Download Chapter 36 Rejoinders

Question 1
a. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 prohibited the closed (all-union shop), made
unions liable for economic damages resulting from jurisdictional disputes
among themselves, and forced unions to take a noncommunist oath.
b. The rapidly growing number of service sector workers made it more difficult
for organized labor to organize workers in the post-World War II era. The
middle-age female composition of service sector and the part-time, isolating,
and the small shop working conditions of the service sector made it more
difficult for unions to organize service workers of the early postwar ear than
the assembly-line industrial workers successfully organized by unions in the
1930s and 1940s.
c. The failure of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to unionize
southern textile workers and steelworkers in 1948, partly attributable to the
exploitation of racial tensions between white and black workers by southern
employers, dealt a serious blow to the union organizing efforts of organized
labor in the early post-World War II era.
d. Correct answer. The great majority of new jobs created in the postwar era
went to women. Urban offices and shops and the dramatically growing service
sector of the economy provided a bonanza of employment for female workers.
Women accounted for a quarter of the American workforce at the end of
World War II and nearly half the labor pool five decades later.
e. The growing number of part-time workers slowed the growth of organized
labor in the post-World War II era because the plethora of part-time workers,
often working in varied and diffuse locales and under different compensation
arrangements and working conditions, proved to be much more difficult to
organize than their full-time labor counterparts working in industrial unions.
Question 2
a. The Truman administration created the President’s Council of Economic
Advisers in 1946, as part of the implementation of the Employment Act of
1946, to give the president statistical data and policy recommendations that
would facilitate reaching the Employment Act’s goal of advancing maximum
employment, production and purchasing power in the United States.
b. The Truman administration sold war factories and other government
installations to private businesses at very low prices to prevent the onset of a
postwar economic recession.
c. The Truman administration obtained Congressional passage of the
Employment Act of 1946, making it government policy “to promote,
maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.”
d. The Truman administration oversaw implementation of the Service
Readjustment Act, commonly known as the GI Bill of Rights of 1944, to
enable returning soldiers to further their education at technical and vocational
schools and colleges and universities at the government’s expense. The Act,
actually passed during the last year of President Franklin Roosevelt’s
administration, also stimulated the construction industry by enabling the
Veterans Administration (VA) to guarantee about $16 billion in loans for
veterans to buy homes, farms, and small businesses.
e. Correct answer. The Truman administration lifted wartime wage and price
controls shortly after the conclusion of the World War II. This action sparked
a 33 percent spike in prices during 1946and 1947 and precipitated a wave of
strikes by workers fearful that they would not be able to afford the autos and
other consumer goods they were manufacturing.
Question 3
a. The vast expansion of the home-owning middle class Americans in the early
post-World War II era, encouraged by the availability of generous government
home-loan guarantees and tax deductions for interest payments on home
mortgages, sparked a boom in the construction industry and the development
of numerous suburban tract developments that found millions of eager home
buyers eager to purchase their first suburban home.
b. The economic forces of consolidation, accelerated by the cost-efficiency
demands of giant agribusinesses, the mechanization of farming processes, the
introduction of rich new fertilizers, and the availability of government
subsidies and price supports, contributed to concurrent expansions in
agricultural output and productivity and a significant decrease in the number
of American family farms and farmers in the post-World War II era.
c. The post-World War II era marked a massive migration of (mostly white)
middle class Americans from the cities to the suburbs. This migration was
facilitated by the construction of miles of suburban tract developments, the
availability of generous government home-loan guarantees, the construction
of the interstate highway system, and the simultaneous departure of taxpaying
business downtown shops to suburban shopping malls.
d. Americans seeking greater employment opportunities in growing sectors, such
as the aerospace and electronics industries; an improved climate; and lower
taxes flocked to the Sunbelt region of the United States in the postwar era.
The fifteen states of the Sunbelt, a southern and western regional crescent
stretching from Virginia through Florida and Texas to Arizona and California,
experienced population increases at a rate nearly double that of the old
industrial zones of the Northeast during the postwar era.
e. Correct answer. The suburban and urban residential patterns of African
Americans and whites remained highly segregated in the postwar period.
Whites fled to newly constructed and affordable houses in the suburbs, while
migrating African Americans from the South populated the urban
environments that were abandoned by the departing white middle-class.
Moreover, middle class African Americans who sought to migrate from the
inner city to these new suburban neighborhoods and developments found their
aspirations blocked by discriminatory government lending policies that
exacerbated this continuing pattern of residential segregation. Finally, public
housing programs frequently followed a so-called neighborhood composition
rule that had the effect of constructing new public housing for African
Americans in inner city neighborhoods that were already predominately
composed of African Americans.
Question 4
a. At the February 1945 Yalta conference, the Soviet Union agreed to attack
Japan within three months in exchange for the United States and Britain
granting the Soviet Union sovereignty over Japan’s Kurlie Islands and the
southern half of Japan’s Sakhalin Island, joint control over the railroads of
China’s Manchuria, and special privileges in the two seaports of Darien and
Port Arthur located in the Manchuria region.
b. Stalin agreed at Yalta that the Soviet Union would sponsor free elections in
Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania. Stalin subsequently broke this democratic
pledge and quickly established communist totalitarian Soviet satellites in each
of these Eastern European countries.
c. At Yalta, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt agreed to establish and assign
military occupation zones in Germany to the respective victorious powers.
These military occupation zones became the bases for the formation of
separate countries in 1949, when the British, French, and American zones
became the democratic, capitalist West Germany and the Soviet Union
became communist East Germany. Berlin remained under joint four-power
occupation from 1945 to 1990 and became a central point of Cold War
tensions during the postwar period.
d. Correct answer. At Yalta in February 1945, the Soviet Union and the United
States did not agree on completing a military withdrawal from Europe after a
peace treaty was signed. The purpose of Yalta was not to have Roosevelt,
Stalin, and Churchill draft the specific provisions of a comprehensive peace
and security settlement for Europe. Instead the goals included sketching some
general intentions for postwar Europe, securing Stalin’s entry into the Asian
war, testing one another’s reactions to various political proposals and
generalized understandings, and concluding interim four-power security
arrangements for Germany.
e. Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill agreed at Yalta to plans for organizing a new
international peacekeeping organization, the United Nations.
Question 5
a. The United Nations (U.N.) and the old League of Nations both attempted to
include all the independent nations in its membership.
b. Correct answer. The United Nations granted each member of the U.N.
Security Council, dominated by its permanent Great Power members, the
United States, the USSR, China, Britain, and France, veto power over any
proposed collective action involving a member of the Security Council. This
veto authority, granted to members of the U.N. Security Council, contrasted
with the rules of the League of Nations, which denied the veto power to any
party involved an international dispute.
c. The United Nations attempted to address the issue of colonialism through the
U.N. Trusteeship Council to guide former colonies to independence. The
League of Nations attempted to address colonialism by developing the League
of Nations mandate system, which placed the political control and evolution
of the former German and Ottoman Empire colonies in the hands of by the
Allied powers following World War I.
d. The United Nations authorized the Security Council to create and control an
independent military force to maintain peace in international trouble spots and
intervene militarily when collective security demanded such an action.
e. The United Nations established a powerful independent executive branch,
Secretariat of the United Nations, headed by the Secretary General, to
administer the operations of the different bodies of the United Nations and
provide research studies, facilities, and information updates to the bodies of
the U.N.
Question 6
a. The containment doctrine, as developed by George F. Kennan and advanced
by President Truman, did not entail the United States providing military
support to spark democratic insurgencies and uprisings in communist Eastern
Europe. The doctrine implicitly accepted the military and political fact that the
Soviet Union had, by 1947, established a nearly impenetrable totalitarian
sphere-of-influence encompassing all the nations of Eastern Europe. Instead,
the containment doctrine posited that relentless Soviet expansionism could be
curtailed by offering substantial and well-timed military, economic, and
political support to strategically important pro-Western nations facing
communist pressures.
b. The development and implementation of the containment doctrine did not
involve the United States or Western Europe taking any steps to block Soviet
trade with Africa and Asia.
c. Containing the spread and development of nuclear weapons was not an
element of the containment doctrine, as developed by George F. Kennan and
advanced by President Truman. After the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb in
1949, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a dangerous nuclear
arms race, accelerating their development, production, and deployment of new
types of destructive nuclear weapons.
d. Correct answer. In March 1947, the Truman administration requested $400
million from Congress in military and financial aid for the faltering Western
nations of Greece and Turkey because President Truman asserted that each
nation would soon fall under the control of the Soviet Union because of
communist pressures on the Greek government. The Truman administration
believed that such a massive grant of military and economic aid to Greece and
Turkey was necessary to withstand Soviet expansion and control over these
two geopolitically critical nations.
e. The Truman administration made a highly contingent and politically and
economically untenable offer to the Soviet Union to participate in the joint
European economic recovery arrangements of the Marshall Plan. The Soviet
Union, as the Truman administration expected, declined to participate in the
Marshall Plan or in any of the evolving democratic and capitalist European
political and economic organizations that succeeded the Marshall Plan, such
as the European Community (EC).
Question 7
a. Critics were concerned that the Truman Doctrine represented a sweeping and
open-ended commitment of political, economic, and military interventionism
by the United States on behalf of every anti-communist insurgency and
faltering pro-Western government in the world. These critics contended that
the specific scope and duration of American military, political, and economic
intervention required and the implications for the vital national interests to
American national security must be evaluated and weighed before committing
substantial American military, political, and economic assistance on behalf of
threatened free peoples or pro-Western governments facing communist
pressures.
b. Some critics of Truman’s promise of support for unlimited support for any
peoples resisting Communist aggression would be used by corrupt,
authoritarian anti-Communist despots to claim they needed substantial
American military and economic assistance to stave off alleged Soviet-backed
Communist insurgencies of dubious strength or insignificant strategic
importance to the United States.
c. Some critics of the Truman Doctrine asserted that it recklessly polarized the
world into pro-Soviet and pro-American camps. These critics worried that
such a polarization threatened to transform every colonial conflict and
political insurgency erupting in Third World nations (now commonly known
as Less Developed Countries (LDCs)) into a dangerous proxy Cold War
showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union.
d. Some critics of the Truman Doctrine claimed that it construed the Soviet
expansionist threat as primarily military in nature and did not emphasize
offering economic assistance and development, particularly to Third World or
less developed nations, as an important bulwark against the advance of
communism in regions of the world outside of Europe.
e. Correct answer. Proponents of the Truman Doctrine, not its critics, made the
argument that it was necessary for President Truman to exaggerate the current
and potential Soviet military and political threat to American national security
interests and to rhetorically emphasize the ideological challenge posed by
godless Soviet communism in order to forestall a revival of the dangerous
isolationism that prevailed in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.
Question 8
a. Correct answer. The United States strictly conditioned its offer of Marshall
Plan economic aid to the Soviet Union on the USSR making certain
unpalatable political reforms and accepting external economic and political
controls that would have limited Soviet decision-making authority in the
distribution and use of Marshall Plan economic aid. The Soviet Union
b.
c.
d.
e.
unsurprisingly rejected the deliberately onerous terms offered by the United
States for Marshall Plan economic aid and did not participate in the European
economic recovery program.
Congress overcame its initial reluctance and ultimately approved spending an
unprecedented $12.5 billion over four years to economically assist the sixteen
cooperating countries in Europe that participated in the Marshall Plan.
The massive transfusion of billions of American dollars into the anemic
economies of the Western European nations participating in the Marshall Plan
permitted these democratic, capitalist European nations to exceed their prewar
outputs and enjoy robust economic prosperity only a few years after receiving
this critical economic assistance from the United States.
The postwar economic prosperity enjoyed in Western Europe, fueled by
Marshall Plan economic aid, caused the Communist parties in Italy and France
to lose considerable political support in the early postwar years, and the two
critical European nations became remained solidly grounded in the proAmerican democratic capitalist political orbit during the postwar years.
In fact, no Marshall Plan aid was sent to Less Developed Countries. The
Marshall Plan was designed to spur the economic recovery of only Western
European countries. The enormous economic outlays of American funds
required to realize the Plan’s goal of restoring European economic vitality
meant that relatively little foreign economic aid would be distributed by
America to Less Developed Countries during the early postwar years.
Question 9
a. American membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in
1949 strengthened the containment of possible Soviet expansion in Europe by
creating a transatlantic military and mutual security alliance that linked the
precarious security of the democracies of Western Europe to a historic
peacetime commitment by the United States (and Canada) to defend militarily
any Soviet efforts to extend their political dominance over the nations of
Western Europe.
b. American membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization helped
provide a structural framework for reintegrating Germany into the European
family. The organization of NATO alliance by the United States and the
wartime allied Western European powers precluded the development of a
resurgent and domineering Germany on the continent during the postwar era.
Moreover, the development of the transatlantic NATO military alliance
allowed these allied wartime Western European powers to feel secure about
admitting West Germany into NATO in 1955 to defend Western Europe
against Soviet aggression, thus, advancing the full-fledged postwar
reintegration of West Germany into the European family.
c. Correct answer. NATO membership by the United States required substantial
increases in annual American defense expenditures to upgrade its
conventional and nuclear forces, construct and maintain an array American
army, naval, and air force bases in Europe, and train and permanently base, at
its peak, over 2 million American soldiers in Western Europe.
d. American membership in NATO reassured postwar era Europeans that the
U.S. would not abandon them if a resurgent, re-militarized Germany or Soviet
aggression and expansionism threatened the collective security of Western
Europe. American membership in NATO inextricably tied the collective
security and defense of these fearful, exhausted, and threatened Western
European nations to the protections and deterrence offered by the formidable
conventional force and nuclear arms umbrella of the United States.
e. American membership in NATO dealt a major blow against U.S. isolationism
because American national security and military defense was now firmly
connected to the ability of this postwar transatlantic military and political
alliance to deter and resist possible Soviet aggression and expansionism into
Western Europe; to prevent the re-emergence of a threatening, aggressive, and
dominant Germany; and to maintain the political stability and precarious Cold
War peace in Europe during the postwar era.
Question 10
a. Correct answer. After the conclusion of World War II, the Japanese
government did not join an American military alliance to prevent the spread of
communism in East Asia because the postwar constitution that General
Douglas MacArthur required Japan to adopt renounced all forms of militarism.
b. The MacArthur-dictated postwar constitution in Japan provided for the
establishment of women’s legal equality in the defeated East Asian nation.
c. General MacArthur introduced Western-style democratic government
institutions, procedures, and principles into the constitution that he required
Japan to adopt after the war.
d. The Western-style democratic and economic principles, anti-militarism, and
women’s equality enshrined in the postwar Japanese constitution and the
cooperative maintenance of these constitutional principles by the postwar
Japanese government helped pave the way for an impressive postwar
economic recovery in Japan.
e. The postwar Japanese government renounced militarism as required by
General MacArthur’s postwar constitution.
Question 11
a. Most of the bitter, partisan Republicans who attributed the collapse of the
Nationalist Chinese government and the political and military triumph of the
Communist Chinese forces of General Mao Zedong to the leadership
shortcomings of President Truman and secretary of state Dean Acheson, and
alleged communist-infiltrated Democratic government agencies declined to
make the incredible assertion that Communist China now posed a greater
threat to the national security of the United States than the Soviet Union. After
all, by September 1949, the Soviet Union had consolidated its political and
military control over all of Eastern Europe and successfully exploded an
atomic bomb.
b. Immediately following the Communist victory in China in 1949, Republicans
did not advocate forcing a showdown with China over the stalemated, hostile
peninsula of Korea that was divided precariously at the thirty-eighth parallel
between the regimes of North Korea, a Soviet client state, and South Korea,
an ally of the United States. After war erupted on the Korean peninsula in
June 1950, most Republicans agreed with the mistaken assessment of U.N.
commander General Douglas MacArthur, dismissing the likelihood of a
massive military intervention and confrontation with the Chinese should U.N.
troops approach the strategic Yalu River border between Korea and China.
c. Republicans did not favor amending the Japanese constitution to permit Japan
to possess nuclear weapons to counter the Chinese Communist threat.
d. Correct answer. Partisan Republicans, bitterly dismayed over the Communist
victory over Chinese Nationalists in 1949, alleged that the fall of China could
be attributed directly to President Truman and secretary of state Dean
Acheson and the withholding of American aid to the Nationalist Chinese
leader Jiang Jieshi by Democratic government agencies infiltrated and
controlled by communists.
e. In the aftermath of the political and military victory achieved by the Chinese
Communists over the Chinese Nationalists in 1949, some virulent
anticommunist Republicans asserted that a critical analysis, evaluation, and
readjustment of American foreign policy in East Asia required the immediate,
high priority attention of Congress and the Truman administration to identify
the Democratic culprits responsible for the fall of China and forestall feared
Soviet and Chinese communist expansionism in this region.
Question 12
a. Correct answer. The success achieved by the Soviet Union in developing an
atomic bomb by September 1949 was attributed, by many government
officials, to the cleverness of communist spies in stealing American atomic
secrets. Among those who had allegedly provided atomic information to the
Soviet Union were two American citizens, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who
were convicted in 1951 of espionage and subsequently executed.
b. Two American citizens, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed as Soviet
spies in 1953, following their conviction in 1951 of providing classified
atomic data to the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs remain the only people in
American history ever executed in peacetime for espionage.
c. The distinguished and experienced State Department official Alger Hiss
adamantly denied the allegations uncovered by Congressman Richard Nixon
and the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had provided
information and intelligence to the Soviet Union. However, Hiss was unable
to explain embarrassing inconsistencies and falsehoods contained in his
Congressional testimony, and he was convicted of perjury in 1950.
d. Some fiercely anti-communist conservative state and local politicians used
charges of communism to attack real or perceived changes in American sexual
or cultural values, such as declining religious sentiment, increased sexual
freedom, and agitation for civil rights. Anti-communist state and local
crusaders attempted to remove subversive textbooks and drove debtors,
drinkers, and homosexuals, all alleged to be security risks, from their jobs.
e. Teachers and other public employees in individual states were forced to sign
anti-communist loyalty oaths as a condition of employment.
Question 13
a. National Security Council Memorandum Number 68 or NSC-68 reflected the
American belief in the limitless capability of the American economy and
society to meet its various foreign policy and national security challenges
because the document assumed that the postwar American economy could
bear, without severe strain or social rupture, the enormous costs associated
with the massive long-term rearmament program that NSC-68 proposed.
b. NSC-68 advocated that the United States quadruple its defense spending,
initiate a massive buildup its standing military forces, and be prepared to
deploy several million American soldiers, armed with well-equipped
modernized, and lethal armaments, around the world to counter the perceived
political, economic, and military challenges posed by the Soviet Union and
their Cold War allies to maintaining American national security and achieving
American political, economic, and military goals in the postwar era.
c. The Korean crisis, which emerged in June 1950, provided the necessary
political impetus and pretext for the successful implementation of the fullfledged militarization of American foreign policy, as recommended by NSC68. Absent at the outbreak of the Korean War, the Truman administration
would have encountered insurmountable political barriers to gaining domestic
support for implementing a massive military expansion of American military
spending ($50 billion per year on the defense budget—13 percent of the GNP),
dramatically increasing the standing armed forces of the United States (3.5
million Americans under arms), and utilizing the deployment of American
armed forces and the provision of large amounts of U.S. military aid as the
primary instruments of U.S. foreign policy.
d. NSC-68’s emphasis on the critical importance military action and military
assistance in achieving the Cold War foreign policy goals of the United States
contrasted with the multi-faceted approach of the containment policy outlined
by George Kennan. The containment policy, devised by Kennan, underlined
the importance of using utilizing diplomatic (political) and economic
strategies, along with military ones, to counter Soviet aggression and
expansionism.
e. Correct answer. The massive militarization of U.S. foreign policy, envisioned
in NSC-68, represented an anathema to the isolationist wing of the Republican
Party represented by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Senator Taft and his fellow
Republican isolationists feared that the enormous militarization of U.S.
foreign policy would inevitably lead to unsustainable, costly, and protracted
overseas American military interventions and political alliances that would
sap American economic and national security.
Question 14
a. General Douglas MacArthur did not continue to lose crucial battles during his
command of U.N. forces in Korea from June 1950 to April 1951. By the time
b.
c.
d.
e.
of President Truman’s April 1951 decision to relieve General MacArthur from
command of the U.N forces battling the Chinese and North Korean forces, the
fighting had deteriorated into a frozen stalemate on the icy hills and valleys
near the thirty-eighth parallel.
Following General MacArthur’s daring amphibious landing behind enemy
lines at Inchon in September of 1950, President Truman ordered MacArthur to
cross the thirty-eighth parallel, enter North Korea, and pursue the retreating
North Koreans in order to prevent the North Koreans from regrouping and reinvading South Korea. President Truman and the United Nations advised
MacArthur not to take any military action that would precipitate a military
intervention by the Chinese or the Soviets.
MacArthur’s miscalculation that the Chinese communists would not intervene
militarily to support North Korea when the U.N. troops approached the
strategic Yalu River boundary between Korea and China represented a major
strategic blunder and military setback for General MacArthur and his United
Nations forces. Nevertheless, President Truman did not decide to relieve the
still popular General MacArthur of his command during the immediate
aftermath of the November 1950 rout of U.N. force by Chinese communist
forces.
Correct answer. President Truman relieved General MacArthur of his
command of U.N. forces in April of 1951 because General MacArthur, on
multiple occasions, publicly questioned and defied presidential orders about
military policy and strategy following the humiliating military reversal his
U.N forces experienced by Chinese forces in November 1950. General
MacArthur aggressively advocated for the authority to blockade the Chinese
coast and bombard Chinese bases in Manchuria. However, MacArthur was
overruled by President Truman and the president’s top military and political
policymakers who were concerned that the general’s proposed military
strategies and tactics would spark a wider clash in Asia with China and detract
the United States from successfully stabilizing and protecting Western Europe
in the face of possible Soviet aggression and expansion.
MacArthur did not announce that he would run for President of the United
States in 1952, while serving as commander of U.N. forces in Korea, and he
never formally campaigned for the presidency, despite numerous entreaties by
his supporters to do so.