Download 50s and Cold War

What is so
nifty about
the 50s?
Better dead than Red!
By the light of the atomic bomb
•1945 -1989
•Promise and Menace
•Baby boomers
•Fantastic standard of living
•Welfare state (elderly)
•Opportunities for women
•Welcome immigrants
•Civil rights and AAs
•Activist foreign policy
PLASTICS! great new
inventions
1945
1950
1958-1970s
20 years of economic success!
End of
WWII
Korean War
McCarthyism
Vietnam War
Great Society
Feminism
Civil Rights
Watergate
1980s
Conservatism
Republicanism
Technologies
Computers
Berlin Wall comes down
Disco
What you should be aware
of:
The
Montgomery
GI Bill
•
By raising educational levels and stimulating construction of the housing
industry the GI Bill profoundly shaped the entire industry of postwar
America
This Century With
Peter Jennings
What you should be aware
of:
We made $ in WWII
Permanent war economy -Military budgets - Military
Industrial Complex - R and D
Deals in the Middle East: Israel (Palestine) vs. Arabs (read
Leon Uris’ Exodus)
Highway systems, air conditioning, electricity
Agricultural machinery and production levels
1947 Taft Hartley Act - unions take noncommunist oath Unions can’t overcome the South/women work force Unions peak in 1950s and decline in U.S. thereafter
Population and therefore political shifts: *broke historic
grip of the North
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Yalta Conference
February 1945 “Big Three” Churchill, Stalin and FDR met to
create a post war agreement.
Agreed to divide Germany into 4 zones controlled by allies.
Berlin also divided into 4 zones (located in Soviet Zone)
Poland – US and GB wanted the people of Poland to choose
their government.
Stalin insisted for security, Poland had to have a Soviet friendly
government.
Compromise – US agreed to recognize soviet government
provided they include non- communist members and that free
elections be held as soon as possible.
Stalin never holds free elections
Cold War
•Quietly behind the battles and bombs,
American diplomats were working hard to
make sure that when the war ended
American economic power would be second
to none....we would penetrate areas where
England had been dominating....our massive
economic machine needed more than just
domestic markets... the
world markets
would be ours
•Case in point: Middle East and
oil
Howard Zinn A People’s History of the United
States
The Term “Iron Curtain” came from a speech given by Winston Churchill at
an American University in 1945.
The Division of Europe between East and West.
Communism in the East v. Capitalism in the West
New international economic order based on
partnership between gov’t and big business
International Monetary Fund - regulate
internat’l exchanges of currency; voting
proportional to capital ($) contributed, so
American dominance was assured.
Internat’l Bank of Reconstruction and
Development - set up to help and its 1st
objective was to “promote foreign investment.”
Howard Zinn
United Nations was to promote
cooperation to prevent future
wars...but it was dominated by
Western imperialist countries
Was the war fought to correct Hitler’s claim of white
race supremacy?
• U.S. came close to fascism itself with internment of
Japanese Americans
• African Americans:
“The Army jim-crows us. The
Navy only lets us serve as messmen. The Red Cross
refuses our blood. Employers & unions shut us out.
Lynchings continue. We are the disenfranchised, jimcrowed, spat upon.. What more could Hitler do than
Howard Zinn
that?”
Iron Curtain
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British prime minister Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech (1946) illustrated the division within Europe at that time. Following World War II, Europe had clearly
been divided into two political and economic systems supported by two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States.
The Soviet Union occupied countries in Eastern Europe (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria) after the war, imposing Communist rule
over them.
The western democracies of Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium, along with allies such as Canada and the United States, were in
opposition to the spread of Communism in Europe.
In his speech, Churchill described the conflict this way: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
Churchill was outlining the ideological conflict between Soviet Communism and democratic capitalism
Truman Doctrine
•
1st application of foreign policy of
containment and 1st time US
strayed from G. Washington’s
Farewell Address on maintaining
peacetime isolation
Events that led to the Truman Doctrine:
•George Kennan’s analysis of Soviet behavior
•Soviet reluctance to leave Iraq
•Difficulty in implementing Potsdam agreements
•Inability to reach an accord to control atomic energy
(Bernard Baruch Plan)
•Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech in Fulton,
Missouri
•Both Houses return a Republican majority in 1946
•England announces she can no longer provide aid to
Greece & Turkey
Truman Doctrine
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Sec. of State Acheson
- Containment Foreign
Policy
Greece and Turkey
invasion of Iraq 2002 U.S. and Turkish
airfield bases in
Turkey?
Marshal Plan 1948
$16 BILLION in economic aid to Western
European countries in 4 years -
• economic aim - build up markets for
American exports
• political motive - Communist parties in Italy
and France were strong and the US used
pressure/money to keep Communists out of
cabinets of those countries
• *yeah, humanitarian aid but even more...a
matter of national self-interest
Economic/Political Aid
from the U.S.
• From 1952 on, foreign aid was more and
more designed to build up military power
in non-Communist countries.
• 1952-1962: $50 BILLION in aid to ninety
countries and only $5 billion was for nonmilitary aid
Executive Order 9835
-issued 1947
•Program to search out any “infiltration of
disloyal persons in the U.S.”
•Great wave of hysteria erupts
•Even membership in “sympathetic
associations” like Chopin Cultural Center League of American Writers- Nature
Association (watch those commie pink tree
huggers) - People’s Drama
“Infiltration of disloyal persons in the
•and why not? afterU.S.”
all...
1.1948 Communist party in Czechoslovakia ousted
the non-Communists from rule
2.Soviet Union blockaded Berlin - jointly occupied city
isolated inside Soviet sphere of East Germany forcing the U.S. to airlift supplies
3.The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb
4.Colonial people demanding independence:
Indochina (Vietnam) ag. the French; in Indonesia ag.
Dutch; Philippines ag. U.S.
5.China going red under Mao Tse Tung after Chiang
Kai-Shek ousted to Taiwain
Berlin crisis convinced Americans that they needed a
Military alliance with Western Europe.
1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NATO members agreed to come to the aid of one
another if one was attacked.
1955 – US and NATO members agreed to let West
Germany rearm
Prompted the Soviet Union to create the Warsaw
Pact – a military alliance of Soviet Union and other
Eastern European nations.
Korean War 1950-1953
After WWII Korea was split between the
North (Soviet influenced) communist and
the South (American sphere) right-wing
dictatorship
When North Koreans crossed the 38th
parallel into South Koream, the United
Nations, dominated by the U.S., asked its
members to “rebel the armed attack.”
The American army became the UN army
Howard Zinn
Korean War 1950-1953
The UN resolution was to, “repel the attack and
restore peace”
• American/UN armies after pushing North Koreans back
across the 38th parallel, advanced all the way up through
North Korea to the Yalu River on the border of China
• This provoked the Chinese into entering the war. The
Chinese then swept southward and the war stalemated
back on the 38th parallel
• Where it still sits today...the largest armed border in the
world
Howard Zinn
The Results of the
Korean War 1950-1953
The Korean War mobilized liberal opinion behind
the war
It justified a sustained policy of intervention
abroad
It justified the militarization of the economy at
home
MacArthur also got fired....by Pres Truman Howard Zinn
Joe McCarthy- Jr. Senator from Wisconsin - looking for a political
cause
heeling, W. Va; speaking to the Women’s Republican Club
Holding up some papers and shouting: “I have here in
my hand a list of 205- a list of names that were made
known to the Secretary of State as being members of
the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still
working and shaping policy in the State Dept.”
Next day, in Salt Lake City, McCarthy claimed he had a list of 57
(numbers kept changing) such Communists in the State Dept.
Shortly afterward, on the Senate floor, he appeared with 100
dossiers from the State Dept loyalty files. The files were 3 years
old and most of the people no longer worked for the State Dept but
he claimed they were, “Communistically inclined” or active traveler
became, “active Communist” and so on
He insisted: Communism won in China because of softness on Communism in the American gov’t
Howard Zinn
McCarthyism
Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg 1950
(shades of Sacco and
Vanzetti)
Large-circulation newspapers have articles
like:
“How Communists Get That Way”
“Communists are After Your Child”
Movies
I Married a Communist
McCarthyism
Mickey Spillane published in 1951 One Lonely Night
(3 million copies sold) in which the hero, Mike
Hammer, says:
“I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on
my hands. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed
every minute of it...They were Commies...red sonsof-bitches who should have died long ago....”