of Harry S. Truman. It was one of the most significant statements of American policy in the Cold War. NSC-68 largely shaped U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War for the next 20 years, and involved a decision to make Containment against Communist expansion a high priority. The strategy outlined in NSC-68 arguably achieved ultimate victory with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent emergence of a "new world order" centered on American liberal-capitalist values alone. Truman officially signed NSC-68 on September 30, 1950. It was declassified in 1975. By 1950, events had reinforced the need for better coordination of national security policies: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed, military assistance for Europe had begun, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb, and the Communists won control in China over the Nationalists. The United States Department of State seized the opportunity to review US strategic policy and military programs, overcoming opposition from Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and his allies in the Bureau of the Budget. Accounts of the deliberation on "NSC-68" indicate that the Defense Department representatives on the committee initially resisted proposals that would exceed the existing $12.5 billion ceiling on defense spending.[3] The report, known as NSC-68, was requested by President Truman on 31 January 1950, following a feasibility study of both the US and the USSR acquiring thermonuclear weapons; he directed the secretaries of State and Defense "to undertake a reexamination of our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans." The first report was submitted on 7 April, and then passed on to the NSC for further consideration. Originally, President Truman did not support NSC-68 when it was brought to him in 1950. He believed that it was not specific about which programs would be affected or changed and it also didn't go well with his previous defense spending limits. Truman sent it back for further review until he finally approved it in 1951. The document outlined the de facto national security strategy of the United States for that time (though it was not an official NSS in the form we know today) and analyzed the capabilities of the Soviet Union and of the United States of America from military, economic, political, and psychological standpoints. The document outlined the de facto national security strategy of the United States for that time (though it was not an official NSS in the form we know today) and analyzed the capabilities of the Soviet Union and of the United States of America from military, economic, political, and psychological standpoints. Although George F. Kennan's theory of containment articulated a multifaceted approach for U.S. foreign policy in response to the perceived Soviet threat, NSC-68 recommended policies that emphasized military over diplomatic action. Kennan's influential telegram advocated a policy of containment towards the Soviet Union. In NSC-68, it can be defined as "a policy of calculated and gradual coercion." That said, the NSC-68 called for significant peacetime military spending, in which the U.S. possessed "superior overall power" and "in dependable combination with other like-minded nations." NSC-68 itself did not contain any specific cost estimates. The programs would cost a significant portion of U.S. GNP, perhaps as much as 20% or more by one estimate[7][citation needed], at a time when the United States was committing only six to seven percent of its GNP to defense. It was evident that the limits the President had previously set on defense spending would not be compatible with NSC-68.[8] NSC-68 required that the United States must increase defence spending to as much as $50 billion per year from the original $13 billion set for 1950.[9] However the specific costs were left to subsequent groups in the NSC to analyze and budget.

"containment doctrine"

was a United States policy using numerous strategies to prevent the spread of communism abroad. A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet Union to enlarge communist influence in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Africa , and Vietnam. It represented a middle-ground position between détente and rollback. The basis of the doctrine was articulated in a 1946 cable by U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan. As a description of U.S. foreign policy, the word originated in a report Kennan submitted to U.S. Defense Secretary James Forrestal in 1947, a report that was later used in a magazine article. It is a translation of the French cordon sanitaire, used to describe Western policy toward the Soviet Union in the 1920s.The word containment is associated most strongly with the policies of U.S. President Harry Truman (1945-53), including the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact. Although President Dwight Eisenhower (1953-61) toyed with the rival doctrine of rollback, he refused to intervene in the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. President Lyndon Johnson (1963-69) cited containment as a justification for his policies in Vietnam. President Richard Nixon (1969-74), working with his top advisor Henry Kissinger, rejected containment in favor of friendly relations with the Soviet Union and China; this détente, or relaxation of tensions, involved expanded trade and cultural contacts. President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) emphasized human rights rather than anti-communism, but dropped détente and returned to containment when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. President Ronald Reagan (1981-89), denouncing the Soviet state as an "evil empire", escalated the Cold War and promoted rollback in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Central programs begun under containment, including NATO and nuclear deterrence, remained in effect even after the end of the war. In January 1947, Kennan submitted a report entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" to Navy Secretary Forrestal. The use of the word "containment" originates from this report: "In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." Forrestal gave permission for the report to be published in the journal Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X." Biographers Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley have dubbed Forrestal "godfather of containment" largely on account of his work in distributing Kennan's writing. Interestingly, Kennan admitted to several deficiencies in his X-Article including that by containment he meant not the containment of Soviet Power by "by military means of a military threat, but the political containment of a political threat." Second, Kennan admitted a failure in the article to specify the geographical scope of "containment", and that containment was not something he believed the United States could necessarily achieve everywhere successfully.

Progressive party

was a left-wing political party that ran former Vice President Henry A. Wallace of Iowa for president and U.S. Senator Glen H. Taylor of Idaho for vice president in 1948. The formation of the Progressive Party began in 1946, when the recently ex- Secretary of Commerce and former Vice President Henry A. Wallace began to publically agitate against the policies of the Truman administration. The need and want for a third party had been growing even before Wallace left the Truman Administration, with two major organizations, the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC)and the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP), ( Both of these organizations were formed as PACs for Roosevelt). While these two organizations would eventually form the backbone of the 1948 Progressive Party and Henry Wallaces bid for President, it took several years for these organizations to agree on a shared platform and move forward with the formation of a political party. This happened in July 1948, when a convention was called in Philadelphia to launch the "New Party" to a crowd of enthusiastic liberal and left-leaning citizens. The slogan of the "New Party", and the name many used to refer to the party forming around Henry Wallace, was appropriately "Fight for Peace". A major drive for Henry Wallace had always been the ending of the hostile relations between the Soviet Union and the United States and the acceptance of Russian influnece in Europe.[4] These sentiments were first put forward by Wallace in 1944, but those same sentiments soon began to take a more dramatic tone, as a really sense of urgency and anxiety for peace settled in with the beginning of the arms race and the Cold War. Yet, while the "New Party" may be most famous for its anti-war, pro-Russian relations, it sought to include an incredibly broad range of issues and interests. The quote by Henry Wallace above shows how he, and many others in the party, sought to create something more than a single issue party, to the objection of other leaders in the party who felt that would be their undoing.[5] Nevertheless, the platform of the party and the range of issues it covered shows the diversity of the people who formed the "New Party" in 1948, which included many socialists as well as communists. Among the policies the Progressive Party hoped to implement was the end of all Jim Crow laws/ segregation in the South, the advancement of womens rights, the continuation of many New Deal policies including national health insurance and unemployement benefits, the expansion of the welfare system, and the nationalization of such industries as power. Historians have disputed the degree to which Communists shaped the party. Most agree that Wallace himself was not a Communist, but they also agree that he paid very little attention to internal party affairs. In 1952, the Progressive Party ran lawyer Vincent Hallinan for president. Their vice presidential candidate was Charlotta Bass, the first African-American woman ever to run for national office. The campaign attracted little media attention and few votes, and was not even on the ballot in many states. Erstwhile Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace, who had resigned from the Progressive Party in 1950 over its opposition to the Korean War and had supported Dwight D. Eisenhower, published an article in the September 7, 1952, issue of This Week magazine (a Sunday supplement that was included in 37 American newspapers) entitled "Where I Was Wrong," detailing some of his mistakes in not having opposed Stalin strenuously enough. The Progressive Party disbanded in 1955, as the Cold War dominated the political spectrum, and any party which had not taken an anti-Communist position was deemed to be unviable. The 1948 Progressive Party is but tenuously connected to the original Progressive Party (1912-1932) (although Henry A. Wallace's father had been a fervent Bull Mooser, and Wallace himself had only officially left the Republican party in 1936); members of the 1948 Progressive Party, however, have joined the later state Progressive Parties, thus linking the 1948 group to the Vermont Progressive Party, the Wisconsin Prodanes, and the Progressive Party of Washington.

Truman Doctrine

was a policy set forth by the U.S. President Harry Truman in a speech on March 12, 1947 stating that the U.S. would support Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid to prevent their falling into the Soviet sphere. Historians often consider it as the start of the Cold War, and the start of the containment policy to stop Soviet expansion. President Harry S. Truman told Congress the Doctrine was "the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."[4] Truman reasoned, because these "totalitarian regimes" coerced "free peoples", they represented a threat to international peace and the national security of the United States. Truman made the plea amid the crisis of the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). He argued that if Greece and Turkey did not receive the aid that they urgently needed, they would inevitably fall to communism with grave consequences throughout the region. Because Turkey and Greece were historic rivals, it was necessary to help both equally, even though the threat to Greece was more immediate. For years Britain had supported Greece, but was now near bankruptcy and was forced to radically reduce its involvement. In February 1947, Britain formally requested the United States take over its role in supporting the Greek government. The policy won the support of Republicans who controlled Congress and involved sending $400 million in American money, but no military forces, to the region. The effect was to end the Communist threat, and in 1952 both countries (Greece and Turkey) joined NATO, a military alliance that guaranteed their protection. The Doctrine was informally extended to become the basis of American Cold War policy throughout Europe and around the world. It shifted American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union from détente (a relaxation of tension) to a policy of containment of Soviet expansion as advocated by diplomat George Kennan. The Truman Doctrine underpinned American Cold War policy in Europe and around the world. The doctrine endured because it addressed a broader cultural insecurity regarding modern life in a globalized world. It dealt with Washington's concern over communism's domino effect, it enabled a media-sensitive presentation of the doctrine that won bipartisan support, and it mobilized American economic power to modernize and stabilize unstable regions without direct military intervention. It brought nation-building activities and modernization programs to the forefront of foreign policy. The Truman Doctrine became a metaphor for emergency aid to keep a nation from communist influence. Truman used disease imagery not only to communicate a sense of impending disaster in the spread of communism but also to create a "rhetorical vision" of containing it by extending a protective shield around non-communist countries throughout the world. It echoed the "quarantine the aggressor" policy Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to impose to contain German and Japanese expansion in 1937--("quarantine" suggested the role of public health officials handling an infectious disease). The medical metaphor extended beyond the immediate aims of the Truman Doctrine in that the imagery combined with fire and flood imagery evocative of disaster provided the United States with an easy transition to direct military confrontation in later years with communist forces in Korea and Vietnam. By presenting ideological differences in life or death terms, Truman was able to garner support for this communism-containing policy.

Point Four

was a technical assistance program for "developing countries" announced by United States President Harry S. Truman in his inaugural address on January 20, 1949. It took its name from the fact that it was the fourth foreign policy objective mentioned in the speech. Following the Second World War, the United States found itself in a Cold War struggle against the USSR. The Truman administration came up with the idea for a technical assistance program as a means to win the "hearts and minds" of the developing world. By sharing US know-how in various fields, especially agriculture, industry and health, officials could help "third world" nations on the development path, raise the standard of living, and show that democracy and capitalism could provide for the welfare of the individual. This was not a call for economic aid--on the order of the Marshall Plan--but for the US to share its "know-how" and help nations develop with technical assistance. According to the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, it was the initiative of the then legal counsel to the president Clark Clifford, who suggested to president Truman to initiate an assistance on a worldwide basis, and to include the issue in his inaugural address.[2] According to Robert Schlesinger's book, White House Ghosts, it was Benjamin H. Hardy who first came up with the concept. After the suggestion was as good as lost in the foggy miasma of the State Department's bureaucracy, Hardy decided to bring the idea to the attention of Truman aide, George Elsey. Elsey and Clifford went on to herald the abstraction into policy. Hardy eventually left the Department of State and became the new Technical Cooperation Administration's Chief Information Officer. In order to implement the program, on February 9, 1949 a new committee was established within the Department of State, known as the Technical Assistance Group, under the chairmanship of Samuel Hayes. The program was approved by the United States Congress on June 5, 1950 in the Foreign Economic Assistance Act, which allotted to the program a budget of $ 25,000,000 for fiscal year 1950/51. Following Congressional approval, on October 27, 1950, the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA) was established within the Department of State to run the Point Four program. The program was carried out with the countries whose governments concluded bilateral agreements with the US government regarding aid under the program, and the TCA established field missions within those countries, which worked to improve agricultural output and distributed technical know-how on improving the economy in general. The first government to do so was the government of Iran, on October 19, 1950. Point Four Program was different from other programs in that it was not confined to any specific region; it was extended to countries such as Pakistan, Israel and Iran. Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower discarded the Point Four name in favor of simply referring to it as a technical assistance program, and reorganized the TCA into the Foreign Operations Administration (its successor agencies include the International Cooperation Administration and the present-day Agency for International Development). Point Four Program was the first US plan for international economic development.

House Committee on Un-American Activities

was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. It was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having Communist ties. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security". When the House abolished the committee in 1975, its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee. The committee's anti-Communist investigations are often confused with those of Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, as a U.S. Senator, had no direct involvement with this House committee. McCarthy was the Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations Committee of the U.S. Senate, not the House. The Overman Committee was a subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary chaired by North Carolina Democratic Senator Lee Slater Overman that operated from September 1918 to June 1919. The subcommittee investigated German as well as Bolshevik elements in the United States. The Committee was originally concerned with investigating pro-German sentiments in the American liquor industry. After World War I ended in November 1918 and the German threat lessened, the Committee began investigating communist Bolshevism. Bolshevism had appeared as a threat during the First Red Scare after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Committee's hearing into Bolshevik propaganda, conducted February 11 to March 10 of 1919, had a decisive role in constructing an image of a radical threat to the United States during the First Red Scare. On May 26, 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established as a special investigating committee, reorganized from its previous incarnations as the Fish Committee and the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist or fascist ties.[10][11] It was chaired by Martin Dies Jr. (D-TX), and therefore known as the Dies Committee. In 1946, the committee considered opening investigations into the Ku Klux Klan but decided against doing so, prompting known anti-black committee member John E. Rankin (D-MS) to remark, "After all, the KKK is an old American institution."[12] Instead of the Klan, HUAC concentrated on investigating the possibility that the American Communist Party had infiltrated the Works Progress Administration, including the Federal Theatre Project and the Federal Writers' Project. In 1965-1966, however, the Committee did conduct an investigation into Klan activities under chairman Edwin Willis (D-LA). The Committee also put together an argument for wartime internment of Japanese Americans, known as the "Yellow Report."[14] The investigation was presented to the 77th Congress and alleged that certain cultural traits--Japanese loyalty to the Emperor, the number of Japanese fishermen in the US, and the Buddhist faith--were evidence for Japanese espionage. With the exception of Rep. Herman Eberharter (D-PA), the members of the committee seemed to support internment. In 1938, Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Federal Theatre Project, was subpoenaed to appear before the committee to answer the charge the project was overrun with communists. Flanagan was called to testify for only a part of one day, while a clerk from the project was called in for two entire days. It was during this investigation that one of the committee members, Joe Starnes (D-AL), famously asked Flanagan whether the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe was a member of the Communist Party, and mused "Mr. Euripides" preached class warfare. In 1939, the committee investigated leaders of the American Youth Congress, a Comintern affiliate organization. The House Committee on Un-American Activities became a standing (permanent) committee in 1945. Representative Edward J. Hart of New Jersey became the committee's first chairman. Under the mandate of Public Law 601, passed by the 79th Congress, the committee of nine representatives investigated suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that attacked "the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution." Under this mandate, the committee focused its investigations on real and suspected communists in positions of actual or supposed influence in the United States society. A significant step for HUAC was its investigation of the charges of espionage brought against Alger Hiss in 1948. This investigation ultimately resulted in Hiss's trial and conviction for perjury, and convinced many of the usefulness of congressional committees for uncovering communist subversion. In the wake of Senator McCarthy's downfall, the prestige of HUAC began a gradual decline beginning in the late 1950s. By 1959, the committee was being denounced by former President Harry S. Truman as the "most un-American thing in the country today."

Marshall Plan

was the American program to aid Europe, in which the United States gave monetary support to help rebuild European economies after the end of World War II in order to prevent the spread of Soviet Communism. The plan was in operation for four years beginning in April 1948. The goals of the United States were to rebuild a war-devastated region, remove trade barriers, modernize industry, and make Europe prosperous again. The initiative was named after Secretary of State George Marshall. The plan had bipartisan support in Washington, where the Republicans controlled Congress and the Democrats controlled the White House. The Plan was largely the creation of State Department officials, especially William L. Clayton and George F. Kennan. Marshall spoke of urgent need to help the European recovery in his address at Harvard University in June 1947. The reconstruction plan, developed at a meeting of the participating European states, was established on June 5, 1947. It offered the same aid to the Soviet Union and its allies, but they did not accept it, as to do so would be to allow a degree of US control over the Communist economies. During the four years that the plan was operational, U.S. $13 billion in economic and technical assistance was given to help the recovery of the European countries that had joined in the Organization for European Economic Co-operation. This $13 billion was in the context of a U.S. GDP of $258 billion in 1948, and was on top of $13 billion in American aid to Europe between the end of the war and the start of the Plan that is counted separately from the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan was replaced by the Mutual Security Plan at the end of 1951. The ERP addressed each of the obstacles to postwar recovery. The plan looked to the future, and did not focus on the destruction caused by the war. Much more important were efforts to modernize European industrial and business practices using high-efficiency American models, reducing artificial trade barriers, and instilling a sense of hope and self-reliance. By 1952, as the funding ended, the economy of every participant state had surpassed pre-war levels; for all Marshall Plan recipients, output in 1951 was at least 35% higher than in 1938.[12] Over the next two decades, Western Europe enjoyed unprecedented growth and prosperity, but economists are not sure what proportion was due directly to the ERP, what proportion indirectly, and how much would have happened without it. A common American interpretation of the program's role in European recovery is the one expressed by Paul Hoffman, head of the Economic Cooperation Administration, in 1949, when he told Congress that Marshall aid had provided the "critical margin" on which other investment needed for European recovery depended.[13] The Marshall Plan was one of the first elements of European integration, as it erased trade barriers and set up institutions to coordinate the economy on a continental level — that is, it stimulated the total political reconstruction of western Europe. The Marshall Plan was originally scheduled to end in 1953. Any effort to extend it was halted by the growing cost of the Korean War and rearmament. American Republicans hostile to the plan had also gained seats in the 1950 Congressional elections, and conservative opposition to the plan was revived. Thus the plan ended in 1951, though various other forms of American aid to Europe continued afterwards. The years 1948 to 1952 saw the fastest period of growth in European history. Industrial production increased by 35%. Agricultural production substantially surpassed pre-war levels.[58] The poverty and starvation of the immediate postwar years disappeared, and Western Europe embarked upon an unprecedented two decades of growth that saw standards of living increase dramatically. There is some debate among historians over how much this should be credited to the Marshall Plan. Most reject the idea that it alone miraculously revived Europe, as evidence shows that a general recovery was already underway. Most believe that the Marshall Plan sped this recovery, but did not initiate it. The United States worked to direct the Marshall Plan towards children and an increase of nutritional material for all citizens within western Europe so as to shed a positive light on its goals as it worked to effectively defeat communist threats. One effect of the plan was that it subtly "Americanized" countries, especially Austria, who embraced United States' assistance, through popular culture, such as Hollywood movies and rock n' roll (Bischof, Pelinka and Stiefel 174-175). The political effects of the Marshall Plan may have been just as important as the economic ones. Marshall Plan aid allowed the nations of Western Europe to relax austerity measures and rationing, reducing discontent and bringing political stability. The communist influence on Western Europe was greatly reduced, and throughout the region communist parties faded in popularity in the years after the Marshall Plan. The trade relations fostered by the Marshall Plan helped forge the North Atlantic alliance that would persist throughout the Cold War. At the same time, the nonparticipation of the states of Eastern Europe was one of the first clear signs that the continent was now divided. The Marshall Plan also played an important role in European integration. Both the Americans and many of the European leaders felt that European integration was necessary to secure the peace and prosperity of Europe, and thus used Marshall Plan guidelines to foster integration. In some ways this effort failed, as the OEEC never grew to be more than an agent of economic cooperation. Rather it was the separate European Coal and Steel Community, which notably excluded Britain, that would eventually grow into the European Union. However, the OEEC served as both a testing and training ground for the structures that would later be used by the European Economic Community. The Marshall Plan, linked into the Bretton Woods system, also mandated free trade throughout the region. While some historians today feel some of the praise for the Marshall Plan is exaggerated, it is still viewed favorably and many thus feel that a similar project would help other areas of the world. After the fall of communism several proposed a "Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe" that would help revive that region. Others have proposed a Marshall Plan for Africa to help that continent, and U.S. vice president Al Gore suggested a Global Marshall Plan. "Marshall Plan" has become a metaphor for any very large scale government program that is designed to solve a specific social problem. It is usually used when calling for federal spending to correct a perceived failure of the private sector.

Fair Deal

was the term given to an ambitious set of proposals put forward by United States President Harry S. Truman to the United States Congress in his January 1949 State of the Union address. The term, however, has also been used to describe the domestic reform agenda of the Truman Administration,[1] which governed the United States from 1945 to 1953. It marked a new stage in the history of Modern liberalism in the United States, but with the Conservative Coalition dominant in Congress, the major initiatives did not become law unless they had GOP support. As Neustadt concludes, the most important proposals were aid to education, universal health insurance, FEPC and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. They were all debated at length, then voted down. Nevertheless, enough smaller and less controversial (but still important) items passed that liberals could claim some success. Despite a mixed record of legislative success, the Fair Deal remains significant in establishing the call for universal health care as a rallying cry for the Democratic Party. Lyndon B. Johnson credited Truman's unfulfilled program as influencing Great Society measures such as Medicare that Johnson successfully enacted during the 1960s.[11] The Fair Deal faced much opposition from the many conservative politicians who wanted a reduced role of the federal government. The series of domestic reforms was a major push to transform the United States from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy.[12] In a context of postwar reconstruction and entering the era of the Cold war, the Fair Deal sought to preserve and extend the liberal tradition of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.[5] During this post-WWII time, people were growing more conservative as they were ready to enjoy the prosperity not seen since before The Great Depression.[13] The Fair Deal faced opposition by a coalition of conservative Republicans and predominantly southern conservative Democrats. However, despite strong opposition, there were elements of Truman's agenda that did win congressional approval, such as the public housing subsidies cosponsored by Republican Robert A. Taft under the 1949 National Housing Act, which funded slum clearance and the construction of 810,000 units of low-income housing over a period of six years. Although Truman was unable to implement his Fair Deal program, a great deal of social and economic progress took place in the late Forties and early Fifties. A Census report confirmed that gains in housing, education, living standards, and income under the Truman administration were unparalleled in American history. By 1953, 62 million Americans had jobs, a gain of 11 million in seven years, while unemployment had all but vanished. Farm income, dividends, and corporate income were at all-time highs, and there had not been a failure of an insured bank in nearly nine years. The minimum wage had also been increased while Social Security benefits had been doubled, and 8 million veterans had attended college by the end of the Truman administration as a result of the G.I. Bill, which subsidized the businesses, training, education, and housing of millions of returning veterans. Millions of homes had been financed through previous government programs, and a start was made in slum clearance. Poverty was also significantly reduced, with one estimate suggesting that the percentage of Americans living in poverty had fallen from 33% of the population in 1949 to 28% by 1952. Incomes had risen faster than prices, which meant that real living standards were considerably higher than seven years earlier. Progress had also been made in civil rights, with the desegregation of both the federal civil Service and the armed forces and the creation of the Commission on Civil Rights.

McCarran Act

is a United States federal law of the McCarthy era. It was enacted over President Harry Truman's veto. The Act required Communist organizations to register with the United States Attorney General and established the Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate persons suspected of engaging in subversive activities or otherwise promoting the establishment of a "totalitarian dictatorship," either fascist or communist. Members of these groups could not become citizens and in some cases were prevented from entering or leaving the country. Citizens found in violation could lose their citizenship in five years. The Act also contained an emergency detention statute, giving the President the authority to apprehend and detain "each person as to whom there is a reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage." It tightened alien exclusion and deportation laws and allowed for the detention of dangerous, disloyal, or subversive persons in times of war or "internal security emergency". The Act made picketing a federal courthouse a felony if intended to obstruct the court system or influence jurors or other trial participants. Truman vetoed it on September 22, 1950, and sent Congress a lengthy veto message in which he criticized specific provisions as "the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly since the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798," a "mockery of the Bill of Rights" and a "long step toward totalitarianism". The House overrode the veto without debate by a vote of 286-48 as soon as it received the President's veto message on September 22. The Senate overrode his veto on September 23 after "a twenty-two hour continuous battle" by a vote of 57-10. Thirty-one Republicans and 26 Democrats voted in favor, while five members of each party opposed it.[

Frostbelt

is a region of the United States generally considered to include the Northeastern United States, the Great Lakes Region, and much of the Upper Midwest. The region is known for its cold, frost-producing winters and heavy snowfall. The Frost Belt was for many years the center of American economic activity, and the most populous part of the United States. A shift away from domestic manufacturing beginning in the 1980s dealt a heavy blow to the region's economy. For most of the latter 20th century, the Frost Belt had already been experiencing a stagnating population as Americans relocated to the more temperate Southern and Western regions of the country. This shift was caused by economic factors as well as social developments; the desegregation of the South and easing of racial tensions in that area made it a more welcoming place for African-Americans and other minorities. Even the advent of air conditioning played a role; the South and Southwest, once almost uninhabitable for a part of the year, became a more viable alternative to the colder climates of the Northeast and Midwest. Census results for the past several decades have indicated a population shift from the Frost Belt to the Sun Belt. For various reasons many retirees decide to stay.

United Nations

is the world's largest, foremost, and most prominent international organization. The stated aims of the United Nations include promoting and facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, political freedoms, democracy, and the achievement of lasting world peace. The UN was founded in 1945 after World War II to replace the League of Nations, to stop wars between countries, and to provide a platform for dialogue. It contains multiple subsidiary organizations to carry out its missions. The League of Nations failed to prevent World War II (1939-1945). Because of the widespread recognition that humankind could not afford a third world war, the United Nations was established to replace the flawed League of Nations in 1945 in order to maintain international peace and promote cooperation in solving international economic, social, and humanitarian problems. The earliest concrete plan for a new world organization was begun under the aegis of the U.S. State Department in 1939. Franklin D. Roosevelt first coined the term 'United Nations' as a term to describe the Allied countries. The term was first officially used on 1 January 1942, when 26 governments signed the Atlantic Charter, pledging to continue the war effort. On 25 April 1945, the UN Conference on International Organization began in San Francisco, attended by 50 governments and a number of non-governmental organizations involved in drafting the United Nations Charter. The UN officially came into existence on 24 October 1945 upon ratification of the Charter by the five then-permanent members of the Security Council—France, the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States—and by a majority of the other 46 signatories. The first meetings of the General Assembly, with 51 nations represented, and the Security Council, took place in Methodist Central Hall Westminster in London beginning 6 January 1946. Since its creation, there has been controversy and criticism of the United Nations. In the United States, an early opponent of the UN was the John Birch Society, which began a "get US out of the UN" campaign in 1959, charging that the UN's aim was to establish a "One World Government". After the Second World War, the French Committee of National Liberation was late to be recognized by the US as the government of France, and so the country was initially excluded from the conferences that aimed at creating the new organization. Charles de Gaulle criticized the UN, famously calling it a machin ("contraption"), and was not convinced that a global security alliance would help maintain world peace, preferring direct defence treaties between countries. The United Nations' system is based on five principal organs (formerly six - the Trusteeship Council suspended operations in 1994, upon the independence of Palau, the last remaining UN trustee territory); the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Secretariat, and the International Court of Justice. Four of the five principal organs are located at the main United Nations Headquarters located on international territory in New York City. The International Court of Justice is located in The Hague, while other major agencies are based in the UN offices at Geneva, Vienna, and Nairobi.Other UN institutions are located throughout the world. The six official languages of the United Nations, used in intergovernmental meetings and documents, are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. The Secretariat uses two working languages, English and French. Four of the official languages are the national languages of the permanent members of the Security Council (the United Kingdom and the United States share English as a de facto official language); Spanish and Arabic are the languages of the two largest blocs of official languages outside of the permanent members (Spanish being official in 20 countries, Arabic in 26). Five of the official languages were chosen when the UN was founded; Arabic was added later in 1973. The United Nations Editorial Manual states that the standard for English language documents is British usage and Oxford spelling, the Chinese writing standard is Simplified Chinese. This replaced Traditional Chinese in 1971 when the UN representation of China was changed from the Republic of China to the People's Republic of China (see China and the United Nations for details).

Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI bill)

was a law that provided a range of benefits for returning World War II veterans (commonly referred to as G.I.s). Benefits included low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans to start a business or farm, cash payments of tuition and living expenses to attend college, high school or vocational education, as well as one year of unemployment compensation. It was available to every veteran who had been on active duty during the war years for at least ninety days and had not been dishonorably discharged; combat was not required. By the end of the program in 1956, roughly 2.2 million veterans had used the G.I. Bill education benefits in order to attend colleges or universities, and an additional 6.6 million used these benefits for some kind of training program. Since the original 1944 law, the term has come to include other veteran benefit programs created to assist veterans of subsequent wars as well as peacetime service. Historians and economists consider the G.I. Bill a major political success—especially in contrast to the treatments of World War I veterans—and a major contribution to America's stock of human capital that sped long-term economic growth. The bill was introduced in the House on January 10, 1944, and in the Senate, the following day, both chambers approved their own versions of the bill. The bill that President Roosevelt initially proposed was not as far reaching. The G.I. Bill was created to prevent a repetition of the Bonus March of 1932 and a relapse into the Great Depression after World War II ended. Another provision was known as the 52-20 clause. This enabled all former servicemen to receive $20 once a week for 52 weeks a year while they were looking for work. Less than 20 percent of the money set aside for the 52-20 Club was distributed. Rather, most returning servicemen quickly found jobs or pursued higher education. A look at the available statistics reveals that these later bills had an important influence on the lives of returning veterans, higher education, and the economy. A greater percentage of Vietnam veterans used G.I. Bill education benefits (72 percent) than World War II veterans (51 percent) or Korean War veterans (43 percent).

National Security Act

was an Act of Congress signed by President Truman on 26 July 1947, which realigned and reorganized the U.S. Armed Forces, foreign policy, and Intelligence Community apparatus in the aftermath of World War II. The majority of the provisions of the Act took effect on September 18, 1947, the day after the Senate confirmed James Forrestal as the first Secretary of Defense. His power was extremely limited and it was difficult for him to exercise the authority to make his office effective. This was later changed in the amendment to the act in 1949, creating what was to be the Department of Defense. The Act merged the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into the National Military Establishment, headed by the Secretary of Defense. It was also responsible for the creation of a Department of the Air Force which made the Army Air Forces into its own service. Initially, each of the three service secretaries maintained quasi-cabinet status, but the act was amended on August 10, 1949, to assure their subordination to the Secretary of Defense. At the same time, the NME was renamed as the Department of Defense. The purpose was to unify the Army, Navy, and what was soon to become the Air Force into a federated structure. Aside from the military reorganization, the act established the National Security Council, a central place of coordination for national security policy in the executive branch, and the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S.'s first peacetime intelligence agency. The function of the council was to advise the president on domestic, foreign, and military policies so that they may cooperate more tightly and efficiently. Departments in the government were encouraged to voice their opinions to the council in order to make a more sound decision. The Joint Chiefs of Staff was officially established under Title II, Section 211 of the original National Security Act of 1947 before Sections 209-214 of Title II were repealed by the law enacting Title 10 and Title 32,] United States Code (Act of August 10, 1956, 70A Stat. 676) to replace them. The act and its changes, along with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, were major components of the Truman administration's Cold War strategy. The bill signing took place aboard Truman's VC-54C presidential aircraft Sacred Cow, the first aircraft used for the role of Air Force One.

Nuremburg Trials

were a series of military tribunals, held by the Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany, in 1945-46, at the Palace of Justice. The first and best known of these trials, described as "[t]he greatest trial in history" by Norman Birkett, one of the British judges who presided over it,[1] was the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT). Held between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946,[2] the Tribunal was given the task of trying 23 of the most important political and military leaders of the Third Reich, though one of the defendants, Martin Bormann, was tried in absentia, while another, Robert Ley, committed suicide within a week of the trial's commencement. Not included were Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels, all of whom had committed suicide several months before the indictment was signed. The second set of trials of lesser war criminals was conducted under Control Council Law No. 10 at the US Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT); among them included the Doctors' Trial and the Judges' Trial. This article primarily deals with the IMT; see the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials for details on those trials. A precedent for trying those accused of war crimes had been set at the end of World War I in the Leipzig War Crimes Trials held in May to July 1921 before the Reichsgericht (German Supreme Court) in Leipzig, although these had been on a very limited scale and largely regarded as ineffectual. At the beginning of 1940, the Polish government-in-exile asked the British and French governments to condemn the German invasion of their country. The British initially declined to do so; however, in April 1940, a joint British-French-Polish declaration was issued. Relatively bland because of Anglo-French reservations, it proclaimed the trio's "desire to make a formal and public protest to the conscience of the world against the action of the German government whom they must hold responsible for these crimes which cannot remain unpunished." Three-and-a-half years later, the stated intention to punish the Germans was much more trenchant. On 1 November 1943, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States published their "Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe", which gave a "full warning" that, when the Nazis were defeated, the Allies would "pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth ... in order that justice may be done. ... The above declaration is without prejudice to the case of the major war criminals whose offences have no particular geographical location and who will be punished by a joint decision of the Government of the Allies." This Allied intention to dispense justice was reiterated at the Yalta Conference and at Berlin in 1945. British War Cabinet documents, released on 2 January 2006, showed that as early as December 1944, the Cabinet had discussed their policy for the punishment of the leading Nazis if captured. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had then advocated a policy of summary execution in some circumstances, with the use of an Act of Attainder to circumvent legal obstacles, being dissuaded from this only by talks with US leaders later in the war. In late 1943, during the Tripartite Dinner Meeting at the Tehran Conference, the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, proposed executing 50,000-100,000 German staff officers. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, joked that perhaps 49,000 would do. Churchill, believing them to be serious, denounced the idea of "the cold blooded execution of soldiers who fought for their country" and that he'd rather be "taken out in the courtyard and shot" himself than partake in any such action. However, he also stated that war criminals must pay for their crimes and that in accordance with the Moscow Document which he himself had written, they should be tried at the places where the crimes were committed. Churchill was vigorously opposed to executions "for political purposes." According to the minutes of a Roosevelt-Stalin meeting at Yalta, on 4 February 1945, at the Livadia Palace, President Roosevelt "said that he had been very much struck by the extent of German destruction in the Crimea and therefore he was more bloodthirsty in regard to the Germans than he had been a year ago, and he hoped that Marshal Stalin would again propose a toast to the execution of 50,000 officers of the German Army." The International Military Tribunal was opened on October 20, 1945, in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg.[24][25] The first session was presided over by the Soviet judge, Nikitchenko. The prosecution entered indictments against 24 major war criminals and seven organizations - the leadership of the Nazi party, the Reich Cabinet, the Schutzstaffel (SS), Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Gestapo, the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the "General Staff and High Command", comprising several categories of senior military officers. These organizations were to be declared "criminal" if found guilty. The death sentences were carried out 16 October 1946 by hanging using the standard drop method instead of long drop. The U.S. army denied claims that the drop length was too short which caused the condemned to die slowly from strangulation instead of quickly from a broken neck. But evidence remains that some of the condemned men died agonizingly slowly taking from between 14 minutes to choke to death to as long as struggling for 28 minutes. The executioner was John C. Woods. The executions took place in the gymnasium of the court building (demolished in 1983). Of the 12 defendants sentenced to death by hanging, two were not hanged: Hermann Göring committed suicide the night before the execution and Martin Bormann was not present when convicted (he had, unbeknownst to the Allies, most likely been killed trying to escape from Berlin in May 1945). The remaining 10 defendants sentenced to death were hanged.