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Semester One Topic Summaries: The Founding of America to Reconstruction
These short summaries were developed as supplements to The American Nation by Mark Carnes.
American Society in the Making
The many different expectations that colonists brought to the New World, the various
environments they entered there, and their distance from Europe combined to produce a number
of distinct patterns of social development in America. In New Mexico and Florida, Franciscan
friars established missions and sought to Christianize and "civilize" the Indians while putting
them to work building, mining, and farming. British North America could be divided into three
regional societies. The southern colonies, comprising the Chesapeake Bay area, the Carolinas,
and Georgia, were predominantly agricultural; land itself turned out to be the major asset of the
area and the property owners found that they could realize the most profit by cultivating highyield cash crops such as tobacco and rice. These crops were also extremely labor intensive,
however, and the proprietors turned to indentured servants and then increasingly to African slave
labor to work the fields. With such large tracts of land under cultivation, settlements in the South
tended to be spread out, and this coupled with the generally high mortality rate and captive labor
population of the region translated into social instability. At perhaps the opposite end of the
spectrum stood the New England colonies, which, as a result of their settlers' emphasis on
families, religious and secular covenants, and strict mores, enjoyed a very stable, cohesive social
structure. Like the South, New England’s economy was primarily agricultural, though on a far
smaller scale: cash crops were not an option. But with its many towns and educated populace,
New England also supported merchants, educational institutions, and some artisans. The middle
colonies—New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—were home to the most diversified
colonial economies; farmers, merchants, and artisans were all well represented. These colonies
were also more ethnically and religiously diverse than their neighbors to the north and south, as
well as more politically sophisticated. Whereas in the southern colonies settlers tended to defer
to their appointed leaders or the landed gentry and New England’s elections generally granted
power to the wealthy and socially prominent, the middle colonies, where most males could vote,
not so readily ceded power in their representative assemblies to the rich or favored; in fact, the
John Peter Zenger libel trial in Pennsylvania illustrates their unique political culture.
America in the British Empire
Although the relationship was intended to be mutually beneficial, England and its American
colonies increasingly seemed to work at cross purposes as time progressed. The colonies were
founded by a number of disparate groups independent of one another, and that is how they
regarded themselves and were viewed in England, but even by the middle of the seventeenth
century Parliament attempted to impose a mercantilistic order with various navigation acts and
the 1696 placement of the colonies under the jurisdiction of the Board of Trade. Meanwhile, a
more unified American character and identity was emerging in the colonies; one of the early
examples of this is the Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century, which despite often
splitting Americans along class lines, was a unique, collective American experience.
Enlightenment thought was also making headway in America—not only did the era’s political
thought influence Americans, but its followers’ scientific inquiry into the colonies' natural
environment fostered a developing sense of America as a place profoundly different from
Europe. In this whole process, the colonies were not necessarily growing apart from England,
only gaining an identity as British subjects in a new land—growing apart came as a result of
colonists' participation in the American theaters of England's wars with the French and Spanish,
the final one being the French and Indian War, fought mostly on American soil. The colonists
absorbed heavy losses and emerged from the war deeply in debt; a wartime economic boom
quickly faded into depression, coincidentally at the moment that Parliament decided that the
colonies should contribute more toward their own administrative and defense costs. The back
and forth over Parliament's attempts to exact this due and assert its power—the Sugar Act, the
Stamp Act, the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Duties—and actions such as prohibiting
settlement beyond the Appalachians and the Quartering Act convinced colonists that Parliament
wanted to deprive them of their rights as English subjects. Tensions came to a head with the
Gaspee incident, the Tea Act (and the subsequent Boston Tea Party), and Coercive Acts leading
to the convocation of the First Continental Congress, in 1774, and revolution.
The American Revolution
The actions of the First Continental Congress moved the British to use force to reassert control
over the colonies; in April 1775 British troops and colonial irregulars in engaged in the first
battles of what would turn out to be the American Revolution. The Second Continental Congress,
meeting in May 1776 and somewhat more radical than its predecessor, organized colonial forces
into a Continental Army with George Washington at its lead, made one last appeal to George III,
and pleaded their case in the "Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms."
Most colonists, for various reasons, were still chary of severing ties to Britain, but the feelings of
many changed when the British elected to use Hessian mercenaries to fight the war and upon
reading Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which argued for complete independence. By July the
Second Continental Congress had drafted the Declaration of Independence describing the theory
behind the American revolt and enumerating American grievances against George III. In the war,
although Britain had superior resources of manpower, materials, and industrial capacity as well
as the advantages of a strong centralized government, the most powerful navy in the world, and
an experienced and well-trained army, its war effort was poorly directed and only halfheartedly
supported at home. Despite fighting on familiar terrain, the Americans' inexperience showed in
early defeats, which did not end disastrously only because the British inexplicably did not pursue
them. But as the war progressed and fighting moved south (where the British thought that they
would find more Loyalist support), Washington pulled his army together and with considerable
help from the French finally wrested an English surrender at Yorktown. The Peace of Paris
ending the war was generous for the United States, but the new nation nevertheless faced the task
of forming a national government and other institutions, complicated by the sovereignty enjoyed
by the states under the Articles of Confederation. The states also had to create governments and
formulate constitutions, most of which, in their structures and distributions of power, would
reflect the concerns colonists developed while under British rule. Socially, the war accelerated
the growth of a national spirit, as it linked the colonies in a common cause and then in a nation
and also gave the Americans heroes, most notably George Washington. National spirit was also
enhanced by the Great Land Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, which opened the Ohio Valley to
settlers, and a national culture began to emerge in textbooks, religion, and in the arts.
The Federalist Era: Nationalism...
In the wake of the Revolution, the Unites States' government, as organized under the Articles of
Confederation, found itself unable to effectively address serious challenges: interstate quarrels,
foreign policy and trade conflicts with Spain and Britain, and severe economic dislocations.
Under the Articles, the states and federal government had unsuccessfully tried, often in conflict
with one another, to pay their Revolutionary War debts, establish credit, and control new
territory in the West. To deal with these problems, state delegates met in Philadelphia in 1787
and drafted the Constitution. This document created a new federal system and specifically
delineated its powers, balanced between an executive branch, a bicameral legislature and the
states. Although support for the Constitution was not unanimous (Federalists backed it; the AntiFederalists did not), the Constitution was ratified by the states, in many cases with the stipulation
that a Bill of Rights be added. Congress added the Bill of Rights in its first session and
established the government’s third branch, the judiciary. George Washington, the first president,
had within his cabinet both Federalists and Anti-Federalists. At the outset the most important
figure was a Federalist, the Treasury Secretary Andrew Hamilton, at whose behest Congress
approved the establishment of a national bank and the federal assumption of states’ war debts,
both signal events in the development of the national government. Meanwhile, the federal
government faced a tax revolt in the West and threats from the Spanish, French, and British. The
Whiskey Rebellion was put down by federal troops with relatively little trouble at Pittsburgh; the
Jay Treaty settled American differences with Britain for the moment, and the Pinckney Treaty
did the same with Spain. Relations with France were rockier, but in the wake of the Citizen
Genet and XYZ affairs, Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, which pushed France to
sign the Convention of 1800 and avoided war. At home, the Alien and Sedition Acts provoked
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to issue the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves respectively,
which not only argued that those acts were unconstitutional, but also raised the idea that states
could declare acts of Congress unconstitutional.
Jeffersonian Democracy
Thomas Jefferson, an Anti-Federalist, won the presidency; the peaceful transition of power
effectively capped the demise of the Federalists, but not before the Federalists had established a
strong, working central government structured and principled as described in the Constitution,
instituted a sound financial system, and began diversifying the economy. An indirect legacy of
the Federalists, via the Judiciary Act of 1801 and the ensuing Marbury v. Madison, was the
doctrine of judicial review, or the power of the federal judiciary to invalidate federal laws on
constitutional grounds. Jefferson differed from the Federalists in that he saw government as a
threat to individual freedom; the only protection against that threat was democracy and strong
protections of personal liberties. He did not, however, reject wholesale the accomplishments of
the Federalist administrations that preceded him, and his combination of them with his own
beliefs came to be known as "Jeffersonian democracy." The Jefferson presidency saw increasing
factionalism and a couple of controversies (involving Aaron Burr and John Randolph), but was
most notable for its deeds outside of America. Jefferson attempted to face down the Barbary
pirates, purchased Louisiana from the French (and sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark off
to explore it), and tried to triangulate between the French and British, who were at war at the
time. Americans prospered by supplying both sides in the war, but retaliatory actions by the
combatants against each other endangered the Americans' racket, while the British practice of
impressing American sailors threatened America’s neutral rights. In response, Jefferson and
Congress passed the Embargo Act, prohibiting all American exports and thus unsurprisingly
hurting the American economy. Congress soon repealed it and replaced it with the NonIntercourse Act, which only forbade trade with Britain and France, and authorized the president
to end the boycott against either at his discretion.
National Growing Pains
Succeeding Jefferson to the presidency, Madison also tried to deal with French and British
predations on American shipping. Although by 1812 Napoleon’s Continental System appeared to
be nudging Britain toward repealing the Orders in Council and reopening trade with the United
States, Napoleon (in reality, the greater threat to the United States) had successfully played the
United States against England such that the Americans felt compelled to declare war on Great
Britain. Moreover, war fever in the United States was driven by westward expansion: after the
Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811 essentially ended Indian resistance in the Ohio Valley, western
Americans wanted to take Canada; Madison saw attacking Canada as a way to force a change in
British policy. The War of 1812, opposed by maritime interests and New England Federalists,
was not a well-executed undertaking for either side, and ended in 1814 with a status quo ante
bellum. In ensuing years the United States and Britain agreed to demilitarize the Great Lakes,
settled the northern boundary of the Louisiana Territory as far west as the Rockies, and
negotiated joint control of the Oregon Territory, as well as grew closer economically. The United
States also concluded the Transcontinental Treaty with Spain, by which it gained Florida (for $5
million) and established boundaries with Mexico. And in 1823 the United States issued the
Monroe Doctrine, stating that while it would respect already-existing European colonies in the
Western Hemisphere and try to stay out of European affairs, the United States would treat any
attempt to extend European control in the hemisphere as a hostile gesture. The Monroe
presidency domestically is often called the Era of Good Feelings, but although it did see the end
of the old Federalist–Anti-Federalist issues, shadows of sectionalism were arising as powerful
leaders from the South, West, and North all gained prominence. The sections clashed on the
Second Bank of the United States and monetary issues, protectionism and the tariff, credit and
expansion in the West, and slavery. The first of many conflicts on that issue was addressed in the
debate over Missouri statehood and was resolved with the Missouri Compromise (1820). And in
response to the tariff, John Calhoun issued his "Exposition and Protest," which questioned
federal authority and argued for states’ rights to nullify acts of Congress.
Toward a National Economy
Until the Revolution, Americans imported most of their manufactured goods from England.
After the war, however, America's agrarian economy began to diversify. Textile mills led the
American industrial revolution; Francis Cabot Lowell and his Boston Associates used the British
model to establish the Boston Manufacturing Company and combine machine production, largescale operation, efficient management, and centralized marketing under one roof. The success of
Lowell and the industrial revolution was dependent on a number of interrelated factors:
technology, cheap labor, dependable and abundant supplies of materials, financing, markets, and
efficient transportation to market. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the
invention of the steam engine and spinning machines as well as more-efficient water-power
mechanisms, all of which made large factories possible. Furthermore, Eli Whitney's cotton gin
made the cultivation of upland cotton throughout the South profitable. Labor to staff these
factories first was provided by young, single women (in Cabot’s "Waltham System") and
children, and, later, immigrants; the cotton gin essentially revived and entrenched the South's
dependence on slave labor. In addition, the early industrial revolution operated in a favorable
regulatory climate: the Bank of the United States extended credit, corporations chartered by
states helped raise capital, and the Supreme Court was friendly to business interests. Not only did
this capital and governmental oversight help industrialists, it also fueled a transportation boom:
Americans built roads and canals, and operated steamboats on rivers. This improved
transportation allowed manufacturers to deliver their goods and farmers their crops to markets
throughout the country. The demand was there: industrial growth helped to create wealth, but the
United States' population explosion of the era was no small boost itself.
Jacksonian Democracy
The Jacksonian Era arguably began when Jackson lost the 1824 presidential election to John
Quincy Adams, because it was at that time that Jackson harnessed his party's apparatus to
campaign for 1828. Many new states’ constitutions eliminated property qualifications for
officeholders, while more offices were becoming elective rather than appointive: voting became
more widespread and more important, thus competition between candidates increased,
manifested in less concern for issues than for character assassinations of opponents. Response to
this was a new party system, which required money, people, and organizations to run campaigns
and get out the vote. Jackson, a firm believer in the "common man," used all of this to gain the
presidency on 1828. Jackson's supporters, the Jacksonian Democrats, included rich and poor,
abolitionists and slaveholders, and came from all regions of the country; they were united by
suspicion of special privilege and large business corporations, belief in freedom of economic
opportunity and political freedom (for white males), the conviction that ordinary citizens could
perform the tasks of government, and support for states’ rights. Jackson ran his administration
according to such principles, as he employed the spoils system and rotated his appointees
through offices, killed the second Bank of the United States, and preferred to leave local
improvement projects to the states. Jackson did, however, also believe in the Union and the
power of the presidency, which he utilized in the Cherokee removal (contrary to Supreme Court
rulings), negotiating trade agreements with Britain and exacting reparations from France, and in
facing down the Nullification Crisis. Jackson was not, however, terribly economically savvy, as
his idea to distribute surplus federal revenues to the states would have caused deficits, his battle
against the bank threatened to provoke a panic, and his Specie Circular caused an economic
downturn, the panic of 1837, which he bequeathed to his hand-picked successor, Martin Van
Buren. The Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, running a Jacksonesque campaign,
defeated Van Buren in 1840.
The Making of Middle-Class America
When the French aristocrats Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont toured the United
States in the 1830s, both were struck by the degree of equality and social and physical mobility
they witnessed in the American people. While each oversimplified, America's agrarian economy,
cheap and available land, and voting laws did promote a certain equality relative to Europe. In
the same era, however, the American industrial revolution was shaping a middle class and its
institutions. The various embargoes of the early part of the nineteenth century caused many
artisans to bring in and manage apprentices and lesser-skilled help; the rise of factories created a
similar managerial class. Factories, of course, could not be homes also, and as a result more
people began leaving home to go to work and cities began to divide into industrial and residential
areas, which further broke down along class lines. Women were left at home, and the "woman's
sphere" and cult of domesticity began to take hold. Childhood was also transformed in this era,
as middle-class couples married later and had fewer children. The cult of domesticity often
dovetailed into or crossed paths with other movements of the time, such as the Second Great
Awaking and reform crusades including temperance, abolitionism, and women's rights. Other
reformers included utopian communities, which were often, but not always, religious, and
voluntary associations.
A Democratic Culture
By the 1830s, the United States was developing its own distinct culture as illustrated by
movements in literature, the arts, and education. Romanticism, a literary movement that rose in
reaction to the Age of Reason, valued emotion and intuition, and stressed optimism, patriotism,
ingenuousness, and, in particular, the individual as part of nature and therefore divine. America's
main proponents of this thinking were the Transcendentalists, the most famous of whom were
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Both objected to society's restrictions on
individuals, but whereas Emerson was apolitical, Thoreau was something of an activist, as his
poll-tax protest and essay "Civil Disobedience" show. Edgar Allan Poe was not a
Transcendentalist but a romantic all the same; he was America's prototype tortured genius. Other
writers, such as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, had a romantic focus on the
individual, but explored the darker side of people's struggles with guilt, sin, good and evil, and
pride; Walt Whitman borrowed from the all of them to create his own most American voice by
relying on his natural inclinations and using commonplace subjects and often coarse language. In
architecture and the decorative arts, the Federal, Gothic, Greek, and Italian styles all gained
popularity, while technology made mass production of items such as wallpaper, rugs, and
furniture possible. Painters of the Hudson River school and the luminists decorated wealthy
homes; the middle class embraced Currier and Ives. This mid-nineteenth-century era also saw the
growth of public education throughout the country save for the South. Educators were driven not
only by the beliefs that humans were "improvable" and that democracy required an educated
citizenry, but also by a desire to "Americanize" immigrants and create good employees. And
though exceedingly few Americans used them, colleges began to reform and create more
practical curricula in the 1840s and some to educate women. In the general culture, magazine,
newspaper, and book publishers flourished, as did civic cultures in cities like Boston,
Philadelphia, New York, Cincinnati, Lexington, and Pittsburgh. In the hard sciences, states
sponsored geological and coastal surveys. An American sense of humor also emerged in this era.
Expansion and Slavery
John Tyler served a somewhat embattled presidency, as he often clashed with his cabinet and
Henry Clay over issues such as a new Bank of the United States and the tariff. Southerners were
most against the tariff, hinting at sectional differences that would grow with America's expansion
in the next few years. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty, which settled the Maine–New Brunswick
border and others between the U.S. and Canada, caused little sensation. Developments in the
West, however, did, starting with Texas. Americans had begun to stream into Texas, a part of
independent Mexico, and soon outnumbered the Mexicans. The conflicts between the two
cultures led white Texans to fight a war for independence, which they won in 1835. Texans
wanted to be annexed by the United States, but Presidents Jackson and Van Buren resisted
because they neither wanted war with Mexico nor to rouse sectional tensions over slavery, which
Texan statehood would inevitably provoke. But Americans continued to move to Texas and
California, also a part of Mexico, as well as Oregon, which the U.S. shared with Great Britain,
arduous journeys west undertaken with a firm belief in manifest destiny. Finally, by a joint
resolution of Congress, Texas was annexed. Under President Polk, the United States gained the
Oregon Territory south of the forty-ninth parallel from England and went to war with Mexico
over disputed Texan territory. At minimal expense, the Mexican War won this territory,
California, and much of the American Southwest; the later Gadsen Purchase added to this
Mexican cession. And it paid immediate dividends for the United States, as gold was soon
discovered in California. Meanwhile, however, California was ready to apply for statehood and
the new territories had to be organized, both facts that necessitated addressing the question of
slavery’s spread. The Compromise of 1850 settled the matter for the time being.
The Sections Go Their Ways
Industrialization further deepened the divisions among the sections in the United States,
particularly between North and South. Although it did develop some manufacturing and mining,
the South's economy was agricultural, and the industrial North's as well as European demand for
its products, especially cotton, gave it no reason to change. The importance of cotton cultivation,
however, had a number of consequences, among the most significant being that it kept the South
rural and fostered a dependence on slave labor. The South's capital was tied up in land and
slaves, and thus could not be used to develop industry or even transportation or marketing
mechanisms for its crops, so the real profits from cotton went to northern merchants or middle
men. Moreover, many plantations were for the most part self-sufficient, meaning that society was
less interdependent. Slavery also had tangible social effects on whites: it made poor southerners
regard work for others as servitude, reinforced male dominance, and kept them on a constant
state of alert to the threat of insurrections. Meanwhile, in the North, westward expansion
delivered raw material and markets, and corporations provided capital for the growth of industry.
Such growth led to further technological innovations and economic expansion, but while
machines increased production and made some wealthy, machines also helped to create a poor
and unskilled working class, often immigrant, that shared few of the benefits of mechanization.
For all of its industry, however, America still remained in these years primarily an exporter of
raw materials and importer of finished goods; Great Britain was the major trading partner.
American transportation also continued to improve, as steamships began crossing the Atlantic
quickly and affordably (often bringing more immigrants back with them); internally, canals
proliferated. The most significant transportation development, though, was the railroad, which
could determine patterns of settlement and quite literally put towns and cities on the map.
Financed primarily by private capital but also enjoying legislative and monetary support of local
municipalities, the railroads spread throughout the North and Midwest, even further integrating
the regions’ economies. The South lagged behind in its own railroads.
The Coming of the Civil War
North-South divisions deepened in the 1850s with the Compromise of 1850’s new fugitive slave
law and the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin. In an attempt to distract
attention from the sectional conflict and spurred by manifest destiny, a search for new markets,
and a desire to spread democracy throughout the globe, the Young America movement guided
American forays into Nicaragua, Mexico, and Japan as well as the negotiation of a treaty with
Britain regarding a future canal across the Central American isthmus. But when American
ministers produced the Ostend Manifesto proposing taking Cuba from Spain, many northerners
saw it as a "slaveholders' plot." A leading voice for the Young America movement was Stephen
Douglass, who based his politics in expansion and popular sovereignty; while he opposed
slavery's expansion he did not see it as a moral issue. Hence he was the architect of the
Compromise of 1850 and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which positioned the United States on
the road to civil war. The act caused another realignment in national politics, for reaction to it
split the Whigs into the American (or "Know-Nothing") and Republican parties; the Republicans
also drew Free-Soilers, "Conscience" Whigs, and "Anti-Nebraska" Democrats. Meanwhile,
abolitionists and defenders of slavery fought for control of Kansas, sometimes erupting into
armed skirmishes. The tensions were exacerbated by the Supreme Court's Dred Scott ruling and
its accompanying declaration of the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, and by John
Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in
1860 on a platform that included the exclusion of slavery from the territories led six southern
states to secede out of fear of northern economic and political domination and the threat to
slavery that it promised. They justified their action via states’ rights and a strict constructionist
interpretation of the Constitution. President Buchanan claimed he had no legal power to oppose
them.
The War to Save the Union
Lincoln assumed the presidency open to many viewpoints and not intending to threaten the
South, but he made it clear that he believed secession illegal. And although he did not attempt to
reclaim federal property seized by the Confederates in the Deep South, his decision to defend
and rearm Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor provoked the first shots of the war. In response,
Lincoln called up volunteers, and with that the states of the Upper South seceded. The North
entered the war with the advantages of superior numbers, industry, railroads, naval strength, and
a strong leader in Lincoln; it was hampered by poor military leadership. The South, though it had
to create new governmental institutions and was committed to states’ rights, held sway over the
North in its own military leaders, and was buoyed by the knowledge that it could fight a
defensive war, and the confidence that the North would not stomach a long conflict and that the
importance of cotton to Northern and European economies would give it an upper hand. On the
battlefield, the South did perform well, and Lincoln was continually searching for adequate
leadership for the Union army. The turning points in the war were the Battle of Gettysburg, in
Pennsylvania, in which Meade defeated Lee, and Grant’s capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi.
Lincoln named Grant Union commander. The North paid for the war effort with excise and
income taxes, a direct tax on states, borrowing, and printing paper money. Likewise, the South
relied on income and excise taxes, borrowing, and printing paper money as well as a tax in kind
and cotton mortgages to finance the war, but for it, this was a serious drain on its resources. Its
hoped-for help from abroad never came. In addition, both Lincoln’s and Davis's administrations
had their share of conflicts: slavery remained a divisive issue in the North and some chafed at
Lincoln’s expansion of presidential power, while in the South spats arose between Davis and
state governors. Although it was not on his agenda at the outset, Lincoln made freedom of the
slaves a war aim with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It, too, was divisive in the North,
but it gave the war an added moral dimension and drew blacks to Union lines. Nevertheless, by
the end of that year, the South was on its way to defeat, worn down by the Union’s superior
numbers and industrial might. The Northern economy, meanwhile, boomed as government
demand stimulated manufacturing and Congress passed economically oriented bills that
Southerners had blocked. Although there was inflation, some labor unrest, and labor shortage,
the war hastened industrialization and modernization. The war also helped to change women's
roles, as by necessity they took on some of the tasks traditionally assigned to men, who were off
fighting: they became nurses, factory workers, and government clerks; they ran farms. Grant’s
leadership and his and Sherman’s pursuit of "total war" brought about the South's defeat in 1865.
The war not only preserved the union, it created the nation.
Reconstruction and the South
Even as the Civil War raged, Abraham Lincoln had rather conciliatory and lenient plans, some of
which he implemented in Confederate areas under Union control, for readmitting the secessionist
states. He was opposed by the Radical Republicans, who were intent on guaranteeing blacks
rights and on punishing the Confederacy. Andrew Johnson tried to continue with Lincoln’s plans
after the latter’s assassination, but control of the Reconstruction process was wrested from him
by the Radical Republicans, who won large congressional majorities in the election of 1866. One
of the major issues in the election was the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted blacks
political rights in the South and outlawed the Black Codes that had sprung up throughout the
former Confederacy. Johnson opposed the measure, but he was repudiated by the public, and,
emboldened by their triumph, the Radical Republicans pushed ahead with a number of
Reconstruction acts dividing the South into five military districts and setting stringent guidelines
for the Confederates’ readmission to the Union. They also tried to impeach Johnson and only
narrowly failed. Republican Ulysses Grant took over the presidency in 1868, helped by the votes
of newly enfranchised Southern blacks. The Radical Republicans furthermore passed the
Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed all blacks, including those in the North, the right to
vote. Blacks also took advantage of the opportunities presented by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments to become involved in politics in the South. Rebuilding the South, however, was
difficult because of the damage of the war, and few in government or elsewhere had given much
thought to the fates of the newly freed slaves. This and the South’s general lack of industry gave
rise to sharecropping and the crop-lien system, which were often little better in practical terms
for blacks than slavery. Although black political power was overwhelmingly minimal, white
backlash nevertheless occurred, showing up in associations like the Ku Klux Klan, which
terrorized blacks. Congress dealt with the Klan with three Force acts (1870–71), but its legacy
lived on in conservative Democratic parties, which began to win Southern legislatures in the
1870s. Meanwhile, Northern interest in the problems of the South was waning, and with the
Compromise of 1877 that put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House, Reconstruction ended.
Semester Two Summaries: Post-Reconstruction to Present Day
These short summaries were prepared to supplement The American Nation by Mark Carnes
In the Wake of War
While major changes were occurring in American society at large, the federal government, but
for the "bloody shirt" and debates over the tariff, currency, and civil-service reform, essentially
disengaged itself from any meaningful issues of the day. Like most Americans, it took a laissezfaire approach to (not) regulating business; social Darwinism for many justified such an
approach. Mark Twain called this era the "Gilded Age," dazzling on the surface but base
underneath. In the South, blacks were gradually disenfranchised through the use of poll taxes and
literacy tests, while the Supreme Court curtailed blacks' civil rights and the power of the
government to defend them. Blacks responded with militant nationalism, a revival of the backto-Africa movement, and, as preached by Booker T. Washington and most popularly,
accommodation and concentration on self-improvement. Meanwhile, Americans were filling the
West at breakneck speed, provoking more conflict with the Indians. First the United States
attempted a policy of "concentration," which might have worked had it not been for white
encroachments on Indian lands. It was then decided that the Indians should be given reservations
and take up farming; some tribes yielded but others went to war against the U.S. and settlers. The
army eventually broke Indian resistance, though not before taking some spectacular losses, and
the Dawes Severalty Act parceled tribal lands out to individual Indians, effectively killing tribal
life. Whites were drawn to the West by the great mineral strikes made there and the lure of land,
but the reality was that both the mines and most of the land could only be afforded by large
corporations or wealthy speculators. Among those corporations were the railroads, which were
subsidized by government land grants and loans. The railroads aided western farmers by
providing them with cheap and convenient transportation to markets; likewise the railroads
helped the growth of cattle ranching in the West, which, until the crowding, fencing, and
overproduction caused a crash in the late 1880s, prospered on the open range.
An Industrial Giant
With advances in technology, plentiful natural resources and raw materials, a large immigrant
labor force, a favorable tariff, and a laissez-faire government, American industry thrived in the
late nineteenth century. Railroads were probably the most significant element in American
economic development; important as an industry themselves, the railroads also contributed to the
growth and development of other industries. Land-grant railroads helped to settle the West by
selling their lands cheaply and on easy terms to settlers. Almost as important was the iron and
steel industry, in which the Bessemer process made mass production possible. Furthermore, new
technologies fostered the growth of the oil industry, and new inventions like the telephone and
incandescent light bulb gave birth to industries of their own. The railroad, steel, and oil industries
required expensive machinery and economies of scale, which led to economic concentration.
Soon, monopolies developed; the same happened in the utility industries in order to avoid costly
duplication of equipment and to protect patents. Many Americans saw such monopolies as
threats to fair pricing and endangering economic opportunity and democratic institutions. They
were also concerned about maldistribution of wealth and the sheer power of corporations.
Reformers included authors such as Henry George, Edward Bellamy, and Henry Demarest
Lloyd, and political movements like Marxism. The perceived threat of corporations’ large
concentrations of wealth and monopolies was finally addressed by government, first on the local
level and then the federal. Railroads were the focus of early regulation, but the subsequent
Interstate Commerce Act and Sherman Antitrust Act targeted big business in general, and sought
to restore competition. Workers also reacted to their lot by organizing, with varying degrees of
success. Significant events in labor history from this era include the Knights of Labor’s
involvement in the Haymarket Square riot, the formation of the American Federation of Labor,
and the Homestead and Pullman strikes. The government's role in defeating the Pullman strike in
particular raised questions about just how effective any labor action against big business could
be. The largest question that dominated this era struck at the heart of the nation’s democratic
promise: How could the government promote democracy and freedom with industrialization’s
growing divide between rich and poor and its suppression of dissent?
American Society in the Industrial Age
As the industrial era progressed, social divisions in America became more apparent. The middle
class, wage earners, women, and farmers all experienced industrialization differently. In middleclass families, husbands and wives functioned in separate spheres of responsibility, and children
were closely supervised. Improvements in urban transportation allowed them to move out of city
centers. Wage earners, especially unskilled ones, had a more difficult time with industrialization,
as large-scale industry decreased and made more impersonal contact between employees and
employer, machines set the pace of work, and workers were subject to swings of the business
cycle and poverty dogged them. Nevertheless, although strikes revealed working-class unrest,
many in the working class still believed that with ability and hard work they could rise from their
circumstances. Growing numbers of women worked outside the home, most as domestic
servants, but others in mills and sewing, nursing, the secretarial field, and in elementary
education. Farmers in more established areas benefited from technology and easy access to urban
markets, but farmers in general increasingly lived at the mercy of industrial cycles, and reacted
with periodic waves of radicalism that shook off some of their previous laissez-faire attitudes.
Despite the increasing rigidity of these emerging social divisions, America still remained a
socially, economically, and educationally mobile society. The working class and the problems of
the cities were of particular concern during this era, probably because the influential urban
middle class saw them every day. Working-class slums (and, soon, ethnic neighborhoods) were
being filled by new, and different-looking immigrants from southern and eastern Europe,
alarming many with their alien customs, the threat they appeared to pose to "American" laborers,
and their reputed radicalism. Meanwhile, at the same time that their concentrations of people
fostered varied social, artistic, and intellectual opportunities, cities were overwhelmed by their
population growth. Reformers, then, were driven by a desire to clean up the cities, alleviate
poverty, and in the process, "Americanize" the immigrants. Some church leaders, preaching the
"Social Gospel," and settlement houses made up the ranks of the reform movement.
Intellectual and Cultural Trends
American education, social philosophy, the sciences, and literature all experienced significant
changes in the Gilded Age. The American population was growing and generally better-educated
than ever before, and demand for reading material skyrocketed; the era was probably the golden
age of American magazine publishing, and libraries, newspapers, and reading groups
proliferated. Many magazines took on the social issues of the day. Literature also reflected this
focus, as realists such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James gained
prominence. American art also reflected this realism. As they witnessed the social changes
wrought by industrialization, Americans also became interested in social theory, and social
scientists applied the idea of social Darwinism to human relations of all sorts as they attempted
to use scientific methodology to find objective truths in subjective fields. Social scientists were
also drawn into practical affairs over questions about slums and trusts. Evolution even influenced
law and the study of history, as show in the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Frederick
Jackson Turner. Although the literacy of much of the population was a triumph in itself,
educators realized that traditional education did not prepare students for life in industry.
Progressive educators, John Dewey foremost among them, saw schools as mechanisms for social
reform and argued for a more inclusive curriculum taught by professional instructors. And
though only about 2 percent of the eligible population went to college, the modern college and
university has its roots in this era. Finally, while the theory of evolution helped explain much of
modern life, its logic also made it difficult to justify fixed systems and eternal verities, and that,
carried further by Charles Pierce, concepts could only be fairly understood in terms of their
practical effects. This thinking, represented most visibly in the work of Pierce and William
James, was known as pragmatism.
Politics: Local, State, and National
In the late nineteenth century, the major national political parties avoided taking stands on
controversial issues; voters' decisions were usually determined by their ethnic background,
region of the country, religion, and stance on the Civil War. The largely ineffective presidents
and congressional leaders of the era did little to distinguish themselves. Local politics, however,
were somewhat more active: the cities saw the rise of the boss system, while the farm belt,
suffering from low commodity prices, restrictive tariff and fiscal policies, foreign competition,
drought, and perpetual boom-and-bust cycles, produced the Farmers Alliance, which finally
roused national politics from its slumber. The Alliance joined forces with the Knights of Labor in
1892 to form the People's, or Populist, party. Their platform was sweeping, but the most
prominent issue was silver. The Populists demanded free and unlimited coinage of silver at a
ration of 16:1 to gold. Primarily over the silver issue, Republican William McKinley defeated
Populist William Jennings Bryan in the election of 1896. The election was significant not only
because it decided the silver question, which turned out to be of little consequence anyway, but
because McKinley ran a campaign with a national approach against Bryan's more parochial one
that appealed to only certain groups.
The Age of Reform
Following hard on the heels of the Gilded Age was the Progressive era. Progressives were never
a single group and never shared a single objective; the movement can best be seen as a search for
order in an increasingly complex society. Among the more famous progressives were the
muckraking journalists. The order that Progressives sought was very particular: the movement
was paternalistic, often oversimplified issues, and regarded its own (predominantly middle-class)
values as absolute; it also seldom challenged the fundamental principles of capitalism or basic
social structure. Some who did formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Progressives
reform often began with corrupt city machines, replacing them with such systems as "home
rule," nonpartisan bureaus, city commissioners, and city managers. They also pursued urban
renewal, municipalization of public utilities and public transportation systems, and penalinstitution reform. Municipal reforms, however, would fail without support at the state level, so
progressive reformers also turned their attention there. Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin is
exemplary as a progressive at the state level; he introduced direct primaries, corrupt practices
acts, and campaign spending legislation, as well as the Wisconsin Idea, which was basically to
consult scholars and outside experts on particular reforms. Other states adopted the initiative and
referendum to make their governments more responsive to the people. Progressive legislation by
states also included laws regulating workplace conditions, restricting child and women’s labor,
and regulating transportation, banking, utilities, and insurance. Nationally, one of progressivism's
aims was women's suffrage, which was achieved in 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment. In the
White House, Theodore Roosevelt earned a progressive, "trust-busting" reputation, although he
much preferred regulating and reaching "gentlemanly agreements" with large corporations to
busting them. He was fair to both labor and business, as illustrated in his handling of the
anthracite coal strike. But as time passed, Roosevelt did become more progressive and liberal.
He backed the Hepburn Act (1906), giving the ICC the right to fix maximum railroad rates, and
the Pure Food and Drug Act (1907), supported conservation, and advocated income and
inheritance taxes. His move left and the panic of 1907 helped to split the Republican party . His
successor, William Howard Taft, aroused Roosevelt’s ire such that Roosevelt broke with the
Republicans in 1912. Woodrow Wilson won the election and continued progressive reforms,
though tempered to a degree. Wilson was also an exemplary progressive in that he was a
reactionary on race matters: progressives’ search for order often included marginalizing blacks.
In reaction to this, a new wave of black militancy, led by W. E. B. Du Bois, broke with Booker
T. Washington, and began the Niagara Movement and later the NAACP.
From Isolation to Empire
While not usually so attentive to European affairs in the second part of the nineteenth century,
the United States, motivated by markets, missionary zeal, Anglo-Saxonism, manifest destiny,
and strategic and military concerns, displayed increasing interest in Latin America and the Far
East—the "large policy." In the Pacific, the U.S. acquired Alaska, the Midway Islands, and
Hawaii, the latter two of which were important stops on the way to China and Japan. In Latin
America, the United States unilaterally abrogated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (1850), and via the
Hay-Pauncefote Agreement (1901) won the right to sole control of a canal across Panama. The
United States also had an abiding interest in Cuba and supported Cuban rebels when they
revolted against the Spanish in 1895. When an American battleship, the Maine, exploded in
Havana harbor in 1898, the U.S. seized the opportunity to declare war on Spain. Significantly,
the United States disavowed any intention to annex Cuba in the Teller Amendment. As a result
of the Spanish-American War, Spain evacuated Cuba, and the U.S. gained Puerto Rico, Guam,
and, through a later negotiation, the Philippines. The acquisition of the Philippines occasioned
great debate in America over the idea of an empire; an insurrection in the islands against the
Americans did not help matters. In Cuba, the United States established a military government in
1898, but eventually withdrew after modernizing sugar production, improving sanitary
conditions, establishing schools, restoring orderly administration, and inserting the Platt
Amendment into the Cuban constitution. The United States intervened repeatedly throughout the
Caribbean, justifying such actions with the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
Motivated by Colombia’s rejection of a treaty on the isthmian canal, the U.S. also played a major
role in helping Panama break from Colombia. In Asia, the United States sought to trade in China,
but Japan and a number of European countries had already established spheres of influence there.
To check their influence and secure the U.S. a spot, Secretary of State Hay issued a series of
Open Door notes calling upon the various powers to honor existing trade agreements with China,
respect China's territorial integrity, and impose no restrictions on trade within their spheres. The
Open Door policy, along with the U.S. role in the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, and the
Gentlemen's Agreement all engendered ill feelings between the U.S. and Japan. Somewhat
remarkably, by the eve of World War I the U.S. had become a world power.
Woodrow Wilson and the Great War
In Wilson's presidency, the United States mediated a dispute between Japan and China,
suppressed unrest in the Caribbean, and intervened in Mexico to overthrow the dictator
Victoriano Huerta. The defining event, however, was the Great War, in which the United States
initially attempted to remain neutral. Neutrality was tested by increased trade with the Allied
powers and German submarine warfare in the Atlantic, and when diplomatic overtures for peace
were rejected and the U.S. intercepted the Zimmermann telegram, Wilson declared war on the
Central Powers. America mobilized for the war only fitfully, but the war did bring some benefits
for blacks, who served in the armed forces in addition to finding work in wartime industry;
women, who entered new fields; and for labor in general, as wartime needs decreased
unemployment, raised wages, and opened the way for unionization in many areas. Government
planning and regulation of industry began a new era of cooperation between the two. To finance
the war the government borrowed, sold Liberty and Victory bonds, and used income, inheritance,
and excess-profits taxes; to secure support for the war effort, Wilson named George Creel to
head the Committee on Public Information. The Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act
(1918) helped silence dissent. American involvement was decisive in winning the war for the
Allies, but Wilson’s plans for the peace did not fare so well. Wilson proffered his Fourteen
Points: Germany accepted, but the Big Four, more concerned with security, war guilt, and
reparations, did not. Wilson hoped to implement his Fourteen Points, then, with the League of
Nations, but he faced daunting opposition at home. Wilson had made political mistakes that
eroded his support and refused to compromise on the League, thus Congress rejected American
membership. The end of the war and a rapid, unsupervised demobilization brought instability to
the United States, leading to inflation, economic decline and unemployment, strikes, and a Red
Scare. In electing Harding in 1920, Americans expressed their desire to return to "normalcy."
Postwar Society and Culture
The 1920s was yet another decade of jarring social change in America, even as immigration was
sharply reduced by Congress. For the first time, urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans,
and city life affected family structure, employment, the role of women, and educational and
cultural opportunities. New ideas—about marriage, child rearing, contraception, and women’s
rights—gained currency. A younger generation, disillusioned by the outcome of the war,
behaved in ways that confounded their elders. And, in addition, the emergence of radio, the
movies, and spectator sports transformed leisure and popular culture. Rural Americans saw the
urban culture as threatening; they were resistant to the changes society was undergoing. This
resistance was played out in a number of ways: a rise of fundamentalism and the Scopes
"Monkey Trial," a new Ku Klux Klan, and Prohibition. And in rural and urban areas alike,
immigrants and foreigners remained suspect, as illustrated by the travesty of the Sacco and
Vanzetti trial. Such paranoia coupled with the carnage of World War I led intellectuals to
abandon the hope for social change implicit in the work of the realists and progressives. Authors
such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway formed a "lost generation" (many of them
expatriates) and along with H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis wrote as critics of society and of
alienation. Likewise, blacks in the 1920s were disillusioned: the hope that their patriotism in
World War I would lead to more opportunity was shattered. The 1920s did, however, see a
flowering of black culture epitomized by the Harlem Renaissance. But in spite of this
dissatisfaction, the "New Era" of the 1920s was very prosperous and good to many Americans. It
was the first true age of the consumer. Meanwhile, the automobile made Americans even more
mobile and became a symbol of freedom, prosperity, and individualism, and the airplane
fascinated the public, especially after Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight.
The New Era: 1921-1933
The Harding and Coolidge administrations of the 1920s were very pro-business. Harding's was
also not free from scandal, which revolved around his "Ohio Gang" of cronies and Secretary of
the Interior Albert Fall's Teapot Dome deal. The World War I and League of Nations experiences
led America to withdraw somewhat from foreign involvements, but economic interests rendered
impossible complete disengagement. The United States’s efforts in foreign policy included the
Washington Conference (1921), which produced the Five-Power Treaty, the Four-Power Treaty,
and the Nine-Power Treaty. The treaties were essentially toothless but regained some moral
influence for the United States in the wake of the League rejection. The United States in addition
had a strong peace movement, and was instrumental in the signing of the rather utopian KelloggBriand Pact in 1928. American policy toward Latin America also changed drastically under
Harding and Coolidge with the introduction of the Good Neighbor Policy; the United States
vowed to treat its neighbors as equals, renounced its self-proclaimed right to intervene at will in
the region, and withdrew from Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The inadequacy of
the Washington Conference and the Kellogg-Briand pact became apparent in the early 1930s,
when Japan occupied Manchuria: neither the United States nor the League of Nations would
intervene, though the U.S. did issue the Stimson Doctrine. The Europeans were too preoccupied
with quarrels over wartime debt and reparations to worry about Japan. Britain and France owed
the United States, and insisted on reparations from Germany to help pay those debts. Germany
simply could not pay. The combination of these debts, shaky economic foundations, and lack of
governmental regulation in the United States resulted in the Great Crash of October 1929.
Although Hoover had been elected in a landslide in 1928, he absorbed blame for the depression,
and his attempts to deal with it failed and at times exacerbated the situation. Americans elected
Franklin Roosevelt president in 1932.
The New Deal, 1933-1941
With a sympathetic bipartisan Congress convinced of the need for government intervention to
combat the depression, Roosevelt introduced, and passed, an unprecedented array of legislation
upon assuming the presidency. He had no comprehensive plan of action and policies were
sometimes contradictory; the intent was to stimulate the economy, alleviate unemployment and
industrial stagnation, and inject optimism into the American public. Among the programs
introduced in Roosevelt's first New Deal were the National Recovery Administration, the
Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Tennessee Valley Administration, and the Works
Progress Administration. But because unemployment still remained high, optimism was not
always easy to come by and Roosevelt had his detractors. Literature, such as John Dos Passos’s
U.S.A. trilogy, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and the work of William Faulkner portray
some of the national mood, as did the popularity of Huey Long’s "Share Our Wealth" plan and
Father Charles Coughlin’s attacks on Jews, bankers, and Roosevelt himself. As the depression
continued, Roosevelt unveiled the second New Deal in 1935; it introduced deficit spending and
was somewhat less business-friendly than earlier efforts. Roosevelt won reelection in 1936, and
emboldened by his triumph and frustrated by opposition from the Supreme Court to some of the
New Deal programs, attempted to increase the number of judges on the Court. He failed, and
although some judges became more friendly and others retired or died and thus allowed
Roosevelt to name replacements, the court-packing scheme was a blow to Roosevelt. This
episode also essentially marked the beginning of the end of the New Deal, as a "Roosevelt
recession" gripped the country in 1937. The New Deal was very significant because it increased
the role of government in assuring the public welfare, and expanded the federal bureaucracy and
the powers of the president. The New Deal also changed the lot of blacks, women, and Indians.
Throughout the 1930s, preoccupied with the depression and inspired by the Nye Commission
report, America was resolutely isolationist in global matters. Aggression on the part of Germany,
Japan, and Italy, however, slowly drew Americans out, albeit very reluctantly. The U.S. aided
Britain and France in their fight against Germany and Italy, initiated an atomic-bomb project,
and began a peacetime draft. By 1941, with the Lend-Lease Act establishing a relationship with
Britain, the U.S. occupying Iceland and Greenland, and the Greer and Reuben James incidents,
the United States was at war in all but name.
War and Peace: World War II
While Roosevelt saw Hitler as a more dangerous enemy, the United States and Japan stumbled
on a more direct path toward confrontation. In 1937 the Japanese resumed war against China and
hostilities in Asia; in early 1941 Secretary of State Hull demanded Japan withdraw from China
and not occupy French and Dutch holdings in Asia, a proposal that was overwhelmingly
unacceptable to the Japanese. When the Japanese occupied Indochina in July 1941, the United
States froze Japanese assets and placed an embargo on petroleum. The Japanese attacked the
American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in December, drawing the United States into the war.
Roosevelt, granted wide emergency powers by Congress, mobilized the home front through the
Office of War Mobilization and the National War Labor Board; the United States financed the
war with taxes. Wartime industry offered great opportunities to women, blacks, and American
Indians, but was not so kind to Hispanics and Mexicans; meanwhile industry and the armed
forces contributed to population mobility and an increase in marriages and births. And although
German and Italian Americans did not suffer form prejudice, Japanese Americans were interned
in a blatant and racist disregard for their civil rights. In the conduct of the war, the Allies chose
to concentrate on defeating Hitler first; the Japanese threat remained rather remote. Stalin and
Roosevelt argued for opening up a western front in France to alleviate Nazi pressure on the
Soviet Union, but Churchill’s preference to bomb German cities and attack through North Africa
and then Italy prevailed. Eventually, after the Soviets had turned back the Nazis at Stalingrad and
the Allies were moving through Italy, the western front in France was opened in June 1944.
Germany’s last gasp came with the Battle of the Bulge, but it surrendered in May 1945.
Meanwhile, the United States in the Pacific got the upper hand on the Japanese in the Battle of
the Coral Sea in 1942, and conducted a campaign of island hopping on the way to a planned
invasion of the Japanese home islands. The tenacity of Japanese forces convinced President
Truman that an invasion of Japan would result in huge casualties, and with that, and a desire to
end the Pacific war before the Soviets could play a part in it and thus the peace, in mind, he
decided to use atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inducing a Japanese surrender in
August 1945. The war ended with a new hope for international cooperation embodied in the
United Nations, but the Soviets and their Western allies soon had a falling out. Stalin was
determined to secure his western boundary and install friendly governments on his borders,
which came into conflict with Western commitments to self-determination and a perceived need
to check the spread of communism. Conferences at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam were
increasingly contentious and set the stage for postwar Soviet-American rivalry.
The American Century
Truman for the most part carried on Roosevelt's policies at home and abroad; his first challenge
was demobilization after the war and a reconversion of the economy. Although he vacillated, the
transition went smoothly, aided by pent-up demand and wartime savings. The postwar era was
extremely prosperous in America, the trend toward early marriage continued and births boomed,
and government policies encouraged large families and home ownership. The era was also the
beginning of the Cold War, in which the United States adopted a policy of containment toward
communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. This led to American aid Greece and
Turkey and then to the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe. Conflict with the Soviets
occurred when they closed the West’s surface access to Berlin; Truman countered with an airlift
and after a year the Soviets relented. To secure mutual defense and further combat the Soviet
threat, the United States and Western Europeans formed NATO in 1949. Containment was not so
successful in Asia, where Japan became a prosperous and democratic American ally but China
was "lost" to Mao's communists. Containment also led the United States, as the major player in a
UN peacekeeping intervention, into a dubious conflict in Korea. Fear of communism made
Americans paranoid and directly resulted in the rise of Joseph McCarthy, who was discredited
only after he had ruined many people. In 1952 Eisenhower was elected president, and he and his
secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, discontinued the containment policy in favor of a reliance
on America’s nuclear arsenal and "massive retaliation." Vestiges of the containment policy,
however, were present in U.S. aid to France in Vietnam and the subsequent partitioning of that
country and in the standoff in the Suez Crisis of 1956, which prompted the "Eisenhower
Doctrine." Nevertheless, tensions with the Soviets appeared to be on the wane when Soviet
premier Nikita Khrushchev spoke of "peaceful coexistence" and he and Eisenhower met in 1955
and Vice President Nixon traveled to Moscow in 1959. Before anything substantial could
happen, though, an American spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. In 1959–
60, the United States also saw the revolutionary government in Cuba, which it had initially
supported, ally itself with the Soviets. Meanwhile, in the United States, the civil-rights
movement gathered momentum from the mid-1950s on, under the charismatic leadership of
Martin Luther King Jr. Key events include the Montgomery bus boycott, the Supreme Court's
Brown decision, and Eisenhower’s decision to use federal power to enforce Brown in Arkansas.
In 1960 Kennedy defeated Vice President Nixon for the presidency.
From Camelot to Watergate
John F. Kennedy's presidency found its defining moments in the global arena. Kennedy
organized the Alliance for Progress, authorized the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuban,
faced down Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis, and saw Khrushchev order construction of
the Berlin Wall. Domestically, Kennedy did not deal effectively with Congress, which rejected
his proposals for federal aid to education, urban renewal, a higher minimum wage, and medical
care for the aged. After Kennedy's assassination, Johnson had more success with much the same
agenda, which he expanded into his Great Society programs. Both Kennedy and Johnson, like
Eisenhower before them, grappled with the civil-rights movement and the issues surrounding it;
a major part of the Great Society comprised civil-rights legislation. Meanwhile, the United States
became ever more deeply involved in Vietnam under Johnson, a move that was widely
unpopular, divided Americans, and essentially led Johnson to decide not to run for reelection in
1968. The Democratic party was rent over the war issue and its national convention marred by
violence; Republican Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and considered his major
challenge to be finding an acceptable, "honorable" resolution to the war. He pursued a policy of
"Vietnamization," withdrawing American troops and turning the war over to the hapless South
Vietnamese. However, revelations of American war atrocities and the president's decision to
bomb Cambodia aroused even more antiwar feeling and protest demonstrations; students were
killed at two colleges by National Guardsmen. Nixon in response increased the pace of
withdrawal but escalated bombing of North Vietnam and ordered northern harbors mined.
Although haunted by Vietnam, Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger pursued a more
successful policy with regard to China and the Soviets. Called détente, or a relaxing of tensions,
the policy treated each country individually rather than as part of a monolithic "communism,"
and sought to play them against each other. The oil crisis of 1973 also occurred during Nixon's
presidency. Domestically, Nixon faced inflation caused by large war outlays and backed some
liberal legislation such as the Clean Air Act, but was less active in supporting desegregation and
many Great Society programs unliked by conservatives. Nixon was eventually brought down by
the Watergate scandal, which forced him to resign before he could be impeached.
Society in Flux
Facilitated by government policies and advances in transportation, technology, and
communication, America's growing population moved in the postwar era from North and East to
South and West, from cities to suburbs. Perhaps the most significant development in
communications was the growth of television; by the mid-1950s it had already become a nearindispensable advertising, entertainment, information, and political medium. American
prosperity and the growth of the middle class, along with the world-shrinking effects of
television and the automobile, helped to make America a more homogeneous society. To a
certain extent this was reflected in religion, as churches in the 1950s tended to become more
secular and tolerant in their outlooks, but at the same time it is important to remember the pivotal
role churches played in the civil-rights movement and in the rise of fundamentalism and
conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s. The concerns of the postwar era, and critiques of its
conformity, can be found in the literature of the period as well in the visual arts in the works of
the New York school, the abstract expressionists, and the op (for optical) and pop (for popular)
artists, the latter of whom often satirized modern consumer culture. While incredibly materially
prosperous in these years, American culture was not without its discontents. Americans faced
two dilemmas: progress was often self-defeating, and modern society, in placing a premium on
cooperation, undermined the individual’s sense of importance. Meanwhile, many groups agitated
for their rights in society. Frustrated by the slowness of integration, some blacks turned to
separatism and confrontation in their fight for civil rights. Others, ranging from Hispanics,
Native Americans, and other ethnic groups to women and sexual minorities, were inspired by the
black struggle to assert their own rights. The era, particularly the 1960s, also saw widespread
student unrest over the war in Vietnam, university policies, and governmental failures in civil
rights and the economy. Some young people turned their backs on conventional culture and
formed a counterculture. Many Americans also questioned traditional sexual mores, leading to a
sexual revolution. At the same time, driven by a perceived Soviet superiority in technology,
American schools underwent yet another reform in which progressive theories were replaced
with an emphasis on traditional subjects. Thanks to the baby boom and the GI Bill, enrollments
in American junior colleges, colleges, and universities expanded.
Running on Empty: The Nation Transformed
After Nixon’s resignation, Gerald Ford became president. Plagued by his inability to solve the
nation’s economic problems and his pardon of Nixon, Ford was defeated in 1976 by Jimmy
Carter. Carter, though unquestionably well-intentioned and virtuous, was not an effective
president. He unable to raise the country out of what he termed its “malaise.” During the Carter
presidency, the nation faced double-digit inflation, economic competition from abroad, and a
recession, none of which Carter addressed effectively. In foreign policy, Carter sought to put
“basic human rights” before all else; with this in mind he cut aid to Chile and Argentina. He
negotiated the return of the Panama Canal to Panama, and withdrew recognition of Taiwan and
recognized the People’s Republic of China. And while he attempted to continue détente and
negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union, Soviet actions in
Afghanistan led Carter to withdraw the treaty, suspend grain and technology sales to the Soviets,
and boycott the Moscow Olympics. Carter’s greatest foreign-policy accomplishment was the
Camp David Agreement; his greatest defeat the Iranian hostage crisis. Although there may have
been little he could do about the crisis, the failure of a rescue mission brought wide criticism.
Carter lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, upon whose inauguration the hostages were
freed. Reagan deeply believed in supply-side economics, cutting federal programs, tax cuts, and
military spending; his policies brought about a recession in 1982.
In foreign policy, he was a dedicated anticommunist and supported right-wing rebels in
Nicaragua and El Salvador, and used the American military to oust a Cuban-backed government
in Grenada. After his reelection in 1984, Reagan’s feelings toward the Soviets softened in light
of the reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan did, however, adhere to his commitments
to defense spending, tax cuts, and opposition to communism and terrorism. The Reagan
administration was shaken, and the president’s image tarnished, by the Iran-Contra scheme in his
second administration.
During the Reagan years, the United State absorbed new immigrants from Asia and Latin
America, saw an aging population and a new disease, AIDS, begin to put demands on health care
and social services, and faced troubling questions about the state of the family, urban decay,
maldistribution of wealth, crime, drugs, and dislocations caused by government deregulation,
mergers and acquisitions, and a shift from a production-oriented to a service-based economy.
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Reagan's vice president George Bush became president in 1988, and immediately faced the fall
of communism in Eastern Europe. Bush sought to strengthen the American position in the "new
world order" that was to emerge, and to show American might he invaded Panama and was the
driving force behind the UN effort to push Saddam Hussein and Iraq out of Kuwait. Bush gained
a reputation for being inattentive to domestic matters, which included a sluggish economy,
though, and this contributed to his defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992. Reaction against many of
Clinton’s ealry proposals led to a Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, leading Clinton to
subsequently move toward the right. The Clinton presidency has been fraught with scandal, but
the President's approval ratings remained quite high. Soon after George W. Bush won the 2000
election (though he lost the popular vote to for Vice President Al Gore), terrorists attacked the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The U.S. "war against terrorism" in Afghanistan followed
shortly after. These attacks will undoubtedly have a lasting effect on the course of American
history in the "imponderable" 21st century.