Transcript Chapter 37 pages 895-902 - apush

The Eisenhower Era
Chapter 37
part-3
Eisenhower Republicanism at Home
• Eisenhower came into the White
House pledging a policy of “dynamic
conservatism,” - that he would be
liberal with people, but conservative
with their money.
• Ike decreased government spending
by decreasing military spending, tried
to transfer control of offshore oil fields
to the states, and triedto curb the TVA
by setting up a private company to take
its place.
 His secretary of health, education, and
welfare condemned free distribution of
the Salk anti-polio vaccine as being
socialist.
 Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft
Benson tackled agriculture issues, but
despite the government’s purchase of
surplus grain which it stored in giant
silos costing Americans $2 million a
day, farmers didn’t see prosperity.
• Eisenhower also cracked
down on illegal Mexican
immigration (a direct reversal
from the bracero program) by
rounding up 1 million
Mexicans and returning them
to their native country in 1954.
With Indians, Ike
proposed ending the lenient
FDR-style treatment toward
Indians and reverting to a
Dawes Severalty Act-style
policy toward Native
Americans. However, due to
protest and resistance, this
was disbanded.
Operation Wetback Thousands of illegal Mexican
immigrants were forcibly repatriated to Mexico in the
federal government’s 1954 roundup operation, which
was promoted in part by the Mexican government.
The man in this photograph is being pulled across the
border by a Mexican official, while an American spectator
tries to pull him back into the United States.
• Still, Eisenhower did keep many of the
New Deal programs, since some, like
Social Security and unemployment
insurance, had already become
nationally accepted and depended upon
by the American people.
• In some respects, Ike even did the New
Deal programs one better, such as his
backing of the Interstate Highway Act,
which built 42,000 miles of interstate
freeways – a far larger and more
expensive project than anything in
FDR’s New Deal.
•
•
Actually, Eisenhower only balanced the budget three times in his eight years of
office, and in 1959, he incurred the biggest peacetime deficit in U.S. history up to
that point.

Critics said that he was economically timid, blaming the president for the sharp
economic downturn of 1957-58.
Also, the AF of L merged with the CIO to end 20 years of bitter division in labor
unions. The AFL-CIO is the most powerful union in America today.
A New Look in Foreign Policy
• Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stated that the policy of containment
was not enough and that the U.S. needed to push back communism and
liberate the peoples under it. This became known as “rollback.”
•Eisenhower’s "new look" policy was
called massive retaliation - the
greater reliance on air power and the
deterrent power of nuclear weapons
than on the army and navy.
•The U.S. created the Strategic Air
Command (SAC). This was an airfleet
of superbombers equipped with cityflattening nuclear bombs. These
fearsome weapons would inflict
"Massive Retaliation" on the enemy,
and were also a “great bang for the
buck.”
At the same time, Eisenhower sought a thaw in
the Cold War through negotiations with the new
Soviet leaders, who came to power after
dictator Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953.
At first, the Soviets were surprisingly
cooperative, and the new premier, Nikita
Khrushchev publicly denounced Stalin’s
brutality.
In the end, the touted “new look” proved illusory.
Khrushchev rudely rejected Ike’s call in 1955 for
an “open skies” mutual inspection program over
both the Soviet Union and the United States.
In 1956, Hungarians rose up against their
Soviet masters and felt badly betrayed when the
United States turned a deaf ear to their
desperate appeals for aid. Their resistance was
crushed.
• The brutally crushed Hungarian uprising revealed the sobering truth that
America’s mighty nuclear sledgehammer was too heavy a weapon to wield
in such a relatively minor crisis.
• The rigid futility of the “massive retaliation” doctrine was thus starkly
exposed. To his dismay, Eisenhower also discovered that the aerial and
atomic hardware necessary for “massive retaliation” was staggeringly
expensive.
The Vietnam Nightmare
In Vietnam, revolutionary Ho Chi Minh had
tried to encourage Woodrow Wilson as far
back as 1920 to help the Vietnamese against
the French. Ho did gain some support from
Wilson, but as Ho became increasingly
communist, the U.S. began to oppose him.
In March 1954, when the French became
trapped at Dienbienphu by Vietnamese rebels,
Eisenhower’s aides wanted to bomb the Viet
Minh guerilla forces, but Ike held back, fearing
plunging the U.S. into another Asian war so
soon after Korea. After the Vietnamese won at
Dienbienphu, Vietnam was split at the 17th
parallel, supposedly temporarily.
Ho Chi Minh was supposed to allow free
elections, but soon, Vietnam became clearly
split between a communist north and a proWestern south.
Dienbienphu marked the start of American
interest in Vietnam.
Secretary Dulles created the Southeast Asian
Treaty Organization (SEATO) to emulate
NATO, but this provided little help.
Cold War Crisis in Europe & the Middle East
•
In 1955, the USSR formed their own “gang”, the Warsaw Pact to counteract NATO,
but the Cold War did seem to be thawing a bit, as Eisenhower pressed for reduction
of arms.
•
However, in 1956, when the Hungarian revolutionaries were brutally crushed, talks
went out the window.
•
The U.S. did change some of its immigration laws to let 30,000 Hungarians into
America as immigrants to escape Soviet rule.
In 1953, in order to protect oil supplies in the Middle East, the CIA
engineered a coup in Iran that installed the youthful Shah Mohammed
Reza Pahlevi, as ruler of the nation, protecting the oil for the time
being, but earning the wrath of Arabs that would be repaid in the 70s
and has never really waned…...
Suez Canal Crisis
The Suez crisis was far
messier: President
Gamal Abdel Nasser, of
Egypt, needed money to
build a dam in the upper
Nile and flirted openly
with the Soviet side as
well as the U.S. and
Britain.
Upon seeing this blatant
communist association,
Secretary of State
Dulles dramatically
withdrew his offer of
financial aid, thus
prompting Nasser to
nationalize the Suez
Canal.
Late in October 1956,
Britain, France, and
Israel suddenly
attacked Egypt to
regain control of the
Suez Canal, thinking
that the U.S. would
supply them with the
oil needed to carry
out the operation, as
had been the case in
WWII, but an angry
Eisenhower refused,
and the attackers
were forced to
withdraw.
The Suez crisis
marked the last time
the U.S. could
brandish its “oil
weapon” to make
foreign policy
demands.
• The poor Middle Eastern nations increasingly resolved to reap for
themselves the enormous oil wealth that Western companies had been
pumping out of their deserts for the last 30 years.
In 1960, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela joined to form the
cartel Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
• In the aftermath of this crisis, the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine was
announced, which empowered the president to extend economic and
military aid to nations of the Middle East that wanted help to resist
communist aggression.
Round Two for “Ike”
• In 1956, Eisenhower again ran
against Stevenson and won
easily by a landslide.
• The GOP called itself the “party
of peace” and the Democrats
attacked Ike’s health, claiming he
was unfit to be re-elected since
he had just suffered a heart
attack in 1955 and a major
abdominal operation in ’56.
– However, the Democrats did win
the House and Senate.
• After Secretary of State Dulles
died of cancer in 1959 and
presidential assistant Sherman
Adams was forced to leave
under a cloud of scandal due to
bribery charges, Eisenhower,
without his two most trusted and
most helpful aides, was forced to
govern more and golf less.
• A drastic labor-reform bill in 1959
grew from recurrent strikes in critical
industries.
• Teamster chief “Dave” Beck was
sent to prison for embezzlement, and
his controversial successor, James
R. Hoffa’s appointment got the
Teamsters expelled out of the
recently united AFL-CIO due to his
criminally suspect union tactics.
– Hoffa was later jailed for jury
tampering and then disappeared
before going to prison, allegedly
murdered by some gangsters that he
had crossed.
•
The 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act was
designed to bring labor leaders to
book for financial shenanigans and
prevent bullying tactics.
–
Anti-laborites forced into the bill
bans against “secondary boycotts”
and certain types of picketing.
A “space-race” began in 1957.
–
On October 4, 1957, the
Russians launched the first
man-made satellite, Sputnik
I, into space, and a month
later, they sent Sputnik II
into orbit as well, thus totally
demoralizing Americans as
this seemed to prove
communist superiority in the
sciences.
–
Plus, now the possibility
existed that the Soviets
could fire missiles at the
U.S. from space.
–
Critics charged that Truman
had not spent enough
money on missile programs
while America had used its
science for other, more
frivolous things, such as
television.
Still, only four months after Sputnik I, the
U.S. sent its own satellite (weighing only 2.5
lbs) into space. Still, this apparent lack of
U.S. technology sent concerns over U.S.
education, since American children seemed
to be learning less advanced information
than Soviet kids.
In response to Sputnik I, the 1958 National
Defense and Education Act (NDEA) was
passed, granting the federal government
the power to spend millions of dollars to
improve American science and language
education.
The Continuing
Cold War
•
Humanity-minded scientists called for an end to atmospheric nuclear testing, lest
future generations be deformed and mutated from radiation poisoning.
•
Beginning October 1958, Washington did halt “dirty” testing, as did the U.S.S.R.,
but attempts to regularize such suspensions were unsuccessful.
•
Then, in 1959, Khrushchev was invited by Ike to America for talks, and when he
arrived in New York, he immediately (and quite surprisingly) spoke of
disarmament, though he gave no means yet of how to do it.
•
Later, at Camp David (the presidential retreat), talks did show upward signs, as
the Soviet premier said that his previously stated ultimatum for the Allied
evacuation of Berlin would be extended indefinitely.
• THEN, at the Paris summit
conference in 1960, shortly after
such promising progress at Camp
David the year before, an enraged
Khrushchev stormed out of the
meeting after it was revealed that
the Soviets had shot down a United
States U-2 spy plane over Soviet
territory.
• After initial denial of any knowledge
of such a spy plane, Eisenhower
was embarrassingly forced to take
personal responsibility when the
Russians revealed the wreckage
AND the pilot!
• Sadly, Cold War tensions
immediately tightened again over
the U-2 incident.
What’s So Funny? 1960 Premier Khrushchev gloats
over Ike’s spying discomfiture.
U-2 Spy Plane