16: A People's War? Flashcards
True or False: When a resolution was introduced in the senate in 1934 asking senate and president to express “surprise and pain” at what the Germans were doing to the Jews and ask restoration of Jewish rights, the state department “caused this resolution to be buried in committee”
True
Did the U.S. provide aid to Spain when a fascist rebellion took place in 1936?
No
True or False: Hitler’s attacks on the Jews brought the US into WWII
False
Which event caused America to join WWII?
Attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941
Which measures di the US take against Japan in summer 1941 which led to the attack on PH?
Total embargo on scrap iron and oil
The records show that a White House conference two weeks before Pearl Harbor __________ a war and discussed how it should be _________”
Anticipated; justified
Despite the Atlantic charter released by FDR and Churchill claiming to support self-government and anti-colonialism, the Americans assured the French of this
That they would be allowed to keep their empire after the war
Executive order 9066, signed by Roosevelt in 1942, gave the army what powers?
To arrest every Japanese-American on the West Coast (110,000) and bring them out of their homes to concentrations camps
True or False: US communists organized severe opposition to WWII
False, they supported it mostly
What did the Smith Act of 1940 do?
Made the Espionage Act apply in peacetime
Where was the climax of British and American bombing which killed 100,000?
Dresden
What excuse was given for the atomic bombings of Japan?
To prevent a deadlier invasion and end the war quickly
Why was America in a rush to end the war with Japan before August 8th?
They wanted Japan to surrender to them before the Russians joined the fight so that they could occupy post-war Japan
What does the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey say about the reasons Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen?
They were chosen as targets “because of their concentration of activities and population”
Charles E. Wilson, president of General Electric during the war, suggested a “permanent ___ economy”
War
The Truman doctrine began with this
A 1947 speech in which he asked for $400 million in military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey, saying that he US must help “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures” (this was denouncing the left-wing rebellion in Greece fighting against a right-wing dictatorship)
When the North Koreans invaded South Korea, the U.S. asked this body’s members to help repel the armed attack
U.N.
How many Koreans died in the Korean War?
2,000,000
Despite claiming to be fighting for the restoration of peace, the U.S. pushed into North Korea and brought this country into the war
China
Between the launch of Truman’s security program in March 1947 (executive order 9835) and December 1952, 6.6 million persons were investigated for disloyalty/espionage. How many cases of espionage were uncovered?
0
What made it easier for the US to drum up anti-communist sentiment after WWII?
Multiple communist victories (Czechoslovakia, China, blockading Berlin, first Atom bomb)
What, besides communist victories, worried the US after WWII (global politcs)
Anti-colonial rebellions (Indochina, Indonesia, Philippines)
Indochina, China, Korea, and the Philippines were what type of communist movements?
Local, not Russian aggressions (anti-imperialist wave)
The Committee or the Negro in the arts, the League of American writers were on this list, in which membership to one of the groups on the list could be used to determine “disloyalty”
List of totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive organizations
Who was Julius Rosenberg (bonus: who was Morton Sobell)
A man sentenced to the electric chair for sending Atom bomb parts schematics to the Soviets based on shady testimony from 2 men who were themselves indicted and in dire straits (bonus: man sentenced for 30 years as co-conspirator for allegedly bringing Julius a film cannister)
Truman’s Justice Department prosecuted the leaders of this party successfully in the early 50s, driving the rest of the party underground
The communist party
During what decade did the US military budget start to balloon?
1950s
Which 1948 plan gave $16 billion dollars to European countries over 4 years
The Marshall Plan
What did Truman’s Secretary of state say about the Marshall Plan?
That the policy of relief and reconstruction was chiefly installed as “a matter of national self-interest”
What did the US do in Guatemala in 1954?
Overthrew a legally elected government with an invasion force of CIA trained mercenaries and American fighter planes, putting into power Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas
The Guatemalan government of 1954 is described by Zinn as what?
The most democratic they ever had, left-of-center socialist, but not communist
What decision by Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala) was most unsettling to the US?
Expropriated 234,000 acres of land owned by United Fruit
What did President Kennedy say 4 days before the Bay of Pigs invasion
That the US armed forces would not intervene in Cuba (technically true, but the sentiment was a complete lie)
New York Times’ columnist James Reston described JFK as what political leaning?
Centrist, having moved from the left, encouraging job creation, low wage demands to compete in global markets, and soft on civil right ambitions, refusing to outlaw discrimination in government-insured housing