Transcript History 1302: United States History since 1877

History 1302: United States
History since 1877
From World War II to the Cold War
Revised Spring 2014
Introduction
 At the end of World War II, two questions faced the Americans: what would
be the relationship with the Soviet Union, and would the post-war economy
be one of prosperity or depression?
 Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, John F. Kennedy replaced him in
1961.
 The Cold War entered a new phase, with Joseph McCarthy feeding a Red
Scare inside the United States and the CIA getting involved in anticommunist activities in various places around the world.
 Teenagers in America were preoccupied with newfound freedoms and with
having money to spend, and they spent a great deal of it on the music of
Elvis Presley and similar performers. Their parents began to call for
educational reforms after the Soviet Union bested the United States by
launching the first artificial satellite.
 The new medium of television brought all of these events into the homes of
ordinary Americans, and the world would never be the same again.
The Cold War, 1938-1991
 An ideological struggle between Capitalism and Communism.
 Starts with the creation of the House of Un-American Activities
Committee in 1938.
 1938-1975. House of Un-American Activities Committee
 Supposed to end after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
but it didn’t.
 Used by the U.S. to expand its empire into the third world using
the excuse that those countries were going Communist.
 The ideological reason given for the effort to break the Soviet
Union financially and militarily without explicitly going to war
against them.
World War II:
The Tide Turns
 Russian defense of Leningrad (1941-1944) and Stalingrad
(1942-1943).
 Famine and cannibalism
 The Soviets lost 27 million people; the Americans about
half a million.
 The Soviets fought 4 million Nazis; the West fought about
100,000.
 Early 1943. Nazis retreating from Stalingrad. Soviets
winning the war.
 1941-1945. U.S. aid to the Soviets: $12 Billion
 1941-1945. U.S. Aid to the British: $33 Billion
The War in Europe
June 1944. The Normandy invasion.
May 8, 1945. Berlin collapsed to the
Soviets
The Allies converged on Berlin from
both east and west.
World War II in Europe
Bombing of Tokio
 Night of 9-10 of March, 1945.
Japanese attempt to surrender to
the Soviets
 July 13, 1945. The Americans intercepted cable sent
by the Japanese Foreign Minister Shingenori Togo
to his Ambassador in Moscow.
 To the Soviets, the Japanese offered handing over
occupied territories in mainland East Asia, including
Manchuria and southern Sakhalin, in exchange for a
trade agreement that included guarantees for oil
and steel supplies.
 Sources: Howard Zinn, A People’s History; Sam Wineburg, Undue Certainty.
 http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter1213/Wineburg.pdf
Atomic Bombing
 Strategic military and industrial targets.
 August 6. Hiroshima
 August 9. Nagasaki
 Bottom line: Keeping the Japanese from
surrendering to the Soviets. Not doing so would allow
for a stronger Japan and Soviet Union to exist.
End of the Roosevelt Era (1933-1945)
End of World War II
FDR- Harry S. Truman ticket won the 1944 elections.
 February 4-11, 1945. Yalta conference.
 April 15, 1945, Roosevelt died.
 March 5, 1953. Stalin died.
 January 24, 1965. Churchill died.
The Truman Doctrine (1947)
 The government of the United States will offered
foreign aid to any country threatened by communist
expansion.
 Targeted specifically to Greece and Turkey.
Harry Truman and “Containment”
 Preventing the spread of communism abroad, i.e.,
Eastern Europe, China, Korea, and Vietnam.
 Communism must be stopped where it already exists
and not allowed to spread further.
NATO and the Warsaw Pact
 NATO. North Atlantic Treaty
Organization.
 A CAPITALIST military
alliance.
 Formed 1949 to oppose the
Soviets.
 Led by the U.S.
 Members included Canada
and many European
countries
 Warsaw Pact.
 Counterpart to NATO.
 A communist MILITARY
alliance.
 Led by the Soviet Union.
 China not a member
 Members include Eastern
European nations under the
sphere of influence of the
Soviet Union.
The Marshall Plan
 Communists running for office all over Europe.
 The European Recovery Program (ERP), 1947-1952, generated a broad
industrial recovery in western Europe.
 A subsidy to pro-American regimes designed to keep Communists from
winning political power.
 Named after Secretary of State George Marshall.
 Over $24 Billion in aid.
 Most went straight to U.S. manufacturers and agribusinesses
 “Keeping the Americans in, the Soviets out, and the Europeans down.”
 Greece and Turkey. Lake of oil to the South.
Source: Cost of the Marshall Plan to the United States. Seymour E. Harris. The
Journal of Finance , Vol. 3, No. 1 (Feb., 1948), pp. 1-15.
Effect on the Cold War American Citizens:
“If we don’t like you, we persecute you as a Communist”
The Cold War affected the United States the following ways:
• If accused of being a Communist, the only viable defense was to
plea guilty and denounced other real or imagined
“Communists.”
 The House Un-American Activities Committee sought out
domestic subversion.
 U.S. citizens were targeted if they ever belonged to any sort of
socialist, anarchist, or communist organization.
 The main targets of the Second Red Scare [begins 1944] (the
first one peaked in 1919-1920) were civil rights leaders, labor
leaders, and intellectuals.
Communist Threat
 The notion that agents working for the Soviets within
the U.S. and that they will enable the Soviet Union to
take over the United States.
 Provide an excuse for crushing dissidents and for
expanding the American empire, especially in Latin
America.
 Provided an excuse to build the military-industrial
complex.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
 Created in 1947.
 Replaced the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
 Although he gives the orders, the CIA gives the President of the U.S. plausible
deniability (“I didn’t know they were doing that).
The CIA has four traditional principal activities, which are
 1) gathering information about foreign governments, corporations, and
individuals;
 2) analyzing that information, along with intelligence gathered by other U.S.
intelligence agencies, in order to provide national security intelligence assessment
to senior United States policymakers; and
 3), upon the request of the President of the United States, carrying out or
overseeing covert activities and some tactical operations by its own employees,
by members of the U.S. military, or by other partners (proxies).
 4) When somebody blows the whistle, giving the president of the U.S. plausible
deniability.
Black Operations (Black Ops)
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Covert (secret) and frequently illegal and unconstitutional operations by government,
government agency, or military organization.
Commonly carried out the CIA, the U.S. military, by U.S. special forces, and by foreign
proxies.
Deniable assets.
Involve a significant degree of deception to conceal who is behind it or to make it appear
that some other entity is responsible.
Examples: Assassination of foreign leaders disguised as accidents or as actions by local
enemies; instigation of revolutions (Mujahedeen, Nicaraguan Contras) while hiding U.S.
inolvemen. Facilitating coup d’etats and the establishing fascist dictatorships (assassination
of Chilean President Salvador Allende on 9-11-1973; the coup d’etats described in “Harvest of
Empire,” the killing of Patrice Lumumba and the establishment of Mobutu as dictator of
Congo [the last king of Scotland]).
Often recruiting deranged individuals to be the assassins, then killing them.
Black Ops encourage conspiracy theories (who planned or allowed the killing J.F. and
Robert Kennedy, M. L. King, Malcolm X; who were really behind the “Arab Spring” of 2011.
Blowback
 What happens when victims attack the U.S. and Americans ask, “why do
they hate us?” W’s answer: “They hate our freedom.”
 What happens when the public finds out about our government’s shady
activities.
 Unintended consequences of a covert operation that are suffered by the
aggressor. To the civilians suffering the blowback of covert operations, the
effect typically manifests itself as “random” acts of political violence
without a discernible, direct cause; because the public—in whose name
the intelligence agency acted—are unaware of the effected secret attacks
that provoked revenge (counter-attack) against them.
 Examples: The immigration of refugees to the US from countries that are
victims of U.S. covert operations (Guatemala, El Salvador), the Iran Hostage
Crisis of 1980-1981; the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks; news about Abu Ghraib.
House of Un-American Activities
Committee (1938-1975)
 Subscribed to an expanded definition of “un-American”
that included liberal Democrats and labor organizers.
 At least three thousand federal employees fired during the
Truman administration alone because for being suspects of
communist affiliations.
 Targeted hundreds of thousands of Americans.
 Thousands of intellectuals de-barred. Producers, actors,
professors, civil rights activists, labor leaders.
 Few actual Soviet collaborators actually prosecuted.
Examples: Alger Hiss; Julius Rosenberg.
 Ethel Rosenberg, execution based on false evidence.
Conclusion
 The 1950s, people hoped, would be a time in which
they could stabilize their family lives, solidify their
careers, and leave behind the anxieties of the recent
past. However, the race for world supremacy led the
Americans to invest all of their material and
intellectual resources in fighting communism, the
political ideology antithetical to American capitalism.
Sources
 Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!: An American History, Seagull Fourth Edition. New
York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
 Jacqueline Jones, et.al., Created Equal: A History of the United States, Fourth
Edition. New York: Pearson Longman, 2013.
 Kevin M. Schultz, HIST. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013.
 Carol Berkin, et.al., Making America: A History of the United States. Boston:
Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2012.
 John Mack Faragher, et.al., Out of Many: A History of the American People,
Combined Volume, Seventh Edition. New York: Pearson Longman, 2011.
 Edward L. Ayers, et.al. American Passages: A History of the United States, 4th
Edition. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2009.
 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present. New York:
Harper Collins, 2003.