I. Postwar Economic Anxieties
1.The Americans cheered the end of World War II in 1945, but many
worried that with the war over,
the U.S. would sink back into another
Great Depression. •Upon war’s
end, inflation shot up with the release of price
controls while the gross national
product sank, and labor strikes swept
the nation.
2.To get even with labor,
Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which
outlawed “closed” shops (closed
to non-union members), made
unions liable for damages that
resulted from jurisdictional disputes
among themselves, and required
that union leaders take non-communist
oaths. Opposite of the Wagner Act
of the New Deal, this new act was a
strike against labor unions.
3.Labor tried to organize in the
South and West with “Operation Dixie,” but this proved frustrating and
unsuccessful.
4.To forestall an economic
downturn, the Democratic administration
sold war factories and other
government installations to private
businesses cheaply. Congress
passed the Employment Act of 1946, which
made it government policy to
“promote maximum employment,
production, and purchasing
power,” and created the Council of
Economic Advisors to provide the
president with data to make that
policy a reality. •It also passed
the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944,
better known as the GI Bill of
Rights, which allowed all servicemen to
have free college education once
they returned from the war.
1.Then, in the late 1940s and into the 1960s, the economy began to
boom tremendously, and folks who
had felt the sting of the Great
Depression now wanted to bathe in
the new prosperity. •The middle class more than doubled while people now wanted
two cars
in every garage; over 90% of
American families owned a television.
2.Women also reaped the benefits
of the postwar economy, growing in
the American work force while
giving up their former roles as
housewives.
3.Even though this new affluence
did not touch everyone, it did touch many.
1.Postwar prosperity was fueled by several factors, including the war
itself that forced America to
produce more than it’d ever
imagined.
2.However, much of the prosperity
of the 50s and 60s rested on colossal military projects. •Massive appropriations
for the Korean War, defense spending,
industries like aerospace,
plastics, and electronics, and research and
development all were such
projects.
•R and D, research and
development, became an entirely new industry.
3.Cheap energy paralleled the popularity
of automobiles, and spidery
grids of electrical cables
carried the power of oil, gas, coal, and
falling water into homes and
factories alike.
4.Workers upped their
productivity tremendously, as did farmers, due
to new technology in fertilizers,
etc. In fact, the farming population
shrank while production soared.
1.With so many people on the move, families were being strained.
Combined with the baby boom, this
explained the success of Dr. Benjamin
Spock’s The Common Sense Book of
Baby and Child Care.
2.Immigration also led to the
growth of a fifteen-state region in the
southern half of the U.S. known
as the Sunbelt, which dramatically
increased in population. •In
fact, in the 1950s, California overtook New York as the most populous state.
3.Immigrants came to the Sunbelt
for more opportunities, such as in
California’s electronics industry
and the aerospace complexes of
Texas and Florida. •Federal
dollars poured into the Sunbelt (some $125 million), and
political power grew there as
well, as ever since 1964, every U.S.
president has come from that
region.
•Sunbelters were redrawing the
political map, taking the economic and political power out of the North and
Northeast.
1.Whites in cities fled to the suburbs, encouraged by federal
agencies such as the Federal
Housing Authority and the Veteran’s
Administration, whose loan
guarantees made it cheaper to live in the
suburbs than in cramped city apartments
•By 1960, one out of ever four Americans lived in the suburbs.
2.Innovators like the Levitt
brothers, with their monotonous but
cheap housing plans, built
thousands of houses in projects like
Levittown, and the “White flight”
left the cities full of
the poor and the
African-Americans. •Federal agencies aggravated this by often refusing to make
loans to Blacks due to the “risk factor” involved with this.
1.After the war, many soldiers returned to their sweethearts and
married them, then had babies,
creating a “Baby Boom” that
would be felt for generations.
2.As the children grew up
collectively, they put strains on
respective markets, such as
manufacturers of baby products in the 1940s
and 50s, teenage clothing
designers in the 60s, and the job market in
the 70s and 80s.
3.By around 2020, they will place
enormous strains on the Social Security system.
VII. Truman: the “Gutty” Man from Missouri
1.Presiding after World War II was Harry S. Truman, who had come to
power after Franklin Roosevelt
had died from a massive brain
hemorrhage. •The first president
in a long time without a college education,
Truman at first approached his
burdens with humility, but he gradually
evolved into a confident, cocky
politician.
•His cabinet was made up of the
old “Missouri gang,”
which was composed of Truman’s
friends from when he was a senator
in Missouri.
•Often, Truman would stick to a
wrong decision just to prove his decisiveness and power of command.
2.However, even if he was small
on the small things, he was big on
the big things, taking
responsibility very seriously and working very
hard.
1.With the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. as the only world superpowers
after WWII, trouble seemed
imminent, for the U.S. had waited until
1933, to recognize the U.S.S.R.;
the U.S. and Britain had delayed to
open up a second front during
World War II; the U.S. and Britain had
frozen the Soviets out of
developing nuclear arms; and the U.S. had
withdrawn its vital lend-lease
program from the U.S.S.R. in 1945 and
spurned Moscow’s plea for a $6
billion reconstructive loan while
approving a similar $3.75 billion
loan to Berlin.
2.Stalin wanted a protective
sphere around western Russian, for twice
earlier in the century Russia had
been attacked from that direction,
and that meant taking nations
like Poland under its control.
3.Even though both the U.S.A. and
the U.S.S.R. were recent newcomers
to the world stage, they were
very advanced and had been isolationist
before the 20th century, now they
found themselves in a political
stare-down that would turn into
the Cold War and last for four and a half decades.
X. Shaping the Postwar World
1.However, the U.S. did manage to establish structures that were part of
FDR’s open world. •At a meeting at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, the
Western
Allies established the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) to encourage
world trade by regulating the
currency exchange rates.
2.The United Nations opened on
April 25, 1945. •The member nations drew up a charter similar to that of the
old
League of Nations, formed a
Security Council to be headed by five
permanent powers (China,
U.S.S.R., Britain, France, and U.S.A.) that
had total veto powers, and was
headquartered in New York City.
•The Senate overwhelmingly
approved the U.N. by a vote of 89 to 2.
3.The U.N. kept peace in Kashmir
and other trouble spots, created the
new Jewish state of Israel,
formed such groups as UNESCO (U.N.
Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization), FAO (Food and
Agricultural Organization), and
WHO (World Health Organization),
bringing benefits to people all
over the globe.
4.However, when U.S. delegate
Bernard Baruch called in 1946 for a
U.N. agency free from the great
power veto that could investigate all
nuclear facilities and weapons,
the U.S.S.R. rejected the proposal,
since it didn’t want to give up
its veto power and was opposed to
“capitalist spies” snooping
around in the Soviet Union. The
small window of regulating
nuclear weapons was lost.
1.The Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 severely punished 22 top culprits of
the Holocaust.
2.America knew that an
economically healthy Germany was indispensable
to the recovery of all of Europe,
but Russia, fearing another
blitzkrieg, wanted huge
reparations from Germany.
3.Germany, like Austria, was
divided into four occupational zones
controlled by the Allied Powers
minus China, but as the U.S. began
proposing the idea of a united
Germany, and as the Western nations
prevented Stalin from getting his
reparations from their parts of
Germany, it became obvious that
Germany would remain indefinitely
divided. •In 1948, when the
U.S.S.R. choked off all air and railway access to
Berlin, located deep in East
Germany, they thought that such an act
would starve the Allies out,
since Berlin itself was divided into four
zones as well.
•However, the Allies organized
the massive Berlin Airlift to feed
the people of Berlin, and in May
1949, the Soviets stopped their
blockade of Berlin.
1.When, in 1946, Stalin used his troops to aid a rebel movement in Iran,
Truman protested, and the Soviets backed down.
2.Truman soon adopted the
“containment policy,” crafted
by Soviet specialist George F.
Kennan, which stated that firm
containment of Soviet expansion
would halt Communist power.
3.On March 12, 1947, Truman
requested that the containment policy be
put into action in what would
come to be called the Truman Doctrine:
$400 million to help Greece and
Turkey from falling into communist
power. •So basically, the
doctrine said that the U.S. would aid any power
fighting Communist aggression, an
idea later criticized because the
U.S. would often give money to
dictators “fighting
communism.”
4.In Western Europe, France,
Italy, and Germany were still in
terrible shape, so Truman, with
the help of Secretary of State George
C. Marshall, implemented the
Marshall Plan, a miraculous recovery
effort that had Western Europe up
and prosperous in no time. •This helped in the forming of the European
Community (EC).
•The plan sent $12.5 billion over
four years to 16 cooperating
nations to aid in recovery, and
at first, Congress didn’t want to
comply, especially when this sum
was added to the $2 billion the U.S.
was already giving to European
relief as part of the United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA).
•However, a Soviet-sponsored coup
that toppled the government of
Czechoslovakia finally awakened
the Congressmen to their senses, and
they passed the plan.
5.Truman also recognized Israel
on its birthday, May 14, 1948,
despite heavy Arab opposition and
despite the fact that those same
Arabs controlled the oil supplies
in the Middle East.
1.The 1947 National Security Act created the Department of Defense,
which was housed in the Pentagon
and headed by a new cabinet position,
the Secretary of Defense, under
which served civilian secretaries of
the army, navy, and air force.
2.The National Security Act also
formed the National Security Council
(NSC) to advise the president on
security matters and the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) to
coordinate the government’s foreign
fact-gathering (spying).
3.The “Voice of America,” a radio
broadcast, began
beaming in 1948, while Congress
resurrected the military draft
(Selective Service System), which
redefined many young people’s
career choices and persuaded them
to go to college.
4.In 1948, the U.S. joined
Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands,
and Luxembourg to form the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),
which considered an attack on one
NATO member an attack on all, despite
the U.S.’s policy of
traditionally not involving itself in entangling alliances. •In response, the
U.S.S.R. formed the Warsaw Pact, its own alliance system.
•NATO’s membership grew to
fourteen with the 1952 admissions
of Greece and Turkey, and then to
15 when West Germany joined in 1955.
1.General Douglas MacArthur headed reconstruction in Japan and tried
the top Japanese war criminals.
He dictated a constitution that was
adopted in 1946, and democratized
Japan.
2.However, in China, the
communist forces, led by Mao Zedong,
defeated the nationalist forces,
led by Chiang Kai-shek, who then fled
to the island of Formosa (Taiwan)
in 1949. •With this defeat, one-quarter of the world population (500,000,000
people) plunged under the Communist flag.
•Critics of Truman assailed that
he did not support the nationalists
enough, but Chiang Kai-shek never
had the support of the people to
begin with.
3.Then, in September of 1949,
Truman announced that the Soviets had
exploded their first atomic
bomb—three years before experts
thought it was possible, thus
eliminating the U.S. monopoly on nuclear
weapons. •The U.S. exploded the
hydrogen bomb in 1952, and the Soviets
followed suit a year later; thus
began the dangerous arms race of the
Cold War.
1.Republicans won control of the House in 1946 and then nominated
Thomas E. Dewey to the 1948
ticket, while Democrats were forced to
choose Truman again when war-hero
Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to be
chosen. •Truman’s nomination
split the Democratic Party, as Southern
Democrats (“Dixiecrats”)
nominated Governor J. Strom
Thurmond of South Carolina on a
State’s Rights Party ticket.
•Former vice president Henry A.
Wallace also threw his hat into the ring, getting nominated by the new
Progressive Party.
2.With the Democrats totally
disorganized, Dewey seemed destined for
a super-easy victory, and on
election night, the Chicago Tribune even
ran an early edition wrongly
proclaiming “DEWEY DEFEATS
TRUMAN,” but Truman shockingly
won, getting 303 electoral votes
to Dewey’s 189. And to make
things better, the Democrats won
control of Congress again.
•Truman received critical support from farmers, workers, and blacks.
3.Truman then called for a new
program called “Point
Four,” which called for financial
support of poor, underdeveloped
lands in hopes of keeping
underprivileged peoples from turning
communist.
4.At home, Truman outlined a
sweeping “Fair Deal”
program, which called for
improved housing, full employment, a higher
minimum wage, better farm price
supports, a new Tennessee Valley
Authority, and an extension of
Social Security. •However, the only successes came in raising the minimum wage,
providing for public housing in the Housing Act of 1949, and extending
old-age insurance to more
beneficiaries with the Social Security Act of
1950.
1.General MacArthur landed a brilliant invasion behind enemy forces
at Inchon on September 15, 1950,
and drove the North Koreans back
across the 38th parallel, towards
China and the Yalu River. •An overconfident MacArthur boasted that he’d “have
the
boys home by Christmas,” but in
November 1950, Chinese
“volunteers” flooded across the
border and pushed the South
Koreans back to the 38th
parallel.
2.MacArthur, humiliated, wanted
to blockade China and bomb Manchuria,
but Truman didn’t want to enlarge
the war beyond necessity, but
when the angry general began to
publicly criticize President Truman and
spoke of using atomic weapons,
Harry had no choice but to remove him
from command on grounds of
insubordination. •MacArthur returned to cheers while Truman was scorned as a
“pig,” an “imbecile,” an appeaser
to communist
Russia and China, and a “Judas.”
•In July 1951, truce discussions
began but immediately snagged over the issue of prisoner exchange.
•Talks dragged on for two more
years as men continued to die.
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