C H A P T E R 2 7

Cold War America

1945–1960

I. The Cold War Abroad

A. Descent into Cold War, 1945–1946

1. Roosevelt had been able to work with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, and in part as a memorial to Roosevelt, the Senate approved America’s participation in the United Nations in 1945.

2. After Yalta, the Soviets made no move to hold the promised elections and rebuffed western attempts to reorganize Soviet-installed governments in its European “sphere of influence.”

3. At the 1945 Potsdam Conference, President Harry Truman was in a position of strength because the United States had the atom bomb and the Soviets did not, so he took a hard line against Soviet expansion.

4. At Potsdam, the Allies agreed to disarm Germany, dismantle its military production facilities, and permit the occupying powers to extract reparations.

5. Plans for future reunification of Germany stalled, and the foundation was laid for what would later become the division of Germany into the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany and the Communist German Democratic Republic.

6. The failure of the Baruch Plan to maintain a U.S. monopoly on nuclear arms while preventing their development by other nations signaled the beginning of a frenzied nuclear arms race between the two superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union.

B. The Truman Doctrine and Containment

1. As tensions mounted, the United States increasingly perceived Soviet expansionism as a threat to its own interests, and a new policy of containment began to take shape.

2. The Truman Doctrine called for large-scale military and economic assistance in order to prevent communism from taking hold in Greece and Turkey, which in turn lessened the threat to the entire Middle East.

3. The appropriation reversed the postwar trend toward sharp cuts in foreign spending and marked a new level of commitment to the cold war.

4. The Marshall Plan sent relief to devastated European countries and helped to make them less susceptible to communism; the plan required that foreign-aid dollars be spent on U.S. goods and services.

5. Truman’s plan for economic aid to European economies met with opposition in Congress until a Communist coup occurred in Czechoslovakia in February 1948.

6. Over the next four years, the United States contributed nearly $13 billion to a highly successful recovery;Western European economies revived, opening new opportunities for international trade.

7. Truman countered a Soviet blockade ofWest Berlin with airlifts of food and fuel; the blockade, lifted in May 1949, made West Berlin a symbol of resistance to communism. 8. In April 1949, under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pact, twelve nations agreed that an armed attack against one of them would be considered an attack against all of them.

9. NATO agreed to the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in May 1949; in October, the Soviets created the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). 10. The Soviets organized the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1949 and the military Warsaw Pact in 1955.

11. In September 1949, American military intelligence had proof that the Soviets had detonated an atomic bomb; this revelation called for a major reassessment of American foreign policy. 12. The National Security Council (NSC) gave a report, known as NSC-68, that recommended the development of a hydrogen bomb and called for increased taxes in order to finance defense building.

13. The beginning of the Korean War helped to transform the NSC-68 recommendations into reality.

C. Containment in Asia and the Korean War 1. American policy in Asia was based as much on Asia’s importance to the world economy as on the desire to contain communism.

2. After dismantling Japan’s military forces and weaponry, American occupation forces began the job of transforming the country into a bulwark of Asian capitalism.

3. In China, a civil war had been raging since the 1930s between Communist forces, led by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and conservative Nationalist forces, under Jiang Jieshi.

4. For a time the Truman administration attempted to help the Nationalists until they proved intransigently corrupt; in October 1949 the People’s Republic of China was formally established under Mao, and Jiang’s forces fled to Taiwan.

5. The “China lobby” led the United States to refuse to recognize “Red China”; instead, the United States recognized the exiled Nationalist government and blocked China’s admission to the United Nations (UN).

6. At the end ofWorld War II, both the Soviets and the United States had troops in Korea; as a result, Korea was divided at the thirty-eighth parallel into competing spheres of influence. 7. The Soviets supported a Communist government, led by Kim Il Sung, in North Korea; and the United States backed a Korean nationalist, Syngman Rhee, in South Korea.

8. On June 25, 1950, North Koreans invaded across the thirty-eighth parallel; Truman asked the United Nations Security Council to authorize a “police action” against the invaders. 9. The Security Council voted to send a “peacekeeping” force to Korea, and Truman ordered U.S. troops to go there; General Douglas MacArthur headed the UN forces.

10. Given domestic opinions and a stalemate in Korea, Truman and his advisors decided to work toward a negotiated peace; they did not want large numbers of U.S. troops tied down in Asia.

11. MacArthur, who believed that the future of the United States lay in Asia and not in Europe, tried to execute his own foreign policy involving Korea and Taiwan and was drawn into a Republican challenge of Truman’s conduct of the war.MacArthur was relieved of his command in Korea and Japan; the decision to relieve him was not a popular one at home. 12. Two years after truce talks began, an armistice was signed in July 1953; Korea was divided near the original border at the thirty-eighth parallel, with a demilitarized zone between the countries.

13. Truman committed troops to Korea without congressional approval, setting a precedent for other undeclared wars.

D. Eisenhower and the “New Look” of Foreign Policy 1. Eisenhower’s “New Look” in foreign policy continued America’s commitment to containment but sought less expensive ways of implementing U.S. dominance in the cold war struggle against international communism. 2. One of Eisenhower’s first acts as president was to use his negotiating skills in order to bring an end to the Korean War.

3. Eisenhower then turned his attention to Europe and the Soviet Union; Stalin died in 1953, and after a struggle, Nikita S. Khrushchev emerged as his successor in 1956.

4. Soviet repression of the 1956 Hungarian revolt showed that American policymakers had few options for rolling back Soviet power in Europe, short of going to war with the Soviet Union.

5. Under the “New Look” defense policy, the United States economized by developing a massive nuclear arsenal as an alternative to more expensive conventional forces. 6. The U.S. Strategic Air Command had a Distant Early Warning line of radar stations installed in Alaska and Canada.

7. By 1958, both the United States and the Soviets had intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and they were both carrying out atmospheric testing of the hydrogen bomb.

8. The arms race curtailed the social welfare programs of both nations by funneling resources into weapons.

9. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was created to complement the NATO alliance in Europe.

10. U.S. policymakers tended to support stable governments, as long as they were not Communist; some American allies were governed by dictatorships or repressive right-wing regimes.

11. The Central Intelligence Agency moved beyond intelligence gathering into active, albeit covert, involvement in the internal affairs of foreign countries.

12. In 1953 the CIA helped to overthrow Iran’s nationalist premier after he seized control of British oil properties, and in 1954 the CIA helped to support a coup against a duly elected government in Guatemala.

13. The American policy of containment soon extended to new nations emerging in the Third World.

14. The United States often failed to recognize that indigenous or nationalist movements in emerging nations had their own goals and were not necessarily under the control of Communists.

15. On May 14, 1948, Zionist leaders proclaimed the state of Israel; Truman quickly recognized the new state, alienating the Arabs but winning crucial support from Jewish voters.

16. In early 1957, after the Suez Canal crisis, the Eisenhower Doctrine stated that American forces would assist any nation in the Middle East requiring aid against communism. 17. Eisenhower invoked the doctrine when he sent troops to aid King Hussein of Jordan and when he sent troops to back a pro-United States government in Lebanon.

18. U.S. attention given to developments in the Middle East in the 1950s reflected a growing desire for access to steady supplies of oil, a desire that increasingly affected foreign policy.

II. The Cold War at Home

A. Postwar Domestic Challenges

1. Government spending dropped after the war, but consumer spending increased, and unemployment did not soar back up with the shift back to civilian production.

2. When Truman disbanded the Office of Price Administration and lifted price controls in 1946, prices soared, producing an annual inflation rate of 18.2 percent.

3. The Employment Act of 1946 introduced federal fiscal planning on a permanent basis to achieve full employment, but the legislation was ineffective because it did not mandate planning measures or set clear economic priorities. 4. Inflation prompted workers to demand higher wages; workers mounted crippling strikes in the automobile, steel, and coal industries. 5. Truman ended a strike by the United Mine Workers and one by railroad workers by placing the mines and railroads under federal control;

Democrats in organized labor were outraged. 6. In 1947 the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, a rollback of several prounion provisions of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.

7. Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley Act countered some workers’ hostility to his earlier antistrike activity and kept labor in the Democratic fold.

8. In the election of 1948, the Republicans again nominated Thomas E. Dewey for president and nominated Earl Warren for vice president. 9. Democratic left and right wings split off: the Progressive Party nominated Henry A.Wallace for president; the States’ Rights Party (Dixiecrats) nominated Strom Thurmond.

10. To the nation’s surprise, Truman won the election handily, and the Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress.

B. Fair Deal Liberalism

1. The Fair Deal was an extension of the New Deal’s liberalism, but it gave attention to civil rights, reflecting the growing importance of African Americans to the Democratic coalition. 2. Congress adopted only parts of Truman’s twenty-one point plan: a higher minimum wage, an extension of and increase in Social Security, and the National Housing Act of 1949.

3. The activities of certain interest groups—

Southern conservatives, the American Medical Association, and business lobbyists—helped to block support for the Fair Deal’s plan for enlarged federal responsibility for economic and social welfare.

C. The Great Fear

1. As American relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated, a fear of communism at home started a widespread campaign of domestic repression, often called “McCarthyism.”

2. In 1938, a group of conservatives had launched the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to investigate Communist influence in labor unions and New Deal agencies. 3. In 1947, HUAC intensified the “Great Fear” by holding widely publicized hearings on alleged Communist activity in the film industry. 4. In March 1947, Truman initiated an investigation into the loyalty of federal employees; other institutions undertook their own antisubversive campaigns.

5. Communist members of the labor movement were expelled, as were Communist members of civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the National Urban League.

6. In early 1950, Alger Hiss, a State Department official, was convicted of perjury for lying about his Communist affiliations; his trial and conviction lent credibility to the paranoia about a Communist conspiracy and contributed to the rise of Senator Joseph Mc-Carthy.

7. McCarthy’s accusations of subversion in the government were meant to embarrass the Democrats; critics who disagreed with him were charged with being “soft” on communism. 8. McCarthy failed to identify a single Communist in government, but cases like Hiss’s and the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg lent weight to McCarthy’s allegations. 9. McCarthy’s support declined with the end of the Korean War, the death of Stalin, and when his hearings as he investigated subversion in the U.S. Army were televised revealing his smear tactics to the public.

D. “Modern Republicanism”

1. In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower secured the Republican nomination and asked Senator Richard M. Nixon to be his running mate. 2. The Eisenhower administration set the tone for “modern Republicanism,” an updated party philosophy that emphasized a slowdown, rather than a dismantling, of federal responsibilities. 3. The Democrats nominated Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois for president and Senator John A. Sparkman for vice president. 4. Eisenhower was popular with his “I Like Ike” slogan, his K1 C2 (Korea, Communism, Corruption) formula, and his campaign pledge to go to Korea to end the stalemate.

5. As president, Eisenhower hoped to decrease the need for federal intervention in social and economic issues yet simultaneously avoid conservative demands for a complete rollback of the New Deal.

6. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was founded in 1958, the year after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first satellite.

7. To advance U.S. technological expertise, Eisenhower persuaded Congress to appropriate funds for college scholarships and for research and development.

8. The creation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 consolidated government control of social welfare programs.

9. The Highway Act of 1956 was an enormous public works program that surpassed anything undertaken during the New Deal.

III. The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue A. Civil Rights under Truman 1. Truman offered support for civil rights not only because he wanted to solidify the Democrats’ hold on African American voters but also because he was concerned about America’s image abroad.

2. Truman appointed the National Civil Rights Commission in 1946, and he signed an executive order to desegregate the army in 1948. 3. Southern conservatives blocked Truman’s proposals for a federal antilynching law, federal protection of voting rights, and a federal agency to guarantee equal employment opportunity.

B. Challenging Segregation

1. Legal segregation of the races still governed southern society in the early 1950s; whites and blacks did not share the same room in restaurants or even the same water fountains.

2. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

(1954), the Supreme Court overturned the

long-standing “separate but equal” doctrine of

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

3. Over the next several years, the Supreme Court used the Brown case to overturn segregation in public recreation areas, transportation, and housing.

4. In the Southern Manifesto of 1956, southern members of Congress denounced the Brown decision as an abuse of judicial power and encouraged their constituents to defy the ruling. 5. In response to the Little Rock school-integration incident, Eisenhower became the first president since Reconstruction to use federal troops to enforce the civil rights of blacks. 6. Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat to a white person prompted the Montgomery bus boycott; the Supreme Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional in 1956.

7. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was catapulted into national prominence after the bus boycott; in 1957, he and other black clergy founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta.

8. While the SCLC and the NAACP achieved only limited victories in the 1950s, they laid the organizational groundwork for the dynamic civil rights movement of the 1960s.

C. The Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War 1. The cold war affected civil rights because of the way in which the hunt for internal subver-sives stifled dissent in American culture in the late 1940s and 1950s.

2. This suppression shaped the direction of the civil rights movement by minimizing the attention given to class and economic issues and focusing instead on the legal discrimination and violence toward African Americans in the south.

3. Black activists invoked the cold war as justification for pursuing racial reform; U.S. presidents increasingly had to view black civil rights at home in the context of international politics.

IV. The Impact of the Cold War

A. Nuclear Proliferation

1. After the 1950s, federal investigators documented a host of illnesses, deaths, and birth defects among families of veterans who had worked on weapons tests and among “downwinders.” 2. According to a 1993 Department of Energy report, many subjects used in the Atomic Energy Commission’s experiments in the 1940s and 1950s did not know that they were being irradiated. 3. Bomb shelters and civil defense drills were daily reminders of the threat of nuclear war;

Eisenhower himself had second thoughts about the Mutual Assured Destruction policy. 4. Eisenhower tried to negotiate an arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union, but in 1960, progress was cut short when an American spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory.

B. The Military-Industrial Complex

1. The Department of Defense evolved into a massive bureaucracy that profoundly influenced the postwar economy; with the government paying part of the bill, corporations developed products with unprecedented speed.

2. In his final address in 1961, Eisenhower warned against the growing power of what he termed the “military-industrial complex,” which by then employed 3.5 million Americans.