What is so nifty about the 50s?

By the light of the atomic bomb

Better dead than Red!

•1945 -1989

•Promise and Menace

•Baby boomers

•Fantastic standard of living

•Welfare state (elderly)

•Opportunities for women

•Welcome immigrants

•Civil rights and AAs

•Activist foreign policy PLASTICS! - great new inventions

1945

End of WWII

1950

Korean WarMcCarthyism

1958-1970s

Vietnam WarGreat Society

FeminismCivil RightsWatergate

1980s

ConservatismRepublicanismTechnologiesComputers

Berlin Wall comes downDisco

20 years of economic success!

What you should be aware of:

• By raising educational levels and stimulating construction of the housing industry the GI Bill profoundly shaped the entire industry of postwar America

The Montgomery

GI Bill

This Century With Peter Jennings

What you should be aware of:

We made $ in WWII

Permanent war economy -Military budgets - Military Industrial Complex - R and D

Deals in the Middle East: Israel (Palestine) vs. Arabs (read Leon Uris’ Exodus)

Highway systems, air conditioning, electricity

Agricultural machinery and production levels

1947 Taft Hartley Act - unions take noncommunist oath - Unions can’t overcome the South/women work force - Unions peak in 1950s and decline in U.S. thereafter

Population and therefore political shifts: *broke historic grip of the North

Yalta Conference• February 1945 “Big Three” Churchill, Stalin and FDR met to

create a post war agreement.

• Agreed to divide Germany into 4 zones controlled by allies.

• Berlin also divided into 4 zones (located in Soviet Zone)

• Poland – US and GB wanted the people of Poland to choose their government.

• Stalin insisted for security, Poland had to have a Soviet friendly government.

• Compromise – US agreed to recognize soviet government provided they include non- communist members and that free elections be held as soon as possible.

• Stalin never holds free elections

Cold War

•Quietly behind the battles and bombs, American diplomats were working hard to make sure that when the war ended American economic power would be second to none....we would penetrate areas where England had been dominating....our massive economic machine needed more

than just domestic markets... the world markets would be ours

•Case in point: Middle East and oil

Howard Zinn A People’s History of the United States

The Term “Iron Curtain” came from a speech given by Winston Churchill at an American University in 1945.

The Division of Europe between East and West. Communism in the East v. Capitalism in the West

New international economic order based on partnership between gov’t and big businessInternational Monetary Fund - regulate

internat’l exchanges of currency; voting proportional to capital ($) contributed, so American dominance was assured.

Internat’l Bank of Reconstruction and Development - set up to help and its 1st objective was to “promote foreign investment.” Howard Zinn

United Nations was to promote cooperation to prevent future wars...but it was dominated by Western imperialist countriesWas the war fought to correct Hitler’s claim

of white race supremacy?

• U.S. came close to fascism itself with internment of Japanese Americans

• African Americans: “The Army jim-crows us. The Navy only lets us serve as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers & unions shut us out. Lynchings continue. We are the disenfranchised, jim-crowed, spat upon.. What more could Hitler do than that?” Howard Zinn

Iron Curtain

• British prime minister Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech (1946) illustrated the division within Europe at that time. Following World War II, Europe had clearly been divided into two political and economic systems supported by two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States.

• The Soviet Union occupied countries in Eastern Europe (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria) after the war, imposing Communist rule over them.

• The western democracies of Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium, along with allies such as Canada and the United States, were in opposition to the spread of Communism in Europe.

• In his speech, Churchill described the conflict this way: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Churchill was outlining the ideological conflict between Soviet Communism and democratic capitalism

Truman Doctrine• 1st application of foreign

policy of containment and 1st time US strayed from G. Washington’s Farewell Address on maintaining peacetime isolationEvents that led to the Truman

Doctrine:•George Kennan’s analysis of Soviet behavior•Soviet reluctance to leave Iraq•Difficulty in implementing Potsdam agreements•Inability to reach an accord to control atomic energy (Bernard Baruch Plan)•Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech in Fulton, Missouri•Both Houses return a Republican majority in 1946•England announces she can no longer provide aid to Greece & Turkey

Truman Doctrine

• Sec. of State Acheson - Containment Foreign Policy

• Greece and Turkey

• invasion of Iraq 2002 - U.S. and Turkish airfield bases in Turkey?

Marshal Plan 1948$16 BILLION in economic aid to Western European countries in 4 years -

• economic aim - build up markets for American exports

• political motive - Communist parties in Italy and France were strong and the US used pressure/money to keep Communists out of cabinets of those countries

• *yeah, humanitarian aid but even more...a matter of national self-interest

Economic/Political Aid from the U.S.

•From 1952 on, foreign aid was more and more designed to build up military power in non-Communist countries.

•1952-1962: $50 BILLION in aid to ninety countries and only $5 billion was for non-military aid

Executive Order 9835

-issued 1947•Program to search out any “infiltration of disloyal persons in the U.S.”

•Great wave of hysteria erupts

•Even membership in “sympathetic associations” like Chopin Cultural Center - League of American Writers- Nature Association (watch those commie pink tree huggers) - People’s Drama

“Infiltration of disloyal persons in the U.S.”•and why not? after all...

1.1948 Communist party in Czechoslovakia ousted the non-Communists from rule

2.Soviet Union blockaded Berlin - jointly occupied city isolated inside Soviet sphere of East Germany - forcing the U.S. to airlift supplies

3.The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb

4.Colonial people demanding independence: Indochina (Vietnam) ag. the French; in Indonesia ag. Dutch; Philippines ag. U.S.

5.China going red under Mao Tse Tung after Chiang Kai-Shek ousted to Taiwain

Berlin crisis convinced Americans that they needed a Military alliance with Western Europe.

1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO members agreed to come to the aid of one

another if one was attacked.1955 – US and NATO members agreed to let West

Germany rearmPrompted the Soviet Union to create the Warsaw

Pact – a military alliance of Soviet Union and other Eastern European nations.

Korean War 1950-1953After WWII Korea was split between the North (Soviet influenced) communist and the South (American sphere) right-wing dictatorship

When North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel into South Koream, the United Nations, dominated by the U.S., asked its members to “rebel the armed attack.”

The American army became the UN army

Howard Zinn

Korean War 1950-1953The UN resolution was to, “repel the attack and restore peace”

• American/UN armies after pushing North Koreans back across the 38th parallel, advanced all the way up through North Korea to the Yalu River on the border of China

• This provoked the Chinese into entering the war. The Chinese then swept southward and the war stalemated back on the 38th parallel

• Where it still sits today...the largest armed border in the world Howard Zinn

The Results of theKorean War 1950-1953

The Korean War mobilized liberal opinion behind the war

It justified a sustained policy of intervention abroad

It justified the militarization of the economy at home

MacArthur also got fired....by Pres TrumanHoward Zinn

Joe McCarthy- Jr. Senator from Wisconsin - looking for a political cause

Wheeling, W. Va; speaking to the Women’s Republican ClubHolding up some papers and shouting: “I have here in my hand a list of 205- a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Dept.”Next day, in Salt Lake City, McCarthy claimed he had a list of 57 (numbers kept changing) such Communists in the State Dept.

Shortly afterward, on the Senate floor, he appeared with 100 dossiers from the State Dept loyalty files. The files were 3 years old and most of the people no longer worked for the State Dept but he claimed they were, “Communistically inclined” or active traveler became, “active Communist” and so on

Howard Zinn

He insisted: Communism won in China because of softness on Communism in the American gov’t

McCarthyism

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg 1950

(shades of Sacco and Vanzetti)

Large-circulation newspapers have articles like:

“How Communists Get That Way”“Communists are After Your Child”MoviesI Married a CommunistI Was a Communist for the FBI

McCarthyismMickey Spillane published in 1951 One Lonely Night (3 million copies sold) in which the hero, Mike Hammer, says:

“I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on my hands. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it...They were Commies...red sons-of-bitches who should have died long ago....”