Although never stated at the time, this slogan provides a useful way to understand what drove American policymakers after the war. The government developed policies to achieve these goals. At other times, it accidentally happened upon programs that helped to achieve them.

First, to try to guarantee no more world wars, the United States joined with other countries to create the United Nations (UN) in April 1945. Second, to avoid future depressions, the U.S. developed policies to keep the economy strong. Finally, the Cold War with the Soviets unexpectedly advanced the goal of no more world wars. Once the Soviets developed their own atomic bomb it changed U.S.-Soviet relations. Atomic warfare threatened the potential end of the world. Understanding that nuclear war could mean their “mutually assured destruction” (MAD), the U.S. and Soviets kept conflicts from escalating into all-out world war.

The Cold War also had an unplanned effect on the U.S. economy. National defense became a focus of the federal government, which spent huge sums of money on the military. National defense became the justification for multi-billion dollar contracts and was even the reason behind such huge projects as the interstate highway system. This spending helped lead to an era of great prosperity by the early 1950s.

The slogan “No More World Wars” does not mean no more wars. The U.S. would fight “limited” wars when necessary.

“No More World Wars and No More Great Depressions”

United Nations (UN): a world congress where the nations discuss issues and resolve disputes on the principle of collective security: all member nations promise to come to the defense of any member invaded or attacked by another. The UN consists of the General Assembly, where all members have a seat, and the Security Council—an executive committee of fifteen nations, including five permanent members: the U.S., Russia, France, Great Britain, and China. The permanent members can veto any UN action.The goal of the UN could be summarized as trying to guarantee peace through diplomacy.

The Baby Boom: The postwar years (1946-1962) saw the largest demographic bubble in U.S. history—70 million babies, almost two-fifths of the 1960 population of 190 million.

The boom resulted not only from soldiers returning home, but also from an increase in marriages among those who delayed marriage because of the Depression and war and from people marrying younger. It did not occur because couples were having more children, rather because more couples were having children.

The boom ended with the advent of the “birth-control pill” in the early 1960s, as couples married later, and as divorce became more accepted.

Levittown: First mass suburban tract built after WWII. William Levitt and Sons created an assembly line approach to home construction. Levitt divided the building process into steps, performed in sequence by a crew that repeated its same tasks on each home. Levitt claimed to finish a house every fifteen minutes. The first Levittown, on Long Island had 17,500 houses and 82,000 residents.

“No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.”

The houses were small by today’s standards and came in two styles, a Cape Cod and a Ranch bungalow. The Cape Cod started at $7000; the ranch a bit higher. According to a Levittown resident in 2008, “you can’t get a house [here] for less than $400,000.”

Along with new construction techniques, postwar homebuilders and buyers took advantage of new tax rules and low-interest loans sponsored by the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration to create the post-war housing boom.

Television: Although invented much earlier, television receivers were not marketed to any great extent before the end of WWII (besides there was nothing to watch). In 1949, 2.3% of U.S. homes had black-and-white sets on which to watch the most popular viewing of the day—wrestling. By 1962, 90% had at least one TV and by the mid-1960s sets were color.

In between, the two major radio networks, CBS and NBC, transformed many of their popular radio shows into television shows (Amos and Andy, The Lone Ranger, etc.) many shown “live.” New TV stars established themselves—none bigger than Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy. Game shows were extremely popular, at least before being discredited in the “Quiz Show Scandal” where viewers of Twenty-One and $64,000 Question discovered that contestants had been given the answers before hand.

Viewers became riveted by news programs and Congressional hearings involving McCarthy’s Red Scare and Kefauver’s investigations into organized crime. Finally, while important and cutting-edge dramas played on programs such as Playhouse 90, most shows were family fare – light, moralist, and suburban – blandly capturing the “American Dream.”

Polio Vaccine: Invented by Jonas Salk in 1952, it all but eliminated child paralysis (poliomyelitis), a disease that affected 58,000 children in 1952 (killing 1,400) and had paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt. Albert Sabin produced an oral vaccine in 1962.

The research was funded by government and through the work of such organizations as the March of Dimes. By 1962, there were only 910 recorded cases in the U.S. Ending polio boosted other disease prevention research and gave hope that science would end other childhood diseases, as well as cancer, heart disease, and stroke

Costing an estimated $129 Billions, it transformed the U.S. economy, changed the relationship of the federal government to the states , reshaped cities, altered the landscape, and changed American culture.

Along with television, radio, other technology, and the growth of the federal government, the Interstate united the country and created a more uniform culture.

“The interstate is a wonderful thing. It makes it possible to go from coast to coast without seeing anything or meeting anybody. If [America] interests you, stay off the interstates.”

Charles Kuralt

Interstate Highway System: Inspired by the German Autobahn, it is a limited-access superhighway that serves a dual-purpose: to promote commerce, and increase national security .

Truman Doctrine: In 1946, tensions between the U.S. and the Soviets grew. Stalin had promised elections in the Soviet–occupied nations (Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary) but the Soviet military squelched political dissent. The Soviets also helped Communist groups in various European nations, most notably in Greece. President Truman promised to help Greeks fighting Communism. He created the Truman Doctrine, in which the U.S. pledged to intervene in any conflict to stop the spread of Communism. It evolved into a strategic policy known as containment.

“Iron Curtain”: Term from Winston Churchill’s speech in 1946, it became the image of the absence of political and economic freedom in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

Red China: Events in Asia cemented the conflict between the U.S. and the Soviets. In 1949, the Chinese civil war ended as Mao Zedong’s (Mao Tse-tung) Communist forces pushed the U.S.-backed Chinese Nationalists out to Taiwan. At the end of the year, Mao and Stalin signed a treaty confirming an alliance against the US. Months later, they gave North Korean leader Kim Il Sung the okay to invade South Korea.

Korean War, 1950-1953: In June 1950, North Korean forces (equipped with Soviet-made weapons) invaded South Korea. Truman pushed a resolution through the U.N. condemning the invasion. The U.N. sent troops (mostly Americans) to free South Korea. In November 1950, Chinese Communists came to North Korea’s defense, invading North Korea to push the U.S. troops back. The world stood on the brink of a world war. But that unimaginable conflict created restraint. Truman did not attack the Chinese. Dwight Eisenhower won the election of 1952 and in August 1953, he settled for a truce. Korea remains divided today.

Are the Soviets winning the Cold War?

Senator Joseph McCarthy: Wisconsin Republican , in 1950, he announced that he had proof there were 57 known Communists in the U.S. State Department and declared that the Soviets were winning the Cold War, touching off the “Second Red Scare.”

In 1954, he turned his attention on Communist infiltration of the U.S. Army in a series of televised hearings.

Opponents of McCarthy circled the wagons: members of both parties called him reckless; the media stepped up their attacks.

Six months after the hearings, the Senate censured him. He died of the effects of alcoholism in 1957.

His name is a noun meaning vicious, unsupported political attacks, a witch hunt: McCarthyism.

Ironically, Venona showed that most of his claims were true.

Sputnik: Following WWII, the U.S. and Soviets began a rivalry of technology. In August 1957, the Soviets tested the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM)--a long-distance missile capable of hitting the U.S. In October, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite.

Many Americans began to panic that the Soviets were winning the Cold War. In what Barack Obama has called a “Sputnik Moment”, Congress, in 1958, created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and enacted the National Defense Education Act to advance training in math, science, and foreign languages.

The Kennedy Administration, 1961-1963

“Ask not”: John Kennedy’s presidency represented, as he said, “a passing of the torch” from the WWI generation (Eisenhower) to the WWII generation. His New Frontier program was meant to spark the imagination of young people by inviting them to volunteer to contribute to society. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he declared in his inaugural address, “ask what you can do for your country.”

A government agency, it called on college-age people to go to developing nations to help grow food and improve health conditions. The first volunteers went to Ghana in 1961. By the end of 1963, 7,300 were serving in 44 countries. Despite its humanitarian value, the programs also expected to help the U.S. Cold War effort by winning the “hearts and minds” of people.

The Peace Corps:

Cuban Missile Crisis: The critical moment of the Kennedy presidency. After pushing JFK around for more than a year, the Soviets went too far, placing nuclear missiles in Cuba. The missiles could target major U.S. cities. Kennedy ordered the Soviets to remove the missiles. The Soviets countered, demanding that the U.S. pull its missiles out of Turkey. Kennedy refused and a six-day stand-off resulted.

The world was never closer to nuclear war. Finally, Khrushchev backed down, removing the missiles. Kennedy claimed victory. What was not known or admitted at the time was that Kennedy had also backed down—he had pulled U.S. missiles out of Turkey.

The crisis scared the U.S. and Soviets so much that they began talks to lessen the nuclear arms race.

Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963): International agreement between the Soviet Union, Britain, and the U.S. banning testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Though a small step, it was a step toward better relations between the USSR and the U.S.

On November 22, 1963, as JFK rode through Dallas in an open limousine, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed him. Arrested the day of the shooting, Oswald was interrogated, but denied doing it. A couple of days after the assassination, Oswald’s quick death left many questions unanswered and has led ever since to speculation of a conspiracy. Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s Vice-POTUS, became POTUS as a result of the murder.ald was killed by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner who claimed he wanted to avenge Kennedy.

Assassination of John F. Kennedy:

Jim Crow America

Case involving school segregation cases. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Plessy precedent, arguing that “separate but equal” can never be equal because of the stigma separation gives blacks. In a second ruling the Court ruled that states must act “with all deliberate speed” to admit students to schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis.

Many Southern leaders and regular citizens rejected the ruling and pledged “massive resistance” to fight desegregation.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS

The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968The fight for civil rights (legal rights guaranteed to citizens) dates back to the colonial era when religious minorities fought for toleration. But the civil rights movement is a specific event, with a beginning and an end, and with a specific cast of characters that dates from the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in 1955 to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968.

The grassroots civil rights movement began a year after the NAACP’s victory in Brown (when the Supreme Court reversed the Plessy doctrine of “separate but equal”). It began in Montgomery, Alabama. On buses, blacks had to ride at the back; if there were no seats in the black section, then they had to stand; if the white section filled up, then they had to give up their seats to whites. In December, a forty-two year old seamstress trained in the tactic of civil disobedience, Rosa Parks, fought back. Tired from a day’s work, she sat down at the front of the black section of a bus. The white section filled up and when a white man told her to give up her seat, Parks refused. She was arrested and spent the night in jail. When her community heard about the incident, it began a boycott of the bus company. Blacks refused to ride the buses, instead walking or car-pooling to work. The boycott lasted more than a year, ending when the Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional.

The key organizations of the Civil Rights Movement were:

• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

• National Urban League• Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)• Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (“Snick”)• Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)• Nation of Islam• Black Panther Party

Not all groups agreed with each other on tactics or strategy. For example, the Nation of Islam advocated self-segregation and violent retaliation. These divisions proved useful to the moderate organizations, such as the SCLC, because they could say that if government did not meet their demands, then African Americans might move to the more radical organizations. Ironically, even though government did meet those demands, the “Movement” still became more radical and violent over time.

The boycott also brought forward a unifying leader of the civil rights movement.

The boycott showed the importance of organizing coherent protests. Indeed, the real story of the “Movement” involves not spontaneous responses to discrimination by individuals, but rather it demonstrates the importance of organizations, training, planning, and adapting.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: The intelligent, articulate, and charismatic head of the SCLC, a coalition of southern religious leaders.

He was the main spokesman for the tactic of “militant non-violent direct action”. It called for blacks to protest segregation by putting themselves in harm’s way to provoke a violent reaction and then not fight back. This way they focused attention on discrimination and won the sympathy of moderate and liberal whites throughout the country.

The SCLC’s most effective use of nonviolent direct action occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. After a week of protest little resulted, the SCLC recruited children to draw attention to discrimination. When they began their march, Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordered the police to use dogs and the fire department to use fire hoses to stop the protest. On the evening newscasts, viewers across the country and around the world saw how fierce massive resistance could become. It was a terrible day, but a major victory for the tactic of nonviolence.

Many organizations joined the NAACP and the SCLC in the fight for justice. SNCC used the tactic of a “sit-in.” The typical sit-in went like this: activists entered a store, sat down at the counter, and waited for service; they would stay there, taking abuse from white customers and not being served, until police came to cart them off to jail. The famous early lunch counter sit-in occurred in 1960 at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro and was led by students from UNC A&T.

On August 28, 1963, civil rights groups held a March on Washington to protest discrimination and force the Kennedy administration to enact a meaningful civil rights law. More than 250,000 people, black and white, marched to the Lincoln Memorial where they gathered and listened to speeches, including King’s “I Have a Dream.” The march marked the high point of the civil rights movement.

Two weeks later, the movement began its slow decline into factionalism when four young girls were killed in the Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Cynthia Wesley Addie Mae Collins Carole Robertson Denise McNair

Bloody Sunday, Selma, Alabama: On March 7, 1965, marchers began a march from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, demanding voting rights. As John Lewis, Hosea Williams, and the nearly 600 marchers crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge, police blocked their way and told them to disperse. The non-violent marchers declared their right to march and the police attacked them. Using tear gas, whips, and clubs, the police wailed on the marchers for several minutes.

The shocking police attack was played-back on news programs for the next several weeks. Another march began two weeks later, reaching Montgomery on the 24th. But it too was not without violence. Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit woman who had joined the march after seeing the events of “Bloody Sunday,” was run off the road and murdered by Klansmen.

The civil rights movement moved north after its victories of 1964 and 1965

In 1964 and 1965 the civil rights movement bore fruit. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council

By 1965, the mood of many blacks had changed. Many were tired of the battles and the struggle and of the violence that they had to put up with. More radical voices started to yell out to meet white violence with black violence. New leaders emerged, calling for Black Power to fight white power. A militant organization called the Black Panthers took up weapons to threaten the overthrow of the white establishment.

1968 marked the last gasp of the movement and nonviolence. Blacks demonstrated to end housing discrimination. They won the last major civil rights legislation: Civil Rights Act of 1968 (Fair Housing Act).

But on April 4th, Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered by James Earl Ray. Upon King’s death, blacks throughout the country took to the streets in riot.

In the end, the civil rights movement can be viewed as a major success if we look at its initial strategy: to end segregation by law (Jim Crow) in the South and elsewhere and to give blacks the same political rights as whites.

If we look at it as a movement to improve race relations throughout the U.S. and to create a society wherein a person is judged by the “content of his character” rather than the color of his skin (as Martin Luther King, Jr., declared), then the movement was a mixed success.

Things have improved for blacks, but many whites have resisted social equality. Rather than live peaceably with blacks many whites fled increasingly black cities for “lily-white” suburbs. The residential segregation that resulted made integration of schools more difficult, keeping the races apart.

The race war of the late 1960s has become a truce that flares into conflict now and again.

The “color line” has been America’s great problem, throughout its history, and it is still not solved.

Betty Friedan: Started the modern women’s liberation movement with her book The Feminine Mystique (1963). She was co-founder of the National Organization for Women. In 1969, she co-founded NARAL (the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws), advocating legalizing abortion.

Equal Rights Amendment

Having won the vote, women’s rights advocates, in the 1920s, called for a constitutional amendment that would ban discrimination on account of gender. They wanted to ensure women access to jobs, to equal pay for those jobs, as well as rights of contract and any other area of public life. With the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s, Congress passed the proposed amendment; it went to the states for ratification.

A counter-movement, named Stop-ERA argued the ERA would end many gender-based benefits that women enjoy in America. Stop-ERA successfully blocked the advance of the amendment and by 1982 its time had run out. The ERA failed.

Women’s Liberation

César Chávez was born in Yuma, Arizona, and had worked as a migrant farm worker in California in his youth. Farm workers had few rights and were not treated fairly. After facing segregation while in the Navy in WWII, he became an advocate for civil rights of Hispanics. With Delores Huerta, he founded the United Farm Workers. The union led a national boycott of grapes during the late 1960s and early 1970s that forced California growers to raise the wages of farm workers.

César Chávez and the Migrant Farm Workers Movement