Unit Six: Boom Bust and the New Deal—The Basics
Unit Seven: World War II and its Aftermath—The Basics
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According to President Wilson, the United States entered the First World War to make the world “safe for democracy.” Twenty years later, democracy was under great threat in Europe and Asia as totalitarian governments took over some of the major world powers. In Russia, Josef Stalin became a communist dictator, transforming the USSR into an industrial power. Meanwhile in Germany, Adolf Hitler took over the government. Before taking power, Hitler had written a best-seller called Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) explaining his theories of racial superiority and his belief that communists and Jews had betrayed Germany at the end of World War One and that German people should not have to pay reparations and were entitled to seize back the territory taken from them at Versailles.
After building up his military and teaming up with Benito Mussolini of Italy to form the Axis Alliance, Hitler made demands for part of Czechoslovakia. In the Munich Pact, allied leaders gave in to Hitler’s demands in order to avoid war. This policy was called appeasement, and it proved to be a miserable failure when the Nazis took over the rest of Czechoslovakia six months later. The next year, in 1939, the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed, in which the two leaders pledged not to attack each other. A few weeks later, German forces invaded Poland, and World War II began. Though there was no real fighting through the winter of ’39-40, Hitler’s Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) began again in the spring of 1940 as the Nazis quickly took over most of Europe.
Of all the European democracies, only Great Britain remained, and their new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, vowed that Britain would not give in to Axis aggression. As Nazi planes bombed London and other cities in the Battle of Britain, the US government passed the Lend-Lease Act, authorizing President Franklin Roosevelt to loan American military equipment to the British. In the meanwhile, Japan joined the Axis and launched a sneak attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which FDR referred to as: “a date which will live in infamy.”
The US economy, which had still been suffering from the Great Depression, set about a massive mobilization effort that quickly reduced unemployment to historic lows. Rosie the Riveter became an icon of female wartime employment, and A. Philip Randolph secured a promise from FDR that war-time jobs would be made available to African Americans. Other minority groups were not treated as well, such as those locked up in the Japanese Internment, in which Japanese Americans were locked up in internment camps for fear they would serve as spies.
In Europe, defeat of the Nazis came from crucial operations at the Battle of Stalingrad, where huge Soviet losses forced a German retreat, and the Normandy Invasion, also known as the D-Day invasion, planned by General Dwight Eisenhower. In the spring of 1945, Germany surrendered on VE-Day. The last remaining member of the Axis Alliance, Japan, had begun to lose ground to the Americans at the Battle of Midway. As the Japanese military turned to more Kamikaze attacks and sustained tremendous losses at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, it became clear that the Japanese leaders were not going to surrender. Meanwhile, FDR had died and was replaced by Harry Truman, who chose to unleash the force of the newly created Atom Bomb, developed by the highly secret Manhattan Project on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrendered on VJ Day.
During the war Hitler’s government perpetrated the Holocaust throughout Europe, systematically relocating and murdering Jews. The Final Solution involved the use of poison gas and crematoria to try to eliminate Jews from Europe.
After the war, the Soviet Union began to dominate Eastern Europe, setting up non-democratic communist regimes in the nations his army liberated, under the terms of the Yalta agreement. Winston Churchill spoke of this new threat to world peace in his Iron Curtain speech. The US then set out to contain the spread of communism, sending aid to war torn nations via the Marshall Plan and forming a peace time military alliance with Western European nations called NATO.
Communism continued to spread, however, and in 1949, Mao Zedong announced a communist victory in China. The next year, the Korean War started, and Truman sent forces commanded by General Douglas MacArthur to help the non-communist South Koreans fight off the communist North Korean army. The war ended in a stalemate.
One reason that Truman, and then Eisenhower, chose not to widen the war effort was that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic weapon of their own, an accomplishment that led to the execution of Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg for espionage. Fear of communism also led to the McCarthy era, in which those accused of being communists had their reputations and careers ruined. As the USA and USSR battled to make larger and more devastating weapons, the nations then engaged in a space race, with a dramatic victory going to the Russians when the launched Sputnik, the first artificial space satellite.
Back home, economic growth in the 1950s was stimulated by increased college enrollment, partly caused by the GI Bill, which offered scholarships to veterans. In politics, Truman was nearly unseated by a challenge from the pro-segregation Dixiecrats of his party, and the population received a boost in the Baby Boom as veterans returned home and started families.
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