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Chapter 23: The United States and the Cold War, 1945–1953
On September 16, 1947, the 160th anniversary of the Constitution’s signing,
the Freedom Train opened to the public in Philadelphia. The train, containing
dozens of the most significant historical documents in American history, including
the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg address, toured the nation.
Visitors were asked to affirm American ideals by taking a Freedom Pledge and
signing a Freedom Scroll. More than 3.5 million visited the train, and even more
attended the educational programs and parades that accompanied it.
Beneath the surface of the train’s exhibits lay conflict over the meaning of
American freedom. Archivists who proposed the initial list of documents for the
train intended to include the Wagner Act, which granted workers the right to
organize unions, and President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, in which he
articulated “freedom from want.” The conservative American Heritage Foundation,
to which the Truman administration had given the train, eliminated these
documents from the exhibit. The foundation also would not include the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendments, which had established equal and civil political rights
regardless of race during Reconstruction. The train did not mention unions or social
welfare, and only a few documents, such as the Emancipation Proclamation and
Thirteenth Amendment (which outlawed slavery), spoke to black Americans’
history.
The train showed how the Cold War affected America. Just before the train
opened to the public, President Truman declared that the United States would
adopt a policy of containing Soviet power across the world, and that disloyal
Americans would be removed from government jobs. Government officials
soon praised the train for contributing to the fight against communist
subversion, and the FBI even reported on those who criticized the exhibit. The
Freedom Train’s history shows how the Cold War transformed freedom by
imbuing it with anti-communism, advocacy for “free enterprise,” and support
for the status quo in American society.
After World War II, the United States possessed enormous industrial capacity,
the largest navy and air force (the army was demobilized). and the only atomic
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bomb in the world. This made it the most powerful nation on earth. Roosevelt
had wanted to avoid a return to the isolationism of the post–World War I era
and believed the United States should lead efforts to establish cooperation,
democracy, and prosperity across the globe, in part through new institutions
such as the World Bank and United Nations. U.S. leaders believed that
America’s security depended on stability in Europe and Asia and that
American prosperity required the rebuilding of economies worldwide. The
chief obstacle to American leaders’ visions for the postwar world seemed to be
the Soviet Union, whose victorious military occupied much of eastern Europe
and eastern Germany. The Soviet Union’s triumph over Germany and its claim that
communism modernized Russia appealed to colonized peoples who desired national
independence, and like the United States, the USSR intended to reshape the world in
its own image. Though Americans knew the Soviet military was too weak to directly
threaten the United States, they accurately recognized Soviet intentions to dominate
eastern Europe.
The wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union was
formed only to defeat Hitler. Clashes between American and Soviet interests
and values were bound to resurface after the war. The Cold War’s first event
occurred in the Middle East, where Soviet troops occupied parts of northern Iran in
with rich oil fields. Pressured by Britain and the United States, the Soviets withdrew
troops from Iran but simultaneously installed pro-communist governments in
Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, a move they compared to U.S. domination in Latin
America. To many Americans, Stalin seemed to violate his promise at Yalta for free
elections in Poland. Soon thereafter, U.S. diplomat George Kennan, in his famous
Long Telegram, told the Truman administration that communist ideology made the
Soviet government inherently and permanently aggressive. Only America, he wrote,
could prevent the extension of Soviet communist rule in the world. This was the
basis for the policy of “containment,” in which the United States aimed to check all
Soviet attempts to expand its power in the world.
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The Cold War Begins
In a speech in Missouri, former British prime minister Winston Churchill
declared that an “iron curtain” had fallen over Europe, dividing the free West
from the communist East. This reinforced emerging beliefs that a long-term
struggle between the United States and the Soviets was at hand. In March
1947, Truman announced that the United States was now engaged in a global
conflict with the Soviet Union. This new policy came to be called the Truman
Doctrine.
When he became FDR’s vice-president in 1944, Truman was an obscure senator
from Missouri with little foreign policy experience, and as president he soon faced
daunting foreign policy challenges. He did not trust Stalin and believed the
United States had to assume world leadership. Truman decided to embrace
containment when Britain signaled it could no longer afford military aid to
Greece, where a monarchy faced a communist-led revolt, and to Turkey,
where the Soviets wanted joint control of the crucial straits linking the Black
Sea and the Mediterranean. Britain asked America to step in. Though unrest in
Greece and Turkey was mostly homegrown and incited by corrupt and
undemocratic governments, these states were strategically important as doors to
southern Europe and the oil-rich Middle East.
To win Congress’s support for containment, Truman was told to frighten the
American populace, and he repeatedly invoked the nation’s responsibility to
defend freedom at home and abroad. Truman’s rhetoric laid the framework
for how Americans viewed the postwar world, and it became the “guiding
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spirit of American foreign policy.” Republican and Democratic support for
Truman’s policy initiated a long period of bipartisan backing for containment. And
his speech showed the extent to which the Cold War was an ideological
conflict, in which both powers claimed their social system was a model for
other nations and that they advanced freedom and social justice while
defending their own security. Congress’s approval of military aid to Turkey and
Greece rescued these governments and checked Soviet power. Truman’s speech and
policy committed the United States to a permanent responsibility in the world and
set a precedent both for U.S. support of undemocratic, anti-communist regimes and
for the creation of military alliances against the Soviets. The Truman administration
soon established new “national security” agencies, such as the National Security
Council and Central Intelligence Agency, which were removed from congressional
oversight.
Potential military action was only one element of containment. Secretary of
State George C. Marshall outlined another in a speech in June 1947, in which
he committed the United States to spending billions of dollars to finance
Europe’s economic reconstruction. The destruction caused by the war, food
scarcity, and inflation plagued the continent, and these crises expanded
support for communist parties in France and Italy, which American leaders
feared might go communist. The Marshall Plan promoted the idea that
capitalism, even after the Great Depression, would flourish, and it defined as a
threat to American security, not just Soviet military power, but the economic
and political instability that nourished communism. The Marshall Plan gave a
positive meaning to containment, making freedom more than just anticommunism. It represented a kind of New Deal for Europe that would establish
mass industry and mass consumption in order to provide employment and a
high standard of living for Europeans. In only a few years, production in Europe
exceeded pre-war levels. But the plan exacerbated tensions between the United
States and the Soviet Union, which refused to support a plan that would consolidate
U.S. influence in Europe. With 23 other nations, the United States simultaneously
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created the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) to foster more free
trade and create larger markets for American goods and investments.
In Japan, General Douglas MacArthur administered a U.S. occupation that ended in
1948 with a new, democratic constitution and land reform. The new constitution
gave women the vote and affirmed that Japan would never again wage war and
would only maintain a small military force for self-defense. The United States
supervised Japan’s economic recovery, as well. Though the nation considered
dissolving the giant industrial corporations that had enabled Japanese aggression,
this idea was scrapped when U.S. policymakers determined that a strong Japanese
economy would check communism in Asia. By the 1950s, Japan’s economy was
booming.
The Division of Germany and Berlin and the Formation of NATO
The Cold War rapidly intensified. At the end of World War II, each winning
power occupied and administered parts of Germany and its capital, Berlin,
which was located far inside the Soviet zone. In June 1948, when the United
States, Britain, and France started a process that would lead to a new West
German government allied with them, the Soviets responded by blocking all
traffic from the American, British, and French zones to the city. Western
planes began an 11-month airlift of supplies to West Berlin. Stalin lifted the
blockade, but two nations—East and West Germany—took form, each allied
with a side in the Cold War, and Berlin stayed divided. West Berlin survived as
an isolated city surrounded by communist East Germany, and only in 1991 was
Germany reunified. In 1949, the Soviet Union also first tested an atomic bomb,
thus ending the U.S. monopoly on nuclear arms. That year the United States,
Canada, and 10 nations in western Europe created the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact in the event of Soviet aggression
in Europe. Many Europeans applauded when West Germany joined NATO,
because they hoped it would prevent future German aggression and defend
against Soviet advances. In turn, the Soviets in 1955 formed the Warsaw Pact,
their own military alliance in Eastern Europe.
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China Goes Red
Also in 1949, Chinese communists led by Mao Zedong won the civil war in that
country, dealing a heavy blow to U.S. containment policy. The Truman
administration, criticized by Republicans for having “lost” China to
communism, did not recognize the new People’s Republic of China and
prevented it from taking its seat in the United Nations. Until the 1970s, the
United States defended the exiled regime in Taiwan as China’s legitimate
government.
In 1950, the National Security Council responded to the growing tensions in
Germany, China’s new government, and the Soviet atom bomb with a policy of
permanent military armament. The document expressing this new policy, called
NSC-68, depicted the Cold War as an epochal conflict between “the idea of freedom”
and the “slavery” of the Soviets that would determine whether the “free world”
survived. NSC-68 spurred monumental increases in military spending.
The Korean War
The Cold War turned “hot” not in Europe, but in Asia. In 1945, Korea was split
into Soviet and American zones. These became two governments: a
communist North Korea, and the anti-communist and undemocratic South
Korea, aligned with America. In June 1950, North Korean troops invaded the
south in an attempt to unify the peninsula under communist rule, and they
nearly conquered all of South Korea. Truman interpreted the invasion as a
Soviet challenge to US containment policy, and the UN authorized military
action. American troops led by General Douglas MacArthur launched a campaign
that resulted in US occupation of most of North Korea. But in October 1950,
hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops crossed the border and pushed UN forces
back down the peninsula. When MacArthur demanded the right to use nuclear
weapons to repel the Chinese and perhaps even invade China, Truman declined.
MacArthur’s refusal to recognize the president’s civilian control of the military led
to his dismissal. The war stalemated, and in 1953, an armistice left the two prewar
nations intact without any formal peace treaty.
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More than 33,000 Americans, 1 million Korean soldiers, 2 million civilians,
and hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops died. The Cold War that began in
Europe now became global in scope. Events since 1947 suggested that the
world had not found peace, as had been hoped in 1945 when the UN was
founded. Instead of one world living in harmony, the world was split between
the US, which led what became known as the West (including Japan), or the
“Free World.” The US formed more military alliances in Southeast Asia and the
Middle east, effectively surrounding the Soviet Union and China.
In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s brutal regime had jailed or murdered millions. Its
authoritarianism made the Soviet Union seem antithetical to “free enterprise”
and democracy. But some Americans argued that approaching the Cold War as
a titanic struggle between freedom and slavery was problematic. Even George
Kennan, who inspired containment policy, argued that US leaders should
avoid ideological decisions and view international crises on a case-by-case
basis if they were to determine if freedom or American interests were in
danger. Walter Lippman condemned turning foreign policy into an “ideological
crusade” that required the US to constantly intervene abroad and violate its own
ideals by allying with authoritarian anti-communist governments – many of which
faced rebellions sparked by domestic problems, not Soviet subversion. Lippman
argued that communists were bound to be part of the movements for national
independence that the US should itself support.
The war elevated awareness in the US about imperialism and decolonization, even
as anti-colonial movements used the Declaration of Independence to make claims
for self-government. Some liberals and black leaders pressed Truman to
promote decolonization, and in 1946, the US gave independence to the
Philippines. But the Cold War saw the US retreat from the pressure that FDR
had exerted on America’s European allies to grant sovereignty to their
colonies. Britain and France hoped to retain their possessions in Africa and
Asia. While geopolitical and economic interests influenced US foreign policy as
much as ideas of freedom, US policymakers used the language of freedom to
justify actions that seemed to contradict freedom. Even extremely repressive
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governments were included in the “Free World” as long as they were anticommunist. One such ally was South Africa, where an apartheid regime preserved
white supremacy and suppressed the black population.
The Cold War was an ideological conflict in which both sides sought to win
support across the world. Freedom was central to mobilizing public opinion,
and in the 1950s freedom was a prominent theme in the academy, the media
and mass culture, and government. The Cold War set the boundaries for
understanding freedom.
Culture and history were mobilized for the Cold War. Historians argued that
the American Creed of pluralism, tolerance, and equality had always defined
American life, and neglected the ways in which race and ethnicity had
restricted freedom. The federal government pressed Hollywood to make anticommunist films, from which all references to racism were to be removed. The
CIA and the Defense Department patronized the arts, enlisting actors, dancers, and
musicians to promote the superiority of American values at home and abroad, and
sponsoring magazines and academic conferences. The CIA even funded the
controversial abstract expressionist art of painter Jackson Pollock, whose canvasses,
created by dropping and splashing paint, were said to embody cultural freedoms
absent in socialist nations.
The Cold War’s other master concept was “totalitarianism.” First used in
World War II to describe fascist Italy and German as aggressive, ideological
governments that harshly controlled all of civil society and denied the rights
and alternative values that might lead to social change, totalitarianism soon
came to describe the Soviet Union and its allies. This concept helped spread the
belief that powerful governments were the greatest threat to freedom. Whatever
the Soviet Union supported was automatically deemed antithetical to
freedom. The American Medical Association launched the largest public
relations campaign in history against Truman’s proposal for national health
insurance, calling it “socialized medicine.” Soviet hostility to organized
religion automatically made Christian worship a bastion of freedom.
The Cold War also shaped the idea of human rights. The war’s atrocities and
the Four Freedoms and Atlantic Charter sparked calls for a new global order
ruled by universal rights for all of humanity. The war crimes trials of German
officials showed that the international community would hold individuals
accountable for violations of human rights. In 1948, the UN General Assembly
adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which declared
that all people should have basic rights to freedom of speech and religion,
should be free from arbitrary government, and should enjoy social and
economic entitlements such as housing, education, health care, and an
adequate standard of living. Though the document could not be enforced
anywhere, its assertion that governments were accountable for the way they
treated their citizens became widely accepted.
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Debates over the UDHR showed the contradictions and tensions in the idea of
human rights. How much human rights should supersede national
sovereignty, and who or what should protect the human rights that
governments violate, are still unsettled questions. Both the US and the Soviet
Union resisted the creation of a mechanism to enforce the UDHR because they
feared outside interference in domestic and foreign policy. American leaders
were particularly sensitive about race relations, which they feared might
invite UN action against the US. In the 1950s, Cold War considerations limited
human rights and both the US and the Soviet Union used human rights for their own
interests. The USSR claimed to provide its citizens with social and economic rights,
while the US criticized the Soviets for violating democratic rights and civil liberties.
Only in 1992 did Congress ratify the part of the UDHR that covers “Civil and Political
Rights”; it has not yet ratified the declaration’s “Economic, Social, and Cultural
Rights.”
The Truman Presidency
After the war, President Truman faced the monumental task of shifting
America from war to peace. The more than 12 million men still in the military
in 1945 wanted to return to their families and jobs, and demobilization
occurred rapidly. While some veterans found civilian life difficult, others used
GI Bill benefits to build or buy homes, start small businesses, and go to college.
By 1946, more than 1 million veterans were attending colleges under it s
provisions., making up half of total college enrollment. Almost 4 million would
receive home mortgages, spurring the postwar suburban housing boom. Most
veterans went into the labor force, taking jobs from more than 2 million women
workers. The government dismantled wartime agencies that regulated industry and
labor and set price controls, which sparked immediate inflation.
Backed by Democratic liberals and unions, Truman in 1945 tried to revive
New Deal politics with a program he eventually called the “Fair Deal.” This
would improve the social safety net and raise living standards. Truman
pressed Congress to hike the minimum wage, create a national health
insurance system, and increase public housing, Social Security, and
educational aid.
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The year 1946 was one of labor revolt. The AFL and CIO launched Operation Dixie
to bring unions to the South and end the anti-labor conservatism of southern
politics, sending hundreds of labor organizers into the region’s textile mills, steel
factories, and fields. With no more overtime work for war production, and
skyrocketing inflation caused by the end of price controls, workers’ real income
dropped sharply. Workers responded by going on strike to demand wage raises
– 5 million of them. 750,000 steel workers conducted the largest single strike
in US history up to that point. The strike wave alarmed President Truman,
who became hostile to the unions and won an injunction to force striking coal
miners back to work.
In the 1946 elections, middle-class voters scared by labor unrest voted
Republican, and many workers angry at Truman’s policies stayed at home.
The Democrats lost both houses of Congress to the Republicans for the first
time since 1920. Operation Dixie capitulated to the opposition of southern
employers and white workers’ racism, keeping intact southern political power in
Washington. The 1946 elections secured the continuing domination of the
Congress by a coalition of conservative southern Democrats and Republicans.
President Truman in his first term embraced civil rights for African-American,
departing from Roosevelt’s administration relative lack of concern. The war
against Nazism and its racial theories had raised black militancy and
consciousness about the plight of black Americans. Many states established fair
employment practices commission and cities passed laws to end discrimination in
jobs and public accommodations. A civil rights coalition of labor, religious, and black
groups supported these efforts. By 1952, the NAACP had raised the number of
black voters in the South to 20%, and in that year no lynchings took place, as
many law enforcement agencies started to crack down on the practice. Sports
started to desegregate after the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 added black athlete
Jackie Robinson to their team. Robinson’s performance on the field and
exemplary character off the field opened the doors for the full integration of
baseball within less than a decade, despite continued racial harassment.
In 1947, a Commission on Civil Rights appointed by Truman issued a report,
To Secure These Rights, calling on the federal government to end segregation
and guarantee equal treatment in housing, employment, education, and
criminal justice. The Truman administration, calling the report an “American
charter of human freedom,” hoped to deflect Cold War criticisms that
American racial relations violated democracy and human rights. Though
Truman soon presented a comprehensive civil rights program to Congress
asking for a federal civil rights commission, anti-lynching and anti-poll tax
laws, and laws for equal access in jobs and education, Congress rejected it. But
in the summer of 1948 Truman desegregated the military, and the military
became the first large integrated institution in American history. Truman
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went on to help construct the most progressive Democratic platform in
history for the 1948 elections, which included a robust civil rights plank.
When liberals at the 1948 Democratic convention passed the civil rights
plank, many southern delegates walked out. These so-called “Dixiecrats” soon
formed the States Rights’ Democratic Party and nominated for president
Strom Thurmond, the governor of South Carolina. This party’s platform called
for “complete segregation of the races,” and though he denied being racist,
Thurmond argued that the freedom of states to govern themselves was
imperiled. Truman also faced a second political insurgency from the left. Leftwing critics of Truman’s foreign policy formed the Progressive Party and
nominated Henry A. Wallace for president. Wallace proposed expanding the
welfare state and denounced segregation more than Truman. Wallace differed most
strongly from Truman over the Cold War. He called for international controls on
nuclear weapons and advocated trade with the Soviet Union. Yet when Wallace
welcomed the support of socialists and communists, opening the party to
Communist influence, liberals abandoned his candidacy.
Though Wallace threatened Truman on the left and Thurmond threatened
him in the democratic South, Truman’s primary challenger was the
uncharismatic Republican candidate, Thomas A. Dewey. Truman campaigned
furiously, criticized the Congress for its inaction, and recycled New Deal
critiques of Wall Street and warnings that Republicans wanted to end Social
Security. This election was the last before television transformed electoral politics
by minimizing in-depth debate and presentations of ideology and policy. Despite a
widely-predicted Dewey victory, Truman won an overwhelming majority in the
electoral college. For the first time since 1868, blacks decisively influenced the
outcome. Thurmond carried four southern states, anticipating a later shift of these
Democratic states’ voters to the Republican Party. Wallace received fewer votes
than Thurmond, an outcome which made criticism of America’s Cold War foreign
policy even less acceptable.
The Anticommunist Crusade
The Cold War completely transformed American life. Society was permanently
militarized. The military-industrial complex forged by World War II persisted
and expanded. The US retained a large and active federal government which
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spent billions on weapons and overseas bases. National security justified
enormous government projects and expenditures, including aid to higher
education and the building of a national highway system. It also made
government officials secret and dishonest, leading, for example, to the
covering up of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons tests conducted on
US soldiers and civilians. Cold War spending fostered economic growth and
scientific and technological innovation that greatly shaped civilian life, in
medicine, computers, aircraft, and other products. Government research needs
expanded higher education. The Cold War changed immigration policy to favor
refugees from communist countries, and increased pressure on American officials to
minimize segregation. And the Cold War, like World War I, created a culture which
sharply differentiated the loyal from the disloyal and eroded civil liberties.
In 1947, Truman created a loyalty review system, in which federal employees
had to prove their devotion to America, without knowing who was accusing
them of disloyalty, and on what basis. No espionage was revealed, but
hundreds lost their jobs or resigned rather than be investigated. In 1947, the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) held hearings about
communist influence in Hollywood. Celebrities and famous writers and
directors were forced to appear before the committee or face punishment.
Though some, like Ronald Reagan, alleged that the entertainment industry was rife
with communism, some refused to testify, claiming that HUAC violated
constitutional protections for free speech and political association. A group called
the Hollywood Ten went to jail for contempt of Congress, and a Hollywood
blacklisted them and hundreds of others who were accused of communist
sympathies or who refused to identify alleged communists.
Several high-profile legal cases exacerbated the anti-communist craze.
Whittaker Chambers, a Time magazine editor, charged that in the 1930s Alger
Hiss, a State Department official, had given him secret documents to take to
Soviet agents. Hiss denied the allegations, but was convicted for perjury and
served five years in prison. The Hiss case helped launch the national political
career of Richard Nixon, a Republican congressman from California. Who
relentlessly pursued Hiss. The Truman administration put Communist Party leaders
on trial for advocating revolution, and several were imprisoned.
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In 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, working-class Jewish communists from
New York, were convicted of conspiring to pass secrets about the atomic bomb
to the Soviets during World War II. The evidence against them was deemed
too secret to be revealed at the time, but later it became clear that Julius had
not given “the secret of the bomb” to the Soviets, and that almost no evidence
supported charges against Ethel. Even though their charges were less serious
than spying or treason, the judge said they had helped “cause” the Korean War. They
were sentenced to death, and executed in 1953. Whether or not Hiss or the
Rosenbergs were actually guilty, their trials strengthened Americans’ sense
that a massive spy network in the US endangered the nation.
McCarthy and McCarthyism
This climate of fear allowed an obscure Wisconsin senator to lead a spurious
anticommunist crusade. In 1950, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy delivered a
speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed to have a list of 205
communists employed at the State Department. The charge was baseless, he
constantly changed the numbers, and he never identified anyone who was
actually disloyal. But McCarthy used his senatorial position to hold hearings
and allege disloyalty at the Defense Department and other government
agencies. Though many Republicans embraced McCarthy’s campaign as a way
to damage the Truman administration, his attacks on government officials
after Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in
1952 alienated Republicans. In 1954, his allegations of disloyalty in the army led
to televised hearings that exposed McCarthy’s tactics and led to his downfall. The
Republican senate condemned his action, and though McCarthy died three years
later, “McCarthyism” came to refer to the abuse of power in the name of
anticommunism.
Although anti-communism most affected the national government,
anticommunism pervaded local government and life as well. States created
committees, based on HUAC, to ferret out alleged communists, and state and
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local authorities required loyalty oaths of teachers, pharmacists, and other
professionals. Private groups like the American Legion and the National
Association of Manufacturers also targeted individuals for their political beliefs.
Organizations that had been influenced by communists in the 1930s and 1940s
became tainted, and those who would not testify about their past and present
political opinions or refused to name communists often lost their jobs. “UnAmerican” books, like stories of Robin Hood, were removed from local
libraries. Universities refused to host left-wing speakers and fired teachers
who would not take loyalty oaths. The courts did nothing to halt these
violations of civil liberties, and the Supreme Court defended the
imprisonment of communists for their beliefs.
Though Soviet spies certainly were in the US, the minuscule Communist Party
did not endanger American security. Most of those jailed or fired in the
McCarthy era were guilty of only holding unpopular beliefs and engaging in
lawful political activity. Anti-communism was a popular mass movement that had
its uses. One basis was in ethnic groups with roots in eastern European countries
dominated by the Soviets, like the Polish, and among American Catholics who
opposed communist hostility to religion. Government agencies like the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, led by J. Edgar Hoover, used anti-communism to
increase their power. Anti-communism was also used for purely partisan
political purposes. McCarthy and other anti-communist leaders seemed to
criticize the legacy of Roosevelt and the New Deal more than Stalin and
communism. Many Democrats embraced anti-communism to deflect
Republican allegations of disloyalty. The Democrats excluded many in the left
and the Popular Front who had helped organize support for New Deal policies. Anticommunism made conformity the new definition of loyalty; any criticism of the
status quo now appeared subversive. Business used anti-communism against
unions, white supremacists used it against black civil rights, and others used it to
defend sexual morality and traditional gender roles against feminism and
homosexuality.
Anti-communism, most pervasive from the late 1940s to the early 1960s,
powerfully shaped American politics and culture. Republicans invoked
communism to stymie Truman’s political program. Truman became alarmed
by excesses of anti-communism, and he seemed to retreat from it in policies in
government. In 1950, he vetoed a measure that required “subversive” groups
to register with the government, denied passports to their members, and
authorized the president to deport or detain them. But Congress over-rode his
veto and enacted it.
In 1952, a new immigration law also passed over Truman’s veto, which shot down
Truman’s proposals for immigration reform and allowed the deportation of
communists, even if they were citizens. In 1954, the federal government’s
Operation Wetback resulted in the military deportation of about 1 million
Mexican-Americans alleged to be illegal aliens. Truman only barely expanded
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the coverage of Social Security, and instead of extending federal social welfare,
private welfare prevailed. Union workers’ contracts provided them with
health insurance, wage increases that followed the cost of living, pensions, and
paid vacations, while all other workers remained covered. But only workers in
the unionized heavy industries enjoyed these benefits in America. In Europe,
all workers received these benefits from the government.
All political and social groups had to comply with anti-communism or be
destroyed, and this severely damaged the labor and civil rights movements
that had benefited from dedicated communist organizers. After the 1947
passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which withdrew bargaining rights and legal
protections from unions whose leaders refused to swear that they weren’t
communist, the CIO expelled left-wing unions with nearly 1 million members.
Unions began to support Cold War US foreign policies. Since left-wingers were often
the most militant advocates of women’s rights and civil rights, their expulsion left
unions unable to respond to the civil rights movement and an economy that shifted
form manufacturing to service work.
The civil rights movement changed. While major civil rights groups at first
protested Truman’s loyalty program and criticized anti-communists for not
defining racism as “un-American,” nearly all black leaders and civil rights
organizations were pressured into joining the anti-communist crusade. Groups
like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, that had united communists and
non-communists in a struggle for both racial equality and social justice,
disintegrated, leaving only legalistic groups like the NAACP. Black organizations
adopted Cold War language to argue that segregation and racism in the US gave
credence to Soviet criticisms of America, and thus helped solidify Cold War
understandings of freedom.
In a climate of anti-communism and McCarthyism, criticisms of American
policy, domestic or foreign, invited a harsh response. Truman’s civil rights
program faltered. But the booming economy of the 1950s, which produced an
“affluent society” in America for the first time, produced a widening gap between
white affluence and black poverty and disenfranchisement that would help inspire a
civil rights resurgence in the 1960s.
ESSAY QUESTIONS (40 points each)
1. What caused the Cold War? Is it proper to blame one side, or do both sides
share to some degree in the blame? Was this conflict between the United
States and the western capitalist democracies versus the Soviet Union and the
communist nations of Eastern Union and after 1949 China, inevitable?
2. How was the language of freedom used to justify American foreign policy in
the early Cold War? What were the consequences of viewing the Cold War in
such narrow terms as “free” and “slave”?
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3. Evaluate Harry Truman’s domestic policies. Which parts of it reflected the
New Deal? Why was it so difficult to implement? How did it expand freedom
for Americans? How did it restrict freedom?
4. The Cold War impacted every aspect of American life. Discuss the domestic
implications of the Cold War. Your essay should explain how the Cold War
affected higher education, the economy, immigration policy, civil rights, and
civil liberties.
5. Fully discuss the limitations placed on freedom during the Cold War. Then
compare those circumstances with those during the First Red Scare after
World War I. What was the same? What was different? Were restrictions on
civil liberties justified in both cases? Why, or why not? How did Americans
react in each era?
KEY TERMS and PEOPLE (5 points each)
Write a sentence or two explaining the significance of each of these
terms/people to the period between 1945-1953.
A. Joseph Stalin
B. iron curtain
C. Truman Doctrine
D. Marshall Plan
E. Berlin Airlift
F. NATO
G. Korean War
H. GI Bill
I. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
J. Senator Joseph McCarthy/McCarthyism
K. Jackie Robinson
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