AP Outline Notes – Pages 887-916



AP Outline Notes – Pages 887-916

Chapter 38 – The Eisenhower Era – 1952-1960 – Fatigued from the Depression and war, Americans wanted a respite to enjoy the vision of a new consumer-culture affluence. But, the Cold War would caused worries abroad, and the fear of communist subversion and tensions over civil rights issues made for dangerous divisions at home. America needed a reassuring leader, and they got it in Dwight D. Eisenhower.

A. The Advent of Eisenhower

1) Truman and the Democrats did not have high hopes for the 1952 elections – Truman’s hopes for a second elected term were essentially dashed by

a) the stalemate in Korea

b) his firing of MacArthur

c) inflation from the war

d) hints of scandal in the White House

2) 1952 election – Democrats nominate Adlai E. Stevenson, the professorial governor of Illinois.

a) Republicans nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower,

1) Richard M. Nixon, a young Senator from Ca received the vice presidential nomination.

2) Among “Ike”’s credentials:

a) commanded Operation Overlord (D-Day) in WWII

b) was supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe during WWII

c) was Army chief of staff after WWII

d) was first commander of NATO, from 1950-1952

e) was president of Columbia University, 1948-1950

f) was a genuine war hero, and the American people loved him – was probably the most popular American at the time. His popular campaign theme ‘I like Ike.’

3) Ike was a grandfather-image who generated confidence. He kept a rather non-partisan posture during the campaign and let Nixon do the stumping.

4) Nixon, a political fighter, made sharp criticisms of the opposition.

5) Nixon became embroiled in scandal though, as it revealed that he had tapped into a secret ‘slush fund’ while in the Senate.

a) Ike, prodded by Republican party officials, seriously considered dropping Nixon from the ticket.

b) Nixon went on the new national medium of television, and made his case to the people, even evoking sympathy as he brought his daughters and their little cocker spaniel named ‘checkers’.

c) The speech generated much support for Nixon, and Ike kept him on the ticket.

d) IMPORTANT – the ‘checkers’ speech shows how important the medium of television now was in politics. Ten second ‘sound bites’ would become the most important means of political communication.

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6) Ike won in a huge and easy victory. His ‘coattails’ were long enough to give the Republicans a narrow majority in Congress.

B. Ike Takes Command

1) Keeping his campaign pledge, president-elect Ike went on a three-day visit to Korea in December, 1952, to try to foster a peace.

2) Seven months later, after Ike had threatened to use atomic weapons, an armistice was signed, though violated several times in the decades to follow.

a) Cost of the Korean War – 54,000 American lives, with many more North and South Koreans, and Chinese killed. The U.S. had spent tens of billions of dollars on the war.

b) BUT, THE U.S. HAD ACHIEVED ITS COLD WAR OBJECTIVE OF CONTAINMENT OF COMMUNISM WITH THE OUTCOME OF THE KOREAN WAR – COMMUNISM HAD NOT SPREAD – the status-quo at the 38th parallel had been restored.

3. The grandfatherly Ike knew that his greatest political asset was the respect and affection that he enjoyed from the American people. His critics though would charge that he preferred social harmony over social justice, and that he did not do enough to lead in the area of civil rights.

C. The Rise and Fall of Joseph McCarthy

1) Ike had to deal with the problem that the popularity of Senator Joseph McCarthy presented for him – McCarthy helped to foster insecurity and suspicion about communism at a time when insecurity and suspicion over communism already existed.

2) “McCarthyism” –

a) Senator Joseph McCarthy was a lack-luster first-term senator from Wisconsin, who, while facing reelection in 1952 with a rather unaccomplished record as a senator, needed an issue to campaign on. He came up with a great one.

b) In a speech in 1950, he accused Secretary of State Dean Acheson of knowingly employing 205 communists in the State Department.

c) Though pressed to do so, McCarthy, never was able to produce a real list.

d) But, his speech made him a national figure, and his rhetoric and wild accusations increased as time went on. There were other red-hunters beside McCarthy – such as Nixon, but none was as ruthless and damaging as McCarthy.

e) His often baseless accusation and guilt by association tactics, resulted in the ruin of many people’s careers, in several different walks of life, including government, acting, literature and journalism to name a few.

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f) An example of his recklessness and irresponsibility in painting victims with a communist brush occurred when he denounced General George Marshall, former army chief of staff and ex-secretary of state, as ‘part of a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.’

g) Ike personally detested McCarthy, but essentially kept a low profile while McCarthy was on his destructive path.

h) McCarthy finally met his match when he targeted the U.S. Army.

1) 1954 – The Army McCarthy hearings – these inquisitions were televised, and ended up being a showcase of the unfairness, meanness, and ruthlessness of McCarthy. The public tide turned against McCarthy, and he was censured by the Senate for ‘conduct unbecoming a member.’

2) McCarthy, a broken and disgraced man, died three years later of complications from alcoholism.

3) The term “McCarthyism” is still used today to describe unfair, baseless sorts of charges, founded in guilt by association, innuendo, or limited or no factual basis.

D. Desegregating the South

1) In 1950, the black population in the U.S. was approximately 15 million, two thirds of whom still lived in the South.

2) Jim Crow still existed throughout the South, with it’s legally imposed dehumanizing racial segregation.

3) Only 20 percent of eligible southern blacks were registered to vote, as poll taxes and literacy tests still prevented full African American suffrage.

a) Fewer than 5 percent were registered in some of the states of the Deep South, such as Mississippi and Alabama.

4) Examples of the appalling violence perpetrated against blacks when they sought equality –

a) 1946 – 6 black war vets claiming basic constitutional rights were murdered.

b) 1955 – a Mississippi lynch mob killed 14 year old Emmett Till for allegedly ‘leering at a white women.’ His mother left his casket open, showing his disfigured face, stating that she wanted the whole world to see ‘what they had done to my boy’. Jet magazine featured the picture, and it became an important symbol in the civil rights movement.

c) 1944 – An American Dilemma, by Gunnar Myrdal exposed the contradiction between the American claim that ‘all men are created equal’, and the manner in which blacks were treated in the U.S.

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5) 1947 – Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball.

6) 1944 – The Supreme Court ruled that the ‘white primary’ was unconstitutional, thus weakening the power of the whites in the Democratic ‘Solid South”.

7) 1950 – NAACP chief legal counsel Thurgood Marshall, later to become the first black Supreme Court justice, successfully argued in Sweatt vs. Painter, which held that separate professional schools for blacks violated the 14th Amendment Equal Protection clause.

8) 1954 – Thurgood Marshall successfully argues the case of Brown vs. Board of Education, Topeka Kansas, in behalf of little Linda Brown, an African American girl denied admission to a public school on the basis of her race. The Supreme Court held that ‘separate but equal’, in the context of public education, violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, thus signifying the end of the separate but equal doctrine established in 1896 in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson.

a) Leading the way in the nine to nothing decision was Chief Justice Earl Warren, who lead the court in the direction of judicial activism – a role where the court effects social change.

b) Warren, whom Ike consider to have been his biggest mistake, would lead the Court as it struck down Jim Crow, as well as make several rulings that favored civil liberties and the rights of the accused in the criminal process.

c) The Brown decision provided that public schools must be desegregated ‘with all deliberate speed’ (order issued in 1956) .

1) Much of the South responded to this order with ‘massive resistance’, to the point that the governor of Virginia closed the public schools rather than comply with the order.

2) Many ‘private academies’ were established so that parents did not have to send their children to integrated schools.

3) “white flight’ from the cities took place, as many white parents did not want their children attending mixed schools.

4) 1956 – ‘Declaration of Constitutional Principles’ – more than 100 southern congressmen signed this, pledging their adamant resistance to the Brown ruling.

5) 10 years after the Court’s ruling, less than 2 percent of the eligible blacks in the Deep South were in classrooms with whites – ‘all deliberate speed’ turned out to mean quite slow.

9) 1955 – Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott –

a) Rosa Parks, a well respected officer in the local NAACP in Montgomery, Alabama, one day refused to give up her seat to a white man and go to the back of the bus where the blacks were required to sit – all in violation of the local Jim Crow ordinance.

b) Parks was prosecuted under the Montgomery city ordinance.

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c) Martin Luther, King, Jr., a 26 year old minister, is asked to lead the bus boycott.

d) Gifted in his oratory, and dedicated to the principles of non-violent social change that sought social justice, King successfully led the effort to desegregate the busses in Montgomery. The Supreme Court, after about one year of litigation, ruled that the segregated buses violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

E. Seeds of Civil Rights Revolution

1) Truman, appalled by the lynching of the 6 black war veterans in 1946, responded by commissioning a report entitled ‘To Secure These Rights’.

a) Following the recommendations of the report, in 1948 Truman desegregated the U.S. military.

b) He also ended segregation in federal civil service

2) The Brown decision, like the Warren Court that issued it, was revolutionary. The seeds of change had been sewn.

F. Crisis at Little Rock Central High

1) Ike showed little inclination to implement school integration. He complained that the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board had upset ‘customs and convictions of at least two generations of Americans,’ and he declined to issue a public statement endorsing the decision. ‘I do not believe,’ he said, ‘that prejudices, even palpably unjustifiable prejudices, will succumb to compulsion.’

2) 1957 – Ike is now forced to act on the issue of school desegregation –

a) Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Little Rock Central High School.

b) Faubus’ action was in direct disobedience to federal authority.

c) Ike, upholding federal authority, federalized the National Guard troops, and sent in federal troops (101st Airborne), to escort the nine black students into the high school, and to assure their safety.

3) 1957 – Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 – the first civil rights act since Reconstruction.

a) It set up a permanent Civil Rights Commission to investigate violations of civil rights, and authorized the use of federal injunctions to protect voting rights.

4) 1957 – Martin Luther King, Jr. founded the SCLC along with other Baptist ministers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Its goal was to mobilize the huge power of the black churches in behalf of civil rights. This was an excellent strategy, because these churches were the best organized black institutions.

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5) 1960 – the ‘sit-in’ movement is started in Greensboro, N.C. by four black college freshmen. They demanded service at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter, and were denied service.

a) They returned the next day, with 19 classmates.

b) The following day, they returned with 85 students.

c) By the end of the week, there were a thousand.

d) THE SIT IN MOVEMENT SWEPT ACROSS THE SOUTH LIKE WILDFIRE.

e) The movement gave birth to wade-ins, lie-ins, and pray-ins, designed to compel equal treatment in transportation, restaurants, employment, housing, and voter registration.

f) 1960 – southern black college students form the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced ‘snick’) to give more focus and impact to these efforts.

1) Many of these young activists, most notably Stokely Charmichael, a founder of SNCC, would become frustrated with their inability to make institutional changes. Many would reject the highly principled tactics of the SCLC, and the legalisms of the NAACP, and become militant in their efforts to achieve social justice for blacks.

G. Eisenhower Republicanism at Home

1) Eisenhower proclaimed himself to be a liberal regarding those things that concerned people, and a conservative on those matters that pertained to government or the economy.

2) He believed in small government. He wanted to balance the budget (he accomplished that only 3 of his 8 years as president,) and to guard the U.S. from ‘creeping socialism.’

3) He stopped Truman’s huge military buildup.

4) He tried to curb the power of the TVA by encouraging a private company to build a power plant to compete with TVA.

5) Ike responded to fears by the Mexican government that illegal Mexican immigration to the U.S. would undercut the bracero program of legally imported farm workers that was created during WWII.

a) 1954 – ‘Operation Wetback’ resulted in the deportation of about 1 million illegal Mexican immigrants back to Mexico.

6) Ike sought to cancel the tribal preservation policies the ‘Indian New Deal’, put in place in 1934.

a) He proposed to ‘terminate’ the tribes as legal entities, and go back to the assimilation goals of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887.

b) A few tribes were induced to end their tribal status – ex: the Klamaths of Oregon gave up all of their land and agreed to the dissolution of their tribe.

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c) Most Indians resisted termination, and the policy was abandoned in 1961.

7) Ike backed the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, which was a $27 billion plan to build 42,000 miles of fast, multilane highways.

a) These roadways had a defensive purpose too – they had to be wide enough to land a bomber if necessary.

b) They were a boon to the economy, and speeded up the process of suburbanization.

c) They did hurt the railroad business though, and created air-quality and energy consumption issues.

d) They hurt the downtown sections of cities, as shopping malls thrived in the suburbs.

e) Ike had the largest peacetime deficit in U.S. history in 1959.

1) Critics said that Ike was not pro-active enough with the economy, and contended that his economic inaction worsened the several business recessions during the 1950s.

2) They particularly emphasized the steep economic downturn of 1957-1958, which left in excess of five million workers unemployed.

3) Economic troubles helped revive the Democrats, as they regained control of Congress in 1954.

4) Concerns about unemployment also helped bring about a merger between the AF of L and the CIO in 1955, ending 20 years of bitter division between the two.

H. A New Approach to Foreign Policy – ‘Massive Retaliation’

1) The Republican platform in 1952 condemned the policy of containment, and provided for the rolling-back of communism.

a) This approach was endorsed by the new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.

b) Ike’s administration promised to balance the budget by cutting military spending.

c) Dulles’ ‘policy of boldness’ in 1954, provided that the army and the navy would take a back seat to building an air fleet of superbombers (called the Strategic Air Command, or SAC), equipped with nuclear bombs.

d) These bombers would inflict ‘massive retaliation’ on the Soviets or Chinese if they did not behave.

e) “Massive Retaliation’ was thought to be a wise policy because of its deterrent effect. It was believed to be cheaper. PROBLEM: IT LIMITED THE RANGE OF MILITARY OPTIONS THAT THE U.S. WOULD HAVE, AND IT DID NOT PROVIDE FOR PROPORTIONAL RESPONSE.

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f) At the same time, Ike sought to limit Cold War tensions through negotiations with the new Soviet leaders who came to power after Stalin died in 1953.

1) But, new Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev briskly rejected Ike’s peace overtures at the Geneva summit in 1955.

2) Ike’s call for ‘open skies’ over both nations was flatly rejected by Khrushchev, contending that it was just an espionage ploy.

g) In the end, ‘massive retaliation’ did not prove to be a viable policy –

1) 1956 – Hungarian uprising – Hungarians rose up for their rights, appealing in vain to the U.S. for help, but were brutally crushed by Soviet power.

2) Problem: a nuclear response would have been disproportionate to the issue, thus illustrating a major flaw in the strategy of ‘massive retaliation’.

3) Also, it turned out that the financial cost of the ‘massive retaliation’ policy was hugely expensive.

I. The Nightmare of Vietnam

1) Because of NATO and the Marshall Plan, Europe was reasonably secure during the early 1950s.

2) East Asia though was not.

a) Nationalist movements had sought for years to end the colonial power of the French in Indochina.

b) Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese nationalist, had appealed to Wilson at Versailles to support self-determination for peoples of Southeast Asia.

c) FDR had also inspired hope among Asian nationalists.

d) After the Japanese defeat in WWII, Ho desired an independent Vietnam, and sought U.S. help to create same.

e) The French, who had lost their colony of Vietnam in 1941 to the expansionist Japanese, wanted it back after WWII.

f) The U.S., forced with the decision of supporting Ho or supporting its old ally France, chose to support France.

g) Ho thus sought the help of the communists.

h) By 1954, the U.S. was supporting French colonial efforts in Indochina to the tune of about $1 billion a year.

i) Initial American support of the French was given in part to win French approval of a plan to rearm West Germany.

3) Despite this massive U.S. aid, the French were defeated by the Ho’s Viet Minh forces at Dienbienphu.

a) Dulles wanted to implement the ‘policy of boldness’, and activate the bombers in support of the French.

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b) Ike, fearing another war in Asia on the heels of Korea, would not support this.

c) Dienbienphu fell to the nationalists as mentioned above.

d) 1954 – Geneva Conference – a multination conference to determine the future of Vietnam –

1) Vietnam would be divided at the 17th parallel

2) Ho agreed to this, with the assurance that Vietnam-wide elections would be held within two years, to unify the nation.

3) In the South, a pro-Western government was established under Ngo Dinh Diem.

4) The national elections were never held, as Diem refused to hold them, fearing that the communists would win.

5) War broke out between the communist North under Ho, and the South under Diem.

6) Ike pledged economic and military aid to the autocratic Diem, on the condition that he undertake social (democratic) reforms.

7) Ike sent military advisers into South Vietnam, but never exceeding 875 in number.

8) Ike believed that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, all of South East Asia would do the same – this was the “Domino Theory”. In the end, he was proven wrong.

9) Ike was against sending American fighting troops into Vietnam, contending that American boys could not win a war in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

J. A False Quiet in Europe

1) West Germany joined NATO in 1955, contributing a half-million troops.

2) Also in 1955, the Warsaw Pact was formed – an alliance of the Eastern European nations and the Soviet Union.

3) Thawing of tensions –

a) May, 1955 – Soviets agreed to end occupation of Austria.

b) 1955 Geneva Summit – produced little progress on major issues, but engendered a conciliatory ‘spirit of Geneva’, that created some optimism in the West. Further encouragement was created when Khrushchev publicly denounced the brutal excesses of Stalin.

c) But, the violent events of late 1956 – the crushing of the Hungarian uprising – ended the optimism created in the wake of the Geneva Summit.

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K. Menacing in the Middle East

1) U.S. fears of Soviet involvement in the oil-rich Middle East prompted the U.S. to take extreme action.

a) Iran –

1) The government of Iran, supposedly influenced by the Soviets, started to resist the power of the huge Western oil companies that controlled Iranian petroleum.

2) In response, the CIA engineered a coup, toppling the government and installing the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, as a sort of dictator.

3) Though in the short-run successful in supplying the West with oil, the resentment of the Iranian people was substantial.

4) More than 20 years later, they took revenge on the shah and his American allies – the shah was deposed, and Iranians took over the American embassy, holding several Americans hostage. They would not be released until January 21, 1981, at 12:01 P.M. – a final dig by the Iranian government against outgoing president Jimmy Carter.

2) Suez crisis –

a) President Nasser of Egypt, an Arab nationalist, sought funds to build a huge dam on the upper Nile River for badly needed irrigation and power.

b) U.S. and Britain tentatively offered aid for this, but when Nasser flirted with the Soviets, Sec. Dulles withdrew the offer of American aid for the dam.

c) Nasser, in response, nationalized the Suez Canal, which was chiefly owned by British and French stockholders.

d) Without informing the U.S., France, Britain, and Israel coordinated an attack on Egypt in late October, 1956.

1) For a week, the world hung on the edge of nuclear war

2) An irritated Ike refused to supply France and Britain with oil while their Middle Eastern supplies were disrupted. Ike: let them ‘boil in their own oil.’

3) The “oil-less allies” withdrew their troops, and for the first time, the U.N. police force was sent to maintain order.

4) The Suez crisis was the last time that it could use its ‘oil weapon,’ as the U.S. had by 1948 became a net oil importer. The importance of the Middle East oil region had escalated dramatically.

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3) 1957 – Eisenhower Doctrine proclaimed – pledged U.S. military and economic aid to Middle Eastern nations threatened by communist aggression.

a) The real threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East did not come from communism, but rather from nationalism.

b) 1960 – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela joined to form OPEC – the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

c) OPEC’s control over Western economies in the next two decades would be huge.

L. A Second Term for Ike

1) 1956 election – Ike, despite a major heart attack in 1955, ran again against Stevenson, and defeated him easily again.

2) Despite Ike’s big victory, the Republicans failed to gain control of either chamber of congress.

3) Much corruption existed in organized labor.

a) Teamster chief Dave Beck was sentenced to prison for embezzlement.

b) Tough-guy James (“Jimmy”) Hoffa was elected Beck’s successor, which resulted in the AF of L – CIO expelling the Teamsters.

c) Senate investigation reported that in 15 years, union officials had stolen or misappropriated about $10 million.

1) Hoffa was jailed for jury tampering, and later disappeared, presumably the victim of gangsters whom he had apparently crossed.

2) 1959 – Congress passed the Landrum-Griffin Act, designed to bring labor leaders to account for financial misdeeds and to stop bullying tactics.

3) The new statute also included prohibitions against ‘secondary boycotts’ and certain kinds of picketing.

M. The Space Race with the Soviets

1) October, 1957 – Sputnik I, launched by the Soviets, becomes the first satellite to orbit the earth.

2) A month later, they launched Sputnik II, another satellite, and this time carrying a dog.

3) Sputnik sent chills down the spines of Americans, as the Soviets had beaten the U.S. into space.

4) Because the Soviets could launch heavy objects into space, Americans feared that they could launch ICBMs – intercontinental ballistic missiles – targeted for the U.S.

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5) The Soviet focus on rocketry left Americans worried that a ‘missile gap’ existed in favor of the Soviet Union.

6) ‘Rocket fever’ swept the U.S., as Ike established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and directed billions of dollars toward missile development.

1) After several embarrassments such as the Vanguard missile – which blew-up on national T.V. a few feet above ground in 1957 – the U.S. put a small satellite into space in Feb of 1958.

2) By the end of the decade, several satellites had been launched, and the U.S. had successfully tested ICBMs of its own.

3) 1958 – The National Defense and Education Act (NDEA) authorized $887 million in loans to college students in need and in grants for improvement of teaching the sciences and languages. This law was part of the U.S. effort to catch-up to the Soviets in science by improving American education in same.

N. The Continuing Cold War

1) The Cold War continued to pose a dizzying and growing threat of nuclear destruction. It also posed a threat to man through environmental issues arising from nuclear testing.

a) 1958 – The Soviet Union, after extensive ‘dirty testing’, proclaimed a suspension of testing, and urged the Western powers to do the same.

b) 1958 – Washington followed the Soviets with a suspension of testing underground and in the atmosphere.

2) July, 1958 – Lebanon’s president called for aid under the Eisenhower Doctrine, after interference by Egypt and communists in Western oriented Lebanon.

a) The U.S. landed several thousand troops and helped restore order without loss of life.

3) 1959 – Khrushchev indicated that he wanted to have a ‘summit conference’, so Ike, skeptical about what the results would be, invited Khrushchev to the U.S.

a) Khrushchev landed in NY, and appeared before the U.S. General Assembly.

b) He called for total disarmament, but did not offer a strategy as to how to achieve same.

c) He met with Ike at Camp David, and agreed to indefinitely extend his ultimatum that Berlin be evacuated.

d) The world took encouragement from this ‘spirit of Camp David’, but would become disappointed in short order.

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e) The follow-up summit was to take place in Paris, and was doomed to failure, as both sides had taken strong stances on Berlin, from which they could not step back.

1) On the eve of the summit, American U-2 pilot Frances Gary Powers was shot-down deep in the Soviet Union.

2) After bungling denials at the diplomatic level, Ike himself took personal responsibility.

3) An irate Khrushchev stormed into Paris, and the summit collapsed before it began.

O. Cuba goes Communist

1) People in Latin America resented the fact that the U.S. had spent billions of dollars in aid to Europe, and spent much less in aid for its neighbors in Latin America.

a) They also resented continuing American intervention in Latin America, such as –

b) 1954 – The CIA orchestrated a coup in Guatemala, ousting the leftist government there.

2) They also resented U.S. support of brutal Latin American dictators who purported to be fighting communists.

3) Cuba – Fulgencio Batista ruled with an iron hand in Cuba, and had encouraged large American investment in Cuba.

a) 1959 – Castro leads a revolution, toppling Batista, and confiscated some of the American property.

b) The U.S. responded by blocking Cuban imports of sugar into the U.S.

c) Castro responded by confiscating more American property, and gravitated further to the communist – Soviet camp.

d) Anti-Castro Cubans fled Cuba to the U.S., especially in Florida.

e) Nearly a million entered the U.S. between 1960 and 2000.

f) The U.S. cut off diplomatic relations with Cuba in early 1961.

4) The U.S. persuades the OAS (Organization of American States) to condemn communist infiltration into the Americas. Ike proposed a ‘Marshall Plan’ for Latin America – the U.S. funded $500 million in aid to Latin America – but, it was too little too late in the eyes of many Latin Americans.

P. Kennedy Challenges Nixon for the Presidency

1) Nixon had much more responsibility given to him by Ike than any vice president had ever been given.

a) Nixon assumed many duties in foreign policy as vice president. His encounter with Soviet premier Khrushchev in the famous ‘kitchen debate’ in 1959 was an example of his active role in foreign affairs.

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b) Some viewed Nixon as seasoned statesmen, and some viewed him as a ruthless, opportunist, politician.

c) Nixon’s running mate in 1960 was Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. of Massachusetts. Lodge had served seven years as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

2) The Democrats nominated young, handsome, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s running mate was his chief rival for the nomination, Texan and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson.

a) In Kennedy’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, he called upon Americans to make sacrifices to reach their potential greatness – something that he termed the New Frontier.

Q. 1960 Presidential Issues

1) Kennedy, a Catholic, had to deal with concerns among many that a Catholic would be dependent upon the Pope for decisions. Some, for reasons of simple bigotry, were not ready for a Catholic president.

a) The ‘Bible Belt’ South, which was traditionally democratic, was concerned.

b) The religious issue though largely cancelled itself out, because for those that stayed away from the polls in the South because Kennedy’s Catholicism, there were many who turned out for him in the North because of the bitter attacks on their Catholic faith.

2) Kennedy pointed out that he had 14 years of experience in Congress – 3 terms in the House, and was serving his second term in the Senate.

3) During the campaign Kennedy charged that the Soviets had gained on the U.S. in power and prestige.

4) Nixon tried to argue and emphasize that his maturity and experience made him the better candidate.

5) The role of television –

a) The candidates agreed to a series of four televised debates –

b) The first one took place in Chicago – Kennedy appeared tanned, relaxed, cool, and capable. Nixon, who had been ill and lost weight, appeared pale, nervous, and had a ‘five o’clock’ shadow.

c) Those who heard the debate on the radio, scored it about even, or that Nixon won. Those that watched on T.V. concluded that Kennedy won.

d) Kennedy himself said after the election that television ultimately could have been the difference for him.

6) Kennedy won in a close election, with one of the narrowest margins ever in the popular tally.

7) The Democrats easily carried both houses of Congress.

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8) The New Frontier was ready to roll, but there existed the issue of whether or not this youngest man ever to be elected president, and the nation’s first Catholic president, would be able to build consensus with the conservatives of his party and with Republicans in order to accomplish the New Frontier agenda.

R. Ike Leaves

1) Despite those that felt that the U.S. had had ‘eight years of golfing and goofing’, Ike remained extraordinarily popular with the American people.

2) During Ike’s second term, he had demonstrated better leadership and political skill than he did in his first term.

3) From 1955-1961, Congress was controlled by the Democrats, yet Ike exerted strong control over Congress. Out of 169 vetoes, he was overridden only twice.

4) America was very prosperous during the Eisenhower years, despite recurring recessions and pockets of poverty.

5) In 1959, both Alaska and Hawaii gained statehood.

6) His greatest failing might well have been his failure to lead more in the area of civil rights. Though Ike himself was not a bigot (and he did uphold federal authority in the context of Brown vs. Board) (and remember Little Rock Central High School and the Little Rock Nine.)

7) As a military man he had exercised intelligent restraint in the use of military power, and had led the nation away from many threats to peace.

8) He was bitterly disappointed that he had not been able to end the Soviet arms race. But, he had ended the Korean War, and kept the U.S. out of other wars. As time passed, his esteem in history had grew.

9) When he left office, he warned the nation of the perils of the military – industrial complex.

S. Changing Economic Patterns

1) Great prosperity was part of the continuing post-WWII economic boom in the 1950s.

2) Prosperity created a huge surge in home construction. One out of every four homes in the U.S. in 1960 had been built during the 1950s. Eighty-three percent of those new homes were built in the suburbs.

3) More than ever, technology and science drove economic growth.

a) 1948 – the development of the transistor brought about a revolution in electronics, especially in computers.

b) Printed circuits on silicon wafers would make possible dramatic minaturization and incredible computational speed.

c) IBM became the prototype of the ‘high tech’ corporation with the arrival of the ‘information age’.

d) Personal computers and cheap pocket calculators would eventually contain more computing power than early computers that occupied an entire room.

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e) Computers transformed business practices such as billing and inventory, and created new high-speed worlds in areas such as airline scheduling, high-speed printing, and telecommunications.

4) Thanks to Ike’s focus on the Strategic Air Command, and the expanding passenger airline business, and to the connections between military and civilian aircraft production, aerospace industries grew incredibly in the 1950s.

5) 1957 – Boeing built the first large passenger jet – the 707 - which was designed much like the SAC’s B-52 bomber.

6) 1959 – Boeing built the first presidential jet – Air Force One – a modified 707.

7) 1956 – For the first time, white collar workers outnumbered blue collar workers, marking the beginning of the postindustrial era.

a) Union membership as a percentage of the labor force peaked at about 35 percent in 1954, and then entered into a steady decline.

b) The growth in white-collar employment created new opportunities for women.

1) After WWII, most women returned to conventional female roles.

2) A ‘cult of domesticity’ emerged in popular culture to celebrate this role, where women stayed home and raised the bomers. This role was reinforced in TV programs such as

a) ‘Ozzie and Harriet’

b) ‘Leave it to Beaver’

c) These programs depicted a simple and to many people an idyllic home-life in the suburbs, where women stayed home and cooked, sewed, and raised the children while Dad was off at work .

c) But as the 1950s progressed, women were gravitating toward the workplace more and more.

8) Of the approximately 40 million jobs created in the thirty years following 1950, more than 30 million were in clerical and service work. AND, WOMEN FILLED THE VAST MAJORITY OF THESE NEW POSITIONS.

9) Women were the principle beneficiaries of these new post-war employment opportunities, creating a large ‘pink-collar ghetto’ of occupations dominated by women.

10) These new employment opportunities for women created conflict with the cult of domesticity.

11) Women’s new dual role of both worker and homemaker created questions about family life and traditional definitions of gender differences.

12) 1963 - Betty Freidan gives life to the feelings of women in this regard with the publication of The Feminine Mystique, - it became a feminist literary classic and launched the modern women’s movement.

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T. Consumer Culture in the 1950s

1) During the 1950s, there was a huge expansion of the middle class and a large growth in consumer culture –

a) Diner’s Club card – 1950

b) 1954 – the first McDonald’s opens

c) 1955 – Disneyland opened

d) TV sets became the norm, as 7 million were sold in 1951, and by 1960, virtually every home had one.

e) Critics of TV said that it lowered social, moral, political, and educational standards.

f) TV evangelism was practiced by nationally known ministers such as Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

g) TV in sports now resulted in audiences of millions watching at home.

2) Sports reflected the shift in population toward the West and the South.

a) 1958 – NY Giants (baseball) moved to San Francisco

b) 1958 – Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles

c) Major league baseball and football leagues expanded into the South and the West, along with the population.

3) Elvis Presley created the new craze of Rock and Roll

a) Rock and Roll was ‘crossover’ music, that bridged black and white musical traditions.

b) The boomers listened and danced to the Rock music, as it became kind of a means of coming of age for youth in the fifties.

c) Many critics felt that Rock and Roll was a form of moral decadence.

d) Like in the ‘20s, sexual allure was used to sell, and suggestive ads would appear on the television.

e) Many criticized the consumerist lifestyle.

1) David Riesman, a Harvard sociologist, portrayed the postwar generation as a group of conformists in The Lonely Crowd (1950)

2) The Organization Man – author William H. Whyte, Jr. followed the same theme.

3) Novelists Sloan Wilson addressed a similar theme in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955)

4) John Kenneth Galbraith, a Harvard economist, in a series of books questioned the relationship between private wealth and public good, called The Affluent Society (1958)

a) Galbraith spoke of how the post-war explosion of prosperity had produced troublesome combination of public squalor with private affluence.

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5) 1973 – Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) identified even deeper paradoxes of prosperity. He argued that hedonistic ‘consumer ethic’ might erode the ‘work ethic.’

6) 1956 – sociologist C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite’, alleged collusion at the highest levels of the ‘military-industrial complex’ served to rally ‘New Left’ student activists in the 1960s.

U. The Life of the Mind in Postwar America

1) Literary achievements in the post-war period abounded –

a) fiction –

1) Ernest Hemingway’s The Old man and the Sea (1952)

2) John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952) was a graphic portrayal of American society; and his Travels with Charley (1962)

3) Both Hemingway (1954) and Steinbeck (1962) won a Nobel prize for literature.

4) Novels that portrayed the life of the WWII soldier –

a) 1948 – Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead

b) James Jones’ From Here to Eternity (1951)

c) Less realistic than the above two were Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), a satire with comedy, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s such as Slaughterhouse Five (1969)

5) Problems surrounding the new mobility and affluence of American life were addressed by John Updike in works such as Rabbit, Run (1960) and Couples (1968), and by John Cheever in The Wapshot Chronicle (1964).

6) Louis Auchincloss wrote in elegant about upper-class New Yorkers.

7) Gore Vidal wrote a series of interesting historical novels, as well as iconoclastic works such as Myra Breckinridge (1968)

8) These writers were a contrast to the older, WASP elite that had for a long time dominated American writing.

b) Poetry –

1) Poets during this era were often critical, and even despairing, about the character of life in America.

a) Ezra Pound – continued to write, but was jailed after the war for alleged collaboration with Fascists.

b) Wallace Stevens and William C. Williams, both pursued poetry as a second career and were of world-class stature.

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c) Theodore Roethke wrote about the land.

d) Robert Lowell – For the Union Dead (1964) – applied the wisdom of Puritan past to the perplexities of the present.

e) Sylvia Plath – Ariel (1966), and The Bell Jar (1963)

f) Anne Sexton – wrote depressing autobiographical poems

g) John Berryman

h) Many of these poets took their own lives – it was said that the life of a poet ‘began in sadness and ended in madness.’

2) Playwrights –

a) Tennessee Williams wrote series of dramas about psychological misfits who struggled to keep themselves together amidst destructive forces of modern life. Among his more notable works -

1) A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

2) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)

b) Arthur Miller wrote several plays that examined American values. The included –

1) Death of a Salesman (1949)

2) The Crucible (1953) – used the Salem witch trials as a foreshadowing of the dangers of McCarthyism.

c) Lorraine Hansberry wrote a compelling portrait of African American life in Raisin in the Sun (1959).

d) Edward Albee – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), examined the underside of middle-class life.

3) Books by black authors –

a) Richard Wright – Native Son (1940) – a portrait of a black killer in Chicago, who had to confront elements of racism within the judicial process.

b) Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man (1952)

c) James Baldwin – The Fire Next Time (1963)

d) Black nationalist LeRoi Jones wrote powerful plays such as Dutchman (1964)

4) Literary renaissance in the South, led by William Faulkner from Mississippi (Nobel winner in 1950)

a) Walker Percy and Eudora Welty, both from Mississippi, carried on for Faulkner, who died in 1962.

b) Robert Warren – All the King’s Men (1946) immortalized Louisiana Senator Huey Long.

c) Flannery O’Connor wrote about her native Georgia

d) William Styron – The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

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5) Many books were produced by Jewish novelists –

a) J.S. Salinger – Cather in the Rye (1951) about a sensitive, upper-class Anglo-Saxon adolescent.

b) Bernard Malamud – wrote about the experience of lower and middle-class Jewish immigrants in The Assistant (1957), about a family of New York Jewish storekeepers.

1) Malamud also wrote The Natural (1952) about the culture of American baseball.

c) Philip Roth wrote comically about young suburbanites living in New Jersey in Goodbye Columbus (1959), and wrote about a middle-aged sexually obsessed New Yorker in Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)

d) Saul Bellow of Chicago wrote masterful stories about Jewish literary and urban life in landmark books such as Herzog (1962) and The Adventures of Augie March (1953). 1977 - Bellow became the eighth American to win the Nobel prize for literature.

e) E.L. Doctorow used Old Testament themes in his fictional accounts of spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, in The Book of Daniel (1971).

a) Later he creatively recast other modern historical materials in books such as Ragtime (1975) and World’s Fair (1985) and Billy Bathgate (1989).

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