Re-thinking History

On the Dissertation Grind

2010-01-03T19:21:00.000-08:00

Hello Everyone~

I am on the grind with my dissertation research and writing! If you have any information on the colonization movement from Mississippi, I would love to talk with you.

Pictures from the most recent research trip to Natchez, MS will be posted soon!

Have a blessed and prosperous New Year! Stay on your grind!

Best,
D~

Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan

2008-12-09T08:32:00.000-08:00

Gerald Ford (1974-1976)

Gerald Ford became president, following the resignation of Nixon in 1974 and continued the policy of détente with China and Russia. Ford visited China and entered into the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union.
Ford met with Brezhnev in 1974 and agreed to support S.A.L.T. II. Ford ordered the final withdrawal of American troops in Vietnam, in “Operation Freedom Wind.” However, Ford still employed covert operations, as the president approved secrete supplies of money and weapons to UNITA and the FNLA in Angloa.
Ford granted Nixon a full pardon and Congress passed the Election Campaign Act of 1974 to guard against the abuses revealed in the Watergate investigations. Special investigating committees in Congress discovered a host of illegal FBI and CIA activities stretching back to the 1950s, including harassment of political dissenters and plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders.
In the 1976 race, Ford carried a number of burdens, such as a weak economy and a serious threat mounted from the Republican right.
Howard Zinn, The Twentieth Century, (2003), argued that in 1974-75, the resignation of Nixon, the succession of Ford and the exposure of bad deeds, such as the bombing of Cambodia were designed to regain the badly damaged confidence of the American people.
Grame Mount, 895 Days that Changed the World: The presidency of Gerald Ford. (2006) argued that the record of Ford’s foreign policy had mixed results. Ford found the right balance to negotiate democracy without offending Portuguese nationalists, yet failed in attempts at reconciliation with Cuba. Ford took advantage of the death of Franco and negotiated a new bilateral U.S.-Spanish treaty. However, Mount calls Ford’s support of a military government in Argentina and Kissinger’s knowledge of Operation Condor as deplorable.

Jimmy Carter

Elected in 1976, Jimmy Carter stressed the notion of human rights in foreign policy. However, while criticizing repressive governments of Chili and South Africa, Carter did not condemn the repressive governments in the Philippines or South Korea.
Foreign policy successes of the Carter administration included the Panama Canal Treaty in 1977, and the signing of the Camp David Accords by Egypt and Israel one year later. However, Carter also had problems with his foreign policy as Soviet-U.S. relations cooled with the invasion of Afghanistan, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the refusal to boycott South Africa for its apartheid policies.
Carter’s decision for a military buildup came in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan whose Communist government was threatened by Muslim opposition. Carter claimed that Soviet actions posed the greatest threat to peace since WWII and announced the “Carter Doctrine,” which threatened to use of any means necessary to prevent an outside force from gaining control of the Persian Gulf.
Carter’s foreign policy suffered its worse humiliation over Iran in 1979, with the overthrow of the Shah and hostage situation for 444 days in Tehran. On November 4, 1979 a crowd broke into the U.S. Embassy and seized more than 60 Americans, demanding that the shah be returned to Iran for trial. Carter sent a small military operation into Iran in April 1980, but the rescue mission failed and the hostages remained prisoners until January 1981. The disastrous rescue mission fed American’s feelings of impotence, and increased support for a more militaristic foreign policy.
Carter vowed to help the poor, the aged, improve education and to provide jobs. When these aims conflicted, especially with inflation threatening economic stability, Carter’s commitment to reform took second place.
Carter’s outside status helped him win the presidency, but left him with no strong ties to part insiders. Liberal objectives made little headway under Carter: his legislation to ensure the solvency of Social Security increased employer and employee contributions, increasing the tax burden of lower-and-middle income individuals. Corporations and wealthy individuals gained from new legislation, including a cut in the capital gains tax, loans to ensure the survival of the Chrysler Corporation and the deregulation of the airlines, banking, trucking and railroad industries.
As fuel shortages and sky-rocketing prices led to stagflation and threatened the entire economy, Carter proposed a comprehensive program to conserve energy and established the Department of Energy. The National Energy Act of 1979 penalized gas-guzzling cars and provided incentives for conservation and alternate fuels. The 1979 Iranian revolution created the most severe energy crisis, however, Carter’s measures failed to reduce American dependence on foreign oil.
The Carter administration sponsored 1980 legislation to create a so-called Superfund of $1.6 billion to clean up hazardous wastes left by the chemical industry.
Human rights formed the cornerstone of Carter’s approach to reversing the policies of his predecessors, yet glaring inconsistencies appeared in Carter’s human rights policy. Carter sped up negotiations over control of the Panama Canal and led discussion between Anwar Sadat (Egypt) and the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin for 13 days at Camp David in Maryland, securing the Camp David Accords which were signed at the White House in March 1979.
Robert A. Strong, Working in the World: Jimmy Carter and the Making of American Foreign Policy, (2000) argued that Carter engaged in “personal diplomacy,” with his foreign policy and was relentless in his quest for human rights in the Soviet Union, Central America and with the Shah of Iran. Strong noted that Carter’s gift for “a consensus”, created a balance within his own administration between Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Ali M. Ansari, Confronting Iran, (2006) argued that the close relationship between the Shah and the U.S. started with Nixon. The impressions of the majority of Iranians caught up in the revolutionary fervor were shaped by the experiences of the 1953 coup. Ansari stated that Carter’s human rights within his foreign policy did not apply to Iran and precipitated the crisis by allowing the Shah to receive medical treatment in the U.S.

Ronald Reagan (1981-1989)

Foreign policy took center stage during the second presidential term of Ronald Reagan, as he reversed Carter’s policy of diplomacy with Cuban communists, supported the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which encouraged foreign investments at the expense of indigenous businesses.
Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, and asked scientists to develop a means of rendering nuclear weapons obsolete. In March 1983, Reagan created SDI, or dubbed “Star Wars” by his critics in an effort to combat state sponsored terrorism, a new element that emerged during the last decade of the Cold War.
Reagan sent U.S. forces into Grenada in 1983, applied pressure to encourage Chilean leader Pinochet to reform and took a strong stance against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Reagan’s support and economic aid to the “Freedom Fighters,” led to the passage of the Boland amendment, which prohibited the U.S. from funding the military overthrow of the Nicaraguan government.
In response, Reagan asked the NSC to find other solutions to help fund the Contras, a decision that led Iran-Contra scandal in 1986. Congress strongly and repeatedly instructed the president to stop aid to the Contras, but Reagan ignored their requests, ruining the Nicaraguan economy, and undermining the support for the Sandinista government. The scandal centered on the U.S. efforts to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of seven American hostages in Lebanon, funneling the proceeds from the arms sales through Swiss bank accounts to the Contras in Nicaragua. In November 1986, the Reagan administration faced serious charges: bargaining with terrorists and defying Congress’s ban on military aid to the Contras. An independent prosecutor’s report found no evidence that Reagan had broken the law, but concluded that both Reagan and V.P. George Bush and known about the diversion of funds to the Contras and had “knowingly participated or at least acquiesced” in covering up the scandal.
In addition, the administration aided Afghan rebels’ war against the Soviet backed government, armed revel forces against Angola’s Soviet-supported government and sided with South Africa’s brutal suppression of black anti-apartheid protesters.
In El Salvador, the United States sent money and military advisers to prop up an authoritarian government despite the fact that it had committed murderous human rights violations.
Mikhail Gorbachev became the new leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, and his reform measures, perestroika (economic) and glasnost (opening up) and his meetings with Reagan and later George W. Bush, contributed to the end of the Cold War.
Reagan’s support came from religious conservatives, who constituted a relatively new phenomenon in politics know as the “New Right.” However, the Reagan administration opposed both the Equal Rights Amendment, which failed ratification in 1982 and a woman’s right to abortion.
Feminists began to focus more on women’s economic and family problems and found some common ground with Reagan administration: the Child Support Enforcement Amendments and the Retirement Equity Act of 1984. Reagan’s major achievements lay in areas such as anticommunism, reducing taxes and government restraints on free enterprise.
Reagan’s first domestic objective was a massive tax cut and relied on a new theory called supply-side-economics, which held that cutting taxes would actually increase revenue. In the summer of 1981, Congress passed the Economic Recovery Act, the largest tax reduction in U.S. history, cutting personal tax rates on the lowest incomes from 14 to 11 percent and on the highest incomes 70 to 50 percent.
Reagan loosed laws protecting employee health and safety and weakened labor unions. He blamed environmental laws for the sluggish economy and targeted them for deregulation but popular support for environmental protection blocked full realization of his goals.
Deregulation of the banking industry created a crisis in the savings and loan industry: the S&L crisis deepened the federal budget deficit, which grew during the 1980s. The administration cut funds for food stamps, job training, aid to low income students, health service and other welfare programs. The economic upswing in 1983 and Reagan’s own popularity and a landslide 59 percent of the vote in the 1984 election.
The 1989 collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Berlin Wall further eased Cold War tensions.
William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992, (1998) argued that the Reagan administration evaded congressional oversight committees, lied to Congress about human rights violations in Central America. Reagan cleverly adopted diplomatic overtures prior to Congressional votes, but disregarded them once he received Congressional approval. Reagan’s rejection of diplomatic policy led the administration to lose all control of the diplomatic process.
Frances Fitzgerald, in ,Way Out There in the Blue: Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, (2000) argued that as a gifted salesman, Reagan recognized the appeal of missile defense to citizens frightened by mutual assured destruction. Secretary of State George Shultz regarded SDI as an effective tool in bargaining with Russia, while Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger perceived SDI as a way of dominating testy allies and the Soviets.
John Lewis Gaddis, in The Cold War: A New History, (2005) noted that Gorbachev promised that there would be no bloodshed with the 1989 revolution and welcomed the U.S. as a European power, something no Soviet leader had explicitly done before.
Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, (2007) suggested that both Reagan and Gorbachev desired to build a human relationship, to transcend the ideological divide without abandoning their individual principles. However, as Leffler argued, Gorbachev ended the Cold War, as his thinking shifted most fundamentally. Leffler stated that the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the acceptance of free-market ideas, democratic political reforms, and Gorbachev’s decision to retract Soviet power to prewar borders signaled the end of the Cold War.

Richard Nixon

2008-12-05T21:11:00.000-08:00

Richard Nixon (1969-1974)

Please refer to the class handouts for additional assistance.
According to Eric Foner, Richard Nixon capped a remarkable political comeback by winning the Republican nomination. He campaigned as the champion of the "silent majority," -ordinary Americans who believed that change had gone too far-and called for a renewed commitment to "law and order." Nixon won the presidency by a very narrow margin and moved toward the political center on many issues. Nixon was mostly interested in foreign policy, and he had no desire to battle Congress, still under Democratic control on domestic issues.
Just as Eisenhower had helped to institutionalize the New Deal, Nixon accepted and even expanded many elements of the Great Society. Conservatives applauded Nixon's "New Federalism", which offered federal "block grants" to the states to spend as they saw fit, rather than for specific purposes. Nixon created new agencies, such as the Environmental Protection agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board. However, Nixon abolished the Office of Economic Opportunity, which had coordinated Johnson's War on Poverty. Nixon did sign congressional measures that expanded the food stamp program and indexed Social Security benefits to inflation-meaning that they would rise automatically as the cost of living increased. The Endangered Species Act prohibited spending federal funds on any project that might extinguish an animal species.
Perhaps Nixon's most startling imitative was his proposal for a Family Assistance Plan that would replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children by having the federal government guarantee a minimum income for all Americans. Universally known as "welfare," AFDC provided assistance, often quite limited, to poor families who met all eligibility requirements.
The liberal policies of the Nixon administration reflected a number of forces, including the Democrats’ control of Congress and Nixon’s desire to preserve support from moderates from his party and achieve Republican ascendancy by attracting some traditional Democrats. Nixon also acted contrary to his rhetoric against a growing federal bureaucracy by expanding controls over the economy when economic crises and energy shortages induced him to increase the federal government’s power in the marketplace.
In the fall of 1973, the United States faced its first energy crisis when Arab nations, furious at the nation’s support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, cut off oil shipments to the United States. Nixon authorized temporary emergency measures allocating petroleum and establishing a national fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit to save gasoline. Soaring energy prices worsened already severe economic problems, including high rates of inflation and unemployment. The president’s response to these economic problems diverged from conventional Republican doctrine. His policies treated the economy only superficially, however, and by the mid- 1970s, the nation faced the most severe economic crisis since the depression of the 1930s. More successfully, Nixon expanded the government’s regulatory role with a host of environmental protection measures.

The Burger Court

Nixon’s 1968 campaign had exploited antipathy to black protest and new civil rights policies in order to woo white Southerners and northern workers away from the Democratic Party, yet his administration had to answer to the courts and Congress.
Nixon was reluctant to use federal power to compel integration, but the Supreme Court overruled efforts by the Justice Department to delay Court-ordered desegregation and compelled the administration to enforce the law.
The Nixon administration also began to implement affirmative action, requiring contractors and unions to employ more minority workers on federally funded construction projects and awarding more government contracts and loans to minority businesses.
While women as well as minority groups benefited from the implementation of affirmative action and the strengthened EEOC, several measures of the Nixon administration specifically attacked sex discrimination. President Nixon gave more public support for justice for Native Americans than for any other protest group.
When Earl Warren retired as chief justice in 1969, Nixon appointed Warren Burger, a federal court-of-appeals judge to succeed him. An outspoken critic of the "judicial activism" of the Warren Court, Burger was expected to lead the justices in a conservative direction.
In 1971, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which arose in North Caroline, the justices unanimously approved a lower court's plan that required extensive transportation of students to achieve school integration. The decision led to hundreds of cases in which judges throughout the country ordered the use of busing as a tool to achieve integration. The issue of busing was controversial, as white parents enrolled their children in private academies, as in the fight that took place in Boston during the 1970s, when the Irish-American community of South Boston demonstrated vociferously and sometimes violently against a busing plan decreed by a local judge.
In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriquez, a 5-4 Court majority ruled that the Constitution did not require equality of school funding. Mexican-American schools in Texas stood far below that of white school.

Chronology

1968 My Lai massacre/ Oil discovered in Alaska
1969 Warren Burger appointed Chief Justice
1970 United States invades Cambodia/ Ohio National Guard kills four students at Kent State
1971 United States goes off gold standard/Pentagon Papers published
1972 Nixon travels to the People's Republic of China/SALT is signed/Congress approved Title IX/Congress passes the Equal Rights Amendment for ratification/Equal Credit Opportunity Act
1973 War Powers Act/Paris Peace agreement ends war in Vietnam/OPEN embargo placed on oil to the United States/CIA-aided Chilean coup
1974 Nixon resigns in Watergate scandal
1975 Saigon falls to North Vietnamese communists

Foreign Policy
The administration of Richard Nixon, (1969-1974) announced a new “Doctrine,” which asked other nations to take more responsibility for fighting communism. Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor for Nixon, introduced the concept of détente, a French term meaning the easing of tensions. The Nixon Doctrine modified the Truman Doctrine, and led to a gradual withdrawal from Vietnam. However, as the Paris peace talks stalled in 1969, Nixon secretly ordered an escalation in the bombing of communist positions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Congress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1970. In May 1972, President Nixon visited Moscow, and the two leaders signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), marking the beginning of the "detente" era. According to Eric Foner, conservatives viewed Nixon's policy as dangerously "soft" on communism. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor and secretary of state, continued their predecessor's policy of attempting to undermine governments deemed dangerous to American strategic or economic interests. Attacks on Israel escalated with the creation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964, which murdered several Israeli athletes in 1972 Olympics and attacked Israel in October a year later. Beginning in 1972, Nixon ordered an escalation in the bombing of communist positions in Vietnam. In 1973, the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in Moscow, which stated that each country could only have two ABM deployment areas.

Robert S. Litwak, Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969-1976, (1984), argued that Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger developed a strategy for withdrawing from war in Vietnam honorably without damaging the United States credibility. Litwak noted that agreements reached with the Soviet Union were essential to this strategy, and until Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the strategy of détente worked.
Richard C. Thornton, The Nixon-Kissinger Years: Reshaping America’s Foreign Policy, (1989) argued that Kissinger shaped Nixon’s foreign policy as he controlled the withdrawal from Vietnam. Thornton stated that Kissinger took advantage of Watergate and gained complete control of foreign policy as Nixon focuses were elsewhere.
Norman Friedman, The Fifty Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War. (2000) argued that the 1972 SALT agreements between the U.S. and the Soviets symbolized a new stage for Soviet-American relations. Friedman stated that Brezhnev preferred détente and found SALT extremely valuable, as the U.S. had to acknowledge the Soviet Union as equal.
Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, (2007) argued that détente was the natural outgrowth of containment, the development of Soviet nuclear parity with the West and the Chinese challenge to Russia national security. Dallek noted that détente opened Russia to Western influence and eroded communism’s hold on parts of the global community. Dallek stated that the Kissinger’s diplomacy in 1973-74 in addressing Israeli tensions with Egypt and Syria laid the foundation for the Camp David Accords in 1978. Dallek suggested that while détente did not end the Cold War, it did set in motion a process that came to fruition under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s.

Nixon and Vietnam

According to Eric Foner, when Nixon ran for president in 1968, he declared that he had a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. On taking office, he announced a new policy, "Vietnamization." Under this plan, American troops would gradually be withdrawn while South Vietnamese soliders, backed by continued American bombing did more and more of the fighting. But Vietnamization neither limited the war nor ended the anti-war movement. Hoping to cut North Vietnamese supply lines, Nixon in 1970 ordered American troops into neutral Cambodia. The invasion did not achieve its military goals, but it destabilized the Cambodian government and set in motion a chain of events that eventually brought to power the Khmer Rouge. Before being ousted by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, this local communist movement attempted to force virtually all Cambodians into rural communes and committed widespread massacres in that unfortunate country.
As the war escalated, protests again spread on college campuses. In the wake of the killing of four antiwar protesters at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard and two by police at Jackson State University in Mississippi, the student movement reached its high-mark. In the spring of 1970, more than 350 colleges and universities experienced strikes, and troops occupied 21 campuses. The protests at Kent State, a public university with a largely working-class student body, and Jackson State, a Black institution, demonstrated how antiwar sentiment had spread far beyond elite campuses like Berkeley and Columbia.
At the same time, troop moral in Vietnam decreased. The army predominantly composed of working class whites and persons of color. Eric Foner noted that unlike in previous war, Blacks complained not about exclusion from the army but about the high number of Black soldiers among the casualties. In 1965 and 1966 Blacks accounted for over 20 percent of American casualties, double their proportion in the army as a whole. After protests from Black leaders, President Johnson ordered the number of Black soldiers in combat units reduced. For the war as a while, Blacks made up 14 percent of deaths among enlisted men.
Public support for the war was rapidly waning. In 1969, the "New York Times" published details of the My Lai massacre of 1968, in which a company of American troops had killed some 350 South Vietnamese civilians. After the military investigation, one solider, Lt. William Calley, was found guilty of directing the atrocity. However, Nixon released him from prison in 1974. In 1971, the "Times" began publishing the "Pentagon Papers", a classified report prepared by the Department of Defense that traced American involvement in Vietnam back to WWII and revealed how successive presidents had misled the American people about it. In a landmark freedom-of-the-press decision, the Supreme Court rejected Nixon's request for an injunction to halt publication. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which was the most vigorous assertion of congressional control over foreign policy in the nation's history, as this act required the president to seek congressional approval for the commitment of American troops overseas.

John F. Kennedy & LBJ

2008-12-03T15:18:00.000-08:00

The Black Freedom Movement

In 1960, Ella Baker called a meeting of 200 African American college students in Raleigh, North Carolina. Out of this meeting emerged the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. (SNCC) Desired to replace the culture of segregation with a "beloved community," of racial justice and to empower lack Americans to take control of the decisions that affected their lives.
Blacks in Biloxi and Gulfport, MS engaged in "wade ins" demanded access to segregated public beaches.
In February 1960, four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, NC entered the local Woolworth's department store and sat down at the lunch counter. Whites refused to serve the four students, who suffered insults, threats of violence, assault with condiments, silverware etc. Five months later, however, Woolworth's in July agreed to serve black customers at the counter.
In 1961 SNCC launched a campaign of nonviolent protests against discrimination in Albany, Georgia. SNCC initially embraced civil disobedience and the nonviolence principles of Martin Luther King Jr. The activists’ optimism and commitment to nonviolence soon confronted severe testing.
In May 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality organized Freedom Rides to integrate interstate transportation in the South. Encouraged by Kennedy administration officials who viewed voter registration as less controversial than civil disobedience and more likely to benefit the Democratic Party, SNCC and other groups began a Voter Education Project in the summer of 1961.
The high point of protest came in the spring of 1963, when demonstrations took place in towns and cities across the South, dramatizing black discontent over inequality in education, employment and housing.
In May 1963, King, Jr. decided to send Black schoolchildren into the streets of Birmingham. Police chief Eugene "Bull" Connor unleashed his forces against the thousands of young marchers. The images, broadcast on television of children being assaulted with nightsticks, high-pressure fire hoses, and attack dogs produced a wave of revulsion throughout the world and turned Birmingham into a triumph for the civil rights movement. Television revealed to the world the brutality of southern resistance to racial equality in 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. launched a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, to integrate public facilities and open jobs to African Americans.
In June 1963, NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers was shot and killed.
On September 15, 1963, four little girls were killed when a bomb exploded in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
The largest demonstration drew 250,000 blacks and whites to the nation’s capital in August 1963, where King put his indelible stamp on the day, delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech. The euphoria of the March on Washington quickly faded as activists returned to continued violence in the South.

John F. Kennedy 1961-1963

The presidential campaign of 1960 turned out to be one of the closest in American history. Republicans chose Vice President Richard Nixon as their candidate to succeed Eisenhower. Democrats nominated John F. Kennedy, a senator from Massachusetts and a Roman Catholic, whose father, a millionaire Irish-American business, had served as ambassador to Great Britain during the 1930s. LBJ accepted Kennedy's offer to run for vice-president. In the first televised debate between presidential candidates, Kennedy boasted Nixon, who was suffering from a cold and appeared tired and nervous. According to Eric Foner, Kennedy had few tangible accomplishments with his domestic program, the "New Frontier." From the onset of his presidency, Kennedy regarded civil rights as a distraction from his main concern-vigorous conduct of the Cold War.
Cold War foreign affairs during the administration of John F. Kennedy (1961-1963), centered on problems in Africa, Latin America and Asia, as Kennedy moved away from brinksmanship policy and toward a flexible response policy. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk were concerned with the Soviet Union as the U-2 incident in 1960 cooled efforts towards better relations. Kennedy requested an increase in nuclear weapons and asked Congress to increase funding to N.A.S.A. to develop long-range missiles. In 1961, the Berlin Wall was created by East Germans in an effort to keep out Berlin residents, and supported by Khrushchev. In keeping with the Truman Doctrine, Kennedy offered economic assistance to “Third World,” countries to challenge growing communist guerrilla movements and established a massive aid program, “Alliance for Progress,” in Latin America. Covert operations flourished during Kennedy’s administration, and failed missions, such as the Bay of Pigs, led to Cuban Missile Crisis. Leonid Brezhnev became the new Soviet leader in 1962 and reversed Khrushchev’s polices of rehabilitation for Stalin’s victims, and moved to a more conservative and regressive approach to the Cold War. Kennedy's perception of the civil rights movement was changed in 1963 as the world watched in horror as police men attacked young black schoolchildren who were protesting in Birmingham. Until this time, as Foner noted, Kennedy had been reluctant to take a forceful stand on Black demands.
According to Eric Foner, Kennedy created an new policy towards Latin America, the "Alliance for Progress," a kind of Marshall Plan for the Western Hemisphere, and aimed to promote both political and material freedom. The Alliance for Progress failed, as military regimes and local elites controlled Alliance for Progress aid. Like his predecessors, Kennedy viewed the entire world through the lens of the Cold War and this outlook shaped his dealings with Fidel Castro, who led a revolution in 1959 that ousted Fulgencio Batista. Until Castro took power, Cuba was an economic dependency of the United States. In 1961, Kennedy allowed the CIA to launch its invasion, at a site know as the Bay of Pigs. Military advisers predicted a popular uprising that would topple the Castro government. However, the Bay of Pigs invasion failed as over 100 invaders were killed and 1,100 captured. Cuba became more closely tied to the Soviet Union.
Eric Foner noted that the most dangerous crisis of the Kennedy administration and in many ways of the entire Cold War, came in October 1962, when American spy planes discovered that the Soviet Union was installing missiles and captured images of silos in Cuba. Kennedy imposed a quarantine of the island and demanded the missiles removal. After tense behind-the scenes negotiations, Soviet primer Nikita Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles. In addition, Kennedy pledge that the U.S. would not invade Cuba and secretly agreed to remove American Jupiter missiles from Turkey, from which they could reach the Soviet Union.
Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Affairs: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam, (2002), argued that Kennedy respected the Soviet Union as a competitor for international influence, kept his options open and believed that negotiations could occur with Russia. Freedman stressed that Kennedy failed to understand the dynamics of decolonization and changes in governments in Africa and Latin America, where the Cold War was less relevant to the indigenous populations struggling against colonial rule.
Michael G. Schatzberg, Mobutu or Change? The United States and Zaire, 1960-1990, (1991) argued that Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s gravitation towards the Soviet Union, following independence from Belgium in June 1960 eventually led to a CIA endorsed coup d’etat by Colonel Joseph Mobutu. Schatzberg suggested the U.S. government was present at the creation of Zaire and guided the country’s political life. Schatzberg noted that Kennedy’s relationship with the “friendly tyrant,” was problematic to U.S. foreign policy as it placed foreign policy priorities in conflict. Schatzberg asserted that Mobutu successfully played on U.S. fears of Soviet activity in the region.
Bernard A. Weisberger, in Cold War, Cold Peace, (1985) argued that conflicting pressures of good intentions and immediate necessities shaped Kennedy’s foreign policy. Weisberger stated that as long as negotiations prevented war between the two superpowers, the Kennedy administration believed the Berlin Wall changed nothing and left the issue of a divided Germany alone.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. argued in his introduction to Robert Kennedy’s Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, (1999) that the Presidents purpose during the Cuban Missile Crisis was to stop the delivery of further missiles through the naval “quarantine,” of Cuba and remove present missiles on the island through diplomacy. Kennedy resisted a sneak air attack and saw a trade of American missiles in Turkey for Soviet missiles in Cuba as a possible way out.
Stephen G. Rabe, in The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America, (1999) argued that the Kennedy administration held an inordinate fear of communism, a result of the challenge to U.S. hegemony by the Cuban revolution. Rabe asserted that Kennedy’s ‘Alliance’, intended to counter the emerging communist threat by Cuba in the region. Rabe noted that Kennedy grudgingly accepted the anticommunism stance and eased sanctions against the repressive ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier regime (1957-1971), in Haiti.
Rabe, in U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story, (2005) argued that in the name of anticommunism, the Kennedy administration took extraordinary measures to deny the people of British Guiana the rights to national self-determination. Rabe asserted that Kennedy’s ‘Alliance,’ appeared as a U.S. effort to economic assistance to Peoples Progressive Party leader Cheddi Jagan but planned to develop a covert program to address communists. Merging in 1955, the labor union, the AFL-CIO went from supporting U.S. foreign policy to implementing it and creating unrest. The covert U.S. intervention ignited racial warfare between blacks and Indians, leading to the replacement of Jagan in 1964 with Forbes Burnham, (Afro-Guyanese) whose 21-year dictatorship persecuted the Indian population.
Kennedy: New Frontier: Domestic Policy
At his inauguration, the 43-year-old Kennedy declared that a “new generation, ”was assuming leadership, and he called on Americans to cast off complacency and self indulgence and serve the common good. Though Kennedy’s idealism inspired many, he failed to redeem campaign promises to expand the welfare state. Kennedy did win support for a $2 billion slum clearance and urban renewal program— the Area Redevelopment Act of 1961, offering incentives to businesses to locate in depressed areas— and for the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962, which provided training for the unemployed. Kennedy had promised to “get this country moving again,” making economic growth a key objective. Key economic advisers argued that infusing money into the economy by reducing taxes would increase demand, boost production, and decrease unemployment. Congress passed Kennedy’s tax cut bill in 1964, ushering in the greatest economic boom since World War II. Poverty had caught Kennedy’s attention in 1960 when he campaigned in Appalachia for the votes of the rural poor.
Kennedy and the World Kennedy's agenda envisioned new initiatives aimed at countering communist influence in the world. One of his administration's first acts was to establish the Peace Corp, which sent young men and women abroad to aid in the economic and educational progress of developing countries and to improve the image of the United States.
Assassination of a President
1. The murder of the president touched Americans as had no other event since the end of World War II.
2. Stunned Americans struggled with what had happened, and why.
3. To get to the truth, President Johnson appointed a commission headed by Chief
Justice Earl Warren, which concluded in September 1964 that both Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated Kennedy, and that Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald two days later, also acted alone. However, historians have suggested that there were more individuals involved in the assassination of JFK.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-68)

Following the assassination of JFK in 1963, vice-president Johnson assumed the leadership role of president. In 1064, Johnson campaigned for reelection and his opponent was conservative Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona. Goldwater desired a more aggressive approach to the Cold War and critiqued the New Deal welfare state, which he believed stifled individual initiative and independence. He called for the substitution of private charity for public welfare programs and voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson received almost 43 million votes to Goldwater's 27 million. Goldwater represented the conservative strand of the sixties that existed within the midst of tumult and rebellion. Conservatives, such as Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, one of the most prominent segregationists discussed the evils of welfare with racial overtones.
Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency with a wealth of political experience. Johnson’s coarse wit, extreme vanity, and Texas accent repulsed those who preferred the sophisticated Kennedy style. Johnson excelled behind the scenes, where he could entice or threaten legislators into support of his objectives. Johnson’s goal was to fulfill Kennedy’s vision for America, and he secured the passage of Kennedy’s proposed tax cut and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Fast on the heels of the Civil Rights Act came a response to Johnson’s call for “an unconditional war on poverty.” The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 authorized ten programs under a newly created Office of Economic Opportunity, allocating $800 million for the first year. The most novel and controversial part of the law, the Community Action Program, required “maximum feasible participation” of the poor themselves in antipoverty programs, thus challenging the system itself.
The administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-69) faced divisive foreign affair issues that affected the goals of his “Great Society”. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara outlined the terms of “mutual assured destruction,” which assumed that both sides had enough nuclear weaponry to destroy the other. In addition, McNamara’s notion of ‘graduated pressure’ addressed the issue of Viet Cong mobility and the need for increased U.S. ground troops in Vietnam. In Latin America, Johnson isolated Cuba, and sent U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic in 1954 to quell communist takeover and ensure election defeat of Juan Bosch. In the Middle East, the U.S. and Russia used the ‘hot line,” during the 1967 Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel. However, Vietnam became Johnson’s greatest foreign policy problem by far, as the CIA sponsored assassination of Diem in 1963 ushered in a set of new problems for the president. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964 permitted Johnson to subsequently “Americanize”, the Vietnam War. One year later, Johnson initiated ‘Operation Rolling Thunder,’ the three-year massive bombing effort, following an attack on a U.S. based in central South Vietnam, with Vietnamese casualties reaching nearly 60,000 a year. The 1968 Tet Offensive altered the U.S. course in Vietnam, as U.S. casualties convinced the Johnson administration to attempt diplomacy in Paris with North Vietnam.
George C. Herring, in LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (1994), argued that the Johnson administration was wrong and divided over the Vietnam War. Herring stressed that the doctrine of limited war hindered any change of direction in the war in 1968. Herring noted that Johnson’s limited war doctrine failed to employ a sound military strategy or maintain a pro-war consensus.
Michael H. Hunt, in Lyndon Johnson’s War: Americas Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968, (1996) argued that the roots of the Vietnam conflict began with U.S. paternalism towards Asian countries that emerged from FDR’s trusteeship concept during WWII and culminated in massive intervention in the sixties. Hunt noted that a serious misreading of Vietnamese history and culture by the administration led to Johnson’s misfortune.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, in Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, (1991) noted that Johnson failed to understand cultures, and tended to see foreign leaders as remote figures. Goodwin argued that although Johnson learned the accepted concepts of containment, he thought in terms of personalities, power and good works.
H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, (1998) argued that Johnson, McNamara, and the “silent accomplices,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff succeeded in creating the illusion that the decisions to increase American involvement in Vietnam were alternatives to war rather than war itself. McMaster noted that McNamara’s testimony before Congress in 1964 failed to alert Congress to covert maritime operations, including destroyer patrols along the North Vietnamese Coast. McMaster indicated that the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 "probably did not occur" as historians have debated whether U.S. patrol boats were fired upon by the North Vietnamese. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was designed to allow President Johnson to assume unchecked power in Vietnam.
Lyndon Johnson's War: According to Eric Foner, Johnson came to the presidency with little experience in foreign policy. Johnson had initial misgivings about sending American troops to Vietnam. However this changed with the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. In August 1964, North Vietnamese vessels encountered an American ship on a spy mission off the coast. Claiming that the North Vietnamese had fired on the American vessel, Johnson proclaimed that the U.S. was a victim of aggression. In response, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, authorizing the president to "take all necessary measures to repel armed attack in Vietnam." Only two senators, Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon, voted against Johnson this blank check. The resolution passed without any discussion of American goals and strategy in Vietnam. In December 2006, the National Security Agency finally released hundreds of pages of secret documents that made it clear that no North Vietnamese attack had actually taken place. During the 1964 election, Johnson insisted that he had no intention of sending American troops, but changed his mind rather quickly. The National Security Council recommended that the United States begin air strikes against North Vietnam and introduce American ground troops in the south. When the Viet Cong in February 1965 attacked an American air base in South Vietnam, Johnson put the plan, Operation Rolling Thunder" into effect. At the same time, Jonhson intervened in the Dominican Republic. Here, military leaders in 1963 had overthrown the left-wing but non-communist Juan Boche, the country's first elected president since 1924. In April 1965, another group of military men attempted to restore Bosch to power but were defeated by the ruling junta. Fearing the unrest would lead to another "Cuba situation," Johnson dispatched 22,000 American troops. The intervention outraged many Latin Americans. By 1968, the number of American troops in Vietnam exceeded half a million and the conduct of war had become more and more brutal. American planes dropped tons of bombs on the small countries of North and South Vietnam, more than both sides used in all of WWII. They spread chemicals that destroyed forests to deprive the Viet Cong of hiding places and dropped bombs filled with napalm, a gelatinous form of gasoline that burns the skin. The army pursued Viet Cong and North Vietnam forces in "search and destroy" missions that often did not distinguish between combatants and civilians. As casualities mounted, the Cold War foreign policy consensus began to unravel, as the war had sidetracked much of the Great Society and had torn families, universities and the Democratic party apart. Opposition to the war became the organizing theme that united people of all kinds of doubts and discontents. In 1967, young men were burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada. In October of that year, 100,000 anti-war protestors assembled at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. and many marched across the Potomac River to the Pentagon, where protestors placed flowers in the rifle barrels of soldiers gaurading the nerve center of the American military.
The "Great Society" Agenda Having steered the nation through the assassination trauma and established his capacity for national leadership, Johnson rejected stability and security in the midst of a booming economy. Johnson wanted to usher in the “Great Society,” and in the sheer amount and breadth of new laws, he succeeded mightily. The Great Society provided health services to the poor and elderly in the new Medicaid and Medicare programs; federally funded education and urban development; created the Departments of Transportation, Housing and Urban Development; new agencies such as the Equal Opportunity Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts, and the national public broadcasting network.
The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was just the opening shot in the war on poverty.
Targeting depressed regions that the general economic boom had bypassed, Johnson’s measures sought to help the poor indirectly by stimulating economic growth and providing jobs through road building and other public works programs. A second approach endeavored to equip the poor with the skills necessary to find jobs. Other antipoverty efforts provided direct aid. For example, a new food stamp program, which largely replaced surplus food distribution, gave poor people greater choices in obtaining food. The federal government’s responsibility for health care increased. The assumption of national responsibility for social justice also underlay key civil rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Great Society benefits reached well beyond the poverty-stricken and victims of discrimination. The flood of reform legislation dwindled to a trickle after 1966, when midterm elections trimmed the Democrats’ majorities in Congress and a backlash against government programs arose. Against these odds, in 1968 Johnson pried out of Congress a civil rights law that banned discrimination in housing and jury service.
Assessing the War on Poverty
Measured by statistics, the reduction in poverty in the 1960s was considerable. In 1962, Michael Harrington published The Other America, which revealed that 40-50 million Americans lived in poverty, often in isolated rural areas or suburan slums "invisible" to the middle class. Large numbers of the aged and members of male-headed families rose out of poverty, while the plight of female headed families actually worsened. Conservatives charged that Great Society programs discouraged initiative by giving the poor “handouts.” Most of the funds for economically depressed areas built highways and helped the construction industry. Some critics argued that ending poverty would require a redistribution of income — raising taxes and using those funds to create jobs, overhaul social welfare systems, and rebuild slums.
The Judicial Revolution
A key element of liberalism’s ascendancy during the Kennedy and Johnson years emerged in the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, who presided from 1953 to 1969. Expanding the Constitution’s promise of equality and individual rights, the Court’s decisions supported an activist government to prevent injustice and discrimination and provided new protections to disadvantaged groups and accused criminals. Chief Justice Warren considered Baker v. Carr (1963), which established the principle of “one person, one vote,” his most important decision. The egalitarian thrust of the Warren Court also touched the criminal justice system, as it overturned a series of convictions on the grounds that the accused had been deprived of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law,” a denial of Fourteenth Amendment rights. As Supreme Court decisions overturned judicial precedents and often moved ahead of public opinion, critics accused the justices of obstructing law enforcement and letting criminals go free. The Warren Court also fortified protections for people suspected of being Communists or subversives, setting limits, for example, on the government officials who investigated and prosecuted them. The Court’s decisions on prayer and Bible reading in public schools provoked even greater outrage. Two or three justices who believed that the Court was overstepping its authority often issued sharp dissents, but the Court’s major decisions withstood Warren’s retirement in 1969 and the test of time.
The Black Freedom Struggle During the administration of LBJ
In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project mobilized more than a thousand northern black and white college students to conduct voter education classes and a voter registration drive in Mississippi.
In March 1965, Alabama troopers used such fierce force to turn back a march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery that the incident earned the name “Bloody Sunday” and forced President Johnson to call up the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers.
The Response in Washington: Both the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations acted more in response to the black freedom struggle than on their own initiatives, moving only when events gave them little choice. In June 1963, Kennedy finally made good on his promise to seek strong antidiscrimination legislation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 guaranteed access for all Americans to public accommodations, public education, employment, and voting, thus sounding the death knell of the South’s system of segregation and discrimination. In August 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which empowered the federal government to intervene directly to enable African Americans to register and vote. Two more measures completed Johnson’s
civil rights record. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned racial discrimination in housing and jury selection and authorized federal intervention when states failed to protect civil rights workers from violence. In September 1965, Johnson used his presidential authority to issue Executive Order 11246, banning discrimination by employers holding government contracts and obligating them to take affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity.

The Changing Black Movement
By 1966, civil rights activism had undergone drastic changes. Black protest extended from the South to the entire nation, demanded not just legal equality but also economic justice, and no longer held nonviolence as its basic principle. In part, the new emphases resulted from earlier success, as legal oppression receded only to reveal other injustices more subtle but no less pervasive.
Integration and legal equality did little to improve the material conditions of blacks, and black rage at oppressive conditions erupted in waves of riots from 1964 to 1968. In the North, a powerful new challenge to the ethos of nonviolence arose.

Malcolm X, emphasized racial pride, black autonomy and enterprise, and separation from the dominant white culture and institutions, attracted a large following, especially from the urban ghettos. Malcolm X: Shift in ideology during last year of life to Pan-African and Black Nationalist vision; (pride, economic, political, social & cultural independence from whites.) Historiography: starting with Alex Haley: place Malcolm in conciliatory history of CRM: does not discuss Pan-Africansim, OAH, Black Nationalism,; Mecca more important than last year of life
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (1984) Last year of Malcolm's life: breadth to his vision; understood the necessity to change. 400 years of survival as an endangered species; black survival skills is ability to change. Was no such thing as a single issue struggle, b/c we don’t live single issue lives. Malcolm knew this…Revolution is not a one time event. It is becoming always vigilant, for the smallest opportunity to make genuine change. Malcolm stated: We are not responsible for our oppression, but we our responsible for our liberation.
George Breitman, Malcolm Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, (2nd edition, 1990) Speeches reflect a shift to a broader scope, from civil rights to humanitarian rights.
o 1959 & 1964 Trips to Africa were not only about Islam and peace with the white man.
o Development of a Pan-African ideology that understood the importance of connection with Africans in Diaspora.
o April 11, 1964, Accra. “You cannot understand what is going on in MS if you don’t understand what is going on in the Congo, and you cannot really be interested in MS if you are not also interested in what’s going on in the Congo. There both the same.
o Malcolm: civil rights keeps you under his restrictions and means that you are asking Uncle Sam to treat you right. However, human rights are something that you were born with…they are you’re God given rights”
The Black Revolution, April 8, 1964,
§ Revolution, loss of land and will be bloody; never compromising and never based upon negotiations.
§ Identified with decolonization movements in Latin America and Africa.
§ Addressed divide & rule concept: in global community, white man is minority.
§ Objected to Moise Tshombe and Colonel Mobutu in Congo
Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution, (1981)
o OAAU was appropriate, practical revolutionary response to economic conditions of time.
o Stressed the importance of moving away from the American Negro identity.
o Stress common enemy, white racism, white supremacy.
o Stressed need for new allies.
Robert E. Terrill, Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment, (2004)
o April 3 1964 The Ballot or the Bullet, asked audience to adopt a critical perspective in an effort to make possible a critical engagement with the world.
o Laid ideological foundation for OAUU; Black Nationalism; black man should be economic & political control of community; re-evaluate the community with new eyes.
· William W. Sales, Jr. From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, (1994)
o First stage in the evolution of X thought, trips to Africa 1959 and 1964; pushed forward the development of his thinking;
o role of Africa was both political & cultural.
o Organization represented the changing views by Malcolm of Africa and the liberation movement.
o Organization for Afro-American Unity: killed during a meeting; modeled after OAU
o U.S. violation of humanitarian rights during slavery.
Black Power: 1966 James Meredith March Against Fear, shot in leg, Greenwood Ms, Stokeley Carmichael, rally after detention in MS jail, uttered “Black Power” SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael gave those principles a new name, “black power,” which quickly became the rallying cry in SNCC and CORE. Carmichael rejected integration and assimilation because both implied the superiority of white institutions and values. To black power advocates, nonviolence only brought more beatings and killings.
After police killed an unarmed black teenager in San Francisco in 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale organized the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and armed its members for self-defense against police brutality.
On April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York, King, Jr. questioned U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King Jr. agreed with black power advocates on the need for “a radical reconstruction of society.” Although black power organizations made headlines, they failed to capture the massive support that African Americans gave King and other earlier leaders.
A Multitude of Movements
Native American Protest
Protest was not new to the group of Americans with the oldest grievances, but Native American activism took on fresh militancy and goals in the 1960s. According to Eric Foner, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations attempted to dismantle the reservation system and intergrate Native Americans into the American mainstream, a policy knows as "termination," since it meant ending recognition of the remaining elements of Indian sovereignty. Many leaders protested vigorously against this policy and it was abandoned by President Kennedy. President Johnson's War on Poverty increased federal funds to reservations. In 1961, a new, more militant generation of Native Americans expressed growing discontent with the government and with the older Indian leadership by forming the National Indian Youth Council. Native Americans demonstrated and occupied land and public buildings, claiming rights to natural resources and territory that they had owned collectively before European settlement. In Minneapolis in 1968, two Chippewa, Dennis Banks and George Mitchell, founded the American Indian Movement to attack problems in cities, where about 300,000 Indians lived. AIM sought to protect Indians from police harassment, secure antipoverty funds, and establish “survival schools” to teach Indian history and values. AIM leaders helped to organize the “Trail of Broken Treaties” caravan to the nation’s capital, where some of the activists took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A much longer siege occurred on the Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota, where conflicts between AIM militants and older tribal leaders led AIM to take over the village of Wounded Knee. Although these occupations failed to achieve their specific goals, the wave of Indian protest produced the end of relocation and termination policies; greater tribal sovereignty and control over community services; enhanced health, education, and other services; and protection of Indian religious practices.
Latino Struggles for Justice
The fastest-growing minority group in the 1960s was Latinos, or Hispanic Americans, an extraordinarily varied population encompassing people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and other Latin American origins. Throughout the twentieth century, Mexican Americans had organized to push for political power and economic rights. In the 1960s, however, young Mexican Americans, like African Americans and Native Americans, increasingly rejected traditional polices in favor of direct action. Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta organized a movement to improve the wretched conditions of migrant agricultural workers. In 1962, they founded the United Farm Workers. UFW marchers and strikes gained widespread support, and a national boycott of California grapes helped the union win a wage increase for the workers in 1970. Chicanos mobilized elsewhere to end discrimination in employment and education, gain political power, and combat police brutality. In 1965, the Young Lords Organzation, modeled on the Black Panthers, staged street demonstrations in New York to protest the high employment rate among the city's Puerto Ricans and the lack of city services in Latino neigborhoods.
With blacks and Native Americans, Chicanos continued to be overrepresented among the poor but gradually won more political offices, more effective enforcement of antidiscrimination legislation, and greater respect for their culture.
Student Rebellion, the New Left, and the Counterculture
Although materially and legally more secure than their African American, Indian, and Latino counterparts, white youth joined them in expressing dissent, supporting the black freedom struggle and launching student protests, the antiwar movement, and the new feminist movement. The central organization of the white student protest was Students for a Democratic Society, formed in 1960 by a remnant of an older socialist-oriented student organization. A free speech movement, the first largescale white student protest, arose at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, when university officials banned student organizations from setting up tables to recruit support for various causes. Hundreds of student rebellions followed on campuses across the country. Opposition to the Vietnam War activated the largest number of students; they held rallies and took over buildings to protest universities’ links to the war. Growing up alongside and often overlapping the New Left and student movements was a rebellion known as the counterculture, which drew on the ideas of the Beats of the 1950s. Cultural radicals rejected many mainstream values, such as the work ethic, materialism, rationality, order, and sexual control. Rock and folk music defined both the
counterculture and the political left. Music during the 1960s often carried insurgent political and social messages. The hippies faded away in the 1970s, but many elements of the counterculture — from rock music to jeans and long hair— filtered into the mainstream.
The New Wave of Feminism
A Movement Emerges: After women won the right to vote in 1920, feminism receded from national attention, but small groups of women continued to work for women’s rights and opportunities in such areas as employment, jury service, and electoral politics. Policy initiatives in the early 1960s reflected larger transformations and the specific efforts of small bands of women’s rights activists in the 1940s and 1950s, and they sparked new activism.
The President’s Commission on the Status of Women, appointed by Kennedy in 1961, highlighted a practice that women’s organizations and labor unions had sought to eliminate for two decades: the age-old custom of paying women less than men for the same work. Just as it inspired other protests, the black freedom struggle also gave an immense boost to the rise of a new women’s movement, by creating a moral climate sensitive to injustice and providing precedents and strategies that feminists followed.
In 1966, Betty Friedan and others founded the National Organization for Women, which focused on achieving equal treatment for women in the public sphere. Simultaneously, a more radical feminism grew among women in the black freedom struggle and the New Left. In 1964, two white women in SNCC, Mary King and Casey Hayden, recognized the contradiction between the ideal of equality and women’s actual status in the movement, and in 1965, they began circulating their ideas to other New Left women. Women’s liberation demonstrations began to gain public attention, especially when dozens of women picketed the Miss America beauty pageant in 1968, protesting against being forced “to compete for male approval [and] enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards.”
Radical feminists, who called their movement “women’s liberation,” differed from those in NOW and other more mainstream groups in several ways, particularly in the early years of feminism’s resurgence. Groups like NOW wanted to integrate women into existing institutions, while radical groups insisted that women would never achieve justice until economic, political, and social institutions were totally transformed. Complicated relationships between black women and feminists arose from their interlocking racial and gender identities.
Although NOW elected a black president in 1970, white middle-class women predominated in the new feminism’s national leadership and much of its constituency. Common threads underlay the great diversity of feminist organizations, issues, and activities. Although more an effect than a cause of women’s rising employment, feminism lifted female aspirations and helped lower barriers to jobs and offices monopolized by men.
Feminist activism produced the most sweeping changes in laws and policies affecting women since they had won the right to vote in 1920. At the state and local levels, radical feminists won passage of laws forcing police departments and the legal system to treat rape victims more justly and humanely. Feminists also pressured state legislatures to end restrictions on abortion.
A Countermovement Arises
Public opinion polls registered majority support for most feminist goals, yet by the mid-1970s, feminism faced a strong countermovement focused on preventing ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist in the Republican Party, mobilized a highly effective host of women at the grassroots level who believed that traditional gender roles were God-given and feared that feminism would devalue their own roles as wives and mothers. Opposition to the right to abortion was even more intense. Feminists faced a host of other challenges.

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961)

2008-11-23T10:48:00.001-08:00

Historiography: Eisenhower & the Cold War

Shortly after Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961) became president, Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin died in March followed by the end of the Korean War. These factors gave the American public the perception that a more friendly relationship would emerge between the two superpowers. However, the Cold War rhetoric never really disappeared as people and incidents on both sides kept the Cold War alive. A new arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was beginning. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles was hostile in his approach to the Soviet Union as his policy of brinksmanship and massive retaliation would curtail Soviet aggression and maintain peace. Eisenhower prescribed to the domino theory, believing that if one country fell to communism, then others around it would fall like domino's. The new leader of the Soviet Union, hard line communist Nikita Khrushchev, disturbed the U.S., as he increased Soviet nuclear energy and escalated the arms race. In 1953, the NSC (144/1) warned of a shift towards radical and nationalist regimes and contained a number of elements to protect American security and economic interests in Latin America. Following the Geneva accords of July 1954, which sanctioned the partition of Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration devoted its energies in the creation of a viable, self-sustaining state in South Vietnam. Several developments in Europe, such as the Soviet invasion of Hungry in 1956 and the Soviet demand for the U.S. to leave Berlin two years later, contributed to the Cold war tensions. Eisenhower and Khrushchev inherited problems in the Middle East, such as Suez Canal Crisis in 1956, which led to the formation of the Eisenhower Doctrine, and stated that the U.S. would send forces to the Middle East to maintain peace and check Soviet influence. In Latin America, the U.S. supported pro-American and anti-communist governments in Guatemala (Arbenz Guzman) and supported Cuban president Fulgencio Batista.

Chester J. Pach, Jr. and Elmo Richardson, in The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, (1991) argued that Dulles believed that a strong nuclear force and “massive retaliation,” would maintain peace and keep military costs down. Pach and Richardson stressed that Eisenhower decided to place more emphasis on covert operations: Iran (1952), Guatemala (1954), the 1957 delay and denial of economic and humanitarian supplies to Egypt, and a 1960 CIA plan to organize a coup against Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

David L. Anderson, in Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953-1961, (1991) argued that the Eisenhower based his Vietnam policy on trivial assumptions concerning the government of Saigon, its future prospects and the importance of its survival to U.S. global strategic interests. Anderson noted that the Eisenhower administration foolishly touted the Ngo Diem regime as the miracle of Southeast Asia, which trapped successors into a commitment to the survival of its own counterfeit creation.

Michael W. Weis in Cold Warriors and Coups D’Etat: Brazilian-Americana relations, 1945-1964, (1993) argued that Eisenhower’s administration desired to reshape the basis of their economic relationship with Brazil following the Korean War, by terminating the Joint Commission and emphasized American leadership, economic development financed by foreign private investors and the Brazilian support of liberal capitalism.

Saki Dockrill in Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy, 1953-1961, (1996) argued that Eisenhower’s Cold War approach went beyond questions of nuclear and conventional defense posture. Dockrill stated that Eisenhower’s national security strategy was a balance between economy and defense spending, which led to a heavier reliance on nuclear weapons, dependence on allies and a more use of covert and psychological instruments of influence.

The Cold War and the Color Line

A ‘color line’, identified by W.E.B. Dubois in 1903, with his publication of the Souls of Black Folk, shaped U.S. foreign policy in Africa during the Cold War. "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. " (Souls of Black Folk, Chapter II: Of the Dawn of Freedom, 1903)

Henry F. Jackson, in From the Congo to Soweto: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Africa Since 1960, (1982) argued that the injection of Cold War diplomacy into the making of African foreign policy emerged during the waning months of the Eisenhower administration. Formulated by Dulles, Cold War diplomacy in Africa was a series of manipulative maneuvers by policy makers, grounded in ethnocentrism that demanded African allegiance as a condition of U.S. assistance.

Thomas Borstelmann, in The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena, (2002), argued that the foreign policy and race relations in the U.S. paralleled one another, as the changing race relations affected the way America fought the Cold War. Borstelmann noted that the racist beliefs and prejudices of American foreign policy makers, including Dean Acheson and Dwight Eisenhower, influenced U.S. policy in Africa. Borstelmann stressed that U.S. Cold War security concerns with Soviet influence were more important to American policymakers than human rights.

Liberation Rhetoric and the Practice of Containment: In order to meet his goals of balancing the federal budget and cutting taxes, Eisenhower was determined to control military expenditures. Eisenhower's defense strategy concentrated U.S. military strength in nuclear weapons along with the lanes and missiles needed to deliver them. In addition, the U.S. instead of spending huge amounts for large ground forces on its own, gave friendly nations American weapons. Nuclear weapons could not stop a Soviet nuclear attack, but in response to one, the U.S. could inflict enormous destruction on the USSR; this nuclear standoff became known as mutual assured destruction, or MAD. Nuclear weapons were useless, however, in defeating the "iron curtain," the nuclear weapons would destroy the very peoples that the U.S. had promised to liberate. For example, when Hungarian freedom fighters revolted against the Soviet-controlled government, the United States did not offer support.
Applying Containment to Vietnam: A major challenge to the containment policy came in Southeast Asia, where in 1945, a nationalist coalition, called the Vietminh, led by Ho Chi Minh, proclaimed Vietnam's independence from France. Eisenhower viewed communism in Vietnam much as Truman had regarded it in Greece & Turkey, an outlook known as the "domino theory." Although the U.S. was contributing 75 percent of the cost of France's war, Eisenhower resisted a larger role, refusing to send American ground troops to aid the French. The Vietminh defeated French forces at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954; two months later, France signed a truce that temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, separating the Vietminh in the north from the puppet government established by the French in the South. Some officials warned against United States involvement in Vietnam. However, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles moved to join the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to defend Cambodia, Laos and South Vietnam. Between 1955-1961, the U.S.provided nearly $800 million to the South Vietnamese army. Even with U.S. dollars, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam was grossly unprepared for the guerrilla warfare that began in the late 1950s. Eisenhower was unwilling to abandon containment and handed over the deteriorating situation to his successor, John F. Kennedy.

Interventions in Central America and the Middle East

The Eisenhower administration with the assistance of the CIA worked to topple unfriendly nations in Central America and the Middle East.

The Eisenhower administration employed clandestine activities in Guatemala, where the government of Jacobo Arbenz, democratically elected, was not a Communist or controlled by the Soviet Union. However, Arbenz did accept money from the local communist party. In 1954, reformist president Arbenz nationalized the land owned, but not used, by the United Fruit Company, a company that Acheson had stock in. Eisenhower authorized the CIA to carry out a covert operation, with the assistance of General Carlos Castillo Armas, that would destablized the economy of Guatemala and the government of Arbenz. The code name for this intervention was PBSUCCESS.

According to historian Kate Doyle, (1997) PBSUCCESS got its start when the U.S. government concluded that Arbenz was a danger of international dimensions. Although inside Guatemala, Arbenz was seen as a reformer bent only on changing the country's rigid oligarchy, Washington was nervous because he permitted the Guatemalan Communist Party to operate openly. Also, his land reform program threatened U.S. commercial interests, in particular those of the powerful United Fruit Company. U.S. concerns coalesced in covert plans to destroy the Arbenz administration. By 1952, two years after Arbenz's election, the CIA had begun recruiting an opposition force to overthrow him. The CIA first looked to the Guatemalan military for a solution. A "General Plan of Action," written in 1953, stated that the CIA regarded the military as "the only organized element in Guatemala capable of rapidly and decisively altering the political situation." The CIA chose as its lead man for the coup a disgruntled officer named Carlos Castillo Armas. The CIA was open to any means necessary to get rid of Arbenz. According to one secret report, a senior CIA official declared bluntly, "Arbenz must go; how does not matter." The intervention led to decades of destructive civil wars in Guatemala. According to the CIA's historical account, the meticulous CIA coup-plotters had "no plans for what would happen next." They considered democracy an "unrealistic" alternative for Guatemala and foresaw the best alternative as a moderate authoritarian regime that would be staunchly pro-American. But Guatemala's center quickly "vanished from politics into a terrorized silence." The violence also caught up many of the coup-makers. Just three years after his grab for power, Castillo Armas died at the hands of his own presidential guard. His successor, Gen. Manuel Fuentes, was ousted by Defense Minister Enrique Peralta Asurdia. When a small insurgency developed, Guatemala's military used U.S. military training, weapons and money to unleash a savage wave of repression that left thousands of peasants dead. The killing continued for four decades.

The United States tried to pursue a similar policy in Cuba, working against Fidel Castro, who in 1959 overthrew the U.S. supported dictator Flugencio Batista. The Cuban Revolution started in 1952 and lasted until 1959, with the successful removal of Batista. July 26, 1953, marked the first public activity of the most pending revolution. It was on this day that a group of revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro Ruz attacked the Cuban army barracks at Moncada.

Large corporations grew rich off Cuban resources, while the people starved and suffered violent atrocities, even death. Batista offered neither health care nor education to his country's people. The bulk of the people lived in great poverty while Batista and his friends lived a wealthy lifestyle. Many people opposed Batista, most importantly Fidel Castro, and his organization, M-26-7. This organization trained in Mexico until 1956, when they returned to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma. Batista's massive police and spy force had been watching Castro closely, and Batista had even granted Castro amnesty to get out of prison a few years before.

The large, well-equipped army of Batista could not put down the popular revolt. Batista fled the country in 1959, stealing millions of dollars. He left behind an army of 40,000 men, Castro had only a few thousand. Batista stayed in Spain until his death in 1973. Che Guevara was present during the revolution, as well as Frank Pais, who led part of the M-26-7, who remained in Cuba following the revolution. During the year 1959, the CIA began monitoring the telephone conversations of Cuban leaders. Subversive radio stations transmitted to Cuba from Miami, the Bahamas and Central America.

In 1953, Eisenhower authorized CIA agents to instigate a coup against the nationalist head of Iran, Dr. Mohammad Mossadeqh, for bribing army officials and paying Iranians to demonstrate against the government. According to Eric Foner, Mossadeqh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, whose refinery in Iran was Britain's largest remaining overseas asset. The purpose was to return the Shah to power through CIA engineered protests and bribery of Iranian officers. According to historians, four major objectives led to Western intervention in the Iranian political system: to contain Communism and prevent Iran from falling to Communism, to protect Western interests in Iranian oil, to reverse the nationalization of the oil industry by the Iranian government, and to prevent a possible economic collapse in Iran.

The first phase was unsuccessful and the Shah fled Tehran, fearful that his life was in danger for his participation in the attempted overthrow of Mossadeqh. The second phase was more successful, and enabled the Shah to victoriously return to Iran where he then had a 25-year dictatorship supported by the United States. However, this ruling also came with the Savak, a brutal and terrifying police force that angered many Iranians and ignited hatred towards the Americans. Although the people of Iran suspected CIA involvement, the U.S. government kept the coup d’etat a secret from the American people. Operation Ajax was considered a resounding success until 1979, when the Iranians revolted against the U.S. Embassy in what became known as the Iranian Hostage Crisis. The operation was engineered by Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of of President Theodore Roosevelt. Allen W. Dulles, the director of central intelligence, approved $1 million on April 4 to be used "in any way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddeqh."

In 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, began talks with Egypt, concerning American support to build the Aswan Dam on the Nile River. Aswan is a city located at the first cataract of the Nile River. However, two years later, Egypt's leader, Gamal Abdel Nassar, received arms from Communist Czechoslovakia, which had formed a military alliance with other Arab nations and recognized the People's Republic of China. When Egypt concluded an arms deal with Czechoslovakia, the U.S. Secretary of State John Dulles announced the withdrawal of all U.S. funds and assistance for President Gamal Abdel Nasser's, who had come to power in the 1953 nationalistic revolution, development program. In response to this treatment by the United States and the refusal of Western powers to fund the Aswan Dam on the Upper Nile River, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956. Nasser decision to nationalize the Suez Canal to finance the construction of the Aswan High Dam, led directly to the second Arab-Israeli War of October-November 1956. The successful co-ordinated attacks upon Suez by Israel, France, and Britain were quickly halted and a ceasefire arranged after strong UN and U.S. pressure. Although Eisenhower opposed the intervention, he did make it clear that the U.S. would actively combat communism in the Middle East, invoking the Eisenhower Doctrine. From 1958, Egypt relied increasingly upon Soviet military and economic aid. This ended Egypt's non-aligned policy and she became the principal Soviet client state in the Middle Eastern Cold War.

The Nuclear Arms Race: While Eisenhower's foreign policy centered on countering a perceived communist threat in the global arena, a number of events encouraged the president to reduce superpower tensions. Eisenhower and Khruschev met in Geneva in 1955 at the first summit conference since the end of WWII. In August 1957, the Soviets test-fired their first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and two months later beat the U.S. into space by launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to circle the earth. Eisenhower insisted that the U.S. possessed nuclear superiority and tried to diminish public panic by creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and signing the National Defense Education Act, providing assistance for students in math, foreign languages and sciences. By 1960, the two sides were within reach of a ban on nuclear testing; to avoid jeopardizing the summit, Eisenhower cancelled espionage flights over the Soviet Union, which came one day too late, as a Soviet missile shot down a U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory, ending any prospects of a nuclear agreement between the Soviet Union and the U.S. Eisenhower's "more bang for the buck" defense budget enormously increased the U.S. nuclear capacity; more than quadrupling the stockpile of nuclear weapons. When Eisenhower left office in 1960, he warned about the growing influence of the "military industrial complex," in American and government life.
Truman & Eisenhower approach to foreign policy: Both President Truman and President Eisenhower perceived a grave threat in the Soviet Union and the spread of communism around the world. First, with the issue of containment, Kennan's rationale for containment toward the Soviet Union enjoyed the support from key advisors and Truman, prior to Dean Acheson and NSC-68. Truman's administration pursued the development of atomic weapons, increased traditional military power, international military alliances, military and economic support for politically sympathetic countries. Truman's administration had articulated a solid policy of containment while Republicans, particularly Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, criticized containment for its refusal to attack Soviet power directly, and its acceptance of the status quo. Secondly, both presidents believed that communism threatened national military and economic security and both adopted the strategies of containment to combat communism. For example, fears of the "domino effect," influenced Eisenhower's effort to support anti-Communist forces against Vietnam as well as Truman's decision to intervene in Greece. Third, Truman oversaw an enormous expansion in defense spending while Eisenhower attempted to curtail defense spending. Eisenhower called for limiting the expansion of the military in direct contrast to his predecessor. In addition, Eisenhower desired to back up conventional troops with a large nuclear arsenal. Fourth, Truman had committed troops to Korea as part of his containment polic with mixed results. However, Eisenhower refused to commit troops. Fifith, while Truman's endorsement of containment hinged on the belief that negotiation with Stalin was impossible, the pressure of the nuclear arms race and the emergence of Nikita Kruschev, following the death of Stalin in 1953, led Eisenhower to pursue a policy of diplomacy.

Eisenhower and the Politics of "Middle Way" : In contrast to the Old Guard conservatives of his party who desired to repeal much of the New Deal and preferred a unilateral approach to foreign policy, Eisenhower preached "modern Republicanism," maintaining the course chartered both by FDR and Truman. Eisenhower attempted to distance himself from the anti-Communist fevor that plagued the Truman administration, but refused to publicly denounce Senator McCarthy. During his administration, the "welfare state," grew and the federal government took on new project. In 1954, Eisenhower signed laws expanding Social Security and continued the federal government's modest role in financing public housing. Eisenhower's greatest domestic initiative was the Interstate Highway and the Defense System Act in 1956. In other areas, Eisenhower restrained federal activity in favor of state governments and private enterprise, resisting a larger federal role in health care, education and in civil rights. Eisenhower was forced to address the issue of civil rights with the 1957 desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Termination and Relocation of Native Americans: Eisenhower's efforts to restrict federal activity also helped shape a new direction in Indian policy, reversing the emphasis on strengthening the "tribal" governments and preserving Indian culture established by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. In 1946, during the administration of Truman, Congress established a commision to discharge any claims by indigenous peoples for lands taken from them by the government. (by 1978, 285 cases were heard and compensation exceeded $800 million.) Beginning in 1953, Eisenhower signed bills transferring jurisdiction over tribal lands in several states to state and local governments; the loss of federal hospitals, schools and other special arrangements devastated the indigenous populations. The government encouraged Native Americans to move to cities, providing one-way bus tickets and relocation centers to help with housing, job training, and medical care. About 1/3 of the indigenous population who were relocated eventally went back to the reservation and those who stayed faced difficulties, such as racism, lack of adequately paying jobs and poor housing, which created "indian ghettos."
The Modern Day Civil Rights Movement (Eisenhower administration): Black migration from the South to areas where they could vote and exert political pressure, cold war concerns raised by white leaders, and an organizational structure for Blacks in the segregated South all spurred black protest in the 1950s.
The legal strategy of the major civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, (NAACP) reached its achievement with the Supreme Court decision in 1954, with Brown v. the Board of Education, Topeka Kansas. Ultimate responsibility for enforcement of the decision lay with Eisenhower and he refused to endorse the Supreme Court decision over-turning de jure segregation in public space and facilities. The 1954 United States Supreme Court decision in Oliver L. Brown et.al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS) et.al. is among the most significant judicial turning points in the development of our country. Originally led by Charles H. Houston, and later Thurgood Marshall and a formidable legal team, it dismantled the legal basis for racial segregation in schools and other public facilities. By declaring that the discriminatory nature of racial segregation ... "violates the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees all citizens equal protection of the laws," Brown v. Board of Education laid the foundation for shaping future national and international policies regarding human rights. Brown v. Board of Education was not simply about children and education. The laws and policies struck down by this court decision were products of the human tendencies to prejudge, discriminate against, and stereotype other people by their ethnic, religious, physical, or cultural characteristics. Ending this behavior as a legal practice caused far reaching social and ideological implications, which continue to be felt throughout our country. The Brown decision inspired and galvanized human rights struggles across the country and around the world. What this legal challenge represents is at the core of United States history and the freedoms we enjoy. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown began a critical chapter in the maturation of our democracy. It reaffirmed the sovereign power of the people of the United States in the protection of their natural rights from arbitrary limits and restrictions imposed by state and local governments. These rights are recognized in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. While this case was an important historic milestone, it is often misunderstood. Over the years, the facts pertaining to the Brown case have been overshadowed by myths and mischaracterizations: Brown v. Board of Education was not the first challenge to school segregation. As early as 1849, African Americans filed suit against an educational system that mandated racial segregation, in the case of Roberts v. City of Boston. Oliver Brown, the case namesake, was just one of the nearly 200 plaintiffs from five states who were part of the NAACP cases brought before the Supreme Court in 1951. The Kansas case was named for Oliver Brown as a legal strategy to have a man head the plaintiff roster. The Brown decision initiated educational and social reform throughout the United States and was a catalyst in launching the modern Civil Rights Movement. Bringing about change in the years since the Brown case continues to be difficult. But the Brown v. Board of Education victory brought this country one step closer to living up to its democratic ideas.
The Supreme Court combined five cases under the heading of Brown v. Board of Education, because each sought the same legal remedy. The combined cases emanated from Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, DC. The following describes those cases:
Delaware – Belton v. Gebhart (Bulah v. Gebhart) First petitioned in 1951, these local cases challenged the inferior conditions of two black schools designated for African American children. In the suburb of Claymont, African American children were prohibited from attending the area’s local high school. Instead, they had to ride a school bus for nearly an hour to attend Howard High School in Wilmington. Located in an industrial area of the state’s capital city, Howard High School also suffered from a deficient curriculum, pupil-teacher ratio, teacher training, extra curricular activities program, and physical plant. In the rural community of Hockessin, African American students were forced to attend a dilapidated one-room school house and were not provided transportation to the school, while white children in the area were provided transportation and a better school facility. In both cases, Louis Redding, a local NAACP attorney, represented the plaintiffs, African American parents. Although the State Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, the decision did not apply to all schools in Delaware. These class action cases were named for Ethel Belton and Shirley Bulah.
Kansas – Brown v. Board of Education
In 1950 the Topeka NAACP, led by McKinley Burnett, set out to organize a legal challenge to an 1879 State law that permitted racially segregated elementary schools in certain cities based on population. For Kansas this would become the 12th case filed in the state focused on ending segregation in public schools. The local NAACP assembled a group of 13 parents who agreed to be plaintiffs on behalf of their 20 children. Following direction from legal counsel they attempted to enroll their children in segregated white schools and all were denied. Topeka operated eighteen neighborhood schools for white children, while African American children had access to only four schools. In February of 1951 the Topeka NAACP filed a case on their behalf. Although this was a class action it was named for one of the plaintiffs Oliver Brown.
South Carolina - Briggs v. Elliot
In Claredon County, the State NAACP first attempted, unsuccessfully and with a single plaintiff, to take legal action in 1947 against the inferior conditions African American students experienced under South Carolina’s racially segregated school system. By 1951, community activist Rev. J.A. DeLaine, convinced African American parents to join the NAACP efforts to file a class action suit in U.S. District Court. The Court found that the schools designated for African Americans were grossly inadequate in terms of buildings, transportation and teacher’s salaries when compared to the schools provided for whites. An order to equalize the facilities was virtually ignored by school officials and the schools were never made equal. This class action case was named for Harry Briggs, Sr.
Virginia – Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County
One of the few public high schools available to African Americans in the state was Robert Moton High School in Prince Edward County. Built in 1943, it was never large enough to accommodate its student population. Eventually hastily constructed tar paper covered buildings were added as classrooms. The gross inadequacies of these classrooms sparked a student strike in 1951. Organized by sixteen year old Barbara Johns, the students initially sought to acquire a new building with indoor plumbing. The NAACP soon joined their struggles and challenged the inferior quality of their school facilities in court. Although the U.S. District Court ordered that the plaintiffs be provided with equal school facilities, they were denied access to the white schools in their area. This class action case was named for Dorothy Davis.
Washington, DC – Bolling v. C. Melvin Sharpe
Eleven African American junior High School students were taken on a field trip to the cities new modern John Phillip Sousa school for whites only. Accompanied by local activist Gardner Bishop, who requested admittance for the students and was denied, the African American students were ordered to return to their grossly inadequate school. A suit was filed on their behalf in 1951. After review with the Brown case in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled "segregation in the District of Columbia public schools…is a denial of the due process of law guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment…" This class action case was named for Spottswood Bolling. For more information on this, please visit http://brownvboard.org/summary/
Eisenhower kept his distance from civil rights issues, and such inaction by the President fortified southern resistance to school desegregation and fueled the gravest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. The crisis came in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, when the state's governor, Orval Faubus, ordered National Guard troops to block the enrollment of nine black students at Central High School. Eisenhower was forced to send in regular army troops to enforce desegregation at Little Rock-it was the first federal intervention in the South since Reconstruction. (The second federal intervention in desegregation attempts at an educational facility was at Ole' Miss, in Oxford, Mississippi during the Kennedy administration.)
Eisenhower ordered the integration of public facilities in Washington D.C. and on military basis and was 'forced' to support the first federal civil rights legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, since Reconstruction. This act aimed to ensure that Black Americans were given the right to vote, and critics of Eisenhower suggested that the president supported this act to garner Black votes. The African American community were divided with regards to the bill. University professor, Ralph Bunche, saw the bill as a sham and stated that he would have preferred no act at all rather than the 1957 Act. However, Bayard Rustin of CORE, believed that it was important because of its symbolism - the first civil rights legislation for 82 years. Rustin argued that the bill could have been written better, but that almost certainly it was only the first of such acts that would provide a foundation for future civil rights bills.
Montgomery and Mass Protest: The events in Montgomery represent both the Modern Day Civil Rights Movement and the Black Radical Tradition. Both of these elements are important in understanding the demand by Black Americans to garner economic, civil and political rights in the U.S. and in the global arena. However, as scholars, we should not attempt to prove that one tradition was 'better' than the other. Rather, we need to understand that both traditions, working independently, were really working for the same goal in the U.S.: equality of Black Americans in areas of economics, political and social rights.
The Black Radical Tradition can be best desribed as a tree with many branches; as an expressive, philosophical and physical response to oppression, forced labor, absence of freedom or independence and violence in Diaspora. The BRT included many traditions, movements, ideas & philosophies that emerged with specific conditions & experiences of Africans in the Diaspora. According to Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (2nd edition 2000) the BRT was a response to oppression from European industrial development & experiences framed by human exploitation in New World. In addition, the BRT was the ability to conserve indigenous consciousness of the world from western intrusion, the ability too imaginatively re-create a world while being subjected to enslavement, racial domination and oppression. The BRT emerged from of the Atlantic Slave trade and was created in the Diaspora.
According to historian Robin D.G. Kelley, in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class, (2nd edition, 1996), public spaces were frequently embattled sites of black working-class opposition and resistance to segregation during WWII. The wartime rhetoric of democracy and freedom, undermined the legitimacy of white supremacy. White dominated spaced was undemocratic and violent as bus drivers and citizens were weapons. The segregation of the Birmingham city transit system became contested terrain as the youth, who were often servicemen, zoot suiters, militant female high school students to young house hold workers, became vehemently angered by the fact that drivers shortchanged African-Americans on change owed from fares. In response to this, many of the youth started to "make noise and talk loud," in white space. In response to this, white bus drivers supported the passage of cursing laws and resorted to violence to quell Black Americans from engaging in civil acts of disobediance.
The Modern Day Civil Rights movement emerged during the late forties and fifities to confront white institutions directly, with legal challenges and boycotts, to use non-violence and passive resistance to bring aout change. According to Charles Payne, in I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, (1997) women and men such as Ella Baker, Bob Moses and Amzie Moore laid the foundation for the modern day civil rights movement through their civil rights works in the rural counties of MS. The approach to Montgomery was distinct from the BRT.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks violated a local segregation ordinance which trigered a city-wide boycott of buses. Contrary to past historical narratives which protray Parks as a weary seamstress who was tired and decided to sit down in a 'whites only' section on the bus, Parks had long been active in the local NAACP and was an early activist to free the "Scottsboro Nine," during the thirties.
Following her arrest, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) organized a bus boycott, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., a pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Two years later, in January 1957, black clergy from across the South met to coordiante local protests against segregation and disenfranchisement. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) develped centers in several southern states, paving the way for a mass movement that would revolutionize the racial system in the South.
CORE: The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in 1942 as the Committee of Racial Equality by an interracial group of students in Chicago-Bernice Fisher, James R. Robinson,James L. Farmer, Jr., Joe Guinn, George Houser, and Homer Jack.. Many of these students were members of the Chicago branch of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization seeking to change racist attitudes. The founders of CORE were deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi's teachings of nonviolent resistance. CORE started as a nonhierarchical, decentralized organization funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of its members. The organization was initially co-led by white University of Chicago student George Houser and black student James Farmer .
In 1942, CORE began protests against segregation in public accommodations by organizing sit-ins. It was also in 1942 that CORE expanded nationally. James Farmer traveled the country with Bayard Rustin, a field secretary with FOR, and recruited activists at FOR meetings. CORE's early growth consisted almost entirely of white middle-class college students from the Midwest. CORE pioneered the strategy of nonviolent direct action, especially the tactics of sit-ins, jail-ins, and freedom rides. From the beginning of its expansion, CORE experienced tension between local control and national leadership. The earliest affiliated chapters retained control of their own activities and funds. With a nonhierarchical system as the model of leadership, a national leadership over local chapters seemed contradictory to CORE's principles. Some early chapters were dominated by pacifists and focused on educational activities. Other chapters emphasized direct action protests, such as sit-ins. This tension persisted throughout CORE's early existence.
Through sit-ins and picket lines, CORE had success in integrating northern public facilities in the 1940s. With these successes it was decided that, to have a national impact, it was necessary to strengthen the national organization. James Farmer became the first National Director of CORE in 1953. In April of 1947 CORE sent eight white and eight black men into the upper South to test a Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in interstate travel unconstitutional. CORE gained national attention for this Journey of Reconciliation when four of the riders were arrested in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and three, including Bayard Rustin, were forced to work on a chain gang. In the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision, CORE was revived from several years of stagnation and decline. CORE provided the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, with its philosophical commitment to nonviolent direct action. As the Civil Rights Movement took hold, CORE focused its energy in the South.
CORE's move into the South forced the leadership to address the question of the organization's place within the black community. Though whites still remained prominent, black leaders were sought out for high profile positions. CORE remained committed to interracialism but no longer required that new chapters have an interracial membership, largely expecting little white support in the South. While middle-class college students predominated in the early years of the organization, increasingly the membership was made up of poorer and less educated African Americans. For more information, please visit http://www.core-online.org/.

Harry S. Truman (1945-1952)

2008-11-16T13:24:00.000-08:00

William Leuchtenberg: On April 12, 1945, as V.P. Truman was presiding in the Senate over a debate on a water treaty, Truman was told to call the White House. Once Truman was in the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt put her arm around his shoulder and said softy," Harry, the President is dead." After a moment of shock, Truman recovered and asked Mrs. Roosevelt, "Is there anything I can do for you?" Eleanor replied: "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now."
Legacy of FDR: Each president was judged during the 'first 100 days' of the new administration on foreign and domestic policies. Each president defined their domestic duties in three words to resemble the New Deal. Truman had extreme difficulty during his "first" term as a president, as many in the White House were die-hard supporters of FDR. Truman and FDR had a precarious relationship, as Truman was not privy to information outside of FDR's circle: example the Manhattan Project. As far back as WWII, FDR and Truman had a difficult working relationship and while V.P. for the 82 days in FDR's fourth term, Truman had little contact with the President.
Truman and Henry Wallace: (V.P. 1941-1945 under FDR) (In the 1948 election, Wallace ran on the Progressive Party ticket) At a talk in September 1946 in Madison Square Garden, Wallace stated that "the danger of war is much less from communism than it is from imperialism-where it be be of the United States or England." Truman interpreted this comment as criticism of the administration's "get tough" foreign policy, and Truman fired him from his position as Secretary of Commerce.
Truman and General Leslie Groves: He was a "Roosevelt hater and a Mrs. Roosevelt scorner."
Eleanor Roosevelt: Did not always approve of the Truman's policies, and stated that the Truman Doctrine would undermine the United Nations.

The Cold War Begins: Although the Allies overcame a common enemy, the prewar mistrust and antagonism between the Soviet Union and the West resurfaced over distinct vision of the postwar world. The Western Allie's delay in opening a second front in Western Europe aroused Soviet suspicions during the war. Following the war, Joseph Stalin, Churchill and the U.S. met at Potsdam between July-August 1945, to discuss post-war Europe. Stalin desired to make Germany pay for the rebuilding of the Soviet economy, to expand Soviet influence in the world and to have friendly governments on the Soviet borders in Eastern Europe. In contrast, the U.S. emerged from the war with a vastly expanded productive capacity and a monopoly on atomic weapons.
In 1946, Truman and Winston Churchill travelled to Fulton, Missouri, where the former prime minister denounced Soviet suppression of the popular will of England and central Europe & famously declared than an "iron curtain" had descended across the continent.
In February 1946, Soviet expert Dr. George Kennan wrote a comprehensive rationale for a foreign policy of containment. Between 1944-1946, Kennan had observed the social, political and economic aspects of the Soviet Union and issued a 5,300 word telegram entitled the "Long Telegram from Moscow." In addition he published "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," under the pseudonym of X. Kennan believed that Soviet threat was politically and warned that unchecked containment, in areas of Latin America and Africa would bring unnecessary conflict. Kennan asserted that containment would be best in four regions of the world. Kennan believed that economic and political pressure & not military efforts were adequate methods as the chief agent of containment.
Truman Doctrine: In 1947, the U.S. implemented the policy of containment outlined in the Truman Doctrine which would guide foreign policy for the next forty years. Crisis in Greece and Turkey, from leftist rebels and communist takeover triggered the implementation of containment through U.S. military and economic aid. Outlining what would later be called the domino theory, Truman warned that if Greece fell to the leftist rebels, confusion and disorder would spread throughout the entire Middle East and eventually threaten Europe. According to the Truman Doctrine, the U.S. would resist Soviet military power & support "free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Congress authorized aid for Greece and Turkey.
The Marshall Plan: According to Eric Foner, the Marshall Plan combated the idea, widespread since the Great Depression, that capitalism was in decline and communism was "the wave of the future." It defined the threat to American security, not so much as Soviet military power, but as economic and political stability, which was considered breeding grounds for communism. Marshall insisted, "our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos." In March 1948, Congress approved the "European Recovery Program," and over the next rive years, the U.S. spent $13 billion to restore the economies of sixteen Western European nations.
Berlin Blockade: In 1948, Germany was divided into two halves, with the Berlin Wall; East Germany was controlled by Russia and West Germany was controlled by the U.S. Truman stated that "We will remain in Berlin, period." The Soviet had staged a brutal coup against the government of Czechoslovakia, installing a Communist regime, blockading Berlin. In 1949, after the U.S. and Britain airlifted goods to Western Berliners for over nearly a year, Berlin became divided.
Building a National Security State:Advocates of the new policy of containment developed a defense strategy. There are six features of the national security state:
Development of the hydrogen bomb, which Kennan stated would lead to an "endless arms race." (1950s-1980s: deterrence formed the basis of American nuclear strategy);
a second aspect was the establishment of the National Security Council in 1947, which enacted a peace time draft, & renamed the War Department the Department of Defense (war=limited engagement while defense=ongoing);
a third aspect if collective security (1949 NATO, $1 billion given in aid to NATO allies) which effectively ended the U.S. policy of isolationism.; Critics of NATO saw this treaty as a kind of "double containment.
Foreign assistance was a fourth element of the national security state;
a fifth aspect was the development of the government's espionage capacities and the means to deter communism through covert activities through the creation of the CIA, which was established as a result of the 1947 National Security Act;
a sixth aspect is the intensification of propaganda to "win the hearts & minds" throughout the world and using Jazz musicians, such as Louis Armstrong, as cultural ambassadors. (1957- Armstrong speaks out against Little Rock, Arkansas and desegregation efforts, calls Eisenhower out on hypocrisy and quits as a cultural ambassador)
Point IV Program: January 20, 1949: Gives countries that technological support to undeveloped nations that supported U.S. efforts to contain communism, monies to increase their technology. An example would be in Ethiopia, with leader Emperor Halie Selassie, and Oklahoma State University, in which educational schools, would now offer a B.A. in agriculture. See http://cowboyjournal.okstate.edu/cjspring02/html/ethiopia.htm, for possible extra credit opportunities.
Civil War in China: Civil war broke out in China between peasants led by Mao Zedong & those led by Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek. The U.S. gave Kai-shek nearly $3 billion in aid. In October 1949, Mao established the Peoples Republic of China. With China in turmoil, the U.S. focused on re industrializing the economy of Japan.
Containment as a dominant feature of foreign policy following WWII: Immediately following WWII, the U.S. and European nations desired to restructure the global power systems. Containment shaped American actions abroad for nearly a half century and became a dominant feature of American foreign policy. When the Grand Alliance, born of sharing a common enemy, Hitler, broke apart, the ideological and strategic conflicts between the U.S. and the Soviet Union emerged. In the disputes over how to manage the political reorganization of the world, particularly land held or conquered by the Axis powers, the U.S. perceived the Soviet Union as an enormous threat. In addition, American critique of the policy of appeasement first adopted in responding to Hitler's aggression led to pursuing a more aggressive policy towards Stalin and the Soviet Union. Kennan had asserted the domestic weakness, rather than ideology, led the Soviet Union to overstate foreign threats in an effort to expand their power. Leftist pressure against the governments in Greece and Turkey gave Truman the opportunity to implement this new policy and convince the American public of its wisdom. Truman cast American intervention abroad as protecting American at home. Containment faced opposition even within Truman's own administration, as Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace openly criticized the policy for failing to take the Soviet Union's concerns about security seriously, as well as its compromise of the idea of regional spheres of influence. Republicans opposed containment, the enormous defense spending and an ongoing American presence in Europe as a result.
Historiography: Truman & the Cold War: Historians have offered distinct interpretations of Truman’s foreign policy during the Cold War. Vice-President for 82 days, Truman took office following the death of FDR and nearly four months later, authorized the use of atomic weapons in 1945 against Japan who rejected the Potsdam Conference. Two years later, Truman issued his “Doctrine” of containment and the ‘Marshall Plan,” for economic assistance to resist communist expansion in Europe. Congress passed the National Security Act, which established the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council. Soviet aggression in Eastern Europe in 1948 led to the creation of N.A.T.O. (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) a year later. In 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson vehemently disagreed with Kennan’s analysis of the Soviet threat as political, and desired a more aggressive containment policy. In 1950, NSC-68, a blueprint for waging the Cold War and written by Acheson, articulated this point. The U.S. and Soviet disagreement about the establishment of a Jewish state in 1947, Red China under Mao in 1949, the outbreak of the Korean War one year later and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam added to the Cold War hostilities during Truman’s administration.
As soon as the term “cold war” emerged in public discourse, first by George Orwell in his essay, You and the Atomic Bomb, (1945) interpreting the Cold War has become a source of contention among historians, as three varied approaches surfaced to study of the Cold War. The first U.S. school of interpretation was orthodox, and placed the responsibility for the Cold War on Russia and its expansion in Eastern Europe. Thomas Bailey, in American Faces Russia, (1950) argued that Soviet aggression forced the U.S. to respond with the Truman Doctrine, Kennan’s policy of containment and the Marshall Plan, as Stalin violated promises made at Yalta and conspired to spread communism around the world. Revisionist accounts of history emerged in the wake of the tumultuous sixties to re-examine the origins of the Cold War, the alleged threat of Soviet expansion and America’s hegemonic role in international affairs. William A. Williams, in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (1959) argued that Americans had always been nation-building people and noted that America’s ‘open door’ policy abroad created access to foreign markets for U.S. business and agriculture. Post revisionist historians in the seventies de-emphasized economic motivations in foreign policy and identified responsibility for the Cold War on both sides. Thomas G. Patterson in, Soviet American Confrontation, (1973) argued that Soviet hostility and efforts by the U.S. to dominate the post-war world were equally responsible for the Cold War.
Historians have offered varied interpretations for the origins and causes of the Cold War. Walter LeFeber in, America, Russia, and the Cold War, (9h edition 2000), argued that the Cold War had its origins in late 19th century conflicts between Russia and America over the opening of East Asia to US trade, markets, and influence. LaFeber suggested that Truman’s popularity increased following his announcement of the Truman doctrine in 1947, in which the president capitalized from America’s fear of communism both at home and abroad to convince Americans they must embark upon a Cold War foreign policy. John Lewis Gaddis, in The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, (1972) argued that the most important cause of the Cold War was the post-war tension between the American principle of self-determination and Russian security needs. Gaddis downplayed revisionist arguments of economic motivations for an open-door policy. Gaddis suggested that the Truman administration initially adopted a ‘get tough policy’ in spring of 1946, largely in response to American public opinion. Robert L. Messer in, The End of an Alliance: James F. Brynes, Roosevelt, Truman and the Origins of the Cold War, (1982) argued that accommodation and concessions by Secretary of State Brynes (July 1945-Janury 1947) towards the Soviet Union, contributed to Truman’s change in foreign policy. Messer cited two events that triggered Truman’s shift to a ‘get tough policy’: a meeting with the Council of Foreign Ministers, which ended in a stalemate as Russia questioned America’s atomic advantage, and an agreement with Moscow on mutual support for Chiang Kai-shek in China. John Fousek, in To Lead the World: American Nationalism and the Roots of the Cold War, (2000), argued that American nationalist ideology provided the basis for a broad public consensus that supported a shift in foreign policy to initiate the Cold War. As the Truman Doctrine redefined anti-Soviet policy in terms of American national greatness and global responsibility, organizations such as the NAACP supported the American anti-communist stance, while keeping civil rights goals in mind.
John Lewis Gaddis, in Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (1982), argued that Kennan’s containment strategy was strongpoint containment, designed to use U.S. economic aid and covert action to create a balance of power in Western Europe and Japan. Gaddis distinguished between strong point and global containment, which drew the U.S. into unnecessary Latin American and African conflicts, and an arms race with the Soviet Union. Kennan stressed in, Memoirs, 1925-1950, (Pantheon: 1983) that containment involved something other than the use of military "counterforce," such as the economic and political defense of Western Europe. Kennan was never pleased that the policy he influenced was associated with the arms build-up of the Cold War. However, Wilson D. Miscamble, in George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950, (1992), argued that Kennan had no overall plan for containment, either of strong-point or global varieties. Miscamble suggested that Kennan had a flexible set of approaches applied in ad hoc fashion to restore the balance of power. James Clarke Chace, in Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World, (2007) argued that Acheson believed the U.S. to be a world leader of humanity. Chace asserted that NSC-68 failed to discuss in geographical details where American interests conflicted with Russia’s, and left open the possibility of global containment. Chace noted that Acheson’s support of crossing the 38th parallel extended the perimeter of American vital interests as the doctrine of limited containment moved towards a policy of global containment during the Korean War. Sara L. Sale, in The Shaping of Containment: Harry S. Truman, the National Security Council and the Cold War, (1998), argued that the NSC was at the forefront of the course of American foreign policy between the years 1947-1952. Sale suggested that Truman, a minor participant in the formulation of foreign policy, recognized the need for NSC advice and the Council consensus provided the basis for Truman’s foreign policy. Sale argued that the Korean War eliminated the distinction between vital and peripheral communist interests. Sale concluded that by 1952, the NSC perceived national security policy as a global contest to check the Soviet Union. Thomas Borstelmann, in Apartheids Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War, (1993), argued that U.S. officials recognized the dangers of apartheid and its disregard for basic human rights, but Truman was unwilling to challenge South Africa as natural resources (uranium ore) were crucial to America’s nuclear industry. Borstelmann noted that South Africa’s commitment of containment, participation in the Korean War, and the encouragement of U.S. trade solidified the administrations willingness to overlook racism.
The Korean War: 1950-1953 The Cold War Turns Hot; WWII divided Korea into a two halves; a communist North and an American-occupied south; divided at the 38th parallel. The Korean war began when the North Korean Communist army crossed the 38th parallel and invaded non-Communist South Korea. The North was led by Kim Sung II and was armed with Soviet tanks. General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw the post-WWII occupation of Japan, commanded the U.S. forces. Although Korea was not considered strategically essential to the U.S.; the political environment at this stage of the Cold War was such that policymakers did not want to appear "soft on Communism." For more information on the Korean War, please visit this link: http://www.koreanwar.com/
The Fair Deal: 21 Point Program: Truman desired social and economic reforms similar to FDR's "New Deal". However, Congress approved only the Employment Act of 1946, which stated that it was the government's responsibility to maintain the economy, promote maximum employment, production and purchasing power. The Council of Economic Advisors was created to advise the president on economic issues, but did not have the authority to create new policies. Due to the shortage of meat, automobiles and even houses due to inflation, many veterans of WWII slept in converted garages.
The rise of Human Rights: According to Eric Foner, the Cold War affected the concept of human rights. The idea that there are rights that are applicable to all of humanity originated during the 18th century in the Enlightenment period and during the French and American Revolutions. The atrocities committed during WWII as well as the global language of the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter, forcefully raised the issue of human rights in the postwar world. Following the Second War, the Allies put numerous German officials on trial before special courts at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity. For the first time, individuals were held directly accountable to the international community for violations of human rights. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by committee chair Eleanor Roosevelt. It identified a broad range of rights to be enjoyed by people everywhere, including freedom of speech, religious toleration and protection against arbitrary government, as well as social and economic entitlements like the right to an adequate standard of living and access to housing, education and medical care.
Black Americans: Truman was incensed that returning Black veterans from WWII could not find adequate employment or housing, due to discrimination and segregation (Jim Crow). In 1946, Truman created the Committee on Civil Rights, in an effort to address 'Jim Crow' laws in housing and public space. One year later, Truman was invited to speak at the annual meeting of the N.A.C.P. In 1947, a Commission on Civil Rights appointed by the president issued To Secure These Rights, one of the most devastating indictments every published of racial inequality in America. It called on the federal government to assume responsibility for abolishing segregation and ensuring equal treatment in housing, employment, education and the criminal justice system. Truman noted that if the U.S. were to offer the "peoples of the world a choice of freedom or enslavement," it must "correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy." In 1948, Truman issued an executive order to desegregate armed forces. The armed forces became the first large institution in American life to promote racial integration actively and to attempt to root out long-standing racist practices. The Korean War was the first American conflict fought by an integrated army since the War of Independence.
Mexican Americans: In 1929, the League of Latin American Citizens, (LULAC) was established to address segregation and discrimination in the Southwest. In 1948, Dr. Hector Perez Garcia created the American GI Forum & with the assistance of Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, from Texas questioned the denial of burial of Felix Longoria, a WWII veteran.
Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism: Throughout the 1940s and 1950s America was overwhelmed with concerns about the threat of communism growing in Eastern Europe and China. Capitalizing on those concerns, a young Senator named Joseph McCarthy made a public accusation that more than two hundred “card-carrying” communists had infiltrated the United States government. Though eventually his accusations were proven to be untrue, and he was censured by the Senate for unbecoming conduct, his zealous campaigning ushered in one of the most repressive times in 20th-century American politics.
It was at a speech in February 1950, in Wheeling, West Virgina, that McCarthy announced that he had a list of 105 communists working for the state department. McCarthy never identified those on his "list" but used the Senate subcommittee he chaired to hold hearings and level charges against federal employees.
In 1947, Truman issued Executive Order 9835, establishing loyalty review boars to investigate federal employees; hundreds of employees were fired or resigned over accusations of disloyalty or "sexual perversion."
McCarthy's downfall came in 1954, when a Senate committee investigated his charges that the army had harbored and "coddled" communists." The nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings revealed McCarthy has a bully that browbeat witnesses and made sweeping accusations with no basis in fact. The dramatic high point came when McCarthy attacked the loyalty of a young lawyer in the firm of Joseph Welch, the army's chief lawyer. Welch pleaded, "let us not assassinate this lad further...you have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?" Following the hearings, the Senate censured McCarthy for his behavior and he died three years later in 1957.
However, the legacy of McCarthy is, what Eric Foner describes as the "atmosphere of fear." States created their own committees, modeled on HUAC (remember Richard Nixon), that investigated suspected communists and dissenters. Private organizations such as the American Legion, National Association of Manufactures and the Daughters of the American Revolution also persecuted individuals for their beliefs. The Better America League in southern CA gather the names of nearly 2 million alleged subversives in the region.
Local anticommunist groups forced public libraries to remove from their shelves, "un-American," books such as the tales of Robin Hood, who took from the rich and gave to the poor. University refused to allow left-wing speakers to appear on campus and fired teachers who refused to sign loyalty oaths or testify against others. In 1951, in Dennis v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the jailing of Communist Party leaders even though the charges concerned their beliefs, not any actions taken against them. Although the ACLU condemned McCarthy's tactics, the organization refused to defend the indicted Communist Party leaders.

FDR & the New Deal, WWII: Foreign & Domestic

2008-11-08T12:40:00.000-08:00

Hello History 12~

These lecture notes will cover Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal, WWII abroad and WWII at home. As these notes cover the years, 1932-1945, I will post the most relevant information that will be beneficial to you in this course.

However, these notes do not replace your attendance in class or the fact that you should be taking notes while I lecture. You can not participate in class, which is 30 points of your grade, if you are not present.
Concerning the issue of note-taking, half of you do not take notes. Be pro-active in your eduction and make the attempt to write down what I put up on the board!
So, if you are concerned about your grade or the fact that I don't post notes in a timely fashion, then you need to come to class! It is very simple!
Please review your syllabus should you have any questions about the requirements for the course. If you need to visit me during my office hours, then do so. If you need to email me, then do so! Don't wait until the last minute!
In addition, a survey text, "The American Promise," is on reserve at the college library. This text has been on reserve for the entire semester and only one student has utilized the text.
Lastly, you should not be waiting until I post notes from the lecture to finish your essays. You course text "Reading the American Past," has a wide range of documents that will assist in the majority of your essay topics. I also posted additional sources that cover most of your topics in a earlier post this semester!

Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1932-1945, Democrat (FDR was elected to four terms as the president, 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944; dying three months into his fourth term on April 12, 1945.)

Born in 1882 & grew up on his father's estate in Hyde Park on the Hudson River, north of New York City. Politicians have argued that he was born with a "silver spoon in his mouth that was later bent." This statement addresses the issue of class consciousness and many called FDR a traitor for abandoning his wealth.
In the summer of 1921, FDR became infected with the polio virus and frequently visited a facility in Warm Springs, Georgia for treatment. It was in Georgia that he combined treatment with political overtures to southern Democrats.
As Governor of New York, FDR believed that the government should intervene to protect citizens from economic hardships rather than do nothing but wait for the law of supply and demand to improve the economy.
As the election of 1932 neared, President Hoover was increasingly unpopular with the American public as the Depression continued. FDR won the 1932 presidential election in a historic landslide and received 57% of the nation's votes, the first time a Democrat had won a majority of the popular vote since 1852. Roosevelt captured 472 electoral votes to Hoover's 59.
In his inaugural speech on March 4, 1933, FDR promised "direct, vigorous action." The first months of Roosevelt's administration, termed "the 100 days" fulfilled that promise in a whirlwind of government initiatives that launched the New Deal. The majority of his New Deal programs were designed to bring "relief, recovery and reform" to the American population. In addition, two acts dealt specifically with the issue of finance and banks, who were dealt a severe blow from the stock market crash.
However, relief for big corporations were not high on the list of FDR's "First New Deal" programs, as these acts or programs concentrated on the plight of the impoverished and addressed the rights of worker, as the case of the 1934 Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board to sponsor and oversee elections for union representation. FDR signed this Act into law the following year, providing for the first time federal support for labor organization-the most important New Deal reform of the industrial order. It was during his second New Deal that the business community was challenged.
Lastly, historians have stated that FDR's "New Deal" programs have contributed to the emerging Welfare State.
The "Brain Trust": FDR was influenced by academic advisers when designing his "New Deal policies."
March 9, 1933, Emergency Banking Act: Provides for reopening stable banks and authorizing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to supply funds.
March 31, 1933: Civilian Conservation Corps Act: Provides jobs for unemployed (nearly 250,000) young men.
May 12, 1933: Federal Emergency Relief Act: Provides relief funds for the destitute.
May 12, 1933: Agricultural Adjustment Act: Provides funds to pay farmers for not growing crops; limited amount of crop growing, as excessive crops would be wasted.
May 18, 1933: Tennessee Valley Authority Act: Creates the TVA to bring electric power and conservation to the area.
June 16, 1933: National Industrial Recovery Act: Specifies cooperation among business, government and labor in setting fair prices and working conditions.
June 16, 1933: Glass-Stegall Banking Act: Creates the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to insure bank deposits.
The Works Progress Administration: Gave unemployed Americans government-funded jobs on public works projects. The WPA put millions of jobless citizens to work on roads, bridges, parks, public buildings.
Prohibition was repealed by FDR and issued an Executive Order redefining 3.2% alcohol as the maximum allowed.
The single most important feature of the New Deal's emerging welfare state was Social Security, designed to provide a modest income to relieve the poverty of elderly people. Only about 15% of older Americans had a type of pension and during the Depression, banks and big corporations often failed to pay the meager pensions. Some corporations even fired or demoted employees to avoid or reduce pension payments. Not all workers benefited from Social Security, as it excluded domestic and agricultural workers from receiving benefits, making ineligible about 1/2 of all African Americans, more than half of all employed women and Mexican American migrants workers in CA.
Eleanor Roosevelt & African Americans: Eleanor sponsored the appointment of Mary McLeod Bethune as head of the Division of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration. Bethune used her position to guide a small number of Black professionals and civil rights activist to posts within New Deal agencies. However, the 1897 ruling of 'separate but equal' severely restricted the spirit of many of the New Deal programs.
In the election of 1936, Roosevelt won 60.8% of the popular vote and carried electoral votes of every state except Maine and Vermont.
Following the election, FDR desired to remove the remaining obstacles to New Deal reforms and decided to target the Supreme Court. FDR proposed that for every Supreme Court justice that had served for ten years and over the age of 72, a new justice would be added. This was called "court packing scheme," and even supporters of FDR were disturbed by this issue.
In addition, historians have stated that Executive Order 6102 was controversial, as the gold confiscation by executive order was assumed to be unconstitutional. FDR argued that the "War Time Powers Act" on 1917 gave him the authority to 'nationalize' privately held gold bullion.
Fair Labor Standards Act (1938): Created the minimum wage.
The 22nd Amendment, which now limited the length of office for presidency was passed following FDR's years in office.
Roosevelt and reluctant isolationism: FDR believed that the nation's highest priority was to attack the domestic causes and consequences of the depression. However, historians have argued that FDR long advocated an active role for the U.S. in international affairs. Following WWI, FDR embraced Wilson's vision that the U.S. should take the lead in making the world "safe for Democracy." FDR advocated membership in the League of Nations during the isolationist 1920s. However, during his 1932 presidential campaign, FDR pulled back from his endorsement of the League of Nations and reversed his previous support for forgiving European war debts. Once in office, FDR advocated a low-profile foreign policy that encouraged free trade and disarmament.
FDR and the Good Neighbor Policy: Policy applied specifically to Latin America, where U.S. military forces had intervened in local affairs. In replacement of the old policy of "arrogant intervention" would be replaced by a "helping hand," extended in a desire for friendly cooperation to create, "more order in this hemisphere and less dislike." This essentially a pledge that no nation had the right to intervene in the internal or external orders of another. However, this did not indicate a U.S. retreat from empire in Latin America. Instead, this policy declared that the U.S. would not depend on military force to exercise its influence in the region. Nor did this policy prevent the U.S. from exerting its economic influence in Latin America. However, there was a price to pay for non involvement as fascist governments in Italy and Germany emerged, the militaristic government of Japan planned conquests throughout Southeast Asia.
The Neutrality Act of 1936: attempted to reconcile the nation's desire for both peace and foreign trade with a "cash & carry" policy that required warring nations to pay cash for nonmilitary goods and transport them in their own ships.

WWII Radically different from WWI

Ideologically driven

Allies USA, UK and the USSR
Axis: Germany, Japan, Italy
Civilian casualties
Ruined cities
Europe
Asia

The Path to War, European and American Involvement in the War

1931: Japan invades Manchuria
1933: Adolf Hitler becomes German chancellor
1935-37: Congress passes a series of neutrality acts to protect the U.S. from involvement in world conflicts.
1936: March, Nazi troops invade Rhineland, violating the Treaty of Versailles. Versailles treaty forbade Germany for placing troops in the Rhineland. June, Civil War breaks out in Spain and Mussolini's fascist Italian regime conquers Ethiopia.
1937: December, Japanese troops capture Nanking, China. "The raping of Nanking"
1938: Hitler annexes Austria; September 29, Hitler accepts offer of "appeasement" in Munich from British prime minister Neville Chamberlain.
1939: March, Hitler invades Czechoslovakia; August, Hitler & Stalin sign Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact; September 1, Germany invades Poland, beginning WWII.
1940: Spring, German blitzkrieg smashes through Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands and northern France. Japan signs Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.
1940: May-June: German armies flank Maginot Line, British and French evacuated from Dunkirk. France surrenders to Germany.
1940: Summer-Fall: Germany conducts bombing campaign against England.
1941: Congress approves Lend-Lease Act, making arms available to Britain.
June 22: Hitler invades Soviet Union.
August: Roosevelt & Churchill issue Atlantic Charter.
October: Militarists led by Hideki Tojo take over Japan.
December 7: Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.
December 8: United States declares war on Japan.
December 11: Germany and Italy declare War on United States.
November 1942-43: Allies mount North African campaign. (Operation Torch)
July 10, 1943: Allies begin Italian invasion through Sicily.
June 4, 1944: Allies liberate Rome from German occupation.
June 6, 1944: D Day-Allied forces invade Normandy. (2 million arrive via the beach: snipers and grenades are used against Allies)
August 25, 1944: Allies liberate Paris.
September 12, 1944: Allies enter Germany.
February 19-March 16, 1945: Battle of Iwo Jima. The Native American Ira Hayes helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima.
May 2, 1945: Soviet forces capture Berlin.
August 6, 1945: United States drop atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
August 9, 1945: United States drops atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

Hitler, 'the final solution,' U.S. lack of involvement, and concentration camps

Since the 1930s, the Nazis had persecuted the Jews in Germany and every German-occupied territory, causing many to seek asylum beyond Hitler's reach. However, immigration restrictions in the U.S. during the 1920s allowed a small number of immigrants into the country each year.
FDR was sympathetic to the pleas of help by refugees, but did not desire to jeopardize his foreign policy or offend American voters.
Followed by Hitlers 1938 Anschluss, thousands of Austrian Jews were turned away by Americans. (82% opposed the immigration)
In 1942, numerous reports that Hitler was implementing a "final solution" filtered out of the German-occupied Europe. Skeptical U.S. State Department officials refused to grant asylum to Jews. The U.S. Office of War Information worried that charging Germans with crimes against humanity might incite them to greater resistance and prolong the war.
The World Jewish Congress appealed to the Allies to bomb the death camps and railroad tracks leading to them in order to hamper the killing and block further shipments of victims. The Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy stated that the U.S. and her allies were intent on achieving military victory as soon as possible, arguing that air forces could not spare resources from their military missions.
When Russian troops arrived at Auschwitz in Poland in February 1945, they found emancipated prisoners, skeletal corpses, gas chambers, pits filled with human ashes and loot the Nazis had stripped from the dead, including hair, gold, fillings and false teeth.
In early October 1939, as Hitler's blitzkreig swept through Poland, FDR received a letter from renowned scientist Albert Einstein, which indicated that Hitler was attempting to harness nuclear energy in Germany. A group of refugee physicists asked Einstein to explain to FDR the military and political threats posed by the latest research in nuclear physics.

The Atomic Bomb

My God, what have we done?" - Robert Lewis co-pilot of the Enola Gay
In mid-July, as Allied forces prepared for the final assault on Japan, scientists in America, such as Robert Oppenheimer, tested a secret weapon at an isolated desert site near Los Alamos, New Mexico.
In 1942, FDR authorized the top-secret Manhattan Project (named after preliminary research at Columbia University) to find a way to convert nuclear energy into a superbmomb before the Germans added such a weapon to their arsenal.
Key Staff - Manhattan Project Scientists Who Invented the Atomic Bomb under the Manhattan Project: Robert Oppenheimer, David Bohm, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Otto Frisch, Rudolf Peierls, Felix Bloch, Niels Bohr, Emilio Segre, James Franck, Enrico Fermi, Klaus Fuchs and Edward Teller.
General Leslie Groves was asked to be the Director of the Manhattan Project.
A delegation of scientists & officials, troubled by the bombs destructive force, secretly proposed that the U.S. give a public demonstration of the bombs power, hoping to persuade Japan's leaders to surrender.
Robert Oppenheimer, though ecstatic about the success of the project, quoted a remembered fragment from the Bhagavad Gita. "I am become Death," he said, "the destroyer of worlds." Ken Bainbridge, the test director, told Oppenheimer, "Now we're all sons of bitches."
After viewing the results several participants signed petitions against loosing the monster they had created, but their protests fell on deaf ears.70 scientists disapporved of using the atomic bomb to end the war on ethical grounds. However, the U.S. rejected this idea as it only had 3 bombs in its arsenal.
Following the death of FDR, President Harry S. Truman first heard about the Project while at Potsdam, Germany, negoitating with Stalin about post-war issues.
Truman issued an ultimatum: Japan must surrender unconditionally or face utter ruin. When the Japanese failed to respond by the deadline given, Truman order the bomb be dropped on a Japaneese city not already damaged by American raids.

Japanese Internment Camps:

On February 19, 1942, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, which authoirzed sending all Americans of Japanese descent to ten makeshift prison camps located in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah and Colorado.
Allowed little time to secure or sell their property, Japanese Americans lost homes and business worith about $400 million and lived out the war penned in by barbed wire and armed guards.
The Supreme Court, in its 1944 Korematsu decision, upheld Executive Order 9066 "blatant violation of constitutional rights as justified by military necessity."

The Double V Campaign: African Americans during WII

African American soldiers and civilians were increasingly unwilling to quietly accept a segregated army or the discriminatory conditions they had previously endured. Fighting against Nazi Germany and its ideology of Aryan racial supremacy, Americans were confronted with the extensive racial prejudice in their own country.
FDR declared that "Black Americans were in war, not only to defend America, but to establish a universal freedom under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all-regardless of station, race or creed."
The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading Black newspaper called for a "Double V" campaign seeking "victory over our enemies at home and victory over our enemies on the battlefields abroad."
Over 2.5 million African American men and thousands of black women served in all branches of service and in all Theaters of Operations during World War II. Many black infantrymen were involved in the war in Europe and the war of the Pacific.
In addition Black support of war efforts from the home front was instrumental in achievement of success of allied forces. Northern black troops sent to the South for training often had violent encounters with white citizens there.
Labor leader A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters threatened a march on Washington, D.C. by hundreds of thousands of blacks in 1941 to protest job discrimination in defense industries and the military.
To avoid this protest, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, reaffirming the "policy of full participation in the defense program by all persons, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin." This order authoirzed the Committee on Fair Emplyment Practices to investigate and prevent racial discrimination in employment.
In 1942, the Congress of Racial Equality was established, and organized picketing and sit-ins against Jim Crow restaurants and theaters.
Even though an extreme shortage of nurses in World War II forced the federal government to seriously consider drafting white nurses, defense officials remained reluctant to recruit black nurses throughout the war. Allowing black nurses to care for whites was considered a violation of social norms.
The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, led by Mabel Staupers, and rights groups like the NAACP, loudly protested racial policies in the Army Nurse Corps and the military in general.
During World War II civil rights groups and black professional organizations pressed the government to provide training for black pilots on an equal basis with whites. Their efforts were partially successful. African American fighter pilots were trained as a part of the Army Air Force, but only at a segregated base located in Tuskegee, Alabama. Hundreds of airmen were trained and many saw action.
Toni Frissell became the first professional photographer permitted to photograph the all-black 332nd Fighter Pilot Squadron in a combat situation. She traveled to their air base in southern Italy, from where the "Tuskegee Airmen" flew sorties into southern Europe and North Africa.

Mexican Americans and WWII

World War II caused a tremendous labor shortage. When the military forces called for recruits, Mexican Americans responded in great number and went on to serve with distinction. Some 350,000 Chicanos served in the armed services and won 17 medals of Honor.
The war also brought industrial expansion, further aggravating the labor shortage caused by growth of the armed forces. Chicanos thus managed to gain entry to jobs and industries that had been virtually closed to them in the past. These new opportunities liberated many Chicanos from dependence on such traditional occupations as agriculture.
The turnaround from the labor surplus of the 1930s to the labor shortage of the 1940s had a special impact on agriculture and transportation. For help, the United States turned to Mexico, and in 1942 the two nations formulated the Bracero Program. From then until 1964, Mexican braceros were a regular part of the U.S. labor scene, reaching a peak of 450,000 workers in 1959. Most engaged in agriculture; they formed 26 percent of the nation's seasonal agricultural labor force in 1960.
Along with opportunities, World War II also brought increased tensions between Chicanos and law-enforcement agencies. Two events in Los Angeles brought this issue into focus.
In the Sleepy Lagoon case of 1942-1943, 17 Chicano youths were convicted of charges ranging from assault to first-degree murder for the death of a Mexican American boy discovered on the outskirts of the city. Throughout the trial, the judge openly displayed bias against Chicanos, and allowed the prosecution to bring in racial factors. Further, the defendants were not permitted haircuts or changes of clothing. In 1944, the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee obtained a reversal of the convictions from the California District Court of Appeals, but the damage had been done. Los Angeles newspapers sensationalized the case and helped create an anti-Mexican atmosphere. Police harassed Chicano youth clubs, and repeatedly rounded up Chicano youth "under suspicion."
In the aftermath of the convictions and the press campaign, conflict broke out between U.S. servicemen in the area and young Mexican Americans who often dressed in the zoot suits popular during the wartime era. Soldiers and sailors declared open season on Chicanos, attacking them on the streets and even dragging them out of theaters and public vehicles.
Instead of intervening to stop the attackers, military and local police moved in afterward and arrested the Chicano victims. Spurred on by sensational, anti-Mexican press coverage of the "zoot-suit riots," these assaults spread throughout Southern California and even into Midwestern cities. A citizens' investigating committee appointed by the governor later reported that racial prejudice, discriminatory police practices, and inflammatory press coverage were among the principal causes of the riots.
The Sleepy Lagoon case and the zoot-suit affair provided the basis for Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit, which in 1979 became the first Chicano play to appear on Broadway.

Post WWII

February 1945: Yalta Conference & the Big Three, FDR, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stain at the Black Resort Sea resort of Yalta plan the postwar reconstruction of Europe.

New Era and Depression 1920s-1932

2008-10-09T14:03:00.000-07:00

The New Era and Depression

The New Era, the decade following WWI is recalled in popular memory as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties. With its flappers, speakeasies (nightclubs that sold liquor in violation of Prohibition) and the soaring stock market fueled by easy credit and a get-rich-quick outlook, this decade was a time of revolt against moral rule inherited from the 19th century. However, many Americans did not welcome the new secular, commercial culture. They resented and feared the ethnic and racial diversity of America’s cities and what they considered the lax moral standards of urban life. The 1920s was a decade of profound social tensions-between rural and urban Americans, traditional and modern Christianity, participants in a consumer culture and those who did not fully share in the new prosperity.

What were the main features of the new society of the 1920s? (6 aspects)
· The twenties was a decade of prosperity, as productivity and economic output rose dramatically as new industries-chemicals, aviation, and electronics-flourished and older ones like food processing and the manufacture of household appliances using Ford’s method of the assembly line.
· During the 1920s, as new society was created as, an increased amount of consumer goods of all kinds were marketed by salesmen and advertisers who promoted them as ways of satisfying American desires and needs. Frequently purchased on credit, with easy payment plans, consumer goods altered daily life. Telephones, the vacuum, even Coca-Cola became a symbol of American life.
· Beneath the prosperity of the 1920s, there was a limit of prosperity, as the fruits of increased production were unequally distributed, as real wages for industrial workers only slight rose, while corporate profits rose at more than twice that rate. Economic concentration created a disparity of wealth.
· Farmers did not share in the decade’s prosperity. The “golden age” of American farming had reached its peak during WWI and farms declined during the 1920s. Farm incomes had declined steadily as mechanization and increased use of fertilized, insecticides and agricultural production continued to rise even when the world no longer needed farmers’ assistance following the war. During the twenties, some 3 million persons migrated out of rural areas, and many headed to southern California, where the growing economy needed labor.
· During the twenties, the image of business was transformed by Hollywood films that spread images of the “American way of life,” across the globe. Businessmen such as Henry Ford and engineers like Herbert Hoover were cultural heroes. The image of business was changed, as Hollywood films succeeded in changing popular attitudes toward Wall Street. In addition, businesses hired public relation firms to sway the minds of while populations as these firms aimed to justify corporate practices to the public and counteract the public’s longstanding distrust of big business.
· With the defeat of the labor upsurge of 1919 and the dismantling of the wartime regulatory state, business used the rhetoric of Americanization and “industrial freedom” as weapons against labor unions. Some corporations during the 1920s implemented a new style of management as they provided their employees with private pensions, medical insurance, job security and greater workplace safety. Management insisted that prosperity depended on giving business complete freedom of action, which was reinforced in a propaganda campaign that linked unionism & socialism as examples of the sinister influence of foreigners on American life. During the 1920s, organized labor lost over 2 million members as unions agreed to numerous demands by management in an effort to prevent the complete elimination of union.

The Republican Era and the Corruption in Government

Government policies reflected the pro-business stance of the 1920s. Recalling the era’s prosperity, one stockbroker later remarked “God….J.P. Morgan and the Republican party were going to keep everything going forever.
Business lobbyist's dominated national conventions of the Republican Party. They called on the federal government to lower taxes on personal incomes and business profits.
The administrations of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge obliged to these demands by businesses.
The two presidents appointed so many pro-business members on the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Trade Commission & other Progressive era agencies, they in effect repealed the regulatory system.
However, the Harding administration did support Secretary of Commerce Herbert’s Hoover successful effort to persuade the steel industry to reduce the workday from 12 to eight hours.
Under William Howard Taft, appointed chief justice in 1921, the Supreme Court remained strongly conservative and struck down a federal law that barred goods produced by child labor. In 1923, the Court overturned Muller v. Oregon, which had set a minimum wage law for women in Washington D.C.
Warren G. Harding took office as president in 1921 promising a return to normalcy after an era of Progressive reform and world war. However, his administration quickly became one of the most corrupt in American history. Calling himself a “man of limited talents from a small town,” Harding seemed to have little regard for either governmental issues or the dignity of the presidency.
Prohibition did not cause him to curb his appetite for liquor.
He continued a previous affair with a young woman from Ohio, a fathered a illegitimate child. This was not discovered until 1927 when Nan Britton, his mistress published “The President’s Daughter.”
Although his cabinet included men of integrity and talent like Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, Harding surrounded himself with cronies who used their offices for private gain.
Attorney General Harry Daugherty accepted payments not to prosecute accused criminals.
The head of the Veterans’ Bureau, Charles Forbes, received kickbacks from the sale of government supplies.
The most notorious scandal involved Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, who accepted nearly $50,000 from private businessmen to who he leased government oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Fall became the first cabinet member in history to be convicted of a felony.
Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, who as governor of Massachusetts had won national fame using states troops against striking Boston policemen in 1919, was a man of few words. Coolidge was reelected in 1924, in a landslide defeat against John W Davis, a Wall Street lawyer who was chosen to run by a badly divided Democratic convention…lack of organization, direction, platform.
Coolidge vetoed twice the McNary-Haugen Bill, the top legislative priority of congressmen from farm states. Farm Relief was an important element of the Progressive Party platform during the 1924 that selected Robert La Follette as a presidential candidate. Remember, the farmer did not share in the decade’s prosperity. This bill sought to have the government purchase agricultural products for sale overseas in order to raise farm prices. Coolidge denounced this bill as an unwarranted interference with the free market.
Robert La Follette was chosen to run as the candidate of a new Progressive Party. Coolidge described their platform as a blueprint for a “communistic and socialistic America.”

Economic Diplomacy
Foreign Affairs also reflected the close working relationship between business and government.

In competition, capital, trade, agriculture, labor and statecraft all go hand in hand if a country is to profit.
The 1920s market retreated from Wilson’s goal of internationalism in favor of unilateral American actions mainly designed to increase exports and investment opportunities overseas.
What is sometimes called the “isolationism” of the twenties is really a response to Wilson’s disappointing results of military and diplomatic pursuit of freedom and democracy in the global community.
Although the U.S. did play host to the Washington naval Arms Conference in 1922, America remained outside the League of Nations.
The tariff was raised to the highest levels of in history, again, a response to Wilson’s principle of promoting free trade.
Much foreign policy was conducted through private economic relationships rather than governmental action. The United States emerged from WWI as both the world’s foremost center of manufacturing and the major financial power, thanks to British and French debts for American loans that had funded their war efforts.
During the 1920s, New York bankers, sometimes acting on their own, and sometimes with the cooperation of Harding and Coolidge administrations, solidified their international position by extending loans to European and Latin American governments. They advanced billions of dollars to Germany to enable the country to meet its WWI reparations payments.
American investors gained control of raw materials such as cooper in Chili and oil in Venezuela. In 1928, in the so-called Red Line Agreement, British, French and American oil companies divided oil producing regions in the Middle East and Latin America among themselves.
As before WWI, the U.S. government dispatched soldiers when a change in government in the Caribbean threatened economic interests.
Having been stationed in Nicaragua since 1912, American marines withdrew in 1925. But the troops returned in an effort to suppress a nationalist revolt headed by General Anastasio Somoza, and finally left in 1933. A year later, Somoza assassinated Sandino & seized power, and for the next 43 years, he and his family ruled and plundered Nicaragua. Somoza was eventually overthrown in 1978 by a popular movement calling itself the Sandinistas.

Why did the protection of civil liberties gain importance in the 1920s?
· Among the casualties of WWI and the 1920s was the belief that an active federal government embodied the national purpose and enhanced the enjoyment of freedom. Wartime and postwar repression, Prohibition and the pro-business policies of the 1920s all illustrated how public power could go grievously wrong.
· This lesson opened the door to a new appreciation of civil liberties-rights an individual may assert even against democratic majorities-as essential elements of American freedom. The American public remembered the Palmer raids and the censure of freedom of speech, the rhetoric of war and now developed a greater appreciation of the necessity of vibrant, unrestricted political debate.
· The 1920s saw the birth of a coherent concept of civil liberties and the beginnings of significant legal protection for freedom of speech against the government.
· As wartime repression continued into the 1920s, college students and union leaders were beaten, Black Americans were lynched in Alabama, Arkansas and Florida, socialists were not allowed to speak in Pennsylvania. The postmaster continued to remove magazines and papers that criticized the government. Hollywood producers feared recent publicity of a drug overdose and a murder trial would reinforce the belief that movies promoted immorality. In fear of government sanctions, Hollywood enforced its own code to define immoral acts in 1923. (Hays code)
· The arrest of antiwar dissenters under the Espionage Act and Sedition Act of 1917 inspired the formation in 1917 of the American Civil Liberties Union. For the rest of the century, the ACLU would take part in most of the landmark cases that helped to bring about a rights revolution. Its efforts helped to give meaning to traditional civil liberties like freedom of speech and created new ones, such as right to privacy.
· Following WWI, the Supreme Court was forced to address the questions of the permissible limits on political and economic dissent. In 1919, the Court upheld the Espionage Act and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that the 1st Amendment did not prevent Congress from prohibiting speech that presented a “clear and present danger” Free speech did not protect a person who shouted Fire in a crowded room.
· However, the dissent by two Supreme Court justices concerning the conviction of Jacob Adams and five others for distributing pamphlets critical of American intervention in the Russian Revolution, marked a change in how the Court viewed free speech. By the end of the 1920s, the Court began to recognize a broader arrange of civil liberties, such as book censorship and the ban on James Joyce’s novel Ulysses.

The Culture Wars: The Fundamentalist Revolt
· Although many Americans enjoyed the fruits of prosperity of the twenties and embraced modern urban culture with liberated sexual rules, others found it alarming. Many Evangelical Protestants felt threatened by the decline of traditional values and the increased visibility of Catholicism and Judaism because of immigration. Despite the portrayal by the press that fundamentalism was a backwoods movement, it was a national phenomenon and remained a important element of 1920s culture and politics.
· Many Americans deemed Prohibition as a violation of individual freedom. However, to fundamentalists Prohibition contributed to widespread corruption and owners of illegal speakeasies and bootleggers who reaped large profits from their operation, bribed the police and public officials to turn a blind eye to the violation of the law. In addition, violence increased during the Prohibition era, as theft and murders threatened communities.
· Some of the main expression of fundamentalisms included the debate between traditional values and modern secular culture, as seen with the 1925 trial in Tennessee of John Scopes, who was arrested for violating the state law that prohibited the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The jury found Scopes guilty, although the Tennessee supreme court later overturned the decision on a technicality. The Scopes trial reflected the enduring tension between two American definitions of freedom: fundamentalists beliefs in moral liberty and time honored religious belief & those who upheld the Tennessee law that questioned these same values.
· A second expression of fundamentalism was the creation of the Second Ku Klux Klan, in 1915 following the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory workers accused of killing a teenage girl. The Second Klan claimed over 3 million members, native born Protestants, and for a time controlled the state Republican Party in Indiana and politics in Los Angeles. The Second Klan continued their attacks on Black Americans and now included Jews and Catholics, feminism, unions and immorality.
· A third expression of fundamentalism was the sweeping fundamental change in immigration policy. During the 1920s, pressure for whole scale immigration restriction became irresistible as the fear of immigrant radicalism now outweighed the desire for cheap unskilled labor. In 1921, a temporary measure restricted immigration from Europe to 357,000.Three years later, Congress limited immigration to 150,000 per year. A law in 1924 established no limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, in an effort to satisfy the demands of large farmers in CA who relied heavily on seasonal labor from Mexico. However this same law denied entry of immigrants from Asian countries. The 1924 included a new category-illegal alien, which created a new enforcement mechanism, the Border Patrol, charged with patrolling the land boundaries of the U.S. This term at first referred to European immigrants who snuck into America from Mexico or Canada.

The Emergence of Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance
· The 1920s witnessed an upsurge of self-consciousness among Black Americans as a vibrant black community emerged to challenge the past perceptions and stereotypes of white Americans and the writing of history.
· Alain Locke in his 1925 publication “The New Negro” associated the condition of Black Americans with the Pan-African movement, of which W.E.B. Dubois was a part of. Writers during the Harlem Renaissance were led to the roots of the black experience- Africa, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Peculiar Institution, the Nadir, the Southern folk traditions and life in 20th century America.
· The Harlem Renaissance challenged the erroneous identity and history of Africa created by European and white Americans. The Trans-Atlantic Slave trade created the image or the identity of the “Negro”, a peculiar entity with no history, no past, no knowledge and no contribution to civilization. The Harlem Renaissance objected to this racist image and redefined the emotions. the history, identity and experiences of Africans in the Diaspora.
· The Harlem Renaissance created a Black critique of white America, addressing topics of the notion of two-ness (wearing one face in public and then changing the face in the privacy of his/her own community), racism in the North and South, violence, Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement. Writers wrote of hope and despair, recalling past aspects of history, such as the Haitian Revolution and the future of race relations in America.

The Depression Era Read this Information to answer the written portion of the exam!
Prior to the 1929 crash of the stock market, there were signs of economic trouble in America. Southern California and Florida experienced a frenzied real-estate and land speculation period which led to banks failing, land remaining underdeveloped and mortgages foreclosing. The highly unequal distribution of income and the prolonged depression in farm regions reduced American purchasing power. Sales of new autos and household consumer goods had declined rapidly since 1926. The corruption in the administrations of Harding and Coolidge contributed to the stock market crash of 1929. The stock market crash came with such a severity that it destroyed many of the investment companies that had been created to buy and sell stock. By 1930, around 26,000 American business failed and the global community was ill equipped to deal with the downturn. Germany defaulted on reparations payments to France and Britain, which led to these governments to stop repaying debts to American banks.

Eric Foner argued that the Depression transformed American life as hundreds of American people took to the road in search of work. Hungry men, women and children lined the streets of major cities looking for their next meal. Thousands of families evicted from their homes, moved into ramshackle shanty towns that sprang up in parks and abandoned towns.
The Depression forced families to move from cities to rural areas in an effort to grow food and by 1935, 33 million lived on farms. In rural areas, however, families reduced their number of meals per day and children were often barefoot.
The American suicide rate increased during the Depression as this decade was shrouded in uncertainity.
The onset in 1930 of a period of unusually dry weather in the nation’s heartland worsened the Depression’s impact on rural America. By mid-decade into the Depression Era, the region suffered from the century’s most severe drought and as winds now blew much of the soil away, creating the Dust Bowl affected areas of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and Colorado.
The image of big business collapsed as congressional investigations revealed massive irregularities committed by bankers and tock brokers. Banks had knowlingly sold worthless bonds and prominent Wall Street Bankers had unloaded their own portfolios while instructing their clients to maintain their holdings.
When the Soviet Union advertised its need for skilled workers, it received over 100,000 applications from the United States.

The Progressive Era and WWI

2008-10-07T09:35:00.000-07:00

Hello History 12~

I have edited this page to reflect information that will appear on the midterm.

The Progressive Era

Progressives started in the cities, addressing acute problems, such as tenement housing, slum lords and deplorable and unsafe conditions in factories. (Triangle Fire)
Some of the various reform movements during the Progressive era: settlement houses (Jane Adams), emergence of reform organizations such as the Women's Trade Union League, (WTUL 1903) and the National Consumer's League. Reform also included publications by muckracking journalists, such as Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 publication of The Jungle addressed the filthy conditions in meatpacking plants. The Temperance movement strengthened as women now linked excessive drinking to poverty and domestic violence. Prior to the Progressive era, drinking was considered a moral sin. The Progressive era included economic and the issue of violence as two fundamental problems of alcohol. Photojournalism emerged during this era to illustrate tenement life in cities, as Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant who knew the squalor of NY lodging houses and slums campaigned for tenement reform. Lastly, reform occurred at the personal level, as there was a new visibility of women in urban public places, which indicated that traditional gender roles were changing dramatically during the era. Native born W.A.S.P. women enjoyed high paying office jobs while immigrant women were largely confined to low paying factory jobs. In the South, progressives was distinct and centered on the idea of white Southern progress, economic development, the educating the masses separately. MS was applauded by progressive whites in 1904, for the states heroism in educating blacks and whites in separate facilities.
Reform at the State Level: Cleveland Mayor Thomas L. Johnson reduced the street car fair from $.5 cents to $.3 cents and supported municipal ownership of public utilities. In Wisconsin, Governor Robert M. LaFollette used professors and scientists in his administration to lower railroad rates and raise railroad taxes, improved education, preached conservation, established factory regulation and worker's compensation. Lastly, California Governor Hiram Johnson was successful in removing the Southern Pacific Railroad Company from CA politics and signed an employer's liability bill.
Progressive Policies of President Theodore Roosevelt: Investigated the Northern Securities Company in 1902; used the Sherman Antitrust Act against 43 trusts; refused to send troops to quell the coal miner strike in Pennsylvania, instead attempted to meet with owners and the representatives of miners in the White House; coined the term "Fair Deal" following the arbitration by miners and management; Hepburn Act, which increased the power of the ICC; passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act & the Meat Inspection Act in 1906; Hetch Hetchy dam and clash with John Muir (conservationist vs. preservationist); addition of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904; the building of the Panama Canal; won Nobel Peace Prize for his role in negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War.
The 16th and 17th Amendments were passed during the Taft administration. The 16th Amendment established an income tax. The 17th Amendment established the direct election of senators.
Events leading to the Election of 1912: The four way contest between Taft, Roosevelt, Democrat candidate Woodrow Wilson and Socialist Eugene Debs became a national debate on the relationship between political and economic freedom in the age of big business. In February 1912, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination, but Taft refused to step aside. At the Chicago convention, the Republicans refused to seat Roosevelt's delegates, who numbered 248 to Taft's 48 in the primary election. A brawl broke out on the floor of the convention and Roosevelt's supporters bolted from the party. However, seven week later, the Progressive Party (the Bull Moose Party) emerged and nominated Roosevelt, with Hiram Johnson, governor of CA as his vice-president selection. Roosevelt ran on the slogan "New Nationalism", which called for women's suffrage, an end to child labor, minimum wage that included women, worker's compensation and social security. Wilson ran on the slogan "New Freedom". A little over 4 million people voted for Roosevelt, capturing 27.4% of the popular vote compared to Wilson's 41.9%.
The Importance of the Federal Reserve System of 1913 & the Federal Trade Commission of 1914: The Federal Reserve System consisted of 12 regional banks, overseen by a central board appointed by the president, to handle the issuance of currency, aid banks in danger of failing and influence interest rates to promote economic growth. This was created in response to the Panic of 1907, when the failure of several financial companies threatened the general collapse of the banking system. The second expansion of national power occurred as Congress established the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and prohibit unfair business activities such as price fixing and monopolistic practices.

WWI: Abroad and at Home

What were the reasons for the U.S. declaration of war on Germany in 1917: In May 1915, a German submarine sank the British liner, Lusitania off the coast of Ireland and 124 Americans lost their lives; One year later, Germany announced the suspension of submarine warfare against noncombatants. However, in 1917, Germany announced its intention to resume submarine warfare against ships (including commercial) sailing to or from the British Isles, and several American merchant ships were sunk; the Zimmerman Telegram (March 1917) called on Mexico to join in the coming war against the U.S. and promised to help Mexico recover territory lost in the Mexican War 1846-48. On April 2, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, proclaiming that the world must be safe for democracy. (In November 1917, a communist revolution headed by Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Russian government that had come to power in March of the same year. In January 1918, Wilson issued his "Fourteen Points", which historians have considered to be the clearest statement of war aims and his vision for a new international order. It was not until Spring 1918 that American forces arrived in Europe under the direction of General John J. Pershing.)
Espionage Act of 1917: Prohibited spying and interfering with the draft, prohibited false statement that might impeded military success.
American Protective League: Assisted the Justice Department identify radicals and critics of the war by spying on their neighbors.
The suffrage movement: Frances Willard, during the Populist era asked that suffrage be included in the platform of the People Party in 1892. The National Woman's Party was organized during the war period and demanded the right to vote. Alice Paul, leader of the party compared Wilson to the German Kaiser and with a group of women, chained themselves to the White House fence. In addition, Carrie Chapman Catt was instrumental in influencing Wilson's decision to extend suffrage to women during his second term and in 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, barring states from using sex as a qualification for the suffrage. However, as noted during class, Wilson suffered a massive stroke and his wife assumed responsibility for the affairs of the country. Historians have argued that it was Wilson's wife that changed Wilson's opinion concerning suffrage. However, historians have also argued that during his bid for reelection, he courted suffragists as well, in an effort to garner support for his bid for second term. The U.S. became the 27 country to allow women to vote.
The 18th Amendment (ratified 1919): This Amendment established prohibition in the United States. The prohibition movement of the 20th century has roots in the 19th century temperance movement. Women were supporters of prohibition as excessive drinking increased violence in the family and threatened the economic security of the family. It was repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933. Prohibition was not a success, and as Eric Foner noted, led to criminalization as law enforcement officers would take bribes to ensure the continuance of bootlegging. Crime actually increased during this period, as demonstrated by Al Capone and various criminal enterprises.
The Versailles Treaty: Eric Foner argued that this treaty was a harsh document that laid the premise for future conflict in Europe. The treaty placed severe restrictions on the size of Germany's future army and navy. In addition, Wilson was persuaded to add a clause declaring Germany morally responsible for war and set an astronomical payment which crippled the Germany economy. The German people were impoverished as a result of this treaty, and German officials were threatened with use of military force if they declined to sign the treaty. This treaty created the seeds for the emergence of Adolf Hitler, his destruction of Jews, Gypsies and others and WWII.
1919, a watershed year for the U.S. and the global community: According to Eric Foner, 1919 was a year of worldwide social and political upheaval. Inspired by Lenin's call for revolution, communist-led governments emerged in Bavaria and Hungary. Strike occurred in Belfast and Glasgow demanding fulfillment of war time promises of "industrial democracy" Crowds challenged British rule in India and national movements in other colonies demanded independence. As political journalist Walter Lippman argued, "we are living and shall live all our lives in a revolutionary world." Wilson's policies toward the Soviet Union revealed the contradictions of his liberal internationalist view. On one hand, Wilson desired to foster trade with Lenin's government but the fear of communism as a source of international economic, political and social instability & a threat to private community thwarted any attempts that the U.S. would engage in dialogue with Russia. In the U.S. 1919 brought turmoil as racial violence, labor strikes and the Palmer raids defined the "Red Scare" The Palmer raids were overseen by 24 year old J.Edgar Hoover, the director of the Radical Division of the Justice Department.
How did WWI transform "Americanization into a government sponsored campaign that demanded immigrant to demonstrate their devotion to the U.S.? : A demand for Americanization of immigrants was a product of war, as war transformed Americanization into a government sponsored program. Prior to WWI, Americanization efforts were conducted by private organizations. Wilson declared that some Americans "born under foreign flags were guilt of disloyalty and must be absolutely crushed." The Committee on Public Information renamed the Fourth of July 1918, Loyalty Day and asked ethnic groups to participate in patriotic pageants. New York City's celebration included a procession of 75,000 persons with dozens of floats and presentations linking immigrants with the war effort and highlighting their contributions to American society. However, German immigrants bore the brunt of forced Americanization, as the use of German expressions, language, culture & music enjoyed prior to WWI became a threat to American notions of liberty, freedom and democracy. In Iowa, Governor William L. Harding issued a proclamation that required all oral communication in schools, public places and over the telephone, to be conducted in English. Americanization programs attempted to exclude undesirables, such as the mentally ill. In 1917, despite a veto by Wilson, Congress required that immigrants be literate in English or another language. Americanization was designed solely for 'white' immigrants, as these programs assumed that European immigrants and their children could eventually embrace American values, life and become productive citizens. In the Southwest, public officials treated the Mexican population with contempt, despite that Mexicans were legally classified as white in 1917. Segregation, both law & custom was common in school, hospitals, theaters and other institutions. By the 1920, nearly all Mexican children in CA and the Southwest were educated in their own schools and classrooms. Puerto Ricans occupied an ambiguous position within American society and on the eve of WWI, Congress conferred American citizenship to the residents of the island, in an effort to stymie any support of Puerto Rican independence. Puerto Rican men were drafted into WWI and Jose de Diego, Speaker of the House of the island's legislature, wrote Wilson in 1917 asking that Puerto Rico be granted the democracy the United States was fighting for in Europe.

Dissent, Depression and War 1890-1900

2008-09-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

Hello History 12~

Hard times in the 1880s & 1990s

Farm prices fell decade after decade as the price of wheat, cotton and corn was significantly lower than in the 1970s.

By 1894, in Kansas alone, nearly 1/2 of the farms had become property of banks by foreclosure.

Banking system was dominated by eastern commercial banks committed to the gold standard.

A railroad rate system that was unfair to the farmer, as the railroads charged higher rates for short term hauls.

In the South, lack of currency and credit drove farmers to the 'crop lien,' and 'furnishing merchants,' which left the farmer with chronic debt due to high interest rates.

1890 McKinley Tariff; (federal tax on imported goods) was particularly high and hurt western and southern farmers who sold their harvests on unprotected markets & forced to buy expensive manufactured goods.

Farmers Alliance

1878 self help organization established in Lampasas County, Texas to fight "land sharks and horse thieves." Support for this alliance spread to Arkansas and the rural parishes of Louisiana.

Reached out to workers as well as farmers, supporting the strike against Jay Gould's Texas & Pacific Railroad in 1886.

More than 30% of Alliance members in Kansas were women, as the political culture of the Alliance encouraged the inclusion of women.

The Northwestern Farmers Alliance: Kansas and Nebraska

The Southern Farmers Alliance: recruited nearly 20,000 members a month and by 1890, this organization counted more than 3 million members.

Colored Farmers Alliance: founded in Texas and worked with the Southern Farmers Alliance for a better cause: the plight of the American farm operation.

Farmer's cooperative: farmers combined their individual product, such as cotton, to sell in bulk, in an effort to negotiate a better price. By setting up exchanges and stores, farmers did not have to deal with merchants and high credit. By 1888, farmers were victorious in their defeat of the "jute bagging" trust and its scheme to double the price of the bags used to bale cotton.

As the cooperative died, Texas farmers turned to direct political action in 1886 and within two years, the Southern Farmer's Alliance demanded railroad regulation, laws against speculation and currency and credit reform.

Populism/Populist Era

The Populist movement emerged as society was rapidly changing, a society that was now influenced by big business and technology. The seeds for Populism, the movement emerged from the small town squares and churches. These same communities became under siege as the spread of railroads brought travelling salesman and rural delivery which threatened many of the rural traditional folkways.

Threats from industrialization, urbanization, influx of immigrants, business consolidations and commercial agriculture created the agrarian protest spirit.

Populism provided a place for women in their movement and supported both temperance and suffrage.

Populism addressed the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively, the role of federal government in regulating business, active government intervention in the economy, the regulation of trusts, and unlimited coinage of silver and opposed the use of troops against striking workers.

The People's Party (Populist Party) & Election of 1892

Party emerged in St. Louis in 1892 and laid out their platform and selected candidates in Omaha, Nebraska.

Did not endorse suffrage of prohibition, which angered women, such as Francis Willard (Woman's Christian Temperance Union)

James B. Weaver, (Iowa) campaigned on a platform of unlimited silver. He was the second choice for Populists, as Leonidis L. Polk, the party's first choice had suddenly died on the even off the convention.

Populists also campaigned for government ownership of all railroad & telephone companies, a graduated income tax, direct election of U.S. senators, one-term limit for presidents, immigration restrictions & shorter workdays.

Republicans nominated Benjamin Harrison.

Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland.

Although Cleveland one, which meant his second inconsecutive term in office, the Populist Party received over 1 million popular votes & 22 electoral votes.

Labor Unrest in the 1890s

The 1890s was the decade of depression, unemployment, widespread poverty & crisis in rural America.

Panic of 1893 was triggered by the failure of a London banking firm & caused many British investors by the failure of a London banking firm & British investors unloaded their American stocks, which in turn caused a stock market crash. The selling of the stock occurred at the same time the McKinley Tariff of 1890 depressed the agricultural export market. The 3 year depression saw soup kitchens, farm foreclosures, high unemployment and desperate strikes.

1892: Carnegie's Homestead Steel Works & the Pinkerton Detective Agency

1894: George Pullman sleeping-car works & Eugene Deb's American Railway union; 8000 federal troops called into quell strike, but it was a court injunction by the Cleveland administration that put down the strike and censored Deb's.

1894: Cripple Creek, Colorado, Western Federation of Miner's went out on stike as the owners desired to increase the workday from 8 hours to ten. What is most distinct about the narrative of Cripple Creek was the relationship of the miners and the town. Although the mine owners controlled the county sheriff, local officials intervened when the sheriff tried to put down the strike. The mayor, city marshal and police magistrate all belonged to the miners union. In addition, Governor Davis H. Wait, a Populist elected in 1892, refused to use the power of the state and send in troops. By May of 1894, the owners gave into the demands of the miners and the union won an eight hour work day.

Coxey's Army: Masses of unemployed Americans marched to Washington D.C. to bring attention to the plight of poverty and unemployment. Millionaire Jacob S. Coxey of Ohio proposed a scheme to finance public works through non-interest bearing bonds, and his plan won the support of the American Federation of Labor and the Populists. On May 1, Coxey and his army arrived in Washington and marched on capital grounds, where they were immediately met with force by the police. Within four months, Coxey's army was dissolved and although this movement did not bring change to federal legislation, Coxey's army addressed the plight of the impoverished at the highest level.

Election of 1896

By 1896, President Cleveland did not have a good chance of being elected for a third term, as his presidency was marred by multiple issues: he did not assist the American population during the Depression of 1893; he barely managed to keep the U.S. Treasury at a stable level (remember J.P. Morgan); angered middle class constituents by ending the Pullman strike with federal forces and did not make good on his promise to significantly reduce the tariff.

Republicans nominated Senator William McKinley of Ohio, who sponsored the controversial McKinley Tariff, on a pro-business platform. Wealthy Ohio businessman Mark Hanna financed most of McKinley's campaign ($15 million). During the convention, miners and farmers walked out in disgust when it was announced that McKinley would be supporting the gold standard.

Democrats and Populists supported candidate William Jennings Bryan, who delivered his famous "Cross of Gold," speech, seen as one of the finest rally cries in U.S. history. However, Bryan, an adherent of Social Gospel alienated many supporters, such as Catholic immigrants who did not like his 'style or delivery' of the speech.
The election of 1896 became a contest between those who supported Bryan and those who did not.

Some Democrats claimed that McKinley had "bought" the White House and he killed the Populist's dream of free silver when he signed in 1900, the Gold Standard Act. McKinley's win represented a victory for urban middle class Americans over agrarian interests.

The Bryan campaign marked the end of the Populist movement as the People's Party became part of the Democratic Party by throwing its support behind Bryan.

The election of 1896 marked the last time in which a major candidate tried to win by appealing to agricultural interests.

The Wizard of Oz

Written by L. Frank Baum (1900) and historians have suggested that this publication was actually a commentary on the election of 1896 and its aftermath. Emerald City represents the Capital; the Wizard of Oz represented President McKinley; Dorothy wore silver slippers in the book, not red ones in the movie, to representing the money preferred by ordinary people. The Wicked Witches of the East represent oppressive industrialists and mine owners.

The United States & The World

At the turn of the century, American foreign policy consisted of two currents: isolationism and expansionism. In addition, the Monroe Doctrine (1823) is part of U.S. foreign policy. The push towards commercial expansion was an effort to refocus the nation's attention following the Depression of 1893.

1880s: Republican Secretary of State James G. Blaine promote peace and trade through Pan-American cooperation, yet used American troops to intervene in Latin American border disputes.
In 1895, President McKinley asserted the right of the U.S. to step in and reduce Venezuela to the role of a mere onlooker in its own affairs. (Venezuela & Germany)
United Fruit Company from Britain dominated the Central American nations of Costa Rica & Guatemala. An importer from New Orleans turned Honduras into a 'banana republic.'
By 1895, the United States through business as well as diplomacy had successfully achieved hegemony in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Standard Oil & Mei Foo Lamps: Rockefeller sold more than a million lamps in China in the 1890s to promote the sale of kerosene in the Chinese market.
Secretary of State John Hay: Open Door Policy becomes international policy by 1900, which secured American access to Chinese markets and expanded economic power while avoiding the problems of maintaining a far-flung colonial empire on the Asian mainland.
The Spanish American War: 4 months of fighting; yellow journalism changed public opinion to support the our efforts to aid Cubans against the Spanish. In addition, the Dupuy de Lome letter was intercepted and called McKinley a dimwitted politician. The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898 killed 267 servicemen. McKinley did not want to go to war but he feared that if he failed to respond to strong public opinion of the war, William Jennings Bryan would win the election of 1900. War was declared on April 1898 and was quick and decisive. Theodore Roosevelt led "the Rough Riders" up the San Juan Hill, but Black U.S. soldiers were already present. The Treaty of Paris ended the war and Spain granted the United States Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam. Although the Americans did honor the Teller Amendment and withdrew from Cuba in 1902, the U.S. dictated the Cuban constitution which included the Platt Amendment, establishing a permanent U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay. (99 year lease)
McKinley also annexed Hawaii in 1898.
The Philippines War: Emilio Aguinaldo led a revolt against the U.S.; this war is often called the 'forgotten war." McKinley justified his policies on the grounds that this 2nd war would "uplift, civilize and Christianize."

This period is also the start of the Nadir, intense and violent racial tensions, undoing of everything good that came out of Reconstruction; Plessey v. Ferguson, de jure segregation and disenfranchisement which would end legal segregation with the 1954 Brown v. The Board of Education, Topeka Kansas.

The Gilded Age, 1870-1895

2008-09-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

Information for this blog is taken from American Promise, (2009), which is on reserve at the library. As language is important to the study of history, take into consideration the introduction of the term 'slum' to the American vocabulary during this era.

In addition, as this issue emerged during my lecture this past semester, the term 'third world' used during the Cold War, (but mentioned during the lecture) referred to nations that did not align themselves with the West (NATO) or with Russia and communism. These countries were born as colonies of powerful nations, exploited by western imperialists, who left these countries to fend for themselves and face the challenges of state and nation building on their own. Politically, this term emerged from the 1955 Bandung Conference, which resulted in the Nonaligned Movement. However, it is important to note that leaders of underdeveloped countries have contributed to the demise of their citizens, as political and economic corruption was prevalent in Africa and Latin America during the decolonization period. We need to be careful as scholars not to be careless with terms that might have a different meaning that often includes the experiences and emotions of citizens in the global community.

For additional insight into this issue, please read A. Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. (1995); Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, (2004); Michael J. Twomey, A Century of Foreign Investment in the Third World, (2000); Frantz Fanon, Richard Philcox, Jean-Paul Sartre, The Wretched of the Earth: Frantz Fanon (Translated by Richard Philcox), (2005) Historian Peter Burnell has suggested that the term 'third world' has outlived its usefulness, and with the end of the Cold War, the term has lost some of its clarity. Political theorist Hannah Arendt has suggested that "the Third World is not a reality but an ideology."

Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age, (1873) Twain left no one unscathed in his critique of this 'get-rich-quick' era; politicians, lobbyists, Wall Street financiers, small-town boosters, miners and the general public were discussed in this satire. Despite the glitter of the Gilded Age, as Twain’s titled implied, a darker side of this era was visible; the corrupt partnership of business and politics in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, (1869-1877).
The political corruption characterized the administration of Grant existed in the 1880s, as the spoils system-(awarding jobs for political purposes)-remained the practice in party politics at all levels of government in the Gilded Age.
Party factionalism plagued the Republican Party. Stalwarts: (Senator Roscoe Conklin: supporters of Grant and the spoils system); James G. Blaine, Maine: (Half-Breeds: charges of corruption) and Mugwumps, who straddled the fence and would jump ship in 1884, in favor of Democratic presidential nominee, Grover Cleveland, the reform governor of New York
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes tried to find a middle ground between supporters of the spoils system and those who intended to reform it.
The Scandal of 1884: Was considered "the most vilest campaign ever waged," as Cleveland's hometown newspaper, Buffalo Telegram, printed that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child in an affair with a local widow. Cleveland, a bachelor took responsibility for this child, to save the reputation of his married law partner, who may have actually fathered this child. A public rallies, supporters of James G. Blaine taunted Cleveland. However, Blaine overlooked an anti-Catholic slur directed towards Catholic voters. This oversight offended Irish American voters, whom Blaine had counted on to leave the Democratic Party and support Blaine due to his Irish background.
In addition, Twain argued that Congress was for "sale to the highest bidder and the intimacy between government and business meant that politicians, from senators, to representatives and even members of the executive branch were on the payroll of business interests." As one journalist stated, “Standard Oil had done everything to the Pennsylvania legislature expect to refine it,” as the “oil combination,” owned two state senators. Nelson Aldrich, a powerful Republican Rhode Island senator, whose daughter married John D. Rockefeller, Jr., did not object to being called “senator from Standard Oil.”
Twain’s tale described a tale in an age when the promise of wealth led as many to ruin as to riches. In the Gilded Age, fortunes were made and lost, often with devastating results, as Wall Street panics, like those in 1873 & 1893 periodically interrupted the good times and plunged the country into economic depression. Small business’s suffered and families starved, as big business and government made deals that protected only the ‘strongest’ of the nation while leaving the rest of the country in hardship.
President Cleveland second term in office was ushered in by the Panic of 1893, the worst depression the country had yet seen. However, it was this distinct relationship between businessmen, such as J.P. Morgan and the President Cleveland that would save the gold standard. Individuals and investors had traded banknotes for gold during the Panic of 1893. The Treasury’s gold reserves had dipped extremely low and many were worried that obligations would not be met. Morgan and a group of bankers offered to purchase gold abroad and restock the Treasury. Although Cleveland’s controversial agreement with Morgan saved the gold standard, the winter following the economic depression was one of the worst time in American history. A firm believer in limited government, Cleveland insisted that nothing could be done to help with unemployment, extreme freezing temperatures and hunger. Cleveland believed that the act threatened economic confidence. Yet, it was Cleveland’s great faith in the gold standard that prolonged the depression, favored creditors over debtors and caused immense hardship for millions of Americans.
The Gilded Age witnessed the expansion of the scale and scope of American industry. Old industries like iron transformed into modern industries, such as U.S. Steel. The expansion of the nation’s rail system in the decades following the Civil War played a vital role in the transformation of the American economy. New rail lines created a national market and fueled a new consumer culture that enabled businesses to expand from a regional to a nationwide scale.

Railroads: America's First Big Business

The railroads became America’s first business. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 when the tracks of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads came together at Promontory Point, Utah, linking new markets in the West to the nation’s economy. (Big Four=Leland Stanford, President. Collis P. Huntington, VP, Charles Crocker, Construction Supervisor; Mark Hopkins, Treasurer)

Jay Gould, a notorious speculator concentrated on buying and selling railroad stock and was not interested in transporting customers or operation of the railroads. Gould operated in the stock market like a shark, looking for vulnerable railroads, buying enough stock to take control and threatening to undercut his competitors, until they bought him out at a high profit.

The Pennsylvania Railroad by the 187s boasted a payroll of more than 55,000 workers and a capital of more than $400 million. This railroad company was responsible for increased industrial development in the South.

The Republican Party worked closely with the railroad business interests, subsidizing the transcontinental railroad system with land grants of a 100 million acres and $64 million in tax incentives and direct aid.

On the eastern seaboard, railroad companies fiercely competed for business and several owners established "pool" which enabled the railroads to set rates and divide up territory. However, angry farmers in the Midwest, who despised unfair shipping practices of the railroads organized to fight for railroad legislation.

The Patrons of Husbandry, or The Grange, founded in 1867 became an independent political movement and elected Grange members to state offices, which made it possible for several Midwestern states to pass legislation that regulated railroads.

1877: Munn v. Illinois; The Supreme Court ruled in favor of state regulation but became more conservative in the 1880s and 1890s, interpreting the Constitution to protect business from taxation, regulation, labor organization and anti-trust legislation.

1886: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad; Court struck down state laws regulating railroad rates and deemed labor unions unconstitutional.

1886: Wabash v. Illinois; Court reversed its previous ruling (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad) and stated that because railroads crossed state boundaries, they fell outside state jurisdiction.

Interstate Commerce Act (1887) was passed during Grover Cleveland's first administration (1885-1889) and established the nation's first federal regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, to oversee the railroad industry.

Sherman Antitrust Act (1890); This act outlawed "pools" and "trust," ruling that business could no longer enter into agreements to restrict competition.

Andrew Carnegie, Steel and Vertical Integration

Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant, who was a millionaire by thirty years of age, capitalized from Henry Bessemer's development of producing iron cheaper from pig iron and became one of the first to support "King Steel."
Although he generously gave away nearly $300 million to public libraries, Carnegie made inhuman demands on his labor force; demanding 12 hour days at 6 days a week with low pay in dangerous working conditions and pitted managers against one another.
Pioneered as system of "vertical integration," which meant, "that there was never a price, profit, or royalty paid to an outsider." All aspects of the business, from mining ore, to its transport to the Great Lakes to the production of steel were controlled by Carnegie.
The Gospel of Wealth, essay written by Carnegie defending the concentration of wealth during the Gilded Age and support for philanthropy.
By 1900, steel was used to support elevated trains in New York and Chicago; supported the first steel bridge to span the Mississippi River and was instrumental is assisting the U.S. Navy to become a powerful force during this era.

John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil & the Trust

Discovery of oil in Pennsylvania by Edwin Drake in 1859; called black gold.
Start up costs for oil refineries was low.
Rockefeller founded Standard Oil Company in 1870 and eventually controlled 9/10 of the oil-refining business. Rockefeller used 'horizontal integration,' and controlled only the oil refining business, in contrast to Carnegie, who controlled all aspects of his steel empire, from the ground up.
Prior to the automobile and gasoline, crude oil was refined into lubricating oil for machinery and kerosene for lamps, the major source of lightening in the 19th century prior to the invention of gas lamps or electric lighting.
Rockefeller demanded secret rebates from the railroads in exchange for his steady business, as these rebates allowed Rockefeller to drive out competitors through predatory pricing.
In 1882, Rockefeller pioneered a new form of corporate structure, the "trust", which allowed trustees to coordinate policy among refineries by swapping stock, which allowed Rockefeller to obtain a virtual monopoly on the oil-refining business. The Standard Oil "trust" laid the foundation for trusts in sugar, whiskey and matches.
In 1888, New York State ordered an inquiry into the holdings of Standard Oil.
As the federal government responded to public pressure to outlaw the trust in 1890, with the Sherman Antitrust Act, Standard Oil changed course and reorganized as a holding company. The holding company brought competing companies under one central administration without violating anti-trust laws.
The Sherman Antitrust Act proved to be weak against Standard Oil and in 1895, the Supreme Court ruled in, United States v. E.C. Knight Company, that 'manufacture' did not constitute 'trade.' This ruling allowed companies, such as the American Sugar Refining Company to control 98% of the production of sugar.
Ida B. Tarbell, "History of Standard Oil", McClure's Magazine, investigation into the methods Rockefeller used to take over the oil industry; her articles largely shaped public opinion of Rockefeller. Her father's smaller refinery in Pennsylvania was bought out by Standard Oil.

Mass Marketing, Advertising and Consumer Culture

By the 1880s, a national market for consumer goods was made possible by the railroad. Manufacturers used methods of mass production and mass distribution to create the first large-scale consumer business in the U.S.
Gustavus Swift: meatpacking vertically integrated
Henry John Heinz: efficient methods of canning & bottling; network of sales offices and created a buying and storing organization with local farmers.
Ladies Home Journal: nearly 1/2 million subscribers in the 1880s.
Advertisements for Jello-O, Hershey chocolate bars, electric lights and telephone

J.P. Morgan and Finance Capitalism

Business's during remaining decades of the Gilded Age, replaced partnerships and sole proprietorship's with corporate structure.
Finance capitalism: Investment sponsored by banks and bankers.
Bankers brought order and reorganized major industries following the panic of 1893.
Morgan acted as a power broker and reorganized the railroads by using his own capital in the 1890s and created industrial giants such as General Electric and U.S. Steel.
Directly challenged Carnegie in 1898 and paid Carnegie's asking price of $480 million (9.6 billion today) to acquire Carnegie Steel, which "signaled the passing of one age and the arrival of another." Carnegie represented "the old entrepreneurial order, while Morgan represented the new corporate world."
Morgan formed United States Steel in 1901 and became the largest corporation in the world, with a capital of 1.4 billion.

The City and Labor During the Gilded Age

Brooklyn Bridge, fourteen years to build and cost 30 men their lives; caissons
Chicago gave birth to the modern skyscraper.
Between 1870 & 1900, eleven million people moved into the cities. Industrial centers, such as Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York and Cleveland attracted workers.
By the 1870s, the world was conceptualized as "three interconnected geographic regions."
Industrial Core: In the U.S., St. Louis, Chicago, Richmond and Louisville. Outside the U.S., Toronto, Glasgow, Berlin, Warsaw, Barcelona, Milan.
Agricultural Core: Canada, Russia, Poland, much of Scandinavia, southern Spain, the U.S. South and U.S. western plains, central and northern Mexico, hinterlands of Northern China and southern islands of Japan.
Underdeveloped Countries: Caribbean, Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa, India and most of Asia. Ties between this part of the world and the industrial core were cemented by the late 19th century. Occupations included working on plantations and railroads, mines and ports. This was a huge network of labor managed by foreign powers, "that staked out spheres of influence and colonies in this vast region."
Before 1880, the majority of immigrants came from North and Western parts of Europe and included German, Irish, English and Scandinavian immigrants.
After 1880, this pattern shift as immigrants came from South and Eastern parts of Europe and included Italians, Hungarians, Eastern European Jews, escaping the pogroms, Turks, Armenians, Poles, Russians and Slavic immigrants.
Great Fire of 1871 destroyed three square miles and left 18 thousand people homeless.
1882: Chinese Exclusion Act and Angel Island (1910-detention center for Asian immigrants)
Race as a social construct: Apparent with the testimony of an Irish dockworkers who boasted "that he hired only white men to load cargo, and excluded Poles and Italians."
Women often came to U.S. as mothers, wives and daughters, except for Irish women, who were single-wage laborers. Women's occupational role shifted during this time, from domestic, to factory worker to office workers and sales clerks. Women workers were often called 'typewriters' and perceived as indistinguishable from the machines they operated.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877: The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad declared a 10% increase for stockholders and a 10% decreased for railroad workers. ($70 to $30 a day)
Brakemen in Virginia went on strike and this action touched off a nationwide uprising that spread rapidly across the country. As the strike spread, violence erupted, which lead to property damage and deaths. Governors in nine states defined the strike as an "insurrection" and called for federal troops to protect scab crews and maintain peace.
The Knights of Labor: first mass organization of America's working class; 1878 launched a membership drive to organize workers regardless of skill, sex, race, or nationality. Advocated worker's democracy that embraced public ownership of railroads, an income tax, equal pay for women workers and abolition of child labor.
American Federation of Labor: Samuel Gompers desired to organize skilled workers, such as machinists and locomotive engineers and use strikes to obtain objectives such as higher pay and better working conditions.
Chicago May 1 1886: Protest the 12 hour work day and support the eight-hour day. 45,000 workers paraded down Michigan Avenue. However, two days later, strikers attacked scabs outside the McCormick reaper works and police opened fire, kiling or injuring six men. Radicals organized a rally for May 4th in Haymarkey Square to protest the police action. However, when police ordered the crowd to disperse, a incidinary device was thrown into the police ranks. Stunned at first, the police injured more than thirty citizens, killed a number of others and lost seven of their own during this melee. The bomb blast at Haymarket delivered a blow to the eight-hour day movement and to the Knights of Labor.
Tammany Hall, William Marcy Tweed, Democratic Party machine (a political party oragnized at the grass roots level and its purpose was to win elections and reward its folllowers often with jobs on city's payroll. At the bottom of the machine were district captains, who in return for votes, provided services for their constituents, such as obtaining coal to housing a evicted family. At the top were powerful ward bvosses who distrivuted lucrative franchises for subways and streetcars. "They formed a shadow government, more powerful than the city's elected officials. The cost of Tweed's rule was enormous, as the New York City courthouse, with a budget of $250,000 cost taxpayers $1.4 million. This sum represented bribery, kickbacks and the "greasing of many palms."
Growing class divisions emerged in patterns of lesiure during the Gilded Age. The poor and working class relaxed in dance halls, music house, ball parks and amusement arcades. Saloons were central to worker's lives, and served informally as political headquarters, employment agencies and union halls.
Central Park, architect Fredrick Law Olmstead and partner Calvert Vaux 1873
Coney Island, 1890

The Contested West 1870-1900

2008-09-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

The term "West" and its meaning has shifted throughout the decades of American history. Prior to the Gold Rush of 1849, in which California became became the primary focus, the West for settlers lay beyond the Appalachian Mountains. However, by the 1860s, the term "West" referred to the land across the Mississippi River, from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean. With its rich natural resources and fertile soil, the West became contested terrain, as Native Americans struggled to preserve their sovereignty and cultural identity, and as Anglos, Mexicans, Chinese, Jews, Blacks, Scandinavians, the Polish, Russians, Hungarians, Canadians and Turks competed for the promise of land and riches.

As Ray Allen Billington argued, in America's Frontier Heritage (1966), the frontiersmen can be classified into two types: those who came to use the soil and those who came to subdue the soil. Patricia Nelson Limerick, in Legacy of Conquest, (1987) stated that the West is a region marked by a legacy of human & environmental conquest. Limerick explained that, "one person's success often meant another person's loss." Lastly, Gerald D. Nash, (1981) in Creating the West, noted that the interpretation of Western migration can be organized into four perceptions: the West as a frontier, as a region, as urban civilization and as a myth.

As I noted during the lecture, the West was settled by various people from the global community. However, recent scholarship has suggested that the West was not just a male phenomenon. Brenda K. Jackson, in Domesticating the West, (2005), argued that women redefined themselves as leaders of a new western environment through community activism, volunteerism and political participation. Elizabeth (Tappan) became the president of the local chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and later, in 1902, the local chapter historian of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Review Questions & Making Connections: (Possible Paper Topics!)

How did the slaughter of bison contribute to Plains Indian's removal to reservations? The buffalo was a vital source of food and fuel to groups such as the Sioux and the Kiowa. In addition, the buffalo was a key element for indigenous culture and religious life. Westward expansion destroyed the buffalo, as the railroads sponsored kills. Without the buffalo, Native American prospects for independence rapidly decline, forcing the indigenous populations to move onto reservations.

How did industrial technology change mining in Nevada? Small-scale gold miners were replaced by industrial mining following the "Big Bonanza" strike in 1873. The scale of industrial mining also made mining centers, as in the case of Virginia City functioning cities, with school, churches and families. Lastly, industrial mining required capital investment, as technological advancements, such as stamping mills and hydraulic equipment was costly. As industrial mining required a large workforce of immigrants from all over the global community, unions were organized by workers in Nevada to bargain for wages, ($4 per day- the highest), provide nursing care and secure death benefits.

How did business and technology transform agriculture in the West? The development of tools such as the mechanized reaper and plow transformed American agriculture as these technological developments increased production. Agriculture was now big business, as businesses like Miller & Lux used the technique of vertical integration and corporate consolidation to control large sectors of the economy. Innovations, such as the barbed wire, created by Joseph F. Glidden, a sheriff from Illinois, replaced the 'free range' and revolutionized the cattle business. Barbed wire displaced smaller farmers and created a tumultuous and often violent relationship with "fence cutters."

What sorts of hardships did the young women homesteaders encounter in the Dakotas? Women encountered loneliness, severe winters, as in the case of Bess Cobb who described the preparation for long cold winters, and lack of material goods that were once available in their daily lives. However, women on the Dakotas experienced a sense of adventure, as the women described in their letters, their experiences with shack-building as interesting yet difficult. Particularly appealing to women homesteaders was the autonomy of the West, as women made independent decisions in building homes, planting crops, throwing parties and participating in community life. Women homesteaders were faced with challenges, adventure, economic rewards and the ability to meet other challenges, such as the homesteader who now gained confidence from her experiences in the West and attend and graduated from college.

Who:

John M. Chivington: Colonel; his Colorado militia murdered 270 Cheyenne, mostly women and children in November 1864. He justified killing of indigenous children with the terse remark, "Nits make lice." The city of Denver treated Chivington has a hero, but a congressional inquiry castigated the soldiers for their actions. To escape court martial, Chivington reassigned his commission and left the army.

William T. Sherman and Indian Policy: "Remove all to a safe place and then reduce them to a helpless condition."

Phillip Sheridan: Applauded white hide hunters for "destroying the Indian's commissary," which were bison, and forced the indigenous population to choose between starvation and the reservation.

Red Cloud: Great Sioux chief that led many of his community to the reservation, but regretted the decision and his brief acceptance of the second Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. U.S. broke their promise to preserve Indian land and forced to indigenous community to relinquish all territory outside their reservations.

Crazy Horse: Stopped General George Cook at the Battle of Rosebud. Refused to sign the second Treaty of Fort Laramie.

George Armstrong Carter: In 1874, his troops found gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota, which led to the government breaking their promise to Red Cloud.

Crow Chief Plenty Coups: Explained that his alignment with the U.S. centered on the fact that "this course was the only one which might save our beautiful country for us." Fought alongside the U.S. army against their old enemies, the Sioux. The Crow remained on their land and avoided the fate of other tribes shipped to reservations far away.

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce: Came to symbolize the heroic resistance of the Nez Perce. In 1879, he travelled to Washington D.C. to speak for his people, and his speech, which lasted two hours received a standing ovation. The Nez Perce were shipped off to Oklahoma, following the betrayal of General Nelson Miles.

Lozen: A female member of Geronimo's ( a respected shaman of the Chiricahua Apache) band, who rode with the warriors, armed with a rifle and a cartridge belt. In the spring of 1885, Geronimo and his band raided and burned ranches on both sides of the border in the Sierra Madre region.

General Nelson Miles: Replaced General Cook and adopted a policy of hunt and destroy when tracking the Apache raiding parties.

Buffalo Soldiers: Black soldiers who served in the West during the 'Indian' wars; troops number up to 25,000. However, the army pitted people of color against one another, using Black soldiers to fight the Apaches in Arizona Territory and to help subdue the Sioux in the Dakotas.

Brigham Young: Assumed leadership role in the Church of Latter-Day Saints following the mob killing of Joseph Smith in 1844. Polygamy had come under attack as early as 1857 and to counter the criticism of polygamy, the Utah territorial legislature gave women the right to vote in 1870. However, polygamy remained as newly enfranchised women did not "do away with the horrible institution of polygamy."

William F. Cody: "Buffalo Bill" panned for gold, ridden for the Pony Express, scouted for the army, hunted buffalo for the railroad, and became a masterful showman with his touring Wild West company in 1893. His 'Wild West' shows helped to create the myth of the West.

Frederick Jackson Turner: Addressed the American Historical Association on The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Turner noted that by 1890, the census could no longer discern a clear frontier line.

What:

1870 Territories in the West: New Mexico, Utah, Washington, Colorado, Dakota, Arizona, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877); Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881); James Garfield (1881); Grover Cleveland (1885-1892 & 1893-1897); Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893) (Peace Policy: advocated reservations as a way to segregate and control Native Americans) ; William McKinley (1897-1901)

Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania 1879: Became a model for later institutions, as the school pioneered the 'outing system,'- sending students to live with white families during the summer. The policy reflected the school's slogan: "To civilize the Indian, get him into civilization. To keep him civilized, let him stay."

Hampton Institute (1868): An Indian boarding school in Virginia that accepted its first Native American students in 1878. A year before, Congress appropriated funds for education, reasoning, "It was less expensive to educate Indians than kill them."

Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851): Ten thousand Plains Indians met at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to negotiate a treaty that ceded a large portion of their land to allow passage of wagon trains. The U.S. government promised that the rest of indigenous lands would remain inviolate, but did not follow through with that promise.

Santee Uprising (1862): (also called the Dakota Sioux, Minnesota) For years, under the leadership of Chief Little Crow, the Dakota, had pursued a policy of accommodation, ceding land in return for the promise of annuities. However, with his people on the verge of starvation, Little Crow reluctantly led his angry warriors in a desperate campaign against the intruders, killing 1,000 settlers. American troops quelled the 'Great Sioux Uprising' and marched 1,700 Sioux to Fort Snelling, where 400 Sioux were put on trial for murder and 38 died in the largest mass execution in American history.

U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs: A badly managed, weak agency, often acting through corrupt agents-supposedly to minister to the needs of the indigenous populations on reservations.

Treaty of Medicine Lodge: 5000 Comanches, Kiowa and Southern Arapahos gathered at Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas to negotiate a treaty. To preserve their land from white encroachment, the indigenous communities signed the treaty in 1867, agreeing to move to a reservation.

Bozeman Trail (1866): The Cheyenne and the Sioux in Wyoming desired to protect their hunting grounds in the Power River valley, which was threatened by the construction of this trail, which would connect Fort Laramie with the goldfields of Montana.

Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868): Following the death of Captain William Fetterman, who was killed when going through the Sioux nation, the impressive victory led to a second treaty, in which the United States agreed to abandon the Bozeman Trail and guaranteed indigenous control of the Black Hills, land which was sacred to the Lakota Sioux. The treaty was full of contradictions, as the U.S. promised to preserve indigenous land and then decided to force the population to relinquish all territory outside their reservations.

Pine Ridge Reservation, Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne: After refusing to sell the Black Hills to the government, the army responded by issuing an ultimatum ordering all Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne bands onto the Pine Ridge Reservation and threatening to hunt down those who refused.

Dawes Allotment Act: (1887), A new policy designed to encourage assimilation through farming and the ownership of private property. Congress passed this act to abolish reservations and allot lands to individuals as private property. The Dawes Act dealt a damaging blow to indigenous cultures and beliefs.

Ghost Dance Religion: Origins are in 1870s, Paiute shaman Wovoka, combining elements of Christianity and traditional indigenous beliefs and practices to found the religion in 1889. This religion was born of despair with its message of hope. Generally nonviolent, but among the Sioux, this dance took on a more radical flavor, prompting President Benjamin Harris to dispatch several thousand federal troops to Sioux country to handle any outbreak. In December 1890, when Sitting Bull joined the Ghost Dancers in South Dakota, he was shot and killed by police as they tried to arrest him at his cabin on the Standing Rock Reservation.

Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota: Following the murder of Sitting Bull, a melee ensued, and the army opened fire on Sitting Bull's people who had fled the scene and were later apprehended by the Seventh Cavalry, Custer's old regiment near Wounded Knee Creek, SD. As they laid down their arms, a shot rang out, and the solider opened fire. Indigenous men, women and children were brutally murdered in minutes by the army's brutally efficient Hotchkiss rapid-fire guns. More than 200 hundred Sioux lay dead or dying in the snow.

Comstock Lode: (1859) By 1859, miners from the California Gold rush flocked to the Washoe basin in Nevada. There prospectors found what was described as "that blasted blue stuff," and it turned out the Washoe miners had stumbled upon the richest vein of silver ore on the continent. The legendary Comstock Lode is named for prospector Henry Comstock. Technology and capital were needed to finance operations on the Comstock. In 1873, Comstock miners uncovered a new vein of ore, prompting the transition from small-scale industry to corporate enterprise, creating a radically new social and economic environment. (Big Bonanza) Industrial technology changed mining due to scale of industrial mining, capital investment and unions, which allowed the families of workers to claim death benefits and nursing care of injured miners. In addition, as a result of the union, Comstock miners earned $4 a day and were the highest paid miners during this period.

Workingman's Party: (1876) Was formed to fight for Chinese exclusion and in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, effectively barring further Chinese immigration. Racial and cultural animosities stood at the heart of anti-Chinese agitation. Denis Kearney, the fiery San Francisco leader of the movement, made clear this racist bent when he urged legislation to "expel every one of the moon-eyed lepers.

Homestead Act of 1862: Promised 160 acres to any citizen or prospective citizen, male or female, who settled on the land for five years. However, homesteaders still needed as much as $1000 for a house, a team of farm animals, a well, fencing and seed. For every one person who obtained 160 acres of land for homesteading purposes, 640 acres of land were sold for a profit. (1/5)

Great American Desert: Beginning in the 1870s, as land grew scarce on the prairie, farmers began to push farther west, moving into western Kansas, Nebraska, and eastern Colorado.

Chisholm Trail: A cattle track trail that cowboys used, that started in San Antonio, Texas and ended in Abilene Kansas. One of four trails that originated in Texas and moved north. From there, the cattle traveled by boxcar to Chicago, where they sold for as much as $45 a head. More than a million and a half Texas longhorns when to market before the range began to close in the 1880s.

Barbed wire: Revolutionized the cattle business and replaced the open range. In 1874, Joseph F. Glidden, an Illinois sheriff, invented and patented barbed wire. As the largest ranches in Texas began to fence, fights broke out between big ranchers and "fence cutters" who resented to end of the free range. As one person noted, "Those persons, Mexicans and Americans, without land but who had cattle were put out of business by fencing." Fencing forced small-time ranchers who owned land but could not afford to buy barbed wire or sink wells to sell out for the best price they could get. The displaced ranchers, many of them Mexicans, ended up as wage workers on the huge spreads owned by Anglos or European syndicated.

Agribusiness: Farming as big business with the advent of commercial farms. As farming moved onto the prairies and plains, mechanization took command, as steel plows, reapers, mowers, harrows, seed drills, combines and threshers replaced human muscle. Horse drawn implements were replaced with steam-powered machinery. By 1880, a single combine could do the work of twenty men, vastly increasing the acreage a farmer could cultivate.

Henry Miller and Charles Lux: Alsatian immigrants who pioneered the West's mixture of agriculture and business, developing investment strategies and corporate structures to control not only California land but water rights as well. Beginning as meat wholesalers, Miller and Lux expanded their business to encompass cattle, land, and land reclamation projects, such as dams and irrigation systems. By 1870, Miller and Lux owned well over 300,000 acres of grazing land in the central San Joaquin Valley (CA); over half of it derived from former Mexican land grants. Their company shared the main characteristics of other modern enterprises: corporate consolidation, vertical integration and schemes to minimize labor costs and stabilize the workforce.