Download 8. The Cold War Years UNIT 8. THE COLD WAR YEARS

8. The Cold War Years
UNIT 8. THE COLD WAR YEARS
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
Truman Doctrine was announced to Congress
Republicans won control of both Houses of Congress in November elections
Atomic Energy Commission created
Truman Doctrine proclaimed
Labour Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley Act) passed over Truman's
veto
George Marshall outlined Marshall Plan
William Levitt announced the first Levittown
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated Communist
Infiltration of the film industry
Jackie Robinson became the first black player in major league basketball
The Marshall Plan began
Scientists at Bell Laboratories invented the transistor
President Harry S. Truman ordered loyalty program for government employees
President Truman banned segregation in armed forces
Harry S. Truman scored upset victory in presidential election
North Atlantic Treaty is signed in Washington. NATO was founded
Korean War
McCarthy charged that 205 communists worked for the State Department
McCarran Internal Security Act
HUAC conducted a second investigation of Communist subversion in
Hollywood
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death for espionage
Truman authorised building of the hydrogen bomb
Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected thirty-fourth president
The McCarran-Walter Immigration Act passed over Truman's veto
United States exploded hydrogen bomb in the Pacific on November 1
Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated as the thirty-fourth U. S. President
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed for spying
Korean War truce was signed at Panmunjom
Army McCarthy Senate hearings. U. S. Senate censured McCarthy for
"conduct unbecoming a member"
Supreme Court orders schools desegregated in Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka
AFL and CIO merged
First post-war U. S.-Soviet summit meeting at Geneva. EisenhowerKhrushchev
Rosa Parks arrested, led to Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott
Suez Canal Crisis (October-November)
Khrushchev crushed Hungarian rebellion (November)
Soviets launched the first earth satellite, Sputnik
Southern Christian Leadership Conference organised
Federal Interstate Highway Act began interstate highway system
President Eisenhower Doctrine
Spunik I. The first earth-orbing man-made satellite launched by the Soviets on
October 4
Integration of Little Rock's Central High School
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1958
1959
President Eisenhower started nuclear test-ban talked with Soviets in Geneva
National Aeronautics and Space Administration established (NASA)
National Defence Education Act passed to provide federal aid to schools and
Colleges
Nixon-Khrushchev "kitchen debates"
1. THE POST WAR PERIOD
In the post war period, the United States was the world's greatest power. It alone
possessed the atomic bomb. President Roosevelt was determined to avoid a situation of
isolationism like the one that followed World War I. He thought that the United States could
lead the rest of the world to an international cooperation, expanding democracy, and
increasing living standards. To promote these goals, new institutions like the United
Nations and the World Bank had been created. American prosperity required global
economic reconstruction and its security depended on the security of Europe and Asia.
The only country that could rival the United States was the Soviet Union, whose armies
occupied the eastern part of Germany and other countries of the European area. The
Soviet government tried to establish a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Roosevelt
thought that the United States could establish friendly relation with the Soviet Union once
World War II ended but the conflict between these two countries began gradually. For two
years these nations tried to adjust their differences through discussion and negotiation, the
division of Europe, the atomic bomb and the post-war economic aid.
The control of post-war Europe was the most important disagreement between the two
powers. American and British forces had liberated Western Europe. In The Soviet army
tried to impose communist governments loyal to Moscow in all the eastern countries.
Germany was the most controversial point. By 1947, Britain, France and the United States
were laying plans to transfer their authority to an independent West Germany, but Russia
intensified the communication of its zone, which included the jointly occupied city of Berlin.
One of the results of World War II was the division of Europe.
The Soviet government had to rebuild its economy through reparations, which it extracted
from its zone of Germany, Eastern Europe and Manchuria. The Russian economy was
recovering from the war, but the American refusal to extend aid, convinced Stalin of
Western countries hostility and the growing antagonism deepened. At the same time, a
post-war nuclear arms race emerged. The development of the atomic bomb was a very
closely guarded secret. Americans started the Manhattan Project and the Russians began
their own atomic program in 1943.
The Soviets exploited the territory they had conquered in Europe while the United States
retained its economic and strategic advantages over the Soviet Union. No agreement was
possible between the two countries.
In January 1949, President Harry S. Truman called for a defence pact. Ten European
countries joined the United States and Canada in signing the North Atlantic Treaty, which
established the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). There were two main features
of NATO. First, the United States committed itself to the defence of Europe in case of an
attack, extending its atomic shield over Europe. The second feature was designed to
reassure worried Europeans that the United States would honour this commitment.
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NATO escalated the developing Cold War. It represented a reaction to the Soviet danger
although there was no evidence of any Soviet plan to invade Western Europe. The USSR
and its sphere nations responded to NATO with the Warsaw Pact.
The rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union grew in the late 1940’s and the
early 1950’s. Both countries began to rebuild their military forces with advanced weapons
and their diplomatic competition spread from Europe to Asia to enhance its influence in the
Orient. By the time President Truman left office in early 1953, the Cold War had acquired
global proportions.
2. HARRY S. TRUMAN AND HIS FAIR DEAL
Harry S. Truman won the presidential election of 1948. He viewed his upset victory as a
vindication for the New Deal and a mandate for moderate liberalism. He had invented a
tag, the “Fair Deal” to distinguish his program from the New Deal.
The “Fair Deal” was a legislative package and included an expansion of Social Security,
federal aid education, a federal budget for public housing projects, a higher minimum
wage, a national plan for medical insurance, civil right legislation and other measures to
foster social and economic justice. But the most original proposals of the Fair Deal
legislation were rejected by a Congress that opposed anything defined as “creeping
socialism.”
By 1949, foreign policy dominated the president’s attention and claimed an increasing
share of the federal budget.
The Truman years were a bad period for female workers. During the war they had filled a
wide range of industrial jobs, but returning soldiers quickly displaced them. Some accepted
the change and returned to their pre-war occupations. Others lost their relatively highpaying wages. What was even worse, some employers hired and trained younger males
rather than keep the experienced women. Many unemployed women labourers lamented
the anti-female prejudices among employers.
2.1. The Truman Doctrine and The Marshall Plan.
On March 12, 1947, Truman asked Congress for $400 million in economic and military aid
to Greece and Turkey. In his speech to Congress, Truman announced what became
known as the “Truman Doctrine”. It marked the beginning of a contest that people began to
call a “cold war.” There was an ideological struggle between East and West for world
power and influence. Although the war had ended in the spring of 1945, Europe's
problems continued. It needed money to rebuild its war-torn economies and scarred cities.
In January 1947, General George G. Marshall became Secretary of State. He had the
capacity to think in broad, strategic terms. The Democratic administration's experts drew
up a plan for the massive infusion of American capital to finance the economic recovery of
Europe. Marshall announced a plan to give Europe financial aid.
World War II had been very costly for European countries. Food was scare, industrial
machinery was broken and obsolete, and workers were demoralised by years of
depression and war. This situation led to growing communist voting strength, especially in
France and Italy. Unless the United States could do something to reverse this process,
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Europe might drift into the communist orbit. It was time to extend American economic
power in Europe to stop the Soviet Union's expansionism and create a basis for political
stability and economic well-being.
There was a meeting in Paris in July 1947 where the European nations made a formal
request for $17 billion in assistance over the next four years. The American Congress
responded cautiously to this proposal. The administration pointed out that the Marshall
Plan would help the United States by stimulating trade with Europe. In early 1948,
Congress approved a plan, by majority; to be spent over the next four years for the
European Recovery Program (ERP), more popularly called the Marshall Plan. The United
States quickly put forward loans that generated a broad industrial revival in Western
Europe that became self-sustaining by the 1950s. The threat of communism faded, and
Europe's return to prosperity proved to be a bonanza for American industrialists, farmers
and workers.
The Marshall Plan rebuilt the economic infrastructure of Western Europe and restored
economic prosperity to the area. In the process it created stable markets for American
goods. Americans were proud of the Marshall Plan, and Europeans were moved by it.
Winston Churchill judged it “the most unsordid act in history.” It restored America's prestige
abroad.
2.2. The Red Scare and McCarthyism.
Early in 1950 a little-known Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy,
surfaced as the most ruthless exploiter of the nation’s anxieties. He took up the cause of
anti-communism with a vengeance. He emerged as the national pursuer of subversives
and gave a new name to the anti-communism crusade.
McCarthy never identified a single person guilty of disloyalty but held hearings and made
charges against individuals as well as the Voice of America, the Defence Department and
other government agencies. A favourite target was aristocratic Secretary of State Dean
Acheson, but General Marshall and even fellow Republicans were also named in his
accusations.
In the federal government, Truman imposed loyalty and security requirements for
employees. Some workers were forced out of their jobs. The State Department denied
passports to left-leaning Americans, included celebrated singers, artists and scientists. In
1950, Congress passed an Internal Security Act that compelled Communist organizations
and their members to register with a new Subversive Activities Control Board and the
members were ineligible for jobs in government or defence. Truman vetoed the bill
because it was the "greatest danger to freedom of press, speech, and assembly since the
Sedition Act of 1798," but Congress overrode the veto by a sweeping majority.
Many Republicans supported his rampage as a weapon against President Truman’s
administration but after the election of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower as president in
1952, McCarthy became an embarrassment to the Republican Party. McCarthy's downfall
came in December 1954, when a Senate committee investigated his charges that the army
had harboured communists. After the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings ended,
the Senate censured McCarthy for his behaviour.
McCarthy's success was based on the simple solution he offered to the complicated Cold
War. He proposed to defeat the enemy at home rather than continue to engage in costly
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foreign aid programs and entangling alliances abroad. Yet his influence was deep. Not
only did he paralyse national life with shameful activities, but he also helped impose a
political and cultural conformity that froze dissent for the rest of the 1950s. Freedom of
expression was inhibited, and the opportunity to try out new ideas and approaches was
lost as the United States settled into a sterile Cold War consensus.
3. THE EISENHOWER PRESIDENCY
The Democrats had occupied the White House for the previous twenty years. In 1952,
Republicans capitalised on a growing sense of national frustration to capture the
presidency. Republicans felt it was time for a change and at the polls Americans were
ready to vote for change. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the perfect Republican candidate to
unite the divided nation. He emerged from World War II as the military leader with the
greatest political appeal. Eisenhower promised that if he was elected, he would first end
the war in Korea then fight communism and corruption at home.
President Eisenhower concentrated his efforts on the Cold War abroad and on playing an
active role in dealing with Congress. Eisenhower extended Social security benefits and
raised the minimum wage. In 1953, he consolidated the administration of welfare programs
by creating the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, but he opposed Democratic
plans for compulsory health insurance and comprehensive federal aid to education. The
lack of presidential support and the split of the conservative coalition in Congress blocked
any further reform in the 1950’s. Moderation was the keynote of the Eisenhower
presidency.
In 1955, Eisenhower met with Nikita Khrushchev, the new soviet leader, in Geneva at the
first “summit” conference since Potsdam a decade earlier. In 1958, the two countries
agreed to a voluntary halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. The pause lasted until 1961.
In 1959, Khrushchev toured the United States and had a friendly meeting with Eisenhower
at Camp David. But the spirit of cooperation ended abruptly in 1960, when the Soviets shot
down an American U-2 spy plane over their territory. Eisenhower denied that the plane
had been involved in espionage and refused to apologise even after the Russians
produced the captured pilot. Because of the incident, another planned summit meeting
was cancelled.
The policy of containment easily slid over onto opposition to any government, whether
communism or not, that seemed to threaten American strategic or economic interests.
In domestic policy, Eisenhower brought a military style to the White House. He was in
charge, and he kept the major decisions of his administration in his own hands. But he left
the detail work and the political battle to his subordinates.
During Eisenhower's presidential years, the country made steady and at times spectacular
economic progress. In 1955 the minimum wage was raised from 75 cents to $1 per hour,
and during the 50s, the average family income rose 15% and real wages went up 20%.
And work was plentiful. During this decade, the average unemployment rate only 4.5% per
year, a figure close to the 4% that economists considered “full employment.” The country
was on the whole better housed and fed than ever before. The population increased by 28
million inhabitants. The output of goods and services rose 15%. Especially for white
Americans, "Modern republicanism" seemed a viable alternative to “New Dealism.”
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4. CIVIL RIGHTS DURING THE 1940s
During the Cold War years in the United States, there was a great contradiction between
the denunciation of the Soviet Union for its human rights violations and the second-class
status of the African Americans. This began to arouse the national conscience. America
was fighting for freedom against communist tyranny abroad and they had to face the
reality of the continued denial of freedom to a submerged minority at home.
The social tremors triggered by World War II and the onset of the Cold war transformed
America’s racial landscape. Blacks had benefited economically from WWII, but they were
still a seriously disadvantaged group. Those who moved to northern and western cities
were concentrated in segregated neighbourhoods, working at low-paying jobs, suffering
economic and social discrimination without sharing the post-war prosperity. In the South,
conditions were much worse. State laws forced blacks to live totally apart from white
society. Blacks attended separate schools and were excluded from most public facilities.
They were forced to use separate waiting rooms in train stations, separate seats on all
forms of transportation, and separate rest rooms and drinking fountains. Segregation
appeared at all places of public entertainment and in hospitals, nursing homes, hotels,
restaurants, prisons and even mental institutions.
Harry S. Truman was the first American President who tried to change the pattern of racial
discrimination in the United States.
Truman’s Administration had been unable to secure any significant legislative measure to
improve the blacks' situation, although he had succeeded in adding civil rights to the
Democratic agenda and was able to use his executive power to assist blacks seeking
redress for grievances in school and housing issues. In 1948, Truman issued an important
order calling for the desegregation of the armed forces. By the end of the 1950s, the
military had become far more integrated than American society at large.
The United States in the 1950’s was still a segregated society. Half of the nation lived in
poverty, most of them blacks. In those years, seventeen southern states and Washington,
D. C., had laws requiring the racial segregation of public schools, and several others
permitted local districts to impose them. 28 million schoolchildren studied in legally
segregated schools, and millions more attended classes in northern communities where
school district lines created de facto segregation, separation in fact if not in law.
4.1. The Brown Case
The nation's schools soon became the primary target of civil rights advocates. The
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, concentrated first
on the Universities, successfully waging a legal battle to win admission for qualified blacks
to graduate at professional schools.
The NAACP challenged the city's segregated public schools on behalf of several black
families, including that of Oliver Brown in 1951. Brown was a veteran, assistant pastor at
his church and he went to court because his daughter, who was in third grade, was forced
to walk across dangerous railroad tracks each morning rather than being allowed to attend
a nearby school restricted to whites. By 1952, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Kansas had reached the Supreme Court.
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The Court ruled on May 31, 1955, giving practical force to its ruling, instructing the states
to create public school systems free of racial discrimination "with all deliberate speed."
4.2. The Montgomery Bus Boycott
An incident in Montgomery, Alabama, shifted from legal struggles in the courts to black
protest in the streets. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a forty-five-year old seamstress
who had been active in the local NAACP organisation in Montgomery, violated a city
ordinance by refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a local bus. Parks was mildmannered, a faithful member of her church, and the previous summer she had attended a
workshop on race relations where, as she later declared, she gained the "strength to
persevere in my work for freedom." Resentful of the bus company's policies, Parks stayed
put in her seat. Rosa Parks was arrested, convicted, and, having refused to pay a $10 fine,
was given a suspended prison sentence. Some of Montgomery's black leadership, long
angry at the bus system, already had plans for a citywide bus boycott. Now that Parks had
been arrested, they put this into effect. The black churches, the heart of spiritual and social
life in the black community, supported the boycott and they found a young, eloquent leader
in the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
King was a twenty-six-year-old Baptist minister who had come to Montgomery the year
before. Raised in Atlanta, King learned from his father, himself a prominent minister who
had led black voter-registration drives, that racism was to be resisted. At Morehouse
College and then at Boston University, King broke away from his father's fundamentalism,
embracing a modernist Protestantism committed to combating social inequality and
injustice. He found a means to that end in the doctrine of non-violent resistance to
oppression, taking inspiration from the civil disobedience of Henry Thomas Thoreau in the
1840s against the Mexican War and Mohandas Gandhi in the 1940s, against British
colonial rule in India.
Martin Luther King Jr. brought to the Montgomery bus boycotts a socially transforming
courage and vision. He recognised that non-violent tactics against injustice could arouse
public opinion and stimulate sympathy for the black cause.
The most dynamic force of change came from blacks themselves. For more than ten
months, black Montgomerians organised car pools, rode black-owned taxis whose drivers
had agreed to carry passengers at lower fares, or simply walked. At the same time, King
was arrested, tried, and convicted of leading an illegal boycott. Still, Montgomery's blacks
continued the boycott peacefully; persuaded by King that reacting with violence would
undermine the righteousness of their cause. In the meantime, the leaders of the boycott
filed suit challenging the constitutionality of bus segregation. In mid-November 1956, the
Supreme Court held that the city ordinances governing bus seating violated the Fourteenth
Amendment. The boycott had hurt Montgomery's businesses and their leaders were eager
to see the dispute settled. Before Christmas 1956, thirteen months after the boycott began;
Martin Luther King, Jr. sat with a white man at the front of a bus.
In the Deep South, segregationists denounced the ruling, pledging to prevent the mixing of
Negroes and whites with each other "socially in our school systems." Waves of anti-black
violence broke over the South. But black Americans were not of a mind to retreat. The
Montgomery action demonstrated that they could press the issue of freedom by direct,
non-violent action. It also produced a new leader of protest in Martin Luther King, Jr. In
January 1957, black ministers from eleven states gathered in Atlanta and founded the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with Martin Luther King Jr. as its
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president.
In the mid 1950’s, a growing movement for black civil rights aroused the conscience of
white Americans. But civil rights for African Americans did not seem to arouse President
Eisenhower's conscience.
In 1957, Eisenhower proposed and Congress passed a bill creating a permanent
Commission for Civil Rights, one of Truman's original goals. It also provided for federal
efforts aimed at "securing and protecting the right to vote." A second civil rights act in 1960
slightly strengthened the voting rights section. Like the desegregation effort, the attempt to
ensure black voting rights in the South was still largely symbolic.
5. AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE IN THE 1950s
There was a Golden Age in American society. Between 1950 and 1960, the gross national
product adjusted for inflation shot up some 37%, while the average family income rose
30%. According to their incomes, three out of five Americans came to enjoy middle-class
standing, twice the fraction in the twenties. At the end of the decade, 33 million Americans
owned homes, compared with about 23 million in 1950, and at least one television set was
to be found in about 90% of American households, more than had running water or indoor
plumbing. President Eisenhower’s major goal from the outset was to restore calm and
tranquillity to a badly divided nation. He tried to balance the budget, to keep military
spending in check, to encourage as much private initiative as possible, and to reduce
federal activities to the bare minimum. Wealthy businessmen dominated Eisenhower's
cabinet.
Eisenhower defined his domestic policy as “Modern Republicanism.” Eisenhower
introduced the idea of “mixed economy” in which the government played a major role in
planning economic activity and this was widely accepted throughout the Western
countries. Most of them nationalised their key industries like transportation, steel and
shipbuilding.
Following the war, the nation’s economy bloomed, and everyone wanted a new car.
Americans more than doubled the number of automobiles and trucks on the national’s
streets. Eisenhower supported the idea of the Interstate Highway System (IHS). In 1956,
Congress and the president formally conferred authority on engineers in the U.S. Bureau
of Public Roads and their counterparts in the state highway departments to start the new
system by building 41,000 miles, including approximately 5,000 urban miles.
The Interstate Highway System pleased a variety of road users: the trucking industry,
automobile clubs, organised labour (eager for construction jobs), farmers, and state
highway officials. This interstate system of communication, which was built over the
following twenty years, had a deep influence on American life. It stimulated the economy
and shortened travel times, while intensifying the nation's dependence on the automobile
and favouring metropolitan growth paralleling the new highways.
The 1950’s saw a decrease in the labour conflict of the two previous decades. The
passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 had reduced labour militancy. In 1955, the
American Federation of Labour (AFL) and CIO merged to form a single organisation. In
key industries, labour and management hammered out what has been called a new “social
contract.” Unions signed long-term agreements that left decisions in management's hands,
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and they agreed to try to avoid unauthorised "wildcat" strikes. Unionised workers shared
fully in 1950s prosperity but the social contract did not apply to the majority of workers,
who did not belong to unions. Some companies moved their factories to less unionised
suburbs to the South. By the end of 1950s, the "social contract" was weakening.
Over all, the Eisenhower years marked an era of political moderation.
5.1. Youth Culture and Delinquency (no va para examen)
5.2. Women at Work (no va para examen)
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