APUSH Units 6-11

Article X of the League Covenant

After failing to amend the treaty outright, Lodge finally came up with fourteen formal reservations to it. These safeguards reserved the rights of the US under the Monroe Doctrine and the Constitution and otherwise sought to protect American sovereignty. Senator Lodge and other critics were esp. alarmed by Article X of the League because it morally bound the US to aid any member victimized by external aggression. A jealous Congress wanted to reserve for itself the constitutional war-declaring power.

conquered territories in trust to League of Nations

Wilson's ultimate goal was a world parliament to be known as the League of Nations, but he first bent his energies to preventing an vengeful parceling out of the former colonies and protectorates of the vanquished powers. He forced through a compromise between naked imperialism and Wilsonian idealism. The victors would not take possession of the conquered territory outright, but would receive it as trustees of the League of Nations. Strategic Syria, for example, was awarded to France, and oil-rich Iraq went to Britain. But in practice this half-loaf solution was little more than the old prewar colonialism, thinly disguised.

Catholic schools, Hebrew schools

Immigrants who stayed in America struggled heroically to preserve their traditional culture. Catholics expanded their parochial-school system and Jews established Hebrew schools. ADD?

Henry Kissinger

In 1969 the former Harvard professor, Dr. Henry Kissinger, had begun meeting secretly on Nixon's behalf (he was Nixon's national security adviser) with North Vietnamese officials in Paris to negotiate an end to the war in Vietnam. He was meanwhile preparing the president's path to Beijing and Moscow (Nixon believed that the Chinese-Soviet tension afforded the US an opportunity to play off one antagonist against the other and to enlist the aid of both in pressuring North Vietnam into peace).

Stalingrad

In Sept 1942 the Russians stalled the German steamroller at rubble-strewn Stalingrad, graveyard of Hitler's hopes. More than a score of invading divisions, caught in an icy noose, later surrendered or were "mopped up." In Nov 1942 the resilient Russians unleashed a crushing counteroffensive, which was never seriously reversed. A year later Stalin had regained about two-thirds of the blood-soaked Soviet motherland wrested from him by the German invader.

"Federal Reserve Notes"

The Federal Reserve Board was also empowered to issue paper money - "Federal Reserve Notes" - backed by commercial paper, such as promissory notes of business people. Thus the amount of money in circulation could be swiftly increased as needed for the legitimate requirements of business.

Korematsu v. U.S. and later reparations

The wartime Supreme Court in 1944 upheld the constitutionality of the Japanese relocation in Korematsu vs. US. But more than four decades later, in 1988, the US government officially apologized for its actions and approved the payment of reparations of $20,000 to each camp survivor.

stock exchange speculation

The stock exchange provided an even greater sensations. Speculation ran wild, and an orgy of boom-or-bust trading pushed the market up to dizzy peaks.

CIO, General Motors, sit-down strike

Undaunted, the rebellious CIO moved on a concerted scale into the huge automobile industry. Late in 1936 the workers resorted to a revolutionary technique known as the sit-down strike: they refused to leave the factory building of General Motors at Flint, Michigan, and thus prevented the importation of strikebreakers. Conservative respecters of private property were scandalized. The CIO finally won a resounding victory when its union, after heated negotiations, was recognized by General Motors as the sole bargaining agency for its employees.

multiple use resource management

Under Roosevelt professional foresters and engineers developed a policy of "multiple-use resource management." They sought to combine recreation, sustained-yield logging, watershed protection, and summer stock grazing on the same expanse of federal land.

Schenck v. United States; "clear and present danger"

Virtually any criticism of the government could be censored and punished. Some critics claimed that the new laws were bending, if not breaking, the First Amendment. In Schenck v. US (1919), the Supreme Court affirmed their legality, arguing that freedom of speech could be revoked when such a speech posed a "clear and present danger" to the nation.

pro-business laissez-faire policies (explain)

Well intentioned but weak minded, Harding was the perfect "front" for enterprising imperialists. This new Old Guard hoped to improve on the old business doctrine of laissez-faire. Their plea was not simply for government to keep its hands off business, but for government to help guide business along the path to profits. They subtly and effectively achieved their ends by putting the courts and the administrative bureaus into the safekeeping of fellow stand-patters for the duration of the decade.

Grover Cleveland 1892; laissez-faire idea

With the Populists divided and the Republicans discredited, Grover Cleveland took office once again in 1893, the only president ever reelected after defeat. He was the same old Cleveland, it was not the same old country. ADD

Armistice Day, November 11, 1918

Berlin was ready to hoist the white flag. They turned to Wilson in Oct 1918, seeking a peace treaty based on the 14 points. The president made it clear that the kaiser must be thrown overboard before an armistice could be negotiated. War-weary Germans, whom Wilson had been trying to turn against their "military master," took the hint. The kaiser was forced to flee to Holland. The exhausted Germans were through. They laid down their arms at eleven o'clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 and an eerie, numbing silence fell over the Western front. War-taut America burst into a delirium of around-the-clock rejoicing as streets were jammed with laughing, whooping, milling, dancing masses. The war to end wars had ended.

Stalwarts, Half-Breeds

Boisterous infighting over patronage beset the Republican party in the 1870s and 1880s. A "__" faction, led by Roscoe Conkling, US senator from New York, unblushingly embraced the time-honored system of swapping civil-service jobs for votes. Opposed to the Conklingites were the so-called ___, who flirted coyly with civil-service reform, but whose real quarrel with the __ was over who should grasp the ladle that dished out the spoils. The champion of the H____ was James G. Blaine of Maine. Conkling and Blaine succeeded only in stalemating each other and deadlocking their party.

Indian Territory (Oklahoma)

In the 1860s the federal government intensified this policy (the Fort Laramie treaties) and herded Indians into still smaller confines, principally the "Great Sioux reservation" in Dakota Territory, and the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, into which dozens of southern Plains tribes were forced.

"waving the bloody shirt"

Republicans whipped up enthusiasm for Grant in the 1868 elections by energetically "______" - that is, reviving gory memories of the Civil War - which became for the first time a prominent feature of a presidential campaign. The expression is said to have derived from a speech by Representative Benjamin E. Butler of Massachusetts, who allegedly waved before the House the bloodstained nightshirt of a Klan-flogged carpetbagger. "Vote as You Shot" was a powerful Republican slogan aimed at Union army veterans.

Robert Kennedy campaign, assassination

Robert Kennedy stirred a passionate response among workers, African Americans, Latinos, and young people. Senators McCarthy and Kennedy dueled in several state primaries, with Kennedy's bandwagon gathering ever-increasing speed. But on June 5, 1968, the night of an exciting victory in the California primary, Kennedy was shot to death by a young Arab immigrant resentful of the candidate's pro-Israel views.

trust; Standard Oil

Rockefeller perfected a device for controlling bothersome rivals - the "__." Stockholders in various small oil companies assigned their stock to the board of directors of his ____ Company, formed in 1870. It then consolidated and concerted the operations of the previously competing enterprises. Ruthlessly wielding vast power, ____ soon cornered virtually the entire world petroleum market. Weaker competitors, left out of the __ agreement, were forced to the wall.

Yasir Arafat, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)

The Six Day War markedly intensified the problems of the already volatile Middle East, compressing and focusing the Arab-Israeli conflict into an intractable standoff between the Israelis and the Palestinians, now lead by Yasir Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization. add?

1921 joint resolution (US ends WWI hostilities)

The US, having rejected the Treaty of Versailles, was still technically at war with Germany, Austria, and Hungary nearly three years after the armistice. Peace was finally achieved by lone-wolf tactics. In July 1921 Congress passed a simple joint-resolution that declared the war officially ended.

"wildcat" strikes; War Labor Board

The War Labor Board imposed ceilings on wage increases. Labor unions, whose membership grew from about 10 million to more than 13 million workers during the war, fiercely resented the government-dictated wage ceilings. Despite the no-strike pledges of most of the major unions, a rash of labor walkouts plagued the war effort. Prominent among the strikers were the Uniter Mine Workers, who several times were called off the job by their crusty and iron-willed chieftain, John L. Lewis. Add?

farmers against various trusts

The farmers were "farmed" by the corporations and processors. They were at the mercy of the harvester trust, the barbed-wire trust, and the fertilizer trust, all of which could control output and raise prices to extortionate levels. Middlemen to a juicy "cut" from the selling price of goods that the farmers bought, while operators pushed storage rates to the ceiling at grain warehouses and elevators. The manufacturers and the railroad barons knew how to combine to promote their interests, and so, increasingly, did industrial workers. But the farmers were by nature independent and individualistic - dead set against consolidation or regimentation.

silver supporters and the "Crime of '73"

Down but not out, debtors now looked for relief to another precious metal, silver. The "sacred white metal," they claimed, had received a raw deal. In the early 1870s, the Treasury stubbornly and unrealistically maintained that an ounce of silver was worth only one-sixteenth as much as an ounce of gold, though open-market prices for silver were higher. Silver miners thus stopped offering their shiny product for sale to the federal mints. With no silver flowing into the federal coffers, Congress formally dropped the coinage of silver dollars in 1873. Fate later played a sly joke when new silver discoveries later in the 1870s shot production up and forced silver prices down. Westerners from silver-mining states joined the debtors in assailing the "Crime of '73," demanding a return to the "Dollar of Our Daddies." Like the demand for more greenbacks, the demand for the coinage of more silver was nothing more or less than another scheme for inflation.

"clasp hands across the bloody chasm"

Greeley pleased the Democrats (who he had earlier called traitors, slave shippers, saloon keepers, horse thieves, and idiots) when he pleaded for the clasping of hands across "_____." (He wanted everyone to move on from the Civil War and stop punishing the South).

feminism

Many of the protest movements that convulsed the country in the 1960s died out. One major exception to this pattern stood out: although they had their differences, American feminists showed vitality and momentum. They won legislative and judicial victories and provoked an intense rethinking of gender roles. ADD?

detente with the Soviet Union

Nixon next traveled to Moscow in May 1972 to play his "China card" in a game of high-stakes diplomacy in the Kremlin. The Soviets, hungry for American food-stuffs and alarmed over the possibility of intensified rivalry with an American-backed China, were ready to deal. Nixon's visits ushered in an era of detente, or relaxed tension, with the two communist powers and produced several significant agreements in 1972, including a three-year arrangement by which the food-rich US agreed to sell the Soviets at least $750 million worth of wheat, corn, and other cereals.

affirmative action; reverse discrimination

Nixon's Philadelphia Plan drastically altered the meaning of "affirmative action." Johnson had intended affirmative action to protect individuals against discrimination. Nixon now transformed and escalated affirmative action into a program that conferred privileges on certain groups. Critics assailed the new style of affirmative action as "reverse discrimination," imposed by executive order and judicial decision, not by democratically elected representatives.

"Brain Trust"

Roosevelt consistently preached a New Deal for the "forgotten man," but he was annoyingly vague and somewhat contradictory. Many of his speeches were "ghostwritten" by the "Brain Trust," a small group of reform-minded intellectuals. They were predominantly youngish college professors who later authored much of the New Deal legislation.

nationwide banking holiday

Roosevelt moved decisively. Now that he had full responsibility (after Inauguration), he boldly declared a nationwide banking holiday, March 6-10, as a prelude to opening the backs on a sounder basis. He then summoned the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress into special session to cope with the national emergency.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)

The Glass-Steagall Banking Reform Act provided for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insured individual deposits up to $5,000 (later raised). Thus ended the disgraceful epidemic of bank failures, which dated back to the "wildcat" days of Andrew Jackson.

National Security Council (NSC); CIA

The National Security Act also established the National Security Council to advise the president on security matters and the Central Intelligence Agency to coordinate the government's foreign fact-gathering.

Federal Housing Administration (FHA)

The New Deal meanwhile framed sturdy new policies for housing construction. To speed recovery and better homes, Roosevelt set up the Federal Housing Administration as early as 1934. The building industry was to be stimulated by small loans to house-holders, both for improving their dwellings and for completing new ones. So popular did the FHA prove to be that it was one of the few "alphabetical agencies" to outlast the age of Roosevelt.

Federal Trade Commission

Wilson pushed toward the last remaining rampart in the "triple wall of privilege" - the trusts. Early in 1914 he again went to Congress in personal appearance that still carried drama. Congress responded with the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. The new law empowered a presidentially appointed commission to turn a searchlight on industries engaged in interstate commerce, such as the meatpackers. The commissioners were expected to crush monopoly at the source by rooting out unfair trade practices, including unlawful competition, false advertising, mislabeling, adulteration, and bribery.

Election 1912 (list 5 candidates)

Woodrow Wilson- Democrat; Theodore Roosevelt- Progressive; William H Taft- Republican; Eugene V. Debs- Socialist; and E.W. Chafin- Prohibition. Former professor Wilson won handily, with 435 electoral votes. The "third-party" candidate Roosevelt finished in second, receiving 88 electoral votes, and Taft won only 8 electoral votes. Wilson, with only 41 percent of the popular vote, was clearly a minority president, though his party won a majority in Congress.

bicentennial; election 1976 and Jimmy Carter

America's 200th birthday, in 1976, fell during a presidential election year -- a fitting coincidence for a proud democracy. Ford sought nomination for the presidency in his own right and won the Republican nod at the Kansas City convention. The Democratic standard-bearer was 51 year old James Earl Carter, Jr. A former Georgia governor who insisted on humbler "Jimmy" as his first name, this born-again Baptist touch many people with his down-home sincerity. Untainted by ties with a corrupt and cynical Washington, he attracted may voters as an outsider who would clean the disorderly house of "big government." Carter squeezed out a narrow victory on election day, with 51% of the popular vote and an electoral vote of 297 to 240.

Panay incident

America's isolationist mood intensified, esp. in regard to China. In Dec 1937 Japanese aviators bombed and sank an American gunboat, the "Panay," in Chinese waters, with a loss of two killed and thirty wounded. In the days of 1898, when the "Maine" went down, this outrage might have provoked war. But after Tokyo hastened to make the necessary apologies and pay a proper indemnity, Americans breathed a sigh of relief. Japanese militarists were thus encouraged to vent their anger against the "superior" white race by subjecting American civilians in China, both male and female, to humiliating slappings and strippings.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Among the legacies of the Nixon years was the creation in 1970 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a companion body, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OHSA). Their births climaxed two decades of mounting concern for the environment, beginning with the establishment in LA of the Air Pollution Control Office in 1950.

"pork barrel" bills

Bills politicians got passed for people in exchange of being elected/being paid. "Greasy" bills. LOOK IN BOOK

"Solid South" Democrats

Democrats had a solid electoral base in the South and in the northern industrial cities, teeming with immigrants and controlled by well-oiled political machines. ADD?

John Kennedy's New Frontier

From the outset JFK inspired high expectations, esp. among the young. His challenge of a "New Frontier" quickened patriotic pulses. ADD?

"Magna Carta" of labor

Union leader Samuel Gompers hailed the Clayton Act as the Magna Carta of labor because it legally lifted human labor out of the category of "a commodity or article of commerce." But the rejoicing was premature, as conservative judges in later years continued to clip the wings of the union movement.

rationing

When the Japanese invasion of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies snapped America's lifeline of natural rubber, the government imposed a national speed limit and gasoline rationing in order to conserve rubber and built fifty-one synthetic-rubber plants. Rationing held down the consumption of critical goods such as meat and butter, though some "black marketeers" and "meatleggers" cheated the system.

William Randolph Hearst

A close and ruthless competitor of Pulitzer's was the youthful ____, who had been expelled from Harvard College for a crude prank. Able to draw on his California farther's mining millions, he ultimately built up a powerful chain of newspapers, beginning with the "San Francisco Examiner" in 1887.

composer John Philip Sousa marches

An exhilarating new martial spirit thrilled America, buoyed along by the new popular military marching-band music of John Phillip Sousa. ADD

Sherman Silver Purchase Act repealed

Alarmingly, the gold reserve in the Treasury dropped below $100 million, which was popularly regarded as the safe minimum for supporting about $350 million in outstanding paper money. Cleveland saw no alternative but to halt the bleeding away of gold by engineering a repeal of the ___ of 1890. For this purpose he summoned Congress into an extra session in the summer of 1893. ADD? page 527

Comstock Law

Armed after 1873 with a federal statute - the notorious "____" - this self-appointed defender of sexual purity boasted that he had confiscated new fewer than 202,679 "obscene pictures and photos"; 4,185 "boxes of pills, powers, etc., used by abortionists"; and 26 "obscene pictures, framed on walls of saloons." His proud claim was that he had driven at least fifteen people to suicide. add?

Taliban rule in Afghanistan; U.S. troops

Bin Laden had taken refuge in landlocked Afghanistan, ruled by Islamic fundamentalists called the Taliban. When the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden, Bush ordered a massive military campaign against Afghanistan. Within three months American and Afghan rebel forces had overthrown the Taliban but failed to find bin Laden, and Americans continued to live in fear of future attacks. add?

conscription law

Congress also passed a conscription law, approved Sept 6, 1940. Under this measure -- America's first peacetime draft -- provision was made for training each year 1.2 million troops and 800,000 reserves. The act was later adapted to the requirements of a global war.

Michael Harrington's The Other America

Public support of LBJ's antipoverty war was aroused by Michael Harrington's "The OTher America" (1962), which revealed that in affluent America 20% of the population -- and over 40% of the black population -- suffered in poverty.

"Wall Street" and Eastern bankers

Ruinous rates of interest, running from 8 to 40 percent, were charged on mortgages, largely by agents of eastern loan companies. The windburned sons and daughters of the sod, who felt that they deserved praise for developing the country, cried out in despair against the loan sharks and the Wall Street octopus. ADD?

Alvin C. York

Tennessee-bred Alvin C. York, a member of an antiwar religious sect, became a hero when he single-handedly killed 20 Germans and captured 132 more. (During Pershing's Meuse-Argonne offense from Sept 26 to Nov 11, 1918).

reservationists proposals

ADD!!

settlement houses

An institution in an inner-city area providing educational, recreational, and other social services to the community. Following Jane Addams's lead, women founded ____ in other cities as well. Conspicuous among the houses was Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement in New York, which opened its doors in 1893. The ___ became centers of women's activism and of social reform. add?

Margaret Sanger, contraceptives

An organized birth-control movement, led by fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, openly championed the use of contraceptives. add?

Frank Lloyd Wright

Architecture also married itself to the new materialism and functionalism. Long-range city planning was being intelligently projected, and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright were advancing the theory that buildings should grow from their sites and not slavishly imitate Greek and Roman importations. The machine age outdid itself in NYC when it thrust upward the cloud-brushing Empire State Building, 102 stories high.

ideas of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge

At the same time of Strong's writings, aggressive Americans like Theodore Roosevelt and Congressmen (later Senator) Henry Cabot Lodge were interpreting Darwinism to mean that the earth belonged to the strong and fit - that is, to Uncle Sam. This view threatened late comers to the colonial scramble scooped up leavings from the banquet table of earlier diners.

Macy's, Marshall Field's

Cavernous department stores such as Macy's in New York and Marshall Field's in Chicago attracted urban middle-class shoppers and provided urban working-class jobs, many of them for women. The bustling emporiums also heralded a dawning era of consumerism and accentuated widening class divisions.

Operation Wetback

Eisenhower responded to the Mexican government's worries that illegal Mexican immigration to the US would undercut the bracero program of legally imported farmworkers inaugurated during WWII. In a massive roundup of illegal immigrants, dubbed Operation Wetback in reference to the migrants' watery route across the Rio Grande, as many as 1 million Mexicans were apprehended and returned to Mexico in 1954.

Henry J. Kaiser "Liberty" ships

Massive military orders -- over $100 bullion in 1942 -- almost instantly soaked up the idle industrial capacity of the still-lingering Great Depression. Miracle-man shipbuilder Henry Kaiser was dubbed "Sir Launchalot" for his prodigies of ship construction; one of his ships was fully assembled in fourteen days, complete with life jackets and coat hangers. ADD liberty ships.

Iraq; weapons of mass destruction (WMD)

Itching for a fight, and egged on by hawkish VP Cheney and other "neoconservative" advisers, Bush accused the Iraqi regime of all manner of wrongdoing: oppressing its own people; frustrating the weapons inspectors (avoiding the weapon inspections); developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction (WMD); and supporting terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda. add?

Payne Aldrich tariff and problems

Lowering the barriers of the formidable protective tariff was high on the agenda of the progressive members of the Republican party, and they at first thought they had a friend and ally in Taft. True to his campaign promises to reduce tariffs, Taft called Congress into special session in March 1909. The House proceeded to pass a moderately reductive bill, but senatorial reactionaries, led by Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, tacked on hundreds of upward tariff revisions. After much hand-wringing Taft signed the Payne-Aldrich Bill, thus betraying his campaign promises and outraging the progressive wing of his party, heavily drawn from the Midwest. add?

Pentagon Papers

New combustibles fueled the fires of antiwar discontent in June 1971, when former Pentagon official leaked to The New York Times the "Pentagon Papers," a top-secret Pentagon study that documented the blunders and deceptions of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, esp. the provoking of the 1964 North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin.

suburbs

Other social by-products of the automobile were visible. Autobuses made possible the consolidation of schools and to some extent churches. The sprawling suburbs spread out still farther from the urban core, as America became a nation of commuters.

Soviet Union "sphere of influence"

Stalin aimed above all to guarantee the security of the Soviet Union. The USSR had twice in the 20th century been stabbed in its heartland by attacks across the windswept plains of Eastern Europe. Stalin made it clear from the outset of the war that he was determined to have friendly governments along the Soviet western border, esp. in Poland. By maintaining an extensive Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern and central Europe, the USSR could protect itself and consolidate its revolutionary base as the world's leading communist country. To many Americans, that "sphere of influence" looked like an ill-gained "empire." add?

black workers move north; the "Great Migration"

The black workers who entered the steel mills in 1919 were but a fraction of the tens of thousands of southern blacks drawn to the North in wartime by the magnet of war-industry employment. These migrants made up the small-scale beginnings of a great northward African American trek that would eventually grow to massive proportions. Their sudden appearance in previously all-white areas sometimes sparked interracial violence.

South Vietnam; U.S. "military advisors"

The corrupt, right-wing Diem government in Saigon, despite a deluge of American dollars, had ruled shakily since the partition of Vietnam in 1954. Anti-Diem agitators noisily threatened to topple the pro-American government from power. In a fateful decision late in 1961, Kennedy ordered a sharp increase in the number of "military advisers" (US troops) in South Vietnam.

Captain Mahan "Influence of Sea Power Upon History"

The development of a new steel navy also focused attention overseas. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan's book of 1890, "The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783," argued that control of the sea was key to world dominance. Mahan helped stimulate the naval race among the great powers that gained momentum around the turn of the century.

"Dixiecrat" Democrats, Strom Thurmond

Truman's nomination split the democratic party wide open. Embittered southern Democrats from thirteen states next mer in their own convention, in Alabama, with Confederate flags brashly in evidence. Amid scenes of heated defiance, these "Dixiecrats" nominated Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on a States' Rights party ticket.

John Steinbeck "The Grapes of Wrath"

The dismal story of these human tumbleweeds (Okies and Arkies) was realistically portrayed in John Steinbeck's best-selling novel "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939), which proved to be the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of the Dust Bowl.

post-war economic problems; Taft-Hartley Act

The faltering economy in the initial postwar years threatened to confirm the worst predictions of the doomsayers who foresaw another Great Depression. Real gross national production slumped sickeningly in 1946 and 1947 from its wartime peak. With the removal of wartime price controls, prices giddily levitated by 33 percent in 1946-1947. The growing muscle of organized labor deeply annoyed many conservatives. They had their revenge against labor's New Deal gains in 1947, when the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Taft-Harley Act over President Truman's vigorous veto. Labor leaders condemned the Taft-Harley Act as a "slave-labor law." It outlawed the "closed" (all-union) shop, made unions liable for damages that resulted from jurisdictional disputes among themselves, and required union leaders to take a noncommunist oath.

Domino theory (p 881)

According to the domino theory, if the US declined to fight in Vietnam, other countries would lose their faith in America's will (or their fear of American power) and would tumble one after the other like "dominoes" into the Soviet camp. Revisionists stressed what they saw as the economic necessity behind the domino theory: losing in Vietnam, they claimed, would unravel the American economy.

Pearl Harbor naval base

Americans gradually came to regard the Hawaiian Islands as a virtual extension of their own coastline. The State Department, beginning in the 1840s, sternly warned other powers to keep their grasping hands off. America's grip was further tightened in 1887 by a treaty with the native government guaranteeing priceless naval-base rights at spacious Pearl Harbor.

Pure Food and Drug Act, 1906

As a companion to the Meat Inspection Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was designed to prevent the adulteration and mislabeling of foods and pharmaceuticals.

Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 and loopholes

At long last the masses of people began to mobilize against monopoly. They first tried to control the trusts through state legislation, as they had earlier attempted to curb railroads. Failing here, as they did before, they were forced to appeal to Congress. After prolonged pulling and hauling, the ___ of 1890 was finally signed into law. It flatly forbade combinations in restraint of trade, without and distinction between "good" trusts and "bad" trusts. Bigness, not badness, was the sin. The law proved ineffective because it contained legal loopholes through which clever corporation lawyers could wiggle.

Freedom Summer; violence and murders

Blacks joined hands with white civil rights workers in a massive voter-registration drive in Mississippi during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964. In late June 1964, one black and two white civil rights workers went missing in Mississippi. Their badly beaten bodies were later found buried beneath an earthen dam. FBI investigators eventually arrested 21 white Mississippians, including the local sheriff, in connection with the killings. But white juries refused to convict the whites for these murders. But white juries refused to convict the whites for these murders.

Chief Justice Earl Warren

Chief Justice Earl Warren, former governor of California, shocked traditionalists with his active judicial intervention in previously taboo social issues. Publicly snubbed and privately scorned by President Eisenhower, Warren courageously led the Court to address urgent issues that Congress and the president preferred to avoid, as "Impeach Earl Warren" signs blossomed along the nation's highways.

"Ghost Dance", the massacre at Wounded Knee

Christian reformers, who often administered educational facilities on the reservations, sometimes withheld food to force the Indians to give up their tribal religion and assimilate to white society. In 1884 these zealous white souls joined with military men in successfully persuading the federal government to outlaw the sacred Sun Dance. When the "Ghost Dance" cult later spread to the Dakota Sioux, the army bloodily stamped it out in 1890 at the so-called Battle of Wounded Knee. In the fighting thus provoked, an estimated of 200 Indian men, women, and children were killed, as well as 29 invading soldiers.

National American Woman Suffrage Association

Fiery feminists continued to insist on the ballot. They had been demanding the vote since before the Civil War, but many high-minded female reformers had temporarily shelved the cause of women to battle for the rights of blacks. In 1890 militant suffragists formed the ____. Its founders included aging pioneers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Vietnamese refugees "boat people" (page 955)

Fleeing from the ravages of poverty and from the oppressive communist government, Vietnamese immigrants had crammed themselves and their few possessions into little boats, hoping to reach Hong Kong or get picked up by ships. Eventually, many of these "boat people" reached the US. ADD?

William Taft as governor of the Philippines

Future president William H. Taft, an able and amiable Ohioan who weighed some 350 pounds, became civil governor of the Philippines in 1901. Forming a strong attachment to the Filipinos, he called them his "little brown brothers" and danced light-footedly with the Filipino women.

Ford's pardon of Nixon

Gerald Rudolph Ford, the first man to be made president solely by a vote of Congress, entered the besmirched WHite House in August 1974. Out of the clear sky, he granted a complete pardon to Nixon for any crimes he may have committed as president, discovered or undiscovered. Democrats were outraged, and lingering suspicions about the circumstances of the pardon cast a dark shadow over Ford's prospects of being elected president in his own right in 1976.

fire-bomb raid over Tokyo

Giant bomber attacks were more spectacular. Launched from Saipan and other captured Mariana islands, they were reduced Japan's fragile cities to cinders. The massive fire-bomb raid on Tokyo, March 9-10, 1945, was annihilating. It destroyed over 250,000 buildings, gutted a quarter of the city, and killed an estimated 83,000 people -- a loss comparable to that later inflicted by the atomic bombs.

Watts riot

Just five days after Johnson signed the landmark voting law, a bloody riot erupted in Watts, a black ghetto in Los Angeles. Blacks enraged by police brutality, burned and looted their own neighborhoods for nearly a week. When the smoke finally cleared over the Los Angeles basin, thirty-one blacks and three whites lay dead, more than a thousand people had been injured, and hundreds of buildings stood charred and gutted. add?

Clean Air Act 1970

Legislatively armed by the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and similar laws, the EPA and OSHA stood on the frontline of the battle for ecological sanity. ADD?

meat trust: Armour, Swift

Other trusts blossomed along with the American Beauty of oil. The ___ industry arose on the backs of bawling western herds, and __ kings like Gustav F. ___ and Phillip ___ took their place among the new royalty. ADD

international debt owed to U.S. banks

Overshadowing all other foreign-policy problems in the 1920s was the knotty issue of international debts, a complicated tangle of private loans, Allied war debts, and German reparations payments. By 1922 America had become a creditor nation in the sum of about $16 billion. The key knot in the debt tangle was the $10 billion that the US Treasury had loaned to the Allies during and immediately after the war. add?

Point Four plan for under-developed nations

Smiling and self-assured, Truman sounded a clarion note in the fourth point of his inaugural address, when he called for a "bold new program" ("Point Four"). The plan was to lend US money and technical aid to underdeveloped lands to help them help themselves. Truman wanted to spend millions to keep underprivileged peoples from becoming communists rather than spend billions to shoot them after they had become communists. This farseeing program was officially launched in 1950, and it brought badly needed assistance to impoverished countries, notably in Latin America, Africa, the Near East, and the Far East.

Jackie Robinson, the "color barrier" in professional sports

Somewhat more racial progress was made in the North after the war. Jack Roosevelt (Jackie) Robinson cracked the racial barrier in big-league baseball when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed him in 1947.

Gospel of Wealth

Steel baron Andrew Carnegie agree that the wealthy, entrusted with society's riches, had to prove themselves morally responsible according to a "___." ADD

Supplemental Security Income (SSI)

Surprisingly, Nixon presided over significant expansion of the welfare programs that conservative Republicans routinely denounced. He approved increased appropriations for entitlements like Food Stamps, Medicaid, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, while adding a generous new program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), to assist the indigent, aged, blind, and disabled.

propaganda posters, leaflets, speeches

The Creel Organization proved that words were indeed weapons. It sent out an army of 75,000 "four-minute men" who delivered countless speeches containing much "patriotic pep." Creel's propaganda took varied forms. Posters were splashed on billboards in the "Battle of the Fences," as artists "rallied to the colors." Millions of leaflets and pamphlets, which contained the most pungent Wilsonisms, were showered like confetti upon the world. Propaganda booklets with red-white-and-blue covers were printed by the millions.

Wyoming suffrage

___ Territory - later called "the Equality State" - granted the first unrestricted suffrage to women in 1869. This important breach in the dike once made, many states followed ___'s example. Paralleling these triumphs, most of the states by 1890 had passed laws to permit wives to own or control their property after marriage.

Secretary of the Treasury Mellon; income tax reduction

The burdensome taxes inherited from the war were esp. distasteful to Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, as well as to his fellow millionaires. There theory was that such heavy levies forced the rich to invest in tax-exempt securities rather than in the factories that provided prosperous payrolls. The Mellonites also argued, with considerable persuasiveness, that high taxes not only discouraged business but, in so doing, also brought a smaller net return to the Treasury than moderate taxes. ADD?

Newt Gingrich "Contract with America"

(1994) Led by outspoken Georgia representative Newt Gingrich, Republicans offered voters a "Contract with America" that promised an all-out assault on budget deficits and radical reductions in welfare programs. Their campaign succeeded fabulously, as a right-wing tornado roared across the land in the 1994 congressional elections. Every incumbent Republican gubernatorial, senatorial, and congressional candidate was reelected. Republicans also picked up eleven new governorships, eight seats in the Senate, and 53 seats in the House (where Gingrich became speaker), giving them control of both chambers of the federal Congress for the first time in 40 years. add?

inelastic currency

The country's financial structure, still creaking along under the Civil War National Banking Act, revealed glaring defects. Its most serious shortcoming, as exposed by the panic of 1907, was inelasticity of the currency. Banking reserves were heavily concentrated in NY and a handful of other large cities and could not be mobilized in times of financial stress into areas that were badly pinched. ADD?

Credit Mobilier railroad scandal

The easygoing Grant was first tarred by the ___ scandal, which erupted in 1872. Union Pacific Railroad insiders had formed the ___ construction company and then cleverly hired themselves at inflated prices to build the railroad line, earning dividends as high as 348 percent. Fearing that Congress might blow the whistle, the company furtively distributed shares of its valuable stock to key congressmen. A newspaper expose and congressional investigation of the scandal lead to the formal censure of two congressmen and the revelation the the VP of the United States had accepted payments from ___.

stock market collapse and economic depression

A catastrophic crash came in Oct 1929. By the end of 1929 - two months after the initial crash - stockholders had lost $40 billion in paper values, or more than the total cost of WWI to the US. The stock-market collapse heralded a business depression, at home and abroad, that was the most prolonged and prostrating in American or world experience. By the end of 1930, more than 4 million workers in the US were jobless; two years later the figure had about tripled. Over five thousand banks collapsed in the first three years of the depression, carrying down with them the life savings of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens. add?

Soviet Union's Khrushchev and the Berlin Wall

A few months after settling into the White House, the new president met with Soviet premier Khrushchev at Vienna in June 1961. The Soviet leader threatened to make a treaty with East Germany and cut off Western access to Berlin. The president refused to be bullied. The Soviets backed off from their most aggressive threats but suddenly began to construct the Berlin Wall in August 1961. A barbed-wire and concrete barrier, it was designed to plug the heavy population drain from East Germany to West Germany through the Berlin funnel. But to the free world, the "Wall of Shame" looked like a gigantic enclosure around a concentration camp. The Wall stood for almost three decades as an ugly scar symbolizing the post-WWII division of Europe into two hostile camps.

intervention in Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua

A glaring exception to the US inward-looking indifference to the outside world was the armed interventionism in the Caribbean and Central America. American troops were withdrawn (after an 8 year stay) from the Dominican Republic in 1924, but they remained in Haiti from 1914 to 1934. Coolidge in 1925 briefly removed American bayonets form troubled Nicaragua, where they had glinted intermittently since 1909, but in 1926 he sent them back, five thousand strong, and they stayed until 1933.

Oklahoma City bombing

A huge explosion destroyed a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995, taking 168 lives, presumably in retribution for a 1993 standoff in Waco, Texas, between federal agents and a fundamentalist sect known as the Branch Davidians.

munitions manufacturers and bankers

A myth developed in later years that America was dragged unwittingly into war by munitions makers and Wall Street bankers, desperate to protect their profits and loans. Yet the weapons merchants and financiers were already thriving, unhampered by wartime government restrictions and heavy taxation. The simple truth is that British harassment of American commerce had been galling but endurable; Germany had resorted to the mass killing of civilians. The difference was like that between a gang of thieves and a gang of murders.

Harlem, Langston Hughes

A new racial pride also blossomed in northern black communities that burgeoned during and after the war. Harlem in NYC, counting some 100,000 African American residents in the 1920s, was one of the largest black communities in the world. Harlem sustained a vibrant, creative culture that nourished poets like Langston Hughes, whose first volume verses, "The Weary Blues," appeared in 1926. Harlem in 1920s also spawned a charismatic political leader, Marcus Garvey.

Republican victory and dominance

ADD. Hanna's campaign methods paid off. On election day McKinley triumphed decisively. The vote was 271 to 176 in the Electoral College. Driven by fear and excitement, an unprecedented outpouring of voters flocked to the polls. McKinley ran strongly in the populous East, where he carried every country of New England, and in the upper Mississippi Valley. Bryan's states, concentrated in the debt-burdened South and the trans-Mississippi West, boasted acreage than McKinley's but less population.

beef bonanza and the long drive

After the transcontinental railroads thrust into the West, cattle could be shipped bodily to the stockyards, and under "beef barons" like the Swifts and Armours, the highly industrialized meatpacking business sprang into existence as a main pillar of the economy. Drawing upon the gigantic stockyards at Kansas City and Chicago, the meatpackers could ship their fresh products to the East Coast in the newly perfected refrigerator cars. A spectacular feeder of the new slaughterhouses was the "Long Drive." Texas cowboys - black, white, and Mexican - drove herds numbering from one thousand to ten thousand head slowly over the unfenced and unpeopled plains until they reached a railroad terminal. As long as lush grass was available, the Long Drive proved profitable - that is, to the luckier cattlemen who escaped Indians, stampedes, cattle fever, and other hazards.

Freedom Riders; federal protection

After the wave of sit-ins that surged across in the South in 1960, groups of Freedom Riders fanned out to end segregation in facilities serving interstate bus passengers. A white mob torched a Freedom Ride bus near Anniston, Alabama, in May 1961, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy's personal representative was beaten unconscious in another anti-Freedom Ride riot in Montgomery. When southern officials proved unwilling or unable to stem the violence, Washington dispatched federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders. add?

Alliance for Progress

Although the US regarded Latin America as its backyard, its southern neighbors feared and resented the powerful Colossus of the North. In 1961 JFK extended a hand of friendship with the Alliance for Progress, hailed as a Marshall Plan for Latin America. A primary goal was to help the Good Neighbor close the gap between the callous rich and the wretched poor, and thus quiet communist agitation. But results were disappointing; there was little alliance and even less progress. American handouts had little positive impact on Latin America's immense social problems.

Senate Watergate hearings

Amid a mood of growing national outrage, a select Senate committee conducted widely televised hearings about the Watergate affair in 1973-1974. Nixon indignantly denied any prior knowledge of the break-in and any involvement in the legal proceedings against the burglars. But John Dean III, a former White House lawyer with a remarkable memory, accused top White House officials, including the president, of obstructing justice by trying to cover up the Watergate break-in and and silence its perpetrators. Then another former White House aide revealed that a secret taping system had recorded most of Nixon's Oval Office conversations.

Philadelphia Plan; racial quotas

Amid much controversy, Nixon in 1969 implemented his so-called Philadelphia Plan, requiring construction-trade unions to establish "goals and timetables" for the hiring of black apprentices. The president's new policy had far-reaching implications. Soon extended to all federal contracts, the Philadelphia Plan in effect required thousands of employers to meet hiring quotas or to establish "set-asides" for minority subcontractors.

Henry George's single tax idea; socialism

Another journalist-author, ____, was an original thinker who left an enduring mark. After seeing poverty at its worst in India and land-grabbing at its greediest in California, he took pen in hand. His classic treatise "Progress and Poverty" undertook to solve "the great enigma of our times" - "the association of progress with poverty." According to him, the pressure of growing population on a fixed supply of lad unjustifiably pushed up property values, showering unearned profits on owners of land. A sing 100% tax on those windfall profits would eliminate unfair inequalities and stimulate economic growth. His single-tax ideas were so horrifying to the propertied classes that his manuscript was rejected by numerous publishers. In 1879 the book sold some 3 million copies. He also lectured widely in America, where he influenced thinking about the maldistribution of wealth, and in Britain, where he left a permenant mark on English Fabian socialism.

buying stock "on margin"

As the 1920s surged forward, everybody seemed to be buying stocks "on margin" - that is, with a small down payment. Barbers, stenographers, and elevator operators cashed in on "hot tips" picked up while on duty. "The cash register crashed the social register," as rags-to-riches Americans reverently worshipped at the altar of the ticker-tape machine. So powerful was the intoxicant of quick profits that a few heeded the voices raised in certain quarters to warn that this kind of tinsel prosperity could not last forever.

Senator Nye committee conclusions

As the gloomy 1930s lengthened, an avalanche of lurid articles and books condemning the munitions manufacturers as war-fomenting "merchants of death" poured from American presses. A Senate committee, headed by Senator Nye of North Dakota, was appointed in 1934 to investigate the "blood business." By sensationalizing evidence regarding America's entry into WWI, the senatorial probers tended to shift the blame away from the German submarines onto the American bankers and arms manufacturers. Because the munitions makers had obviously made money out of the war, many a naive citizen leaped to the illogical conclusion that these soulless scavengers had caused the war in order to make money.

Fair Deal proposals and minimum success

At home Truman outlined a sweeping "Fair Deal" program in his 1949 message to Congress. It called for improved housing, full employment, a higher minimum wage, better farm price supports, new TVAs, and an extension of Social Security. But most of the Fair Deal fell victim to congressional opposition from Republicans and southern Democrats. The only major success came in raising the minimum wage, providing for public housing in the Housing Act of 1949, and extending old-age insurance to many more beneficiaries in the Social Security Act of 1950.

W.E.B. DuBois, NAACP, the "talented tenth"

Born in Massachusetts, ______ was a mixture of African, French, Dutch, and Indian blood ("Thank God, no Anglo-Saxon," he would add). After a determined struggle, he earned a Ph. D. at Harvard, the first of his race to achieve that goal ("The honor, I assure you, was Harvard's," he said). He demanded complete equality for blacks, social as well as economic, and helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910. Rejecting Washington's gradualism and separatism, he demanded that the "talented tenth" of the black community be given full and immediate access to the mainstream of American life.

Associated Press

Both Pulitzer and Hearst prostituted the press in their struggle for increased circulation; both "stooped, snooped, and scooped to conquer." Their flair for scandal and sensational rumor was happily somewhat offset by the introduction of syndicated material and by the strengthening of the news-gathering ____, which had been founded in the 1840s.

Cuban refugees in Florida

Castro, in effect, made his left-wing dictatorship an economic and military satellite of Moscow, to the Kremlin's delighted surprise. An exodus of anti-Castro Cubans headed for the US, esp. Florida. Nearly 1 million arrived between 1960 and 2000. add?

Somalia, Rwanda, China (summarize issues)

Clinton followed his predecessor's lead in dispatching American troops as part of a peacekeeping mission to Somalia and reinforced US contingent after Somalia revels killed more than a dozen Americans in late 1993. But in March 1994, the president quietly withdrew the American units, without having accomplished any clearly defined goal. Burned in Somalia, Washington stood on the sidelines in 1995 when catastrophic ethnic violence in central African country of Rwanda resulted in the deaths of half a million people. Clinton also struggled to define a policy with respect to China, which was rapidly emerging as an economic and political powerhouse. Candidate Clinton had denounced George Bush in 1992 for not imposing economic sanctions on China as punishment for Beijing's wretched record of human rights abuses. But China's economic importance to the US did not permit Washington the luxury of taking the high road on human rights. Clinton soon soft-pedaled his criticism of the Beijing regime and instead began seeking improved trade relations with that robustly industrializing country and potential market bonanza. change?

communist North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh

Cold War events dampened the dreams of anti-colonial Asian peoples. Their leaders -- including Ho Chi Minh -- became increasingly communist while the US had become increasingly anticommunist. BY 1954 American taxpayers were financing nearly 80% of the costs of a bottomless French colonial war in Indochina. Despite this massive aid, French forces continued to crumble under Viet Minh guerrilla pressure. ADD?

Five-Power Naval treaty

Complex bargaining followed in the wake of Hughes's proposals. The Five-Power Naval Treaty of 1922 embodied Hughes's ideas on ships ratios, but only after face-saving compensation was offered to the insecure Japanese. The British and Americans both conceded that they would refrain from fortifying their Far Eastern possessions, including the Philippines. The Japanese were not subjected to such restraints in their possessions.

Lindbergh baby kidnapping

Criminal callousness sank to new depths in 1932 with the kidnapping for ransom, and eventual murder, of the infant son of aviator-hero Charles A. Lindbergh. The entire nation was inexpressibly shocked and saddened, causing Congress in 1932 to pass the so-called Lindbergh Law, making interstate abduction in certain circumstances a death-penalty offense.

fall of South Vietnam to communist North, 1975

Early in 1975 the North Vietnamese gave full throttle to their long-expected drive southward. President Ford urged Congress to vote still more weapons for Vietnam, but his plea was in vain, and without the crutch of massive American aid, the South Vietnamese quickly and ingloriously collapsed. add? page 953

Salk antipolio vaccine

Eisenhower's secretary of health, education, and welfare condemned the free distribution of the Salk antipolio vaccine as "socialized medicine."

Commodore Dewey and Theodore Roosevelt

Even before the declaration of war, on February 25, 1898, while the Navy secretary John D. Long was away from office, his hot-blooded assistant secretary Theodore Roosevelt took matters into his own hands. He cabled Commodore George Dewey, commanding the American Asiatic Squadron at Hong Kong, to descend upon Spain's Philippines in the event of war. President McKinley subsequently confirmed Roosevelt's instructions, even though an attack in the distant Far East seemed like a strange way to free nearby Cuba.

Amendment 20, shorter "Lame Duck" period

FDR took the presidential oath on January 20, 1937, instead of the traditional March 4. The 20th Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified in 1933. It swept away the post-election lame duck session of Congress and shortened by six weeks the awkward period before inauguration.

Chester Arthur, Pendleton (Civil Service) Act

Garfield's death had one positive outcome: it shocked politicians into reforming the shameful spoils system. The unlikely instrument of reform was ___. He surprised his critics by prosecuting several fraud cases and giving his former Stalwart pals the cold shoulder. Disgust with Garfield's murder gave the Republican party itself a previously undetected taste for reform. The medicine finally applied to the long-suffering federal government was the ___ Act of 1833 - the so-called Magna Carta of civil-service reform. It made compulsory campaign contributions from federal employees illegal (giving it to people who bribed you, or people you knew well?), and it established the Civil Service Commission to make appointments to federal jobs on the basis of competitive examinations rather than "pull."

Americans With Disabilities Act 1990

George H. W. Bush partly redeemed his pledge to work for a "kinder, gentler America" when he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, a landmark law prohibiting discrimination against the 43 million US citizens with physical or mental disabilities.

Civil Works Administration CWA

Harassed by the continuing plague of unemployment, FDR himself established the Civil Works Administration late in 1933. As a branch of the FERA, it also fell under the direction of Hopkins. Designed to provide purely temporary jobs during the cruel winter emergency, it served a useful purpose. Tens of thousands of jobless were employed at leaf raking and other make-work tasks, which were dubbed "boondoggling."

Middle East oil

Harding could not turn his back completely on the outside world, esp. the Middle East, where a sharp rivalry developed between America and Britain for oil-drilling concessions. Remembering that the Allies had floated victory on a flood of oil, experts recognized that liquid "black gold" would be as necessary as blood in the battles of tomorrow. Secretary Hughes eventually secured for American oil companies the right to share in the exploitation of the sandy region's oil riches.

John D. Rockefeller

He came to dominate the oil industry. Born to a family of precarious income, he became a successful businessman at age 19. In 1870 he organized the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, nucleus of the great trust formed in 1882. By 1877 he controlled 95% of all the oil refineries in the country. ADD

Horatio Alger stories (p 582)

He was a Puritan-reared New Englander, who in 1866 forsook the pulpit for the pen. Deeply interested in NY newsboys, he wrote more than a hundred volumes of juvenile fiction that sold over 100 million copies. His stock formula was that virtue, honesty, and industry are rewarded by success, wealth, and honor - a kind of survival of the purest, esp. nonsmokers, nondrinkers, nonswearers, and nonliars. Although his own bachelor life was criticized, he implanted morality and the conviction that there is always room at the top (esp. if one is lucky enough to save the life of the boss's daughter and marry her).

portrait painting: John Singer Sargeant, Mary Cassatt

He was a gifted portrait painter, was was self-exiled in England. (1856-1916). His flattering but somewhat superficial likenesses of the British nobility were highly prized. ____, an American in exile in Paris, painted sensitive portrayals of women and children that earned her a place in the pantheon of the French impressionist painters.

Edward Bellamy "Looking Backward"

He was a quiet Massachusetts Yankee who was another journalist-reformer of remarkable power. In 1888 he published a socialistic novel, "Looking Backward," in which the hero, falling into a hypnotic sleep, awakens in the year 2000. He "looks backward" and finds that the social and economic injustices of 1887 have melted away under an idyllic government, which has nationalized big business to serve public interest. To a nation already alarmed by the trust evil, the book had a magnetic appeal and sold over a million copies. Scores of ___ Clubs sprang up to discuss this mild utopian socialism, and they heavily influenced American reform movements near the end of the century.

wolf packs

Hitler had entered the war with a formidable fleet of ultramodern submarines, which ultimately operated in "wolf packs" with frightful effect, esp. in the North Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. During ten months of 1942 more than 500 merchant ships were reported lost -- 11 in June alone -- as ship destruction far outran construction.

Fetterman massacre

In 1866 a Sioux war party, attempting to block construction of the Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields, ambushed Captain William J. ____'s command of 81 soldiers and civilians in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains. The Indians left not a single survivor. The massacre led to one of the few - though short-lived - Indian triumphs in the plains wars.

gold, Black Hills, Sioux, Sitting Bull

In 1874 a new round of warfare with the Plains Indians began when Custer led a "scientific" expedition into the Black Hills of South Dakota (part of the Sioux reservation) and announced that he had discovered gold. Hordes of greedy gold-seekers swarmed into the Sioux lands. The aggrieved Sioux took to the warpath, inspired by the influential and wily Sitting Bull.

Richard Nixon, Alger Hiss

In 1948 committee member (of HUAC) Richard Nixon, an ambitious red-catcher, led the chase after Alger Hiss, a prominent ex-New Dealer and a distinguished member of the "eastern establishment." Accused of being a communist agent in the 1930s, Hiss demanded the right to defend himself. He dramatically met his chief accuser before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Aug 1948. Hiss denied everything but was caught in embarrassing falsehoods, convicted of perjury in 1950, and sentenced to five years in prison.

Selective Service System (peacetime draft)

In 1948, Congress resurrected the military draft, providing for the conscription of selected young men from nineteen to twenty-five years of age. The forbidding presence of the Selective Service System shaped millions of young people's educational, martial, and career plans in the following quarter-century. One shoe at a time, a war-weary America was reluctantly returning to a war footing.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

In April 1960 southern black students formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to give more focus and force to these sit-in (and other "ins") efforts. Young and impassioned, SNCC members would eventually lose patience with the more stately tactics of the SCLC and even more deliberate than legalisms of the NAACP.

British evacuation from Dunkirk, France

In a pell-mell but successful evacuation from the French port of Dunkirk, the British managed to salvage the bulk of their shattered and partially disarmed army. The crisis providentially brought forth an inspired leader in Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the bulldog-jawed orator who nerved his people to fight off the fearful air bombings of their cities.

Khrushchev; Hungarian uprising

In the end, the "new look" proved illusory. A new Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, rudely rejected Ike's call in 1955 for an "open skies" mutual inspection program over both the Soviet Union and the US. In 1956 the Hungarians rose up against their Soviet masters and felt badly betrayed when the US turned a deaf ear to their desperate appeals for aid. The brutally crushed Hungarian uprising revealed the sobering truth that America's mighty nuclear sledgehammer was too heavy a weapon to wield in such a relatively minor crisis.

moon landing as a future goal

JFK also promoted a multibillion-dollar project to land an American on the moon. Twenty-four billion dollars later, in 1969, two American astronauts triumphantly planted human footprints on the moon's dusty surface.

Peace Corps

JFK brought a warm heart to the Cold War when he proposed the Peace Corps, an army of idealistic and mostly youthful volunteers to bring American skills to underdeveloped countries. He summoned citizens to service with his clarion call to "ask not what your country can do for you: ask what you can do for your country."

Bay of Pigs invasion

JFK had inherited from the Eisenhower administration a CIA-backed scheme to topple Fidel Castro from power by invading Cuba with anticommunist exiles. On April 17, 1961, some twelve hundred exiles landed at Cuba's Bay of Pigs. When the ill-starred invasion bogged down at the Bay of Pigs, JFK stood fast in his decision to keep hands off, and the bullet-riddled band of anti-Castroites surrendered. President Kennedy assumed full responsibility for the failure, remarking that "victory has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan."

1872 general amnesty for former Confederates

Liberal Republican agitation frightened the regular Republicans (after Grant's reelection) into cleaning their own house before they were thrown out of it. The Republican Congress in 1872 passed a general amnesty act, removing political disabilities from all but some five hundred former Confederate leaders.

fall of the Berlin Wall, end of European communism

Long oppressed by puppet regimes propped up by Soviet guns, Eastern Europe was revolutionized in just a few startling months in 1989. The Solidarity movement in Poland led the way when it toppled Poland's communist government in August. With dizzying speed, communist regimes collapsed in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and even hyper-repressive Romania. In Dec 1989, jubilant German's danced atop to the hated Berlin Wall, symbol of the division of Germany and all of Europe in two armed hostile camps. The Wall itself soon came down, heralding the imminent end of the forty-five-year-long Cold War.

carpet bombing of German cities

Meanwhile, the turning point of the land-air war against Hitler had come late in 1942. The British had launched a thousand-plane raid on Cologne in May. In August 1942 they were joined by the American air force and were cascading bombs on German cities. ADD

Dawes Plan of 1924 (see chart p. 757)

Negotiated largely by Charles Dawes, about to be nominated as Coolidge's running mate, the Dawes Plan of 1924 rescheduled German reparations payments and opened the way for further American private loans to Germany. The whole financial cycle could now become still more complicated, as US bankers loaned money to Germany, Germany paid reparations to France and Britain, and the former Allies paid war debts to the US. Clearly the source of this monetary merry-go-round was the flowing well of American credit.

Neutrality Act of 1939, cash-and-carry

Neutrality promptly became a heated issue in the US. Ill-prepared Britain and France urgently needed American airplanes and other weapons, but the Neutrality Act of 1937 raised a sternly forbidding hand. FDR summoned Congress into special session, shortly after the invasion of Poland, to consider lifting the arms embargo. The Neutrality Act of 1939 provided that henceforth the European democracies might buy American war materials, but only on a "cash-and-carry basis." This meant that they would have to transport the munitions in their own ships, after paying for them in cash. America would thus avoid loans, war debts, and the torpedoing of American arms-carriers.

Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, gold manipulation

Notorious in the financial world were two millionaire partners, "Jubilee Jim" Fisk and Jack Gould. The corpulent and unscrupulous Fisk provided the "brass," while the undersized and cunning Gould provided the brains. The crafty pair concocted a plot in 1869 to corner the gold market (owning such an amount that you control the market). Their slippery game would work only if the Treasury refrained from selling gold. The conspirators worked on President Grant directly and also through his brother-in-law, who received $25,000 for his complicity. On September 24, 1868, Fisk and Gould madly bid the price of gold skyward, while scores of honest businesspeople were driven to the wall. The bubble finally broke when the Treasury, contrary to Grant's supposed assurance, was compelled to release gold.

"pink collar ghetto" jobs for women

Of some 40 million new jobs created in the three decades after 1950, more than 30 million were in clerical and service work. Women filled the huge majority of these new positions.They were the principal employment beneficiaries of the postwar era, creating an extensive "pink-collar ghetto" of occupations that came to be dominated by women. (Working as a security, for example)

Election of 1980, Inauguration, Iran hostages released

On election day the Republican Reagan rang up a spectacular victory, bagging over 51 percent of the popular vote, while 41 percent went to Carter and 7 percent to moderate independent candidate John Anderson. Equally startling, the Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time in 25 years. Reagan's arrival in Washington was triumphal. The Iranians contributed to the festive mood by releasing the hostages on Reagan's Inauguration Day, January 20, 1981, after 444 days of captivity.

Jane Addams and Hull House

One middle-class woman who was deeply dedicated to uplifting the urban masses was ____ (1860-1935). She was one of the first generation of college-educated women. Upon her graduation she sought other outlets for her large talents than could be found in teaching or charitable volunteer work, then the only permissible occupations for a young woman of her social class. Inspired by a visit to England, she acquired the decaying __ mansion in Chicago in 1889. There she established the _____, the most prominent (though not the first) American settlement house. Located in a poor immigrant neighborhood of Greeks, Italians, Russians, and Germans, _____ offered instruction in English, counseling to help newcomers cope with American big-city life, child-care services for working mothers, and cultural activities for neighborhood residents.

Bakke court decision against University of California

One white Californian, Allan Bakke, made headlines in 1978 when the Supreme Court (vote: 5 to 4) upheld his claim that his application to medical school had been turned down because of an admissions program that favored minority applicants. In a tortured decision, reflecting the troubling moral ambiguities and insoluble political complexities of this issue, the Court ordered the University of California at Davis medial school to admit Bakke, and declared that preference in admissions could not be given to any members of any group, minority or majority, on the basis of ethnic or racial identity alone. Yet at the same time, the Court said that racial factors might be taken into account for purposes of assembling a diverse student body.

Little Rock Central High School, federal military assistance

Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas, mobilized the National Guard (state police) to prevent nine black students from enrolling in Little Rock's Central High School. Confronted with a direct challenge to federal authority, Eisenhower sent troops to escort the children to their classes. (1957)

Head Start

Other antipoverty programs, among them Project Head Start, sharply improved the educational performance of underprivileged youth. ADD

"Gibson" girl ideal (also see drawing p 550)

Probably no single group was more profoundly affected by the new industrial age than women. Propelled into industry by recent inventions, chiefly the typewriter and the telephone switchboard, millions of stenographers and "hello girls" discovered new economic and social opportunities. The "____," a magazine image of an independent and athletic "new woman" created in the 1890s by the artist Charles Dana Gibson, became the romantic ideal of the age.

"irreconcilables" versus "reservationists" in the Senate

Republican senators, Lodge in the lead, were sharpening their knives for Wilson. To them the League of Nations was either a useless "sewing circle" or an over-potent "super-state." Their hard core was composed of a dozen or so militant isolationists who were known as "irreconcilables" or "the Battalion of Death." ADD reservationists

Victoria Woodhull and free love

She shook the pillars of conventional morality when she publicly proclaimed her belief in ___ (being able to have sexual relations with anyone regardless of martial statues) in 1871. She was a beautiful and eloquent divorcee, sometime stockbroker, and tireless feminist propagandist. Together with her sister, Tennessee Claflin, she published a far-out periodical, "___ and Claflin's Weekly." The sisters again shocked "respectable" society in 1872 when their journal struck a blow for the new morality by charging that Henry Ward Beecher, the most famous preacher of his day, had for years been carrying on an adulterous affair.

Navajo code talkers

Some twenty-five thousand Native American men served in the armed forces. Comanches in Europe and Navajos in the Pacific made especially valuable contributions as "code talkers." They transmitted radio messages in their native languages, which were incomprehensible to the Germans and the Japanese.

Sputnik

Soviet scientists astounded the world on Oct 4, 1957, by lofting into orbit around the globe a beep-beeping "baby moon" (Sputnik I) weighing 184 pounds. A month later they topped their own ace by sending aloft a larger satellite (Sputnik II) weighing 1,120 pounds and carrying a dog.

decolonization; rise of communism

Special problems for US foreign policy emerged from the worldwide decolonization of European overseas possessions after WWII. Sparsely populated Laos, freed of its French colonial overlords in 1954, was festering dangerously by the time Kennedy came into office. The Eisenhower administration had drenched this jungle kingdom with dollars but failed to cleanse the country of an aggressive communist element. A red Laos, many observers feared, would be a river on which the influence of Communist China would flood into all of Southeast Asia.

Populists support Bryan

The Populists now faced a dilemma, because the Democratic majority had appropriated their main plank - "16 to 1," that "heavenly ration." The bulk of Populists, fearing a hard-money McKinley victory, endorsed both "fusion" with the Democrats and Bryan for president, sacrificing their identity in the mix. They became in effect the "Demo-Pop" party, though a handful of the original Populists refused to support Bryan and went down with their colors nailed to the mast.

Second Agricultural Adjustment Act

The Second Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 was a more comprehensive substitute than the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, although it continued conservation payments. If growers observed acreage restrictions on specified commodities like cotton and wheat, they would be eligible for parity payments. Other provisions of the new AAA were designed to give farmers not only a fairer price but a more substantial share of the national income. Both goals were partially achieved.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

The Supreme Court validated the South's segregationist social order in the case of ____ (1896). It ruled that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional under the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But in reality the quality of African American life was grotesquely unequal to that of whites.

U.N. Trusteeship Council (former colonial lands)

The UN had some gratifying initial success. It played a large role in creating the new Jewish state of Israel. The UN Trusteeship Council guided former colonies to independence. ADD?

kamikazes

The US Navy, which covered the invasion of Okinawa, sustained severe damage. Japanese suicide pilots ("kamikazes") in an exhibition of mass hara-kiri for their decks of the invading fleet. All told, the death squads sank over thirty ships and badly damaged scores more.

barbed wire; blizzards; cowboys

The railroad made the Long Drive, and the railroad unmade the Long Drive, primarily because the locomotive ran both ways. The same rails that bore the cattle from the open range to the kitchen range brought out the homesteader and the sheepherder. Both of these intruders, sometimes amid flying bullets, built barbed-wire fences that were too numerous to be cut down by the cowboys. Furthermore, the terrible winter of 1886-1887, with blinding blizzards reaching 68 degrees below zero, left thousands of dazed cattle starving and freezing. Overexpansion and overgrazing likewise took their toll, as the cowboys slowly gave way to plowboys. add?

closed shop/open shop

The red scare was a godsend to conservative businesspeople, who used it to break the backs of the fledging unions. Labor's call for the "closed," or all-union, shop was denounced as "Sovietism in disguise." Employers, in turn, hailed their own antiunion campaign for the "open" shop as "the American plan."

Public Works Administration (PWA)

The same act of Congress that hatched the NRA eagle also authorized the Public Works Administration, likewise intended both for industrial recovery and for unemployment relief. The agency was headed by the secretary of the interior, acid-tongued Harold Ickes, a free-swinging former bull mooser. Long-range recovery was the primary purpose of the new agency, and in time over $4 billion was spent on some thirty-four thousand projects, which included public buildings, highways, and parkways. One spectacular achievement was the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River - the largest structure erected by humans since the Great Wall of China.

Zimmermann Note

The sensational Zimmerman note was intercepted and published on March 1, 1917, infuriating Americans, esp. westerners. German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmerman had secretly proposed a German-Mexican alliance, tempting anti-Yankee Mexico with veiled promises of recovering Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

NAACP court fights

The war had generated a new militancy and restlessness among many members of the black community. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had for many years pushed doggedly to dismantle the legal underpinnings of segregation and now enjoyed some success. In 1944 the Supreme Court ruled the "white primary" unconstitutional, thereby undermining the status of the Democratic party in the South as a white person's club. And in 1950 NAACP chief legal counsel Thurgood Marshall, in the case Sweatt v. Painter, wrung from the High Court a ruling that separate professional schools for blacks failed to meet the test of equality.

"Big Stick" policies in Latin America

This new brandishing of the big stick in the Caribbean (Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine) became effective in 1905, when the US took over the management of tariff collections in the Dominican Republic, an arrangement formalized in a treaty with the Dominicans two years later. As time wore on, the new corollary was used to justify wholesale interventions and repeated landings of the marines, all of which helped turn the Caribbean into a "Yankee lake." To Latin Americans it seemed as though the revised Monroe Doctrine, far from providing a shield, was a cloak behind which the US sought to strangle them.

Eastern Front (Russia); Western Front (France)

This sudden defection (the Russian Bolshevik Revolution) released hundreds of thousands of battle-tested Germans from the eastern front facing Russia for the western front in France, where, for the first time in the war, they were developing a dangerous superiority in manpower.

wheatless, meatless days; victory gardens

To save food for export, Hoover proclaimed wheatless Wednesdays and meatless Tuesdays - all on a voluntary basis. Even children, when eating apples, were urged to be "patriotic to the core." The country soon broke out in a rash of vegetable "victory gardens," as perspiring patriots hoed their way to victory in backyards and vacant lots.

end of the gold standard

To stimulate the nation's sagging exports, he next stunned the would by taking the US of the gold standard and devaluing the dollar. add?

Guantanamo naval station

Under the Platt Amendment, the Cubans promised to sell or lease needed coaling or naval stations, ultimately two and then only one (Guantanamo), to their powerful "benefactor." The US finally abrogated the amendment in 1934, although Uncle Sam still occupies a 28,000 acre Cuban beachhead at Guantanamo under an agreement that can be revoked only by the consent of both parties.

Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ)

Vice President Johnson was promptly sworn in as president n a waiting airplane and flown back to Washington with Kennedy's body. Although he mistrusted "the Harvards," Johnson retained most of the bright Kennedy team. The new president managed a dignified and efficient transition, pledging continuity with his slain predecessor's policies. ADD? Page 920

women and the "cult of domesticity"

When WWII ended, most women, including those who had worked in war plants, returned to highly conventional female roles as wives and mothers -- the remarkably prolific mothers of the huge "baby-boom" generation. A "cult of domesticity" emerged in popular culture to celebrate those eternal feminine functions. When 1950s television programs depicted idyllic suburban families with a working husband, two children, and a wife who did not work outside the home, they did so without irony; much of white, middle-class, America really did live that way. But as the 1950s progressed, another quiet revolution was gaining momentum that was destined to transform women's roles and even the character of the American family.

sex discrimination

When conservatives tried to derail the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 by adding a prohibition on sexual, as well as racial, discrimination, the tactic backfired. The bill's opponents cynically calculated that liberals would not be able to support a bill that threatened to wipe out any laws that singled out women for special protection because of their sex. But the act's Title VII passed with the sexual clause intact. It soon proved to be a powerful instrument of federally enforced gender equality, as well as racial equality.

death of Harding

While news of the scandals was beginning to break, Harding embarked upon a speechmaking tour across the country all the way to Alaska. On the return trip, he died in San Francisco, on August 2, 1923, of pneumonia and thrombosis. His death may have been hastened by a broken heart resulting from the disloyalty of designing friends. Vice President Calvin Coolidge became the President of the US.

Wilson's War Message

Wilson asked Congress to declare war on April 2, 1917. "The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make." Also, "It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war." Congress declared war on April 6th.

Louis Brandeis

Wilson earned the enmity of businesspeople and bigots but endeared himself to progressives when in 1916 he nominated for the Supreme Court prominent reformer Louis D. Brandeis - the first Jew to be called to the high bench. Yet even Wilson's progressivism had its limits, and it clearly stopped short of better treatment for blacks.

League Covenant

Wilson envisioned the League of Nations as containing an assembly with seats for all nations and a council to be controlled by the great powers. He gained a signal victory over the skeptical Old War diplomats in Feb 1919, when they agreed to make the League Covenant, Wilson's brainchild, an integral part of the final peace treaty. If one nation goes to war, the others with back them up.

Women in the armed forces; military racial segregation

Within a few frantic months, the army grew to over 4 million men. For the first time, women were admitted to the armed forces; some 11,000 to the navy and 269 to the marines. The African Americans also served in the armed forces, though in strictly segregated units and usually under white officers. Reflecting racial attitudes of the time, military authorities hesitated to train black men for combat. and the majority of black soldiers were assigned to "construction battalions" or put to work unloading ships.

wage and price freeze

Worried about creeping inflation (then running at about 5%), Nixon overcame his distaste for economic controls and imposed a ninety-day wage and price freeze in 1971. add? page 946

"beat" poets (beatniks)

"Beat" poets like Allen Ginsberg and iconoclastic novelists like Jack Kerouac had voice dark disillusion with the materialistic pursuits and "establishment" arrogance of the Eisenhower era. In movies like "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955), the attractive young actor James Dean expressed the restless frustration of many young people.

modernization theory

"Modernization theory" provided the theoretical underpinnings for an activist US foreign policy in the "underdeveloped" world. Its proponents believed that the traditional societies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America could develop into modern industrial and democratic nations following the West's own path. Though it would later come under attack for its Eurocentric bias, modernization theory offered a powerful intellectual framework for policymakers ensnared in the Cold War. add?

Alaska and Hawaii statehood

"Old Glory" could now proudly display fifty stars. Alaska attained statehood in 1959, as did Hawaii. Alaska, though gigantic, was thinly populated and noncontiguous, but these objections were overcome in a Democratic Congress that expected Alaska to vote Democratic. Hawaii had ample population, advanced democratic institutions, and more acreage than the mainland states of Rhode Island, Delaware, or Connecticut. As the first noncontiguous states to join the Union, Alaska and Hawaii helped turn America's face toward the Pacific and East Asia.

Pancho Villa's border violence

"Pancho" Villa, a combination of bandit and Robin Hood, had stolen the spotlight. He emerged as the chief rival to President Carranza, whom Wilson now reluctantly supported. Villa and his followers, hoping to provoke a war between Wilson and Carranza, blazed across the border into Columbus, New Mexico, and murdered another nineteen Americans.

closed shop; skilled craftsmen

A major goal of Gompers was the "trade agreement" authorizing the "____" - or all-union labor. Composed of skilled craftsmen, like the carpenters and the bricklayers, the AF of L was willing to let unskilled laborers, including women and esp. blacks, fend for themselves. ADD

"talkies", The Jazz Singer

A new era began in 1927 with the success of the first "talkie" - "The Jazz Singer," starring the white performer Al Jolson in blackface. The age of "silents" was ushered out as theaters everywhere were "wired for sound." At about the same time, reasonably satisfactory color films were being produced.

flappers (describe)

Advertisers exploited sexual allure to sell everything from soap to car tires. Once-modest maidens now proclaimed their new freedom as "flappers" in bobbed tresses and dresses. Young women appeared with hemlines elevated, stockings rolled, breasts taped flat, cheeks rouged, and lips a "crimson gash" that held a dangling cigarette. Thus did the "flapper" symbolize a yearned-for and devil-may-care independence in some American women.

SAC and B-52 bombers

Aerospace industries also grew fantastically in the 1950s, thanks to both Eisenhower's aggressive buildup of the Strategic Air Command and to a robustly expanding passenger airline business -- as well as to connections between military and civilian aircraft production. In 1957 the Seattle-based Boeing Company brought out the first large passenger jet, the "707." Its design owed much to the previous development of SAC's long-range strategic bomber, the B-52.

Hundred Days

After declaring a nationwide banking holiday, FDR summoned the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress into special session to cope with the national emergency. For the so-called Hundred Days (March 9-June 16, 1932), members hastily cranked out an unprecedented basketful of remedial legislation. Some of it derived from earlier progressivism, but these new measures mostly sought to deal with a desperate emergency.

Vietnam cease-fire 1973; end of the draft

After fighting on both sides had again escalated in Vietnam, Nixon launched a furious two-week bombing of North Vietnam in an iron-handed effort to force the North Vietnamese back to the conference table. This merciless pounding drove the North Vietnamese negotiators to agree to cease-fire arrangements on Jan 23, 1973, nearly three months after peace was prematurely proclaimed. The US was to withdraw its remaining 27,000 or so troops and could reclaim son 560 American prisoners of war. The North Vietnamese were allowed to keep some 145,000 troops in South Vietnam, where they still occupied about 30 percent of the country. The draft ended in January 1973, although it was retained on a standby basis. Further members of the armed forces were to be volunteers, greatly easing anxieties among draft-age youth.

Third Reich (page 808-9)

Although America embraced some 150,000 Jews who fled the Third Reich (the Nazi regime) for America in the 1930s, they represented only a tiny fraction of the 6 million Jews who eventually perished under the Nazi heel. Before the outbreak of war in Sept 1939, the problem was how to accommodate the refugees from the Third Reich -- a majority of whom ultimately escaped to America and elsewhere. Thereafter Hitler closed off all emigration from Nazi-occupied Europe. The problem then became how to rescue the Jews trapped inside the Nazi death machine.

Eisenhower's invasion of North Africa

An assault on French-held North Africa was a compromise second front, a far cry from what the badly battered Soviets were demanding. The highly secret attack, launched in Nov 1942, was headed by a gifted and easy-smiling American general, Dwight Eisenhower, a master of organization and conciliation. As a joint Allied operation ultimately involving some 400,000 men (British, Canadian, French, and chiefly American) and about 850 ships, the invasion was the mightiest waterborne effort up to that time in history. After savage fighting, the remnants of the German-Italian army were finally trapped in Tunisia and surrendered in May 1943.

Frederick Taylor; Scientific Management

An enormous industry sprang into being, as Detroit became the motorcar capital of America. The mechanized colossus owed much to the stopwatch efficiency techniques of Frederick Taylor, a prominent inventor, engineer, and tennis player, who sought to eliminate wasted motion. His epitaph reads "Father of Scientific Management."

Frederick Jackson Turner and his frontier hypothesis

As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, "American history had been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West." The story of settling and taming the trans-Mississippi West in the late 19th century was but the last chapter in the saga of colonizing various American "wests" since Columbus's day - from the West Indies to the Chesapeake shore, from the valleys of the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers to the valleys of the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers. ADD

"human rights" foreign policy

As a committed Christian, President Carter displayed from the outset an overriding concern for "human rights" as the guiding principle of his foreign policy. In the African nations of Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) and South Africa, Carter and his eloquent UN ambassador, Andrew Young, championed the oppressed black majority.

national parks

As the nation finally recognized that its land was not inexhaustible, seeds were planted to preserve the vanishing resource. The government set aside land for national parks - first Yellowstone in 1872, followed by Yosemite and Sequoia in 1890.

Chivington and the massacre at Sand Creek

At Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864, Colonel J.M. ____'s militia massacred in cold blood some four hundred Indians who apparently thought they had been promised immunity. Women were shot praying for mercy, children had their brains dashed out, and braves were tortured, scalped, and unspeakably mutilated.

conservatives and the New Right (list social concerns)

Certainly the 1980s were a new day for America's conservative right. The conservative cause drew added strength from the emergence of a "New Right" movement, partly in response to the countercultural protests of the 1960s. Spearheading the New Right were evangelical Christian groups such as the Moral Majority, dedicated believers who enjoyed startling success as political fund-raisers and organizers. New Right activists denounced abortion, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, and esp. affirmative action. The championed prayer in the schools and tougher penalties for criminals. Together the Old and New Right added up to a powerful political combination, devoted to changing the very character of American society.

vertical integration and horizontal integration

Combining into one organization all phases of manufacturing from mining to marketing. Carnegie used this (only people in his employment touched his product - steel). His goal was to improve efficiency by making supplies more reliable, controlling the quality of the product at all stage of production, and eliminating middlemen's fees. Less justifiable on grounds of efficiency was the technique of "___," which simply meant allying with competitors to monopolize a given market. Rockefeller was a master of this stratagem.

Schechter "sick chicken" court case

Complete collapse of the NRA was imminent when, in 1935, the Supreme Court shot down the dying eagle (the symbol of the NRA) in the famed Schechter "sick chicken" decision. The learned justices unanimously held that Congress could not "delegate legislative powers" to the executive. They further declared that congressional control of interstate commerce could not properly apply to a local fowl business, like that of the Schechter brothers in Brooklyn, New York. Roosevelt was incensed by this "horse and buggy" interpretation of the Constitution, but actually the Court helped him out a bad jam.

National Security Act

Congress in 1947 passed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense. The department was to be housed in the sprawling Pentagon building on the banks of the Potomac and to be headed by a new cabinet officer, the secretary of defense. Under the secretary, but now without cabinet status, were the civilian secretaries of the navy, the army (replacing the old secretary of war), and the air force (a recognition of the rising importance of airpower). The uniformed heads of each service were brought together as the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"hard money", creditors, gold

Creditors advocated precisely the opposite policy as the debtors. They had no desire to see the money they had loaned repaid in depreciated dollars. They wanted deflation, not inflation. The "hard-money" advocates carried the day. In 1874 they persuaded a confused Grant to veto a bill to print more paper money. They scored another victory in the Resumption Act of 1875, which pledged the government to the further withdrawal of greenbacks from circulation and to the redemption of all paper currency in gold at face value, beginning in 1879.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

During his first term, Clinton had displayed political courage by supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), creating in 1993 a free-trade zone encompassing Mexico, Canada, and the US. In doing so, he reversed his own stand in the 1992 election campaign and bucked the opposition of protectionists in his own party, esp. labor leaders fearful of losing jobs to low-wage Mexican workers.

Grange Laws (list examples)

Embattled Grangers also went into politics, enjoying their most gratifying success in the grain-growing regions of the upper Mississippi valley (Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota). There, through state legislation, they strove to regulate railway rates and the storage fees charged by railroads and by the operators of warehouses and grain elevators. A number of so-called Granger Laws, however, were badly drawn, and they bitterly fought through the high courts by the well-paid lawyers of the "interests."

lockout, yellow-dog contract, blacklist

Employers could lock their doors against rebellious workers - a procedure called the "___" - and then starve them into submission. They could compel them to sign "ironclad oaths" or "_______," both of which were solemn agreements not to join a labor union. They could put the names of agitators on a "_____" and circulate it among fellow employers.

growth of the sunbelt; Ohio and the "Rustbelt"

Especially striking was the growth of the "Sunbelt" -- a fifteen-state area stretching in a smiling crescent from Virginia through Florida and Texas to Arizona and California. This region increased its population at a rate nearly double that of the old industrial zone of the Northeast. A Niagara of federal dollars accounted for much of the Sunbelt's prosperity, though, ironically, southern and western politicians led the cry against government spending. By the 1990s the South and West were annually receiving some $125 billion more in federal funds than the Northeast and Midwest. A new economic war between the states seemed to be shaping up. Northeasterners and their allies from the hard-hit heavy-industry region of the Ohio Valley (the Rustbelt) tried to rally political support with the sarcastic slogan "The North shall rise again." add?

Apache (AZ and NM); Geronimo

Fierce Apache tribes of Arizona and New Mexico were the most difficult to subdue. Led by Geronimo, whose eyes blazed hatred of the whites, they were pursued into Mexico by federal troops using the sun-flashing heliograph, a communication device that impressed the Indians as "big medicine." Scattered remnants of the warriors were finally persuaded to surrender after the Apache women had been exiled to Florida. The Apaches ultimately became successful farmers in Oklahoma.

Roosevelt and the Nobel Peace Prize

For achieving the Treaty of Portsmouth, as well as for helping arrange an international conference at Algeciras, Spain, in 1906 to mediate North African disputes, TR received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906. But the price of his diplomatic glory was high for US foreign relations. Two historic friendships withered on the windswept plains of Manchuria. US relations with Russia, one friendly, soured as the Russians implausibly accused Roosevelt of robbing them of military victory. Revelations about savage massacres of Russian Jews further poisoned American feelings against Russia. Japan, once America's protege, felt cheated out of its due compensation. Both newly powerful Japan and America now became rivals in Asia, as fear and jealousy between them grew.

Nixon court appointments

Fulfilling his campaign promises, Nixon undertook to change the Court's philosophical complexion. Taking advantage of several vacancies, he sought appointees who would strictly interpret the Constitution, cease "meddling" in social and political questions, and not coddle radicals or criminals. The Senate in 1969 speedily confirmed his nomination of white-maned Warren Burger of Minnesota to succeed the retiring Earl Warren as chief justice. Before the end of 1971, the Court counted four conservative Nixon appointments out of nine members.

Tet offensive; South Vietnamese Viet Cong

Hawkish illusions that the struggle was about to be won were shattered by a blistering communist offensive launched late in January 1968, during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. At a time when the Viet Cong were supposedly licking their wounds, they suddenly and simultaneously mounted savage attacks on 27 key South Vietnamese cities, including the capital, Saigon. Although eventually beaten off with heavy losses, they demonstrated anew that a victory could not be gained by Johnson's strategy of gradual escalation. American military leaders responded to the Tet attacks with a request or 200,000 more troops. ADD?

rise of the Nazi party (list reasons)

Hitler was the most dangerous of the dictators because he combined tremendous power with impulsiveness. He had secured control of the Nazi party by making political capital of the Treaty of Versailles and Germany's depression-spawned unemployment. He was thus a misbegotten child of the shortsighted postwar policies of the victorious Allies, including the US. The desperate German people had fallen in behind the new Pied Piper, for they saw no other hope of escape from the plague of economic chaos and national disgrace.

Bolshevik revolution; red scare

Hysterical fears of red Russia continued to color American thinking for several years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, which spawned a tiny Communist party in America. Tensions were heightened by an epidemic of strikes that convulsed the Republic at war's end, many of them the result of high prices and frustrated union-organizing drives. Upstanding Americans jumped to the conclusion that labor troubles were fomented by bomb-and-whisker Bolsheviks. The big "red scare" of 1919-1920 resulted in a nationwide crusade against left-wingers whose Americanism was suspect. add?

Native-Americans (legalized gambling)

Indians numbered some 2.4 million in 2000 the census. Half of them had left their reservations to live in cities. Meanwhile, unemployment and alcoholism had blighted reservation life. Many tribes took advantage of their special legal status as independent nations by opening bingo halls and gambling casinos for the general public on reservation lands, but the cycle of discrimination and poverty proved hard to break.

Native American Alcatraz and Wounded Knee takeover

Inspired by the civil rights movement, Native Americans in the 1970s gained remarkable power through using the courts and well-planned acts of civil disobedience. Indian activists captured the nation's attention by seizing the island of Alcatraz in 1970 and the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1972. A series of victories in the courts consolidated the decade's gains. In the case of United States v. Wheeler (1978), the Supreme Court declared that Indian tribes possessed a "unique and limited" sovereignty, subject to the will of Congress but not to individual states.

urban riots

Ironically, just as the civil rights movement had achieved its greatest legal and political triumphs, more city-shaking riots erupted in the black ghettos of several American cities. A bloody outburst in Newark, NJ, in the summer of 1967 took 25 lives. Federal troops restored order in Detroit, Michigan after 43 people died in the streets. In LA, black rioters torched their own neighborhoods, attacking police officers and even firefighters, who had to battle both flames and mobs. add?

Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

Johnson also prodded Congress into creating two new cabinet offices: the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to which he named the first black cabinet secretary in the nation's history, respected economist Robert Weaver.

"war on poverty"; Appalachia

Johnson also rammed Kennedy's stalled tax bill through Congress and added proposals of his own for a billion-dollar "War on Poverty." Johnson voiced special concern for Appalachia, where sickness of the soft-coal industry left tens of thousands of mountain folk on the human slag heap.

LBJ's "Great Society" program

Johnson dubbed the domestic program the "Great Society" -- a sweeping set of New Dealish economic and welfare measures aimed at transforming the American way of life.

affirmative action

Johnson struck another blow for women and minorities in 1965 when he issued an executive order requiring all federal contractors to take "affirmative action" against discrimination.

decline of organized labor

Keeping pace with that fundamental transformation (more "white-collar" workers than "blue-collars"), organized labor withered along with the smokestack industries that had been its sustenance. Union membership as a percentage of labor force peaked at about 35 percent in 1954 and then went into steady decline. Some observers concluded that the union movement had played out its historic role of empowering workers and ensuring economic justice, and that unions would eventually disappear altogether in the postindustrial era.

problems for labor

Labor, suddenly deprived of its wartime crutch of friendly government support, limped along badly in the postwar decade. A bloody strike in the steel industry was ruthlessly broken in 1919, partly by exploiting ethnic and racial divisions among the steelworkers and partly by branding the strikers as dangerous "reds." The Railway Labor Board ordered a wage cut of 12 percent in 1922, provoking a two-month strike. It ended when Attorney General Daugherty, who fully shared Harding's big-business bias, clamped on the strikers one of the most sweeping injunctions in American history. Unions wilted in this hostile political environment, and membership shriveled by nearly 30 percent between 1920 and 1930.

strong navy and a canal across Panama

Mahan, by arguing that control of the sea was the key to world dominance, helped stimulate the naval race among the great powers that gained momentum around the turn of the century. Red-blooded Americans joined in the demands for a mightier navy and for an American-built isthmian canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Jay Gould railroad scandals

Methods soon became more refined, as fast-fingered financiers executed multimillion-dollar maneuvers beneath the noses of a bedazzled public (talking about railroads). ____ was the most adept of these ringmasters of rapacity. For nearly thirty years, he boomed and busted the stocks of the Erie, the Kansas Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Texas and Pacific in an incredible circus of speculative skullduggery. ADD

Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)

Militant women entered the alcoholic arena, notably when the _____ was organized in 1874. The white ribbon was a symbol of purity; the saintly Frances E. Willard - also a champion of planned parenthood - was its leading spirit.

pension grab, tariff issue

Military pensions gave Cleveland some of his most painful political headaches. The politically potent GAR routinely lobbied hundreds of private pension bills through a compliant Congress. Benefits were granted to deserters, to bounty jumpers, to men who never served, and to former soldiers who in later years had incurred disabilities in no way connected with war service. A Democrat and a non-veteran, Cleveland was in an awkward position when it came to fighting pension-grabbers. But the conscience-driven president read each bill carefully, vetoed several hundred of them, and then laboriously penned individual veto messages for Congress. He also risked his neck by prodding the hornet's nest of the tariff issue. During the Civil War, tariff schedules had been jacked up to new high levels, partly to raise revenues for the insatiable military machine. The high duties continued to pile up revenue at the customshouses, and by 1881 the Treasury was running an annual surplus amounting to an embarrassing $145 million. Congress could reduce the vexatious surplus in two ways. One was to squander it on pensions and "pork-barrel" bills and thus carry favor with veterans and other self-seeking groups. The other was to lower the tariff - something the big industrialists vehemently opposed. Cleveland had known little and cared less about the tariff before entering the White House. But as he studied the subject, he was much impressed by the arguments of downward revision of the tariff schedules. Lower barriers could mean lower prices for consumers and less protection for monopolies. Most important, they would mean an end to the Treasury surplus, a standing mockery of Cleveland's professed belief in fiscal orthodoxy and small-government frugality. After much hesitation Cleveland saw his duty and overdid it. He tossed an appeal for lower tariffs like a bombshell in the lap of Congress in late 1887. Democrats were deeply depressed at the obstinacy of their chief. Republicans rejoiced at his apparent recklessness. For the first time in years, a real issue divided the two parties as the 1888 presidential election loomed.

Soviet atomic bomb test

More bad news came in Sept 1949 when President Truman shocked the nation by announcing that the Soviets had exploded an atomic bomb -- approximately three years earlier than many experts had thought possible. American strategists since 1945 had counted on keeping the Soviets in line by threats of a one-sided aerial attack with nuclear weapons. But atomic bombing was now a game that two could play.

resistance to integration

More than a hundred southern congressional representatives and senators signed the "Declaration of Constitutional Principles" in 1956, pledging their unyielding resistance to desegregation. Several states diverted public funds to hastily created "private" schools, for there the integration order was more difficult to apply. Throughout the South white citizens' councils thwarted attempts to make integration a reality. Ten years after the Court's momentous ruling, fewer than 2 percent of the eligible blacks in the Deep South were sitting in classrooms with whites.

liberation of Paris

Most spectacular were the lunges across France by American armored divisions, brilliantly commanded by blustery and profane General George Patton. The retreat of the German defenders was hastened when an American-French force landed in Aug 1944 on the southern coast of France and swept northward. With the assistance of French "underground," Paris was liberated in Aug 1944, amid exuberant manifestations of joy and gratitude.

blues, ragtime, jazz

Music, like art, was gaining popularity. America of the 1880s and 1890s was assembling high-quality symphony orchestras. While symphonies and operas were devoted to bringing European music to elite America audiences, new strains of homegrown American music were sprouting in the South. Black folk traditions like spirituals and "ragged music" were evolving into the blues, ragtime, and jazz, which would transform American popular music in the 20th century.

direct primary, initiative, referendum, recall

One of the first objectives of progressives was to regain the power that had slipped from the hands of the people into those of the "interests." These ardent reformers pushed for direct primary elections so as to undercut power-hungry party bosses. They favored the "initiative" so that voters could directly propose legislations themselves, thus bypassing the boss-bought state legislatures. Progressives also agitated for the the "referendum." This device would place laws on the ballot for final approval by the people, esp. laws that had been railroaded through a compliant legislature by free-spending agents of big business. The "recall" would enable the voters to remove faithless elected officials, particularly those who had been bribed by bosses or lobbyists.

Amendment 18; Volstead Act; prohibition

One of the last peculiar spasms of the progressive movement was prohibition, loudly supported by crusading churches and by many women. The arid new order was authorized in 1919 by the Eighteenth Amendment, as implemented by the Volstead Act passed by Congress later that year. Together these laws made the world "safe for hypocrisy." The legal abolition of alcohol was esp. popular in the South and West. Southern whites were eager to keep stimulants out of the hands of blacks, lest they burst out of "their place." In the West prohibition represented an attack on all vices associated with the ubiquitous western saloon: public drunkenness, prostitution, corruption, and crime. But despite the overwhelming ratification of the "dry" amendment, strong opposition persisted in the larger eastern cities. For many "wet" foreign-born people, Old World styles of sociability were built around drinking in beer gardens and corner taverns.

John Maynard Keynes,Keynesian (deficit spending) idea

Only during the Roosevelt recession did FDR at last frankly and deliberately embrace the recommendations of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. The New Deal had run deficits for several years, but all of them had been rather small and none was intended. Now, in April 1937, FDR announced a bold program to stimulate the economy by planned deficit spending. Although the deficits were still undersized for the arduous task of conquering the depression, this abrupt policy reversal marked a major turning point in the government's relation to the economy. "Keynesianism" became the new economic orthodoxy and remained so for decades.

People's Party "Populists" 1892 (list platform)

Politics was no longer "as usual" in 1892, when the newly formed ____, or "____," burst upon the scene. Rooted in the Farmer's Alliance of frustrated farmers in the great agricultural belts of the West and South, the __ met in Omaha and adopted a scorching platform that denounced "the prolific womb of governmental injustice." They demanded inflation through free and unlimited coinage of silver at the rate of sixteen ounces of silver to one ounce of gold. They further called for a graduated income tax; government ownership of the railroads, telegraph, and telephone; the direct election of US senators; a one-term limit on the presidency; the adoption of the initiative and referendum to allow citizens to shape legislation more directly; a shorter workday; and immigration restriction. As their presidential candidate, the ___ uproariously nominated the eloquent old Greenbacker, General James B. Weaver.

"rock and roll", Elvis Presley

Popular music was dramatically transformed in the fifties. The chief revolutionary was Elvis Presley, a white singer born in 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi. Fusing black rhythm and blues with white bluegrass and country styles, Elvis created a new musical idiom known forever after as rock and roll. Rock was "crossover" music, carrying its heavy beat and driving rhythms across the cultural divide that separated black and white musical traditions. Listening and dancing to it became a kind of religious rite for the millions of baby boomers coming of age in the 1950s, and Presley was its high priest. Bloated by fame, fortune, and drugs, he died in 1977 at the age of forty-two.

monopoly, "pool"

Railroad kings were, for a time, virtual industrial monarchs. As manipulators of a huge natural monopoly, they exercised more direct control over the lives of more people than did the president of the US - and their terms were not limited to four years. They increasingly shunned the crude bloodletting of cutthroat competition and began to cooperate with one another to rule the railroad dominion. Sorely pressed to show at least some returns on their bloated investments, they entered into defensive alliances to protect precious profits. The earliest form of combination was the "___" - an agreement to divide the business in a given area and share the profits. ADD?

Grand Army of the Republic (GAR)

Republican strength lay largely in the Midwest and the rural and small-town Northeast. Grateful freedmen in the South continued to vote Republican in significant numbers. Another important bloc of Republican ballots came from the members of the ____ - a politically potent fraternal organization of several hundred thousand Union veterans of the Civil War.

"prime the pump"

Roosevelt had no hesitancy about using federal money to assist the unemployed and at the same time to "prime the pump" of industrial recovery. (A farmer has to pour a little water into a dry pump - that is, "prime it" - to start the flow.)

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); counterculture

Students for a Democratic Society, once at the forefront of the antipoverty and antiwar campaigns, had by decade's end spawned an underground terrorist group called the Weathermen. Peaceful civil rights demonstrations had given to blockbusting urban riots. What started as apparently innocent experiments with drugs like marijuana and LSD had fried many youthful brains and spawned a loathsome underworld of drug lords and addicts. ADD page 935

"Yuppies"

Symbolic of the new income stratification was the emergence of "yuppies," or young, urban professionals. Sporting Rolex watches and BMW sports cars, they made a near-religion out of conspicuous consumption. Though something of a stereotype and numbering only 1.5 million people, yuppies showcased the values of materialism and the pursuit of wealth that came to symbolize the high-rolling 1980s.

CIO breaks from AFL

The CIO surged forward, breaking completely from the AF of L in 1938. On that occasion the Committee for Industrial Organization was formally reconstituted as the Congress of Industrial Organizations, under the high-handed presidency of John L. Lewis. By 1940 the CIO could claim about 4 million members in its constituent unions, including some 200,000 blacks. Nevertheless, bitter and annoying jurisdictional feuding involving strikes continued with the AF of L. At times labor seemed more bent on costly civil war than on its age-old war with management.

credit cards, McDonalds, TV, televangelists

The 1950s witnessed a huge expansion of the middle class and the blossoming of a consumer culture. Diner's Club introduced the plastic credit card in 1949, just one year after the first McDonald's hamburger stand opened in San Bernardino, California. These innovations -- easy credit, high-volume "fast food" production, and new forms of recreation -- were harbingers of an emerging new lifestyle of leisure and affluence that was in full flower by the decade's end. Crucial to the development of that lifestyle was the rapid rise of the new technology of television. TV sets were rich people's novelties in the 1940s, but 7 million sets were sold in 1951. By the mid-1950s, advertisers annually spent $10 billion to hawk their wares on television, while critics fumed that the wildly popular new mass medium was degrading the public's aesthetic, social, moral, political, and educational standards. Even religion capitalized on the powerful new electronic pulpit. "Televengalists" like the Baptist Billy Graham and the Roman Catholic Fulton Sheen took to the airwaves to spread the Christian gospel.

Roe v. Wade abortion ruling

The Burger Court that Nixon shaped proved reluctant to dismantle the "liberal" rulings of the Warren Court; it even produced the most controversial judicial opinion of modern times, the momentous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which legalized abortion.

British blockade of Europe

The Central Powers protested bitterly against the immense trade between American and the Allis, but this traffic did not in fact violate the international neutrality laws. Germany was technically free to trade with the US. It was prevented from doing so not by American policy but by geography and the British navy. Trade between Germany and America had to move sea-lanes, and they threw a noose-tight blockade of mines and ships across the North Sea, gateway to German ports. Over the unavailing protests of American shippers, farmers, and manufacturers, the British began forcing American vessels off the high seas and into their ports. This harassment of American shipping proved highly effective, as trade between Germany and the US virtually ceased.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 created the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to eliminate discrimination when hiring.

exemption of labor unions from antitrust rules

The Clayton Act also conferred long-overdue benefits on labor. Conservative courts had unexpectedly been ruling that trade unions fell under the antimonopoly restraints of the Sherman Act. The Clayton Act therefore sought to exempt labor and agricultural organizations from antitrust prosecution, while explicitly legalizing strikes and peaceful picketing.

Jim Crow, redeemers

The Democratic South speedily solidified and swiftly suppressed the now-friendless blacks. Reconstruction, for better or worse, was officially over. Shamelessly relying on fraud and intimidation, white Democrats ("___") resumed political power in the South and exercised it ruthlessly. Blacks who tried to assert their rights faced unemployment, eviction, and physical harm. With white southerners back in the political saddle, daily discrimination against blacks grew increasingly oppressive. What had started as the informal separation of blacks and whites in the immediate postwar years developed by the 1890s into systematic state-level legal codes of segregation known as ____ laws. Southern states also enacted literacy requirements, voter-registration laws, and poll taxes to ensure full-scale disfranchisement of the South's black population.

Tydings-McDuffie Act; Japan's reaction

The Great Depression burst the fragile bubble of President McKinley's imperialistic dream in the Far East. With the descent into hard times, American taxpayers were eager to throw overboard their expensive tropical liability in the Philippine Islands. Remembering its earlier promises of freedom for the Philippines, Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934. The act provided for the independence of the Philippines after a twelve-year period of economic and political tutelage - that is, by 1946. The United States agreed to relinquish its army bases, but naval bases were reserved for future discussion--and retention. American isolationists rejoiced. Yet in Tokyo, Japanese militarists were calculating that they had little to fear from an inward-looking America that was abandoning its principle possession in Asia.

Branch Davidian siege

The Oklahoma City bombing was presumably in retribution for a 1993 standoff in Waco, Texas, between federal agents and a fundamentalist sect known as the Branch Davidians. The showdown ended in the destruction of the sect's compound and the deaths of many Branch Davidians, including women and children. These episodes brought to light a lurid and secretive underground of paramilitary private "militias" composed of alienated citizens armed to the teeth and ultra-suspicious of all government.

"Big Four"

The Paris Conference of great and small nations fell into the hands of an inner clique, known as the Big Four. Wilson, representing the richest and freshest great power, more or less occupied the drivers seat. He was joined by genial Premier Vittorio Orlando of Italy and brilliant Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain. Perhaps the most realistic of the quartet was cynical, hard-bitten Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, the 78 year old "organizer of victory" known as "the Tiger."

Taft as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court

The Republicans were thrust into an unaccustomed minority status in Congress for the next six years and were frozen out of the White House for eight years. Taft himself had a fruitful old age. He taught law for eight pleasant years at Yale University and in 1921 became chief justice of the Supreme Court - a job for which he was far more happily suited than the presidency. Nominated by Harding.

repeal of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution

The Senate (though not the House) overwhelmingly repealed the Gulf of Tonkin blank check that Congress had given Johnson in 1964 and sought ways to restrain Nixon.

WAAC, WAVES, SPARS, G.I.'s

The armed services enlisted nearly 15 million men in WWII and some 216,000 women, who were employed for noncombat duties. Best known of these "women in arms" were the WAACs (army), WAVES (navy), and SPARs (Coast Guard). As the draft net was tightened after Pearl Harbor, millions of young men were plucked from their homes and clothed in "GI" (government issue) outfits.

Emily Dickinson

The curious figure of ____, one of America's most gifted lyric poets, did not emerge until 1886, when she died and her poems were discovered. A Massachusetts recluse, she wrote over a thousand short lyrics on scraps of paper. Only two were published during her lifetime, and those without her consent. As she wrote, "How dreary to be somebody! // How public, like a frog // To tell your name the livelong June // To an admiring bog!"

genocide (page 808-9)

The deliberate killing of a large people, esp. those of a particular ethnic group or nation. The Holocaust is defined as a systematic genocide designed to eliminate all Jews from Europe.

Hitler suicide

The vengeful Soviets, clawing their way forward from the east, reached Berlin in April 1945. After desperate house-to-house fighting, followed by an orgy of pillage and rape, they captured the bomb-shattered city. Adolf Hitler, after a hasty marriage to his mistress, committed suicide in an underground bunker on April 30, 1945.

Eisenhower and Nixon reelected 1956

The election of 1956 was a replay of the 1952 contest, with President Eisenhower pitted once more against Adlai Stevenson. Eisenhower won with 457 electoral votes to 73. ADD

Clayton Anti-Trust Act

The knot of monopoly was further cut by the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914. It lengthened the shopworn Sherman Act's list of business practices that were deemed objectionable, including price discrimination and interlocking directorates.

Thomas Edison, phonograph, moving pictures, lightbulb

The most versatile inventor of all was ____ (1847-1931), who as a boy had been considered so dull-witted that he was taken out of school. His severe deafness enabled him to concentrate without distraction. Wondrous devices poured out of his "invention factory" in New Jersey - the phonograph, the mimeograph, the dictaphone, and the moving picture. He is probably best known for his perfection in 1879 of the electric ____, which he unveiled after experimenting with some six thousand different filaments. The electric light turned night into day and transformed ancient human habits as well.

triple wall of privilege: tariffs, banks, trusts

The new president called for an all-out assault on what he called "the triple wall of privilege": the tariff, the banks, and the trusts. Underwood Tariff, Amendment 16: Income Tax, Federal Reserve Act, Federal Reserve Commission, and Clayton Anti-Trust Act.

American jingoes

The revolutionary bloodshed also menaced American lives and property in Mexico. Cries for intervention burst from the lips of American jingoes. Prominent among those chanting for war was the influential chain-newspaper published William Randolph Hearst, whose views presumably were colored by his ownership of a Mexican ranch larger than Rhode Island. Yet President Wilson stood firm against demands to step in. It was "perilous," he declared, to determine foreign policy "in terms of material interest."

Japanese-Americans; internment camps

There was virtually no government witch-hunting of minority groups during WWII, as had happened in WWI. A painful exception was the plight of some 110,000 Japanese Americans, concentrated on the Pacific Coast. The Washington top command, fearing that they might act as saboteurs for Japan in case of invasion, forcibly herded them together in concentration camps, though about two-thirds of them were American-born US citizens. This brutal precaution was both unnecessary and unfair, as the loyalty and combat record of Japanese Americans proved to be admirable. But a wave of post-Pearl Harbor hysteria, backed by the long historical swell of anti-Japanese prejudice on the West Coast, temporarily robbed many Americans of their good sense -- and their sense of justice. The internment camps derived these uprooted Americans of dignity and basic rights; the internees also lost hundreds of millions of dollars in property and foregone earnings.

standard time zones

Time itself bent to the railroads' needs. Until the 1880s every town in the US had its own "local" time, dictated by the suns position. For railroad operators worried about keeping schedules and avoiding wrecks, this patchwork of local times was a nightmare. Thus on November 18, 1883, the major rail lines decreed that the continent would henceforth be divided into four "time zones." Most communities quickly adopted railroad "standard" time.

Korean War armistice; division of Korea

True to his campaign pledge, president-elect Eisenhower undertook a flying tree-day visit to Korea in Dec 1952. But even a glamorous Ike could not immediately budge the peace negotiations off dead center. Seven months later, after Eisenhower had hinted that he might use atomic weapons, an armistice was finally signed. The brutal and futile fighting had lasted three years. Yet this terrible toll in blood and treasure (money) brought only a return to the condition of 1950: Korea remained divided at the thirty-eighth parallel. Americans took what little comfort they could from the fact that communism had been "contained" and that the bloodletting had been "limited" to something less than full-scale global war.

"get-Germany-first" strategy of the Allies

Washington, in the so-called ABC-1 agreement with the British, had wisely adopted the strategy of "getting Germany first." If America diverted its main strength to the Pacific (Japan), Hitler might crush both the Soviet Union and Britain and then emerge unconquerable in Fortress Europe. But if Germany was knocked out first, the combined Allied forces could be conquered on Japan, and its daring game of conquest would be up. The get-Germany-first strategy was the solid foundation on which all American military strategy was built. But it encountered much ignorant criticism from two-fisted Americans who thirsted for revenge against Japan.

Underwood Tariff

Wilson tackled the tariff first, summoning Congress into special session in early 1913. Instead of sending his presidential message over to the Capitol to be read, he appeared before a joint session of Congress and presented his appeal with stunning eloquence and effectiveness. The House swiftly passed the Underwood Tariff Bill, which provided for a substantial reduction of rates.

German U-Boats (Unterseeboot) submarines

Wilson warned Germany that it would be held "strict accountability" for any attacks on American vessels or citizens.The German submarines (known as U-boats, from the german Unterseeboot, or "undersea boat") meanwhile had begun their deadly work. In the first months of 1915, they sank about ninety ships in the war zone.

National Defense and Education Act

A strong move now developed in the US to replace "frills" with solid subjects. Congress rejected demands for federal scholarships, but late in 1958 the National Defense and Education Act (NDEA) authorized $887 million in loans to needy college students and in grants for the improvement of teaching the sciences, math, and languages.

Pearl Harbor attack December 7, 1941

After tense negotiations with Japan, the Japanese refused to clear out of China. Officials in Washington knew that Tokyo's decision was for war. But the US, as a democracy committed to public debate and action by Congress, could not shoot first. FDR, mislead by Japanese ship movements in the Far East, evidently expected the blow to fall on British Malaya or on the Philippines. But the paralyzing blow struck Pearl Harbor, while Tokyo was deliberately prolonging negotiations in Washington. Japanese bombers, winging in from distant aircraft carriers, attacked without warning on the "Black Sunday" morning of Dec 7, 1941. About three thousand casualties were inflicted on American personnel, many aircraft were destroyed, the battleship fleet was virtually wiped out when all eight of the craft were sunk or otherwise immobilized, and numerous small vessels were damaged or destroyed. Fortunately for America, three priceless aircraft carriers happened to be outside the harbor.

Bracero program

As the arsenal of democracy, the US exempted certain key categories of industrial and agricultural workers from the draft, in order to keep its might industrial and food-producing machines humming. But even with these exemptions, the draft left the nation's farms and factories so short of personnel that new workers had to be found. An agreement with Mexico in 1942 brought thousands of Mexican agricultural workers, called braceros, across the border to harvest the fruit and grain crops of the West. The bracero program outlived the war by some twenty years, becoming a fixed feature of the agricultural economy in many western states.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover

Attorney General Robert Kennedy set out to recast the priorities of the FBI. The bureau deployed nearly a thousand agents on "internal security" work but targeted only a dozen against organized crime and gave virtually no attention to civil rights violations. Kennedy's efforts were stoutly resisted by J. Edgar Hoover, who had served as FBI director longer than the new attorney general had been alive.

Colonel Custer and Little Big Horn battle

Colonel Custer's Seventh Cavalry, nearly half of them immigrants, set out to suppress the Indians (Sioux Indians led by Sitting Bull in the Black Hills) and to return them to the reservation. Attacking what turned out to be a superior force of some 2,500 well-armed warriors camped along the Little Bighorn River in present-day Montana, the "White Chief with Yellow Hair" and his 264 officers and men were completely wiped out in 1876 when two supporting columns failed to come to their rescue. But in a series of battles across the northern plains in the ensuing months, the US Army relentlessly hunted down the Indians who had humiliated Custer.

communist witch hunt; Red Scare

For many ordinary Americans, the hunt for communists was not just about fending off the military threat of the Soviet Union. Unsettling dangers lurked closer to home. Conservative politicians at the state and local levels discovered that all manner of real or perceived social changes -- including declining religious sentiment, increased sexual freedom, and agitation for civil rights -- could be tarred with a red brush. Anticommunist crusaders ransacked school libraries for "subversive" textbooks and drove debtors, drinkers, and homosexuals, all alleged security risks, from their jobs. ADD?

greenbacks, cheap money, debtors, inflation

Hard times inflicted the worst punishment on debtors, who intensified their clamor for inflationary policies. Proponents of inflation breathed new life into the issue of greenbacks. During the war $450 million of the "folding money" had been issued, but it had depreciated under a cloud of popular mistrust and dubious legality. By 1868 the Treasury had already withdrawn $100 million of the "battle-born currency" from circulation, and "hard-money" people everywhere looked forward to its complete disappearance. But now afflicted agrarian and debtor groups - "cheap-money " supporters - clamored for a reissuance of the greenbacks. With a crude but essentially accurate grasp of monetary theory, they reasoned that more money meant cheaper money, and, hence, rising prices and easier- to-pay debts.

Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign of 1912 vs. Taft

In 1912 the Democrats elected Woodrow Wilson. The third-party Progressive Republican ticket was pushing Roosevelt as the fore candidate. A pro-Roosevelt Progressive convention assembled in Chicago during August 1912. Fired-up Progressives entered the campaign with righteous and enthusiasm. Roosevelt boasted that he felt "as strong as a bull moose" (after he was shot), and the bull moose took its place with the donkey and the elephant in the American political zoo. Roosevelt and Taft were bound to slit each other's political throats; by dividing the Republican vote, they virtually guaranteed a Democratic victory. "Death alone can take me out now," cried once-jovial Taft, as he branded Roosevelt a "dangerous egotist" and a "demagogue." Roosevelt, fighting mad, assailed Taft as a "fathead" with the brain of a "guinea pig."

purchase of Virgin Islands 1917

In 1917 Wilson purchased from Denmark the Virgin Islands, in the West Indies, tightening the grip of Uncle Sam in these shark-infested waters. They also had marines in Haiti to protect US citizens. The forces remained there for nineteen years, making Haiti an American protectorate. In 1916 he sent marines to quell riots in the Dominican Republic, and the debt-cursed land came under the shadow of the American eagle's wings for the next eight years. Increasingly, the Caribbean Sea, with its vital approaches to the now navigable Panama Canal, was taking on the earmarks of a Yankee preserve.

Fordney-McCumber Tariff

In 1922 Congress passed the comprehensive Fordney-McCumber Tariff Law. Glib lobbyists once more descended upon Washington and helped boost schedules from the average of 27 percent under Wilson's Underwood Tariff of 1913 to an average of 38.5 percent, which was almost as high as Taft's Payne-Aldrich Tariff of 1909. Duties on farm produce were increased, and the principle was proclaimed that the general rates were designed to equalize the cost of American and foreign production. A promising degree of flexibility was introduced for the first time, when the president was authorized, with the advice of the fact-finding Tariff Commission, to reduce or increase duties by as much as 50 percent.

German militarism and anti-Jewish policies

In 1935 Hitler openly flouted the Treaty of Versailles by introducing compulsory military service in Germany. The next year he brazenly marched into the demilitarized German Rhineland, likewise contrary to the detested treaty, while France and Britain looked on in agony and indecision. Lashing his following to a frenzy, Hitler undertook to prosecute and then exterminate the Jewish population in the areas under his control. In the end he wiped out about 6 million innocent victims, mostly in gas chambers. Calling upon his people to sacrifice butter for guns, he whipped the new German air force and mechanized ground divisions into the most devastating military machine the world had yet seen.

South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem

In the south (of Vietnam) a pro-Western government under Ngo Dinh Diem was soon entrenched at Saigon. The US did not sign the Geneva accords, though Eisenhower promsed economic and military aid to the autocratic Diem regime, provided that it undertook certain social refors. Change came at a snail's pace, but American aid continued, as communist guerrillas heated up their campaign against Diem. ADD

Election 1964, Johnson vs. Goldwater

Johnson's nomination by the Democrats in 1964 was a foregone conclusion; he was chose by acclamation in Atlantic as his birthday present. The Republicans nominated Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater attacked the federal income tax, the Social Security System, the Tennessee Valley Authority, civil rights legislation, the nuclear test-ban treat, and, most loudly, the Great Society. Democrats gleefully exploited the image of Goldwater as a trigger-happy cowboy who would "Barry us" in the debris of WWIII. The voters were herded into Johnson's column by fondness for the Kennedy legacy, faith in Great Society promises, and fear of Goldwater. The tally in the Electoral College was 489 for Johnson to 52 for Goldwater.

Dust Bowl and various causes

Late in 1933 a prolonged drought struck the states of the trans-Mississippi Great Plains. Rainless weeks were followed by furious, whining winds, while the sun was darkened by millions of tons of powdery topsoil torn from homesteads in an area that stretched from eastern Colorado to the western Missouri - soon to be dubbed the Dust Bowl. Drought and wind triggered the dust storms, but they were not the only culprits. The human hand had also worked its mischief. High grain prices during WWI had enticed farmers to bring countless acres of marginal land under cultivation. Worse, dry-farming techniques and mechanization had revolutionized Great Plains agriculture. The steam tractor and the disk plow tore up infinitely more sod than a team of oxen ever could, leaving the powdery topsoil to be swept away at nature's whim.

railroad effect on industrialization, mining, agriculture

More than any other single factor, the railroad network spurred the amazing industrialization of the post-Civl War years. The puffing locomotives opened up fresh markets for manufactured goods and sped raw materials to factories. The forging of rails themselves generated the largest single source of orders for the adolescent steel industry. The screeching iron horse likewise stimulated mining and agriculture, esp. in the West. It took farmers out to their land, carried the fruits of their toil to market, and brought them their manufactured necessities. Clusters of farm settlements paralleled the railroads, just as earlier they had followed rivers.

Nixon visits communist China

Nixon, heretofore an uncompromising anticommunist, announced to a startled nation in July 1971, that he had accepted an invitation to visit Communist China the following year. He made his historic journey in Feb 1972. He capped his visit with the Shanghai Communique, in which the two nations agreed to "normalize" their relationship. An important part of the accord was America's acceptance of a "one-China" policy, implying a lessened American commitment to the independence of Taiwan.

Kennedy assassination, Oswald, Warren Commission

On November 22, 1963, white riding in an open limousine in downtown Dallas, Texas, President Kennedy was shot in the brain by a concealed rifleman and died within seconds. As a stunned nation grieved, the tragedy grew still more unbelievable. The alleged assassin, a fugitive figure named Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself shot to death in front of television cameras by a self-appointed avenger, Jack Ruby. So bizarre were the events surrounding the two murders that even an elaborate official investigation conducted by Chief Justice Warren could not quiet all doubts and theories about what had really happened.

Pusan perimeter; Inchon landing and 38th Parallel

Rather than fight his way out of the southern Pusan perimeter, MacArthur launched a daring ambitious landing behind the enemy's lines at Inchon. This bold gamble on Sept 15, 1950, succeeded brilliantly; within two weeks the North Koreans had scrambled back behind the "sanctuary" of the 38th parallel. Truman's avowed intention was to restore South Korea to its former borders, but the pursuing South Koreans had already crossed the 38th parallel, and there seemed little point in permitting the North Koreans to regroup and come again. The UN Assembly tacitly authorized a crossing by MacArthur, whom President Truman ordered northward, provided that there was no intervention in force by the Chinese or Soviets.

Warsaw Pact

The Germans were finally welcomed into the NATO fold in 1955, with an expected contribution of half a million troops. In the same year, the Eastern European countries and the Soviets signed the Warsaw Pact, creating a red military counterweight to the newly bolstered NATO forces in the West.

Patrons of Husbandry, "The Grange"

The National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry - better known as the Grange - were organized in 1867. Its leading spirit was Oliver H. Kelley. His first objective was to enhance the lives of isolated farmers through social, educational, and fraternal activities. Farm men and women, cursed with loneliness in widely separated farmhouses, found the Grange's picnics, concerts, and lectures a godsend. Kelley, a Mason, even found farmers receptive to his mumbo-jumbo of passwords and secret rituals, as well as his four-ply hierarchy. The Grange spread like an old-time prairie fire, and by 1875 claimed 800,000 members, chiefly in the Midwest and South. add?

Eisenhower Doctrine

The US president and Congress proclaimed the Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957, pledging US military and economic aid to Middle Eastern nations threatened by communist aggression. The real threat to the US interests in the Middle East, however, was not communism but nationalism, as Nasser's wild popularity among the masses of all Arab countries demonstrated.

National Labor Union 1866 (list goals)

The ____, organized in 1866, represented a giant bootstride by workers. The union lasted six years and attracted the impressive total of some 600,000 members, including the skilled, unskilled, and farmers, though it excluded the Chinese and made only nominal efforts to include women and blacks. It agitated for the arbitration of industrial disputes and the eight-hour workday, and won the latter for government workers. But the devastating depression of the 1870s dealt it a knockout blow.

Anti-Imperialist league (Twain, Gompers, Carnegie)

The _____ sprang up into being to fight the McKinley administration's expansionist moves. The organization counted among its members some of the most prominent people in the US, including the presidents of Stanford and Harvard Universities and the novelist Mark Twain. The anti-imperialist blanket even stretched over such strange bedfellows as the labor leader Samuel Gompers and the steel titan Andrew Carnegie. Anti-imperialists raised many objections. The Filipinos thirsted for freedom; to annex them would violate the "consent of the governed" philosophy in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Despotism abroad might well beget despotism at home. Imperialism was costly and unlikely ever to turn a profit. Finally, annexation would propel the US into the political and military cauldron of East Asia.

VP Agnew resignation; Amendment 25; Gerald Ford

The moral stench hanging over the White House worsened when VP Agnew was forced to resign in Oct 1973 for taking bribes from Maryland contractors while governor and also as VP. Congress invoked the 25th Amendment to replace Agnew with a twelve-term congressman from Michigan, Gerald Ford.

OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries)

The poor, sandy sheikdoms increasingly resolved to reap for themselves the lion's share of the enormous oil wealth that Western companies pumped out of the scorching Middle Eastern deserts. In a portentous move, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran joined with Venezuela in 1960 to form the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). In the next two decades, OPEC's stranglehold on the Western economies would tighten to a degree that even Nasser could not have imagined.

Camp David Agreement 1978

The president's most spectacular foreign-policy achievement came in September 1978 when he invited President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel to a summit conference at Camp David. Skillfully serving as go-between, Carter persuaded the two visitors to sign an accord that held considerable promise of peace. Israel agreed in principle to withdraw from territory conquered in the 1967 war, and Egypt in return promised to respect Israel's borders. Both parties pledged themselves to sign a formal peace treaty within three months.

Indian reservations and problems

The relentless fire-and-sword policy of the whites at last shattered the spirit of the Indians. The vanquished Native Americans were finally ghettoized on reservations where they could theoretically preserve their cultural autonomy but were in fact compelled to eke out a sullen existence as wards of the government. Their white masters had at last discovered that the Indians were much cheaper to feed than to fight. Even so, for many decades they were almost ignored to death. add?

federal troops protect mail delivery (injunction)

The turmoil in Chicago (the Pullman strike) was serious but not yet completely out of hand. At least this was the judgement of Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois, who had pardoned the Haymarket Square anarchists the year before. But US attorney general Richard Olney urged the dispatch of federal troops. His legal grounds were that the strikers were interfering with the transit of the US mail. President Cleveland supported Olney with the ringing declaration, "If it takes an entire army and navy to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that card will be delivered." To the delight of conservatives, federal troops, bayonets fixed, crushed the Pullman strike. Debs was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for contempt of court because he had defied a federal court injunction to cease striking. Embittered cries of "government by injunction" now burst from organized labor. This was the first time that such a legal weapon had been used conspicuously by Washington to break a strike, and it was more distasteful because defiant workers who were held in contempt could be imprisoned without a jury trial.

Warren G. Harding; the "Ohio Gang"

Warren G Harding, inaugurated in 1921, looked presidential. An easygoing, warm-handed backslapper, he exuded graciousness and love of people. Yet the charming, smiling exterior concealed a weak, inept interior. With a mediocre mind, he quickly found himself beyond his depth in the presidency. Harding, like Grant, was unable to detect moral halitosis in his evil associates, and he was soon surrounded by his poker-playing, shirt-sleeved cronies of the "Ohio Gang." "A good guy," Harding was "one of the boys." He hated to hurt people's feelings, esp. those of his friends, by saying no, and designing political leeches capitalized on this weakness. Candidate Harding, who admitted his scanty mental furnishings, had promised to gather about him "the best minds" of the party. Charles Evans Hughes became secretary of state, Andrew Mellon was secretary of the Treasury, and Herbert Hoover was secretary of commerce. Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico, a scheming anti-conservationist, was appointed secretary of interior, and Harry Daugherty, a small town lawyer but a big time crook in the "Ohio Gang," was supposed to prosecute wrongdoers as attorney general.

Stimson Doctrine and its limits

Washington flatly rejected initial attempts of the League in 1931 to secure American cooperation in applying economic pressure on Japan. Washington and Secretary of State Henry Stimson in the end decided to fire only paper bullets at the Japanese aggressors. The so-called Stimson doctrine, proclaimed in 1932, declared that the US would not recognize any territorial acquisitions achieved by force. This verbal slap on the wrist from America did not deter the march of Japanese militarists. Smarting under a Chinese boycott, the bombed Shanghai in 1932, with shocking losses to civilians. Outraged Americans launched informal boycotts of Japanese goods, chiefly dime-store knickknacks. But there was no real sentiment for armed intervention among a depression-ridden people, who remained strongly isolationists during the 1930s.

rising productivity

With the nature increasingly harnessed in their hands, workers chalked up spectacular gains in productivity -- the amount of output per hour of work. In the two decades after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, productivity increased at an average rate of more than 3 percent per year. Gains in productivity were also enhanced by the rising educational level of the workforce. Better educated and better equipped, American workers in 1970 could produce nearly twice as much in an hour's labor as they had in 1950. Productivity was the key to prosperity. Rising productivity in the 1950s and 1960s virtually doubled the average American's standard of living in the postwar quarter-century.

women's suffrage (Amendment 19)

Woman suffrage, the goal of feminists for many decades, received powerful support from the progressives early in the 1900. The political reformers believed that women's votes would elevate the political tone, and the foes of the saloon felt that they could count on the support of enfranchised females. The suffragists protested bitterly against "Taxation Without Representation." Many of the states, esp. the more liberal ones in the West, gradually extended the vote to women. But by 1910 nationwide female suffrage was still a decade away, and a suffragist could still be sneeringly defined as "one who has ceased to be a lady and has not yet become a gentleman."

Chinese laborers and Chinese Exclusion Act

Racial and ethnic fissures among workers everywhere fractured labor unity and were particularly acute between the Irish and Chinese in California. Chinese people who remained in America (and didn't leave when the gold supply petered out and the train tracks were laid in California) faced extraordinary hardships. They worked at the most menial jobs, often as cooks, laundrymen, or domestic servants. Without women or families, they were marooned in a land where they neither were wanted or wanted to be. "Kearneyites," many of them immigrants from Europe, resented the competition of cheap labor from the still more recently arrived Chinese. Taking to the streets, gangs of Kearneyites terrorized the Chinese by shearing off their precious pigtails or murdering them outright. Congress finally slammed the door on Chinese immigrant laborers when it passed the ____ in 1882, prohibiting all further immigration from China. The door stayed shut until 1943.

Central Pacific Railroad; Chinese labor

Rail laying at the California end was undertaken by the ____. This line pushed boldly eastward from boomtown Sacramento, over and through the towering, snow-clogged Sierra Nevada. For farseeing men - the so-called Big Four (ex-governor Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington) - were the chief financial bankers of the enterprise. The railway, which was granted the same princely subsidies as the Union Pacific, had the same incentive to haste. Some ten thousand Chinese laborers, sweating from dawn to dusk under their basket hats, proved to be cheap, efficient, and expendable (hundred lost their lives in premature explosions and other mishaps).

changes in the Roman Catholic church

Religious upheaval churned the tradition-bound Roman Catholic Church, among the world's oldest and most conservative institutions. Clerics abandoned their Roman collars and Latin lingo, folk songs replaced Gregorian chants, and meatless Fridays became ancient history. No matter what the topic, conventional wisdom and inherited ideas came under fire.

Helen Hunt Jackson "A Century of Dishonor"

She was a Massachusetts writer of children's literature who pricked the more sense of Americans in 1881 when she published "______." The book chronicled the sorry record of government ruthlessness and chicanery in dealing with the Indians. Her later novel "Romona" (1884), a love story of injustice to the California Indians, sold some 600,000 copies and further inspired sympathy for the Indians.

invasion of Austria (Anschluss)

Suddenly, in March 1938, Hitler bloodlessly occupied German-speaking Austria, his birthplace. The democratic powers, wringing their hands in despair, prayed that this last grab would satisfy his passion for conquest. But like a drunken reveler calling for madder music and stronger wine, Hitler could not stop.

"Rum, Romanism and Rebellion"

The contest (between Cleveland and Blaine) hinged on the state of NY, where Blaine had blundered badly int the closing days of the campaign. A witless Republican clergyman damned the Democrats in speech as the party of "_____" - insulting with one swift stroke the culture, the faith, and the patriotism of NY's numerous Irish American voters. The Irishmen who deserted his camp helped account for Cleveland's paper-thin plurality of about a thousand votes in NY State, enough o give him the presidency.

destruction of the buffalo

Tens of millions of buffalo blackened the western prairies when white Americans first arrived. They were the staff of life for Native Americans. Their flesh provided food; their dried dung provided fuel; their hides provided clothing, lariats, and harnesses. When the Civil War closed, some 15 million of these beasts were still grazing on the western plains. Much of the food supply of the railroad construction gangs came from leathery buffalo steaks. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody killed over 4,000 animals in eighteen month while employed by the Kansas Pacific. With the building of the railroad, the massacre of the herds began in deadly earnest. The creatures were slain for their hides, for their tongues or for a few other choice cuts, or for sheer amusement. Such wholesale butchery left fewer than a thousand buffalo alive by 1885, and the once-numerous beasts were in danger of complete extinction.

Four-Power Treaty for the Pacific

The Four-Power Treaty replaced the twenty-year-old Anglo-Japanese alliance. The new pact bound Britain, Japan, France, and the US to preserve the status quo in the Pacific - another concession to the jumpy Japanese.

artificial scarcity and Supreme Court ruling

"Subsidized scarcity" did have the effect of raising farm income, but the whole confused enterprise met with acid criticism. Farmers, food processors, consumers, and taxpayers were all to some degree unhappy. Paying the farmers not to farm actually increased unemployment, at a time when other New Deal agencies were striving to decrease it. When the Supreme Court finally killed the AAA in 1936 by declaring its regulatory taxation provisions unconstitutional, foes of the plow-under program rejoiced loudly. add?

Garfield; election 1880, assassination 1881

The Republican party sought a new standard-bearer for 1880 and finally settled on a "dark-horse" candidate, James A. ___, from the electorally powerful state of Ohio. His vice-presidential running mate was a notorious Stalwart henchman, Chester A. Arthur of New York. Energetically waving the bloody shirt, __ barely squeaked out a victory over the Democratic candidate and Civil War Hero, Winfield Scott Hancock. A disappointed and mentally deranged office seeker, Charles J. Guiteau, shot the president in the back a Washington railroad station. __ lingered in agony for eleven weeks and died on Sept. 19, 1881. Guiteau, when seized, reportedly cried, "I am a Stalwart. Arthur is now President of the United States." The implication was that now the Conklingites would get good jobs (spoils system).

National (Industrial) Recovery Administration (NRA/NIRA)

A daring attempt to stimulate a nationwide comeback was initiated when the Emergency Congress authorized the National Recovery Administration. This ingenious scheme was by far the most complex and far-reaching effort by the New Dealers to combine immediate relief with long-range recovery and reform. Triple barreled, it was designed to assist industry, labor, and the unemployed. ADD?

Homestead Act of 1862 (list parts and problems)

A fresh day dawned for western farmers with the Homestead Act of 1862. The new law allowed a settler to acquire as much as 160 acres of land by living on it for five years, improving it, and paying a nominal fee of about $30. The Act often turned out to be a cruel hoax. The standard 160 acres, quite adequate in the well-watered Mississippi basin, frequently proved pitifully inadequate on the rain-scarce Great Plains. Thousands of homesteaders were forced to give up the one-sided struggle against drought.

inflation, oil, deficits, high interest rates

A stinging recession during Ford's presidency brought the inflation rate down temporarily, but virtually from the moment of Carter's inauguration, prices resumed their dizzying ascent, driving the inflation rate well above 13% by 1979. The soaring bill for imported oil plunged America's balance of payments deeply into the red. Yawning deficits in the federal budget, reaching nearly $60 billion in 1980, further aggravated the US economy's inflationary ailments. People with money to lend pushed interest rates ever higher, hoping to protect themselves from being repaid in badly depreciated dollars. The "prime rate" (the rate of interest that banks charge their very best customers) vaulted to an unheard-of 20% in early 1980. The high cost of borrowing money shoved small businesses to the wall and strangled the construction industry, heavily dependent on loans to finance new housing and other projects.

creation of Jewish state of Israel and Palestinian reaction

Access to Middle Eastern oil crucial to the European recovery program and, increasingly, to the health of the US economy, as domestic American oil reserves dwindled. Yet the Arab oil countries adamantly opposed the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in the British mandate territory of Palestine. Should Israel be born, a Saudi Arabian leader warned Truman, the Arabs "will lay siege to it until it dies of famine." Defying Arab wrath as well as objections of his own State and Defense Departments and the European Allies, all of them afraid to antagonize the oil-endowed Arabs, Truman officially recognized the state of Israel on the day of its birth, May 14, 1948.

Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky scandal

Allegations of wrongdoing, reaching back to his pre-presidential days in Arkansas, included a failed real estate investment known as Whitewater Land Corporation. The Clintons' involvement in that deal prompted the appointment of a federal special prosecutor to investigate -- though an indictment for Whitewater wrongdoing never materialized. All previous scandals were overshadowed when it was revealed in Jan 1998 that Clinton had engaged in a sexual affair with a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and then lied about it when he testified under oath in another woman's civil lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment.

Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC)

Another law created by the Hundred Days Congress was the House Owner's Loan Corporation. Designed to refinance mortgages on non-farm homes, it ultimately assisted about a million badly pinched households. The agency not only bailed out mortgage-holding banks, it also bolted the political loyalties of relieved middle-class homeowners securely to the Democratic party.

nativism

Antiforeignism, or ___, earlier touched off by the Irish and German arrivals in the 1840s and 1850s, bared its ugly face in the 1880s with fresh ferocity. New Immigrants came for much the same reason as the Old - to escape the poverty and squalor of Europe and to seek new opportunities in America. But "__" viewed the eastern and southern Europeans as culturally and religiously exotic hordes and often gave them rude reception. Antiforeign organizations were now revived in a different guise. Notorious among them was the American Protective Association, which was created in 1887 and soon claimed a million members. ADD

Bush domestic policies (summarize page 1000)

As president, Bush soon proved to be more of a divider than a uniter, less a "compassionate conservative" than a crusading ideologue. Religious traditionalists cheered but liberals jeered when he withdrew American support from international health programs that sanctioned abortion, advocated federally financed faith-based social welfare initiatives, and sharply limited government-sponsored research on embryonic stem cells, which many scientists believed held the key to conquering diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. He pleased corporate chieftains but angered environmentalists by challenging scientific findings on ground-water contamination and global warming, repudiating the Kyoto Treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions, advocating new oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska's ecologically fragile north coast, and allowing VP Cheney to hammer out his admin's energy policy in behind-closed-doors meetings with representatives of several giant oil companies. He pressed ahead with a tax cut of $1.3 trillion, turning the federal budget surpluses of the late 1990s into yawning deficits.

Hearst, Pulitzer, yellow journalism

Atrocities in Cuba were red meat for the sensational new "yellow journalism" (based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration) of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Engaged in a titanic duel for circulation, each attempted to outdo the other with screeching headlines and hair-raising "scoops." Where atrocity stories did not exist, they were invented. Hearst sent the gifted artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to draw sketches, allegedly with the pointed admonition: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Among other outrages, Remington depicted Spanish customs officials brutally disrobing and searching an American woman. Most readers of Hearst's "Journal," their indignation soaring, had no way of knowing that such tasks were performed by female attendants.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer; Palmer Raids

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who "saw red" too easily, earned the title of the "Fighting Quaker" by his excess of zeal in rounding up suspects (red scare). They ultimately totaled about six thousand. This drive to root out radicals was redoubled in June 1919, when a bomb shattered both the nerves and the Washington home of Palmer. The "Fighting Quaker" was thereupon dubbed the "Quaking Fighter."

German air attacks over Britain, "Battle of Britain"

Before the fall of France in June 1940, Washington had generally observed a technical neutrality. But now, as Britain alone stood between Hitler and his dream of world domination, the wisdom of neutrality seemed increasingly questionable. Hitler launched air attacks against Britain in August 1940, preparatory to an invasion scheduled for September. For month the Battle of Britain raged in the air over the British Isles. The Royal Air Force's tenacious defense of its native islands eventually led Hitler to postpone his planned invasion indefinitely.

Israel; Six-Day War

Beleaguered (under attack) Israel stunned the Soviet-backed Egyptians in the devastating Six-Day War in June 1967. When the smoke cleared, Israel occupied new territories in the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank of the Jordan River, including Jerusalem. Although the Israelis eventually withdrew from Sinai, they refused to relinquish the other areas and began moving Jewish settlers into the heavily Arab district of the West Bank.

Henry Ford, Model T, assembly line

Best known of the new crop of industrial wizards was Henry Ford, who more than any other individual put America in rubber tires. His high and hideous Model T was cheap, rugged, and reasonably reliable, though rough and clattering. After two earlier failures, he grasped and applied fully the techniques of assembly-line production. So economical were his methods that in the mid-1920s, he was selling the Ford roadster for $260 - well within the purse of a thrifty worker.

sharecropping, tenant farming, crop lien system

Blacks were forced into ___ and __ farming. Former slaves often found themselves at the mercy of former masters who were not their landlords and creditors. Through the "____" system, storekeepers extended credit to small farmers for food and supplies and in return took a lien on their harvests. Shrewd merchants manipulated the system so that farmers remained perpetually in debt to them.

Roaring Twenties

Bloodied by war and disillusioned by the peace, the Americans turned inward in the 1920s. Shunning diplomatic commitments to foreign countries, they also denounced "radical" foreign ideas, condemned "un-American" lifestyles, and clanged shut the immigration gates against foreign peoples. The boom of the golden twenties showered genuine benefits on Americans, as incomes and living standards rose for many. New technologies, new consumer products, and new forms of leisure and entertainment made the twenties roar. Yet beneath the surface lurked widespread anxieties about the future and fears that America was losing sight of its traditional ways.

Wilson's background

Born in Virginia shortly before the Civil War and reared in Georgia and the Carolinas, the professor-politician was the first man from one of seceded southern states to reach the White House since Zachary Taylor, 64 years earlier. He sympathized with the Confederacy's gallant attempt to win its independence, a sentiment that partly inspired his ideal of self-determination for people of other countries. Steeped in the traditions of Jeffersonian democracy, he shared Jefferson's faith in the masses - if they were properly informed. Son of a Presbyterian minister, he reared in an atmosphere of fervent piety. He later used the presidential pulpit to preach his inspirational political sermons. A profound student of government, Wilson believed that the chief executive should play a dynamic role. He was convinced that Congress could not function properly unless the president, like a kind of prime minister, got out in front and provided leadership. Professor -> President of Princeton -> governor of NJ -> eventually President of USA.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara

Business whiz Robert McNamara left the presidency of the Ford Motor Company to take over the Defense Department.

Carter's problems; Edward Kennedy

By 1980 the Republican party was ready to challenge the Democrats' hold on the White House. Bedeviled abroad and becalmed at home, Jimmy Carter's administration struck many Americans as bungling and befuddled. Carter's inability to control double-digit inflation was esp. damaging. Frustrated critics bellyached loudly about the Georgian's alleged mismanagement of the nation's affairs. The liberal wing of the Democratic party found its champion in Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the last survivor of the assassin-plagued Kennedy brothers. He and Carter slugged it out in a series of bruising primary elections, while delighted Republicans decorously proceeded to name Reagan their presidential nominee. In the end Kennedy's candidacy fell victim to the country's conservative mood. A battered Carter, his party divided and in disarray, was left to battle with Reagan.

Asian Americans

CHECK HERE PAGE 1026 Asian Americans also made great strides since by the 1980's they were America's fastest-growing minority, and their numbers reached nearly 12 million by 2002. Once feared and hated as the yellow peril and consigned to the most menial degrading jobs, citizens of Asian ancestry were now counted among the most prosperous Americans with the typical Asian household holding nearly 25% greater than that of the typical white household in 2003.

"Southern Manifesto"

CHECK WITH SOMEONE. The Border States generally made reasonable efforts to comply with the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling, but in the Deep South diehards organized "massive resistance" against the Court's annulment of the sacred principle of "separate but equal." More than a hundred southern congressional representatives and senators signed the "Declaration of Constitutional Principles" in 1956, pledging their unyielding resistance to desegregation.

Panama Canal Treaty

Carter also successfully proposed two treaties turning over complete ownership and control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians by the year 2000.

Wilson-Gorman Tariff (including a failed income tax)

Cleveland suffered further embarrassment with the passage of the ___ Tariff in 1894. The Democrats had pledged to lower tariffs, but by the time their tariff bill made it through Congress, it had been so loaded with special-interest protection that it made scarcely a dent in the high McKinley Tariff rates. An outraged Cleveland grudgingly allowed the bill, which also contained a 2% tax on incomes over $4,000, to become a law without his signature. When the Supreme Court struck down the income-tax provision in 1895, the Populists and other dissatisfied groups found proof that the courts were only tools of the plutocrats.

deficit reduction, federal government surplus

Clinton had better luck with a deficit-reduction bill in 1993, which combined with an increasingly buoyant economy by 1996 to shrink the federal deficit to its lowest level in more than a decade. By 1998 Clinton's policies seemed to have caged the ravenous deficit monster, as Congress argued over the unfamiliar question of how to manage federal budget surpluses.

"Good Neighbor" policy in Latin America

Closer to home, FDR inaugurated a refreshing new era in relations with Latin America. He proclaimed in his inaugural address, "I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the Good Neighbor." Taken together, Roosevelt's noninvolvement in Europe and withdrawal from Asia, along with this brotherly embrace of his New World neighbors, suggested that the US was giving up its ambition to be a world power and would content itself instead with being merely a regional power, its interests and activities confined exclusively to the Western Hemisphere.

German brewers and Amendment 18 (Prohibition)

Congress severely restricted the use of foodstuffs for manufacturing alcoholic beverages, and the war-spawned spirit of self-denial helped accelerate the wave of prohibition that was sweeping the country. Many leading brewers were German-descended, and this taint made the drive against alcohol all the more popular. The reformers' dream of a saloonless nation was finally achieved - temporarily - in 1919 with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting all alcoholic drinks.

garbage, impure water, lack of sewers

Country dwellers produced little household waste. In the city, however, goods came in throwaway bottles, boxes, bags, and cans. Apartment houses had no adjoining barnyards where residents might toss garbage to the hogs. Cheap ready-to-wear clothing and swiftly changing fashions pushed old suits and dresses out of the closet and onto the trash heap. Waste disposal, in short, was an issue new to the urban age. Sanitary facilities could not keep pace with the mushrooming population explosion. Impure water, uncollected garbage, unwashed bodies, and droppings from draft animals enveloped many cities in a satanic stench. add?

urban crime

Crime was the great scourge of urban life. The rate of violent crimes committed in cities reaching all-time high in the drug-infested 1980s and then leveled off in the early 1990s. The number of violent crimes even began to decline substantially in many areas after 1995. Nevertheless, murders, robberies, and rapes remained shockingly common not only in cities but also in suburbs and rural areas. The US imprisoned a larger fraction of its citizens than almost any other country in the world, and the some desperate citizens resorted to armed vigilante tactics to protect themselves.

Reconstruction Finance Corporation and limits

Early in 1932 Congress, responding to Hoover's belated appeal, established the RFC. With an initial working capital of half a billion dollars, this agency became a government lending bank. It was designed to provide indirect relief by assisting insurance companies, banks, agricultural organizations, railroads, and even hard-pressed state and local governments. But it didn't loan to individuals. "Pump-priming" loans by the RFC were no doubt of widespread benefit, though the organization was established many months too late for maximum usefulness. Projects that it supported were largely self-liquidating, and the government as a banker actually profited to the tune of many millions of dollars.

satellite states, iron curtain

East Germany, along with other Soviet-dominated Eastern European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, became nominally independent "satellite" states, bound to the Soviet Union. Eastern Europe virtually disappeared from Western sight behind the "iron curtain" of secrecy and isolation that Stalin clanged down across Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic. The division of Europe would endure for more than four decades.

urbanization

Economic miracles wrought during the decades after the Civil War enormously increased the wealth of the Republic. The standard of living rose sharply, and well-fed American workers enjoyed more physical comforts than their counterparts in any other industrial nation. Urban centers mushroomed as the insatiable factories demanded more American labor and as immigrants swarmed like honeybees to the new jobs. ADD/CHANGE?

Eugene V. Debs; American Railway Union

Eugene V. Debs, a charismatic labor leader, had helped organize the American Railway Union of about 150,000 members. The workers struck at the Pullman Palace Car Company - in some places overturning Pullman cars - and paralyzed railway traffic from Chicago to the Pacific Coast. add (from above?)

Austro-Hungarian heir (Franz Ferdinand) assassinated

Europe's powder magazine, long smoldering, blew up in the summer of 1914, when the flaming pistol of a Serb patriot killed the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo. An outraged Vienna government, backed by Germany, forthwith presented a stern ultimatum to neighboring Serbia. Serbia, backed by Russia, refused t bend the knee sufficiently.

Roosevelt Recession of 1937 and causes

FDR's first term, 1933 to 1937, did not banish the depression from the land. Despite the inventiveness of New Deal programs and the billions of dollars in "pump priming," recovery had been dishearteningly modest, though the country seemed to be inching its way back to economic health. Then in 1937 the economy took another sharp downturn, a surprisingly severe depression-within-the-depression that the president's critics quickly labeled the "Roosevelt recession." In fact, government policies had caused the nosedive, as new Social Security taxes began to bite into payrolls and as the administration cut back on spending out of continuing reverence for the orthodox economic doctrine of the balanced budget.

cash crops

Farmers had raised their own food, fashioned their own clothing, and bartered for other necessities with neighbors. Now high prices persuaded farmers to concentrate on growing single "cash" crops, such as wheat or corn, and use their profits to buy foodstuffs at the general store manufactured goods in town or by mail order.

Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique

Feminist Betty Friedan gave focus and fuel to women's feelings in 1963 when she published "The Feminine Mystique," a runaway best seller and a classic of feminist protest literature that launched the modern women's movement. Friedan spoke in rousing accents to millions of able, educated women who applauded her indictment of the stifling boredom of suburban housewifery. Many of those women were already working for wages, but they were also struggling against the guilt and frustration of leading an "unfeminine" life as defined by the postwar "cult of domesticity."

Nine-Power Treaty (Open Door in China)

Finally, the Washington Conference gave chaotic China - "the Sick Man of the Far East" - a shot in the arm with the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922, whose signatories agreed to nail wide open the Open Door in China.

Nasser of Egypt, Suez Canal Crisis

The Suez canal crisis proved far messier than the swift stroke in Iran. President Nasser of Egypt, an ardent Arab nationalist, was seeking funds to build an immense dam on the upper Nile for urgently needed irrigation and power. America and Britain tentatively offered financial help, but when Nasser began to flirt openly with the communist camp, Secretary of State Dulles dramatically withdrew the dam offer. Nasser promptly regained face by nationalizing the Suez Canal, owned chiefly by British and French stockholders. add?

Detroit race riots

In 1943 young "zoot-suit"-clad Mexicans and Mexican Americans in LA were viciously attacked by Anglo sailors who cruised the streets in taxicabs searching for victims. Order was restored only after the Mexican ambassador made an emotional plea, pointing out that such outbreaks were grist for Nazi propaganda mills. At almost the same time, an even more brutal race riot that killed twenty-five blacks and nine whites erupted in Detroit. ADD?

French defeat at Dienbienphu

In March 1954 a key French garrison was trapped hopelessly in the fortress of Dienbienphu in the northwestern corner of Vietnam. The new "policy of boldness" was now put to the test. Secretary Dulles, VP Nixon, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff favored intervention with American bombers to help bail out the beleaguered French. But Eisenhower, wary about another war in Asia so soon after Korea and correctly fearing British nonsupport, held back. Dienbienphu fell to the nationalists.

Interstate Highway Act 1956

In a public works project that dwarfed anything the New Dealers had ever dreamed of, Ike backed the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, a $27 billion plan to build forty-two thousand miles of sleek, fast motorways. Laying down these modern, multilane roads created countless construction jobs and speeded the suburbanization of America. The act offered juicy benefits to the trucking, automobile, oil, and travel industries, while at the same time robbing the railroads, esp. passenger trains, of business. The act also exacerbated problems of air quality and energy consumption, and had esp. disastrous consequences for cities, whose once-vibrant downtowns withered away while shopping malls flourished in the far-flung suburbs.

ban on gays in the military; "don't ask don't tell"

In one of his first initiatives on taking office, Clinton stirred a hornet's nest of controversy by advocating an end to the ban on gays and lesbians in the armed services. Confronted with fierce opposition, the president finally had to settle for a "don't ask, don't tell" policy that quietly accepted gay and lesbian soldiers and sailors without officially acknowledging their presence in the military.

George H.W. Bush, 1988, "Kinder, Gentler America"

In the 1988 presidential elections, Republicans nominated Reagan's VP, George H. W. Bush, who ran largely on the Reagan record of tax cuts, strong defense policies, toughness on crime, opposition to abortion, and a long-running if hardly robust economic expansion. Against the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, Bush won the election with 426 electoral votes to 111. Bush's deepest commitment was to public service; he left the business world to serve briefly as congressman and then held various posts in several Republican administrations, including emissary to China, ambassador to the UN, director of the CIA, and VP. He capped this long political career when he was inaugurated as president in Jan 1989, promising to work for a "kinder, gentler America."

Czechoslovakia "Sudetenland"

Intoxicated by his recent gains (Austria), Hitler began to make bullying demands for the German-inhabited Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. The leaders of Britain and France, eager to appease Hitler, sought frantically to bring the dispute to the conference table. FDR, also deeply alarmed, kept the wires hot with personal messages to both Hitler and Mussolini urging a peaceful settlement.

isolation; irreconcilables, League of Nations

Isolation was enthroned in Washington. The Harding administration, with the Senate "irreconcilables" holding a hatchet over its head, continued to regard the League of Nations as a thing unclean. Harding at first refused even to support the League's world health program. But the new world body was much too important to be completely ignored. "Unofficial observers" were sent to its seat in Geneva, Switzerland, to hang around like detectives shadowing a suspected criminal.

Israeli occupation of Lebanon; Marine barracks bombed

Israel further raised the stakes in the Middle East in June 1982 when it invaded neighboring Lebanon, seeking to suppress once and for all the guerrilla bases from which the Palestinian fighters harassed beleaguered Israel. The Palestinians were bloodily subdued, but Lebanon, already pulverized by years of episodic war, was plunged into armed chaos. President Reagan was obliged to send American troops to Lebanon in 1983 as part of an international peacekeeping force, but their presence did not bring peace. A suicide bomber crashed an explosives-laden truck into a US Marine barracks on Oct 23, 1983, killing more than two hundred marines. President Reagan soon thereafter withdrew the remaining American troops, while miraculously suffering no political damage from this horrifying and humiliating attack.

White House tapes; Saturday Night Massacre

John Dean III, a former White House lawyer with a remarkable memory, accused top White House officials, including the president, of obstructing justice by trying to cover up the Watergate break-in and and silence its perpetrators. Then another former White House aide revealed that a secret taping system had recorded most of Nixon's Oval Office conversations. Now Dean's testimony could be checked against the White House tapes, and the Senate committee could better determine who was telling the truth. But Nixon stubbornly refused to produce the taped evidence. Moreover, on Oct 20, 1973, he ordered the "Saturday Night Massacre," firing his own special prosecutor appointed to investigate the Watergate scandal, as well as his attorney general and deputy attorney general because they had refused to go along with firing the prosecutor.

Catholicism issue, TV debate

Kennedy was a Roman Catholic, the first to be nominated since Al Smith's ill-starred campaign in 1928. Smear artists revived the ancient charges about the Pope's controlling the White House. Kennedy pointed to his fourteen years of service in Congress, denied that he would be swayed by Rome, and asked if some 40 million Catholic Americans were to be condemned to second-class citizenship from birth. Television may well have tipped the scales. Nixon agreed to meet Kennedy in four so-called debates. The contestants crossed words in millions of living rooms before audiences estimated at 60 million or more. Nobody "won" the debates. But Kennedy at least held his own and did not suffer by comparison with the more "experienced" Nixon.

Carnegie, Morgan, and United States Steel

Kingpin among steel masters was Andrew Carnegie. At thirteen he was brought to America by his impoverished parents in 1848 and got a job as a bobbin boy at $1.20 a week. After accumulating some capital, Carnegie entered the steel business in the Pittsburgh area. By 1900 he was producing one-fourth of the nation's Bessemer steel, and the partners were dividing profits of $40 million a year, with the "Napoleon of the Smokestacks" himself receiving a cool $25 million. Into the picture now stepped the financial giant of of the age, J. P. Morgan. He had made himself legendary reputation for himself and his Wall Street banking house by financing the reorganization of railroads, insurance companies, and banks. By 1900 Carnegie, weary of turning steel into gold, was eager to sell his holdings. Morgan had meanwhile plunged heavily into the manufacture of steel pipe tubing. Carnegie, cleverly threatening to invade the same business, was ready to ruin his rival if he did not receive his price. Morgan bought Carnegie out for over $400 million. He moved rapidly to expand his new industrial empire. He took Carnegie's holdings, added others, "watered" the stock liberally, and in 1901 launched the enlarged ____ Corporation. Capitalized at about $1.4 billion, it was America's first billion-dollar corporation - a larger sum than the total estimated wealth of the nation in 1800.

reasons for overseas markets

Many developments fed the nation's ambition for overseas expansion. Both farmers and factory owners began to look for markets beyond American shores as agricultural and industrial production boomed. Many Americans believed that the US had to expand or explode. Their country was bursting with a new sense of power generated by the robust growth in population, wealth, and productive capacity - and it was trembling from the hammer blows of labor violence and agrarian unrest. Overseas markets might provide a safety valve to relieve those pressures.

Army-McCarthy hearings

McCarthy finally bent the bow to far when he attacked the US Army. The embattled military men fought back in 35 days of televised hearings in the spring of 1954. Up to 20 million Americans at a time watched in fascination while a boorish, surly McCarthy publicly cut his own throat by parading his essential meanness and irresponsibility. A few months later, the Senate formally condemned him for "conduct unbecoming a member."

Medicare, Medicaid

Medicare for the elderly, accompanied by Medicaid for the poor, became a reality in 1965. Like the New Deal's Social Security program, Medicare and Medicaid created "entitlements." That is, they conferred rights on certain categories of Americans virtually in perpetuity, without the need for repeated congressional approval. These programs were part of a spreading "rights revolution" that materially improved the lives of millions of Americans -- but also eventually undermined the federal government's financial health.

International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Meeting at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, the Western Allies established the International Monetary Fund to encourage world trade by regulating currency exchange rates.

survival of the fittest (Social Darwinism)

Most defenders of wide-open capitalism relied more heavily on the ____ theories of English philosopher Herbert Spencer and Yale professor William Graham Sumner. Later mislabeled "______," Spencer and Sumner owed less to English evolutionary naturalist Charles Darwin than to British laissez-faire economists David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. In fact, Spencer, not Darwin, coined the phrase "______." Whereas Darwin stressed adaption, these social thinkers emphasized the rigidity of natural law, while occasionally borrowing evolutionary jargon to engage contemporary audiences.

V-E Day May 8, 1945

On May 7, 1945, what was left of the German government surrendered unconditionally. May 8 was officially proclaimed V-E (Victory in Europe) Day and was greeted with frenzied rejoicing in the Allied countries.

War Production Board

Orchestrated by the War Production Board Board, American factories poured forth an avalanche of weaponry: 40 billion bullets, 300,000 aircraft, 76,000 ships, 86,000 tanks, and 2.6 million machine guns. The Board halted the manufacture of nonessential items such as passenger cars. It assigned priorities for transportation and access to raw materials.

American neutrality

President Wilson issued the routine neutrality proclamation and called on Americans to be neutral in thought as well as deed. But such scrupulous evenhandedness proved difficult. Both sides (Central Powers and Allies) wooed the US. The British enjoyed the boon of close cultural, linguistic, and economic ties with Americans and had the added advantage of controlling most of the transatlantic cables. Their censors sheared away war stories harmful to the Allies and drenched the US with tales of German bestiality. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians counted on the natural sympathies of their transplanted countrymen in America. Including persons with at least one foreign-born parent, people with blood ties to the Central Powers numbered some 11 million in 1914. Some of these recent immigrants expressed noisy sympathy for the fatherland, but most were simply grateful to be so distant from the fray.

Liberty bonds

Pressures of various kinds, patriotic and otherwise, were used to sell bonds. The unfortunate German American who could not display a Liberty Bond button might find his or her house bedaubed with yellow paint. A number of reluctant investors in war bonds were roughly handled. In at least one instance, a man signed for a bond with a rope around his neck.

unemployment and old age insurance, minimum wage, restrictions on child labor

The frantic Hundred Days Congress passed many essentials of the New Deal "three R's," though important long-range measures were added in later sessions. The New Dealers, sooner or later, embraced progressive ideas as unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, minimum-wage regulations, conservation and development of natural resources, and restrictions on child labor.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

The stunning success of the Soviet scientists in developing an atomic bomb was attributed by many to the cleverness of communist spies in stealing American secrets. Notorious among those who had allegedly "leaked" atomic data to Moscow were two American citizens, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were convicted in 1951 of espionage and, after prolonged appeals, went to the electric chair in 1953 -- the only people in American history ever executed in peacetime for espionage. Their sensational trial and electrocution, combined with sympathy for their two orphaned children, began to sour some sober citizens on the excesses of the red-hunters.

Office of Price Administration

These wonders of production also brought economic strains. Full employment and scarce consumer goods fueled a sharp inflationary surge in 1942. The Office of Price Administration eventually brought ascending prices under control with extensive regulations.

George Kennan's containment doctrine

Truman's piecemeal responses to various Soviet challenges took on intellectual coherence in 1947, with the formulation of the "containment doctrine." Crafted by a brilliant young diplomat and Soviet specialist, George Kennan, this concept held that Russia, whether tsarist or communist, was relentlessly expansionary. But the Kremlin was also cautious, Kennan argued, and the flow of Soviet power into "every nook and cranny available to it" could be stemmed by "firm and vigilant containment."

John L. Lewis; Committee for Industrial Organization

Under the encouragement of a highly sympathetic National Labor Relations Board, a host of unskilled workers began to organize themselves into effective unions. The leader of this drive was beetle-browed, domineering, and melodramatic John Lewis, boss of the United Mine Workers. In 1935 he succeeded in forming the Committee for Industrial Organization within the ranks of the skilled-craft American Federation of Labor. But skilled workers, ever since the days of the ill-fated Knights of Labor in the 1880s, had shown only lukewarm sympathy for the cause of the unskilled labor, esp. blacks. In 1936, following inevitable friction with the CIO, the older federation suspended the upstart unions associated with the new organizations.

New Immigrants (southern and eastern Europe)

Until the 1880s most immigrants ad come from the British isles and western Europe, chiefly Germany and Scandinavia. But in the 1880s, the character of the immigrant stream changed drastically. The so-called _____ came from southern and eastern Europe. Among them were Italians, Croats, Slovaks, Greeks, and Poles; many of them worshiped in orthodox churches or synagogues. They came from countries with little history of democratic government, where people had grown accustomed to cringing before despotism and where opportunities for advancement were few. Largely illiterate and impoverished, most new immigrants preferred to seek industrial jobs in jam-packed cities rather than move out to farms. add?

Wilson's peace treaty trip to France

Voters returned a narrow Republican majority in to Congress in the congressional elections of 1918. Wilson went to Paris a diminished leader. Unlike all the parliamentary statesmen at the table, he did not command a legislative majority at home. Wilson's decision to go in person to Paris to help make the peace infuriated Republicans. At that time no president had traveled to Europe, and Wilson's journey looked to his critics like flamboyant grandstanding. He further ruffled Republican feathers when he snubbed the Senate in assembling his peace delegation and neglected to include a single Republican senator in his official party.

white violence against marchers

Watching developments on television screens, a horrified world saw peaceful civil rights marchers repeatedly repelled by police with attack dogs and electric cattle prods. Most fearsome of all were the high-pressure water hoses directed at the civil rights demonstrators. They delivered water with enough force to knock bricks loose from buildings or stripe bark from trees at a distance of 100 feet. Water from the hoses bowled little children down the street like tumbleweeds.

Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)

A radical new approach to farm recovery was embraced when the Emergency Congress established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Through "artificial scarcity" this agency was to establish "parity prices" for basic commodities. "Parity" was the price set for a product that gave it the same real value, in purchasing power, that it had enjoyed during the period from 1909 to 1914. The AAA would eliminate price-depressing surpluses by paying growers to reduce their crop acreage. The millions of dollars needed for these payments were to be raised by taxing processors of farm products, such as flour millers, who in turn would shift the burden to consumers.

race riots

African American's sudden appearance in previously all-white areas sometimes sparked interracial violence. An explosive riot in East St. Louis, Missouri, in July 1917 left nine whites and at least forty blacks dead. An equally gruesome race riot ripped through Chicago. The wartime Windy City was taut with racial tension as a growing black population expanded into white-working class neighborhoods and as African Americans found jobs as strikebreakers in meatpacking plants. Triggered by an incident at a bathing beach in July 1919, a reign of terror descended on the city for nearly two weeks. Black and white gangs roamed Chicago's streets, eventually killing fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks.

1914 World War I

After the Austro-Hungarian heir was assassinated by a Serb patriot, the Vienna government, backed by Germany, presented a stern ultimatum to neighboring Serbia. Tiny Serbia, backed by its powerful Slav neighbor Russia, refused to bend the knee sufficiently. The Russian tsar began to mobilize his ponderous war machine, menacing Germany on the east, even as his ally, France, confronted Germany on the west. In alarm, the Germans struck suddenly attacked at France through unoffending Belgium; their objective was to knock their ancient enemy out of action so they would have two free hands to repel Russia. Great Britain, its coastline jeopardized by the assault on Belgium, was sucked into the conflagration on the side of France. Almost overnight most of Europe was locked in a fight to the death.

Dingley Tariff bill

Almost as soon as McKinley took office, the tariff issue, which had played second fiddle to silver in the "Battle of '96," quickly forced itself to the fore. The current Wilson-Gorman law was not raising enough revenue to cover the annual Treasury deficits, and the Republican trusts thought that they had purchased the right to additional tariff protection by their lush contributions to Hanna's war chest. In due course the Dingley Tariff Bill was jammed trhough the House in 1897, under the pounding gavel of the re-throned "Czar" Reed. The proposed new rates were high, but not high enough to satisfy the paunchy lobbyists, who once again descended upon the Senate. Over 850 amendments were tacked onto the overburdened bill. The resulting piece of patchwork finally established the average rates at 46.5 percent, substantially higher than the Democratic Wilson-Gorman Act of 1894 and in some categories even higher than the McKinley Act of 1890.

four occupation zones in Germany

Along with Austria, Germany had been divided into four military occupation zones, each assigned to one of the Big Four powers (France, Britain, American, and the USSR). See map on page 867

Amendment 22

"No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected president shall be elected to the office of the President more than once..." Pessimists had predicted that Eisenhower would be a seriously crippled "lame duck" during his second term, owing to the barrier against reelection erected by the 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951.

NASA

"Rocket fever" swept the nation. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and directed billions of dollars to missile development. After humiliating and well-advertised failures, in Feb 1958 the US managed to put into orbit a grapefruit-sized satellite weighing 2.5 pounds. By the end of the decade, several satellites had been launched, and the US had successfully tested its own IBCMs.

October 29, 1929 "Black Tuesday"

A catastrophic crash came in Oct 1929. It was partially trigged by the British, who raised their interest rates in an effort to bring back capital lured abroad by American investments. Foreign investors and wary domestic speculators began to dump their "insecurities," and an orgy of selling followed. Tension built ip to the panicky "Black Tuesday" of Oct 29, 1929, when more than 16 million shares of stocks were sold in a save-who-may scramble. Wall Street became a wailing wall as gloom and doom replaced boom.

racial issues: segregation, Jim Crow, voting restrictions

America counted some 15 million black citizens in 1950, 2/3 of whom still made their homes in the South. There they lived bound by the iron folkways of a segregated society. A rigid set of antiquated rules known as Jim Crow laws governed all aspects of their existence, from the schoolroom to the restroom. Every day of their lives, southern blacks dealt with a bizarre array of separate social arrangements that kept them insulated from whites, economically inferior, and politically powerless. Only about 20 percent of eligible southern blacks were registered to vote, a fewer than 5 percent were registered in some Deep South states like Mississippi and Alabama.

Great Lakes; St. Lawrence Seaway

America was fabulously prosperous in the Eisenhower years, despite pockets of poverty and unemployment, recurrent recessions, and perennial farm problems. To the north the vast St. Lawrence waterway project, constructed jointly with Canada and completed in 1959, had turned the cities of the Great Lakes into bustling ocean seaports. ADD?

Emergency Banking Relief Act

Banking chaos cried for immediate action. Congress pulled itself together and in an incredible eight hours had the Emergency Banking Relief Act of 1933 ready for Roosevelt's busy pen. The new law invested the president with the power to regulate banking transactions and foreign exchange and to reopen solvent banks.

socialists, feminists and social justice

Caustic critics of social injustice issued from several other corners. Socialists, many of whom were European immigrants inspired by the strong movement for state socialism in the Old World, began to register appreciable strength at the ballot box. High-minded messengers of the social gospel promoted a brand of progressivism based on Christian teachings. They used religious doctrine to demand better housing and living conditions for the urban poor. Feminists in multiplying numbers added social justice to suffrage on their list of needed reforms. With urban pioneers like Jane Addams in Chicago and Lillian Wald in NY blazing the way, women entered the fight to improve the lot of families living and working in festering cities.

Benjamin Harrison, 1888

Dismayed Democrats, seeing no alternative, somewhat dejectedly nominated Cleveland in their St. Louis convention. Eager Republicans turned to ____, whose grandfather was former president William Henry Harrison. The tariff was the prime issue. The two parties flooded the country with some 10 million pamphlets on the subject. The specter of a lower tariff spurred the Republicans to frantic action. They raised money to pay people to vote Republican. On election day Harrison nosed out Cleveland, 233 to 168 electoral votes.

My Lai massacre

Domestic disgust with the war was further deepened in 1970 by revelations that in 1968 American troops had massacred innocent women and children in the village of My Lai. Increasingly desperate for a quick end to the demoralizing conflict, Nixon widened the war in 1970 by ordering an attack on Vietnam's neighbor, Cambodia.

code breakers (Enigma)

Eventaully Allied antisubmarine tactics improved substantially, thanks esp. to British code-breakers, who had cracked the Germans' "Enigma" codes and could therefore pinpoint the locations of the U-boats lurking in the North Atlantic.

A. Philip Randolph, Double-V campaign, NAACP

Explosive tensions between blacks and whites developed over employment, housing, and segregated facilities. Black leader A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened a massive "Negro March on Washington" in 1941 to demand equal opportunities for blacks in war jobs and armed forces. Blacks were also drafted into the armed forces, though they were still generally assigned to service branches rather than combat units and subjected to petty degradations such as segregated blood banks for the wounded. But in general the war helped to embolden blacks in their long struggle for equality. They rallied behind the slogan "Double V" -- victory over the dictators abroad and over racism at home. Membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People shot up almost to the half-million mark, and a new militant organization, the Congress of Racial Equality, was founding in 1942.

jingoism (see caption p 641)

Extreme patriotism, esp. in the form of aggressive or warlike foreign policy. In the cartoon on page 641, an enthusiastic Uncle Same cheers the US Navy in the "splendid little war" of 1898 (Spanish-American War). Many Americans, however, were less than enthused about America's new imperial adventure.

defense jobs move to the "Sunbelt"

FDR had called the South "the nation's number one economic problem" in 1938; when war came, he seized the opportunity to accelerate the region's economic development. The states of the old Confederacy received a disproportionate share of defense contracts, including nearly $6 billion of federally financed industrial facilities. Here were the seeds of the postwar blossoming of the "Sunbelt." ADD?

MacArthur and Leyte Gulf, Philippines

General MacArthur was also on the move. Completing the conquest of jungle-draped New Guinea, he headed northwest for the Philippines, en route to Japan, with 600 ships and 250,000 men. In a scene well stage for the photographers, he splashed ashore at Leyte Island on Oct 20, 1944. Japan's navy -- still menacing -- now made one last effort to destroy MacArthur by wiping out his transports and supply ships. A gigantic clash at Leyte Gulf, fought on the sea and in the air, was actually three battles (Oct 23-26, 1944). The Americans won all of them, though the crucial engagement was almost lost when Admiral William Halsey was decoyed by a feint. Japan was through as a sea power: it had lost about sixty ships in the greatest naval battle of all time.

1890 census (end of the frontier)

In 1890 the superintendent of the census announced that for the first time in America's experience, a frontier line was no longer discernible. All the unsettled areas were now broken into by isolated bodies of settlement. The "closing" of the frontier inspired one of the most influential essays ever written about American history - Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" in 1893.

American and Soviet armies meet at the Elbe River

In March 1945, forward-driving American troops reached Germany's Rhine River, where, by incredibly good luck, they found one strategic bridge undemolished. Pressing their advantage, General Eisenhower's troops reached the Elbe River in April 1945. There, a short distance south of Berlin, American and Soviet advance guards dramatically clasped hands amid cries of "Amerikanskie tovarishchi" (American comrades).

FDR third term election 1940

In one of the miracles of American political history, the Republican Philadelphia convention was swept off its feet by a colorful latecomer, Wendell Willkie. A complete novice in politics, he had rocketed from political nothingness in a few short weeks. With galleries in Philly wildly chanting "We want Willkie," the delegates finally accepted this political upstart as the only candidate who could possibly beat FDR. The Republican platform condemned FDR's alleged dictatorship, as well as the costly and confusing zigzags of the New Deal. Roosevelt delayed to the last minute the announcement of his decision to challenge the sacred two-term tradition. Despite what he described as his personal yearning for retirement, he avowed that in so grave a crisis he owed his experienced hand to the service of his country and humanity. The Democratic delegates in Chicago, realizing that only "the Champ" could defeat Willkie, drafted him by a technically unanimous vote. FDR won, although Willkie a ran strong race. The electoral count was 449 to 82.

limited success of New Frontier legislation

JFK came into office with fragile Democratic majorities in Congress. Southern Democrats threatened to team up with Republicans and ax New Frontier proposals such as medical assistance for the aged and increased federal aid to education. JFK won the first round in his campaign for a more cooperative Congress when he forced an expansion of the all-important House Rules Committee, dominated by conservatives who could have bottled up the entire legislative program. Despite this victory, the New Frontier did not expand swiftly. Key medical and education bills remained stalled in Congress.

OPEC oil embargo

Late in Oct 1973, the Arab nations suddenly clamped an embargo on oil for the US and for other countries supporting Israel. The Middle Eastern sheiks, flexing their economic muscles through OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), approximately quadrupled their price for crude oil after lifting the embargo in 1974. Huge new oil bills wildly disrupted the US balance of international trade and added further fuel to the already raging fires of inflation. add? page 948

Triangle Shirtwaist fire and workers' compensation

Laws regulating factories were worthless if not enforced, a truth horribly demonstrated by a lethal fire in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in NYC. Locked doors and other flagrant violations of the fire code turned the factory into a death trap. One hundred and forty-six workers, most of them young immigrant women, were incinerated or leapt from eighth- and ninth-story windows to their deaths. Lashed by the public outcry, including a massive strike by women in the needle trades, the NY legislature passed much stronger laws regulating the hours and conditions of sweatshop toil. Other legislatures followed, and by 1917 thirty states had put workers' compensation laws on the books, providing insurance to workers injured in industrial accidents.

Endangered Species Act 1973

Legislatively armed by the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and similar laws, the EPA and OSHA stood on the frontline of the battle for ecological sanity. ADD?

Creel Committee on Public Information

Mobilizing people's minds for war, both in America and abroad, was an urgent task facing the Washington authorities. For this purpose the Committee of Public Information was created. It was headed by youngish journalist, George Creel, who was gifted with zeal and imagination. His job was to sell America on war and sell the world on Wilsonian war aims.

German Kaiser Wilhelm II

Most Americans were anti-German from the outset. With his villainous upturned mustache, Kaiser Wilhelm II seemed the embodiment of arrogant autocracy, an impression strengthened by Germany's ruthless strike at neutral Belgium. German and Austrian agents further tarnished the image of the Central Powers in American eyes when resorted to violence in American factories and ports. When a German operative in 1915 absentmindedly left his briefcase on a NY elevated car, its documents detailing plans for industrial sabotage were quickly discovered and publicized. American opinion, already ill-disposed, was further inflamed against the kaiser and Germany.

Greenback Labor party

Republican hard-money policy had political backlash. It helped end a Democratic House of Representatives in 1874, and in 1878 it spawned the ___, which polled over a million votes and elected fourteen members of Congress. The contest of monetary policy was far from over.

Carlisle Indian School (Pennsylvania)

Reservation land not allotted to the Indians under the act was to be sold to railroads and white settlers, with the proceeds used by federal government to educate and "civilize" the native peoples. In 1879 the government had already funded the ____ in Pennsylvania, where Native American children, separated from their tribes, were taught English and inculcated with white values and customs. "Kill the Indian and save the man" was the school founder's motto.

Africa and China partitioned

Roosevelt and Lodge's view on Darwinism threatened late comers to the colonial scramble scooped up leavings from the banquet table of earlier diners. Africa, previously unexplored and mysterious, was partitioned by the Europeans in the 1880s in a pell-mell rush of colonial conquest. In the 1890s Japan, Germany, and Russia all extorted concessions from the anemic Chinese Empire. If America was to survive in the competition of modern nation-states, perhaps it, too, would have to become an imperial power.

Black Panther party; Stokely Carmichael

The Black Panther party meanwhile openly brandished weapons in the streets of Oakland, California. Then in 1966 Trinidad-born Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, began to preach the doctrine of "Black Power," which, he said, "will smash everything Western civilization has created." Some advocates of Black Power insisted that they simply intended the slogan to describe a broad-front effort to exercise the political and economic rights gained by the civil rights movement and to speed the integration of American society.

Equal Rights Amendment failure

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution won congressional approval in 1972. It declared, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Twenty-eight states quickly ratified the amendment, first proposed by suffragists in 1923. With ratification by thirty-eight state legislatures, the amendment would have become part of the Constitution. In 1979 Congress extended the deadline for ratification, but ERA opponents dug in their heels. The amendment died in 1982, three states short of success.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony

The National American Women Suffrage Association's founders included aging pioneers like _____, who had helped organize the first women's rights convention in 1848, and her long-time comrade _____, the radical Quaker spitfire who had courted jail by trying to cast a ballot in the 1872 presidential election.

Amendment 16 Income Tax

The Underwood Tariff Bill substantially reduced import fees, and was a landmark in tax legislation. Under the authority granted by the recently ratified Sixteenth Amendment, Congress enacted a graduated income tax, beginning with a modest levy on incomes over $3,000 (then higher than the average family's income). By 1917 revenue from the income tax shot ahead of receipts from the tariff. This gap has since been vastly widened.

UNESCO, WHO

The United Nations, setting up its permanent glass home in NYC, had some gratifying initial success. Through such arms as UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization), FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization), and WHO (World Health Organization), the UN brought benefits to peoples the world over. ADD?

"Read my lips: no new taxes"; Bush 1992 loss to Clinton

The federal budget deficit continued to mushroom cancerously, topping $250 billion in each of Bush's years as president (elected in 1988). In a desperate attempt to stop hemorrhage of red ink, Bush agreed in 1990 to a budget increase that included $133 billion in new taxes. Bush's 1990 tax and budget package added up to a political catastrophe. In his 1988 presidential campaign, Bush had belligerently declared, "Read my lips -- no new taxes." Now he had flagrantly broken that campaign promise. Bush lost to Clinton in the 1992 elections. ADD?

Progressives against laissez-faire policies

The new crusaders, who called themselves "progressives," waged war on many evils, notably monopoly, corruption, inefficiency, and social injustice. The groundswell of the new reformist wave went far back - the the Greenback Labor party of the 1870s and the Populists of the 1890s, to the mounting unrest throughout the land as grasping industrialists concentrated more and more in fewer and fewer hand. An outworn philosophy of hands-off individualism seemed increasingly out of place in the modern machine age. Social and economic problems were now too complex for the intentionally feeble Jeffersonian organs of government. Progressive theorists were insisting that society could no longer afford the luxury of limitless "let-alone" (laissez-faire) policy. The people, through the government, must substitute mastery for drift.

Brady Bill

The president also induced Congress in 1993 to pass a gun-control law, the "Brady Bill," named for presidential aide James Brady, who had been wounded and disabled by gunfire in the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In July 1994, Clinton made further progress against the national plague of firearms when he persuaded Congress to pass a $30 billion anticrime bill, which contained a ban on several types of assault weapons.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy

The youngest president ever elected, JFK assembled one of the youngest cabinets, including his thirty-five-year-old brother, Robert, as attorney general. The new attorney general set out, among other reforms, to recast the priorities of the FBI. The bureau deployed nearly a thousand agents on "internal security" work but targeted only a dozen against organized crime and gave virtually no attention to civil rights violations.

movement to the South and West

A momentous shift of the American population was underway, as inhabitants from the the Northeast and Rustbelt Midwest moved southward and westward to job opportunities and the sun. The Great Plains, where 60% of all counties were losing pop. as the 20th century ended, were facing the sharpest decline, hollowing out the traditional American heartland.

Clinton reelection 1996

As the 1996 election approached, the Republicans chose Kansas senator Robert Dole as their presidential candidate. A decorated WWII veteran, Dole ran a listless campaign. Clinton, buoyed by a healthy economy and by his artful trimming to the conservative wind, breezed to an easy victory. Clinton won 379 electoral votes, Dole only 159. But Republicans remained in control of Congress.

World Trade Organization (WTO) and protesters

Clinton took another step in 1994 toward a global free-trade system when he vigorously promoted the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and a cherished goal of free-trade advocates since the end of WWII. Simmering discontent over trade policy boiled over in 1999 when Clinton hosted the meeting of the WTO in Seattle. The city's streets filled with protesters railing against what they viewed as the human and environmental costs of economic "globalization." Trade talks fizzled in Seattle, with Clinton taking a hefty share of the blame.

savings and loan (S&L) collapse

Falling oil prices blighted the economy of the Southwest, slashing real estate values and undermining hundreds of savings and loan (S&L) institutions. The damage to the S&Ls was so massive that a federal rescue operation was eventually estimated to carry a price tag of well over $500 billion. Meanwhile, many American banks found themselves holding near-worthless loans they had unwisely foisted upon Third World countries, esp. in Latin America. add?

Latinos (Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, others)

Latinos, among the fastest-growing segments of the US population, include Puerto Ricans, frequent voyagers between their native land and northeastern cities; Cubans, many of them refugees form the communist dictatorship of Fidel Castro, concentrated in Miami and southern Florida; and Central Americans, fleeing the ravages of civil war in Nicaragua and EL Salvador. The US was home to 26 million Chicanos (Mexican Americans), 3 million Puerto Ricans, 1 million Cubans. They elected mayors of Miami, Denver, and San Antonio. add?

Ross Perot (Reform Party)

Reflecting the pervasive economic unease and the virulence of the throw-the-bums-out national mood, nearly 20% of voters cast their ballots for independent presidential candidate H. Ross Perot. add?

leftists in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada

A leftist revolution had deposed the long-time dictator of Nicaragua in 1979. President Carter had tried to ignore the hotly anti-American rhetoric of the revolutionaries, known as "Sandinistas," and to establish good diplomatic relations with them. But Reagan accused the Sandinistas of turning their country into a forward base for Soviet and Cuban military penetration of all of Central America. Brandishing photos taken from high-flying spy planes, administration spokespeople claimed that Nicaraguan leftists were shipping weapons to revolutionary forces in tiny El Salvador, torn by violence since a coup in 1979. Reagan sent military "advisers" to prop up the pro-American government of El Salvador. He also provided covert aid, including the CIA-engineered mining of harbors, to the "contra" rebels opposing the anti-American government of Nicaragua. In a dramatic display of American mights, in Oct 1983, he dispatched a heavy-firepower invasion force to the island of Grenada, where a military coup had killed the prime minister and brought Marxists to power. Swiftly overrunning the tiny island and ousting the insurgents, American troops vividly demonstrated Reagan's determination to assert the dominance of the US in the Caribbean.

aging population and Social Security problems

A person born at the dawn of the century could expect to live less than fifty years, whereas someone born in 2000 could anticipate a life span of seventy-seven years. Miraculous medical advances, including antibiotics and a vaccine against polio, lengthened and strengthened lives. Longer lives spelled more older people. This aging of the population raised a host of political, social, and economic questions. Elderly people formed a potent electoral bloc that aggressively lobbied for gov. favors and achieved real gains for senior citizens. The growth in medical payments for the old far outstripped the growth of educational expenditures for the young, with corresponding consequences for the social and economic situations of both populations. Benefits for senior citizens strained the Social Security System, established in 1935 to provide income retired workers. When Social Security began, most workers continued to toil after age 65. By the end of the century most of the elderly relied on Social Security checks for their living expenses. The payments of current workers into the Social Security system funded the benefits to the current generation of retirees. By the time the new century opened, those benefits had risen so high, and the ratio of active workers to retirees had dropped so low, that drastic adjustments were necessary.

gay marriage

Acrimonious controversies over the rights of gays and lesbians to marry flared up in San Francisco, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon in 2004.

Election 2004; Bush v. Kerry

After a bruising round of primary elections, the Democrats chose as their standard-bearer the Mass. Senator John F. Kerry. Kerry was challenged on the campaign trail to defend the many seemingly contradictory positions he had taken during his 18-year Senate career. He stumbled badly when he said that he had actually voted for a major military spending bill before he voted against it. Such a reversal is normal procedure as bills make their way through the tortuous legislative process, but amid the sound-bite hubbub of a fast-paced presidential campaign, Kerry's statement seemed to ratify Republican accusations that he was a waffling flip-flopper. Bush, in contrast, hammered home the simple message that he was an unflinching, God-fearing, conservative defender of traditional moral values and an implacable for America's enemies. Bush won with 286 electoral votes to 252. add? page 1008

Affluence and Inequality

America's people were still an affluent people at the beginning of the 21st century, with even their poorest (below the government's poverty line) having a better standard of living than two-thirds of the rest of humankind. But Americans were no longer the world's wealthiest people, as they had been in the quarter-century after WWII. The gap between the rich and the poor began to widen in the 1980s and widened further thereafter. The Welfare Reform Bill of 1996, restricting access to social services and requiring able-bodied welfare recipients to find work, weakened the financial footing of many impoverished families still. The income of the rich was larger, and the poor usually did not get medical insurance. The tax and fiscal policies of Reagan and Bush (father and son) presidencies, which favored the wealthy, could be blamed for this, but other more important causes would be intensifying global economic competition; the shrinkage in high-paying manufacturing jobs for semiskilled and unskilled workers; the greater economic rewards commanded by educated workers in high-tech industries; decline of unions; the growth of part-time and temporary work; the rising tide of relatively low-skill immigrants; and the increasing tendency of educated men and women to marry one another and both work, creating household with very high incomes. Educational opportunities also had a way of perpetuating inequality, starting with the underfunding of many schools in poor and urban areas and the soaring cost of higher education.

new trends in art and literature

Americans in the early 21st century read more, listened to more music, and were better educated than ever before. Authors from racial minorities were on the rise esp. from the West. Authors wrote about the small-town west, the end of the cattle-drive era, working class life of the Pacific Northwest, recreation of frontier history, interracial anxiety and affection in WWII-era Pacific Northwest, and of boyhood in Montana. African authors and artists were increasing their mark. Playwrights retold the history of black Americans in the 20th century esp. the psychic cost of the northward movement, musicals focused on the question of black identity and the life of a New Orleans jazzman. Some told of the life of a slave owning family. Native Americans wrote portrayals of Indian life or ancestors. Asian Americans wrote plays, novels, and essays which imaginatively reconstructed the obscure lives of earliest Chinese immigrants or told a humorous tale of suburban family relationships that was not uncommon for 2nd generation Asian Americans or explore the sometimes painful relationship between immigrant Indian parents and their American-born children. New York became the art capital of the world after WWII with artists experimenting with abstract expressionism, flinging paint on huge flats stretched on his studio floor. They tried to create action paintings that expressed individuality and made viewer a creative participant in defining the painting's meaning. These art pieces often used common things like cans and paper clippings. CHECK! Page 1030

corporate scandals, Enron, WorldCom

As job opportunities shrank in some of the nation's regions and expanded in others, as jobs shifted to cheaper labor markets abroad, and giant corporations like Enron and WorldCom collapsed through corporate scandal, many Americans began to fear their economy as a treacherous landscape even as it offered some of them astounding prosperity. add?

campaign finance reform

Campaign finance reform, long smoldering as a potential issue, suddenly flared up after the 1996 presidential contest. Congressional investigators revealed that the Clinton campaign had received funds from many improper sources, including contributors who paid to stay overnight in the White House and foreigners who were legally prohibited from giving to American candidates. But Republicans and Democrats alike had reason to avoid reform. Both parties had grown dependent on vast sums to finance television ads for the candidates. But within the ranks of both parties, a few mavericks proposed to eliminate the corrupting influence of big donors. Senator John McCain from Arizona made campaign finance reform a centerpiece of his surprisingly strong, though ultimately unsuccessful, bid for Republican presidential nomination in the 2000 campaign.

Clarence Thomas appointment controversy

In 1991 Bush nominated for the Supreme Court the conservative African American jurist Clarence Thomas, a stern critic of affirmative action. Thomas's nomination was loudly opposed by liberal groups, including organized labor, the NAACP, and NOW (National Organization for Women). Reflecting irreconcilable divisions over affirmative action and abortion, the Senate Judiciary Committee concluded its hearings on the nomination with a divided 7-7 vote and forwarded the matter to the full Senate without a recommendation. Just days before the Senate was scheduled to vote in early Oct 1991, a press leak revealed that Anita Hill had accused Thomas of sexual harassment. The Senate Judiciary Committee was forced to reopen its hearings. In the end, by a 52-48 vote, the Senate confirmed Thomas as the second African American ever to sit on the supreme bench. While many Americans hailed hill as a heroine for focusing the nation's attention on issues of sexual harassment, Thomas maintained that Hill's widely publicized, unproven allegations amounted to "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves."

Welfare Reform Bill

In 1996 the new Congress achieved a major conservative victory when it compelled a reluctant Clinton to sign the Welfare Reform Bill, which made deep cuts in welfare grants and required able-bodied welfare recipients to find employment. The new welfare law also tightly restricted welfare benefits for legal and illegal immigrants alike, reflecting a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment as the numbers of newcomers climbed toward an all-time high. Old-line liberal Democrats howled with pain at the president's alleged betrayal of his party's heritage, and some prominent. admin members resigned in protest against his decision to sign the welfare bill. But Clinton's acceptance of the welfare reform package was part of his shrewd political strategy of accommodating the electorate's conservative mood by moving to his right.

Hillary Rodham Clinton; health care task force

In a dramatic but personally and politically risky move, the president appointed his wife, nationally prominent lawyer and children's advocate Hillary Rodham Clinton, as the director of the task force charged with redesigning the medical-service industry. Their stupefyingly complicated plan was dead on arrival when it was presented to Congress in Oct 1993. The First Lady was doused with a torrent of abuse, although she eventually rehabilitated herself sufficiently to win election as a US senator from NY in 2000 -- the first First Lady ever to hold elective office.

Persian Gulf crisis; Iraq's Saddam Hussein

On Aug 2 Saddam Hussein, the brutal and ambitious leader of Iraq, sent his armies to overrun Kuwait, a tiny, oil-rich desert sheikdom on Iraq's southern frontier. Financially exhausted by its eight-year war with Iran, which had ended in a stalemate in 1988, Iraq needed Kuwait's oil to pay its huge war bills. Saddam's larger design was iron-fisted control over the Persian Gulf region. With his hand thus firmly clutching the world's economic jugular vein, he dreamed of dictating the terms of oil supplies to the industrial nations, and perhaps of totally extinguishing the Arab's enemy, Israel. On Aug 2, 1990, Saddam's army roared into Kuwait. When an economic embargo failed to squeeze Iraq's troops from Kuwait, the UN Security Council delivered an ultimatum to Saddam to leave Kuwait by Jan 15, 1991, or UN forces would "use all necessary means" to expel his troops. As the Jan 15 deadline approached, some 539,000 US soldiers, sailors, and pilots -- many of them women and all of them members of the new all-volunteer American military -- swarmed into the Persian Gulf region. They were joined by nearly 270,000 troops, pilots, and sailors form 28 other countries in the coalition opposed to Iraq. The US and its UN allies unleashed a hellish air attack against Iraq. For 37 days, warplanes pummeled targets in occupied Kuwait and in Iraq itself. ADD PAGE 984

No Child Left Behind

Pursuant to his campaign promise to end "the soft bigotry of low expectations," Bush championed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, which mandated sanctions against schools that failed to meet federal performance standards.

national debt

Ronald Reagan had taken office vowing to invigorate the American economy by rolling back government regulations, lowering taxes, and balancing the budget. He did ease many regulatory rules, and he pushed major tax reform bills through Congress in 1981 and 1986. But a balanced budget remained grotesquely out of reach. Supply-side economy theory had promised that lower taxes would actually increase government revenue because they would so stimulate the economy as a whole. But, in fact, the combination of tax reductions and huge increases in military spending opened a vast "revenue hole" of $200 billion annual deficits. In his eight years in office, Reagan added nearly $2 trillion to the national debt. Because so much of the Reagan-era debt was financed by foreign lenders, esp. the Japanese, the deficits virtually guaranteed that future generations of Americans would either have to work harder than their parents, lower their living standards, or both to pay their foreign creditors. add?

modification of Roe v. Wade abortion ruling

The contentious issue of abortion reached the Court in 1989. In the case Roe v. Wade in 1973, the Supreme Court had prohibited states from making laws that interfered with a woman's right to an abortion during the early months of pregnancy. For nearly two decades, that decision had been the bedrock principle on which "pro-choice" advocates built their case for abortion rights. It had also provoked bitter criticism from Roman Catholics and various "right-to-life" groups, who wanted a virtually absolute ban on all abortions. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the Court in July 1989 did not entirely overrun Roe, but it did seriously compromise Roe's protection of abortion rights. The Court signaled that it was inviting the states to legislate in an area in which Roe had previously forbidden them to legislate. add?

Alaskan oil spill; Exxon Valdez

The planet was being drained of oil, and disastrous accidents like the grounding and subsequent oil spill of the giant tanker "Exxon Valdez" in 1989 in Alaska's pristine Prince William Sound demonstrated the ecological risk of oil exploration and transportation at sea. add?

Iran-Contra affair

Two foreign-policy problems seemed insoluble to Reagan: the continuing captivity of a number of American hostages, seized by Muslim extremist groups in Lebanon; and the continuing grip on power of the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Reagan repeatedly requested that Congress provide military aid to the contra rebels fighting against the Sandinista regime. Congress repeatedly refused, and the admin grew increasingly frustrated, even obsessed, in its search for a means to help the contras. In 1985 American diplomats secretly arranged arms sales to the embattled Iranians in return for Iranian aid in obtaining the release of American hostages held by Middle Eastern terrorists. At least one hostage was eventually set free. Meanwhile, money from the payment for the arms was diverted to the contras. These actions brazenly violated a congressional ban on military aid to the Nicaraguan rebels -- not to mention Reagan's repeated vow that he would never negotiate with terrorists. News of these secret dealings broke in Nov 1986. President Reagan claimed he was innocent of wrongdoing and ignorant about the activities of his subordinates, but a congressional committee condemned the "secrecy, deception, and disdain for the law" displayed by admin officials and concluded that "if the president did not know what his national security advisers were doing, he should have." The Iran-contra affair cast a dark shadow over the Reagan record in foreign policy.

women appointed to government positions

Women figured prominently in President Clinton's cabinet, including the first female attorney general, Janet Reno, and former University of Wisconsin president Donna Shalala, who became secretary of health and human services. Vowing to shape a government that "looked like America," Clinton appointed several ethnic and racial minority members to his cabinet. He also seized the opportunity to nominate Ruth Bader Ginsberg to the Supreme Court, where she joined Sandra Day O'Conner to make a pair of women justices.

Marcus Garvey, United Negro Improvement Association

Harlem in 1920s also spawned a charismatic political leader, Marcus Garvey. The Jamaican-born Garvey founded the United Negro Improvement Association to promote the resettlement of American blacks in their own "African homeland." Within the US, the UNIA sponsored stores and other businesses, like the Black Star Line Steamship Company, to keep blacks' dollars in black pockets. Most of Garvey's enterprises failed financially, and Garvey himself was convicted in 1927 for alleged mail fraud and deported by a nervous US government. But the race pride that Garvey inspired among the 4 million blacks who counted themselves UNIA followers at the movement's height helped these newcomers to northern cities gain self-confidence and self-reliance. And his example proved important to the later founding of the Nation of Islam movement.

Horatio Alger stories

He was a Puritan-reared New Englander, who in 1886 forsook the pulpit for the pen. Deeply interested in NY newsboys, he wrote more than a hundred volumes of juvenile fiction that sold over 100 million copies. His stock formula was that virtue, honesty, and industry are rewarded by success, wealth, and honor - a kind of survival of the purest, esp. nonsmokers, nondrinkers, nonswearers, and nonliars. Although his own bachelor life was criticized, he implanted morality and the conviction that there is always room at the top (esp. if one is lucky enough to save the life of the boss's daughter and marry her).

Battle of the Bulge

Hitler staked everything on one last throw of his reserves. Secretly concentrating a powerful force, he hurled it, on Dec 16, 1944, against the thinly held American lines in the heavily befogged and snow-shrouded Ardennes Forest. His objective was the Belgian port of Antwerp, key to the Allied supply operation. Caught off guard, the outmanned Americans were driven back, creating a deep "bulge" in the Allied line. The ten-day penetration was finally halted after the 101st Airborne Division had stood firm at the vital bastion of Bastogne. The commander, Brigadier General A.C. McAuliffe, defiantly answered the German demand for surrender with one word: "Nuts." Reinforcements were rushed up, and the last-gasp Hilterian offensive was at length bloodily stemmed in the Battle of the Bulge.

war crimes trial, Nuremberg

Hitler's ruined Reich posed esp. thorny problems for all the wartime Allies. They agreed only that the cancer of Nazism had to be cut out of the German body politic, which involved punishing Nazi leaders for war crimes. The Allies joined in trying twenty-two top culprits at Nuremberg, Germany, during 1945-46. Accusations included committing crimes against the laws of war and humanity and plotting aggressions contrary to solemn treaty pledges. Twelve of the accused Nazis swung from the gallows, and seven were sentenced to long jail terms. "Foxy Hermann" Goering cheated the hangman a few hours before his scheduled execution by swallowing a hidden cyanide capsule. The trials of several small-fry Nazis continued for years. add?

Agricultural Marketing Act

Hoover's administration, in line with its philosophy of promoting self-help, responded to the outcry of the wounded farmers with legislative aspirin. The Agricultural Marketing Act, passed by Congress in June 1929, was designed to help the farmers help themselves, largely through producers' cooperatives. It set up the Federal Farm Board, with a revolving fund of half a billion dollars at its disposal. Money was lent generously to farm organizations seeking to buy, sell, and store agricultural surpluses. add page 759?

Statue of Liberty 1886 and Emma Lazarus poem

In 1886, the ____ arose in New York Harbor, a gift from the people of France. On its base were inscribed the words of Emma Lazarus: "Give me your tired, your poor // Your huddled masses yearning to breath free, // The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." To many nativists, those noble words describe only too accurately the "scum" washed up by the New Immigrant tides.

Federal Reserve Act 1913 (describe its structure)

In 1913 Wilson signed the epochal Federal Reserve Act, the most important piece of economic legislation between the Civil War and the New Deal. The new Federal Reserve Board, appointed by the president, oversaw a nationwide system of twelve regional reserve districts, each with its own central bank. Although these regional banks were actually bankers' banks, owned by member financial institutions, the final authority of the Federal Reserve Board guaranteed a substantial measure of public control.

entangling alliance (collective security)

In 1948 Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed a path-breaking treaty of defensive alliance at Brussels. They then invited the US to join them. The proposal confronted the US with a historic decision. America had traditionally avoided entangling alliances, esp. in peacetime (if the Cold War could be considered peacetime). Yet American participation in the emerging coalition could serve many purposes: it would strengthen the policy of containing the Soviet Union; it would provide the framework for the reintegration of Germany into the European family; and it would reassure jittery Europeans that a traditionally isolationist Uncle Sam was not about to abandon them to the marauding Russian bear -- or to a resurgent and domineering Germany.

McCarran Internal Security bill

In 1950 Truman vetoed the McCarran Internal Security Bill, which among other provisions authorized the president to arrest and detain suspicious people during an "internal security emergency." Critics protested that the bill smacked of police-state, concentration-camp tactics. But the congressional guardians of the Republic's liberties enacted the bill over Truman's veto.

Civil Rights Act 1957

In 1957 Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction days. Eisenhower characteristically reassured a southern senator that the legislation represented "the mildest civil rights bill possible." It set up a permanent Civil Rights Commission to investigate violations of civil rights and authorized federal injunctions to protect voting rights.

Title IX and women's athletics

In 1972 Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments, prohibiting sex discrimination in any federally assisted educational program or activity. Perhaps this act's biggest impact was to create opportunities for girls' and women's athletics at schools and colleges, giving birth to a new "Title IX generation" that would reach maturity in the 1980s and 1990s and help professionalize women's sports as well.

Battle of Guadalcanal

In August 1942 American ground forces gained a toehold on Guadalcanal Island, in the Solomons, in an effort to protect the lifeline from America to Australia through the Southwest Pacific. An early naval defeat inflicted by the Japanese shortened American supplies dangerously, and for weeks the US troops held on to the malarial island only by their fingernails. After several desperate sea battles for naval control, the Japanese troops evacuated Guadalcanal in February 1943. Japanese losses were 20,000, compared to 1,700 for the Americans. That casualty ratio of more than ten to one, Japanese to American, persisted throughout the Pacific war.

FDR's "Quarantine Speech" and reaction

In Chicago--unofficial isolationist "capital" of America--President Roosevelt delivered his sensational "Quarantine Speech" in the autumn of 1937. Alarmed by the recent aggressions of Italy and Japan, he called for "positive endeavors" to "quarantine" the aggressors--presumably by economic embargoes. The speech triggered a cyclone of protest from isolationists and other foes of involvement; they feared that a moral quarantine would lead to a shooting quarantine. Startled by this angry response, Roosevelt retreated and sought less direct means to curb the dictators.

1939 Non-Aggression Pact (Hitler, Stalin)

In March 1939, Hitler suddenly erase the rest of Czechoslovakia from the map, contrary to his solemn vows. Joseph Stalin, the sphinx of the Kremlin (in Russia), was a key to the peace puzzle. In the summer of 1939, the British and French were busily negotiated with Moscow, hopeful of securing a mutual-defense treaty that would halt Hitler. But mutual suspicions proved insuperable. Then the Soviet Union astounded the would by signing, on August 23, 1939, a nonaggression treaty with the German dictator. The notorious Hitler-Stalin pact meant that the Nazi German leader now had a green light to make war on Poland and the Western democracies, without fearing a stab in the back from the Soviet Union -- his Communist arch-foe. With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, WWII was only hours away.

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

In March 1983 (?), Reagan announced his intention to pursue a high-technology missile-defense system called the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars. The plan called for orbiting battle stations in space that could fire laser beams or other forms of concentrated energy to vaporize intercontinental missiles on liftoff. Reagan described SDI as offering potential salvation from the nuclear nightmare by throwing an "astrodome" defense shield over American cities. Most scientists considered this an impossible goal. But the deeper logic of SDI lay in its fit with Reagan's overall Soviet strategy. By pitching the arms contest onto stratospheric plane of high technology and astronomical expense, it would further force the Kremlin's hand.

Bill Clinton, New Democrat, Al Gore

In a bruising round of primary elections, Governor William Jefferson Clinton of Arkansas weathered blistering accusations of womanizing and draft evasion to emerge as his party's standard-bearer (in the 1992 presidential elections). Breaking the tradition of a "balanced ticket," he selected a fellow forty-something southern white male Protestant moderate, Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, as his vice-presidential running mate. Clinton claimed to be a "new" Democrat, chastened by the party's long exile in the political wilderness. With other centrist Democrats, he had formed the Democratic Leadership Council to point the party away from its traditional antibusiness, dovish, champion-of-the-underdog orientation and toward a pro-growth, strong defense, and anticrime policies. Clinton won the election with 370 electoral votes. ADD?

low unemployment; end of the Great Depression

Millions of men and women worked for Uncle Sam in the armed forces. Millions more worked for him in the defense industries, where their employers and unions were monitored by the FEPC and WLB, and their personal needs were cared for by government-sponsored housing projects, day-care facilities, and health plans. The flood of war dollars -- not the relatively modest rivulet of New Deal spending -- at last swept the plague of unemployment from the land. War, not enlightened social policy, cured the depression. As the postwar economy continued to depend dangerously on military spending for its health, many observers looked back to the years 1941-1945 as the origins of a "warfare-welfare state."

"separate spheres" and maternal issues

Nineteenth-century notions of "separate spheres" dictated that a woman's place was in the home, so most female progressives defended their new activities as an extension - not a rejection - of the traditional roles of wife and mother. Thus they were often drawn to moral and "maternal" issues like keeping children out of smudgy mills and sweltering sweatshops, attacking the scourge of tuberculosis bred in airless tenements, winning pensions for mothers with dependent children, and ensuring that only safe food products be found their way to the family table.

Amendment 24 (also add Amendment 23)

The 24th Amendment, ratified in January 1964, abolished the poll tax in federal elections. ADD Amendment 23

ABM Treaty, SALT treaty

The US and the USSR agreed to an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty, which limited each nation to two clusters of defensive missiles, and to a series of arm-reduction negotiations known as SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), aimed at freezing numbers of long-range nuclear missiles for five years. The ABM and SALT accords constituted long-overdue first steps toward slowing the arms race. Yet even though the ABM treaty forbade elaborate defensive systems, the US forged ahead with the development of "MIRVS" (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles), designed to overcome any defense by "saturating" it with large numbers of warheads, several to a rocket. Predictably, the Soviets proceeded to "MIRV" their own missiles.

cities, skyscrapers (elevators), commuters

The growth of American metropolises was spectacular. In 1860 no city in the US could boast a million inhabitants; by 1890 New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia had vaulted past the million mark. Cities grew both up and out. The cloud-brushing skyscraper allowed more people and workplaces to be packed onto a parcel of land. Appearing first as a ten-story building in Chicago in 1885, the skyscraper was made usable by the perfecting of the electric elevator. Americans were also becoming commuters, carted daily between home and job n the mass-transit lines that radiated out from central cities to surrounding suburbs. Electric trollies, powered by wagging antennae from overhead wires, propelled city limits of leg-power, gave way to the immense and impersonal megapolis, carved into distinctly different districts for business, industry, and residential neighborhoods.

Election 1932 and New Deal Democrats

Voters were in an ugly mood as the presidential campaign of 1932 neared. Hoover may have won the 1928 election by promising "a chicken in every pot," but three years later that chicken seemed to have laid discharge slip in every pay envelope. Hoover was renominated by the Republican convention, without great enthusiasm. The platform indulged in extravagant praise of Republican antidepression policies. , while halfheartedly promising to repeal national prohibition and return control of liquor to the states. The rising star of the Democratic firmament was Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York. The Democratic platform came out more forthrightly than the Republican for repeal of prohibition, assailed the so-called Hoover depression, and promised to not only a balanced budget but sweeping social and economic reforms. FDR electrified the delegates and the public (after being nominated) with these words: "I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people." He won with 472 electoral votes to 59. ADD?

Spanish-American War, 1898

War between Spain and America. Fought in the Philippines, even though they were fighting over control of Cuba, who Spain owned. America wanted to free the Cubans. The American people plunged into the war lightheartedly, like schoolchildren off to a picnic. The war got off to a giddy start for American forces. Before the war even started, Theodore Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the Navy, took mattered into his own hands while Navy Secretary John D. Long was away from office. He cabled Commodore George Dewey, commanding the American Asiatic Squadron at Hong Kong, to descend upon Spain's Philippines in the event of war. The war ended after 113 days, was low in casualties, and was theatrically successful - despite the blundering. add?

slums, "dumbbell" tenements

Worst of all were the human pigsties known as slums. They seemed to grow ever more crowded, more filthy, and more rat-infested, esp. after the perfection in 1879 of the "____" tenement. So named because of the outline of its floor plan, the ___ was usually seven or eight stories high, with shallow, sunless, an ill-smelling air shafts providing minimal ventilation. Several families were sardined onto each floor of the barrackslike structures, and they shared a malodorous toilet in the hall. add?

Eisenhower and civil rights

Yet Congress stubbornly resisted passing civil rights legislation, and Truman's successor, Eisenhower, showed no real interest in the racial issue. It was the Supreme Court that assumed political leadership in the civil rights struggle. add?

wedding of the transcontinental railroad; golden spike

A "wedding of the rails" was finally consummated near Ogden, Utah, in 1869, as two locomotives gently kissed cowcatchers. The colorful ceremony included the breaking of champagne bottles and the driving of a last ceremonial golden spike (which is now exhibited at the Stanford University Museum), with ex-governor Leland Stanford clumsily wielding a silver sledgehammer. In all, the Union Pacific built 1,086 miles, the Central Pacific 689 miles.

white collar replaces blue collar

A quiet revolution was marked in 1956 when "white-collar" workers for the first time outnumbered "blue-collar" workers, signaling the passage from an industrial to a postindustrial era. (What does it mean to be white-collar or blue-collar?)

United Farm Workers, Cesar Chavez (migrant workers)

After a few years of struggle, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), headed by the soft-spoken and charismatic Cesar Chavez, succeeded in improving working conditions for the mostly Chicano "stoop laborers" who followed the cycle of planting and harvesting across the American West. add?

gasoline; internal combustion engine

American adapted rather than invented the gasoline engine; Europeans can claim the original honor. By the 1890s a few daring American inventors and promoters, including Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds, were developing the infant automotive industry. ADD

divorce; unmarried mothers

By 1990s one out of every two marriages ended in divorce. Seven times more children were affected by divorce than at the beginning of the century. The proportion of adults living alone tripled in the four decades after 1950, and by the 1990s nearly 1/3 of women aged 25 to 29 had never married. In the 1960's, 5% of all births were to unmarried women, but three decades later one out of four white babies, one out of three Latino babies, and two out of three African American babies were born to single mothers. Every fourth child in America was growing up in a household that lacked two parents.

assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Despair deepened when the magnetic and moderate voice of Martin Luther King, Jr., was forever silenced by a sniper's bullet in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. A martyr for justice, he had he had bled and died against the peculiarly American thorn of race. The killing of King cruelly robbed the American people people of one of the most inspirational leaders in their history -- at a time when they could least afford to lose him. This outrage triggered a nationwide orgy of ghetto-gutting and violence that cost over forty lives.

Geneva Conference, division at 17th parallel, elections

Dienbienphu fell to the nationalists, and a multinational conference in Geneva roughly halved Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The victorious Ho Chi Minh in the north consented to this arrangement on the assurance that Vietnam-wide elections would be held within two years. In the south a pro-Western government under Ngo Dinh Diem was soon entrenched at Saigon. The Vietnamese never held the promised elections, primarily because the communists seemed certain to win, and Vietnam remained a dangerously divided country.

America First Committee, Charles Lindbergh

During the precarious months of the Battle of Britain, debate intensified in the US over what foreign policy to embrace. Supporters of aid to Britain formed propaganda groups, the most potent of which was the Committee to Defend America by Aiding Allies. The isolationists, both numerous and sincere, were determined to avoid American bloodshed at all costs. They organized the America First Committee and proclaimed, "England Will Fight to the Last American." They contended that America should concentrate what strength it had to defend its own shores, lest a victorious Hitler, after crushing Britain, plot a transoceanic assault. Their basic philosophy was "The Yanks Are Not Coming," and their most effective speechmaker was the famed aviator Colonel Charles Lindbergh.

formal recognition of the Soviet Union/communist Russia

FDR made at least one internationalist gesture when he formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. Over the noisy protests of anti-communist conservatives, as well as Roman Catholics offended by the Kremlin's anti-religious policies, FDR extended the hand of diplomatic recognition to the sixteen-year-old Bolshevik regime. He was motivated in part by the hope for trade with Soviet Russia, as well as by the desire to bolster the Soviet Union as a friendly counterweight to the possible threat of German power in Europe and Japanese power in Asia.

criticisms of the New Deal

Foes of the New Deal condemned its alleged waste, incompetence, confusion, contradictions, and cross-purposes, as well as the chiseling and graft in the alphabetical agencies. FDR had done nothing, cynics said, that an earthquake could not have done better. Critics deplored the employment of "crackpot" college professors, leftist "pinkos," and outright Communists. Such subversives, it was charged, were trying to make America over in the Bolshevik-Marxist image under "Rooseveltski." Roosevelt was further accused by conservatives of being Jewish and of tapping too many bright young Jewish leftist for his "Drain Trust." ADD PAGE 796

German-American discrimination

German Americans numbered over 8 million, counting those with at least one parent foreign-born, out of a total population of 100 million. On the whole they proved to be dependently loyal to the US. Yet rumormongers were quick to spread tales of spying and sabotage; even trifling epidemics of diarrhea were blamed on German agents. A few German Americans were tarred, feathered, and beaten; in one extreme case a German Socialist in Illinois was lynched by a drunken mob. Orchestras found it unsafe to present German-composed music, like that of Wagner or Beethoven. German books were removed from library shelves, and German classes were canceled in high schools and colleges.

Hollywood, silent movies, Birth of a Nation

Hollywood, in southern California, quickly became the movie capital of the world, for it enjoyed a maximum of sunshine and other advantages. Spectacular among the first full-length classics was DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (1915), which glorified the KKK of Reconstruction days and defamed both blacks and Northern carpetbaggers. White southerners would fire guns at the screen during the attempted "rape" scene. add?

business codes, maximum hours, minimum wage

Industrial industries - over two hundred in all - were to work out codes of "fair competition," under which hours of labor would be reduced so that employment could be spread over more people. A ceiling was placed on the maximum hours of labor; a floor was placed under wages to establish minimum levels.

Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Kennedy, apparently sobered by the appalling risks he had just run, pushed harder for a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union. After prolonged negotiations in Moscow, a pact prohibiting trial nuclear explosions in the atmosphere was signed in late 1963.

V-J Day

On Aug 10, 1945, Tokyo sued for peace on one condition: that Hirohito, the bespectacled Son of Heaven, be allowed to remain on his ancestral thrown as nominal emperor. Despite their "unconditional surrender" policy, the Allies accepted this condition on Aug 14, 1945. The Japanese, though facing losing face, were able to save both their exalted ruler and what was left of their native land. The formal end came, with dramatic force, on Sept 2, 1945. Official surrender ceremonies were conducted by General MacArthur on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. At the same time, Americans at home hysterically celebrated V-J Day -- Victory in Japan Day -- after the most horrible war in history had ended in mushrooming atomic clouds.

attack on Reagan's life

On March 6, 1981, a deranged gunman shot the president as he was leaving a Washington hotel. A .22-caliber bullet penetrated beneath Reagan's left arm and collapsed his left lung. With admirable courage and grace, and with impressive physical resilience for a man his age, Reagan seemed to recover rapidly from his violent ordeal. Twelve days after the attack, he walked out of the hospital and returned to work. When he appeared a few days later on national television to address the Congress and the public budget, the outpouring sympathy and support was enormous.

German sinking of four U.S. merchant vessels

On the heels of this provocation (the Zimmerman letter) came the long-dreaded "overt" acts in the Atlantic, where German U-boats sank four unarmed American merchant vessels in the first two weeks of March. Simultaneously came the rousing news that a revolution in Russia had toppled the cruel regime of the tsars. America could now fight foursquare for democracy on the side of the Allies, without the black sheep of Russian despotism in the Allied fold.

Berkely Free Speech movement; hippies

One of the first organized protests against established authority broke out at the University of California at Berkley in 1964, in the aptly named Free Speech Movement. Students objected to an administrative ban on the use of campus space for political debate. During the months of protest, they accused the Cold War "megaversity" of promoting corporate interests rather than humane values. But in only a few years, the clean-cut Berkley activists and their sober-minded sit-ins would seem downright quaint. Fired by outrage against the war in Vietnam, some sons and daughters of the middle class became radical political rebels. Others turned to mind-bending drugs, tuned in to "acid rock," and dropped out of "straight" society. Still others "did their own thing" in communes, or "alternative" institutions. Patriotism became a dirty word. Beflowered women in trousers and long-haired men with earrings heralded the rise of a self-conscious "counterculture" stridently opposed to traditional American ways.

totalitarianism: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler

Post-1918 chaos in Europe, followed the Great Depression, spawned the ominous spread of totalitarianism. The individual was nothing; the state was everything. The Communist USSR led the way, with the crafty and ruthless Joseph Stalin finally emerging as dictator. Blustery Benito Mussolini, a swaggering Fascist, seized the reins of power in Italy during 1922. And Adolf Hitler, a fanatic with a toothbrush mustache, plotted and harangued his way into control of Germany in 1933 with liberal use of the "big lie."

"Fighting Bob" LaFollette of Wisconsin

Progressivism naturally bubbled up to the state level, notably in Wisconsin, which became a yeasty laboratory of reform. The governor of the state, pompadoured Robert M. ("Fighting Bob") La Follette, was an undersized but overbearing crusader who emerged as the most militant of the progressive Republican leaders. After a desperate fight with entrenched monopoly, he reached the governor's chair in 1901. Routing the lumber and railroad "interests," he wrested considerable control from the crooked corporations and returned it to the people. He also perfected a scheme for regulating public utilities, while laboring in close association with experts on the faculty of the state university at Madison.

Los Angeles racial riots

Racial and ethnic tension exacerbated problems in American cities. These stresses were especially evident in Los Angeles which was a magnet for minorities, especially immigrants from Asia and Latin America. When in 1992 a mostly white jury exonerated white Los Angeles police officers who had been videotaped ferociously beating a black suspect, the minority neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles erupted in rage. Arson and looting laid waste entire city blocks, and scores of people were killed. Some attacked Asian shopkeepers, who in turn formed armed patrols to protect themselves. The riots showed the African American skepticism about the American system of justice.

Democrat "boll weevils"

Reagan worked naturally in harness with the Republican majority in the Senate, but to get his way in the Democratic House, he undertook some old-fashioned politicking. He enterprisingly wooed a group of mostly southern conservative Democrats (dubbed "boll weevils"), who abandoned their own party's leadership to follow the president.

gold bugs vs. silverites

The Democrat Bryan platform demanded inflation through the unlimited coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 ounces of silver to 1 of gold, though the market ratio was about 32 to 1. This meant the silver dollar would be worth about fifty cents. Democratic "Gold Bugs," unable to swallow Bryan, bolted their party over the silver issue. The Democratic minority charged that the Populists-silverites had stolen bot the name and the clothes of the party.

Al Smith, Roman Catholic Democrat

The Democrats nominated Alfred Smith in the 1928 election. He was four-time governor of NY. "Al(cohol)" Smith was soakingly and drippingly "wet" at a time when the country was still devoted to the "noble experiment" of prohibition. To a nation that had only recently moved to the city, native New Yorker Smith seemed too abrasively urban. He was a Roman Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant - and unfortunately prejudiced - land. Many dry, rural, and Fundamentalist Democrats gagged on his candidacy, and they saddled the wet Smith with a dry running mate and a dry platform.

German war reparations and hyperinflation

The French and the British demanded the Germans make enormous reparations payments, totaling some $32 billion, as compensation for war-inflicted damages. The Allies hoped to settle their debts to the US with the money received from Germany. The French, seeking to extort lagging reparations payments, sent troops into Germany's industrialized Ruhr Valley in 1923. Berlin responded by permitting its currency its currency to inflate astronomically. At one point October 1923, a loaf or bread cost 480 million marks, or about $120 million in preinflation money.

HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee)

The House of Representative in 1938 had established the Committee on Un-American Activities (popularly known as "HUAC") to investigate "subversion."

Immigration and Nationality Act (Latin America and Asia)

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished at last the "national-origins" quota system that had been in place since 1921. The act also doubled the number of immigrants allowed to enter annually, while for the first time setting limits on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. The new law further provided for the admission of close relatives of US citizens, outside those numerical limits. The sources of immigration soon shifted heavily from Europe to Latin America and Asia, dramatically changing the racial and ethnic composition of the American population.

corrupt Indian agents

The Indians surrendered their ancestral lands only when they had received solemn promises from Washington that they be left alone and provided with food, clothing, and other supplies. Regrettably, the federal Indian agents were often corrupt. They palmed off moth-eaten blankets, spoiled beef, and other defective provisions on the friendless Indians. One of these cheating officials, on an annual salary of $1,500, returned home after four years with an estimated "savings" of $50,000.

Teheran Conference and the second front

The Soviets had never ceased their clamor for an all-out second front, and the time rapidly approached for Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin to meet in person to coordinate the promised effort. Marshal Joseph Stalin, with a careful eye on Soviet military operations, balked at leaving Moscow. FDR, who jauntily remarked in private, "I can handle to old buzzard," was eager to confer with him. Teheran, the capital of Iran (Persia), was finally chosen as the meeting place. To this ancient city Roosevelt riskily flew, after a stopover conference in Cairo with Britain's Churchill and China' Jiang Jieshi regarding the war against Japan. At Teheran the discussions among Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill -- from Nov 28 to Dec 1, 1943 -- progressed smoothly. Perhaps the most important achievement was agreement on broad plans, esp. those for launching Soviet attacks on Germany from the east simultaneously with the prospective Allied assault for the west. add?

"one man, one vote"; reapportionment

The Warren Court also struck at overrepresentation of cow-pasture agricultural districts in state legislature. Adopting the principle of one-man-one-vote, the Court in Reynolds v. Sims (1964) ruled that the state legislatures, both upper and lower houses, would have to be reapportioned according to the human population, irrespective of the cows in the area.

1938 Democratic party purge and failure

The aggressive leadership of Roosevelt also came in for denunciation. Heavy fire was especially directed at his attempts to browbeat the Supreme Court and to create a "dummy Congress." FDR had even tried in the 1938 elections, with backfiring results, to "purge" members of Congress who would not lockstep with him. The three senators whom he publicly opposed were all triumphantly reelected.

Anti-Semitism (page 808-9)

The ancient demon of anti-Semitism (hostility or prejudice toward Jews) brutally bared its fangs when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Fortunately, many German Jews managed to escape Hitler's racist juggernaut.

"the Great Rapprochement"

The chastened British, their eyes fully opened to the European peril, were now determined to cultivate Yankee friendship. The British inaugurated an era of "patting the eagle's head," which replaced a century or so of America's "twisting the lions' tail." Sometimes called the Great Rapprochement - or reconciliation - between the US and Britain, the new Anglo-American cordiality became a cornerstone of both nations' foreign policies as the twentieth century opened. CHANGE?

Russian (Communist) Bolshevik Revolution 1917

The communistic Bolsheviks, after seizing power late in 1917, ultimately withdrew their beaten country from the "capitalistic" war early in 1918. This sudden defection released hundreds of thousands of battle-tested Germans from the eastern front facing Russia for the western front in France, where, for the first time in the war, they were developing a dangerous superiority in manpower.

national debt, income tax, war bonds and other borrowing

The conflict was phenomenally expensive. The wartime bill amounted to more than $300 billion -- ten times the direct cost of WWI and twice as much as all previous federal spending since 1776. FDR would have preferred to follow a pay-as-you-go policy to finance the war, but the costs were simply too gigantic. The income-tax net was expanded to catch about four times as many people as before, and maximum tax rates rose as high as 90 percent. But despite such drastic measures, only about two-fifths of the war costs were paid from current revenues. The remainder was borrowed. The national debt skyrocketed from $49 billion in 1941 to $259 billion in 1945. When production finally slipped into high gear, the war was costing about $10 million an hour. This was the price of victory over such implacable enemies.

demagogues (Father Coughlin, Huey Long)

The disheartening persistence of unemployment and suffering demonstrated that emergency relief measures had to be not only continued but supplemented. One danger signal was the appearance of various demagogues (rabble-rousers), notably a magnetic "microphone messiah," Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest in Michigan who began broadcasting in 1930 and whose slogan was "Social Justice." His anti-New Deal harangues to some 40 million radio fans finally became so anti-Semitic, fascistic, and demagogic that he was silenced in 1942 by his ecclesiastical superiors. Also notorious among the new brood of agitators were those who capitalized on popular discontent to make pie-in-the-sky promises. Most conspicuous of these individuals was Senator Huey Long of Louisiana. He used his abundant rabble-rousing talents to publicize his "Share Our Wealth" program, which promised to make "Every Man a King." Every family was to receive $5,000, supposedly at the expense of the prosperous. Fear of Long's becoming a fascist dictator ended when he was shot by an assassin in the Louisiana state capital in 1935.

Indian Reorganization Act 1934 (also see map p. 602)

The forced-assimilation doctrine of the Dawes Act remained the cornerstone of the government's official Indian policy for nearly half an century, until the ____ (the "Indian New Deal") of 1934 partially reversed the individualistic approach and belatedly tried to restore the tribal basis of Indian life. Under these new federal policies, defective though they were, the Indian population started to mount slowly (the census of 2000 counted more than 1.5 million Native Americans, urban and rural).

tariff walls and world trade

The high-tariff course thus chartered by the Republican regimes set off an ominous chain reaction. An impoverished Europe needed to sell its manufactured goods to the US, particularly if it hoped to achieve economic recovery and to pay its huge war debt to Washington. International trade, Americans were slow to learn, is a two-way street. In general, they could not sell to others in quantity unless they bought from them in quantity - or lent them more US dollars. Erecting tariff walls was a game two could play. The American example spurred European nations, throughout the feverish 1920s, to pile up higher barriers themselves. add?

public education; Chautauqua Movement

The ideal of tax-supported elementary schools, adopted on a nationwide basis before the Civil War, was still gathering strength. Americans were accepting the truism that a free government cannot function successfully if the people are shackled by ignorance. Beginning in 1870, more and more states were making at least a grade-school education compulsory, and this gain, incidentally, helped check the frightful abuses of child labor. Public schools, though showering benefits on children, excluded millions of adults. The deficiency was partially remedied by the ___ movement, a successor to the lyceums, which was launched in 1974 on the shores of Lake ___, in New York. The organizers achieved gratifying success through nationwide public lectures, often held in tents and featuring well-known speakers, including the witty Mark Twain. In addition, there were extensive ___ courses of home study, for which 100,000 people enrolled in 1892 alone.

smaller government

The new president was devoted to fiscal fitness and a leaner federal government. He sought nothing less than the dismantling of the welfare state and the reversal of the political evolution of the preceding half-century. Reagan pursued his smaller-government policies with near-religious zeal and remarkable effectiveness. He proposed a new federal budget that necessitated cuts of some $35 billion, mostly in social programs like food stamps and federally funded job-training centers.

Soviet leader Gorbachev and end of Cold War hostilities

The president soon found himself contending for the world's attention with a charismatic new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, installed as chairman of the Soviet Communist party in March 1985. Gorbachev announced two policies with remarkable, even revolutionary, implications. "Glasnost," or "openness," aimed to ventilate the secretive, repressive stuffiness of Soviet society by introducing free speech and a measure of political liberty. "Perestroika," or "restructuring," was intended to revive the moribund Soviet economy by adopting many of the free-market practices -- such as the profit motive and a end to subsidizing prices -- of the capitalist West. Both of these reforms required the USSR to shrink the size of its enormous military machine and redirect its energies to the dismal civilian economy. That requirement, in turn, necessitated an end to the Cold War. Gorbachev accordingly made warm overtures to the West, including an announcement in April 1985 that the USSR would cease to deploy intermediate-range nuclear forces targeted on Western Europe, pending an agreement on their complete elimination. At the third of four summit meetings with Gorbachev (Dec 1987), Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF treaty, banning all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe. ADD PAGE 974

Cornelius Vanderbilt, New York Central Railroad

The success of the western lines was facilitated by welding together and expanding the older eastern networks, notably the _____. The genius in this enterprise was "Commodore" ___. Having made his millions in steamboating, he daringly turned, in his late sixties, to a new career in railroading. Offering superior railway service at a lower rates, he amassed a fortune of $100 million.

petroleum, kerosene, oil, internal combustion engine

The sudden emergence of the oil industry was one of the most striking developments of the years during and after the Civil War. Kerosene, derived from petroleum, was the first major product of the infant oil industry. Burned from a cotton wick in a glass chimney lamp, kerosene produced a much brighter flame than whale oil. The oil business boomed; by the 1870s kerosene was America's fourth most valuable export. However, by 1885, 250,000 of Thomas Edison's electric lightbulbs were in use. Oil might have remained a modest, even a shrinking, industry but for yet another turn of the technological tide - the invention of the automobile. By 1900 the gasoline-burning internal combustion engine had clearly bested its rivals, steam and electricity, as the superior means of automobile propulsion.

radar

The tide of subsea battle turned with agonizing slowness. Old techniques, such as escorting convoys of merchant vessels and dropping depth bombs from destroyers, were strengthened by air patrol, the newly invented technology of radar, and teh bombing of submarine bases.

end of the New Deal era

The war prompted other changes in the American mood. Many programs of the once-popular New Deal -- including that Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, and the National Youth Administration -- were wiped out by the conservative Congress elected in 1942. FDR declared in 1943 that "Dr. New Deal" was going into retirement, to be replaced by "Dr. Win-the-War." His announcement acknowledged not only the urgency of the war effort but the power of the revitalized conservative forces in the country. The era of the New Deal reform was over.

Amendment 26

The youth of America were pleased, though not pacified, when the 26th Amendment in 1971 lowered the voting age to 18.

sinking of the Lusitania

Then the submarine issue became acute when the British passenger liner Lusitania was torpedoed and sank off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915, with the loss of 1,198 lives, including 128 Americans. The Lusitania was carrying forty-hundred cases of small-arms ammunition, a fact the Germans used to justify the sinking. But Americans were swept by a wave of shock and anger at this act of "mass murder" and "piracy." The eastern US, closer to the war, seethed with talk of fighting, but the rest of the country showed a strong distaste for hostilities. The peace-loving Wilson had no stomach for leading a disunited nation into war. Instead, by a series of increasingly strong notes, Wilson attempted to bring the German warlords sharply to book.

"flexible response"

These "brushfire wars" intensified the pressure for a shift away from Secretary Dulles's dubious doctrine of "massive retaliation." With Defense Secretary McNamara, JFK pushed the strategy of "flexible response" -- that is, developing an array of military "options" that could be precisely matched to the gravity of the crisis at hand. To this end Kennedy increased spending on conventional military forces and bolstered the Special Forces. They were an elite anti-guerrilla outfit trained to survive on snake meat and to kill with scientific finesse.

red states, blue states

These polarizing policies both reflected and deepened the cultural chasm that increasingly divided "red" from "blue" America (map p. 1001). The new president's initiatives proved to so divisive that a member of his own party, Vermont senator James Jeffords, severed his connection with the Republicans in May 2001, thereby briefly returning control of the Senate to the Democrats -- though they became the Senate minority party once again following the 2002 elections.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Wilson rivalry

Wilson further ruffled Republican feathers when he snubbed the Senate in assembling his peace delegation and neglected to include a single Republican senator in his official party. The logical choice was the new chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. But including Lodge would have been problematic for the president. Wilson loathed him, and the feeling was hotly reciprocated. An accomplished author, Lodge had been known as the "scholar in politics" until Wilson came on the scene. The two men were at daggers drawn, personally and politically.

Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893)

A revival of architecture forms - and a setback of realism - came with the great ____. Held in Chicago in 1893, it honored the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first voyage. This so-called dream of loveliness, which was visited 27 million people, did much to raise American artistic standards and promote city planning, although many of the spectators were attracted primarily by the contortions of a hootchy-kootchy dancer, "Little Egyptian."

Iwo Jima, Okinawa

America's steel vise was tightening mercilessly around Japan. The tiny island of Iwo Jima, needed as a haven for damaged American bombers returning from Japan, was captured in March 1945. This desperate twenty-five-day assault cost over four thousand American dead. Okinawa, a well-defended Japanese island, was next on the list: it was needed for closer bases from which to blast and burn enemy cities and industries. Fighting dragged on from April to June 1945. Japanese soldiers, fighting with incredible courage from their caves, finally sold Okinawa for 50,000 American casualties, while suffering far heavier losses themselves.

"silent majority"

Antiwar protesters staged a massive national Vietnam moratorium in Oct 1969. Undaunted, Nixon launched a counteroffensive by appealing to the "silent majority" who presumably supported the war. Though ostensibly conciliatory, Nixon's appeal was in fact deeply divisive. His intentions soon became clear when he unleashed tough-talking VP Agnew to attack the "nattering nabobs of negativism" who demanded quick withdrawal from Vietnam.

baseball, boxing, bicycling

Baseball, already widely played before the Civil War, was clearly emerging as the national pastime, if not a national mania. A league of professional players was formed in the 1870s, and in 1888 an all-star baseball team toured the world, using the pyramids as a backdrop in Europe. Even pugilism (boxing), with its long background of bare-knuckle brutality, gained a new and gloved respectability in 1892. Agile "Gentleman Jim" Corbett, a scientific boxer, wrestled the world championship from the aging and alcoholic John L. Sullivan, the fabulous "Boston Strong Boy." The low-framed "safety" bicycle came to replace the high-seated model. By 1893 a million bicycles were in use, and thousands of young women, jokesters remarked, were turning to this new "spinning wheel," one that offered freedom, not tedium.

muckrakers: Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell

Beginning about 1902 the exposing of evil became a flourishing industry among American publishers. A group of aggressive ten- and fifteen-cent popular magazines surged to the front. Waging fierce circulation wars, they dug deep for the dirt that the public loved to hate. Enterprising editors financed extensive research and encouraged pugnacious writing by their bright young reporters, whom President Roosevelt branded as "muckrakers" in 1906. Despite presidential scolding, these muckrakers boomed circulation, and some of their most scandalous exposures were published as best-selling books. In 1902 a brilliant New York Reporter, Lincoln Steffens, launched a series of articles in "McClure's" titled "The Shame of the Cities." He fearlessly unmasked the corrupt alliance between big business and municipal government. Steffens was followed in the same magazine by Ida M. Tarbell, a pioneering journalist who published a devastating but factual expose of the Standard Oil Company. Fearing legal reprisals, the muckraking magazines went to great pains and expense to check their material - paying as much as $3,000 to verify a single Tarbell article.

Wilson's New Freedom

Beyond the clashing personalities, the overshadowing question of the 1912 campaign was which of two varieties of progressivism would prevail - Roosevelt's New Nationalism or Wilson's New Freedom. Both men favored a more active government role in economic and social affairs, but they disagreed sharply over specific strategies. Wilson's New Freedom favored small enterprise, entrepreneurship, and free functioning of unregulated and unmonopolized markets. The Democrats shunned social-welfare proposals and pinned their economic faith on competition - on the "man on the make," as Wilson put it. The keynote of Wilson's campaign was not regulation but fragmentation of the big industrial combines, chiefly by means of vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws.

Compromise of 1877 (list its effects)

Clash or compromise was the stark choice. Frantically laboring statesmen gradually hammered out an agreement in the Henry Clay tradition - the ____. The election deadlock itself was to be broken by the Electoral Count Act, which Congress passed early in 1877. It set up an electoral commission consisting of fifteen men selected from the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court. In February 1877, about a month before Inauguration Day, the Senate and House met together in an electric atmosphere to settle dispute. The roll of the states was tolled off alphabetically. When Florida was reached - the first of the three southern states with two sets of returns - the disputed documents were referred to the electoral commission, which sat in a nearby chamber. After prolonged discussion the members agreed to accept the Republican returns (vote of 8 Republicans to 7 Democrats). Renewed deadlock was avoided by the rest of the complex compromise. The Democrats reluctantly agreed that Hayes may take office in return for his withdrawing intimidating federal troops from the two states in which they remained, Louisiana and South Carolina. Among various concessions, the Republicans assured the Democrats a place at the presidential patronage trough and support for a bill subsidizing the Texas and Pacific Railroad's construction of a southern transcontinental line. Not all of these promises were kept in later years, including the Texas and Pacific subsidy. But the deal held together long enough to break the dangerous electoral standoff. The Democrats permitted Hayes to receive the remainder of the disputed terms - all by the partisan vote of 8 to 7. CHANGE?

the Balkans (former Yugoslavia); use of NATO forces

Clinton's approach to the tormented Balkans in southeastern Europe showed a similar initial hesitation, followed eventually by firm leadership. In the former Yugoslavia, as vicious ethnic conflict raged through Bosnia, the Washington government dithered until finally deciding to commit American troops to a NATO peacekeeping contingent in late 1995. Deadlines for removing the troops were postponed and then finally abandoned altogether as it became clear that they were the only force capable of preventing new hostilities. NATO's expansion to include the new member states of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1997, and its continuing presence in Bosnia, failed to pacify the Balkans completely. When Serbian president Milosevic in 1999 unleashed a new round of "ethnic cleansing" in the region, this time against ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo, US-led NATO forces launched an air war against Serbia. The bombing campaign initially failed to stop ethnic terror, as refugees flooded into neighboring countries, but it eventually forced Milosevic to accept a NATO peacekeeping force on the ground in Kosovo. add? page 995

expansion of federal programs and spending

Congress poured out a flood of legislation, comparable only to the output of the New Dealers in the Hundred Days Congress of 1933. Johnson, confident that a growing economy gave him ample fiscal and political room for maneuver, delivered at last on long-deferred Democratic promises of social reform. Escalating the War on Poverty, Congress doubled the appropriation of the Office of Economic Opportunity to $2 billion and granted more than $1 billion to redevelop the gutted hills and hollows of Appalachia. add?

War Powers Act

Congressional opposition to the expansion of presidential war-making powers by Johnson and Nixon led to the War Powers Act in November 1973. Passed over Nixon's veto, it required the president to report to Congress within 48 hours after committing troops to a foreign conflict or "substantially" enlarging American combat units in a foreign country. Such limited authorization would have to end within 60 days unless Congress extended it for 30 more days.

conservation, Boy Scouts, Sierra Club

Conservatism, including reclamation, may have been Roosevelt's most enduring tangible achievement. He was buoyed in this effort by an upwelling national mood of concern about the disappearance of the frontier - believed to be the source of such national characteristics as individualism and democracy. An increasingly citified people worried that too much civilization might not be good for the national soul. City dwellers snapped up Jack London's "Call of the Wild" (1903) and other books about nature, and urban youngsters made the outdoor-oriented Boy Scouts of America the country's largest youth organization. The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, dedicated itself to preserving the wildness of the western landscape.

Phyllis Schlafly

Conservative spokeswoman Phyllis Schlafly led the campaign to stop the ERA. Its advocates, she charged, were just "bitter women seeking a constitutional cure for their personal problems."

further violence in Iraq

Contrary to rosy predictions that the Iraqi people would welcome the Americans as liberators and that democracy would sweetly blossom, Iraq became a seething cauldron of apparently endless violence. Iraqi factions jockeyed murderously for political position in the post-Saddam era. Iraqi insurgents, aided by militants drawn from other Islamic nations, repeatedly attacked American troops, killing more US soldiers during the occupation (nearly 1,200 by 2004) than during the invasion itself (139). Revelations in April 2004 about American abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison further inflamed anti-American sentiment in Iraq and beyond. Once a model democracy and an inspiration to the world, the US was now reviled in many quarters as just another arrogant imperialistic power. add? page 1006

Election of 1928, Herbert Hoover

Coolidge bowed out of the 1928 presidential election. His logical successor was the super-Secretary of Commerce Hebert Hoover, unpopular with the political bosses but much admired darling of the masses. He was nominated on a platform that clucked contentedly over both prosperity and prohibition. Still-squabbling Democrats nominated Alfred Smith, four-time governor of NY. Radio figured prominently in this campaign for the first time, and it helped Hoover more than Smith. Hoover won with 444 electoral votes to 87.

Cuba, "The Butcher" Weyler

Cuba's masses, frightfully misgoverned, again rose against their Spanish oppressors in 1895. The roots of the revolt were partly economic. Sugar production - the backbone of the island's prosperity - was crippled when the American tariff of 1894 restored high duties on the toothsome product. The desperate insurgents now sought to drive out their Spanish overlords by adopting a scorched-earth policy, burning cane-fields and sugar mills. Their destructive tactics also menaced American interests on the island. Fuel was added to the Cuban conflagration in 1896 with the arrival of the Spanish general "Butcher" Weyler. He undertook to crush the rebellion by herding many civilians into barbed-wire reconcentration camps, where they could not give assistance to the armed "insurrectos." Lacking proper sanitation, these enclosures turned into deadly pestholes; the victims died like dogs.

Haymarket Square riot 1886, decline of Knights of Labor

Despite their outward success, the Knights were riding for a fall. Tensions rapidly built up to the bloody ____ episode. Labor disorders had broken out, and on May 4, 1886, the Chicago police advanced on a meeting called to protest alleged brutalities by the authorities. Suddenly a dynamite bomb was thrown that killed or injured several dozen people, including police. The bomb helped blow the props from under the Knights of Labor. They were associated in the public mind, though mistakenly, with the anarchists. The eight-hour movement suffered correspondingly, and subsequent strike by the Knights met with scant success. Another fatal flaw of the Knights was their inclusion of both skilled and unskilled workers. The skilled workers sought refuge in a federation of exclusively skilled craft unions (the American Federation of Labor). The desertion of the skilled craft unionists dealt the Knights a body blow. By the 1890s they had melted away to 100,000 member, and these gradually fused with other protest groups of that decade.

Selma march; Voting Rights Act of 1965

Early in 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr., resumed the voter-registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, where blacks made up 50% of the population but only 1% of the voters. State troopers with tear gas and whips assaulted King's demonstrators as they marched peacefully to the state capital at Montgomery. What happened in Selma, Johnson insisted, concerned all Americans, "who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice." Following words and deeds, Johnson speedily shepherded through Congress the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law on August 6. It outlawed literacy tests and sent federal voter registrars into several southern states. The Act marked the end of the era of peaceful, nonviolent demonstrations and aimed at integrating blacks into American society.

Eisenhower and smaller government

Eisenhower had entered the White House in 1953 pledging his administration to a philosophy of "dynamic conservatism." "In all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human," he advised. But wen it came to "people's money, or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative." Above all, Eisenhower strove to balance the federal budget and guard the Republic from what he called "creeping socialism." The former supreme allied commander put the brakes on Truman's enormous military buildup, though the defense spending still soaked up some 10 percent of the GNP. True to his small-government philosophy, Eisenhower supported the transfer of control over offshore oil fields from the federal government to the states. He also tried to curb the TVA by encouraging a private power company to build a generating plant to compete with the massive public utility spawned by the New Deal. add/change?

Hawaii: shippers, whalers, missionaries

Enchanted Hawaii had early attracted the attention of Americans. In the morning years of the nineteenth century, the breeze-brushed islands were a way station and provisioning point for Yankee shippers, sailors, and whalers. In 1820 the first New England missionaries arrived, preaching the twin blessings of Protestant Christianity and protective calico. They came to do good - and did well, as Hawaii became increasingly important center for sugar production.

Election 1968; LBJ declines to run

Eugene McCarthy, a little-known Democratic senator from Minnesota, had emerged as a contender for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. Robert F. Kennedy of NY, the murdered president's younger brother and by now himself a "dove" on Vietnam, threw his hat into the ring. In a dramatic plea to unify a dangerously divided nation, Johnson startled his vast audience by firmly declaring that he would not be a candidate for the presidency in 1968. Republicans nominated Richard M. Nixon, who won with 301 electoral votes. Add?

social changes

Everywhere in the 1960s America, a newly negative attitude towards all kinds of authority took hold. Disillusioned by the discovery that American society was not free of racism, sexism, imperialism, and oppression, many young people lost their traditional moral rudders. Neither families not churches nor schools seemed to be able to define values and shape behavior with the certainty of shared purpose that many people believed had once existed. ADD? Page 933

Ida B. Wells; antilynching crusade

Fearful that an integrated campaign would compromise its efforts to get the vote, the National American Woman Suffrage Association limited membership to whites. Black women, however, created their own associations. Journalist and teacher ____ inspired black women to mount a nationwide antilynching crusade. She also helped launch a black women's club movement, which culminated in the establishment of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896.

bootleg liquor, speakeasies, rumrunners, bathtub gin

Flaming youth of the jazz age thought it "smart" to swill bootleg liquor - "liquid tonsillectomies." Millions of older citizens likewise found forbidden fruit fascinating, as they engaged in "bar hunts." Prohibition simply did not prohibit. The old-time "men only" corner saloons were replaced by thousands of "speakeasies," each with its tiny grilled window through which the thirsty spoke softly before the barred door was open. Largely because of the difficulties of transporting and concealing bottles, beverages of high alcoholic content were popular. Foreign rumrunners, often from the West Indies, had their inning, and countless cases of liquor leaked down from Canada. The zeal of American prohibition agents on occasion strained diplomatic relations with Uncle Sam's northern neighbor. "Home brew" and "bathtub gin" became popular, as law-evading adults engaged in "alky cooking" with toy stills. The worst of homemade "rotgut" produced blindness, even death. The affable bootlegger worked in silent partnership with the friendly undertaker.

IWW "The Wobblies", strikes

Fortunately for the Allied cause, Samuel Gompers and his AF of L loyally supported the war, though some smaller and more radical labor organizations, including the Industrial Workers of the World, did not. The IWW, known as the "Wobblies" and sometimes derided as "I Won't Works," engineered some of the most damaging industrial sabotage, and not without reason. As transient laborers in such industries as fruit and lumber, the Wobblies were victims of some of the shabbiest working conditions in the country. When they protested, many were viciously beaten, arrested, or run out of town. Yet labor harbored grievances. Recognition of the right to organize still eluded labor's grasp. Not even the call of patriotism and Wilsonian idealism could defuse all labor disputes. Some six thousand strikes, several strained by blood, broke out in the war years. In 1919 the greatest strike in American history rocked the steel industry. More than a quarter million steelworkers walked off their jobs in a bid to force their employers to recognize their right to organize and bargain collectively. They refused to negotiate with the union representatives and brought in thirty thousand African American strikebreakers to keep the mills running. After bitter confrontations that left more than a dozen workers dead, the steel strike collapsed.

Wright brothers, Kitty Hawk, airplane

Gasoline engines also provided the power that enabled humans to fulfill the age-old dream of sprouting wings. After near-successful experiments by others with heavier-than-air craft, the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, performed "the miracle at Kitty Hawk," North Carolina. On Dec 17, 1903, Orville Wright took aloft a feebly engined plane that stayed airborne for 12 seconds and 120 feet. Thus the air age was launched by two obscure bicycle repairmen.

General John J. "Blackjack" Pershing

General John J. ("Black Jack") Pershing, a grim-faced and ramrod-erect veteran of the Cuban and Philippine campaigns, was ordered to break up the bandit band. His hastily organized force of several thousand mounted troops penetrated deep into rugged Mexico with surprising speed. They clashed with Carranza's forces and mauled the Villistas but missed capturing Villa himself. As the threat of war with Germany loomed larger, the invading army was withdrawn in Jan 1917.

General Douglas MacArthur

General MacArthur fought in the Philippines, but before the inevitable American surrender, he was ordered by Washington to depart secretly for Australia, there to head the resistance against the Japanese. American and Australian forces, under General MacArthur, had been hanging on courageously to the southeastern tip of New Guinea, the last buffer protecting Australia. The scales of war gradually began to tip as the American navy, including submarines, inflicted lethal losses on Japanese supply ships and troop carriers. Conquest of the north coast of New Guinea was completed by August 1944, after General MacArthur had fought his way westward through tropical jungle hells. This hard-won victory was the first leg on his long journey to the Philippines.

14th Amendment and trust protection as "persons"

Giant trusts sought refuge behind the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been originally designed to protect the rights of the ex-slaves as persons. The courts ingeniously interpreted a corporation to be a legal "person" and declared that, as such, it could not be deprived of its property by a state without "due process of the law." There is some questionable evidence that slippery corporation lawyers deliberately inserted this loophole when the 14th Amendment was fashioned in 1866.

Panic of 1873

Grant's woes deepened in the paralyzing economic panic that broke out in 1873. Bursting with startling rapidity, the crash was one of those periodic plummets that roller-coaster the economy in this age of unbridled capitalist expansion. Overreaching promoters had laid more railroad tracks, sunk more mines, erected more factories, and sowed more grainfields than existing markets could bear. Bankers, in turn, had made too many imprudent loans to finance those enterprises. When profits failed to materialize, loans went unpaid, and the whole credit-based house of cards fluttered down. Boom times became gloom times as more than fifteen thousand businesses went bankrupt.

Marconi and radio

Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian, invented wireless telegraphy in the 1890s, and his brainchild was used for long-range communication during WWI. Next came the voice-carrying radio, a triumph of many minds. The earliest radio programs reached only local audiences. But by the late 1920s, technological improvements made long-distance broadcasting possible, and national commercial networks drowned out much local programming. For much of the decade, family and friends would gather around a household's radio as they once had around the toasty hearth. Radio knitted the nation together. Educationally and culturally, the radio made a significant contribution. Sports were further stimulated. Politicians had to adjust their speaking techniques to the new medium, and millions rather than thousands of voters heard their promises and pleas. A host of listeners swallowed the gospel of their favorite newscaster or were even ringside participants in world-shaking events. Finally, the music of famous artists and symphony orchestras was beamed into countless homes.

Dupuy de Lôme letter

Hearst also sensationally publicized a private letter from the Spanish minister in Washington, Duput de Lôme. The indiscreet epistle, stolen from the mails, described President McKinely in decidedly unflattering terms. The resulting uproar forced Dupuy de Lôme's resignation and further infuriated the American public.

2003 invasion of Iraq; arrest of Saddam Hussein

Heavy majorities in both houses of Congress passed a resolution in Oct 2002 authorizing the president to employ armed force to defend against Iraqi threats to America's national security and to enforce UN resolutions regarding Iraq. A month later the UN Security Council voted unanimously to give Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations." UN weapons inspectors returned to Iraq, and Saddam once again harassed and blocked them. No WMDs were found. The UN declined to authorize the use of force to compel compliance. In this tense and confusing atmosphere, Bush, with Britain as his only major ally, launched the long-anticipated invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003. Saddam Hussein's vaunted military machine collapsed almost immediately. In less than a month, Baghdad had fallen and Saddam had been driven from power and hounded into hiding. He was found and arrested some nine months later.

Mark Twain "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn"

His real name was Samuel Clemens. He lived from 1851-1910. He wrote "The Adventures of ____" in 1876 and then "The Adventures of ____" (1884), which was an American masterpiece that defied his own definition of a classic as "a book which people praise and don't read." His later years were soured by bankruptcy growing out of unwise investments, and he was forced to take to the lecture platform and amuse what he called "the damned human race." Journalist, humorist, satirist, and for of social injustice, he made his most enduring contribution in recapturing frontier realism and humor in the authentic American dialect.

U.S. building of airfleet and navy

If Britain went under, Hitler would have at his disposal the workshops, shipyards, and slave labor of Western Europe. He might even have the powerful British fleet as well. This frightening possibility, which seemed to pose a dire threat to American security, steeled American people to a tremendous effort. FDR moved with electrifying energy and dispatch. He called upon an already debt-burdened nation to build huge air-fleets and a two-ocean navy, which could also check Japan. Congress, jarred out of its apathy toward preparedness, within a year appropriated the astounding sum of $37 billion. This figure was more than the total cost of fighting WWI and about five times larger than any New Deal annual budget.

Muller v. Oregon

In the landmark case of Muller v. Oregon (1908), crusading attorney Louis D. Brandeis persuaded the Supreme Court to accept the constitutionality of laws protecting women workers by presenting evidence of the harmful effects of factory labor on women's weak bodies. Although this argument calling for special protection for women seemed discriminatory by later standards and closed many "male" jobs to women, progressives at the time hailed Brandeis's achievement as a triumph over existing legal doctrine, which afforded employers total control over the workplace.

Martin Luther King; Birmingham voter registration

In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a campaign against discrimination in Birmingham, Alabama, the most segregated big city in America. Although blacks constituted nearly half of the city's population, they made up fewer than 15% of the city's voters. Previous attempts to crack the city's rigid racial barriers had produced more than fifty cross burnings and eighteen bomb attacks since 1957.

Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act; free trade

Intimately associated with the Good Neighborism, and also popular in Latin America, was the reciprocal trade policy of the New Dealers. Its chief architect was idealistic Secretary of State Hull. Like FDR, he believed that trade was a two-way street, that a nation can sell abroad only as its buys abroad, that tariff barriers choke off foreign trade, and that trade wars beget shooting wars. Responding to the Hull-Roosevelt leadership, Congress passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in 1934. Designed in part to lift American export trade from the depression doldrums, this enlightened measure was aimed at both relief and recovery. At the same time, it activated the low-tariff policies of the New Dealers. The Act avoided the dangerous uncertainties of a wholesale tariff revision; it merely whittled down the most objectionable schedules of the Hawley-Smoot law by amending them. FDR was empowered to lowed existing rates by as much as 50 percent, provided that the other country involved was willing to respond with similar reductions. The Act reversed the traditional high-protective-tariff policy that had persisted almost unbroken since Civil War days and that had so much damage that the American and international economies following WWI. It paved the way for the American-led free-trade international economic system that took shape after WWII, a period that witnessed the most robust growth in history of international trade.

Senate rejection of the World Court

Isolation continued to reign in the Coolidge era. Despite presidential proddings, the Senate proved unwilling to allow America to adhere to the World Court - the judicial arm of the still-suspect League of Nations. Coolidge only halfheartedly - and unsuccessfully - pursued further naval disarmament after the loudly trumpeted agreements worked out at the Washington Conference in 1922.

debate of civil rights bill; March on Washington 1963

JFK delivered a memorable televised speech to the nation on June 11, 1963. In contrast to Eisenhower's aloofness from the racial question, JFK called the situation a "moral issue" and committed his personal and presidential prestige to finding a solution. JFK called for a new civil rights legislation to protect black citizens. In August Martin Luther King, Jr., led 200,000 black and white demonstrators on a peaceful "March on Washington" in support of the proposed legislation. In an electrifying speech from the Lincoln Memorial, King declared "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Department of Commerce and Labor

Keenly aware of the mounting antagonisms between capital and labor, Roosevelt urged Congress to create the new Department of Commerce and Labor. THis foal was achieved in 1903. (Ten years later the agency was split in two.) An important arm of the newborn cabinet body was the Bureau of Corporations, which was authorized to probe businesses engaged in interstate commerce. The bureau was highly useful in helping to break the stranglehold of monopoly and in clearing the road for the era of "trust-busting."

railroad land grants

Land grants to railroads were made in broad belts along the proposed route. Within these belts the railroads were allowed to chose alternative mile-square sections in checkerboard fashion. But until they determined the precise location of their tracks and decided which sections were the choicest selections, the railroads withheld all the land from the other users. President Cleveland put an end to this foot-dragging practice in 1887 and threw open to settlement the still-unclaimed public portions of the land-granted areas. Granting land was a "cheap" way to subsidize a much-desired transportation system, because it avoided new taxes for direct cash grants.

mechanization on farms; bonanza farms

Large-scale farmers had to buy expensive machinery in order to plant and harvest their crops. A powerful steam engine could drag behind it simultaneously the plow, seeder, and the harrow. This amazing mechanization of agriculture in the postwar years was almost as striking as the mechanization of industry. In fact, agricultural modernization drove many marginal farmers off the land, this swelling the ranks of the new industrial work force. The farm was attaining the status of a factory - an outdoor grain factory. Bonanza wheat farms of the Minnesota-North Dakota area, for example, were enormous. By 1890, at least a half-dozen of them were larger than fifteen thousand acres, with communication by telephone from one part to another. These bonanza farms foreshadowed the gigantic agribusinesses of the next century.

Japan and the Tripartite Pact

Like Germany and Italy, Japan was a so-called have-not power. Like them, it resented the ungenerous Treaty of Versailles. Like them, it demanded additional space for its teeming millions, cooped-up in their crowded island nation. Determined to find a place in the Asiatic sun, Tokyo gave notice in 1934 of the termination of the twelve-year-old Washington Naval Treaty. A year later in London, the Japanese torpedoed all hope of effective naval disarmament. Upon being denied complete parity, they walked out on the multi-power conference and accelerated their construction of giant battleships. By 1935 Japan, too, had quit the League of Nations. Five years later it joined arms with Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact.

Roosevelt's Square Deal (list 3 C's)

Like other reformers, Roosevelt feared that the "public interest" was being submerged in the drifting seas of indifference. Everybody's interest was nobody's interest. Roosevelt decided to make it his. His sportsman's instincts spurred him into demanding a "Square Deal" for capital, labor, and the public at large. Broadly speaking, the president's program embraced three C's: control of corporations, consumer protection, and conservatism of natural resources.

Soviets demand a "Second Front"

Many Americans, including FDR, were eager to begin a diversionary invasion of France in 1942 or 1943. They feared that the Soviets, unable to hold out forever against Germany, might make a separate peace as they had in 1918 and leave the Western Allies to face Hitler's fury alone. FDR rashly promised the Soviets in early 1942 that he would open a second front on the European continent by the end of the year -- a promise that proved utterly impossible to keep. British military planners, remembering their appalling losses in 1914-1918, were not enthusiastic about a frontal assault on German-held France. It might end in disaster. They preferred to attack Hitler's Fortress Europe through the "soft underbelly" of the Mediterranean. Faced with British boot-dragging and a woeful lack of resources, the Americans reluctantly agreed to postpone a massive invasion of Europe.

communist threat; loyalty oaths; Smith Act

Many nervous US citizens feared that communist spies, paid with Moscow gold, were undermining the government and treacherously misdirecting foreign policy. In 1947 Truman launched a massive "loyalty" program. The attorney general drew up a list of ninety supposedly disloyal organizations, none of which was given the opportunity to prove its innocence. Individual states likewise became intensely security-conscious. Loyalty oaths in increasing numbers were demanded of employees, esp. teachers. In 1949 eleven communists were brought before a NY jury for violating the Smith Act of 1940, the first peacetime anti-sedition law since 1798. Convicted of advocating the overthrow of the American government by force, the defendants were sent to prison. The Supreme Court upheld their convictions in "Dennis v. United States" (1951).

assassination of McKinley

McKinley had scarcely served another six months when, in September 1901, he was murdered by a deranged anarchist in Buffalo, NY. Roosevelt rode a buckboard out of his campsite in the Adirondacks to take the oath of office, becoming, at age 42, the youngest president thus far in American history.

Japan takes Manchuria (China)

Militaristic Japan stole the Far Eastern spotlight. In Sept. 1931 the Japanese imperialists, noting that the Western world was badly mired in a depression, lunged into Manchuria. Alleging provocation, they rapidly overran the coveted Chinese province and proceeded to bolt shut the Open Door in the conquered area. America had strong sentimental stake in China but few significant economic interests. In fact, American commercial ties with Japan far outweighed those with China. Yet most Americans were stunned by this act of naked aggression. It flagrantly violated the League of Nations covenant, as well as various other international agreements that solemnly signed by Tokyo, not to mention the American sense of fair play. add?

Public Utility Holding Company Act

New Dealers likewise directed their fire at public utility holding companies, those subcorporations. Citizens had seen one of these incredible colossi collapse during the spring of 1932, when the Chicagoan Samuel Insull's multibillion-dollar financial empire crashed. Possibilities of controlling, with a minimum of capital, a half-dozen or so pyramided layers of big business suggested to Roosevelt "a ninety-six-inch dog being wagged by a four-inch tail." The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 finally delivered a "death sentence" to this type of bloated growth, except where it might be deemed economically needful.

Baby Boom and effects in later years

Of all the postwar upheavals in postwar America, none was more dramatic than the "baby boom" -- the huge leap in the birthrate in the decade and a half after 1945. Confident young men and women tied the nuptial knot in record numbers at war's end, and they began immediately to fill the nations' empty cradles. They thus touched off a demographic explosion that added more than 50 million bawling babies to the nations' population by the end of the 1950s. The maturing babies of the postwar boom sent economic shockwaves undulating through the decades. As tykes and toddlers in the '40s and '50s, they made up a lucrative market for manufacturers of canned food and other baby products. As teens in the '60s, the same youngsters spent an estimated $20 bullion a year for clothes and recorded rock music. In the '70s, the consumer tastes of the aging baby boomers changed again, and the most popular jeans maker began marketing pants with a fuller cut for those former "kids" who could no longer squeeze into their size-thirty Levi's. In the '80s the horde of baby boomers bumped and jostled one another in the job market, struggling to get a foothold on the crowded ladder of social mobility. In the '90s the boom generation began to enter middle age, raising its own "secondary boom" of children -- a faint demographic echo of the postwar population explosion. The impact of the huge postwar generation will continue to ripple through America society well into the 21st century, when its member pass eventually into retirement, placing enormous stains on the Social Security system.

end of Big Stick and Platt Amendment

Old-fashioned intervention by bayonet in the Caribbean had not paid off, except in an evil harvest of resentment, suspicion, and fear. With war-thirsty dictators seizing power in Europe and Asia, FDR was eager to line up the Latin Americans to help defend the Western Hemisphere. Embittered neighbors would be potential tools of transoceanic aggressors. President Roosevelt made clear at the outset that he was going to renounce armed intervention, particularly the vexatious corollary of the Monroe Doctrine devised by his cousin Theodore Roosevelt. Late in 1933, at the Seventh Pan-American Conference, the US delegation formally endorsed nonintervention. Deeds followed words. In 1934, after military strongman Fulgencio Batista had come to power, restive Cuba was released from the worst hobbles of the Platt Amendment, under which America had been free to intervene, although the US retained its naval base at Guantanamo.

Central Powers (list)

On one side of WWI: Germany and Austria-Hungary, and later Turkey and Bulgaria.

Allied Powers (list)

On one side of WWI: principally France, Britain, and Russia, and later Japan and Italy.

Boxer Rebellion

Open Door or not, patriotic Chinese did not care to be used as a doormat by the Western powers. In 1900 a super-patriotic group, known as the "Boxers" for their training in the martial arts, broke loose with the cry, "Kill Foreign Devils." They murdered more than two hundred foreigners and thousands of Chinese Christians and besieged the foreign diplomatic community in the capital, Beijing. A multinational rescue force of some eighteen thousand soldiers arrived in the nick of time and quelled the rebellion. They included several thousand American troops dispatched from the Philippines to protect US rights under the 1844 Treaty of Wanghia and to keep the Open Door propped open.

Roosevelt leaves retirement

People assumed that Roosevelt, an anti-third termer, would not permit himself to be "drafted" on the Republican ballot. But the restless Rough Rider began to change his views about third terms as he saw Taft, hand in glove with the hated Old Guard, discard "my policies." In February 1912 Roosevelt formally wrote to seven state governors that he was willing to accept the Republican nomination. His reasoning was that the third-term tradition applied to three "consecutive elective" terms. Roosevelt came clattering into the presidential primaries then being held in many states. He shouted through half-clenched teeth that the president had fallen under the thumb of the reactionary bosses and that, although Taft "means well, he means well feebly." The once-genial Taft, now in a fighting mood, retorted by branding Roosevelt supporters "emotionalists and neurotics." A Taft-Roosevelt explosion was near in June 1918, when the Republican convention met in Chicago. The Rooseveltites, who were about 100 delegates short of winning the nomination, challenged the right of some 250 Taft delegates to be seated. Most of these contests were arbitrarily settled in favor of Taft.

Josiah Strong's writings

Pious missionaries, inspired by books like the Reverend Josiah Strong's "Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis," looked overseas for new souls to harvest. Strong trumpeted the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization and summoned Americans to spread their religion and their values to the "background" peoples. He cast his seed on fertile ground. (Like Turner's frontier hypothesis and Manifest Destiny)

voting problems, Supreme Court involvement

Pollsters and candidates alike predicted a close election, but they could not foresee that the result would be an epochal cliffhanger. When the Florida Supreme Court ordered a hand count of nearly sixty thousand ballots that the machines had failed to read, Republicans struck back on two fronts. The Republican-dominated Florida legislature moved to name a set or pro-Bush electors, regardless of the vote tabulating and re-tabulating then under way. In the Supreme Court the nine justices broke into a bare-knuckle judicial brawl. Five tumultuous weeks after election day, the presidential campaign of 2000 finally ended when the high court's five most conservative members ruled in Bush's favor. They reasoned that since neither Florida's legislature nor its courts had established a uniform standard for evaluating disputed ballots, the hand counts amounted to an unconstitutional breach of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. add? change? page 999

Reagan's strategy against the Soviets

Reagan believed in negotiating with the Soviets -- but only from a position of overwhelming strength. Accordingly, his strategy for dealing with Moscow was simple: by enormously expanding US military capabilities, he could threaten the Soviets with a fantastically expensive new round of the arms race. The American economy, theoretically, could better bear this new financial burden than could the creaking Soviet system. Desperate to avoid economic ruin, Kremlin leaders would come to the bargaining table and sing Reagan's tune. This strategy wagered the enormous sum of Reagan's defense budgets on the hope that the other side would not call Washington's bluff and initiate a new cycle of arms competition.

religious right, Moral Majority

Religion pervaded American politics in the 1980s. Especially conspicuous was a coalition of conservative, evangelical Christians known as the religious right. In 1979 the Reverend Jerry Falwell, an evangelical minister from Virginia, founded a political organization called the Moral Majority. Falwell preached with great success against sexual permissiveness, abortion, feminism, and the spread of gay rights. In its first two years, the Moral Majority registered between 2 million and 3 million voters. Using radio, direct-mail marketing, and cable TV, "televangelists" reached huge audiences in the 1980s, collected millions of dollars, and became aggressive political advocates of conservative causes. ADD page 977

J.P. Morgan and the gold crisis

Repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act only partially stopped the hemorrhaging of gold from the Treasury. The US was now in grave danger of going off the gold standard - a move that would render the nation's currency volatile and unreliable as a measure of value and that would also mortally cripple America's international trade. Early in 1895 Cleveland turned in desperation to ____, "then bankers' banker" and the head of a Wall Street syndicate. After tense negotiations at the White House, the bankers agreed to lend the government $65 million in gold. They were obviously in business for profit =, so they charged a commission amounting to about $7 million. But they did make a significant concession when they agreed to obtain one-half of the gold abroad and take the necessary steps to dam it up in the leaky Treasury. The loan, at least temporarily, helped restore confidence in the nation's finances.

Nixon resignation 1974

Republican leaders in Congress frankly informed the president that his impeachment by the full House and removal by the Senate were foregone conclusions and that he would do best to resign. Left with no better choice, Nixon choked back his tears and announced his resignation in a dramatic television appearance on Aug 8, 1974. Few presidents had flown so high, and none had sunk so low. In his Farewell Address, Nixon admitted having made some "judgements" that "were wrong" but insisted that he had always acted "in what I believed at the time to be the best interests of the nation" Unconvinced, countless Americans would change the song "Hail to the Chief" to "Jail to the Chief."

House impeachment hearings

Responding at last to the House of Judiciary Committee's demand for the Watergate tapes, Nixon agreed in the spring of 1974 to the publication of "relevant" portions of the tapes, with many sections missing. But on July 24, 1974, the president suffered a disastrous setback when the Supreme Court ruled that "executive privilege" gave him no right to withhold evidence relevant to possible criminal activity. Seeking to soften the impact of inevitable disclosure, Nixon now made public three subpoenaed tapes of conversations with his chief aide on June 23, 1972. Fatally for his own case, one of them revealed the president giving orders, 6 days after the Watergate break-in, to use the CIA to hold back an inquiry by the FBI. The House Judiciary Committee proceeded to draw up articles of impeachment, based on obstruction of justice, abuse of the powers of the presidential office, and contempt of Congress.

Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew; George Wallace

Scenting victory over the badly divided Democrats, the Republicans nominated former VP Richard M. Nixon. As a "hawk" on Vietnam and a right-leaning middle-of-the-roader on domestic policy, Nixon pleased the Goldwater conservatives and was acceptable to party moderates. He appealed to white southern voters and to the "law and order" element when he tapped as his vice-presidential running mate Maryland's Governor Spiro T. Agnew, noted for his tough stands against dissidents and black militants. The Republican platform called for victory in Vietnam and a strong anticrime policy. Adding color and confusion to the campaign was a "spoiler" third-party ticket -- the American Independent party -- headed by scrappy ex-pugilist, George C. Wallace, a former governor of Alabama. Speaking behind a bullet-proof screen, he called for prodding the blacks into their place, with bayonets if necessary. He and his running mate also proposed smashing the North Vietnamese to smithereens by "bombing them back to the Stone Age." Nixon won with 301 electoral votes.

Mary McLeod Bethune; "Black Cabinet" (caption pg 780)

She was the daughter of ex-slaves and founder of a college in Florida. Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955), director of the Office of Minority Affairs in the National Youth Administration, served as the highest-ranking African American in the Roosevelt administration. From this base she organized the "Black Cabinet" o make sure blacks benefited from the New Deal programs along with whites. In the picture on page 780, she is seen picketing against segregated hiring practices at the Peoples Drug Store chain, one of the earliest targets of the black civil rights movement.

Roosevelt, Rough Riders

Shortly after the outbreak of war, the Spanish government ordered a fleet of decrepit warships to Cuba. Sound strategy seemed to dictate that an American army be sent in from the rear to drive out the Spanish ships. The "Rough Riders," a part of the invading army, now charged onto the stage of history. This colorful regiment of volunteers, short of discipline but long on dash, consisted largely of western cowboys and other hardy characters, with a sprinkling of ex-polo players and ex-convicts. Commanded by Colonel Leonard Wood, this group was organized principally by the glory-chasing Theodore Roosevelt, who had resigned from the Navy Department to serve as lieutenant colonel. He was so nearsighted that as a safeguard he took along a dozen pairs of spectacles, cashed in handy spots on his person or nearby.

Amendment 21; repeal of prohibition

Special stimulants aided the recovery of one segment of business - the liquor industry. The imminent repeal of the prohibition amendment afforded an opportunity to raise needed federal revenue and at the same time to provide a measure of employment. Prodded by Roosevelt, the Hundred Days Congress, in one of its earliest acts, legalized light wine and beer with an alcoholic content (presumably nonintoxicating) not exceeding 3.2 percent by weight, and levied a tax of $5 on every barrel so manufactured. Disgruntled drys, unwilling to acknowledge the breakdown of law and order begotten by bootlegging, damned Roosevelt as "a 3.2 percent American." Prohibition was officially repealed by the 21st Amendment late in 1933, and the saloon door swung open.

Elkins and Hepburn acts, Interstate Commerce Commission

Spurred by the former-cowboy president, Congress passed effective railroad legislation, beginning with the Elkins Act of 1903. This curb was aimed primarily at the rebate evil. Heavy fines could now be imposed both on the railroads that gave rebates and on the shippers that accepted them. Still more effective was the Hepburn Act of 1906. Free passes, with their hint of bribery, were severely restricted. The once-infantile Interstate Commerce Commission was expanded, and its reach was extended to include express companies, sleeping-car companies, and pipelines. For the first time, the commission was given real molars when it was authorized, on complaint of shippers, to nullify existing rates and stipulate maximum rates.

Taft and election of 1908

Still warmly popular in 1908, Roosevelt could easily have won a second presidential nomination and almost certainly the election. But he felt bound by his impulsive post-election promise after his victory in 1904. The departing president thus naturally sought a successor who would carry out "my policies." The man of his choice was William Howard Taft, secretary of war and a mild progressive. At the Republican convention of 1908 in Chicago, Roosevelt used his control of the party machinery to push through Taft's nomination on the first ballot. Three weeks later, the Democrats nominated twice-beaten William Jennings Bryan. The dull campaign of 1908 featured the rotund Taft and the now-balding "Boy Orator" both trying to don the progressive Roosevelt mantle. The solid Judge Taft read cut-and-dry speeches, while Bryan griped the Roosevelt had stolen his policies from the Bryanite camp. A majority of voters chose stability wit Roosevelt-endorsed Taft, who polled 321 electoral votes to 162 for Bryan. The election's only surprise came from the Socialists, who amassed 420,793 popular votes for Eugene V. Debs.

Secretary of State Dulles; massive retaliation

The 1952 Republican platform called for a "new look" in foreign policy. It condemned mere "containment" of communism as "negative, futile, and immoral." Incoming secretary of state John Foster Dulles promised not merely to stem the red tide but to "roll back" its gains and "liberate captive peoples." At the same time, the new administration promised to balance the budget by cutting military spending. Eisenhower would relegate the army and the navy to the backseat and build up an airfleet of superbombers (called the Strategic Air Command) equipped with city-flattening nuclear bombs. These fearsome weapons would inflict "massive retaliation" on the Soviets or the Chinese if they got out of hand. The advantages of this new policy were thought to be its paralyzing nuclear impact and its cheaper price tag when compared with conventional forces. At the same time, Eisenhower sought a thaw in the Cold War through negotiations with the new Soviet leaders who came to power after dictator Stalin's death in 1953.

Italian campaign and delay

The Allied forces, victorious in Africa, now turned against the not-so-soft underbelly of Europe. Sicily fell in August 1943 after sporadic but sometimes bitter resistance. Shortly before the conquest of the island, Mussolini was deposed, and Italy surrendered unconditionally soon thereafter, in Sept 1943. But if Italy dropped out of the war, the Germans did not drop Italy. Hitler's well-trained troops stubbornly resisted the Allied invaders now pouring into the toe of the Italian boot. They also unleashed their fury against the Italians, who had turned their coats and declared war on Germany in Oct 1943. For many months Italy appeared to be a dead end, as the Allied advance was halted by a seemingly impregnable German defense centered on the ancient monastery of Monte Cassino. Rome was finally taken on June 4, 1944. The tremendous cross-channel invasion of France begun two days later turned Italy into a kind of sideshow, but the Allies, limited in manpower, continued to fight their way slowly and painfully into norther Italy. While the Italian second front opened the Mediterranean and diverted some German divisions from the blazing Soviet and French battle lines, it also may have delayed the main Allied invasion of Europe, from England across the English Channel to France, by many months -- allowing more time for the Soviet army to advance in Eastern Europe.

Yalu River; Truman removes MacArthur

The Chinese communists had publicly warned that they would not sit idly by and watch hostile troops approach the strategic Yalu River boundary between Korea and China. But MacArthur dismissed all predictions of an effective intervention by the Chinese and reportedly boasted that he would "have the boys home by Christmas." MacArthur erred badly. In Nov 1950 tens of thousands of Chinese "volunteers" fell upon his rashly overextended lines and hurled the UN forces reeling back down the peninsula. MacArthur wanted a blockade of the Chinese coast and bombardment of Chinese bases in Manchuria. But Washington policymakers refused to enlarge the already costly conflict. MacArthur felt that he was being asked to fight with one hand tied behind his back. When the general began to take issue publicly with presidential policies, Truman had no choice but to remove the insubordinate MacArthur from command. Korea remained split at its original borders (38th Parallel).

Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill) (list benefits)

The Democratic administration took some steps of its own to forestall an economic downturn. Most dramatic was the passage of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 -- better known at the GI Bill. Enacted partly out of fear that the markets would never be able to absorb 15 million returning veterans at the war's end, the GI Bill made generous provisions for sending the former soldiers to school. In the postwar decade, some 8 million veterans advanced their education at Uncle Sam's expense. The total eventually spent for education was some $14.5 billion in taxpayer dollars. The act also enabled the Veterans Administration to guarantee about $16 billion loans for veterans to buy homes, farms, and small businesses. Bu raising educational levels and stimulating the construction agency, the GI Bill powerfully nurtured the robust and long-lived economic expansion that eventually took hold in the late 1940s and that profoundly shaped the entire history of the postwar era.

Immigration Quota Act of 1924 and its effects

The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was replaced by the Immigration Act of 1924, Quotas for foreigners were cut from 3 percent to 2 percent. The national-origins base was shifted from the census of 1910 to that of 1890, when comparatively few southern Europeans had arrived. Southern Europeans bitterly denounced the device as unfair and discriminatory - a triumph that "nativist" belief that blue-eyed and fair-haired northern Europeans were of better blood. The purpose was clearly to freeze America's existing racial composition, which was largely northern European. A flagrantly discriminatory section of the Act slammed the door absolutely against Japanese immigrants. Mass "Hate America" rallies erupted in Japan, and one Japanese superpatriot expressed his outrage by committing suicide near the American embassy in Tokyo. Exempt from the quota system were Canadians and Latin Americans, whose proximity made them easy to attract for jobs when times were good and just as easy to send back home when they were not. ADD?

Rommel "Desert Fox" in North Africa

The Germans under Marshal Erwin Rommel -- the "Desert Fox" -- had driven eastward across the hot sands of North Africa into Egypt, perilously close to the Suez Canal. A break-through would have spelled disaster for the Allies. But late in October 1942, British general Bernard Montgomery delivered a withering attack at El Alamein, west of Cairo. With the aid of several hundred hastily shipped American Sherman tanks, he speedily drove the enemy back to Tunisia, more than a thousand miles away.

Hawley-Smoot Tariff 1930 and reaction

The Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930 followed the well-worn pattern of Washington horse trading. It started in the House as a fairly reasonable protective tariff, designed to assist farmers. But by the time the high-pressure lobbyists had pushed it through the Senate, it had acquired about a thousand amendments. It thus turned out to be the highest protective tariff in the nation's peacetime history. The average duty on nonfree goods were raised from 38.5 percent to nearly 60 percent. To angered foreigners, the Hawley-Smoot Tariff was a blow below the trade belt. It seemed like a declaration of economic warfare on the entire outside world. It reversed a promising worldwide trend toward reasoning tariffs and widened the yawning trade gaps.

House of Representatives articles of impeachment

The House quickly cranked up the rusty machinery of impeachment. As an acrid partisan atmosphere enveloped the Capitol, House Republicans in Dec 1998 passed two articles of impeachment against the president: perjury before a grand jury and obstruction of justice. Crying foul, the Democratic minority charged that, however deplorable Clinton's personal misconduct, sexual transgressions did not rise to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors" prescribed in the Constitution. The House Republican managers (prosecutors) of impeachment for the Senate trial replied that perjury and obstruction were grave public issues and that nothing less than the "rule of law" at stake.

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)

The Hundred Days Congress responded to Roosevelt's spurs when it created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which proved to be perhaps the most popular of all the New Deal "alphabetical agencies." This law provided employment in fresh-air government camps for about 3 million uniformed young men, many of whom might otherwise have been driven by desperation into criminal habits. Their work was useful - including reforestation, firefighting, flood control, and swamp drainage. The recruits were required to help their parents by sending home most of their pay. Both human resources and natural resources were thus conserved, though there were minor complaints of "militarizing" the nation's youth.

failure of Populism in the East and South

The Populists made a remarkable showing in the 1892 presidential election. They rolled up 22 electoral votes for General Weaver. They thus became one of the few third parties to break into the electoral column. But they fell far short of an electoral majority. Industrial laborers, esp. in the urban East, did not rally to the Populists banner in appreciable number. The South, although a hotbed of agrarian agitation, proved esp. unwilling to throw in its lot with the new party. Race was the reason. Recognizing the crucial edge that black votes could give them in the South, Populist leaders like Georgia's Tom Watson reached out to the black community. Many blacks were disillusioned enough with the Republican party to respond.

Grant, Republican (1868, 1872)

The Republicans enthusiastically nominated __ for the presidency in 1868. The party's platform sounded a clarion call for continued Reconstruction of the South under the glinting steel of federal bayonets. Yet __, always a man of few words, struck a highly popular note in his letter of acceptance when he said, "Let us have peace." This noble sentiment became a leading campaign slogan and was later engraved on his tomb beside the Hudson River.

"Eurocentric" curriculum

The nation's classrooms became battlegrounds for the debate over America's commitment to pluralism. Multiculturalists attacked the traditional curriculum as "Eurocentric" and advocated greater focus on the achievements of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. In response, critics charged that too much stress on ethnic difference wold come at the expense of national cohesion and an appreciation of common American values.

ethnic violence in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia

Throughout the former Soviet empire, waves of nationalistic fervor and long-suppressed ethnic and racial hatreds rolled across the vast land as communism's roots were wrenched out. A particularly nasty conflict erupted in the Russian Caucasus in 1991, when the Chechnyan minority tried to declare their independence from Russia, prompting President Yeltsin to send in Russian troops. Ethnic warfare flared in other disintegrating communist countries as well, notably in misery-drenched Yugoslavia, racked by vicious "ethnic cleansing" campaigns against various minorities. add?

hydrogen bomb, "H-bomb"

To outpace the Soviets in nuclear weaponry, Truman ordered the development of the "H-bomb" (hydrogen bomb) -- a city-smashing device that was a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb. J Robert Oppenheimer, a former scientific director of the Manhattan Project and current chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, led a group of scientists in opposition to the crash program to design thermonuclear weapons. The H-bomb, these scientists warned, was so deadly that "it becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide." Famed physicist Albert Einstein, whose theories had helped giver birth to the atomic age, declared that "annihilation of any life on earth has been brought within the range of technical possibilities." add?

mobilization and the War Industries Board

Towering obstacles confronted economic mobilizers. Sheer ignorance was among the biggest roadblocks. No one knew precisely how much steel or explosive powder the country was capable of producing. Old world ideas also proved liabilities, as traditional fears of bog government hamstrung efforts to orchestrate the economy from Washington. States' rights Democrat and businesspeople alike balked at federal economic controls, even though the embattled nation could ill afford the freewheeling, hit-or-miss chaos of the peacetime economy. Late in the war, and after some bruising political battles, Wilson succeeded in imposing some order on this economic confusion. In March 1918 he appointed lone-eagle stock speculator Bernard Baruch to head the War Industries Board. But the War Industries Board never had more than feeble formal powers, and it was disbanded within days after the armistice. Even in a globe-girdling crisis, the American preference for laissez-faire and for a weak central government proved amazingly strong.

Southeast Asia (Vietnam); nationalism v. imperialism

Western Europe, thanks to the Marshall Plan and NATO, seemed reasonably secure by the early 1950s, but Southeast Asa was a different can of worms. In Vietnam and elsewhere, nationalist movements had sought for years to throw off the yoke of French colonial rule. The legendary Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, had tried to appeal personally to Woodrow Wilson in Paris as early as 1919 to support self-determination for the peoples of Southeast Asia. ADD?

Jones Act and Philippine independence in 1946

Wilson persuaded Congress in early 1914 to repeal the Panama Canal Tolls Act of 1912, which had exempted American coastwise shipping from tolls and thereby provoked sharp protests from injured Britain. The president further chimed in with the anti-imperial song of Bryan and other Democrats when he signed the Jones Act in 1916. It granted to the Philippines the boom of territorial status and promised independence as soon as a "stable government" could be established. That glad day came thirty years later, on July 4, 1946.

Treaty ratification failure

Wilson, hating Lodge, saw red at the mere suggestion of the Lodge reservations. Although too feeble to lead, Wilson was still strong enough to obstruct. When the day finally came for the voting in the Senate, he sent word to all true Democrats to vote against the treaty with the odious Lodge reservations attached. Wilson hoped that when these were cleared away, the path would be open for ratification without reservations or with only some mild Democratic ones. Loyal Democrats in the Senate, on Nov 19, 1919, blindly did Wilson's bidding. Combining with the "irreconcilables," mostly Republicans, they rejected the treaty with the Lodge reservations appended, 55 to 39. About four-fifths of the senators professed to favor the treaty, with or without reservations, yet a simple majority could not agree on a single proposition. So strong was public indignation that the Senate was forced to act a second time. In March 1920 the treaty was brought up again, with the Lodge reservations tacked on. There was only one possible path to success. Unless the Senate approved the pact with the reservations, the entire document would be rejected. But Wilson again sent word to all loyal Democrats to vote down the treaty with the obnoxious reservations. He thus signed the death warrant of the treaty as far as America was concerned. On March 19, 1920, the treaty netted a simple majority but failed to get the necessary two-thirds majority.

Nationalist Chinese flee to Taiwan

But ineptitude and corruption within the generalissimo's regime gradually began to corrode the confidence of his people. Communist armies swept south overwhelmingly, and late in 1949 Jiang was forced to flee with the remnants of his once-powerful force to the last-hope island of Formosa (Taiwan).

Union Pacific Railroad; Irish labor

Deadlock in the 1850s over the proposed transcontinental railroad was broken when the South seceded, leaving the field to the North. In 1862, Congress made provisions for starting the long-awaited line. (One argument for actions was the urgency of bolstering the Union by binding the Pacific Coast more securely to the rest of the Republic). The ____ was thus commissioned by Congress to thrust westward from Omaha, Nebraska. The laying of rails began in earnest after the Civil War ended in 1865, and with juicy loans and land grants available, the "groundhog" promoters made all possible haste. Sweaty construction gangs, containing many Irish "Paddies" (Patricks) who had fought in the Union armies, worked at a frantic pace. When hostile Indians attacked in futile efforts to protect what once rightfully had been their land, the laborers would drop their picks and seize their rifles. Scores of men - both Indians and workers - lost their lives as the rails stretched ever westward.

American bankers and loans to Allied powers

When Europe burst into flames in 1914, the US was bogged down in a worrisome business recession. But as fate would have it, British and French war orders soon pulled American industry out of the morass of hard times and onto a peak of war-born prosperity. Part of this boom was financed by American bankers, notably the Wall Street firm of JP Morgan and Company, which eventually advanced to the Allies the enormous sum of $2.3 billion during the period of American neutrality.

Korean War, containment

When Japan collapsed in 1945, Soviet troops had accepted the Japanese surrender north of the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula, and American troops had done likewise south of that line. As in Germany, both superpowers helped to set up rival regimes above and below the parallel. By 1949 when the Soviets and Americans had both withdrawn their forces, the entire peninsula was a bristling armed camp, with two hostile regimes eyeing each other suspiciously. The explosion came on June 25, 1950. Spearheaded by Soviet-made tanks, North Korea army columns rumbled across the 38th parallel. Caught flatfooted, the South Korean forces were shoved back southward to a dangerously tiny defensive area around Pusan, their weary backs to the sea. The invasion seemed to provide devastating proof of a fundamental premise in the "containment doctrine" that shaped Washington's foreign policy: that even a slight relaxation of America's guard was an invitation to communist aggression somewhere. ADD

white flight from urban neighborhoods

"White flight" to the leafy green suburbs left the inner cities -- esp. those in the Northeast and Midwest -- black, brown, and broke. Migrating blacks from the South filled up the urban neighborhoods that were abandoned by the departing white middle class. In effect, the incoming blacks imported the grinding poverty of the rural South into the inner cores of northern cities. Taxpaying businesses fled with their affluent customers from the downtown shops to suburban shopping malls. add?

Greenboro lunch counter sit-ins

A "sit-in" movement was launched on Fed 1, 1960 by four black college freshman in Greensboro, North Carolina. Without a detailed plan or institutional support, they demanded service at a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter. Observing that "fellows like you make our race look bad," the black waitress refused to serve them. But they kept their seats and returned the next day with nineteen classmates. The following day, 85 students joined in; by the end of the week, a thousand. The sit-in movement rolled swiftly across the South, swelling into a wave of wade-ins, lie-ins, and pray-ins to compel equal treatment in restaurants, transportation, employment, housing, and voter registration.

Fair Labor Standards Act (wages, hours, child labor)

A better deal for labor continued when Congress, in 1938, passed the memorable Fair Labor Standards Act (Wages and House Bill). Industries involved in interstate commerce were to set up minimum-wage and maximum-hour levels. The eventual goals were forty cents and hour (later raised) and a forty-hour week. Labor by children under sixteen (under eighteen if the occupation was dangerous) was forbidden. These reforms were bitterly though futilely opposed by many industrialists, esp. those southern textile manufacturers who had profited from low-wage labor. But the exclusion of agricultural, service, and domestic workers meant that blacks, Mexican Americans, and women - who were concentrated in these fields - did not benefit from the act.

Treaty of Versailles (few of Wilson's points)

A completed Treaty of Versailles was handed to the Germans in June 1919 - almost literally on the point of bayonet. Excluded from the settlement negotiations at Paris, Germany had surrendered in hope that it would be granted a peace based on the Fourteen Points. A careful analysis of the treaty shows that only about four of the twenty-three original Wilsonian points and subsequent principles were fully honored. Vengeance, not reconciliation, was the treaty's dominant tone. There had to be compromise at Paris, or there would be no agreement. Faced with hard realities, Wilson was forced to compromise away some of his less cherished Fourteen Points in order to salvage the more precious League of Nations.

Munich Conference; appeasement; "peace in our time"

A conference was finally held in Munich, Germany, in Sept 1938. The Western European democracies, badly unprepared for war, betrayed Czechoslovakia to Germany when they consented to the shearing away of the Sudetenland. They hoped -- and these hopes were shared by the American people -- that the concessions at the conference table would slake Hitler's thirst for power and bring "peace in our time." Indeed Hitler publicly promised that the Sudetenland "is the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe."

Yalta Conference 1945 (see p 863)

A final fateful conference of the Big Three had taken place in Feb 1945 at Yalta. Stalin, Churchill, and the fast-failing FDR reached momentous agreements, after pledging their faith with vodka. Final plans were laid for smashing the buckling German lines and assigning occupation zones in Germany to the victorious powers. Stalin agreed that Poland, with revised boundaries, should have a representative government based of free elections -- a pledge he soon broke. Bulgaria and Romania were likewise to have free elections -- a promise also flouted. The Big Three further announced plans for fashioning a new international peacekeeping organization -- the United Nations. Of all the grave decisions at Yalta, the most controversial concerned the Far East. The atomic bomb had not yet been tested, and Washington strategists expected frightful American casualties in the projected assault on Japan. From FDR's standpoint it seemed highly desirable that Stalin enter the Asian war, pin down Japanese troops in Manchuria and Korea, and lighten American losses. Stalin agreed to attack Japan within three months after the collapse of Germany, and he later redeemed this pledge in full. In return, the Soviets were promised the southern half of Sakhalin Island, lost by Russia to Japan in 1905, and Japan's Kurile Islands as well. The Soviet Union was also granted control over the railroads of China's Manchuria and special privileges in the two key seaports of that area. add?

Yalta Conference and postwar superpowers

A final fateful conference of the Big Three had taken place in Feb 1945 at Yalta. Stalin, Churchill, and the fast-failing FDR reached momentous agreements, after pledging their faith with vodka. Final plans were laid for smashing the buckling German lines and assigning occupation zones in Germany to the victorious powers. Stalin agreed that Poland, with revised boundaries, should have a representative government based of free elections -- a pledge he soon broke. Bulgaria and Romania were likewise to have free elections -- a promise also flouted. The Big Three further announced plans for fashioning a new international peacekeeping organization -- the United Nations. Of all the grave decisions at Yalta, the most controversial concerned the Far East. The atomic bomb had not yet been tested, and Washington strategists expected frightful American casualties in the projected assault on Japan. From FDR's standpoint it seemed highly desirable that Stalin enter the Asian war, pin down Japanese troops in Manchuria and Korea, and lighten American losses. Stalin agreed to attack Japan within three months after the collapse of Germany, and he later redeemed this pledge in full. In return, the Soviets were promised the southern half of Sakhalin Island, lost by Russia to Japan in 1905, and Japan's Kurile Islands as well. The Soviet Union was also granted control over the railroads of China's Manchuria and special privileges in the two key seaports of that area. add?

Secretary of State John Hay

A growing group of Americans viewed the vivisection of China with alarm. Merchants feared that Europeans would monopolize Chinese markets. An alarmed American public, openly prodded by the press and slyly nudged by certain free-trade Britons, demanded that Washington do something. Secretary of State John Hay, a quiet but witty poet-novelist-diplomat with a flair for capturing the popular imagination, finally decided upon a dramatic move. In the summer of 1899, he dispatched to all great powers a communication soon known as the Open Door note.

ideas of the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups; lynching

A new KKK, spawned by the postwar reaction, mushroomed fearsomely in the early 1920s. Despite the familiar sheets and hoods, it more closely resembled the antiforeign "nativist" movements of the 1850s than the antiblack nightriders on the 1860s. It was antiforeign, anti-Catholic, antiblack, anti-Jew, antipacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist, antievolutionist, anti-bootlegger, antigambling, antiadultery, and anti-birth-control. It was also pro-Anglo-Saxon, pro-"native" American, and pro-Protestant. In short, the besheeted Klan betokened an extremist, ultraconservative uprising against many of the forces of diversity and modernity that were transforming American culture. As reconstituted, the Klan spread with astonishing rapidity, esp. in the Midwest and the "Bible Belt" South. The principle weapon was the bloodied lash, supplemented by tar and feathers. This reign of hooded horror, so repulsive to the best American ideals, collapsed rather suddenly in the late 1920s. add?

Knights of Labor (list goals)

A new organization - the ______ - seized the torch dropped by the defunct National Labor Union. Officially known as the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, it began inauspiciously in 1869 as a secret society, with a private ritual, passwords, and a special handshake. Secrecy, which continued until 1881, would forestall possible reprisals by employers. It sought to include all workers in "one big union." A welcome mat was rolled out for the skilled and unskilled, for men and women, for whites and underprivileged blacks, some ninety thousand of whom joined. It only barred "nonproducers" - liquor dealers, professional gamblers, lawyers, bankers, and stockbrokers. They campaigned for economic and social reform, including producers' cooperatives and codes for safety and health. ADD?

Japanese "yellow peril"; Gentlemen's Agreement

A new wave of Japanese immigrants began pouring into the spacious valleys of California. Although Japanese residents never amounted to more than 3 percent of the state's population, white Californians ranted about a new "yellow peril" and feared being drowned in an Asian sea. A showdown on the influx came in 1906, when San Francisco's school board, coping with the aftermath of a frightful earthquake a fire, ordered the segregation of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean students in a special school to free more space for whites. Instantly, the incident boiled into an international crisis. The people of Japan, highly sensitive on questions of race, regarded this discrimination as an insult of them and their beloved children. On both sides of the Pacific, irresponsible war talk sizzled in the yellow press. Roosevelt was less happy over the prospect the California might stir up a war that all the other states would have to wage. TR finally broke the deadlock. The Californians were induced to repeal the offensive school order and to accept what came to be known as the "Gentlemen's Agreement." By this secret understanding, worked out during 1907-1908, Tokyo agreed to stop the flow of laborers to the American mainland by withholding passports.

Samoa and Germany

A number of diplomatic crises or near-wars also marked the path of American diplomacy in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The American and German navies nearly claim to blows in 1889 over the faraway Samoan Islands in the South Pacific, which were formally divided between the two nations in 1899. (German Samoa eventually became an independent republic; American Samoa remains an American possession.)

Australian (secret) ballot

A number of the state legislatures passed corrupt-practices acts, which limited the amount of money that candidates could spend for their election. Such legislation also restricted also restricted huge gifts from corporations, for which the donors would expect special favors. The secret Australian ballot was likewise being introduced more widely in the states to counteract boss rule. Bribery was less feasible when bribers could not tell if they were getting their money's worth from the bribed.

Booker T. Washington; George Washington Carver

A staggering 44% of nonwhites were illiterate in 1900. Some help came from northern philanthropists, but the foremost champion of black education was an ex-slave, _____, who had slept under a board sidewalk to save pennies for schooling. Called in 1881 to head the black normal and industrial school at Tuskegee, Alabama, he began with forty students in a tumbledown shanty. Undaunted, he taught black students useful trades so that they could gain self-respect and economic security. Washington's self-help approach to solving the nation's racial problems was labeled "accommodationist" because it stopped short of directly challenging white supremacy. Recognizing the depths of southern white racism, Washington avoided the issue of social equality. Instead he grudgingly acquiesced in segregation in return for the right to develop the economic and educational resources of the black community. Washington's commitment to training young blacks in agriculture and the trades guided the curriculum at Tuskegee Institute and made it an ideal place for slave-born _____ to teach and research. After Carver joined the faculty in 1896, he became an internationally famous agricultural chemist who provided a much-needed boost to the southern economy by discovering hundred of new uses for the lowly peanut, sweat potato, and soybean.

Farmers Alliance and the People's Party (Populists)

A striking manifestation of rural discontent came through the Farmers' Alliance, founded in Texas in the late 1870s. Farmers came together in the Alliance to socialize, but more importantly to break the strangling grip of railroads and manufacturers through cooperative buying and selling. Unfortunately, the Alliance weakened itself by ignoring the plight of landless tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and farmworkers. Out of the Farmers' Alliance a new political party emerged in the early 189s - the People's party. Better known as the Populists, these frustrated farmers attacked Wall Street and the "money trust." They called for nationalizing the railroads, telephone, and telegraph; instituting a graduated income tax; and creating a new federal "sub-treasury" - a scheme to provide farmers with loans for crops stored in government-owned warehouses, where they could be held until market prices rose. They also wanted free and unlimited coinage of silver - yet another debtors' demand for inflation that echoed continuously throughout the Gilded Age.

court modification of affirmative action

Affirmative action continued to agitate the American people. Most African Americans and other minorities hailed it as a just and necessary antidote to centuries of oppression. Many other Americans countercharged that affirmative action amounted to an unjustifiable violation of the Constitution's protection of equality before the law. The Supreme Court appeared to split the difference between these two positions in the twin cases of "Gratz v. Bollinger" and "Grutter v. Bollinger" in 2003. In the first case, the Court declared unconstitutional a numerical formula for admitting minority undergraduate students to U of M. In the second, it allowed to stand a more flexible, individually based minority admissions procedure for the Michigan law school, even while registering its unease with its own opinion by declaring, "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary."

Einstein, nuclear bomb, Manhattan Project

America had a fantastic ace up its sleeve. Early in 1940, after Hitler's wanton assault in Poland, Roosevelt was persuaded by American and exiled scientists, notably German-born Albert Einstein, to push ahead with preparations for unlocking the secret of an atomic bomb. Congress, at FDR's blank-check request, blindly made available nearly $2 billion. Many military minds were skeptical of this "dammed professor's nonsense," but fears that the Germans might first acquire such an awesome weapon provided a powerful spur to action. As it happened, the war against Germany ended before the American weapon was ready. In a cruel twist of fate, Japan -- not Germany, the original target -- suffered the fate of being the first nation subjected to atomic bombardment. What was called the Manhattan Project pushed feverishly forward, as American know-how and industrial power were combined with the most advanced scientific knowledge. Much technical skill was provided by British and refugee scientists, who had fled to America to escape the torture chambers of the dictators. Finally, in the desert new Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, the experts detonated the first awesome and devastating atomic device.

American advantages during WWII

America was fortunate in emerging with its mainland virtually unscathed. Though unprepared for it at the outset, the nation was better prepared than for the others, partly because it had begun to buckle on its armor about a year and a half before the war officially began. In the end the US showed itself to be resourceful, tough, adaptable -- able to accommodate itself to the tactics of an enemy who was relentless and ruthless. American military leadership proved to be of the highest order. A new crop of war heroes emerged in brilliant generals like Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Marshall and in an imaginative admirals like Nimitz and Spruance. President FDR and Prime Minister Churchill collaborated closely in planning strategy. Industrial leaders were no less skilled, for marvels of production were performed almost daily. Assembly lines proved as important as battle lines, and victory went again to the side with the most smokestacks. ADD?

Venezuela and British Guiana border dispute

America's new belligerence (aggressive or warlike behavior) combined with old-time anti-British feeling to generate a serious crisis between the US and Britain in 1895-1896. The jungle boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela had long been in dispute, but the discovery of gold in the contested area brought the conflict between Britain and Venezuela to a head. President Cleveland and his pugnacious secretary of state, Richard Olney, waded into the affair with a combative note to Britain invoking the Monroe Doctrine. Not content to stop there, Olney haughtily informed the world's number one naval power that the US was now calling the tune in the Western Hemisphere. British officials were unimpressed and replied that the affair was none of Uncle Sam's business. Cleveland sent a bristling special message to Congress. He urged an appropriation for a commission of experts, who would run the line where it ought to go. If the British would not accept this rightful boundary, he implied, the US would fight for it. The entire country, irrespective of political party, was swept off its feet in an outburst of hysteria. War seemed inevitable. Fortunately, sober second thoughts prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic. A rising challenge from Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany, as well as looming war with Dutch-descended Boers in South Africa, left Britain in no mood for war with America. London backed off and consented to arbitration.

Pan-American conference 1889

America's new international interest manifested itself in several ways. Two-time secretary of state James G. Blaine pushed his "Big Sister" policy, aimed at rallying the Latin American nations behind Uncle Sam's leadership and opening Latin American markets to Yankee traders. Blaine's efforts bore some fruit in 1889, when he presided over the first Pan-American Conference, held in DC, the modest beginnings of an increasingly important series of inter-American assemblages.

Kellogg-Briand Pact and the idea of "defensive war"

Americans clamored for the "outlawry of war." The conviction spread that if quarreling nations would only take the pledge to foreswear war as an instrument of national policy, swords could be beaten into plowshares. Coolidge's secretary of state, Frank Kellogg, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role, was lukewarm about the idea. But after petitions bearing more than 2 million signatures cascaded into Washington, he signed with the French foreign minister in 1928 the famed Kellogg-Briand Pact. Officially known as the Pact of Paris, it was ultimately ratified by 62 nations. This new parchment was delusory in the extreme. Defensive wars were still permitted, and what steaming aggressor couldn't cook up an excuse of self-defense? Lacking both muscle and teeth, the pact was a diplomatic derelict - and virtually useless in a showdown.

coup against corrupt president Diem

American forces allegedly entered Vietnam to foster political stability -- to help protect Diem from the communists long enough to allow him to enact basic social reforms favored by Americans. But the Kennedy administration eventually despaired of the reactionary Diem and encouraged a successful coup against him in November 1963. Ironically, the US thus contributed to a long process of political disintegration that its original policy had meant to prevent. JFK still told the South Vietnamese that it was "their war," but he had made dangerously deep political commitments. By the time of his death, he had ordered more than 15,000 American men into the far-off Asian slaughter pen.

Operation Desert Storm; cease-fire

American general Norman ("Stormin' Norman") Schwarzkopf's strategy against Iraq (in Kuwait) was simple: soften the Iraqis with relentless bombing, then suffocate them on the ground with a tidal-wave rush of troops and armor. On Feb 23 the dreaded and long-awaited land war begun. Dubbed "Operation Desert Storm," it lasted only four days -- the "hundred-hour war." With lightning speed the UN forces penetrated deep into Iraq, outflanking the occupying forces in Kuwait and blocking the enemy's ability either to retreat or to reinforce. Allied casualties were amazingly light, whereas much of Iraq's remaining fighting force was quickly destroyed or captured. On Feb 27 Saddam accepted a cease-fire, and Kuwait was liberated.

mass production; advertisements; consumerism

American manufacturers seemed to have mastered the problems of production; their worries now focused on consumption. Could they find the mass markets for the goods they had contrived to spew forth in such profusion? Responding to this need, a new arm of American commerce came into being: advertising. By persuasion and ploy, seduction and sexual suggestion, advertisers sought to make Americans chronically discontented with their paltry possessions and want more, more, more. Sports became big business in the consumer economy of the 1920s. Ballyhooed by the "image makers," home-run heroes like George H. "Babe" Ruth were far better known than most statesmen. The fans bought tickets in such numbers that Babe's hometown park, Yankee Stadium, became known as "the house that Ruth built."

German invasion of France, 1940

An abrupt end to the "phony war" came in April 1940 when Hitler, again without warning, overran his weaker neighbors Denmark and Norway. Hardly pausing for breath, the next month he attacked Netherlands and Belgium, followed by a paralyzing blow at France. By late June France was forced to surrender, but not until Mussolini had pounced on its rear for a jackal's share of the loot.

Ronald Reagan (summarize his career)

An actor-turned-politician, Reagan enjoyed enormous popularity with his crooked grin and aw-shucks manner. Reagan got his start in life in the depressed 1930s as a sports announcer for an Iowa radio station. Good looks and a way with words landed him acting jobs in Hollywood, where he became a B-grade star in the 1940s (he played in the original "Million Dollar Baby"). He displayed a flair for politics as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, when he helped purge communists and other suspected "reds" from the film industry. In 1954 he became a spokesman for General Electric and began to abandon his New Deal-ish political views and increasingly to preach a conservative, antigovernment line. Reagan's growing skill at promoting the conservative cause inspired a group of wealthy California businessmen to help him launch his political career as governor of California from 1966 to 1974. He was the Republican presidential nominee in 1980.

U.S. declares war

An anger Congress on Dec 8, 1941 officially recognized the war that had been "thrust" upon the US. The roll call in the Senate and House fell only one short of unanimity. Germany and Italy, allies of Japan, spared Congress the indecision of debate by declaring war on Dec 11, 1941. This challenge was formally accepted on the same day by an unanimous vote of both Senate and House.

Homestead strike; Carnegie Steel

An epidemic of nationwide strikes in the summer of 1892 raised the prospect that the Populists could weld together a coalition of aggrieved workers and indebted farmers in a revolutionary joint assault on the capitalist order. At Andrew Carnegie's Homestead steel plant near Pittsburgh, company officials called in three hundred armed Pinkerton detectives in July to crush a strike by steelworkers angry over pay cuts. Defiant strikers, armed with rifles and dynamite, forced their assailants to surrender after a vicious battle that left ten people dead and some sixty wounded. Troops were eventually summoned, and both the strike and the union were broken.

Humphrey; Democratic convention riots

Angry antiwar zealots, deprived by an assassin's bullet of their leading candidate, streamed menacingly into Chicago for the Democratic convention in August 1968. Mayor Daley responded by arranging for barbed-wire barricades around the convention hall, as well as thousands of police and National Guard reinforcements. Some militant demonstrators baited to officers in blue by calling them "pigs," chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh," shouting obscenities, and hurling bags and cans of excrement at the police lines. The exasperated "peace officers" broke into a "police riot," clubbing and manhandling innocent and guilty alike. Acrid tear gas fumes hung heavy over the city even as Humphrey (Johnson's VP) steamrolled to the nomination on the first ballot. add?

WCTU, Anti-Saloon League, "wet", "dry"

Anti-liquor campaigners received powerful support from several militant organizations, notably the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Founder Frances E. Willard, who would fall to her knees in prayer on saloon floors, mobilized nearly 1 million women to "make the world homelike" and built the WCTU into the largest organization of women in the world. She found a vigorous ally in the Anti-Saloon League, which was aggressive, well organized, and well financed. Caught up in the crusade, some states and numerous counties passed "dry" laws, which controlled, restricted, or abolished alcohol. The big cities were generally "wet," for they had a large immigrant vote accustomed in the Old World Country to the free flow of wine and beer. When WWI erupted in 1914, nearly one-half of the population lived in "dry" territory, and nearly three-fourths of the total area had outlawed saloons.

Sacco and Vanzetti trial

Anti-redism and antiforeignism were reflected in a notorious case regarded by liberals as a "judicial lynching." Nicola Sacco, a shoe-factory worker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were convicted in 1921 of the murder of a Massachusetts paymaster and his guard. The jury and judge were prejudiced in some degree against the defendants because they were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers. Liberals and radicals the world over over rallied to the defense of the two aliens doomed to die. The case dragged on for six years until in 1927, when the condemned men were electrocuted. Communists and other radicals were thus presented with two martyrs in the "class struggle," while many American liberals hung their heads. The evidence against the accused, while damaging, betrayed serious weakness. If the trial had been held in an atmosphere less charged with anti-redism, the outcome might have been only a prison term.

filibuster; Civil Rights Act of 1964

As president, Johnson quickly shed the conservative coloration of his Senate years to reveal the latent liberal underneath. After a lengthy conservative filibuster, Congress at last passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act banned racial discrimination in most private facilities open to the public, including theaters, hospitals, and restaurants. It strengthened the federal government's power to end segregation in schools and other public places. It created the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to eliminate discrimination when hiring.

economic stagnation, price inflation ("stagflation")

As the 1960s came to a close, productivity gains slowed to the vanishing point. The entire decade of the 1970s did not witness a productivity advance equivalent to even one year's progress in the preceding two decades. Some observers said the cause of the slump in productivity was the increasing presence in the work force of women and teenagers, who typically had fewer skills than adult male workers, and were less likely to take the full-time, long-term jobs where skills might be developed. Others blamed declining investment in new machinery, the heavy costs of compliance with government-imposed safety and health regulations, and the general shift of the American economy from manufacturing to services. The Vietnam War drained tax dollars from needed improvements in education, deflected scientific skill and manufacturing capacity from the civilian sector, and touched off a sickening spiral of inflation. Both military spending and welfare spending are inherently inflationary, because they put dollars in peoples' hands without adding to the supply of goods that those dollars can buy. When too many dollars chase to few goods, price rise -- as they did astonishingly in the 1970s. add/change?

Herbert Hoover, Food Administration

As the larder of democracy, America had to feed itself and its allies. By a happy inspiration, the man chosen to head the Food Administration was the Quaker-humanitarian Herbert C. Hoover. He was already considered a hero because he had successfully led a massive charitable drive to feed the starving people of war-racked Belgium. Hoover preferred to rely on voluntary compliance rather than on compulsory edicts. He deliberately rejected issuing ration cards, a practice used in Europe. Instead he waged a whirlwind propaganda campaign through posters through posters, billboards, newspapers, pulpits, and movies.

draft resistance; credibility gap; hawks and doves

As the long arm of the military draft dragged more and more young men off to the Southeast Asian slaughter pen, resistance stiffened. Thousands of of draft registrants fled to Canada; others publicly burned their draft cards. Hundreds of thousands of marchers filled the streets of NY, San Francisco, and other cities, chanting "Hell no, we won't go" and "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" Opposition in Congress to the Vietnam involvement centered in the influential Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, headed by Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas. He staged a series of widely viewed televised hearings in 1966 and 1967, during which the prominent personages aired their views, largely antiwar. Gradually, the public came to feel that it had been deceived about the causes and "winnability" of the war. A yawning "credibility gap" opened between the government and the people. New flocks of antiwar "doves" were hatching daily. ADD? page 929

Election 1936, FDR Democrats

As the presidential campaign of 1936 neared, the New Dealers were on top of the world. They had achieved considerable progress, and millions of "reliefers' were grateful to their bountiful government. The exultant Democrats renominated Roosevelt on a platform squarely endorsing the New Deal. The Republicans nominated governor of Kansas, Alfred Landon. Landon himself was a moderate who accepted some New Deal reforms, although not the popular Social Security Act. The Republican platform condemned the New Deal of Franklin "Deficit" Roosevelt for its radicalism, experimentation, confusion, and "frightful waste." A landslide overwhelmed Landon, as the Republicans carried only two states, Maine and Vermont. The electoral count was 523 5o 8. Democrats could now claim more than two-thirds of the seats in the House and a like proportion in the Senate. add?

Casablanca Conference and unconditional surrender

At Casablanca, in newly occupied French Morocco, FDR, who had boldly flown the Atlantic, met in a historic conference with Winston Churchill in Jan 1943. The Big Two agreed to step up the Pacific war, invade Sicily, increase pressure on Italy, and insist upon an "unconditional surrender" of the enemy, a phrase earlier popularized by General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. Such an unyielding policy would presumably hearten the ultra-suspicious Soviets, who professed to fear separate Allied peace negotiations. It would also forestall charges of broken armistice terms, such as had come after 1918. Paradoxically, the tough-sounding unconditional surrender declaration was an admission of the weakness of the Western Allies. Still unable to mount the kind of second front their Soviet partner desperately demanded, the British and the Americans had little but words to offer Stalin. add?

Upton Sinclair "The Jungle" and meat packing

At the same time, American consumers hungered for safer canned products. Their appetite for reform was whetted by Upton Sinclair's sensational novel "The Jungle," published in 1906. Sinclair intended his revolting tract to focus attention on the plight of the the workers in the big canning factories, but instead he appalled the public with his description of disgustingly unsanitary food products. (As he put it, he aimed for the nation's heart but hit its stomach.) The book described in noxious detail the filth, disease, and putrefaction in Chicago's damp, ventilated slaughterhouses. Many readers, including Roosevelt, were so sickened that for a time they found meat unpalatable.

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Author Rachel Carson gave the environmental movement a huge boost in 1962 when she published "Silent Spring," an enormously effective piece of latter-day muckraking that exposed the poisonous effects of pesticides.

rise of the middle class; women in the workforce

Beginning in about 1950, the American economy surged into a dazzling plateau of sustained growth that was to last virtually uninterrupted for two decades. Millions of depression-pinched souls sought to make up for the sufferings of the 1930s. A people who had once considered a chicken in every pot the standard of comfort and security now hungered for two cars in every garage, swimming pools in their backyards, vacation homes, and gas-guzzling recreational vehicles. The size of the "middle class," defined as households earning between $3,000 and $10,000 a year, doubled from pre-Great Depression days and included 60 percent of the American people by the mid-1950s. Of all the benefits of postwar prosperity, none reaped greater rewards than women. More than ever, urban offices and shops provided a bonanza of employment for female workers. Women accounted for quarter of the American workforce at the end of WWII and for nearly half the labor pool five decades later.

T. Roosevelt and "Big Stick" quote

Believing that it was better to wear out than to rust out, Roosevelt would shake hands of some six thousand people at one stretch or ride horseback many miles in a day as an example of portly cavalry officers. Incurably boyish and bellicose, he ceaselessly preached the virile virtues and denounced pacifistic "flubdubs" and "mollycoddles." An ardent champion of military and naval preparedness, he adopted as his pet proverb, "Speak softly and carry a big stick, [and] you will go far."

fall of the Philippines; Bataan Death March

Better news came from the Philippines, which succeeded dramatically in slowing down the mikado's warriors for five month. The Japanese promptly landed a small but effective army, and General MacArthur, an American commander, withdrew to a strong defensive position at Bataan, not far from Manila. There about 20,000 American troops, supported by a much larger force of ill-trained Filipinos, held off violent Japanese attacks until April 9, 1942. The defenders, reduced to eating mules and monkeys, heroically traded their lives for time in the face of hopeless odds. Before the inevitable American surrender, General MacArthur was ordered by Washington to depart secretly for Australia, there to head the resistance against the Japanese. After the battered remnants of his army had hoisted the white flag, they were treated with vicious cruelty in the infamous eighty-mile Bataan Death March to prisoner-of-war camps -- the first in a series of atrocities committed by both sides in the unusually savage Pacific war.

Reagan reelection 1984

Bolstered by a buoyant economy at home and by the popularity of his muscular posture abroad, Reagan handily won the Republican nomination in 1984 for a second White House term. His opponent was Democrat Walter Mondale, who made history by naming his VP running mate Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro of NY. She was the first women ever to appear on a major-party presidential ticket. But even this dramatic gesture could not salvage Mondale's candidacy, which was fatally tainted by his service as VP in the deeply discredited Carter administration. On election day Reagan walked away with 525 electoral votes to Mondale's 13.

Scopes "Monkey Trial"; evolution

Both science and progressive education in the 1920s were subjected to unfriendly fire from the newly organized Fundamentalists. These devoted religionists charged that the teaching of Darwinian evolution was destroying faith in God and the Bible, while contributing to the moral breakdown of youth in the jazz age. Numerous attempts were made to secure laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools, and three southern states adopted such shackling measures. The stage was set for the memorable "Monkey Trial" at the hamlet of Dayton, eastern Tennessee, in 1925. A likable high-school biology teacher, John Scopes, was indicted for teaching evolution. He was defended by nationally known attorneys, while former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, an ardent Presbyterian Fundamentalist, joined the prosecution. Taking a stand as an expert on the Bible, Bryan was made to appear foolish by the famed criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow. This historic clash between theology and biology proved inconclusive. Scopes, the forgotten man of the drama, was found guilty and fined $100. But the supreme court of Tennessee, while upholding the law, set aside the fine on a technicality. The Fundamentalists at best won only a hollow victory, for the absurdities of the trial cast ridicule on their cause.

Espionage Act, Sedition Act (Debs' conviction)

Both the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918 reflected current fears about Germans and anti-war Americans. Especially visible among the nineteen hundred prosecutions pursued under these laws were antiwar Socialists and members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World. Kingpin Socialist Eugene V. Debs was convicted under the Espionage Act in 1918 and sentenced to ten years in federal penitentiary.

Destroyer Deal

Britain was in critical need of destroyers, for German submarines were again threatening to starve it out with attacks on shipping. Roosevelt moved boldly when, on September 2, 1940, he agreed to transfer to Great Britain fifty old-model, four-funnel destroyers left over from WWI. In return, the British promised to hand over to the US eight valuable defensive base sites, stretching from Newfoundland to South America. These strategically located outposts were to remain under the Stars and Stripes for ninety-nine years. Transferring fifty destroyers to a foreign navy was a highly questionable disposal of government property, despite a strained interpretation of existing legislation. The exchange was achieved by a simple presidential agreement, without so much as a "by your leave" to Congress. Shifting warships from a neutral US to a belligerent Britain was, beyond question, a flagrant violation of neutral obligations -- at least neutral obligations that had existed before Hitler's barefaced aggressions rendered foolish such old-fashioned concepts of fair play.

"Okies", "Arkies" (also see pg 786-7)

Burned and blown out of the Dust Bowl, tens of thousands of refugees fled their ruined acres. In five years about 350,000 Oklahomans and Arkansans - "Okies" and "Arkies" - trekked to southern California in "junkyards on wheels." The earliest Okies had migrated under better circumstances in better times, and they often bragged of the good life in California. Their ears so long filled with glowing reports form this earlier exodus, the Dust Bowl migrants refused to believe that the depression could sully the bright promise of California. Some Okies and Arkies made their way past the Keep Out sign that claimed there were no jobs in California and into the cities, but many of them favored the San Joaquin Valley, the southern part of central California's agricultural kingdom. add? page 787

Mexican immigrants

But if Mexico with rich, the Mexicans were poor. Fed up with their miserable lot, they at last revolted. Their revolution took an ugly turn in 1913, when a conscienceless clique murdered the popular new revolutionary president and installed General Victoriano Huerta in the president's chair. All this chaos accelerated a massive migration of Mexicans to the US. More than a million Spanish-speaking newcomers tramped across the southern border in the first three decades of the 20th century. Settling mostly in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, they swung picks building highways and railroads or followed the fruit harvests as pickers.

unfunded mandates

But if President Clinton had overplayed his mandate for liberal reform in 1993, the congressional Republicans now proceeded to overplay their mandate for conservative retrenchment. The new Republican majority did legislate one long-standing conservative goal when they restricted "unfunded mandates" -- federal laws that imposed new obligations on state and local governments without providing revenues. add?

outsourcing of American jobs

But the very speed and efficiency of the new communications tools threatened to wipe out entire occupational categories. Postal carrier, travel agents, store clerks, bank tellers, stockbrokers, and all kinds of workers whose business it was to mediate between product and client might find themselves roadkill on the information superhighway. White-collar jobs in financial services and high-tech engineering cold now be outsourced to countries such as Ireland and India, where employees could help keep a company's global circuits firing 24 hrs/ day.

buying on credit (refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, etc.)

Buying on credit was another innovative feature of the postwar economy. "Possess today and pay tomorrow" was the message directed at buyers. Once-frugal descendants of Puritans went ever deeper into debt to own all kinds of newfangled marvels - refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and esp. cars and radios - now. Prosperity thus accumulated an overhanging cloud of debt, and the economy became increasingly vulnerable to disruptions of the credit structure.

Horace Greeley, Liberal Republican and Democrat

By 1872 a powerful wave of disgust with Grantism was beginning to build up throughout the nation, even before some of the worst scandals had been exposed. Reform-minded citizens banded together to form the Liberal Republican party. Voicing the slogan "Turn the Rascals Out," they urged purification of the Washington administration as well as an end to military Reconstruction. They muffed their chance when their Cincinnati nominating convention nominated the brilliant but erratic ___ for the presidency. More astonishing still was the action of the office-hungry Democrats, who foolishly proceeded to endorse __'s candidacy. In swallowing __ the Democrats "ate crow" in large gulps, for the eccentric editor of the New York Tribune had long blasted them as traitors, slave shippers, saloon keepers, horse thieves, and idiots. Yet he pleased the Democrats, North and South, when he pleaded for the clasping hands across "the bloody chasm."

capital, resources, labor, ingenuity, patents

By 1894 the US had bounded into first place among the manufacturing nations of the world. Liquid capital, previously scarce, was now becoming abundant. The word millionaire had not been coined until the 1840s, and in 1861 only a handful of individuals were eligible for this class. The amazing natural resources of the nation were now about to be fully exploited, including coal, oil, and iron. Massive immigration helped make unskilled labor cheap and plentiful. Steel, the keystone industry, built its strength largely on the sweat of low-priced immigrant labor from eastern and southern Europe, working in two 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. American ingenuity at the same time played a vital role in the second American industrial revolution. Techniques of mass production were being perfected by the captains of industry. American inventiveness flowered luxuriantly in the postwar years: between 1860 and 1890 some 440,000 patents were issued.

Bessemer-Kelly steel process

By 1900 America was producing as much steel as Britain and Germany combined. The ___ process, a method of making cheap steal, made in the 1850s, caused this increase production of steel. It was named after a derided British inventor, although an American had stumbled on it a few years earlier. William __, a Kentucky manufacturer of iron kettles, discovered that cold air blown on red-hot iron caused the metal to become white-hot by igniting the carbon and thus eliminating impurities. He tried to apply the "air boiling" technique to his own product, but his customers decried "___'s fool steel," and his his business declined. Gradually the ____ process won acceptance, and these two "crazy men" ultimately made possible the present steel civilization.

Carrie Chapman Catt and traditional women's roles

By 1900 a new generation of women had taken command of the suffrage battle. The most effective leader was _____, a pragmatic and businesslike reformer of relentless dedication. Under her the suffragists de-emphasized the argument that women deserved a vote as a matter or right, because they were in all respects equal to men. Instead she stressed the desirability of giving women the vote if they were to continue to discharge their traditional duties as homemakers and mothers in the increasingly public world of the city. Women had special responsibility for the health of the family and the education of children, the argument ran. On the farm, women could discharge these responsibilities in the separate sphere of the isolated homestead. But in the city, they needed a voice on boards of public health, police commissions, and school boards. By thus linking the ballot to a traditional definition of women's roles, suffragists registered encouraging gains as the new century opened, despite of continuing showers of rotten eggs and jeers of male critics who insisted that women were made for loving, not for voting.

Second Battle of the Marne

By July 1918, the awesome German drive had spent its force, and keyed-up American men participated in a Foch counteroffensive in the Second Battle of the Marne, This engagement marked the beginning of a German withdrawal that was never effectively reversed. In September 1918 nine American divisions joined four French divisions to push Germans from the St. Mihiel salient, a German dagger in France's flank.

Taft and trusts (Standard Oil, U.S. Steel)

By fateful happenstance the most sensational judicial actions during the Taft regime came in 1911. In that year the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the mighty Standard Oil Company, which was judged to be a combination in restraint of trade violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. At this same time, the Court handed down its famous "rule of reason." This doctrine held that only those combinations that "unreasonably" restrained trade were illegal. The fine-print proviso ripped a huge hole in the government's antitrust net. Even more explosively, in 1911 Taft decided to press an antitrust suit against the US Steel Corporation. This initiative infuriated Roosevelt, who had personally been involved in one of the mergers that prompted the suit. Once Roosevelt's protege, President Taft was increasingly taking on the role of his antagonist. The stage was being set for a bruising confrontation.

Lend-Lease Act, the end of neutrality (Ch 34 continued)

By late 1940 embattled Britain was nearing the end of its financial tether; its credits in America were being rapidly consumed by insatiable war orders. But FDR, who had bitter memories of the wrangling over the Allied debts of WWI, was determined, as he put it, to eliminate "the silly, foolish, old dollar sign." He finally hit on a scheme of lending or leasing American arms to the reeling democracies. When the shooting was over, the guns and tanks could be returned. The Lend-Lease Bill, patriotically numbered 1776, was entitled "An Act Further to Promote the Defense of the United States." Sprung on the country after the election was safely over, it was praised by the administration as a device that would keep the nation out of the war rather than drag it in. The underlying concept was "Send guns, not sons" or "Billions, not bodies." America would send a limitless supply of arms to the victims of aggression, who in turn would finish the job and keep the war on their side of the Atlantic. Accounts would be settled by returning the used weapons or their equivalents to the US when the war was ended.

suburbs

By the first decade of the 21st century, the suburban rings around big cities such as NY< Chicago, Houston, and Washington, DC., were becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, though individual schools and towns were often homogenous. Suburbs grew fastest in the West and Southwest. In the outer orbits of LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, builders of roads, water mains, and schools could barely keep up with the new towns sprouting across the hardscrabble landscapes. add?

"Silent Cal" Calvin Coolidge

By the light of two kerosene lamps,Calvin Coolidge's father, a justice of the peace, used to old family Bible to administer the presidential oath to his son after Harding's death. Practicing rigid economy in both money and words, "Silent Cal" came to be known in Washington conversational circles for his brilliant flashes of silence. Coolidge seemed to be a crystallization of the commonplace. Painfully shy, he was blessed only with mediocre powers of leadership. The hands-off temperament of "Cautious Cal" Coolidge suited the times perfectly. His thrifty nature caused him to sympathize fully with Secretary of the Treasury Mellon's efforts to both reduce both taxes and debts. No foe of industrial bigness, he let business have its head. add?

Hay--Bunau-Varilla Treaty and Panama Canal Zone

By the terms of the ancient Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, concluded with Britain in 1850, the US could not secure exclusive control over an isthmian route. But by 1901 America's British cousins were willing to yield ground. They consented to the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty in 1901. It not only gave the US a free hand to build the canal but conceded the right to fortify it as well. Many American experts favored to route the canal through Nicaragua, but agents of the old French Canal Company were eager to salvage something from their costly failure at S-shaped Panama. Represented by Philippe Bunau-Varilla, the New Panama Canal Company suddenly dropped the price of its holdings from $109 million to the fire-sale price of $40 million. Congress in June 1902 finally decided on the Panama route. The scene now shifted to Columbia, of which Panama was a restive part. The Colombian senate rejected an American offer of $10 million and annual payment of $250,000 for a six-mile-wide zone across Panama. ADD page 648 Canal construction bean in 1904.

Sandra Day O'Connor; conservative judges

By the time he left office, Reagan had appointed a near-majority of all sitting judgers. Equally important, he had named three conservative-minded justices to the US Supreme Court. They included Sandra Day O'Conner, a brilliant, public-spirited Arizona judge. When she was sworn in on Sept 25, 1981, she became the first woman to ascend to the high bench in the Court's nearly two-hundred-year history.

gross national product (GNP)

By the war's end much of the planet was a smoking ruin. But in America the war invigorated the economy and lifted the country out of a decade-long depression. The gross national product vaulted from less than $100 billion in 1940 to more the $200 billion in 1945. GNP is the total value of goods produced and services provided by a country during one year, equal to the gross domestic product plus the net income from foreign investments. Corporate profits rose from about $6 billion in 1940 to almost twice that amount for years later.

sweatshops and Florence Kelley

Campaigns for factory reform and temperance particularly attracted women foot soldiers. Unsafe and unsanitary sweatshops - factories where workers toiled long hours for low wages - were a public scandal in many cities. Florence Kelley, a former resident of Jane Addams's Hull House, became the state of Illinois's first chief factory inspector and one of the nation's leading advocates for improved factory conditions. In 1899 Kelley took control of the newly founded National Consumers League, which mobilized female consumers to pressure for laws safeguarding women and children in the workplace.

disputes over lands

Clemenceau pressed French demands for the German-inhabited Rhineland and the Saar Valley, a rich coal area. Faced with fierce Wilsonian opposition to this violation of self-determination, France settled for a compromise whereby the Saar basin would remain under the League of Nations for 15 years, and then a popular vote would determine its fate. In exchange for dropping its demand for the Rhineland, France got the Security Treaty, in which both Britain and America pledge to come to its aid in the event of another German invasion. Wilson's next battle was with Italy over Fiume, a valuable seaport inhabited by both Italians and Yugoslavs. Wen Italy demanded Fiume, Wilson insisted that the seaport go to Yugoslavia and appealed over the heads of Italy's leaders to the country's masses. The maneuver fell flat though, as the Italian masses turned savagely against Wilson. Another crucial struggle was with Japan over China's Shandong Peninsula and the German Islands in the Pacific, which the Japanese had seized during the war. Japan conceded the strategic Pacific islands under the League of Nations mandate, but Wilson staunchly opposed Japanese control of Shandong as a violation of self-determination for its 30 million Chinese residents. But when the Japanese threatened to walk out, Wilson reluctantly accepted a compromise whereby Japan kept Germany's economic holdings in Shandong and pledge to return the peninsula at a later date.

Election of 2000, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney

Clinton's loyal VP, Albert Gore, easily won the Democratic party's presidential nomination in 2000. He chose as his running mate Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman, an outspoken critic of Clinton during the Lewinsky affair and the first Jew nominated to a national ticket by a majority party. The Republican nominee, George W. Bush, had catapulted to the party prominence on the strength of his status of the eldest son of former president George H. W. Bush and his popularity as a two-term governor of Texas. Bush chose Richard Cheney, former secretary of defense in the elder Bush's admin and a key planner in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, as his vice-presidential running mate. add?

Malcolm X; Nation of Islam

Deepening division among black leaders was highlighted by the career of Malcolm X. Born Malcolm Little, he was first inspired by the militant black nationalists in the Nation of Islam. Like the Nation's founder, Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm changed his surname to advertise his lost African identity in white America. Malcolm X trumpeted black separatism and inveighed against the "blue-eyed white devils." Eventually Malcolm distanced himself from Elijah Muhammed's separatist preachings and moved toward mainstream Islam. In early 1965 he was cut down by rival Nation of Islam gunmen while speaking to a large crowd in NYC.

1952 election, Eisenhower, Nixon (Checkers Speech)

Democratic prospects in the presidential election of 1952 were blighted by the military deadlock in Korea, Truman's clash with MacArthur, war-bred inflation, and whiffs of scandal from the White House. Dispirited Democrats nominated a reluctant Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois. Republicans chose war hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower on the first ballot. His running mate was Cali senator Richard Nixon. Nixon himself faltered (in the campaign) when reports surfaced of a secretly financed "slush fund" he had tapped while holding a seat in the Senate. He responded with a mawkish, self-pitying speech on television, during which he referred shamelessly to the family cocker spaniel, Checkers. The maudlin "Checkers Speech" saved Nixon's candidacy. It also demonstrated the awesome political potentialities of television, which even more compellingly than radio allowed politicians to bypass traditional party organizations and speak directly to voters. Eisenhower won the election with 442 electoral votes to Stevenson's 89.

victory in Philippines; annexation of Hawaii

Dewey carried out his orders from Roosevelt magnificently on May 1, 1898. Sailing boldly with his six warships at night into the fortified harbor of Manila, he trained his guns the next morning on the moldy ten-ship Spanish fleet. The entire collection of antiquated and over-matched vessels was quickly destroyed, with a loss of nearly four hundred Spaniards killed and wounded, and without the loss of a single American life. Yet Dewey was in a perilous position. He had destroyed the enemy fleet, but he could not storm the forts of Manila with his sailors. He was forced to wait in the sweltering bay while troops were slowly assembled in America. Long-awaited American troops, finally arriving in force, captured Manila on August 13, 1898, in collaboration with Filipino insurgents commanded by their well-educated, part-Chinese leader, Emilio Aguinaldo. These thrilling events in the Philippines had meanwhile focused attention on Hawaii. An impression spread that America needed the archipelago as a coaling and provisioning way station, in order to send supplies as reinforcements to Dewey. McKinley also worried that Japan might grab the Hawaiian Islands while America was distracted elsewhere. A joint resolution of annexation was rushed through Congress and approved by McKinley on July 7, 1898. It granted Hawaiian residents US citizenship; Hawaii received full territorial status in 1900.

direct election of senators (Amendment 17)

Direct election of US senators became a favorite goal of the progressives, esp. after the muckrakers had exposed the scandalous intimacy between greedy corporations and Congress. By 1900 the Senate had so many rich men that it was often sneered at as the "Millionaires' Club." Too many of these prosperous solons, elected as they then were by trust-dominated legislatures, heeded the voice of their "masters" rather than the voice of their masses. A constitutional amendment to bring about popular election of senators had rough sledding in Congress, for the plutocratic members of the Senate were happy with existing methods. But a number os states established primary elections in which the voters expressed their preferences for the Senate. The local legislatures, when choosing senators, found it politically wise to heed the voice of the people. Partly as a result of such pressures, the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1913, established the direct election of US senators.

Washington Disarmament Conference

Disarmament was one international issue on which Harding, after much indecision, finally seized the initiative. A deadly contest was shaping up with Britain and Japan, which watched with alarm as the oceans filled with American vessels. Public agitation brought about the headline making Washington "Disarmament" Conference of 1921-1922. Invitations went to all the major naval powers - except Bolshevik Russia, whose government the US refused to officially to recognize. The double agenda included naval disarmament and the situation in the Far East. At the outset Secretary Hughes startled delegate with a comprehensive, concrete plan for declaring a ten-year "holiday" on the construction of battleships and even for scrapping some of the huge dreadnoughts already built. He proposed that the scaled-down navies of America and Britain should enjoy parity in battleships and aircraft carriers, with Japan on the small end of a 5:5:3 ratio. Complex bargaining followed in the wake of Hughes's proposals.

divorce, birth control

Economic freedom encouraged sexual freedom, and the "new morality" began to be reflected in soaring divorce rates, the spreading practice of birth control, and increasingly frank discussion of sexual topics. As families increasingly became the virtually exclusive arena for intimate companionship and for emotional and psychological satisfaction, they were subjected to unprecedented stress. Many families cracked under strain. From the nineteenth century dates the beginning of the "divorce revolution" that transformed the United States' social landscape in the 20th century. Marriages were being delayed, and more couples learned the techniques of birth control. add?

1894 Chicago Pullman strike

Elsewhere, violent flare-ups accompanied labor protests, notably in Chicago. Most dramatic was the crippling Pullman strike of 1894. Eugene V. Debs, a charismatic labor leader, had helped organize the American Railway Union of about 150,000 members. The Pullman Palace Car Company, which maintained a model town near Chicago for its employees, was hit hard by the depression and cut wages by about one-third, while holding the line on rent for the company houses. The workers finally struck - in some places overturning Pullman cars - and paralyzed railway traffic from Chicago to the Pacific Coast. ADD (why did federal troops shut it down)

the Marianas

Especially prized were the Marianas, including America's conquered Guam. From bases in the Marianas, the United States' new B-26 superbombers could cary out round-trip bombing raids on Japan's home islands. The assault on the Marianas opened on June 19, 1944, with what American pilots called the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot." A combination of the combat superiority of the recently developed American "Hellcat" fighter plane and the new technology of the antiaircraft proximity fuse destroyed nearly 250 Japanese aircraft, with a loss of only 29 American planes. The following day, in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, US naval forces sank several Japanese carriers. The Japanese navy never recovered from these massive losses of planes, pilots, and ships. After fanatical resistance, including a mass suicide leap of surviving Japanese soldiers and civilians from "Suicide" Cliff on Saipan, the major islands of the Marianas fell to the US attackers in July and August 1944. With these unsinkable aircraft carriers now available, virtual round-the-clock bombing of Japan began in November 1944.

Rosie the Riveter and female employment

Even more dramatic was the march of women onto the factory floor. More than 6 million women took up jobs outside the home; over half of them had never before worked for wages. Many of them were mothers, and the government was obliged to set up some 3,000 day-care centers to care for "Rosie the Riveter's" children while she drilled the the fuselage of a heavy bomber or joined the links of a tank track. When the war ended, Rose and many of her sisters were in no hurry to put down their tools. They wanted to keep working and often did. The war thus foreshadowed an eventual revolution in the roles of women in American society. add?

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner

F. Scott Fitzgerald, a handsome Minnesota-born Princetonian then only 24 years old, became an overnight celebrity when he published "This Side of Paradise" in 1920. The book became a kind of Bible for the young. It was eagerly devoured by aspiring flappers and their ardent wooers, many of whom affected an air of bewildered abandon toward life. He followed this melancholy success with "The Great Gatsby" (1925), a brilliant commentary on the illusory American ideal of the self-made man. Ernest Hemingway, who had seen action on the Italian front in 1917, was among the writers most affected by the war. He responded to pernicious propaganda and the overblown appeal to patriotism by devising his own lean, word-sparing but word-perfect style. William Faulkner, a dark-eyed, pensive Mississippian, turned his attention to a fictional chronicle of an imaginary, history-rich Deep South county he named "Yoknapatawpha." In powerful books like "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying," Faulkner peeled back layers of time and consciousness from the constricted souls of his ingrown southern characters.

"court packing" failure and success

FDR bluntly asked Congress for legislation to permit him to add a new justice to the Supreme Court for every member over 70 who would not retire. The maximum membership could then be 15. FDR pointed out the necessity of injecting vigorous new blood, for the Court, he alleged, was far behind in its work. This charge, which turned out to be false, brought heated accusations of dishonesty. At best, FDR was headstrong and not fully aware of the fact that the Court, in popular thinking, had become something of a sacred cow. Congress and the nation were promptly convulsed over the scheme to "pack" the Supreme Court with a "dictator bill." FDR was denounced for attempting to break down the delicate checks and balances among the three branches of government. He was accused of grooming himself as a dictator by trying to browbeat the judiciary. The Court began to support New Deal reforms, including the principle of a state minimum wage for women, the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), and the Social Security Act. FDR's "Court-packing" was further undermined when Congress voted full pay for justices over 70 who retired. Congress finally passed a court reform bill, but this watered-down version applied only to lower courts. FDR thus suffered his first major legislative defeat at the hands of his own party in Congress. Yet in losing this battle, FDR incidentally won his campaign. The Court, as he had hoped, became markedly more friendly to New Deal Reforms.

limited gold standard (foreign trade only)

FDR ordered all private holdings of gold to be surrendered to the Treasury in exchange for paper currency and then took the nation off the gold standard. The Hundred Days Congress responded to his recommendation by canceling the gold-payment clause in all contracts and authorizing repayment in paper money. A "managed currency" was well on its way. The goal of FDR's "managed currency" was inflation, which he believed would relieve debtors' burdens and stimulate new production. He instructed the Treasury to purchase gold at increasing prices. This policy did increase the amount of dollars in circulation, as holders of gold cashed it in at elevated prices. The gold-buying scheme came to an end in February 1934, when FDR returned the nation to a limited gold standard for purposes of international trade only. Thereafter, the US pledged itself to pay foreign bills, if requested, in gold at the rate of one ounce of gold for every $35 due.

Soviet military expansion

Fallout from the Cuban missile crisis was considerable. A disgraced Khrushchev was ultimately hounded out of the Kremlin and became an "unperson." Hard-liners in Moscow, vowing never again to be humiliated in a nuclear face-off, launched an enormous program of military expansion. The Soviet buildup reached a crescendo in the next decade, stimulating, in turn, a vast American effort to "catch up with the Russians."

CIA coup in Iran

Fears of Soviet penetration into the oil-rich Middle East further heightened Cold War tensions. The government of Iran, supposedly influenced by the Kremlin, began to resist the power of the gigantic Western companies that controlled Iranian petroleum. In response, the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped to engineer a coup in 1953 that installed the youthful shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, as a kind of dictator. Though successful in the short run in securing Iranian oil for the West, the American intervention left a bitter legacy of resentment among many Iranians. More than two decades later, they took their revenge on the shah and his American allies (page 962-963).

Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt may have been the most visible woman in the Roosevelt White House, but she was hardly the only female voice. Secretary of Labor France Perkins (1880-1965) burst through the gender barrier when she became America's first woman cabinet member.

information age, Microsoft, Internet

Following WWII, the rise of International Business Machines (IBM) symbolized yet another momentous transformation, to the fast-paced "information age," when the storing, organizing, and processing of data became an industry in its own right. By the century's end the rapid emergence of Microsoft Corporation and the phenomenal growth of the Internet heralded an explosive communications revolution. Americans now rocketed down the "information superhighway" toward the uncharted terrain of an electronic global village, where traditional geographic, social, and political boundaries could be vaulted with the tap of a keypad. In the blink of an eye, ordinary citizens could gain access to info once available only to privileged elites with vast libraries or expert staffs at disposal. A "dot-com" explosion of new commercial ventures quickly expanded the market (and the stock-market stakes) for entrepreneurs leading the way in making Internet a twenty-first-century, electronic mall, library, and entertainment center rolled into one.

Warren court (Gideon, Miranda, N.Y. Times v. Sullivan)

Following his appointment in 1953, Chief Justice Earl Warren had led the Court into a series of decisions that drastically affected the sexual freedom, the rights of criminals, the practice of religion, civil rights, and the structure of political representation. The decisions of the Warren Court reflect deep concern for the individual, no matter how lowly. In 1963 the Court held (Gideon v. Wainwright) that all defendants in serious criminal cases were entitled to legal counsel, even if they were too poor to afford it. Two cases -- Escobedo (1964) and Miranda (1966) -- ensured the right of the accused to remain silent and to enjoy other protections when accused of a crime. Those decisions erected safeguards against confessions extorted under the rubber hose and other torture. In the case of New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), the Court ruled unanimously that public figures could sue for libel only if they could prove that "malice" had motivated their defamers, opening a wide door for freewheeling criticism of the public actions as well as the private lives of politicians and other officials.

Wabash v. Illinois (also p 538)

Following judicial reverses, most severely at the hands of the Supreme Court in the "Wabash" decision of 1886, the Grangers influence faded. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that individual states had no power to regulate interstate commerce. If the mechanical monster were to be corralled, the federal government would have to do the job (railroads).

buffalo soldiers

For more than a decade after the Civil War, fierce warfare between Indians and the US Army raged in various parts of the West. Army troops, many of them recent immigrants who had, ironically, fled Europe to avoid military service, met formidable adversaries in the Plains Indians, whose superb horsemanship gave them baffling mobility. Fully one-fifth of all US Army personnel on the frontier were African American - dubbed "Buffalo Soldiers" by Indians, supposedly because of the resemblance of their hair to the bison's furry coat.

Cambodia; Kent State and Jackson State shootings

For several years the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had been using Cambodia as a springboard for troops, weapons, and supplies. Suddenly, on April 29, 1970, without consulting Congress, Nixon ordered American forces to join with the South Vietnamese in cleaning out the enemy sanctuaries in officially neutral Cambodia. Angry students nationwide responded to the Cambodian invasion with rock throwing, window smashing, and arson. At Kent State University in Ohio, jumpy members of the National Guard fired into a noisy crowd, killing four and wounding many more; at historically black Jackson state College in Mississippi, the highway patrol discharged volleys at a student dormitory, killing two students. The nation fell prey to turmoil as rioters and arsonists convulsed the land.

D-Day, June 6 1944, Normandy Invasion (France)

French Normandy, less heavily defended than other parts of the European coast, was pinpointed for the invasion assault. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the enormous operation, which involved some forty-six hundred vessels, unwound. Stiff resistance was encountered from the Germans, who had been misled by a feint into expecting the blow to fall farther north. The Allies had already achieved mastery of the air over France. They were thus able to block reinforcements by crippling the railroads, while worsening German fuel shortages by bombing gasoline-producing plants. The Allied beachhead, at first clung to with fingertips, was gradually enlarged, consolidated, and reinforced. After desperate fighting, the invaders finally broke out of the German iron ring that enclosed the Normandy landing zone.

deflation

Hard-money Republicans resisted this scheme (for inflation through more coinage of silver) and counted on Grant to hold the line against it. He did not disappoint them. The Treasury began to accumulate gold stocks against the appointed day for resumption of of metallic-money payments. Coupled with the reduction of greenbacks, this policy was called "contraction." It had a noticeable deflationary effect - the amount of money per capita in circulation actually decreased between 1870 and 1880, from $19.42 to $19.37. Contraction probably worsened the impact of depression. But the new policy did restore the government's credit rating, and it brought the embattled up to their full face value. ADD/Change?

German war zone around British Isles (map p 691)

Hard-pressed Germany did not tamely consent to being starved out. In retaliation for the British blockade, in February 1915 Berlin announced a submarine war area around the British Isles. The submarine was a weapon so new that existing international law could not be made to fit it. The old rule that a warship must stop and board a merchantman could hardly apply to submarines, which could easily be rammed or sunk if they surfaced. The cigar-shaped marauders posed a dire threat to the US - so long as Wilson insisted on maintaining America's neutral rights. Berlin officials declared that they would try not to sink neutral shipping, but they warned that mistakes would probably occur. Wilson would continue to claim profitable neutral trading rights, while hoping that no high-seas incident would force his hand to grasp the sword of war. He warned Germany that it would be held "strict accountability" for any attacks on American vessels or citizens.

Depression of 1893 (causes)

Hardly had Cleveland seated himself in the presidential chair when the devastating depression of 1893 burst about his burly frame. Contributing causes were the splurge of overbuilding and speculation, labor disorders, and the ongoing agricultural depression. Free-silver agitation had also damaged American credit abroad, and the usual pinch on American finances had come when European banking houses began to call in loans from the US.

Franklin D. Roosevelt / Eleanor Roosevelt

He was nominated by the Democrats for president in 1932. He suffered from infantile paralysis (struck in 1921). In courageously fighting his way back from complete helplessness to a hobbling mobility, he schooled himself in patience, tolerance, compassion, and strength of will. One of his great personal and political assets was was his wife, Eleanor. FDR's political career was as much as hers as it was his. She traveled countless miles with him or on his behalf in all his campaigns, beginning with his run for the NY legislature before WWI. She was to become the most active First Lady in history. add?

"Czar" Reed and the Billion Dollar Congress

He was the new Republican Speaker of the House (from Maine). He soon bent the intimidated House to his imperious will. He counted as present Democrats who had not answered the roll and who, rule book in hand, furiously denied that they were legally there. By such tactics "Czar" ___ utterly dominated the "_____" Congress - the first in history to appropriate that sum. Congress showered pensions on Civil War veterans and increased government purchases of silver.

invasion of Poland Sept. 1, 1939, "blitzkrieg"; WWII

Hitler now demanded from neighboring Poland a return of the areas wrested from Germany after WWI. Failing to secure satisfaction, he sent his mechanized divisions crashing into Poland at dawn on Sept 1, 1939. Britain and France, honoring their commitments to Poland, promptly declared war. At long last they perceived the folly of continued appeasement. But they were powerless to aid Poland, which succumbed in three weeks to Hitler's smashing strategy of terror. Stalin, as prearranged secretly in his fateful pact with Hitler, came in on the kill for his share of old Russian Poland. Long-dreaded WWII was now fully launched, and the long truce of 1919-1939 had come to and end. ADD blitzkrieg

Rome-Berlin Axis (Axis Powers)

Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations in 1933 and began clandestinely and illegally rearming. In 1936 the Nazi Hitler and the Fascist Mussolini (Italy) allied themselves in the Rome-Berlin Axis.

public works, Hoover Dam

Hoover recommended that Congress vote immense sums for useful public works. Though at heart an antispender, he secured from Congress appropriations totaling $2.25 billion for such works. Most imposing on public enterprises was the gigantic Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. Voted by Congress in the days, it was begun in 1930 under Hoover and finished in 1936 under Roosevelt. It succeeded in creating a huge man-made lake for purposes of irrigation, flood control, and electric power.

Hoover's "trickle down" policy

Hoover would assist the hard-pressed railroads, banks, and rural credit corporations, in the hope that if financial health were restored at the top of the economic pyramid, unemployment would be relieved at the bottom on a trickle-down basis.

Senate impeachment trial (obstruction of justice, perjury)

House Republicans passed two articles of impeachment against the president: perjury before a grand jury and obstruction of justice. In early 1999, for the first time in 130 years, the nation witnessed an impeachment proceeding in the US Senate. Dusting off ancient precedents from Andrew Johnson's trial, the one hundred senators solemnly heard arguments and evidence in the case, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist presiding. On the key obstruction of justice charge, five northeastern Republicans joined all 45 Democratic senators in voting not guilty. The fifty Republican votes for conviction fell far short of the constitutionally required two-thirds majority. The vote on the perjury charge was 45 guilty, 55 not guilty.

Mao Zedong, Communist takeover in China

If Japan was a success story for American policy-makers, the opposite was true in China, where a bitter civil war had raged for years between Nationalists and communists. Washington had halfheartedly supported the Nationalist government of Generalissimo Jiang Jieshi in his struggle with the communists under Mao Zedong. But ineptitude and corruption within the generalissimo's regime gradually began to corrode the confidence of his people. Communist armies swept south overwhelmingly, and late in 1949 Jiang was forced to flee with the remnants of his once-powerful force to the last-hope island of Formosa (Taiwan). ADD?

jazz

If the flapper was the goddess of the "era of wonderful nonsense," jazz was its sacred music. With its virtuoso wanderings and tricky syncopation, jazz moved up from New Orleans along with migrating blacks during WWI. Tunes like WC Handy's "St. Louis Blues" became instant classics, as the wailing saxophone became the trumpet of the new era. Blacks such as Handy, "Jelly Roll" Morton, and Joseph King Oliver gave birth to jazz, but the entertainment industry soon spawned all-white bands - cornered the profits, though not the creative soul, of America's most native music.

drought, dry farming, irrigation projects

Ignoring Powell's advice not to move beyond the 100th meridian (b/c it little rain fell, so agriculture was impossible without massive irrigation), farmers heedlessly chewed up the crusty earth in western Kansas, eastern Colorado, and Montana. They quickly went broke as a six-year drought in the 1880s further desiccated the already dusty region. Western Kansas lost half its population between 1888 and 1892. In the wake of the devastating drought, the new technique of "dry farming" took root on the plains. Its methods of frequent shallow cultivation supposedly were adapted to the arid western environment, but over time "dry farming" created a finely pulverized surface soil that contributed to the notorious "Dust Bowl" several decades later. Eventually federally financed irrigation projects - on a colossal scale - caused the Great American Desert to bloom. More than 45 million acres were irrigated in seventeen western states. In the long run, the hydraulic engineers had more to do with shaping the modern West than all the trappers, miners, cavalrymen, and cowboys ever did.

Mexican immigrants, "reconquista"

Immigrants typically left countries where populations were growing rapidly and where agricultural and industrial revolutions were shaking people loose from old habits of life. And they came to America in search of jobs and economic opportunity. Mexican migrants especially flowed to the Southwest. By the turn of the century Latinos made up made up nearly 1/3 of the pop. in Texas, Arizona, and California, and 40% in New Mexico -- amounting to a demographic reconquista of the lands lost by Mexico in the war of 1846. Mexican Americans, because of their heavy concentration, seemed like they would be able to create a truly bicultural zone in the booming southwestern states.

Wilson reelection 1916

In 1916 the Progressives uproariously renominated Theodore Roosevelt, but the Rough Rider, who loathed Wilson and all his works, had no stomach for splitting the Republicans again and ensuring the reelection of his hated rival. In refusing to run, he sounded the death knell of the Progressive party. The Republican's drafted Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes. The Republican platform condemned the Democratic tariff, assaults on the trusts, and Wilson's wishy-washiness in dealing with Mexico and Germany. Wilson, nominated by acclamation at the Democratic convention in St. Louis, ignored Hughes on the theory that one should not try to murder a man who is committing suicide. His campaign was built on the slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War." Democratic orators warned that by electing Hughes, the nation would be electing a fight - with a certain frustrated Rough Rider leading the charge. On election day Hughes swept the East and looked like a surface winner. Midwesterners and westerners, attracted by Wilson's progressive reforms and antiwar policies, flocked to the polls for the president. Wilson barely squeaked through, with a final vote of 277 to 254 in the Electoral College. ADD

Charles Lindbergh, Spirit of St. Louis, trans-Atlantic flight

In 1927 modest and skillful Charles Lindbergh, the so-called Flyin' Fool, electrified the world by the first solo west-to-east conquest of the Atlantic. Seeking a prize of $25,000, the lanky stunt flier courageously piloted his single-engine plane, the "Spirit of St. Louis," from NY to Paris in a grueling 33 hours and 39 minutes.

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

In 1934 Congress took further steps to protect the public against fraud, deception, and inside manipulation. It authorized the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was designed as a watchdog administrative agency. Stock markets henceforth were to operate more as trading marts and less as gambling casinos.

Fidel Castro, communism in Cuba; seizure of property

In 1959, Fidel Castro engineered a revolution that ousted Bastia. Castro then denounced the Yankee imperialists and began to expropriate valuable American properties in pursuing a land-distribution program. Washington released Cuba from "imperialistic slavery" by cutting off the heavy US imports of Cuban sugar. Castro retaliated with further wholesale confiscations of Yankee property and in effect made his left-wing dictatorship an economic and military satellite of Moscow, to the Kremlin's delighted surprise. ADD

National Organization for Women (NOW) (page 959)

In 1966 Betty Friedan, author of "The Feminine Mystique," cofounded the National Organization for Women, the chief political arm of second-wave feminism. NOW campaigned vigorously for an Equal Rights Amendment that in 1982 fell just three states short of ratification.

conscription (Selective Service Act)

In April and May of 1917, the European associates laid their cards on the table. They confessed that they were scraping the bottom not only of their money chests but, more ominously, of their man power barrels. A huge American army would have to be raised, trained, and transported, or the whole western front would collapse. Conscription was the only answers to the need for raising an immense army with all possible speed. Wilson disliked a draft, as did many other Americans with Civil War memories, but he eventually accepted and eloquently supported conscription as a disagreeable and temporary necessity. The proposed draft bill immediately ran into a barrage of criticism in Congress. At length Congress - six weeks after declaring war - grudgingly got around to passing conscription. The draft act required the registration of all males between the ages 18 and 45. No "draft dodger" could purchase his exemption or hire a substitute. Though the law exempted those in key industries, like shipbuilding.

China's Tienanmen Square massacre

In China hundreds of thousands of prodemocracy demonstrators thronged through Beijing's Tienanmen Square in the spring of 1989. They proudly flourished a thirty-foot high "Goddess of Democracy," modeled on the Statue of Liberty, as a symbol of their aspirations. But in June of the year, China's aging and autocratic rulers brutally crushed the prodemocracy movement. Tanks rolled over the crowds, and machine-gunners killed hundred of protestors. World opinion roundly condemned the bloody suppression of the prodemocracy demonstrators.

Rosa Parks

In Dec 1955, Rosa Parks, a college-educated black seamstress, made history in Montgomery, Alabama. She boarded a bus, took a seat in the "whites only" section, and refused to give it up. Her arrest for violating the city's Jim Crow statutes sparked a yearlong black boycott of the city buses and served notice throughout the South that blacks would no longer submit meekly to the absurdities and indignities of segregation.

Axis of Evil: Iraq, Iran, North Korea

In Jan 2002, just weeks after the Sept 11 attacks, Bush claimed that Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, constituted an "axis of evil" that gravely menaced American security. Iran and North Korea were both known to be pursuing nuclear weapons programs, and Iran had long supported terrorist operations in the Middle East. But the Iraqi tyrant, Saddam Hussein, defeated but not destroyed by Bush's father in 1991, became the principal object of the new president's wrath. Bush was brashly determined to break with long-standing American traditions and wage a preemptive war against Iraq -- and to go it alone if necessary.

secret bombings of Cambodia

In July 1973 America was shocked to learn that the US Air Force had secretly conducted some 3500 bombing raids against North Vietnamese positions in Cambodia, beginning in March 1969 and continuing for some fourteen months prior to the open American incursion in May 1970. The disturbing feature of these sky forays was that while they were going on, American officials, including the president, had sworn that Cambodian neutrality was being respected. Countless Americans began to wonder what kind of representative government they had if the US had been fighting a war they knew nothing about.

Sussex Pledge

In March 1916, when the Germans torpedoed a French passenger steamer, the Sussex. The infuriated Wilson informed the Germans that unless they renounced the inhuman practice of sinking merchant ships without warning, he would break diplomatic relations - an almost certain prelude to war. Germany reluctantly knuckled under to President Wilson's Sussex ultimatum, agreeing not to sink passenger ships and merchant vessels without giving warning. But the Germans attached a long string to their Sussex pledge: the US would have to persuade the Allies to modify what Berlin regarded as their illegal blockade. This, obviously, was something that Washington could not do. Wilson promptly accepted the German pledge, without accepting the "string." He thus won a temporary but precarious diplomatic victory - precarious because Germany could pull the string whenever it chose, and the president might suddenly find himself tugged over the cliff of war.

Oklahoma land rush, sooners, boomers

In a last gaudy fling, the federal government made available to settlers vast stretches of fertile plains formerly occupied by the Indians in the district of Oklahoma. Scores of overeager and well-armed "sooners," illegally jumping the gun, entered Oklahoma Territory. They had to be evicted repeatedly by federal troops, who on occasion would shoot the intruders' horses. On April 22, 1889, all was in readiness for the legal opening, and some 50,000 "boomers" were poised expectantly on the boundary line. By the end of the year, Oklahoma boasted over 60,000 inhabitants, and Congress made it a territory. In 1907 it became the "Sooner State."

Truman Doctrine

In a surprise appearance, the president went before Congress on March 12, 1947, and requested support for what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine. Specifically, he asked for $400 million to bolster Greece and Turkey, which Congress quickly granted (Soviets wanted Greece, and if they fell so would Turkey). More generally, he declared that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure" -- a sweeping and open-ended commitment of vast and worrisome proportions. Informal declaration of cold war against the Soviet Union.

suburbs, Levittown, tract houses

In all regions America's modern migrants -- if they were white -- fled form the cities to the burgeoning new suburbs. Government policies encouraged this momentous movement. Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration home-loan guarantees made it more economically attractive to own a home in the suburbs than to rent an apartment in the city. Tax deductions for interest payments on home mortgages provided additional financial incentive. And government-built highways that sped commuters from suburban homes to city jobs further facilitated this mass migration. Pioneered by innovators like the Levitt brothers, whose first "Levittown" sprouted on NY's Long Island in the 1940s, builders revolutionized the techniques of home construction. Erecting hundreds or even thousands of dwellings in a single project, specialized crews working from standardized plans laid foundations, while others raised factory-assembled framing modules, put on roofs, strung wires, installed plumbing, and finished the walls in record time and with cost-cutting efficiency. Snooty critics wailed about the aesthetic monotony of the suburban "tract" developments, but eager home buyers nevertheless moved int them by the millions.

natural selection and evolution

In lucid prose Darwin set forth the sensational theory that higher forms of life had slowly evolved from lower forms, through a process of random biological mutation and adaption. He broke new ground with his idea of "natural selection." Nature, in his view, blindly selected organisms for survival or death based on random, inheritable variations that they happened to possess. Some traits conferred advantages in the struggle for life, and hence better odds of passing them along to offspring.

Southern cotton textile mills

In manufacturing cotton textiles, the South fared considerably better (than in steel). Southerners had long resented shipping their fiber to New England, and now their cry was "Bring the mills to the cotton." Beginning about 1880, northern capital began to erect cotton mills in the South, largely in response to tax benefits and the prospect of cheap and non-unionized labor. The textile mills proved a mixed blessing to the economically blighted South. They slowly wove an industrial thread into the fabric of southern life, but at a considerable human cost. Cheap labor was the South's major attraction for potential investors, and keeping labor cheap became almost a religion among southern industrialists. Rural southerners - virtually all of them white, for blacks were excluded from all but the most menial jobs in the mills - poured out of the hills and hollows to seek employment in the hastily erected company mill towns. ADD?

Hay's Open Door Note and China

In the summer of 1899, Hay dispatched to all great powers a communication soon known as the Open Door note. He urged them to announce that in their leaseholds of spheres of influence they would respect certain Chinese rights and the ideal of fair competition. Tellingly, Hay had not bother to consult the Chinese themselves. The phrase "Open Door" quickly caught the American public's fancy. But Hay's proposal caused much squirming in the leading capitals of the world, though all the great powers save Russia, with covetous designs on Manchuria, eventually agreed to it.

Patriot Act 2001; Department of Homeland Security

In this anxious atmosphere, Congress in Oct 2001 rammed through the USA Patriot Act. The Act permitted extensive telephone and e-mail surveillance and authorized the detention and deportation of immigrants suspected of terrorism. Just over a year later, Congress created a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security to protect the nation's borders and ferret out potential attackers.

U.S. Steel, Taft and Roosevelt

In truth, Roosevelt never swung his trust-crushing stick with maximum force. In many ways the huge industrial behemoths were healthier - though perhaps more "tame" - at the end of Roosevelt's reign than they had been before. His successor, William Howard Taft, actually "busted" more trusts than TR did. In one celebrated instance in 1907, Roosevelt even gave his personal blessing to JP Morgan's plan to have US Steel absorb the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, without fear of antitrust reprisals. When Taft then launched a suit against US Steel in 1911, the political reaction from TR was explosive.

separation of church and state; school prayer prohibited

In two stunning decisions, Engel v. Vitale (1962) and School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963), the Court outraged religious conservatives when it invoked the First Amendment, which requires the separation of church and state, to prohibit required prayers and Bible reading in public schools.

attempts to end the Indian New Deal

In yet another of the rude and arbitrary reversals that long have afflicted the government's relations with Native Americans, Eisenhower sought to cancel the tribal preservation policies of the "Indian New Deal," in place since 1934. He proposed to "terminate" the tribes as legal entities and to revert to the assimilationists goals of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. Most Indians resisted termination, and the policy was abandoned in 1961.

"Ole Miss"; James Meredith

Integrating universities threatened to provoke wholesale slaughter. Some desegregated painlessly, but the University of Mississippi ("Ole Miss") became a volcano. A 29 year old air force veteran, James Meredith, encountered violent opposition when he attempted to register in Oct 1962. In the end JFK was forced to send in 400 federal marshals and 3,000 troops to enroll Meredith in his first class -- in colonial American history.

tax cuts

JFK soon appealed to believers of free enterprise when he announced his support of a general tax-cut bill. He rejected the advice of those who wished greater government spending and instead chose to stimulate the economy by slashing taxes and putting more money directly into private hands.

European Union (EU) and reduced tariffs

JFK turned his attention to Western Europe, no miraculously prospering after the tonic of Marshall Plan aid and the growth of the American-encouraged Common Market, the free trade area that evolved into the European Union. He finally secured passage of the Trade Expansion Act in 1962, authorizing tariff cuts of up to 50% to promote trade with Common Market countries. This legislation led to the so-called Kennedy Round of tariff negotiations, concluded in 1967, and to a significant expansion of European-American trade.

Mugwumps, Democrats, Grover Cleveland, 1884

James G. Blaine was the clear choice of the Republican convention in Chicago. But many reform-minded Republicans gagged on Blaine's candidacy. Some reformers, unable to swallow Blaine, bolted to the Democrats. They were sneeringly dubbed ___, a word of Indian derivation meant to suggest that they were "sanctimonious" or "holier-than-thou." Victory-starved Democrats turned enthusiastically to a noted reformer, ____. He was a solid but not brilliant lawyer. He had rocketed from the mayor's office in Buffalo to the governorship of NY and the presidential nomination in three short years. The campaign of 1884 sank to perhaps the lowest level in American experience, as the two parties grunted and shoved the hog trough of office. Few fundamental differences separated them. Personalities, not principles, claimed the headlines. ADD?

U.S. embargo of Japanese imports: oil, steel, funds

Japan (a formal military ally of Nazi Germany since September 1940) was still mired down in the costly and exhausting "China incident," from which it could extract neither honor nor victory. Its war machine was fatally dependent on immense shipments of steel, scrap iron, oil, and aviation gasoline from the US. Such assistance to the Japanese aggressor was highly unpopular in America. But FDR had resolutely held off an embargo, lest he goad Tokyo warlords into a descent upon the oil-rich but defense-poor Dutch East Indies. Washington, late in 1940, finally imposed the first of its embargoes on Japan-bound supplies. This blow was followed in mid-1941 by a freezing of Japanese assets in the US and a cessation of all shipments of gasoline and other sinews of war. As the oil gauge dropped, the squeeze on Japan grew steadily more nerve-racking. Japanese leaders were faced with two painful alternatives: knuckle under to the Americans or break out of the embargo ring by a desperate attack on the oil supplies and other riches of Southeast Asia. ADD?

Battle of Midway

Japan next undertook to seize Midway Island, more than a thousand miles northwest of Honolulu. From this strategic base, it could launch devastating assault on Pearl Harbor and perhaps force the weakened American Pacific fleet into destructive combat -- possibly even compel the US to negotiate a cease-fire in the Pacific. An epochal naval battle was fought near Midway on June 3-6, 1942. Admiral Chester Nimitz, a high-grade naval strategist, directed a smaller but skillfully maneuvered carrier force, under Admiral Raymond Spruance, against the powerful invading fleet. The fighting was all done by aircraft, and the Japanese broke off action after losing four vitally important carriers. Combined with the Battle of the Coral Sea, the US success at Midway halted Japan's juggernaut.

Vietnam "attack"; Tonkin Gulf Resolution

Johnson cultivated the contrasting image of a resolute statesman (compared to Goldwater) by seizing upon the Tonkin Gulf episode early in August 1964. Unbeknownst to the American public or Congress, US Navy ships had been cooperating with South Vietnamese gunboats in provocative raids along the coast of North Vietnam. Two of these destroyers were allegedly fired upon by the North Vietnamese on August 2 and 4, although exactly what happened still remains unclear. Johnson called the attack "unprovoked" and moved swiftly to make political hay out of the episode. He ordered a "limited" retaliatory air raid against the North Vietnamese bases, loudly proclaiming that he sought "no wider war" -- thus implying that the truculent Goldwater did. Johnson also used the incident to spur congressional passage of the all-purpose Tonkin Gulf Resolution. With only two dissenting votes in both houses, the lawmakers virtually abdicated their war-declaring powers and handled the president a blank check to use further force in Southeast Asia.

Election 1920 and Harding

Jubilant Republicans gathered in Chicago in June 1920 with wayward bull moosers back in the corral (after Roosevelt's death in 1919) and the senatorial Old Guard back in the saddle. The convention devised a masterfully ambiguous platform that could appeal to both pro-League and anti-League sentiment in the party. The nominee would run on a teeter-totter rather than a platform. The Republicans nominated Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio for president and Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts as VP. The Democrats nominated earnest Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, who strongly supported the League. His running mate was Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt. Democratic attempts to make the campaign a referendum on the League were thwarted by Senator Harding, who issued muddled and contradictory statements on the issue. Pro-League and anti-League Republicans both claimed that Harding's election would advance their cause, while the candidate suggested that if elected he would work for a vague Association of Nations - a league but not the League. With newly enfranchised women swelling the vote totals, Harding won with over 7 million votes.

Marshall Plan

Key nations in Western Europe (France, Italy, and Germany) were still suffering from the hunger and economic chaos spawned by war. They were in grave danger of being taken over from the inside by Communist parties that could exploit these hardships. In a commencement address at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall invited the Europeans to get together and work out a joint plan for their economic recovery. If they did so, then the US would provide substantial financial assistance. The Marshall Plan called for spending $12.5 billion over four years in sixteen cooperating countries. Congress at first balked at this mammoth sum. It looked even more huge when added to the nearly $2 billion the US had already contributed to European relief through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the hefty American contributions to the UN, IMF, and World Bank. But Soviet-sponsored communist coup in Czechoslovakia finally awakened the legislators to reality, and they voted the initial appropriations in April 1948. add? change?

Guam and Puerto Rico; the Philippines

Late in 1898 Spanish and American negotiators met in Paris. War-racked Cuba, as expected, was freed from its Spanish overlords. The Americans had little difficulty in securing the remote Pacific island of Guam, which they had captured early in the conflict from the astonished Spaniards, who, lacking a cable, had not known that a war was on. Spain also ceded Puerto Rico to the US as payment for war costs. Ironically, the last remnant of Spain's vast New World empire thus became the first territory ever annexed to the US without the express promise of eventual statehood. In the decades to come, American investment in the island and Puerto Rican immigration to the US would make this acquisition one of the weightier consequences of the somewhat carefree war. Knottiest of all was the problem of the Philippines, a veritable apple of discord. These lush lands not only embraced an area larger than the British Isles but also contained an ethnically diverse population of some 7 million souls. McKinley did not feel that America could honorably give the islands back to Spanish misrule, esp. after it had fought a war to free Cuba. And America would be turning it back upon its responsibilities in a cowardly fashion, he believed, if it simply pulled up anchor and sailed away. The public seemed to call for the entire group of islands. Zealous Protestant missionaries were eager for new converts from Spanish Catholicism, and the invalid Mrs. McKinley, to whom her husband was devoted, expressed deep concern about the welfare of the Filipinos. Wall Street had generally opposed the war, but it was clamoring for for profits in the Philippines. ADD?

Carrie Nation and her hatchet

Less saintly (than Frances E. Willard) was a muscular and mentally deranged "Kansas Cyclone," ____, whose first husband died of alcoholism. With her hatchet she boldly smashed saloon bottles and bars, and her "hatchetations" brought considerable disrepute to the prohibition movement because of the violence of her one-woman crusade.

farm overproduction

Machines also threatened farmers under an avalanche of their own overabundant crops. The gasoline-engine tractor was working a revolution on American farms. Farmers no longer had to plod after the horse-drawn plow with high-footed gait. They could sit erect on their chugging mechanized chariots and turn under and harrow many acres in a single day. They could grow bigger crops on larger areas, using fewer horses and hired hands. But such improved efficiency and expanded agricultural acreage helped to pile up more price-dampening surpluses. A withering depression swept through agricultural districts in the 1920s, when one farm in four was sold for debt or taxes. add?

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

Martin Luther King, Jr., formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. It aimed to mobilize the vast power of the black churches on behalf of blacks rights. This was an exceptionally shrewd strategy, because the churches were the largest and best-organized black institutions that had been allowed to flourish in a segregated society.

McKinley's War Message and the Teller Amendment

McKinely, recognizing the inevitable, eventually yielded and gave the people what they wanted. But public pressure did not fully explain his course. He had little faith in Spain's oft-broken promises. He worried about Democratic reprisals in the upcoming presidential election of 1900 if he continued to appear indecisive in a time of crisis. He also acknowledged America's commercial and strategic interests in Cuba. On April 11, 1898, McKinely sent his war message to Congress, urging armed intervention to free the oppressed Cubans. The legislators responded uproariously with what was essentially a declaration of war. In a burst of self-righteousness, they likewise adopted the hand-tying Teller Amendment. This proviso proclaimed to the world that when the US had overthrown Spanish misrule, it would give the Cubans their freedom - a declaration that caused imperialistic Europeans to smile skeptically.

computers and IBM

More than ever, science and technology drove economic growth. The invention of the transistor in 1948 sparked a revolution in electronics, and esp. in computers. The first electronic computers assembled in the 1940s were massive machines with hundreds of miles of wiring and thousands of fickle cathode ray tubes. Transistors and, later, printed circuits on silicon wafers made possible the dramatic miniaturization and phenomenal computational speed. Computer giant International Business Machines (IBM) expanded robustly, becoming the prototype of the "high-tech" corporation in the dawning "information age." Eventually personal computers and even inexpensive pocket calculators contained more computing power than room-size early models.

Mideast oil

Nasser's action placed a razor's edge at the jugular vein of Western Europe's oil supply. America's jittery French and British allies, deliberately keeping Washington in the dark and coordinating their blow with one from Israel, staged a joint assault on Egypt in Oct 1956. For a breathless week, the world teetered on the edge of the abyss. The French and British, however, had made a fatal miscalculation -- that the US would supply them with oil while their Middle Eastern supplies were disrupted, as an oil-rich Uncle Sam had done in the two world wars. But to their unpleasant surprise, a furious Eisenhower resolved to let them "boil in their own oil" and refused to release emergency supplies. The oilless allies resentfully withdrew their troops, and for the first time in history, a UN police force was sent to maintain order. add?

Indian Reorganization Act; "Back to the Blanket"

Native American also felt the far-reaching hand of New Deal reform. Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier ardently sought to reverse the forced-assimilation policies in place since the Dawes Act of 1887. Inspired by the sojourn among the Pueblo Indians in Taos, New Mexico, Collier promoted the Indian Reservation Act of 1934. The new law encouraged tribes to establish local self-government and to preserve their native crafts and traditions. The act also helped to stop the loss of Indian lands and revived tribes' interest in their identity and culture. Yet not all Indians applauded it. Some denounced the legislation as a "black-to-the-blanket" measure that sought to make museum pieces out of Native Americans. Seventy-seven tribes refused to organize under its provisions, though nearly two hundred others did establish tribal governments.

Veterans Bureau

Needy veterans were among the few nonbusiness groups to reap lasting gains from the war. Congress in 1921 generously created the Veterans Bureau, authorized to operate hospitals and provide vocational rehabilitation for the disabled.

Nixon landslide 1972, "southern strategy"

Nixon devised a clever but cynical plan -- called the "southern strategy" -- to achieve a solid majority in 1972. Appointing conservative Supreme Court justices, soft-pedaling civil rights, and opposing school busing to achieve racial balance were all parts of the strategy. But as fate would have it, the souther strategy became superfluous as foreign policy dominated the presidential campaign of 1972. Vietnam continued to be the burning issue. The continuing Vietnam conflict spurred the rise of South Dakota senator George McGovern to the 1972 Democratic nomination. Nixon's campaign emphasized that he had wound down the "Democratic war" in Vietnam from some 540,000 troops to about 30,000. His candidacy received an added boost when Dr. Kissinger announced that "peace is at hand" in Vietnam and that an agreement would be settled in a few days. Nixon won the election in a landslide. His victory encompassed every state except Massachusetts and the nonstate DC.

Watergate break-in, dirty tricks, enemies list

Nixon's electoral triumph in 1972 was almost immediately sullied -- and eventually undone -- by the so-called Watergate scandal. On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested in the Watergate apartment-office complex in Washington after a bungled effort to plant electronic "bugs" in the Democratic party's headquarters. They were soon revealed to be working for the Republican Committee for the Re-election of the President. The Watergate break-in turned out to be just one in a series of Nixon administration "dirty tricks" that included forging documents to discredit Democrats, using the Internal Revenue Service to harass innocent citizens named on a White House "enemies list," burglarizing the office of the psychiatrist who had treated the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, and perverting the FBI and the CIA to cover the tricksters' tracks.

Battle of Chateau-Thierry and American "Doughboys"

No really effective American fighting force reached France until about a year after Congress declared war. Nevertheless, France gradually bean to bustle with American doughboys. The first trainees to reach the front were used as replacements in the Allied armies and were generally deployed in quiet sectors with British and French. Late in May 1918, the German juggernaut, smashing to within forty miles of Paris, threatened to knock out France. Newly arrived American troops, numbering fewer than thirty thousand, were thrown into the breach at Chateau-Thierry, right in the teeth of German advance. This was a historic moment, the first significant engagement of American troops in a European war. Battle fatigued French soldiers watched incredulously as the roads filled with endless truckloads of American doughboys, singing new World songs at the top of their voices, a seemingly inexhaustible flood of fresh and gleaming youth. With their arrival it was clear that a new American giant had arisen in the West to replace the dying Russian titan in the East.

Battle of the Atlantic

Not until the spring of 1943 did the Allies clearly have the upper hand against the German U-boat. If they had not won the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain would have been forced under, and a second front could not have been launched from its island springboard. Victory over the undersea raiders was nerve-rackingly narrow. When the war ended, Hitler was about to mass-produce a fearsome new submarine -- on the could remain underwater indefinitely and cruise at seventeen knots when submerged.

Holocaust (page 808-9)

Of course, no one yet knew just how fiendish a destiny Hitler was preparing for Europe's Jews. Strictly speaking, the Holocaust -- defined as systematic genocide designed to eliminate all Jews from Europe -- began only in January 1942, well after the war had started.

September 11, 2001; Osama bin Laden; Al Qaeda

On Sept 11, 2001, the long era of America's impregnable national security violently ended. Suicidal terrorists slammed two hijacked airliners, loaded with passengers and jet fuel, into the twin towers of NYC's World Trade Center. They flew a third plane into the military nerve center of the Pentagon, near DC, killing 189 people. Heroic passengers forced another hijacked aircraft to crash in rural Pennsylvania, killing all 44 aboard but depriving the terrorists of a fourth weapon of mass destruction. President Bush responded with a sober and stirring address to Congress nine days later. While emphasizing his respect for the Islamic religion and Muslim people, he identified the principal enemy as Osama bin Laden, head of a shadowy terrorist network known as Al Qaeda. A wealthy extremist exiled from his native Saudi Arabia, bin Laden was associated with earlier attacks on American embassies in East Africa and on a US Navy vessel in Yemen. Bin Laden was known to harbor venomous resentment toward the US for its economic embargo against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, its growing military presence in the Middle East, and its support for Israel's hostility toward Palestinian nationalism.

Columbine high school shootings

On an April morning in 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killed twelve fellow students and a teacher. Debate flared over the origins of school violence. Some observers targeted the violence portrayed in movies, TV shows, and video games; others pointed to the failings of parents. But the culprit that attracted the most sustained political attention was guns -- their abundance and accessibility, esp. in suburban and rural communities. add?

election night surprise

On election night the Chicago Tribune ran off an early edition with the headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." But in the morning, it turned out that "President" Dewey had embarrassingly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Truman had swept to a stunning triumph, to the complete bewilderment of politicians, pollsters, prophets, and pundits. Truman won 303 electoral votes, primarily from the South, Midwest, and West. To make the victory sweeter, the Democrats regained control of Congress as well.

murder of Medgar Evers; Birmingham church bombing

On the very night of Kennedy's stirring television address, a white gunman shot down Medgar Evers, a black Mississippi civil rights worker. In Sept 1963 an explosion blasted a Baptist church in Birmingham, killing four black girls who had just finished their lesson called "The Love That Forgives." By the time of JFK's death, his civil rights bill was making little headway, and frustrated blacks were growing increasingly impatient.

Oregon Nez Percé tribe; Chief Joseph

One band of Nez Percé Indians in northeastern Oregon were goaded into daring flight in 1877, when US authorities tried to herd them onto a reservation. Chief Joseph finally surrendered his breakaway band of some seven hundred Indians after a tortuous, seventeen-hundred-mile, three-month trek across the Continental Divide toward Canada. There Joseph hoped to rendezvous with Sitting Bull, who had taken refuge north of the border after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Betrayed into believing they would be returned to their ancestral lands in Idaho, the Nez Percés instead were sent to a dusty reservation in Kansas, where 40% of them perished from disease. The survivors were eventually allowed to return to Idaho.

Alexander Graham Bell, telephone

One of the most ingenious inventions was the ___, introduced by ______ in 1876. A teacher of the deaf who was given a dead man's ear to experiment with, he remarked that if he could make the mute talk, he could make the iron speak. America was speedily turning into a nation of "telephoniacs," as a gigantic communications network was built on his invention. The social impact of this instrument was further revealed when an additional army of "number please" women was attracted from the stove to the switchboard. ___ boys were at first employed as operators, but their profanity shocked patrons.

Works Progress Administration WPA

Partly to quiet the groundswell of unrest produced by such crackbrained proposals (from the demagogues), Congress authorized the Works Progress Administration in 1935. The objective was employment on useful projects. Launched under the supervision of the ailing but energetic Hopkins, this remarkable agency spent about $11 billion on thousands of public buildings, bridges, and hard-surfaced roads. Not every WPA project strengthened the infrastructure: for instance, one controlled crickets in Wyoming, while another built a monkey pen in Oklahoma City. Over a period of 8 years, nearly 9 million people were given jobs, not handouts.

1900 election; McKinley and T. Roosevelt

President McKinley's renomination by the Republicans in 1900 was a foregone conclusion. He had won a war and acquired rich, though burdensome, real estate; he had safeguarded the gold standard; and he had brought the promised prosperity of the full dinner pail. An irresistible vice-presidential boom developed for Theodore Roosevelt, the cowboy-hero of the Cuban campaign. Capitalizing on his war-born popularity, he had been elected governor of NY, where the local political bosses had found him headstrong and difficult to manage. They therefore devised a scheme to kick the colorful colonel upstairs to the vice presidency. This plot to railroad Roosevelt worked beautifully. To cries of "We want Teddy!" he was handily nominated. The Democrats, nominating William Jennings Bryan, proclaimed that the paramount issue was Republican overseas imperialism. McKinley once again campaigned safely from his front porch. Bryan again took to the stump in a cyclonic campaign. Lincoln, he charged, had abolished slavery for 3.5 million Africans; McKinley had reestablished it for 7 million Filipinos. Roosevelt out-Bryaned Bryan, touring the country with revolver-shooting cowboys. Flashing his monumental teeth and pounding his fist into his palm, Roosevelt denounced all dastards who would haul down Old Glory. McKinley handily triumphed by a much wider margin than in 1896. But victory for the Republicans was not a mandate for or against imperialism. If there was a mandate at all it was for prosperity and protectionism.

Roosevelt's death

President Roosevelt, while relaxing at Warm Springs, Georgia, suddenly died from a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. The crushing burden of twelve depression and war years in the White House had finally taken its toll. Knots of confused, leaderless citizens gathered to discuss the future anxiously, as a bewildered, unbriefed Vice President Truman took the helm.

gangsters, Al Capone

Prohibition spawned shocking crimes. The lush profits of illegal alcohol led to bribery of the police. Violent wars broke out in the big cities between rival gangs - often rooted in immigrant neighborhoods - who sought to corner the rich market in booze. Rival triggermen used their sawed-off shot guns and chattering machine guns to "erase" bootlegging competitors who were trying to "muscle in" on their "racket." In the gang wars of the 1920s in Chicago, about five hundred mobsters were murdered. In 1925 "Scarface" Al Capone, a grasping and murderous booze distributor, began six years of gang warfare that netted him millions of blood-splattered dollars (in Chicago). He zoomed through the streets in an armor-plated car with bulletproof windows. Capone, though branded "Public Enemy Number One," could not be convicted of the cold-blooded massacre, on St. Valentine's Day in 1929, of seven disarmed members of a rival gang. But after serving most of an eleven-year sentence in a federal penitentiary for income-tax evasion, he was released as a syphilitic wreck.

Coxey's Army

Ragged armies of the unemployed began marching to protest their plight. The most famous of these marchers was "General" Jacob S. Coxey, a wealthy Ohio quarry owner. He set out for Washington in 1894 with a few score of supporters and a swarm of newspaper reporters. His platform included a demand that the government relieve unemployment by an inflationary public works program, supported by some $500 million in legal tender notes to be issued by the Treasury. The "Commonweal Army" of Coxeyites finally straggled into the nation's capital, but the invasion took on the aspects of a comic opera when "General" Coxey and his "lieutenants" were arrested for walking on the grass.

military spending, rising debt, trade deficits

Reagan cascaded nearly 2 trillion budget dollars onto the Pentagon in the 1980s, asserting the need to close a "window of vulnerability" in the armaments race with the Soviet Union. Ironically, this conservative president thereby plunged the government into a red-ink bath of deficit spending that made the New Deal look downright stingy. Federal budget deficits topped $100 billion in 1982, and the government's books were nearly $200 billion out of balance in every subsequent year of the 1980s. Massive government borrowing to cover those deficits kept interest rates high, and high interest rates in turn elevated the value of the dollar to record altitudes in the international money markets. The soaring dollar was good news for American tourists and buyers of foreign cars, but it dealt crippling blows to American exporters, as the American international trade deficit reached a record $152 billion in 1987. The masters of international commerce and finance for a generation after WWII, Americans suddenly became the world's heaviest borrowers in the global economy of the 1980s.

Douglas MacArthur; Japan civilian and military control

Reconstruction in Japan was simpler than in Germany, primarily because it was largely a one-man show. The occupying American army, under the supreme Allied commander, five-star general Douglas MacArthur, sat in the drivers seat. In the teeth of violent protests from the Soviet officials, MacArthur went inflexibly ahead with his program for democratization of Japan. Following the pattern Germany, top Japanese "war criminals" were tried in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948. Eighteen of the were sentenced to prison terms, and seven were hanged. The Japanese cooperated with MacArthur to an astonishing degree. They saw that good behavior and the adoption of democracy would speed the end of the occupation -- as it did. A MacArthur-dictated constitution was adopted in 1946. It renounced militarism, provided for women's equality, and introduced Western-style democratic government -- paving the way for a phenomenal economic recovery that within a few decades made Japan one of the world's mightiest industrial powers.

Poland's Solidarity Movement

Relations with the Soviets further nose-dived in the late 1980s, when the government of Poland, needled for over a year by a popular movement of working-people organized into a massive union called "Solidarity," clamped martial law on the troubled country. Reagan saw the heavy fist of the Kremlin inside this Polish iron glove, and he imposed economic sanctions on Poland and the USSR alike.

McCarthyism: techniques, consequences

Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy was an obstreperous anticommunist crusader. He was neither the first nor the most effective red-hunter, but he was surely the most ruthless, and he did the most damage to American traditions of fair play and free speech. The careers of countless officials, writers, and actors were ruined after "Low-Blow Joe" had "named" them, often unfairly, as communists or communist sympathizers. Politicians trembled in the face of such onslaughts, esp. when opinion polls showed that a majority of the American people approved of McCarthy's crusade. Trying to appease the brash demagogue, Eisenhower allowed him, in effect, to control personnel policy at the State Department. One baleful result was severe damage to the morale and effectiveness of the professional foreign service. "McCarthyism" has passed into the English language as a label for the dangerous forces of unfairness and fear that a democratic society can unleash only at its peril.

Election 1960: Kennedy against Nixon

Republicans approached the presidential campaign of 1960 with VP Nixon as their heir apparent. Nixon handily won the Republican nomination; his running mate was patrician Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts. The Democrats elected John F. Kennedy -- a youthful, dark-haired millionaire senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy charged that the Soviets, with their nuclear bombs and circling Sputniks, had gained on America in prestige and power. Nixon retorted that the nation's prestige had not slipped, although Kennedy was causing it to do so by his unpatriotic talk. Kennedy squeezed through by the rather comfortable margin of 303 electoral votes to 219.

Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, 1937

Responding to the overwhelming popular pressure, Congress made haste to legislate the nation out of war. The Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937, taken together, stipulated that when the president proclaimed the existence of a foreign war, certain restrictions would automatically go into effect. No American could legally sail on a belligerent ship, sell of transport munitions to a belligerent, or make loans to a belligerent. The head-in-the-sand legislation in effect marked an abandonment of the traditional policy of freedom of the seas--a policy for which America had professedly fought two full-fledged wars and several undeclared wars. The Acts were specifically tailored to keep the nation out of a conflict like WWI. If they had been in effect at that time, America probably would not have been sucked in--at least not in April 1917. Congress was one war too late with its legislation.

3 R's: relief, recovery, reform

Roosevelt's New Deal programs aimed at three R's - relief, recovery, and reform. Short-range goals were relief and immediate recovery, esp. in the first two years. Long-range goals were permanent recovery and reform of current abuses, particularly those that had produced the boom-or-bust catastrophe. The three-R objectives often overlapped and got in one another's way. But amid all the topsy-turvy haste, the gigantic New Deal program lurched forward. CHART ON PAGE 774 and 777

good and bad trusts; Northern Securities (RR) Company

Roosevelt believed that these industrial behemoths (trusts), with their efficient means of production, had arrived to stay. He concluded that there were "good" trusts, with public consciences, and "bad" trusts, which lusted greedily for power. He was determined to respond to the popular outcry against the trusts but was also determined not to throw out the baby with the bathwater by indiscriminately smashing all large businesses. Roosevelt, a trustbuster, first burst into the headlines in 1902 with an attack on the Northern Securities Company, and railroad holding company organized by financial titan JP Morgan and empire builder James J. Hill. These Napoleonic moguls of money sought to achieve a virtual monopoly of the railroads in the Northwest. Roosevelt was therefore challenging the most regal potentates of the industrial aristocracy. The railway promoters appealed to the Supreme Court, which in 1904 upheld Roosevelt's antitrust suit and ordered the Northern Securities Company to be dissolved.

Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine

Roosevelt feared that if the Germans or British got their foot in the door as bill collectors, they might remain in Latin America (Latin Americans owed debts), in flagrant violation of the Monroe Doctrine. He therefore declared a brazen policy of "preventive intervention," better known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. He announced that in the even of future financial malfeasance by the Latin American nations, the US itself would intervene, take over the customshouses, pay off the debts, and keep the troublesome Europeans on the other side of the Atlantic. In short, no outsiders could push around the Latin nations except Uncle Same, Policeman of the Caribbean. add?

FDR and the Supreme Court

Roosevelt saw his reelection as a mandate for more New Deal reforms. But to him the men on the supreme bench stood stubbornly in the pathway of progress. In nine major cases involving the New Deal, the Roosevelt administration had been thwarted seven times. As luck would have it, not a single member of the Supreme Court had been appointed by FDR in his first term. Roosevelt viewed with mounting impatience what he regarded as the obstructive conservatism of the Court. Some of these Old Guard appointees were hanging on with a senile grip, partly because they felt it their patriotic duty to curb "socialistic" tendencies of that radical in the White House. FDR believed that the voters in three successive elections (presidential: 1932 and 1936, and congressional: 1934) had returned a smashing verdict in favor of his program of reform. Democracy, in his view, meant rule by the people. If the American way of life was to be preserved, FDR argued, the Supreme Court ought to get in line with the supreme court of public opinion.

Roosevelt Panic of 1907; Aldrich-Vreeland Act

Roosevelt suffered a sharp setback in 1907, when a short but punishing panic descended on Wall Street. The financial flurry featured frightened "runs" on banks, suicides, and criminal indictments against speculators. The financial world hastened to blame Roosevelt for the storm. It cried that this "quack" had unsettled industry with his boat-rocking tactics. Conservatives damned him as "Theodore the Meddler" and branded the current distress the "Roosevelt panic." Fortunately, the panic of 1907 paved the way for long-overdue fiscal reforms. Precipitating a currency shortage, the flurry laid bare the need for a more elastic medium of exchange. In a crisis of this sort, the hard-pressed banks were unable to increase the volume of money in circulation, and those with ample reserves were reluctant to lend to their less fortunate competitors. Congress in 1908 responded by passing the Aldrich-Vreeland Act, which authorized national banks to issue emergency currency backed by various kinds of collateral. The path was thus smoothed for the momentous Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

bank failures

Signals abounded that the economic joyride might end in a crash; even in the best years of the 1920s, several hundred banks failed annually. This something-for-nothing craze was well illustrated by real estate speculation, esp. the fantastic Florida boom that culminated in 1925. Numerous underwater lots were sold to eager purchasers for a preposterous sums. The whole wildcat scheme collapsed when the peninsula was devastated by a West Indian hurricane, which belied advertisements of a "soothing tropical wind."

Japan spreads in the Pacific

Simultaneously with the assault on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched widespread and uniformly successful attacks on various Far Eastern bastions. These included the American outposts of Guam, Wake, and the Philippines. In a dismaying short time, the Japanese invader seized not only the British-Chinese port of Hong Kong but also British Malaya, with its critically important supplies of rubber and tin. The overambitious soldiers of the emperor, plunging into the snake-infested jungles of Burma, cut the famed Burma Road. This was the route the US had been trucking a trickle of munitions to the armies of the Chinese generalissimo Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), who was still resisting the Japanese invader of China. The Japanese lunged southward against the oil-rich Dutch East Indies next. The islands speedily fell to the assailants after the combined British, Australian, Dutch, and American naval and air forces had been smashed at an early date by their numerically superior foe.

Emergency Quota Act of 1921

Some 800,000 immigrants stepped ashore in 1920-1921. The "one-hundred-percent Americans," recoiling at the sight of this resumed "New Immigration," once again cried that the famed poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty was all too literally true: they claimed that the sickly Europe was indeed vomiting on America "the wretched refuse of its teeming shore." Congress temporarily plugged the breach with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Newcomers from Europe were restricted in any given year to a definite quota, which was set at 3 percent of the people of their nationality who had been living in the US in 1910. This national-origins system was relatively favorable to the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, for by 1910 immense numbers of them had already arrived.

Black power goals

Some advocates of Black Power insisted that they simply intended the slogan to describe a broad-front effort to exercise the political and economic rights gained by the civil rights movement and to speed the integration of American society. But other African Americans, recollecting previous black nationalist movements like that of Marcus Garvey earlier in the century, breathed a vibrant separatist meaning into the concept of Black Power. They emphasized African American distinctiveness, promoted "Afro" hairstyles and dress, she their "white" names for new African identities, and demanded black studies programs in schools and universities.

Interstate Commerce Act (list parts)

Stiff-necked President Cleveland did not look kindly on effective regulation. But Congress ignored his grumbling indifference and passed the epochal ___ in 1887. It prohibited rebates and pools and required the railroads to publish their rates openly. It also forbade unfair discrimination against shippers and outlawed charging more for a short haul than for a long one over the same line. Most important, it set up the Interstate Commerce Commission to administer and enforce new legislation.

Wilson retreats from Dollar Diplomacy

Suspicious of Wall Street, Wilson detested the so-called dollar diplomacy of Taft. In office only a week he declared war on dollar diplomacy. He proclaimed that the government would no longer offer special support to American investors in Latin America China. Shivering from this Wilsonian bucket of cold water, American bankers pulled out of the Taft-engineered six-nation loan to China the next day. He believed in moral diplomacy - treat these other countries with respect and dignity, but stay out of their government (don't send in troops).

Ballinger-Pinchot scandal

Taft was a dedicated conservationist, and his contributions actually equaled or surpassed those of Roosevelt. But those praiseworthy accomplishments were largely erased in the public mind by the noisy Ballinger-Pinchot quarrel that erupted in 1910. When Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger opened public lands in Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska to corporate development, he was sharply criticized by Gifford Pinchot, chief of the Agriculture Department's Division of Forestry and a stalwart Rooseveltian. When Taft dismissed Pinchot on the narrow grounds of insubordination, a storm of protest arose from conservationists and from Roosevelt's friends, who were legion. The whole unsavory episode further widened the growing rift between the president and the former president, onetime bosom political partners.

Gen. Pershing and the Meuse-Argonne offensive

The Americans, dissatisfied with merely bolstering the British and French, had been demanding a separate army. General Jon J Pershing was finally assigned a front of eighty-five miles, stretching northwestward from the Swiss border to meet the French lines. As part of the last mighty Allied assault, involving several million men, Pershing's army undertook the Meuse-Argonne offensive, from September 26 to November 11, 1918. One objective was to cut the German railroad lines feeding the Western front. This battle, the most gargantuan thus far in American history, lasted forty-seven days and engaged 1.2 million American troops. The killed and wounded mounted to 120,000 or 10 percent of the Americans involved. The slow progress and severe losses from machine guns resulted in part from inadequate training, in part from dashing open-field tactics, with the bayonet liberally employed. The German's allies were deserting them, the British blockade was causing critical food shortages, and the sledgehammer blows of the Allies pummeled them relentlessly.

Cuban Missile Crisis; quarantine; terms for stand down

The Bay of Pigs blunder, along with continuing American covert efforts to assassinate Castro and overthrow his government, naturally pushed the Cuban leader even further into the Soviet embrace. Chairman Khrushchev lost little time in taking full advantage of his Cuban comrade's position just ninety miles off Florida's coast. In Oct 1962 the aerial photographs of American spy planes revealed that the Soviets were secretly and speedily installing nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. The Soviets evidently intended to use these devastating weapons to shield Castro and to blackmail the US into backing down in Berlin and other trouble spots. JFK flatly rejected air force proposals for a "surgical" bombing strike against the missile-launching sites. Instead, on Oct 22, 1962, he ordered a naval "quarantine" of Cuba and demanded immediate removal of the threatening weaponry. He also served notice on Khrushchev that any attack on the US from Cuba would be regarded as coming from the Soviet Union and would trigger nuclear retaliation against the Russian heartland. On Oct 28 Khrushchev agreed to a partially face-saving compromise, by which he would pull the missiles out of Cuba. The US in return agreed to end the quarantine and not invade the island (the US government also signaled that it would remove from Turkey some of its missiles aimed at the Soviet Union).

Guantanamo military base and prison

The Bush admin further called for trying suspected terrorists before military tribunals, where the usual rules of evidence and procedure did not apply. As hundreds of Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan languished in legal limbo on the American military base at Guantanamo, Cuba, public-opinion polls showed Americans sharply divided on whether the terrorist threat fully warranted such drastic encroachments of America's venerable tradition of protecting civil liberties.

U-2 spy plane

The Camp David spirit quickly evaporated when the follow-up Paris "summit conference," scheduled for May 1960, turned out to be an incredible fiasco. Both Moscow and Washington had publicly taken a firm stand on the burning Berlin issue, and neither could risk a public back down. Then, on the eve of the conference, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down deep in the heart of Russia. After bungling bureaucratic denials in Washington, Eisenhower took the unprecedented step of assuming personal responsibility. Khrushchev stormed into Paris filling the air with incentive, and the conference collapsed before it could get off the ground. add?

Glass-Steagall Banking Reform Act

The Hundred Days Congress supported public reliance on the banking system by enacting the memorable Glass-Steagall Banking Reform Act. This measure provided for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Havana Conference of 1940

The Latin American bulwark likewise needed bracing. The Netherlands, Denmark, and France, all crushed under the German jackboot, had orphaned colonies in the New World. Would these fall into German hands? At the Havana Conference in 1940, the US agreed to share with its twenty New World neighbors the responsibility of upholding the Monroe Doctrine. This ancient dictum, previously unilateral, had been a bludgeon brandished only in the hated Yankee fist. Now multilateral, it was to be wielded by twenty-one pairs of American hands -- at least in theory.

League of Nations and its limits

The League of Nations members had the economic and naval power to halt Japan but lacked the courage to do act. One reason - though not the only one - was that they could not count on America's support. Even so, the Republic came closer to stepping into the chill waters of internationalism than American prophets would have dared to predict in the early 1920s. add?

Dr. Martin Luther King, Montgomery Bus Boycott

The Montgomery bus boycott also catapulted to prominence a young pastor at Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Barley 27 years old, King seemed an unlikely champion of the downtrodden and disfranchised. Raised in a prosperous black family in Atlanta and educated partly in the North, he had for most of his life been sheltered from the grossest cruelties of segregation. But his oratorical skill, his passionate devotion to biblical and constitutional conceptions of justice, and his devotion to the nonviolent principles of India's Mohandas Gandhi were destined to thrust him to the forefront of the black revolution that would soon pulse across the South and the rest of the nation.

Hatch Act and election reform

The New Dealers were accused of having the richest campaign chest in history, and in truth government relief checks had a curious habit of coming in bunches just before ballot time. To remedy such practices, which tended to make a farce of free elections, Congress adopted the much-heralded Hatch Act of 1939. This act barred federal administrative officials, except the highest policy-making officers, from active political campaigning and soliciting. It also forbade the use of government funds for political purposes as well as the collection of campaign contributions from people receiving relief payments. The Hatch Act was broadened in 1940 to place limits on campaign contributions and expenditures, but such clever ways of getting around it were found that on the whole the legislation proved disappointing.

Social Security Act (list parts)

The New Dealers's greatest victory was the epochal Social Security Act of 1935 - one of the most complicated and far-reaching laws ever to pass Congress. The measure provided for federal-state unemployment insurance. To provide security for old age, specified categories of retired workers were to receive regular payments from Washington. These payments ranged from $10 to $85 a month (later raised) and were financed by a payroll tax on both employers and employees. Provision was also made for the blind, the physically handicapped, delinquent children, and other dependents. add?

literacy tests, poll tax, grandfather clause

The Populist-inspired reminder of potential black political strength led to the near-total extinction of what little African American suffrage remained in the South. White southerners more aggressively than ever used ___ tests and poll taxes to deny blacks the ballot. The notorious "___ clause" exempted from those requirements anyone whose forbear had voted in 1860 - when, of course, black slaves had not voted at all. More than half a century would pass before southern blacks could again vote in considerable numbers.

Potsdam Conference

The Potsdam conference, held near Berlin in July 1945, sounded the death knell of the Japanese. These President Truman, still new on his job, met in a seventeen-day parley with Joseph Stalin and the British leaders. The conferees issued a stern ultimatum to Japan: surrender or be destroyed. American bombers showered the dire warning on Japan in tens of thousands of leaflets, but no encouraging response was forthcoming.

Truman 1948 election, civil rights

The Republicans renominated warmed-over NY governor Thomas Dewey. The Democrats wanted to nominate Dwight D. Eisenhower, but he refused to be drafted, leaving them with President Truman. He was chosen in the face of vehement opposition by southern delegates. They were alienated by his strong stand in favor of civil rights for blacks, who now mustered many votes in the big-city ghettos of the North. add?

Spanish Civil War; Francisco Franco

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 -- a proving ground and dress rehearsal in miniature for WWII -- was a painful object lesson in the folly of neutrality-by-legislation. Spanish rebels, who rose against the left-leaning republican government in Madrid, were headed by fascist General Francisco Franco. Generously aided by his fellow conspirators Hitler and Mussolini, he undertook to overthrow the established Loyalist regime, which in turn was assisted on a smaller scale by the Soviet Union. Washington continued official relations with the Loyalist government. In accordance with previous American practice, this regime should have been free to purchase desperately needed munitions from the US. But Congress, with the encouragement of FDR and with only one dissenting vote, amended the existing neutrality legislation so as to apply an arms embargo to both Loyalists and rebels. Uncle Sam thus sat on the sidelines while Franco, abundantly supplied with arms and men by his fellow dictators, strangled the republican government of Spain.

1902 Coal Strike

The Square Deal for labor received its acid test in 1902, when a crippling strike broke out in the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania. Some 140,000 besooted workers, many of them illiterate immigrants, had long been frightfully exploited and accident-plagued. They demanded, among other improvements, a 20 percent increase in pay and a reduction of the working day from ten to nine hours. Unsympathetic mine owners, confident that a chilled population would react against the miners, refused to arbitrate or even negotiate. As coal supplies dwindled, factories and schools were forced to shut down, and even hospitals felt the icy grip of winter. Desperately seeking a solution, Roosevelt summoned representatives of the striking miners and the mine owners to the White House. Roosevelt finally resorted to his trusty big stick when he threatened to seize the mines and operate them with federal troops. Faced with the first-time-ever threat to use federal bayonets against capital, rather than labor, the owners grudgingly consented to arbitration. A compromise decision ultimately gave the miners a 10 percent pay boost and a working day of nine hours.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

The Truman administration decided to join the European pact, called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in recognition of its transatlantic character. With white-tie pageantry, the NATO treaty was signed in Washington on April 4, 1949. The twelve original signatories pledged to regard an attack on one as an attack on all and promised to respond with "armed forces" if necessary. Despite last-ditch howls from immovable isolationists, the Senate approved the treaty on July 21, 1949, by a vote of 82 to 13. Membership was boosted to fourteen in 1952 by the inclusion of Greece and Turkey, to fifteen in 1955 by the addition of West Germany.

island-hopping strategy

The US Navy, with marines and army divisions doing the meat-grinder fighting, had meanwhile been "leapfrogging" the Japanese-held islands in the Pacific. Old-fashioned strategy dictated that the American forces, as they drove toward Tokyo, should reduce the fortified Japanese outposts on their flank. This course would have taken many bloodstained months, for the holed-in defenders were prepared to die to the last man in their caves. The new strategy of island hopping called for bypassing some of the most heavily fortified Japanese posts, capturing nearby islands, setting up airfields on them, and then neutralizing the enemy bases through heavy bombing. Deprived of essential supplies from the homeland, Japan's outposts would slowly wither on the vine -- as they did.

Cuba and the Platt Amendment

The US, honoring its self-denying Teller Amendment of 1898, withdrew from Cuba in 1902. Old World imperialists could scarcely believe their eyes. But the Washington government could not turn this rich and strategic island completely loose on the international sea; a grasping power like Germany might secure dangerous lodgment near America's soft underbelly. The Cubans were therefore forced to write into their own constitution of 1901 the so-called Platt Amendment. The Cubans loathed the amendment, which served McKinley's ultimate purpose of bringing Cuba under America's control. The newly "liberated" Cubans were forced to agree not to conclude treaties that might compromise their independence (as Uncle Tom say it) and not to take on debt beyond their resources (as Uncle Sam measured them). They further agreed that the US might intervene with troops to restore order when it saw fit. Finally, the Cubans promised to sell or lease needed coaling or naval stations, ultimately two and then only one (Guantanamo), to their powerful "benefactor." The US finally abrogated the amendment in 1934, although Uncle Sam still occupies a 28,000 acre Cuban beachhead at Guantanamo under an agreement that can be revoked only by the consent of both parties.

U.N. Security Council; veto power of the Big Five

The United Nations Conference opened on schedule, April 25, 1945, despite Roosevelt's dismaying death thirteen days earlier. Meeting at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, representatives from fifty nations fashioned the United Nations charter. The UN was a successor to the old League of Nations, but it differed in significant ways. Designed to prevent another great-war, the League of Nations had adopted rules denying the veto power to any party to a dispute. The UN, by contrast, more realistically provided that no member of the Security Council, dominated by the Big Five (the US, Britain, the USSR, France, and China), could have action taken against it without its consent. The League, in short, presumed great-power conflict; the UN presumed great-power cooperation. The UN also featured an Assembly, which could be controlled by smaller countries. The Senate overwhelmingly approved the UN Charter on July 28, 1945 -- not least because it provided safeguards for American sovereignty and freedom of action.

West Germany/ East Germany

The Western Allies refused to allow Moscow to bleed their zones of the reparations that Stalin insisted he had been promised at Yalta. They also began to promote the idea of a reunited Germany. The communists responded by tightening their grip on their Eastern zone. Before long, it was apparent that Germany would remain divided. West Germany eventually became and independent country, wedded to the West. East Germany, along with other Soviet-dominated Eastern European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, became nominally independent "satellite" states, bound to the Soviet Union.

World Bank

The Western Allies, at the meeting in Bretton Woods, NH, also founded the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) to promote economic growth in war-ravaged and underdeveloped areas. In contrast to its behavior after WWI, the US took the lead in creating these important international bodies (the World Bank and the IMF) and supplied most of their funding. The stubborn Soviets declined to participate.

special prosecutor Kenneth Starr

The accusation that Clinton had lied under oath presented stunning windfall to the special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr. Clinton, now suddenly caught in legal and political trap, issued repeated denials of involvement with "that woman," Ms. Lewinsky. But he was finally forced to make the humiliating admission that he had an "inappropriate relationship" with her. In Sept 1998 Starr accordingly presented to the House of Representatives a stinging report, including lurid sexual details, charging Clinton with eleven possible grounds for impeachment, all related to the Lewinsky matter.

Battle of the Coral Sea

The aggressive warriors from Japan pushed relentlessly southward. They invaded the island of New Guinea, north of Australia, and landed on the Solomon Islands, from which they threatened Australia itself. Their onrush was finally checked by a crucial naval battle fought in the Coral Sea, in May 1942. An American carrier task force, with Australian support, inflicted heavy losses on the victory-flush Japanese. For the first time in history, the fighting was all done by carrier-based aircraft, and neither fleet saw or fired a shot directly at the other.

Insular Cases and citizenship

The annexation of Puerto Rico (and the Philippines) posed a thorny legal problem: Did the Constitution follow the flag? Did American laws, including tariff laws and the Bill of Rights, apply with full force to the newly acquired possessions? Beginning in 1901 with the "Insular Cases," a badly divided Supreme Court decreed, in effect, that the flag did outrun the Constitution, and that the outdistanced document did not necessarily extend with full force to the new windfall. Puerto Ricans (and Filipinos) might be subject to American rule, but they did not enjoy all American rights.

Whiskey Ring

The breach of scandal in Washington also reeked of alcohol. In 1874-1875 the sprawling ____ robbed the Treasury of millions in excise-tax revenues. "Let no guilty man escape," declared President Grant. But when his own private secretary turned up among the culprits, he volunteered a written statement to the jury to help exonerate the thief.

summit conferences

The burly Khrushchev, seeking new propaganda laurels, was eager to meet with Eisenhower and pave the way for a "summit conference" with Western leaders. Despite grave misgivings as to any tangible results, the president invited him to American in 1959. Arriving in NY, Khrushchev appeared before the UN General Assembly and dramatically resurrected the ancient Soviet proposal of complete disarmament. But he offered no practical means of achieving this end. A result of this tour was a meeting at Camp David. Khrushchev emerged saying that his ultimatum for the evacuation of Berlin would be extended indefinitely. ADD

liberation of concentration camps

The conquering Americans were horrified to find blood-splattered and still-stinking concentration camps, where the German Nazis had engaged in scientific mass murder of "undesirables," including an estimated 6 million Jews. The Washington government had long been informed about Hitler's campaign of genocide against the Jews and had been reprehensibly slow to take steps against it. FDR's administration had bolted the door against large numbers of Jewish refugees, and his military commanders declined even to bomb the rail lines that carried the victims to the camps. But until the war's end, the full dimensions of the "Holocaust" had not been known. When the details were revealed, the whole world was aghast.

mining

The conquest of the Indians and the coming of the railroad were life-giving boons to the mining frontier. But there were more miners than minerals, and many gold-grubbers, with "Pikes Peak or Bust" inscribed on the canvas of their covered wagons, creaked wearily backed with the added inscription, "Busted, by Gosh." Yet countless bearded fortune-seekers stayed on, some to strip away the silver deposits, others to extract nonmetallic wealth from the earth in the form of golden rain. "Fifty-niners" also poured feverishly into Nevada in 1859, after the fabulous Comstock Lode had been uncovered. (ADD page 604) The mining frontier had played a vital role in subduing the continent. Magnetlike, it attracted population and wealth, while advertising the wonders of the Wild West. ADD!

U.S. ocean convoys and German U-boat attacks

The dangerous possibility of being "convoyed into war" had been mentioned in Congress during the lengthy debate on lend-lease, but administration spokespeople had brushed the idea aside. Their strategy was to make only one commitment at a time. FDR made the fateful decision to convoy in July 1941. By virtue of his authority as a commander in chief of the armed forces, the president issued orders to the navy to escort lend-lease shipments as far as Iceland. The British would then shepherd them the rest of the way. Inevitable clashes with submarines ensued on the Iceland run, even though Hitler's orders were to strike at American warships in self-defense. In September 1941 the US destroyer "Greer," provocatively trailing a German U-boat, was attacked by the undersea craft, without damage to either side. FDR proclaimed a shoot-on-sight policy. On Oct 17 the escorting destroyer "Kearny," while engaged in battle with U-boats, lost eleven men when it was crippled but not set to the bottom. Two weeks later the destroyer "Rueben James" was torpedoed and sunk off southwestern Iceland, with the loss of more than 100 officers and enlisted men.

Samuel Gompers, American Federation of Labor

The elitist ____, born in 1886, was largely the brainchild of ____. He was born in a London tenement and removed from school at age ten. He was brought to America at thirteen. Rising spectacularly in the labor ranks, he was elected president of the AF of L every year except one from 1886 to 1924. The AF of L consisted of an association of self-governing national unions, each of which kept its independence, with the AF of L unifying overall strategy. No individual laborer as such could join the central organization.

1877 railway strike

The explosive atmosphere in 1877 was largely a by-product of the long years of depression and deflation following the Panic of 1873. Railroad workers faced particularly hard times. When the presidents of the nation's four largest railroads collectively decided in 1877 to cut employee's wages by 10 percent, the workers struck back. President Hayes's decision to call in federal troops to quell the unrest brought the striking laborers an outpouring of working-class support. Work stoppages spread like wildfire in cities from Baltimore to St. Louis. When the battling between workers and soldiers ended after several weeks, over one hundred people were dead. The failure of the great railroad strike exposed the weakness of the labor movement.

Fort Laramie treaties (why failures)

The federal government tried to pacify the Plains Indians by signing treaties with "chiefs" of various "tribes" at Fort ___ in 1851 and at Fort Atkinson in 1853. The treaties marked the beginnings of the reservation system in the West. They established boundaries for the territory of each tribe and attempted to separate the Indians into two great "colonies" to the north and south of a corridor of intended white settlements. But the white treaty makers misunderstood both Indian government and Indian society. "Tribes" and "chiefs" were often fictions of the white imagination, which could not grasp the fact that Native Americans, living in scattered bands, usually recognized no authority outside their immediate family, or perhaps a village elder. And the nomadic culture of the Plains Indians was utterly alien to the concept of living out one's life in the confinement of a defined territory.

Nixon's "Vietnamization" policy

The first burning need was to quiet the public uproar over Vietnam. President Nixon's policy, called "Vietnamization," was to withdraw the 540,000 US troops in South Vietnam over an extended period. The South Vietnamese -- with American money, weapons, training, and advice -- could then gradually take over the burden of fighting their own war. add?

Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA); work relief

The first major effort of the new Congress to grapple with the millions of adult unemployment was the Federal Emergency Relief Act. Its chief aim was immediate relief rather than long-range recovery. The resulting Federal Emergency Relief Administration was handed over to zealous Harry Hopkins. Hopkins's agency in al granted about $3 billion to the states for direct dole payments or preferably for wages on work projects.

low farm prices and deflated currency

The grain farmers were no longer the masters of their own destinies. They were engaged in one of the most fiercely competitive of businesses, for the price of their product was determined in a world market by the world output. If the wheat fields of Argentina, Russia, and other foreign countries flourished, the price of the farmer's grain would fall and American sodbusters would face ruin, as they did in the 1880s and 1890s. Low prices and a deflated currency were the chief worries of frustrated farmers - North, South, and West. If a family had borrowed $1,000 in 1885, when wheat was worth a dollar a bushel, they were expected to pay back the equivalent of one thousand bushels, plus interested. If they let their debt run to 1890, when wheat had fallen to 50 cents a bushel, they would have to pay back the price of two thousand bushels, plus interest.

stock market decline

The high-tech economy also proved to be as prone to the boom and bust system as the old smokestack economy. In the spring of 2000, the stock market began its most precipitous slide since WWII. By the time the markets bottomed out in 2003, they had lost $6 trillion in value. The boom of the late 1990s turned out to be, as one observer put it, the "Dot.con" Investors had scooped up shares in fledgling firms that proved unable to turn a profit, and stock prices imploded accordingly once the bubble burst. Millions of Americans watched aghast as their pension plans shrank by a third or more. Recent retirees scrambled back into the job market.

gasoline age and changes in daily life

The impact of the self-propelled carriage on various aspects of American life was tremendous. Employing directly or indirectly about 6 million people by 1930, the new industry was a major wellspring of the nation's prosperity. Thousands of new jobs were created by supporting industries (rubber, glass, fabrics, highway construction, service stations, and garages, for example). Speedy marketing of perishable foodstuffs, like fresh fruit, was accelerated. A new prosperity enriched outlying farms, as city dwellers were provided with produce at attractive prices. Countless new roads ribboned out to meet demand of the American motorist for smoother and faster highways, often paid for by taxes on gasoline. The era of mud ended as the nation made haste to construct the finest network of hard-surfaced roadways in the world. Motorcars, once a luxury, rapidly became a necessity. Essentially devices for needed transportation, they soon developed into a badge of freedom and equality.

Rudyard Kipling and "The White Man's Burden"

The imperialists (expansionists) appealed to patriotism, invoked America's "civilizing mission," and played up possible trade profits. Rudyard Kipling, the British poet laureate of imperialism, urged America down the slippery path with a quotable poem that he had circulated before publication to Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge: "Tale up the White Man's burden- // Ye dare not stoop to less- // Nor call to loud on Freedom // To cloak your weariness." In short, the wealthy Americans must help to uplift (and exploit) the underprivileged, underfed, and underclad of the world.

fall of the Shah of Iran; Iran Hostage Crisis

The imperious Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, installed as shah of Iran with help from American CIA in 1953, had long ruled his oil-rich land with a will of steel. His repressive regime was finally overthrown in Jan 1979. VIolent revolution was spearheaded in Iran by Muslim fundamentalists who fiercely resented the shah's campaign to westernize and secularize his country. On Nov 4, 1979, a howling mob of rabidly anti-American Muslim militants stormed the US embassy in Teheran, Iran, and took all of its occupants hostage. The captors then demanded that the American authorities ship back to Iran the exiled shah, who had arrived in the US two weeks earlier for medical treatment. ADD PAGES 963-964

New York City's Tweed Ring; Thomas Nast cartoons

The infamous Tweed Ring in NYC vividly displayed the ethics (or lack of ethics) typical of the age. Burly "Boss" Tweed employed bribery, graft (corruption involving money - paying people?), and fraudulent elections to milk the metropolis of as much as $200 million. Honest citizens were cowed into silence. Protesters found their tax assessments raised. Tweed's luck finally ran out. The New York Times secured damning evidence in 1871 and courageously published it, though offered $5 million not to do so. Gifted cartoonist Thomas Nast pilloried Tweed mercilessly, after spurning a heavy bribe to desist. The portly thief reportedly complained that his illiterate followers could not help seeing "them damn pictures."

Jacob Riis "How the Other Half Lives"

The keen-eyed and keen-nosed Danish immigrant Jacob A. Riis, a reporter for the "New York Sun," shocked middle-class Americans in 1890 with "How the Other Half Lives." His account was a damning indictment of the dirt, disease, vice, and misery of the rat-gnawed human rookeries known as the New York slums. The book deeply influenced a future NYC police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt.

women workers and Amendment 19

The larger part of the suffrage movement, represented by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, supported Wilson's war. The fight for democracy abroad was women's best hope for winning true democracy at home. War mobilization gave new momentum to the women's suffrage fight. Impressed by women's war work, President Wilson endorsed woman suffrage as "a virtually necessary war measure." In 1917 NY voted for suffrage at the state level; Michigan, Oklahoma, and South Dakota followed. Eventually the groundswell could no longer be contained. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, giving all American women the right to vote.

William McKinley and Mark Hanna, 1896

The leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1896 was former congressman William McKinley from Ohio, sponsor of the ill-starred tariff bill of 1890. He had established a creditable Civil War record, having risen from the rank of major; he hailed from the electorally potent state of Ohio; and he could point to long years of honorable service in Congress, where he had made many friends with his kindly and conciliatory manner. As a presidential candidate, McKinley was largely the creature of a fellow Ohioan, Marcus Hanna, who had made his fortune in the iron business and now coveted the role of president maker. As a wholehearted Hamiltonian, Hanna believed that a prime function of government was to aid business. The hardheaded Hanna, although something of a novice in politics, organized his pre-convention campaign for McKinley wit consummate skill and with a liberal outpouring of his own money. The convention steamroller, well lubricated with Hanna's dollars, nominated McKinley on the first ballot in St. Louis in June 1896. The Republican platform declared for the gold standard, leaning toward the hard-money policies. ADD

vaudeville, minstrel shows, circus, Wild West shows

The legitimate stage still flourished, as appreciative audiences responded to the lure of the footlights. Vaudeville, with its coarse jokes and graceful acrobats, continued to be immensely popular during the 1880s and 1890s, as were minstrel shows in the South, now performed by black singers and dancers rather than by whites wearing blackface as in the North before the Civil War. The circus - high-tented and multiringed - finally emerged full-blown. Phineas T. Barnum, the master showman who had early discovered that "the public likes to be humbugged," joined hands with James A. Bailey in 1881 to stage the "Greatest Show on Earth." Colorful "Wild West" shoes, first performed in 1883, were even more distinctively American. Headed by the knightly, goateed, and free-drinking William F. Cody, the troupe included war-whooping Indians, live buffalo, and deadeye marksmen. Among them was the girlish Anne Oakley. Rifle in hand, she could at thirty paces perforate a tossed-up card half a dozen times before it fluttered to the ground.

Filipino insurrection 1899-1901; Emilio Aguinaldo

The liberty-loving Filipinos assumed that they, like the Cubans, would be granted their freedom after the Spanish-American War. They were tragically deceived. Washington excluded them from the peace negotiations with Spain and made clear its intention to stay in the Philippines indefinitely. Bitterness toward the occupying American troops erupted into open insurrection on February 4, 1899, under Emilio Aguinaldo. Having plunged into war with Spain to free Cuba, the US was now forced to deploy some 126,000 troops ten thousand miles away to rivet shackles onto a people who asked for nothing but freedom - in the American tradition. The Americans broke the back of the Filipino insurrection in 1901, when they cleverly infiltrated a guerrilla camp and captured Aguinaldo. But sporadic fighting dragged on for many dreary months, eventually claiming the lives of 4,234 Americans and as many as 600,000 Filipinos.

patronage

The lifeblood of both parties was ___ - disbursing jobs by the bucketful in return for votes, kickbacks, and party service. Boisterous infighting over __ beset the Republican party in the 1870s and 1880s.

1973 Mid-East War

The long-rumbling Middle East erupted anew in Oct 1973, when the rearmed Syrians and Egyptians unleashed surprise attacks on Israel in an attempt to regain the territory they had lost in the Six-Day War of 1967. With the Israelis in desperate retreat, new Secretary of State Kissinger hastily flew to Moscow in effort to restraint the Soviets, who were arming the attackers. Believing that the Kremlin was poised to fly combat troops to the Suez area, Nixon placed America's nuclear forces on alert and ordered a gigantic airlift of nearly $2 billion in war material to the Israelis. This assistance helped save the day, as the Israelis aggressively turned the tide and threatened Cairo itself before American diplomacy brought about an uneasy cease-fire. add? page 948

Teapot Dome and other scandals

The loose morality and get-rich-quickism of Harding era manifested themselves spectacularly in a series of scandals. Most shocking of all was the Teapot Dome scandal, an affair that involved priceless naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome (Wyoming) and Elk Hills (California). In 1921 the slippery secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, induced his careless colleague, the secretary of the navy, to transfer these valuable properties to the Interior Department. Harding indiscreetly signed the secret order. Fall then quickly leased the lands to oilmen Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny, but not until he had received a bribe of $100,000 from Doheny and about three times that amount in all from Sinclair. Details of the crooked transaction began to leak out in March 1923, two years after Harding took office. Fall, Sinclair, and Doheny were indicted the next year, but the case dragged though the courts until 1929. Finally Fall was found guilty of taking a bribe and was sentenced to one year in jail. By a curious quirk of justice, the two bribe givers were acquitted. Still more scandals erupted. Persistent reports as to the underhanded doings of Attorney General Daugherty prompted a Senate investigation in 1924 of the illegal sale of pardons and liquor permits. Forced to resign, the accused official was tried in 1927 but was released after a jury twice failed to agree. add?

Dawes Severalty Act and problems

The misbegotten offspring of the movement to reform Indian policy was the ____ of 1887. Reflecting the forced-civilization views of the reformers, the act dissolved many tribes as legal entities, wiped out tribal ownership of land, and set up individual Indian family heads with 160 free acres. If the Indians behaved themselves like "good white settlers," they would get full title to their holdings, as well as citizenship, in 25 years. The probationary period was later extended, but full citizenship was granted to all Indians in 1924. Reservation land not allotted to the Indians under the act was to be sold to railroads and white settlers, with the proceeds used by federal government to educate and "civilize" the native peoples. It struck directly at tribal organization and tried to make rugged individualists out of the Indians. This legislation was ignored by the inherent reliance of traditional Indian culture on tribally held land, literally pulling the land out from under them.

phony war (sitzkrieg)

The months following the collapse of Poland, while France and Britain marked time, were known as the "phony war." An ominous silence fell on Europe, as Hitler shifted his victorious divisions from Poland for a knockout blow at France. Inaction during this anxious period was relieved by Soviets, who attacked neighboring Finland in an effort to secure strategic buffer territory. The debt-paying Finns, who had a host of admirers in America, were speedily granted $30 million by an isolationist Congress for nonmilitary supplies. But despite heroic resistance, Finland was finally flattened by the Soviet steamroller. An abrupt end to the "phony war" came in April 1940 when Hitler, again without warning, overran his weaker neighbors Denmark and Norway.

gated communities

The nation's brief "urban age" lasted little more than seven decades after 1920, and with its passing many observers saw a new fragmentation and isolation in American life. Some affluent suburban neighborhoods walled themselves off behind elaborate security systems in "gated communities," making it harder, perhaps, to sustain a sense of a larger and inclusive national community.

African-American "Great Migration" north (also page 892)

The northward migration of African Americans accelerated after the war, thanks to the advent of the mechanical cotton picker -- an invention whose impact rivaled that of Eli Whitney's cotton gin. Introduced in 1944, this new mechanical marvel did the work of fifty people at about one-eighth the cost. Overnight, the Cotton South's historic need for cheap labor disappeared, so some 5 million black tenant farmers and sharecroppers headed north in the three decades after the war. Theirs was one of the great migrations in American history, comparable to the immigrant floods from Ireland, Italy, and Poland. By 1970 half of all blacks lived outside the South, and urban had become almost a synonym for black. ADD PAGE 892

Charles Darwin "On the Origin of the Species"

The old-time religion received many blows from modern trends, including a booming sale of books on comparative religion and on historical criticism as applied to the Bible. Most unsettling was "________," a highly controversial volume published in 1859, on the eve of the Civil War, by the English naturalist Charles Darwin.

Russo-Japanese War, Treaty of Portsmouth

The outbreak of war between Russia and Japan in 1904 gave Roosevelt a chance to perform as a global statesman. The Russians had settled in the ports of China's Manchuria, particularly Port Arthur. In Japanese eyes, Manchuria and Korea in tsarist hands were pistols pointed at Japan's strategic heart. The Japanese responded in 1904 with a devastating surprise pounce on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. The proceeded to administer a humiliating series of beatings to the inept Russians. But as the war dragged on, Japan began to run short of men and yen - a weakness it didn't want to betray to the enemy. Tokyo officials therefore approached Roosevelt in the deepest secrecy and asked him to help sponsor peace negotiations. Roosevelt was happy to oblige, as he wanted to avoid a complete Russian collapse so that the tsar's empire could remain a counterweight to Japan's growing power. At Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1905, TR guided the warring parties to a settlement that satisfied neither side and left of Japanese, who felt they had won the war, esp. resentful. Japan was forced to drop its demands for a crash indemnity and Russian evacuation of Sakhalin Island, though it received some compensation in the form of effective control over Korea, which it formally annexed in 1910.

resignation of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan

The peace-loving Wilson had no stomach for leading a disunited nation into war (after Lusitania). Instead, by a series of increasingly strong notes, Wilson attempted to bring the German warlords sharply to book. Even this measured approach was too much for Secretary of State Bryan, who resigned rather than sign a protestation that might spell shooting. But Wilson resolutely stood his ground. "There is such a thing," he declared, "as a man being too proud to fight." This kind of talk incensed the war-thirsty Theodore Roosevelt. The Rough Rider assailed the spineless simperers who heeded the "weasel words" of the pacifistic professor in the White House.

Gilded Age politics, beliefs of Republicans & Democrats

The political seesaw was delicately balance throughout most of the ___ (a sarcastic name given to the thee-decade-long post-Civil War era by Mark Twain in 1873). The majority party in in the House of Representatives switched six times in the eleven sessions between 1869 and 1891. In only three sessions did one party control the House, the Senate, and the White House. Few significant economic issues separated the major parties. Democrats and Republicans saw very nearly eyes to eye on questions like the tariff and civil-service reform, and majorities in both parties substantially agreed even on the much-debated currency question. Yet despite their rough agreement on these national matters, the two parties were ferociously competitive with each other. Republican voters tended to adhere to those creeds that traced their lineage to Puritanism. They stressed strict codes of personal morality and believed that government should play a role in regulating both the economic and moral affairs of society. Democrats, among whom immigrant Lutherans and Roman Catholics figured heavily, were more likely to adhere to faiths that took a less stern view of human weakness. Their religions professed toleration of differences in an impact world, and they spurned government efforts to impose a single moral standard on the entire society. These differences in temperament and religious values often produced raucous political contests at the local level, where issues like prohibition and education loomed large.

Meat Inspection Act

The president was moved by the loathsome mess in Chicago to appoint a special investigating commission, whose cold-blooded report almost outdid Sinclair's novel. It related how piles of poisoned rats, rope ends, splinters, and other debris were scooped up and canned as potted ham. Backed by a nauseated public, Roosevelt induced Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. It decreed that the preparation of meat shipped over state lines would be subject to federal inspection from corral to can. Although the largest packers resisted certain features of the act, they accepted it as an opportunity to drive their smaller, fly-by-night competitors out of business. At the same time, they could receive the government's seal of approval on their exports.

Roosevelt's fourth election 1944, Harry S. Truman

The presidential campaign of 1944, which was bound to divert energy from the war program, came most awkwardly as the awful conflict roared to its climax. But the normal electoral processes continued to function, despite the loose talk of suspending them "for the duration." Republicans nominated Thomas Dewey, popular vote-getting governor of NY. FDR, aging under the strain, was the "indispensable man" of the Democrats. No other major figure was available, and the war was apparently grinding to its finale. He was nominated at Chicago on the first ballot by acclamation. But in a sense he was the "forgotten man" of the convention, for in view of his age, an unusual amount of attention was focused on the vice presidency. With FDR's blessing, vice-presidential nomination finally went to smiling and self-assured Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri. Hitherto inconspicuous, he had recently attained national visibility as the efficient chairman of a Senate committee conducting an investigation of wasteful war expenditures. FDR won with 432 electoral votes to 99, primarily because the war was going well. A winning pitcher is not ordinarily pulled from the game. Foreign policy was a decisive factor with untold thousands of voters, who concluded that FDR's experienced hand was needed in fashioning a future organization for world peace. add?

Mary Elizabeth Lease

The queen of the Populist "calamity howlers" was _____, a tall, athletic woman known as the "Kansas Pythoness." She reportedly demanded that Kansans should raise "less corn and more hell." The big-city "New York Evening Post" snarled, "We don't want any more states until we can civilize Kansas." To many easterners, complaint, not corn, was rural America's staple crop.

tax cuts, supply-side economics, "Reaganomics"

The second part of Reagan's economic program called for deep tax cuts, amounting to 25 percent across-the-board reductions over a period of three years. Thanks largely to Reagan's skill as a television performer and the continued defection of the "boll weevils" from the Democratic camp, the president again had his way. In late 1981 Congress approved a set of far-reaching tax reforms that lowered individual taxes, reduced federal estate taxes, and created new tax-free savings plans for small investors. Reagan's "supply-side" economic advisers assured him that the combination of budgetary discipline and tax reduction would stimulate new investment, boost productivity, foster dramatic economic growth, and eventually even reduce the federal deficit. But at first "supply-side" economics seemed to be a beautiful theory mugged by a gang of brutal facts, as the economy slid into its deepest recession since the 1930s. Ignoring the yawping pack of Democratic critics, President Reagan and his economic advisers serenely waited for their supply-side economic policies ("Reaganeconomics") to produce the promised results. The supply-siders seemed to be vindicated when a healthy economic recovery finally got under way in 1983. Yet the economy of the 1980s was not uniformly sound. The poor got poorer and the very rich grew fabulously richer, while middle-class incomes largely stagnated.

London Economic Conference

The sixty-six-nation London Economic Conference, meeting in the summer of 1933, revealed how thoroughly FDR's early foreign policy was subordinate to his strategy for domestic economic recovery. The delegates to the London Conference hoped to organize a coordinated international attack on the global depression. They were particularly eager to stabilize the values of the various nations' currencies and the rates at which they could be exchanged. Exchange-rate stabilization was essential to the revival of world trade, which had all but evaporated by 1933. FDR first agreed to send an American delegation to the conference, including Secretary of State Cordell Hull. But the president soon began to have second thoughts about the conference's agenda. He wanted to pursue his gold-juggling and other inflationary policies at home as a means of stimulating American recovery. An international agreement to maintain the value of the dollar in terms of other currencies might tie his hands, and at bottom FDR was unwilling to sacrifice the possibility of domestic recovery for the sake of international cooperation. While on vacation, he dashed off a radio message to London, scolding the conference for attempting to stabilize currencies and essentially declaring America's withdrawal from the negotiations. FDR's bombshell announcement yanked the rug from under the London Conference. The delegates adjourned empty-handed, amid cries of American bad faith. The collapse of the Conference strengthened plunged the planet even deeper into economic crisis and strengthened the global trend toward extreme nationalism, making international cooperation even more difficult in the decade of the 1930s.

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

The tempestuous Tennessee River provided New Dealers with a rare opportunity. With its tributaries, the river drained a badly eroded area about the size of England, and one containing some 2.5 million of the most poverty-stricken Americans. By developing a hydroelectric potential of the entire area, Washington could combine immediate advantage of putting thousands of people to work with a long-term project for reforming the power monopoly. An act creating the Tennessee Valley Authority was passed in 1933 by the Hundred Days Congress. This far-ranging enterprise was largely a result of the steadfast vision and unflagging zeal of Senator George W Norris of Nebraska, after whom one of the might dams was named. From the standpoint of "planned economy," TVA was by far the most revolutionary of all the New Deal schemes. add page 788?

Newlands Act and irrigation

The thirst of the desert still unslaked, Congress responded to the whip of the Rough Rider by passing the landmark Newlands Act of 1902. Washington was authorized to collect money from the sale of public lands in the sun-baked western states and then use these funds for the development of irrigation projects. Settlers repaid the cost of reclamation from their now-productive soil, and the money was put into a revolving fund to finance more such enterprises. The giant Roosevelt Dam, constructed on Arizona's Salt River, was appropriately dedicated by Roosevelt in 1911. Thanks to this epochal legislation, dozens of dams were thrown across virtually every major western river in the ensuing decades.

Morrill Act of 1862 and public colleges

The truly phenomenal growth of higher education owed much to the ___ of 1862. This enlightened law provided a generous grant of public lands to the states for support of education. "Land grant colleges," most of which became state universities, in turn bound themselves to provide certain services, such as military training. The Hatch Act of 1887, extending the ___, provided federal funds for the establishment of agricultural experiment stations in connection with the land-grant colleges.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas

The unanimous decision of the Warren Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in May 1954 was epochal. In a forceful opinion, the learned justices ruled that segregation in the public schools was "inherently unequal" and thus unconstitutional. The uncompromising sweep of the decision startled conservatives like an exploding time bomb, for it reversed the Court's earlier declaration of 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" facilities were allowable under the Constitution. That doctrine was now dead. Desegregation, the justices insisted, must go ahead with "all deliberate speed."

Cold War

The wartime "Grand Alliance" of the US, the USSR, and Britain had been a misbegotten child of necessity, kept alive only until the mutual enemy was crushed. When the hated Hitler fell, suspicion and rivalry between communistic, despotic Russia and capitalistic, democratic America were all but inevitable. In a fateful progression of events, marked often by misperceptions as well as by genuine conflicts of interest, the two powers provoked each other into a tense standoff known as the Cold War. Enduring four and a half decades, the Cold War not only shaped Soviet-American relations; it overshadowed the entire postwar international order in every corner of the globe. The Cold War also molded societies and economies and the lives of individual people all over the planet.

Nelson Mandela and the end of South African apartheid

The white regime in South Africa took a giant step toward liberating that troubled land from its racist past when in 1990 it freed African leader Nelson Mandela, who had served 27 years in prison for conspiring to overthrow the government. Four years later Mandela was elected South Africa's president. (apartheid: a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on ground of race)

sinking of the Maine in Havana harbor

Then early in 1898, Washington sent the battleship "Maine" to Cuba, ostensibly for a "friendly visit" but actually to protect and evacuate Americans if a dangerous flare-up should occur and to demonstrate Washington's concern for the island's stability. Tragedy struck of February 15, 1898, when the "Maine" mysteriously blew up in Havana harbor, with a loss of 260 sailors. Two investigations of the iron coffin ensued, one by US naval officers and the other by Spanish officials. The Spaniards concluded that the explosion had been internal and presumably accidental; the Americans argued that the blast had been caused by a submarine mine. Not until 1976 did US Navy admiral H.G. Rickover confirm the original Spanish finding with overwhelming evidence that the initial explosion had resulted from spontaneous combustion in one of the coal bunkers adjacent to a powder magazine.

William Jennings Bryan "Cross of Gold" speech

Then only 36 years of age and known as "the Boy Orator of the Platte," William Jennings Bryan (from Nebraska) stepped confidently onto the platform before fifteen thousand people. with an organ-like voice that rolled into the outer corners of the huge hall, he delivered a fervent plea for silver. Rising to supreme heights of persuasiveness, he thundered, "We will answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them: 'You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.'" The Cross of Gold speech was a sensation. Swept off its feet in a tumultuous scene, the Democratic convention nominated Bryan the next day on the fifth ballot.

ICBM's

This amazing breakthrough (Sputnik) rattled American self-confidence. It cast doubts on America's vaunted scientific superiority and raised some sobering military questions. If the Soviets could fire heavy objects into outer space, they certainly could reach America with intercontinental ballistic missiles (IBCMs).

"Dollar Diplomacy" in Asia and Latin America

Though ordinarily lethargic, Taft bestirred himself to use the lever of American investments to boost American political interest abroad, an approach to foreign policy that his critics denounced as "dollar diplomacy." Washington warmly encouraged Wall Street banker to sluice their surplus dollars into foreign areas of strategic concern to the US, esp. in the Far East and in the regions critical to the security of the Panama Canal. China's Manchuria was the object of Taft's most spectacular effort to inject the reluctant dollar into the Far East theater. Newly ambitious Japan and imperialistic Russia, recent foes, controlled the railroads of this strategic province. Taft saw in Manchurian railway monopoly a possible strangulation of Chinese economic interests and a consequent slamming of the Open Door in the faces of US merchants. In 1909 Secretary of State Philander C. Knox blunderingly proposed that a group of American and foreign bankers buy the Manchurian railroads and then turn them over to China under a self-liquidating arrangement. Both Japan and Russia, unwilling to be jockeyed out of their dominant position, bluntly rejected Knox's overtures. ADD

Hoovervilles, the "Bonus Army" destroyed

Thousands of impoverished veterans, both of war and of unemployment, were prepared to move on Washington, there to demand of Congress the immediate payment of their entire bonus. The "Bonus Expeditionary Force," which mustered about twenty thousand souls, converged on the capital in the summer of 1932. These supplicants promptly set up unsanitary public camps and erected shacks on vacant lots - a gigantic "Hooverville." They thus created a menace to the public health, while attempting to intimidate Congress by their presence in force. Following riots that cost two lives, Hoover responded to the demands of the Washington authorities by ordering the army to evacuate the unwanted guests. Although Hoover charged that the "Bonus Army" was led by riffraff and reds, in fact only a sprinkling of them were former convicts and communist agitators. The eviction was carried out by General Douglas MacArthur with bayonets and tear gas, and with far more severity than Hoover had planned.

"Make the world safe for democracy"

To galvanize the country, Wilson would have to proclaim more glorified aims. Radiating the spiritual fervor of his Presbyterian ancestors, he declared the supremely ambitious goal of a crusade to "make the world safe for democracy." Brandishing the sword of righteousness, Wilson virtually hypnotized the nation with his lofty ideals. He contrasted the selfish war aims of the other belligerents, Allied and enemy alike, with America's shining altruism. America, he preached, did not fight for the sake of riches or territorial conquest. The Republic sought only to shape an international order in which democracy could flourish without fear of power-crazed autocrats and militarists.

McKinley Tariff Act of 1890

To keep the revenues flowing in - and to protect Republican industrialists from foreign competition - the Billion-Dollar Congress also passed the ____ of 1890, boosting rates to their highest peacetime level ever. The new tariff act bought fresh woes to farmers. Debt-burdened farmers had no choice but to buy manufactured goods from high-prices protected American industrialists, but were compelled to sell their own agricultural products into highly competitive, unprotected world markets. ADD?

Western migration

Traditionally footloose, Americans have been notorious for their mobility. Free acreage lured to the West a host of immigrant farmers who otherwise might have remained in the eastern cities to clog the job markets and to crowd the festering and already overpopulated slums. And the very possibility of westward migration may have induced urban employers to maintain wage rates high enough to discourage workers from leaving. But the real safety valve by the late 19th century was in western cities like Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco, where failed farmers, busted miners, and displaced easterners found ways to seek their fortunes. Indeed, after about 1880 the area from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast was the most urbanized region in America, measured by the percentage of people living in cities.

sugar tariff; annexation; Queen "Lil"

Trouble was brewing in the insular paradise, Hawaii. Old World pathogens had scythed the indigenous Hawaiian population down to one-sixth of its size at the time of the first contact with Europeans, leading the American sugar lords to imports large numbers of Asian laborers to work the cane-fields and sugar mills. By century's end, Chinese and Japanese immigrants outnumbered both whites and native Hawaiians, amid mounting worries that Tokyo might be tempted to intervene on behalf of its often-abused nationals. Then sugar markets went sour in 1890 when the MicKinely Tariff raised barriers against the Hawaiian product. White American planters thereupon renewed their efforts to secure the annexation of Hawaii to the US. They were blocked by the strong-willed Queen Liliuokalani, who insisted that native Hawaiians should control the islands. Desperate whites, though only a tiny minority, organized a successful revolt early in 1893, openly assisted by American troops, who landed under the unauthorized orders of the expansionist American minister in Honolulu. A treaty of annexation was rushed to Washington, but before it could be railroaded through the Senate, Republican president Harrison's term expired and Democratic president Cleveland came in. Suspecting that is powerful nation had gravely wronged the deposed Queen Lil and her people, Cleveland abruptly withdrew the treaty.

State Department purge

Trying to appease the brash demagogue, Eisenhower allowed him, in effect, to control personnel policy at the State Department. One baleful result was severe damage to the morale and effectiveness of the professional foreign service. In particular, McCarthyite purges deprived the government of a number of Asian specialists who might have counseled a wiser course in Vietnam in the fateful decade that followed.

German invasion of the Soviet Union 1941

Two globe-shaking events marked the course of WWII before the assault on Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941. One was the fall of France in June 19400; the other was Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, almost exactly one year later, in June 1941. The scheming dictators Hitler and Stalin had been uneasy yoke-fellows under the ill-begotten Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. As masters of the double cross, neither trusted the other. They engaged in prolonged dickering in a secret attempt to divide potential territorial spoils between them, but Stalin balked at dominant German control of the Balkans. Hitler thereupon decided to crush his co-conspirator, seize the oil and other resources of the Soviet Union, and then have two free hands to snuff out Britain. Out of the clear sky, on June 22, 1941, Hitler launched a devastating attack on his Soviet neighbor. ADD? page 817

steel rails, standard gauge, air brakes, Pullman palace cars

Two significant new improvements proved a boon to the railroads. One was the steel rail, which Vanderbilt helped popularize when he replaced the old iron tracks of the NY Central with the tougher metal. Steel was safer and more economical because it could bear a heavier load. A standard gauge of track width likewise came into wide use during the postwar years, thus eliminating the expense and inconvenience of numerous changes from one line to another. Other refinements played a vital role in railroading. The Westinghouse air brake, generally adopted in the 1870s, was a marvelous contribution to efficiency and safety. The Pullman Palace Cars, advertised as "gorgeous traveling hotels," were introduced on a considerable scale in the 1860s. Alarmists condemned them as "wheeled torture chambers" because the wooden cars were equipped with swaying kerosene lamps.

American Legion veterans and the bonus bill

Veterans quickly organized into pressure groups. The American Legion had been founded in Paris in 1919 by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. Legionnaires met periodically to renew old hardships and let off steam in good-natured horseplay. The legion soon became distinguished for its militant patriotism, rock-ribbed conservatism, and zealous antiradicalism. The legion also became notorious for its aggressive lobbying for veterans' benefits. The chief grievance of the former "doughboys" was monetary - they wanted the "dough." The former servicemen demanded "adjusted compensation" to make up for the wages they had "lost" when they turned in their factory overalls for military uniforms during the Great War. Critics denounced this demand as a holdup "bonus," but the millions of veterans deployed heavy political artillery. They browbeat Congress into passing a bonus bill in 1922, which Harding promptly vetoed. Re-forming their lines, the repulsed veterans gathered for a final attack. In 1924 Congress again hoisted the white flag and passed the Adjustment Compensation Act. It gave every former soldier a paid-up insurance policy due in 20 years - adding about $3.5 million to the total cost of war. Coolidge sternly vetoed the measure, but Congress overrode him.

Operation Rolling Thunder; escalation of the war

Viet Cong guerrillas attacked an American air base at Pleiku, South Vietnam, in February 1965. President Johnson immediately order retaliatory bombing raids against military installations in North Vietnam and for the first time ordered attacking US troops to land. By the middle of March 1965, the Americans had "Operation Rolling Thunder" in full swing -- regular full-scale bombing attacks against North Vietnam. Before 1965 ended, some 184,000 American troops were involved, most of them slogging through the jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam searching for guerrillas. Johnson and his advisers believed that a fine-tuned, step-by-step "escalation" of American force would drive the enemy to defeat with a minimum loss of life on both sides. But the enemy matched every increase in American firepower with more men and more wiliness in the art of guerrilla warfare. ADD? Page 927-28

Helms-Burton Act and embargo

Washington broke diplomatic relations with Castro's government early in 1961 and imposed a strict embargo on trade with Cuba. Strengthened by the Helms-Burton Act in 1996, the embargo has remained in place ever since.

Truman and civil rights

When President Truman heard about the lynching of black war veterans in 1946, he exclaimed, "My God! I had no idea it was as terrible as that." The horrified Truman responded by commissioning a report titled "To Secure These Rights." Following the reports recommendations, Truman in 1948 ended segregation in federal civil service and ordered "equality of treatment and opportunity" in the armed forces. Yet Congress stubbornly resisted passing civil rights legislation, and Truman's successor, Eisenhower, showed no real interest in the racial issue. It was the Supreme Court that assumed political leadership in the civil rights struggle.

War Refugee Board (page 808-9)

When reports of the Holocaust were verified in late 1942, the US had yet to land a single soldier on the continent of Europe, so its options for rescue were few. FDR did warn that the perpetrators of genocide would be brought to justice at war's end -- the origins of the later "war crimes" trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo. He eventually created the War Refugee Board, which saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation to the notorious death camp at Auschwitz.

Human Genome Project

When scientists first unlocked the secrets of molecular genetic structure in the 1950's, the road lay open to breeding new strains of high-yield, pest -- and weather -- resistant crops; to curing hereditary diseases; and also, unfortunately, to unleashing genetic mutations that might threaten the fragile balance of the biosphere in which humankind was delicately suspended. The Human Genome Project established the DNA sequencing of the thirty thousand human genes, pointing the way to radical new medial therapies -- and to profits for bioengineering firms. Startling breakthroughs in the cloning of animals raised thorny questions about the legitimacy of applying cloning techniques to human reproduction. Research into human stem cells held out the promise of cures for afflictions like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. But the Bush admin shared the concern of certain religious groups that harvesting stem cells involved the destruction of human life in embryonic form. Bush therefore limited government funding for stem cell research, as Americans struggled with the ethical implications of their vast new technological advances.

National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act)

When the Supreme Court axed the blue eagle, a Congress sympathetic to labor unions undertook to fill the vacuum. The fruit of its deliberations was the Wagner, or National Labor Relations, Act of 1935. This trailblazing law created a powerful new National Labor Relations Board for administrative purposes and reasserted the right of labor to engage in self-organization and to bargain collectively through representative of its own choice. The Wagner Act proved to be one of the real milestones on the rocky road of the US labor movement.

Wilson's "Fourteen Points" (summarize)

Wilson quickly came to be recognized as the moral leader of the Allied cause. He scaled the summit of inspiring oratory on January 8, 1918, when he delivered his famed Fourteen Points Address to an enthusiastic Congress. The first five of the Fourteen Points were broad in scope. 1. A proposal to abolish secret treaties pleased liberals of all countries. 2. Freedom of the seas appealed to the Germans, as well as to Americans who distrusted British sea power. 3. A removal of economic barriers among nations had long been the goal of liberal internationalists everywhere. 4. Reduction of armament burdens was gratifying to taxpayers in all countries. 5. An adjustment of colonial claims in the interests of both native peoples and the colonizers was reassuring to the anti-imperialists. Other points among the fourteen proved to be no less seductive. They held out the hope of independence to oppressed minority groups, such as the Poles, millions of whom lay under the heel of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Number 14 foreshadowed the League of Nations - an international organization that Wilson dreamed would provide a system of collective security.

Wilson's health problems and collapse

Wilson's strenuous barnstorming campaign was undertaken in the face of protests by physicians and friends. Wilson had never been robust; he had entered the White House nearly seven years before with a stomach pump and with headache pills for his neuritis. His frail body had begun to sag under the strain of partisan strife, a global war, and a stressful peace negotiation. Be he declared that he was willing to die, like the soldiers he had sent into battle, for the sake of the new world order. The high point - and the heartbreaking point - of return trip (from his presidential campaign for the Treaty of Versailles) was at Pueblo, Colorado, Sept 25, 1919. Wilson, with tears coursing down his cheeks, pleaded for the League of Nations as the only real hope of preventing future wars. That night he collapsed from physical and nervous exhaustion.

East Berlin, West Berlin; Berlin Blockade, Berlin Airlift

With Germany now split in two, there remained the problem of the rubble heap known as Berlin. Lying deep within the Soviet zone, this beleaguered isle in a red sea had been broken, like Germany as a whole, into sectors occupied by troops of each of the four victorious powers. In 1948, following controversies over German currency reform and four-power control, the Soviet abruptly choked off all rail and highway access to Berlin. They evidently reasoned that the Allies would be starved out. The Americans organized a gigantic airlift in the midst of hair-trigger tension. For nearly a year, flying some of the very aircraft that had recently dropped bombs on Berlin, American pilots ferried thousands of tons of supplies a day to the grateful Berliners, their former enemies. Western Europeans took heart from this vivid demonstrations of America's determination to honor its commitments to Europe. The Soviets, their bluff dramatically called, finally lifted their blockade in May 1949.

election 1876, Hayes vs. Tilden, electoral college

With Grant out of the running and with the Conklingites and Blaineites neutralizing each other, the Republicans turned to a compromise candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, who was obscure enough to be dubbed "The Great Unknown." Pitted against the humdrum Hayes was the Democratic nominee, Samuel J. Tilden, who had risen to fame as the man who bagged Boss Tweed in New York. Campaigning against Republican scandal, Tilden racked up 184 electoral votes of the needed 185, with 20 votes in four states - three of them in the South - doubtful because of irregular returns. ADD?

Hiroshima, Nagasaki

With Japan still refusing to surrender, the Potsdam threat was fulfilled. On Aug 6, 1945, a lone American bomber dropped one atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. In a blinding flash of death, followed by a funnel-shaped cloud, about 180,000 people were left killed, wounded, or missing. Some 70,000 of them died instantaneously. Sixty thousand more soon perished from burns and radiation disease. Fanatically resisting Japanese, though facing atomization, still did not surrender. American aviators, on Aug 9, dropped a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. The explosion took a horrible toll of about 80,000 people killed or missing.

liberal Protestant; YMCA/YWCA

With roots in the Unitarian revolt against orthodox Calvinism, liberal ideas came to dominate American Protestantism between 1875 and 1925, despite frequent and bitter controversies. Entrenched in the leadership and seminaries of the mainstream denominations, liberal Protestants adapted religious ideas to modern culture and called for modest moral reforms. They rejected biblical literalism and questioned the idea of original sin. Ubranites also participated in a new kind of religious-affiliated organization, the Young Men's and Women's Christian Associations. The YMCA and YWCA, established in the US before the Civil War, grew by leaps and bounds. Combining physical and other kinds of education with religious instructions, the "Y's" appeared in virtually every major American city by the end of the nineteenth century.

Atlantic Charter: FDR and Churchill

With the surrender of the Soviet Union still a dread possibility, the drama-charged Atlantic Conference was held in August 1941. British prime minister Winston Churchill secretly met with FDR on a warship off the foggy coast of Newfoundland. This was the first of a series of history-making conferences between the two statesmen for the discussion of common problems, including the menace of Japan in the Far East. The most memorable offspring of this get-together was the eight-point Atlantic Charter. It was formally accepted by FDR and Churchill and endorsed by the Soviet Union later that year. Suggestive of Wilson's Fourteen Points, the new covenant outlined the aspirations of the democracies for a better world at war's end. Surprisingly, the Atlantic Charter was rather specific. While opposing imperialistic annexations, it promised that there would be no territorial changes contrary to the wishes of the inhabitants (self-determination). It further affirmed the right of a people to choose their own form of government and, in particular, to regain the governments abolished by the dictators. Among various other goals, the charter declared for disarmament and a peace of security, pending a "permanent system of general security" (a new League of Nations).

Feminist Revolution

Women started in the 20th century making up 20% of all workers, but by the 1990's they made up 1/2. The majority of working-age women held jobs outside of the home. In 1950 nearly 90% of women with children did not work for pay, but by half a century later women with children as young as 1 years old were wage earners. Beginning in the 1960s, many all-male colleges and military academies opened their doors to women. However, women were still earning less than men in low-prestige, low-paying occupations (the "pink ghetto"). Occupational segregation was mostly due to the fact that women were far more likely than men to interrupt their careers to bear and raise children, and they even choose less demanding career paths to allow for fulfilling those traditional roles. More women than men voted Democratic, a party seen as willing to favor gov. support for health and child care, education, and job equality, as well as being more vigilant to protect abortion rights. More men started to share women's rolls as gender rolls became more mixed.

The Great White Fleet

Worried that his intercession might be interpreted in Tokyo as prompted by fear, Roosevelt hit upon a dramatic scheme to impress the Japanese with the heft of his big stick. He daringly decided to sent hte entire battleship fleet on a highly visible voyage around the world. Late in 1097 sixteen sparkling-white, smoke-belching battleships started from Virginia waters. Their commander pointedly declared that he was ready for "a feast, a frolic, and a fight." The Great White Fleet - saluted by cannonading champagne corks - received tumultuous welcomes in Latin America, Hawaii, New Zealand, and Australia (though it ended up having to borrow coal from the British to complete the voyage). As events turned out, an overwhelming reception in Japan was the high point of the trip. In the warm diplomatic atmosphere created by the visit of the fleet, the US signed the Root-Takahira agreement with Japan in 1908. It pledged both powers to respect each other's territorial possessions in the Pacific and to uphold the Open Door in China.

Joseph Pulitzer, yellow journalism

___ (journalist), Hungarian-born and near-blind, was a leader in the techniques of sensationalism in St. Louis and esp. with the "New York World." His use of the colored comic supplements, featuring the "Yellow Kid," gave the name _____ to his lurid sheets.

causes of the Great Depression (list)

page 762; maldistribution of income; monopolistic pricing; unregulated bank practices and unregulated stock market; policies of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administration; mistakes of the Federal Reserve System; foreign debts from WWI owed to US Banks; and Hawley-Smoot Tariff. PAGE 762

Election of 1924

self-satisfied Republicans nominated Coolidge for the presidency at their convention in Cleveland in the summer of 1924. Squabbling Democrats had more difficulty choosing a candidate when they met in NY's Madison Square Garden. Reflecting many of the cultural tensions of the decade, the party was hopelessly split between "wets" and "drys," urbanites and farmers, Fundamentalists and Modernists, northern liberals and southern stand-patters, immigrants and old-stock Americans. The Democrats at last turned wearily and unenthusiastically to John W. Davis. The Progressives nominated Senator "Fighting Bob" La Follette from Wisconsin. Coolidge and the oil-smeared Republicans slipped easily back into office. The electoral count stood at 382 for Coolidge, 136 for Davis, and 13 for La Follette.