Unit IX Terms Flashcards
The Bretton Woods Conference
July 1944, in which the new World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) was created by forty-four nations to stabilise trade and finance.
George Kennan, “The Long Telegram”
Kennan asserted that Soviet fanaticism made even a temporary understanding impossible. His widely circulated report fed a growing belief among Americans that only toughness would work with the soviets. Was made after Stalin gave a speech in Feb 1946 that depicted the world as threatened by capitalist acquisitiveness.
The Truman Doctrine
The belief that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
Containment
A policy of firm containment, which is the confrontation with Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world. It would check Soviet expansion and mellow Soviet behaviour.
The Marshall Plan
Sent $12.4 billion to western Europe before the program ended in 1951 (began in 1947). Was made to prevent the world from falling back into an economic depression and inspiring fascism or communism to spread across the country. To stimulate business at home, the legislation required that Europeans spend the foreign-aid dollars in the US on American-made products. The program caused inflation, failed to solve a balance-of-payments problem, took only tentative steps toward economic integration and further divided Europe between “East” and “West”. However, brought impressive western European industrial production and investment and started the region towards self-sustaining economic growth.
The National Security Act
July 1947. The act created the Office of Secretary Defense, later the Department of Defense, to oversee all branches of the armed services. Created the National Security Council (NSC) to advise the president, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct spy operations and information gathering overseas.
The Berlin Airlift
In June 1948, in response to the British, French and Americans fusing together their German zones, fearing a resurgent Germany, the Soviets cut off access to western land to the jointly occupied city of Berlin. In response, Truman ordered a massive airlift of food, fuel and other supplies to Berlin. Soviets finally lifted their blockade in May 1949 and founded the German Democratic Republic, East Germany.
NATO
In April 1949, Truman took the major step of formalizing what was already in essence a military alliance among the US, Canada, and the nations of western Europe. Twelve nations signed a mutual defense treaty, agreeing that an attack on any one of them would be considered an attack on all, and establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Truman officials hoped that NATO would keep western Europeans from embracing communism or even neutralism in the Cold War.
NSC-68
Response to the successful completion of the Russian atomic bomb. Delivered to Truman in April 1950. Predicting continued tension with expansionist communists all over the world and describing “a shrinking world of polarized power,” the report, whose primary author was Nitze, appealed for a much enlarged military budget and the mobilization of public opinion to support such an increase.
The Chinese Civil War; Mao Zedong
The US had long backed the Nationalists of Jiang Jieshi against Mao Zedong’s communists. After WWII, Jiang became unreliable and rejected US advice; government had become corrupt, out of touch and inefficient. Mao began to lean towards the Soviet Side, but because China always maintained a fierce independence, which annoyed the Soviets, a rift formed. Mao resented their refusal for aid in the civil war. He won in September 1949, creation of the People’s Republic of China.
Indochina War
1946-1954. After being asked by a Vietnamese nationalist to help assert independence, the US declined and back France in reestablishing rule in Indochina.
The Korean War
June 1950 - July 1953, was only 5 years after WWII, so Truman had to convince people that if South Korea fell to communism, many other countries would too – the Domino Theory. The UN and the US agreed to back South Korea in the Korean War, believing the USSR and China to be backing the North. However, the USSR was not in fact particularly involved. There were long negotiations about POW and borders, and the war ended with the same border that was there before the war started – the 38th parallel.
The Election of 1960
JFK, Democrat, defeated Nixon, Republican, as JFK appealed significantly more confident and placed the Cold War at the front of his agenda.
The Alliance for Progress
It was created by President Kennedy in 1961 in order to foster economic development in Latin American.
The Peace Corps
Created by President Kennedy in 1961, despatched thousands of American teachers, agricultural specialists and health workers, many of them right out of college, to assist authorities in developing nations.
The Bay of Pigs
April 1961, the CIA trained cuban exiles to land and secure a beachhead in Cuba in order for the Cuban people to rise against Castro and welcome a new government brought in from the US – which would protect US interests –, however, there were no Cubans to meet them and the exiles were captures.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
October 1962, the USSR was sending missiles to Cuba to point at the US and only agreed to remove the missiles if the US removed theirs from Turkey – which were pointed at the Soviet Union. After the USSR place nuclear weapons in cuba, tensions eventually decreased because of the mutual threats each country poised to one another.
National Mental Health Act 1946
Was passed, in large part, because of awareness of the psychological toll of war on America’s veterans. Almost half a million veterans were diagnosed with neuropsychiatric disabilities.
Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill)
In the spring of 1944, Congress unanimously passed the bill, which showed the nation’s gratitude to the men who fought, but also attempted to keep the flood of demobilized veterans (almost all of them male) from swamping the US economy. Unemployment benefits, meant to stagger veterans’ entry into the civilian job market, were paid to about half of veterans. Also provided low-interest loans to buy a house or start a business and stipends to cover the cost of college or technical school tuition and living expenses. Implementation fell to state and local agencies, which allowed for racial discrimination. Fostered the emergence of a national middle-class culture.
Baby Boom
In 1946, after marriage and birth rates had plummeted during the war, the US marriage rate was higher than that of any record-keeping nation in the history of the 20th century. The birth rate soared, and although the boom peaked in 1957, more than 4 million babies were born every year until 1965.
Suburbanization
In the postwar years, white Americans moved to the suburbs. Some moved to escape the crowds and noise of the city. Some moved closer to city jobs. Some white families moved out of urban neighbourhoods because African American families were moving in. Many wanted more political influence and more control over their children’s education. Most who moved to the suburbs wanted their own home, and suburban developments were where affordable housing was. Massive migration of 18 million Americans to the suburbs between 1950 and 1960 from cities, small towns and farms.
Walter Levitt
A builder, in 1947, adapted Henry Ford’s assembly-line methods to revolutionized home building. By 1949, instead of 4 or 5 custom homes per year, Levitt’s company built 180 houses a week. They were very basic with identical floor plans, but had different exteriors.
Federal Housing Administration
The FHA mortgage insurance made low-interest GI mortgages and loans possible, helped in the large scale of suburban development.
Highway Act
Passed in 1956 to create a 42,500-mile interstate highway system, which intended to facilitate commerce and rapid mobilization of the military in case of a threat to national security, also allowed workers to live farther and farther away from their jobs in central cities.
Truman Liberalism
The right to employment, healthcare, education, food and housing. Government is responsible for the welfare of the nation and its citizens. Truman’s legislative program sought to maintain the federal government’s active role in guaranteeing social welfare, promoting social justice, managing the economy, regulating the power of business corporations. Proposed an increase in the minimum wage and national housing legislation offering loans for mortgages.
Full Employment Act
Introduced by congressional Democrats in the winter of 1945, which guaranteed work to all who were able and willing, through public-sector employment if necessary. Supported by Truman. Gutted by Congress, by the time it was signed into law in 1946, key provisions regarding guaranteed work had virtually disappeared, though it did reaffirm government’s responsibility for managing the economy.
Taft-Hartley Act
Allowed states to adopt right-to-work legislation that outlawed “closed shops,” in which all workers were required to join the union if a majority of their number favoured a union shop. Also mandated an 80 day cooling-off period before unions initiated strikes that imperiled national security. Limited union’s ability to expand their membership, especially in the South and West. Truman had vetoed the act, but it was overturned by Congress.
1948 Election
Republican Party nominated Thomas Dewey, the candidate Roosevelt had defeated in 1944. Henry A. Wallace was running on Progressive Party ticket, advocating friendly relations with Soviet union, racial desegregation, and nationalization of basic industries. Democratic Party adopted a pro-civil rights platform, and a group of white southerners created the States’ Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrats), which nominated fiercely segregationist Strom Thurmond. Truman red-baited, sought support from African American voters in northern cities. Most Democrats saw Truman as an appealing moderate. African American voters made the difference.
Truman’s Fair Deal
Pushed forward legislation to support the civil rights of African Americans, including the anti lynching bill that Roosevelt had only given lukewarm support. He proposed a national health insurance program and federal aid for education. However, came to fruition.
Sputnik
The first earth-orbiting satellite, successfully launched by the Soviets in 1957, inspired worry about the nation’s scientific vulnerability.
National Defense Education Act
Response to Sputnik, funded elementary and high-school programs in mathematics, foreign languages, and the sciences and offered fellowships and loans to college students. Cold war attempt to win the “battle of brainpower”.
Military-Industrial Complex
In 1959, federal expenditures climbed to $92 billion, about half of which went to support a large standing military of 3.5 million men and to develop new weapons for the ongoing Cold War. Eisenhower warned that this new “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” and its “total influence – economic, political, even spiritual” threatened the nation’s democratic process.
“Verona”
A top-secret project, code-named “Verona,” decrypted almost three thousand Soviet telegraphic cables that proved Soviet spies had infiltrated the US government agencies and nuclear programs. Intelligence officials resolved to prosecute Soviet spies, but they kept their evidence from the American public so that the Soviets would not realise their codes had been compromised.
Duck and Cover
Used in schools and by the general public as the procedure to follow in the case of a nuclear attack on the US. Children practiced these positions in their school classrooms, learning how to shield their faces from the atomic flash and flying debris in the event of an attack.
House Un-American Activities Committee
Leading the anti communist crusade, known as the HUAC. Created in 1939 to investigate “subversive and un-American propaganda.” It was viciously anti-New Deal. Lost credibility then by charging that film stars were dupes of the Communist Party. In 1947, HUAC used FBI files and testimony of people high up in Hollywood to attack Hollywood.
Hollywood Ten
Members of a group of screenwriters and directors who were sent to prison for contempt of Congress when they refused to “name names” of suspected communists for the HUAC.
Loyalty oath
Demonstration of how university professors also became targets of the growing “witch hunt” in 1949. The board of regents at the University of California Berkeley instituted a loyalty oath for faculty, firing 26 who resisted on principle. Protests from faculty members across the nation forced the regents to back down.
Joseph McCarthy
Republican senator of Wisconsin, who came before an audience in West Virginia and charged that the US State Department was infested with Communists. Not a very credible source, constantly changing the number of communists within the department – had severe drinking problems and a record of dishonesty as a lawyer and judge. However, he crystallized the anxieties many felt as they faced the new and difficult era of American life, and the anti communist excesses of this era became known as McCarthyism.
Internal Security Act
With bipartisan support, was passed by Congress. Required members of “Communist-front” organizations to register with the government and prohibited them from holding government jobs or travelling abroad.
Alger Hiss
State department official accused by Richard Nixon of the HUAC of espionage. In 1950, Hiss was convicted of lying about his contacts with Soviet agents.
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
Arrested for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. They were found guilty of treason and executed in 1953. Though many historians believe they were victims of the witch hunt, there was in fact evidence that they were guilty.
Army-McCarthy Hearings
Held by a Senate subcommittee in 1954, because a showcase for the senator’s abusive treatment of witnesses. McCarthy, apparently drunk, alternately ranted and slurred his words. After he maligned a young lawyer who was not even involved in the hearings, army counsel Joseph Welch protested, “Have you no sense of decency sir,” and his career as a witch hunter ended.
President’s Committee on Civil Rights
Signed in December 1946, several weeks after a black sergeant had his eyes gouged out by police in South Carolina only a few hours after he had been discharged from the army – an atrocity that disturbed Truman –, established committee by executive order. Its purpose was to propose measures to strengthen and protect the civil rights of the American people.
To Secure these Rights
The committee’s report, calling for antilynching and antisegregation legislation and for laws guaranteeing voting rights and equal employment opportunity. First time president had acknowledge the federal government’s responsibility to protect blacks and to strive for racial equality. Became the civil rights movement agenda for the next twenty years.
Employment Board of the Civil Service Commission
Created by one of the two executive orders Truman issued in 1948. Its purpose was to hear charges of discrimination.
Jackie Robinson
In 1947, the black baseball player broke the major league colour barrier and electrified Brooklyn Dodgers fans with his spectacular hitting and base running.
Thurgood Marshall
Head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In the 1940s, him and his colleagues carried forward the plan to devise by Charles Hamilton Houston to destroy the separate-but-equal doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) by insisting on its literal interpretation.
NAACP
National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, founded in 1909. Major player in the fight for racial equality. As a result of NAACP lawsuits, African American students won admission to professional and graduate schools at several formerly segregated state universities. Won victories through Smith v Allwright (1944), which outlawed whites-only primaries held by the Democratic Party in some southern states; Morgan v. Virginia (1946) which struck down segregation in interstate bus transportation, and Shelly v. Kraemer (1948), in which the Court held that racially restrictive covenants could not be legally enforced. In 1954, the NAACP won the history victory that stunned the white South and energized African Americans to challenge segregation: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
Thurgood Marshall argued before the high court, incorporated school desegregation cases from several states. The Court concluded that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”. But though it overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, it did not demand immediate compliance. A year later, the Court finally ordered school desegregation, but only “with all deliberate speed”.
Chief Justice Earl Warren
Wrote the Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board. As California’s attorney general, he had pushed for internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and had come to regret that decision.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
In 1955, Rosa Parks, a department store seamstress and longtime NAACP activist, was arrested when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her arrest gave local black women’s organizations and civil rights groups a cause around white to organize a boycott of the city’s bus system. They selected Martin Luther King Jr. as their leader. During the year-long boycott, blacks young and old maintained their boycott through heavy rains and steamy heat of summer. With the bus company near bankruptcy, and downtown merchants suffering from declining sales, city officials adopted harassment tactics to bring an end to the boycott, but they persisted, and 13 months after it began, the Supreme Court declared Alabama bus segregation laws unconstitutional.
Martin Luther King Jr
MLK Jr was a 26 year old Baptist minister with a recent Ph.D from Boston University. Committed to transforming the potential of Christian love and schooled in the teachings of India’s leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, King believed in nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. By refusing to obey unjust and racist laws, he hoped to focus the nation’s attention of the immorality of Jim Crow. Persisted even as opponents bombed his house and he was jailed for “conspiring” to boycott.
Emmett Till
A 14 year old boy from Chicago who was beaten, mutilated and murdered by white men in Mississippi in August 1955, because they took offence at the way he spoke to a white woman.
White Citizens’ Councils
Businesses and professional people created it for the express purpose of resisting the school desegregation order. The council brought their economic power to bear against black civil rights activists.
The Southern Manifesto
This document was issued by 101 congressmen and senators from 11 southern states, all Democrats. Condemned the Brown decision as an “unwarranted exercise of power by the Court,” which violated the principle of states’ rights, and condemned those states that sought to “resist forced integration by any lawful means.”
Little Rock Nine
In September 1957, Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus defied the court-supported segregation plan for Little Rock’s Central High School. He went on television the night before school began to warn that any black students who attempted to enter the school that “blood would run in the streets”. 8 black teenagers tried to enter the school but they were turned away by the Arkansas National Guard troops sent by Faubus. The ninth student was surrounded by jeering whites and narrowly escaped the mob. The “Little Rock Nine” were granted entrance when a federal judge intervened, and Eisenhower dispatched 1000 army paratrooper to guard the students for the rest of the year.
Civil Rights Act 1957
Created the United States Commission on Civil Rights to investigate systemic discrimination, such as in voting. Was another federal recognition of the centrality of civil rights.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
In 1957, MLK Jr. became the first president of the SCLC, organized to coordinate civil rights activities.
Greensboro Sit-ins
In a challenge to segregation, young men sat down at the all-white lunch counter in Greensboro, and inspired a movement in which more than 70,000 Americans – most of them college students – had participated. City by city, they challenged Jim Crow segregation at lunch counters in the South and protested at northern branches that practiced segregation in their southern stores.
