U.S. History II

Cliffs Quick Review

U.S. History II by Paul Soifer, Ph.D. Abraham Hoffman, Ph.D.

Cliffs U.S. History II Quick Review Published by IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. An International Data Group Company 919 E. Hillsdale Blvd. Suite 400 Foster City, CA 94404 www.idgbooks.com (IDG Books Worldwide Web site) www.cliffs.com (Cliffs Web site) Copyright © 1999 IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book, including interior design, cover design, and icons, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 0-7645-8537-1 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10/RR/RQ/ZZ/IN Distributed in the United States by IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. Distributed by CDG Books Canada Inc. for Canada; by Transworld Publishers Limited in the United Kingdom; by IDG Norge Books for Norway; by IDG Sweden Books for Sweden; by IDG Books Australia Publishing Corporation Pty. Ltd. for Australia and New Zealand; by TransQuest Publishers Pte Ltd. for Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Hong Kong; by Gotop Information Inc. for Taiwan; by ICG Muse, Inc. for Japan; by Intersoft for South Africa; by Eyrolles for France; by International Thomson Publishing for Germany, Austria and Switzerland; by Distribuidora Cuspide for Argentina; by LR International for Brazil; by Galileo Libros for Chile; by Ediciones ZETA S.C.R. Ltda. for Peru; by WS Computer Publishing Corporation, Inc., for the Philippines; by Contemporanea de Ediciones for Venezuela; by Express Computer Distributors for the Caribbean and West Indies; by Micronesia Media Distributor, Inc. for Micronesia; by Chips Computadoras S.A. de C.V. for Mexico; by Editorial Norma de Panama S.A. for Panama; by American Bookshops for Finland. For general information on IDG Books Worldwide’s books in the U.S., please call our Consumer Customer Service department at 800-762-2974. For reseller information, including discounts and premium sales, please call our Reseller Customer Service department at 800-434-3422. For information on where to purchase IDG Books Worldwide’s books outside the U.S., please contact our International Sales department at 317-596-5530 or fax 317-596-5692. For consumer information on foreign language translations, please contact our Customer Service department at 1-800-434-3422, fax 317-596-5692, or e-mail [email protected]. For information on licensing foreign or domestic rights, please phone +1-650-655-3109. For sales inquiries and special prices for bulk quantities, please contact our Sales department at 650-655-3200 or write to the address above. For information on using IDG Books Worldwide’s books in the classroom or for ordering examination copies, please contact our Educational Sales department at 800-434-2086 or fax 317-596-5499. For press review copies, author interviews, or other publicity information, please contact our Public Relations department at 650-655-3000 or fax 650-655-3299. For authorization to photocopy items for corporate, personal, or educational use, please contact Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, or fax 978-750-4470. LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: THE PUBLISHER AND AUTHOR HAVE USED THEIR BEST EFFORTS IN PREPARING THIS BOOK. THE PUBLISHER AND AUTHOR MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THERE ARE NO WARRANTIES WHICH EXTEND BEYOND THE DESCRIPTIONS CONTAINED IN THIS PARAGRAPH. NO WARRANTY MAY BE CREATED OR EXTENDED BY SALES REPRESENTATIVES OR WRITTEN SALES MATERIALS. THE ACCURACY AND COMPLETENESS OF THE INFORMATION PROVIDED HEREIN AND THE OPINIONS STATED HEREIN ARE NOT GUARANTEED OR WARRANTED TO PRODUCE ANY PARTICULAR RESULTS, AND THE ADVICE AND STRATEGIES CONTAINED HEREIN MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR EVERY INDIVIDUAL. NEITHER THE PUBLISHER NOR AUTHOR SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFIT OR ANY OTHER COMMERCIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR OTHER DAMAGES. Trademarks: Cliffs, CliffsNotes, and all related logos and trade dress are registered trademarks or trademarks of Cliffs Notes, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brandnames and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks, or registered trademarks of their respective owners. IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. and Cliffs Notes, Inc. are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

is a registered trademark under exclusive license to IDG Books Worldwide, Inc. from International Data Group, Inc.

Preface

This book provides the student with an overview of United States history from the end of Reconstruction to the present. Students will find this book helpful as a supplement to major textbooks in the field or as a summary of the major issues and events in U.S. history. We hope students will make effective use of this book, and we welcome any questions they may direct to us at CliffsNotes. We would like to express our deep appreciation to Kris Fulkerson and Linnea Fredrickson, our editors, for their patience, valuable suggestions on organization, and useful questions on the text, which helped us improve the narrative. The Authors

U.S. HISTORY II

iii333

CONTENTS

SETTLING THE WEST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 Resistance of the Indians in the West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 The Agricultural Frontier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 The Cattle Kingdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 The Mining Frontier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 The Closing of the Frontier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 The Railroads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 Big Business: Steel and Oil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 Technology and Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 The Rise of Organized Labor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 Labor Unrest and Strikes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 The Rise of Urban America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 African-Americans after Reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29 Everyday Life in America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE . . . . . .37 Domestic Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37 The Revolt of the Farmers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 The United States as a World Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Political and Social Reforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Progressivism in the White House: Roosevelt and Taft . . . . . . .52 Progressivism in the White House: Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER . . . . . . . .61 Foreign Policy in the Progressive Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61 The United States in World War I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64 Wilson and the Peace Settlement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 Politics in the 1920s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 Domestic Economic Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 Reaction in the 1920s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77 The New Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80

U.S. HISTORY II

v333

CONTENTS

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85 The Beginnings of the Great Depression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85 Roosevelt and the New Deal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88 The Second New Deal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92 The End of the New Deal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .96

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II . . . . . . . . . . . .99 American Foreign Policy in the ’20s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .99 Foreign Policy and the New Deal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102 The Outbreak of War in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .105 The Road to Pearl Harbor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .108

THE SECOND WORLD WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111 The Home Front . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .111 The World at War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .116 Toward Final Victory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR . . . . . . . . . . .123 Postwar America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .123 The Origins of the Cold War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .127 The Cold War at Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .130

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .135 The Affluent Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .135 American Foreign Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .139 The Civil Rights Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .143

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY .147 The Kennedy Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .147 Johnson and the Great Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .152 The Counterculture of the 1960s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .156

FROM NIXON TO CARTER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .161 The Nixon Presidency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .161 The United States under Ford and Carter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .166 America in the 1970s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .169

vi

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

CONTENTS

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .173 The Reagan Administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .173 The Bush Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .178 The Century’s Last President . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .182

U.S. HISTORY II

vii333

CONTENTS

viii

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

SETTLING THE WEST

I

n the three decades following the Civil War, millions of people poured into the trans-Mississippi West. They came from farms and cities in the East and Midwest, as well as from Europe and Asia, lured by the promise of cheap land, riches in the gold fields, or just the possibility of a better life. Many traveled on the newly constructed transcontinental railroads, while others crossed the plains and mountains by wagon train or sailed around South America to arrive on the West Coast. They settled the Great Plains, the Southwest, and the Great Basin, enduring hardship, danger, and disillusionment. By the end of the nineteenth century, the western migrants had established new farming homesteads, communities, and industries. Although some of the settlers became hugely successful, many, if not most, failed to achieve the wealth of which they dreamed.

Resistance of the Indians in the West From the beginning, settlers and the Plains Indians misunderstood each other in several ways. Non-Indians, for example, seldom respected the religions of the native tribes, which were polytheistic and included the worship of plant and animal spirits. Additionally, Indians lived under a complex kinship system of extended families that outsiders found difficult to comprehend. Most significant, however, were the settlers’ and Indians’ differing concepts of land ownership. A comparatively small number of Native Americans (fewer than 400,000) roamed over a vast stretch of territory that they claimed as a communal hunting ground; whites saw this as a waste of land and expected the area to be surveyed and sold to settlers in 160-acre tracts. Because of such cultural differences, settlers viewed the native peoples of the West simply as savages and barriers to civilization. U.S. policy toward Native Americans. As new territories and states were organized in the West, it became clear that Native Americans could not roam at will over tens of thousands of square miles that nonnatives were hoping to settle. Beginning in the 1860s, the federal government’s policy was to establish small tracts of land for specific tribes and encourage them to take up agriculture. While many tribes U.S. HISTORY II

1 333

SETTLING THE WEST

did settle peacefully on such reservations, others resisted giving up their lands and way of life. Tribes who resisted included the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho on the northern Great Plains, the Apache, Commanche, and Navajo in the Southwest, and the Nez Percé in Idaho. Although Native Americans never presented a united front, various tribes had a series of confrontations with the U.S. Army and settlers between the 1860s and 1880s that collectively became known as the Indian Wars. At Sand Creek in Colorado, for example, more than 300 Arapaho and Cheyenne men, women, and children were massacred by the militia in 1864 after the parties had agreed to peace terms. At the Battle of Little Bighorn in the Montana Territory, a combined force of Sioux and Cheyenne killed all 200 men under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in 1876. In the desert Southwest — New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico — the Apaches fought against settlers and soldiers for decades. Resistance there came to an end only with the capture of the Chiricahua Apache chief Geronimo in 1886. On the Great Plains, the loss of the bison was an even greater threat to Indian survival than the wars with the U.S. Army. The Plains Indians relied upon bison for food, clothing, and shelter, and as a source of fuel (burning bison dung, or “buffalo chips”). Although the wanton destruction of the bison was not federal policy, army commanders in the field approved the practice as a means to destroy a key element of Indian life. Also, the railroads hired hunters such as William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody to kill thousands of the animals to feed the workers laying the tracks for the transcontinental lines. When the railroads were completed, “sportsmen” shot bison from specially chartered cars. By 1875, more than nine million bison had been killed for their hides, which were in demand in the East for lap robes and machine drive belts. The species was almost extinct in another decade, and with the mainstay of their nomadic lifestyle gone, the Plains Indians had little choice but to accept life on the reservations. Change in federal policy and the end of resistance. The Indian reservation system established during the 1860s was a failure. Many

2

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

SETTLING THE WEST

of the reservations were located on marginal agricultural land that made it difficult for the tribes to develop self-sustaining farming. Government promises to provide food and supplies went unfulfilled while unscrupulous Indian agents often cheated the very people they were expected to help. Under the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, the government abandoned its long-standing policy of dealing with the tribes as sovereign nations; the new law was intended to promote agriculture among individual Native Americans by breaking up the reservations. The president was authorized to distribute up to 160 acres of reservation land to the heads of households or 80 acres to individual adults; the allotments were held in trust by the federal government for 25 years, after which the owner was given full title and citizenship. (Full citizenship was accorded the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma in 1901, but it was not extended to all Indians until 1924.) The reservation lands not apportioned to Native Americans were sold to the public. Although it was hailed as an important humanitarian reform, the Dawes Act actually undercut the communal basis of Native-American life and resulted in the loss of millions of acres of Indian land. Desperate to restore the past, the Plains tribes were attracted to a religious movement known as the Ghost Dance, which promised to restore the bison herds and protect Native Americans from the bullets of U.S. soldiers and settlers. The popularity of the religious revival among the Sioux concerned both the settlers and the Army because they feared it would lead to a resurgence in Indian resistance. When attempts to ban the Ghost Dance failed, more direct action was taken. Sitting Bull, who had fought against Custer at Little Bighorn and supported the Ghost Dance movement, was killed while being taken into custody by reservation police. Two weeks later on December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry killed more than 300 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in the Dakota Territory. That confrontation marked the end of Indian resistance. Throughout the twentieth century, Native Americans have comprised the poorest minority group in the United States. With their culture and religion either ignored or treated with contempt, many Indians did become Christians and have supported themselves

U.S. HISTORY II

3 333

SETTLING THE WEST

through farming and ranching. Nevertheless, Native Americans continue to strive to maintain their tribal identities and languages despite all attempts to remake them in the “white man’s” image.

The Agricultural Frontier Federal government policy and the transcontinental railroads both encouraged the agricultural development of the trans-Mississippi West. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided 160 effectively free acres to the head of a family who resided on the land for five years; the land could also be acquired after only six months for $1.25 an acre. Although the price was right, small farms were not efficient, given the semiarid conditions on the Great Plains. Under the Timber Culture Act (1873), homesteaders could increase their holdings and acquire an additional 160 acres if they agreed to plant and maintain trees on part of that land. The Desert Land Act (1877) gave farmers an additional 640 acres at $1.25 an acre if the land was irrigated within three years. Many settlers still preferred to buy land from the railroads, which had received millions of acres through federal land grants. There was no limit on the amount of land that could be purchased, and the proximity to the rail lines gave settlers ready access to the markets in the East. Farming on the Great Plains. Settlers quickly realized that the Plains did not yield crops as readily as the land in the East. Necessary but expensive aspects of agriculture on the Great Plains included dry farming, which involved plowing deeply for moisture, then breaking up the soil surface to catch and hold any precipitation. Dry farming required a heavy reliance on agricultural machinery, such as improved steel plows (“sod busters”), threshing and haymaking machines, and seed drills and used windmills to pump water from deep underground. Another important innovation was barbed wire, patented in 1874, which allowed farmers to fence their fields in a region where timber was in short supply, thereby keeping cattle from trampling their crops.

4

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

SETTLING THE WEST

The average farm in the West was larger than those in other regions of the country, sometimes twice the acreage. In the 1870s, socalled bonanza farms were established in the wheat-growing northern Plains. Ranging from 1,000 to over 10,000 acres, they were highly mechanized and relied on a large number of laborers to bring in a single crop. Although most disappeared by the 1890s, the bonanza farms were symbolic of the trend toward large-scale agriculture that began in the West. Farm production and declining prices. Bringing new lands under cultivation and the widespread use of machinery led to a tremendous increase in farm production. The wheat crop, which became an export staple, grew from 170 million bushels at the end of the Civil War to more than 700 million bushels by the close of the century. Overproduction in the United States and expanded crop production in Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Russia drove agricultural prices down during the same period. Unfortunately, American farmers did not seem to understand how the market operated. When prices fell, the inclination was to plant more, which added to the worldwide surplus and pushed prices still lower. The promise of wealth through agriculture failed to materialize for most settlers in the West. They had borrowed heavily to buy their land and equipment and, as prices continued to fall, were unable to pay their debts. Foreclosures and the number of tenant farmers steadily increased in the late nineteenth century, particularly on the Great Plains. Farmers typically blamed their plight on others: the railroads for charging exorbitant shipping rates; the federal government for keeping the supply of money tight by adhering to the gold standard; and middlemen, such as grain elevator operators, for not paying the full value for their crops. Although organizations such as the Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, (which was founded in 1867 and grew quickly to more than a million members) brought redress of some grievances, discontent among the farmers continued to grow at the end of the nineteenth century.

U.S. HISTORY II

5 333

SETTLING THE WEST

The Cattle Kingdom The cattle industry grew tremendously in the two decades after the Civil War, moving into western Kansas and Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas in the 1870s and 1880s with the expansion of the railroads. While motion pictures, television, and novels have helped make cowboys — the men who rounded up, branded, and drove the cattle to market — the most heroic and best known symbols of the West, cattle ranching was in fact a big business that attracted foreign investment and required considerable organization. The long drive. The rise of the cattle kingdom coincided with the spread of the railroads across the country. In 1866, Texas ranchers drove their herds of longhorn cattle north to the railhead at Sedalia, Missouri, for shipment to the slaughter and packinghouses in the East. As the railroads moved west, the terminus of the long drive moved with them. The famed Chisholm Trail went from San Antonio to Abilene, Kansas, while the Western Trail ended in Dodge City. These drives covered approximately 800 miles and took about two months; the Goodknight-Loving Trail, which swung through west Texas and then north into New Mexico and Colorado, was considerably longer. The cattle business was a profitable one. A steer purchased for less than ten dollars in south Texas might sell for three or more times that amount in the Kansas cow towns. Since the herds grazed on the open range and as few as a dozen cowboys could handle several thousand heads of cattle, a rancher’s operating expenses were low. Given this positive outlook, it is not surprising that the cattle industry attracted capital from investors both in the East and overseas. Many ranchers simply managed cattle and land for outside corporate interests. Two of the largest corporate ranches — the Anglo-American Cattle Company (1879) and the Prairie Cattle Company (1881) — were established in England and Scotland, respectively.

6

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

SETTLING THE WEST

Few cowboys made driving cattle their life’s work, and after a year or two, most moved on to some other occupation. Although there were certainly cowhands who hoped to save enough money to start a ranch of their own, this was not easy. The cowboys were basically wageworkers, paid a meager $25 to $40 per month plus room and board. Ranch hands in the Texas Panhandle and in Wyoming even went on strike demanding higher salaries in the 1880s. Although whites were invariably hired as foremen in the ranch-hand hierarchy, nearly 20 percent of the cowboys were African and Mexican Americans. Indeed, the techniques for handling cattle on the range and the clothes the cowboys wore owed much to their early Mexican counterparts, the vaqueros. Range wars. As settlers advanced into cattle country, a conflict was inevitable between the farmers who fenced their land with barbed wire and sought to control water sources and the ranchers whose livelihood depended on keeping the range open. But the so-called range wars also pitted cattlemen against sheepherders (sheep were notorious for eating grasses down to the stubble so that the land was unsuited for cattle grazing) and cattle barons against smaller ranchers. In what was known as the Johnson County War (1892), the Wyoming Stock Growers Association hired gunmen to get rid of small operators accused of stealing cattle. The collapse of the cattle kingdom. A combination of factors brought an end to the cattle kingdom in the 1880s. The profitability of the industry encouraged ranchers to increase the size of their herds, which led to both overgrazing (the range could not support the number of cattle) and overproduction. As with crop production, more beef on the market and the rise of foreign competition led to declining prices. In addition to the loss of grazing land, nature took its toll. Successive harsh winters in 1886 and 1887, coupled with summer droughts, decimated the cattle herds on the Great Plains and forced ranchers to adopt new techniques. With some notable exceptions, such as the fabled King Ranch in south Texas, the trend shifted toward

U.S. HISTORY II

7 333

SETTLING THE WEST

smaller ranches. Cattlemen fenced in more manageable herds averaging 200 head, feeding them hay or grain in the winter and turning to selective breeding to increase the amount of beef produced.

The Mining Frontier The discovery of gold in California in 1848 did more than trigger the migration of tens of thousands of people hoping to make their fortune in the mineral-rich West. It created a body of prospectors willing to go wherever a strike was made. When gold was found in British Columbia in 1857, prospectors streamed north into Canada. In the following year, the slogan was “Pikes Peak or Bust,” as news spread about gold in what is today Colorado. The Comstock Lode, which produced over $300 million in gold and silver over a twenty-year period, was discovered in 1859 in western Nevada. Miners flocked to Idaho and Montana in the 1860s and followed the lure of gold into the Black Hills in the Dakota territory in 1875 (a violation of Sioux treaty rights that led to the Battle of the Little Bighorn). The last gold rush of the century brought miners to the Klondike region of Canada’s Yukon Territory in 1897. The mining boom also brought government to the Mountain West, first through vigilante committees that provided swift justice to those who broke the law. Several areas became territories and states sooner than they would have without the mining rush. Nevada, for instance, was admitted to the Union in 1864, just five years after the discovery of the Comstock Lode. Boom and bust on the mining frontier. The pattern was the same almost everywhere. With the discovery of gold or silver, prospectors rushed into an area to stake their claims, and small mining camps turned into boomtowns overnight, complete with dance halls, saloons, prostitutes, and astronomical prices for food and equipment. Those who really struck it rich were, more often than not, those who supplied the prospectors with what they needed, and not the prospectors themselves. Most of the mines played out quickly, and as people moved on to newer strikes, once bustling mining communities turned

8

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

SETTLING THE WEST

into ghost towns. If the deposits were rich, the mines were soon taken over by well-financed corporate mining operations. Surface deposits were quickly removed through placer mining, in which a lone prospector panned for gold by a stream or a small group of men used a sluice to wash off larger amounts of dirt and sand. To get at the ore buried deep inside rock or veins of quartz, shafts had to be dug and shored up with timber, pumps installed to keep the tunnels dry, and mills set up to crush the rock and separate the precious metals. All this required heavy machinery, capital, and technical expertise provided by investors and large mining companies. Gold and silver were not the only sources of wealth on the mining frontier. Lead, zinc, and particularly copper were important as well. The Anaconda Mine in Montana, where copper ore was extracted, smelted, and refined, helped make the United States the world’s leading producer of copper in the 1880s. Labor on the mining frontier. The shift from placer to hard-rock mining meant that independent prospectors became laborers, paid either by the day or the week. Work in the mines was hard and dangerous, and the pay was usually low. Miners of the Comstock Lode went on strike as early as 1864 for higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions, and although unions such as the Miners Protective Association had wide support throughout the mining frontier, opposition to them was also strong. In 1892, state and federal troops were used to break up a strike in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where the miners were seeking company recognition of their union. This conflict led to the formation of the Western Federation of Miners under the leadership of William “Big Bill” Haywood. A number of the WFM’s 50,000 members also became an important force in the even more militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or “Wobblies”), founded by Haywood in 1905. From the days of the California gold rush, mining attracted an ethnically diverse labor force, including Chinese, Irish, Mexican, and new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Racial discrimination among these groups was rife. More often than not, whites actually worked the mines while Chinese or Mexicans served as muckers,

U.S. HISTORY II

9 333

SETTLING THE WEST

who loaded and dumped the ore cars, or as simple laborers taking away surface rubble. Such unskilled jobs paid considerably less than the wages miners received. On those parts of the mining frontier where Chinese and Mexican workers were not common, another hierarchy of labor based on ethnicity emerged, with Americans and Irish working as the miners while recent arrivals from Italy, Greece, or the Balkans took on the menial tasks.

The Closing of the Frontier By the end of the nineteenth century, the West was effectively settled. Railroads stretched across all parts of the region, from the Great Northern, which ran along the Canadian border, to the Southern Pacific that ran across Texas and the Arizona and New Mexico territories to link New Orleans and Los Angeles. The influx of homesteaders, ranchers, and miners swelled the census rolls and led to the admission of Nevada (1864), Colorado (1876), South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Washington (all four in 1889), and Idaho and Wyoming (1890) to the Union. New towns and cities created by the cattle or mining boom, such as Abilene, Denver, and San Francisco, dotted the trans-Mississippi West. The Oklahoma Land Rush. Under President Andrew Jackson, Native American tribes from the Southeast had been resettled in what became Oklahoma. Long considered remote and unproductive, the land became increasingly valuable and, by the 1880s, the federal government was under pressure to open it to non-natives for settlement. Congress responded by putting two million acres of the Indian Territory into the public domain. At noon on April 22, 1889, more than 50,000 men, women, and children (popularly known as the Boomers) on horseback, in wagons, and even on bicycles stampeded into what is now central Oklahoma to stake out their claims. Within a few hectic hours, all the available land was settled, with the choicest acreage actually going to the Sooners, those who had crossed the line

10

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

SETTLING THE WEST

before the official beginning of the land rush. An additional six million acres in the Oklahoma Panhandle called the Cherokee Strip was opened for settlers in 1893. Frederick Jackson Turner and the frontier. A year after the Oklahoma Land Rush, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the frontier was closed. The 1890 census had shown that a frontier line, a point beyond which the population density was less than two persons per square mile, no longer existed. The announcement impressed Frederick Jackson Turner, a young historian at the University of Wisconsin. In 1893, he presented a paper to the American Historical Association entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In it he argued that the experience of the frontier was what distinguished the United States from Europe; the frontier had shaped American history as well as produced the practicality, energy, and individualism of the American character. Turner’s claims about the effects of the frontier on American life influenced generations of historians, particularly in their appreciation of the role of geography and the environment in helping to shape national development. With more people homesteading farms after 1890 than in the decades before, the Western experience was far from over. But with the approach of the new century, there was a new appreciation of the environment and the scenic values of the West. As the frontier officially disappeared, popular interest in preserving wilderness grew. Although Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming was established in 1872, California’s Yosemite (1890) was the first national park specifically designed to protect a wilderness area. In 1891, Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act authorizing the president to close timber areas to settlement and create national forests by withdrawing the land from the public domain. President Benjamin Harrison immediately set aside 13 million acres under the legislation. Naturalist John Muir, who was a driving force behind the creation of Yosemite, founded the Sierra Club in 1892 to protect the Pacific Coast’s mountain ranges. For all the preservation sentiment, there were also trends developing that emphasized more fully utilizing the resources of the West. The

U.S. HISTORY II

11 333

SETTLING THE WEST

twentieth century’s large-scale irrigation projects, dams, aqueducts, and power lines that would bring water and electricity hundreds of miles to the region’s major cities would transform the West in ways that could not be imagined in 1890.

12

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

Between the end of the Civil War and 1900, the United States sur-

passed all other countries as the world’s leading industrial nation. By any measure — number of workers employed in factories; production of raw materials such as coal, iron, and oil; or the development of new technology — the American achievement was impressive. With industrial progress, however, came changes in the nature of work and the beginning of organized labor, as well as the federal government’s first serious steps to regulate big business. It was also the age of the great entrepreneurs. Whether hailed as captains of industry or condemned as robber barons, men like steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, financier J. Pierpont Morgan, and inventor Thomas A. Edison changed the very structure of the American economy.

The Railroads The railroads were the key to economic growth in the second half of the nineteenth century. Besides making it possible to ship agricultural and manufactured goods throughout the country cheaply and efficiently, they directly contributed to the development of other industries. The railroads were the largest single market for steel, which went into their locomotives and track, and they relied on coal as their principal fuel. Because of their size and complexity, the railroads pioneered new management techniques such as the separation of finance and accounting from operating functions and the development of the first organizational charts that clearly showed the chain of command and responsibility. Furthermore, competition among the various rail companies ultimately led to consolidation, which also became a trend in late-nineteenth century American industry. Growth and innovation. The decades after the Civil War were a great age of railroad building. Total rail mileage in the United States grew from 53,000 miles in 1870 to just under 200,000 miles at the turn of the century, with most of the new track being laid east of the Mississippi River in the nation’s industrial heartland. Along with the railroad boom came solutions to problems that had plagued the industry in the past. U.S. HISTORY II

13 333

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

Cross-country scheduling, for instance, became easier in 1883 when the railroads established the Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones across the United States, and shipping delays caused by railroads using different gauge track were resolved in 1886 when almost all the companies adopted a 4-foot-81⁄2 inch standard. The capital needed to purchase and maintain track and rolling stock made owning and operating a railroad an expensive venture. Although subsidies from local, state, and federal governments were important, most of the money needed for expansion came from private investors through the sale of stocks and bonds. Railroads, however, often engaged in stock watering, selling more stock than the company’s actual value. In the 1880s and 1890s, railroad financing increasingly came from investment banks such as J.P. Morgan & Company, which were able to assume a management role and push for the consolidation of rail lines as the price for extending credit. Morgan himself was involved in reorganizing several lines, including the Erie and the Northern Pacific, after the Panic of 1893. Competition and regulation. Competition among railroads led some into bankruptcy, sunk others heavily in debt, and ignited bitter rate wars. To limit competition, lines operating in the same region sometimes worked out an agreement to share the territory or divide the profit equally at the end of the year. This was known as pooling, a process that kept rates artificially high. Lacking such cooperation, the companies used various means to draw customers away from their competitors, such as paying kickbacks or rebates to large customers for using their lines and making up any losses by charging small shippers more. Because of such practices, rates were often lower for a long haul than for a short haul. For example, shipping goods from Chicago to New York, where several companies had routes, was cheaper than sending the same shipment from Buffalo to Pittsburgh, where only one railroad had a monopoly. The unfairness of such ratesetting practices led to government regulation of the industry. As early as the 1860s, largely due to pressure from farmers, states began establishing maximum rates and outlawing rate discrimination. In 1886, however, the Supreme Court ruled in Wabash v. Illinois that the authority to regulate railroads engaged in interstate commerce

14

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

rested with the federal government rather than the states. Congress, which had been investigating the railroads for several years, responded to the decision by passing the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The legislation provided that rates must be “reasonable” and prohibited pooling, rebates, and long/short haul rate differentials. The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the nation’s first regulatory agency, was created with the authority to review rates and investigate the railroads. The Commission had very little real power; it could not compel witnesses to testify, and the courts often rejected its decisions.

Big Business: Steel and Oil The term “big business” is often used to characterize industrial expansion after the Civil War. During this period, the movement of the production of goods out of small shops and mills and into factories increased tremendously. In almost every industry, the number of factory workers grew, and by 1900, manufacturing plants with over 1,000 employees — something unheard of 30 years earlier — were commonplace. Big business also meant consolidation; entire industries were controlled by a handful of companies as competition led to new forms of business organization. The steel and oil industries are good examples of this trend. Andrew Carnegie and the steel industry. With the introduction of such new technology as the Bessemer converter and the open hearth process, the amount of steel produced in the United States went from 77,000 tons in 1870 to over 10 million tons in 1900. The bulk of the production at the turn of the century was in the hands of a single company, Carnegie Steel, founded by Scottish immigrant and railroad entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie. While acquiring other steel companies that were unable to compete against his highly efficient operations, Carnegie also bought iron ore deposits as well as steamships and railroad cars, which were used to ship ore to his plants and goods to his customers. This concept of controlling the manufacture of a product from the raw material stage to the sale of the finished product is U.S. HISTORY II

15 333

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

known as vertical integration. Carnegie sold his company to a group of investors led by J. Pierpont Morgan in 1901 for just under $500 million. Out of that sale came the United States Steel Corporation, the largest company in the world at that time, controlling 200 subsidiaries and employing more than 168,000 people. Carnegie was also a philosopher of the new industrial age. His article “Wealth,” which was first published in the North American Review in 1889 and was later included in his book Gospel of Wealth (1900), drew on the then-popular ideas of social Darwinism. He argued that although competition in business widened the gap between the rich and poor, it also insured the “survival of the fittest” and was essential to human progress. To Carnegie, the issue was not the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, but how those few used their wealth. Carnegie strongly believed that the purpose of philanthropy was to enable people to help themselves, and he used his immense fortune to support universities, libraries, hospitals, and similar projects throughout the country. John D. Rockefeller and the oil industry. John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil of Ohio in 1870, and the company quickly monopolized oil refining and transportation in the United States. Rockefeller received significant rebates from the railroads and made his own oil barrels, built pipelines and oil storage facilities, and bought tank cars to reduce expenses. These methods of vertical integration allowed Standard Oil to cut prices and drive competitors out of business. The company also led the way in horizontal integration, controlling businesses in the same industry. In 1882, Rockefeller formed the Standard Oil Trust, which controlled upward of 95 percent of the refining capacity in the United States. In a trust, stockholders give up their stock and the control of their respective companies to a board of trustees in return for trust certificates, which pay higher dividends. Growth in the number of trusts led Congress to take action against them. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 declared trusts or other business combinations operating “in restraint of trade” to be illegal and authorized the federal government to break them up. However, the legislation did not define what a trust was or what

16

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

“restraint of trade” meant, and it was not vigorously enforced. Eighteen lawsuits were filed under the statute between 1890 and 1904, four of these against labor unions. Nevertheless, as a result of the antitrust legislation, the Ohio Supreme Court dissolved the Standard Oil Trust in 1892. Rockefeller reorganized his business in 1899 as Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. The new entity was a holding company (a corporation owning a controlling share of the stock in other firms), and this new type of combination continued to exercise a monopoly over the oil industry. New forms of business organization were not unique to steel and oil, though. Gustavus Swift, for instance, established meat packing and provisioning as a vertical integration by purchasing cattle, refrigerated railroad cars and warehouses, and a fleet of wagons to deliver beef to retail butchers. Similarly, other industries, such as sugar refining, followed Rockefeller’s example and formed trusts. Nor was big business limited to heavy industry; the late nineteenth century also saw the rise of large-scale retailing. In Philadelphia in 1876, John Wanamaker opened the first department store, which was quickly imitated by Macy’s in New York and Marshall Field in Chicago. The successful department store sold a wide variety of merchandise, kept prices low through buying in large volume direct from manufacturers, focused on quality and customer service, and advertised heavily.

Technology and Business The late nineteenth century saw an explosion of technological innovation. While the U.S. Patent Office issued less than 1,000 patents annually in the years before the Civil War, the average number was over 20,000 per year from 1866 to 1900. A simple innovation could transform entire sections of the economy, such as the introduction of barbed wire (1874) to cattle ranching and farming in the West. Technological breakthroughs could also significantly improve the way an industry operated, as demonstrated by George Pullman’s sleeping car (1864) and George Westinghouse’s railroad air brake (1868) and their effects on the railroad industry. Within a few decades, a host of new products — the typewriter (1867), the carpet

U.S. HISTORY II

17 333

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

sweeper (1876), the adding machine (1888), and the Kodak hand camera (1888) — came on the market and changed the way Americans worked and played. Thomas A. Edison and the process of invention. While many of the technological marvels were the work of a solitary inventor, the invention process itself was changing due to the work of Thomas A. Edison and his model of collaborative research. After patenting an electric voting machine (1869) and making improvements to the telegraph, Edison brought together a group of technicians, machinists, and craftsmen at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876, creating the first industrial research laboratory, a factory for inventions. Out of Menlo Park came the phonograph (1877), the first efficient incandescent light bulb (1879), and the first central power station (1882). His larger facility, established in West Orange, New Jersey, in 1887, continued to produce new inventions, including an improved motion picture projector (1897) and the alkaline storage battery (1900). Although Edison personally held more than 1,000 patents, most were the product of the research done in his laboratories. Edison and Westinghouse. Edison ushered in the electric utility industry in 1882 when his Pearl Street Station produced electricity for 85 customers in New York City. Although the number of Edison power plants grew quickly after 1882, the direct-current (DC), lowvoltage system that his plants used had a limited transmission range. Long-distance transmission of electricity became possible with the alternating-current system that George Westinghouse developed in 1886, in which the high-voltage current is reduced or “stepped down” by transformers for household use. Although Edison believed that high voltage was too dangerous, Westinghouse eventually won the “battle of the currents.” As a result, the long-distance transmission capabilities of AC systems allowed for the electrification and dispersement of industry, providing factories with an instant source of power so that their locations were no longer tied to natural power sources, such as water or coal.

18

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

Alexander Graham Bell and the communications revolution. In 1876, the same year that Edison opened his research laboratory at Menlo Park, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. A curiosity at first, the telephone quickly became an essential feature of the office and a fixture in many homes, and by 1900 there were almost 800,000 telephones in operation in the United States. The patent that Bell received was one of the most valuable ever granted, in part because his company, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, used it to monopolize the telephone’s use by bringing patent-infringement suits against competitors. By the end of the nineteenth century, the long-distance service provider American Telephone and Telegraph Company consolidated hundreds of intercity phone companies. The telephone was a technological leap beyond the telegraph, which required a trained operator to send and receive messages from the telegraph office. When messages did come in, they had to be “translated” from Morse code and then delivered by messenger, all of which took time. The communication revolution brought about by the telephone was more than just a matter of speed, however; it meant instantaneous direct communication. Moreover, while the telegraph had been used primarily by business, the telephone allowed anyone to talk to anybody about anything. Communication became more egalitarian and informal.

The Rise of Organized Labor Before the Civil War, less than a million people worked in industry; by the end of the century, that figure had more than tripled. Traditionally, skilled artisans were employed in small shops to make finished products while setting their own hours, and more often than not, they worked alongside the shop owner. As the factory system took hold and plants became larger, the nature of labor changed. Mass production meant that workers were responsible for only a small part of the process, performing one specific task repeatedly in the creation of an item. Many tasks could be done just as well by unskilled workers, and craftsmen found themselves displaced by women, children,

U.S. HISTORY II

19 333

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

and recent immigrants, all of whom were willing to work for a lower wage. The factory became an impersonal environment in which workers never saw or even knew the owners, and where the pace of work was set by the capabilities of the machines. The typical factory worker in the late nineteenth century worked ten hours a day, six days a week. Unskilled workers were paid between $1.00 and $1.50 a day; skilled workers might make twice as much, while women (who became a significant percentage of the labor force after the Civil War), children, and African-Americans were paid considerably less. Workplace accidents were common, and the idea of compensating workers injured on the job was unheard of at the time. To help each other through illness, injury, and deaths, workers formed mutual benefit societies (often organized along ethnic lines), but the assistance these groups provided was minimal. The most serious problem for factory workers was unemployment. It was common for a worker, particularly an unskilled one, to be out of a job at least part of the year. Early labor unions. Skilled workers, such as cigarmakers, iron molders, and hat finishers formed the first labor unions before the Civil War. Several of these craft unions (so named because they organized workers within specific craft industries) joined together to form the National Labor Union (NLU) in 1866. Although the organization advocated an eight-hour workday, it did not support strikes to achieve that goal. The NLU was also concerned with social reform, including equal rights for women, establishing worker cooperatives, and temperance. The union, along with organized labor in general, declined sharply in the wake of the depression of 1873 but not before influencing Congress to enact the eight-hour day for federal employees (1868). The Knights of Labor, organized in 1869, is considered to be the first industrial union, open to skilled and unskilled workers, women, and African-Americans. This inclusive policy contributed to its growth, and the union boasted more than 700,000 members by the mid-1880s. The program of the Knights of Labor was a combination of reform ideas and specific worker demands. Along with setting up

20

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

cooperative workshops and calling for the regulation of the railroads, the union wanted an eight-hour workday, legislation protecting the health and safety of workers, and an end to child labor (for children under the age of 14). To achieve these goals, political action and arbitration between employers and labor representatives were preferred over strikes. The decline of the Knights of Labor after 1886 was due to several factors: the failure of several unauthorized strikes, the growing dissatisfaction of craftsmen who felt the union favored the interests of unskilled workers, and the public perception in the wake of the Haymarket Square Riot (1886) that the Knights supported violence. On May 4, 1886, a mass meeting of workers was called in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest the death of a striker at the McCormick Harvester plant. When the police tried to disperse the crowd, someone threw a bomb that killed seven policemen and injured several more. The riot that followed resulted in additional deaths on both sides. Although it was one of the three unions on strike at McCormick, the Knights of Labor had nothing to do with the events in Haymarket Square. This fact did not prevent the union from becoming a victim of the antilabor sentiment that swept the country, and its membership declined rapidly over the next four years. The American Federation of Labor. Founded in 1886 by Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was a federation of skilled workers in national craft unions that maintained their autonomy while working together to promote labor legislation and support strikes. In contrast to its predecessors, the new union focused exclusively on basic labor issues — the eight-hour workday, higher wages, better working conditions (particularly plant safety), and the right of workers to organize. To Gompers, who began his career in the cigarmakers union, only craftsmen that could not be easily replaced had the leverage necessary to either bargain effectively with employers or go on strike. The AFL had little more than disdain for unskilled workers or blacks, skilled or not, and did not seriously try to organize women. Although he was an immigrant himself, as were many local union men, Gompers nevertheless strongly supported restrictions on

U.S. HISTORY II

21 333

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

immigration to prevent new arrivals from competing with American workers for jobs. Even though it excluded most of the working class, the AFL became the largest single labor organization in the country by 1900 with over one million members.

Labor Unrest and Strikes Although the major national labor unions, with the exception of the AFL, disavowed strikes as a tactic, there were still over 20,000 strikes involving an estimated 6.6 million workers between 1880 and 1890. Strikes often broke out spontaneously in response to calls from leaders in a factory, but local and national unions increasingly played an important role in organizing work stoppages. Governments at every level opposed strikes, and often, local police, the state militia, and federal troops were called in to end labor unrest. This did not mean, however, that elected officials were unsympathetic to workers’ aspirations. Indeed, in 1894 Congress declared the first Monday in September to be Labor Day, a legal national holiday recognizing the nation’s workers. The Railroad Strike of 1877. The first nationwide strike, precipitated by a wage cut for workers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, spread quickly to lines east of the Mississippi River and as far west as San Francisco. Wherever the strike erupted — Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis — riots broke out and railroad equipment was burned. When the state militia proved incapable of restoring order, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in federal troops, which resulted in an inevitable clash between the Army and the workers. By the time the strike was over, 100 people had been killed and property damage stood at $10 million. The Homestead Steel Strike of 1892. On June 29, 1892, members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel & Tin Workers were locked out of the Homestead Steel plant in a dispute over wages and working conditions. The manager of the plant, Henry Clay Frick, was determined to use the strike to break the union. A confrontation

22

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

between the strikers and Pinkerton detectives brought in by Frick to enforce the lockout turned violent, and 8,000 state troops were needed to reopen the plant in July for nonunion workers. Although the strike continued well into November, the union was effectively destroyed, causing a major setback for organized labor in the steel industry. The Pullman Strike of 1894. In the wake of the depression of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company reduced wages and laid off many workers. The workers lived outside of Chicago in a company town, where the company owned the workers’ houses and the stores in which they bought their food and clothing. Despite the wage cuts and layoffs, rents and prices for goods remained the same. Consequently, Pullman workers went on strike, and the American Railway Union, recently formed under Eugene V. Debs, called on its members to refuse to handle trains that had Pullman cars. By July 1894, rail traffic throughout the Midwest and West came to a standstill. Although Debs urged a peaceful boycott, there were clashes between the strikers and the special deputies sent by the U.S. Attorney General to keep the trains running. President Grover Cleveland ordered troops in over the objection of Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois, and the federal government came up with a new tactic. Citing the Sherman Antitrust Act, a federal district court issued an injunction prohibiting the strikers from interfering with the delivery of the mail or taking actions in restraint of trade. The union called off the strike, but Debs was jailed for violating the injunction. Upheld by the Supreme Court in 1895, the injunction became a powerful weapon against organized labor in the decades that followed. Despite public fears, left-wing elements had very little influence on the unions. Debs was radicalized by the Pullman strike, and the collapse of the American Railway Union led him into politics. In 1897 he founded the Social Democratic Party of America, which soon merged with the Socialist Labor Party to form the Socialist Party of America in 1900. The party’s candidate for president five times, Debs received more than 900,000 votes, about 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912.

U.S. HISTORY II

23 333

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE, 1865 – 1900

T

he years of industrial expansion after the Civil War brought significant changes to American society. The country became increasingly urban, and cities grew not only in terms of population but also in size, with skyscrapers pushing cities upward and new transportation systems extending them outward. Part of the urban population growth was fueled by an unprecedented mass immigration to the United States that continued unabated into the first two decades of the twentieth century. The promise that America held for these new immigrants contrasted sharply with the rise of legalized segregation of African-Americans in the South after Reconstruction. Meanwhile, ongoing industrialization and urbanization left their mark on how people spent their daily lives and used their leisure time.

The Rise of Urban America In 1870, there were only two American cities with a population of more than 500,000; by 1900, there were six, and three of these — New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia — boasted over one million inhabitants. Roughly 40 percent of Americans lived in cities and the number was climbing. Although much of the urbanization occurred in the industrial regions of the Northeast and Midwest, it was a national phenomenon that often corresponded to the presence of railroads. For example, Atlanta experienced a rapid economic recovery in the last quarter of the century, and Los Angeles became a boomtown in the 1880s due to the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads. Because the birth rate in the United States declined in the late nineteenth century, urban growth reflected an internal migration of Americans from farms and small towns to the larger cities and the overseas migration that brought millions of people to U.S. shores. The new immigration. Before the Civil War, immigration to the United States largely originated in Northern and Western European countries, such as Great Britain (particularly Ireland), Germany, and Scandinavia, with smaller numbers of immigrants from China and Mexico settling in California and the Far West. In the 1880s, however, the origin of immigrants shifted to Southern and Eastern U.S. HISTORY II

25 333

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Europe. A combination of deteriorating economic conditions, war, and religious/ethnic persecution compelled Jews (from AustriaHungary and the Russian Empire), Greeks, Italians, Poles, Russians, Serbs, and Turks to come to the “Golden Land” of America. Although historians distinguish between the “old” (pre-1880) and “new” (post1880) immigration in terms of the immigrants’ countries of origin, it is a somewhat arbitrary distinction; immigrants from the Balkans and Russia were in the United States early in the century, and Irish and Germans continued to arrive after 1880. Another popular misconception is that all immigrants found permanent homes in the United States. In fact, perhaps as many as three out of every ten new arrivals (most of them single young men) returned to their homeland after they earned enough money to buy land or set up their own business. Immigrants moved into the poorer sections of the major cities — New York’s Lower East Side, for example — and often into neighborhoods abandoned by upwardly mobile immigrant groups. Seeking familiar surroundings, they tended to live and work with people from their native country. Although their children attended public schools and quickly learned English, immigrant parents continued to use their native tongue, transplanting a bit of the Old World into the new. Whether nicknamed Little Italy, Little Bohemia, or Chinatown, immigrant neighborhoods were rich with Old World languages, from the words printed in the newspapers and on the signs in store windows to the voices heard on the streets. These neighborhoods, which helped ease the transition from greenhorn (as newcomers were often called) to citizen, were terribly overcrowded, with upward of 4,000 people housed on a single block. Such overcrowding contributed to poverty, crime, and disease. Native-born Americans were troubled by the influx of foreigners, who seemed very different from earlier immigrants, because earlier immigrants spoke English (for example, the Irish) or followed the Protestant religion (such as Germans or Scandinavians). Moreover, new immigrants were often portrayed as dangerous radicals ready to undermine the American political system or as threats to the jobs of American workers because of their willingness to settle for lower wages. Given these attitudes toward foreigners, it is not surprising that calls for restrictions on immigration began to sound. In 1882,

26

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Congress denied convicts, paupers, and the mentally ill the right to enter the United States and three years later prohibited contract laborers (immigrants whose passage was paid in return for working for a certain period of time). Neither law had much affect on what was essentially an open immigration policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), on the other hand, suspended immigration from China for ten years; it was extended for another decade in 1892 and then was made permanent in 1902. The law was not repealed until 1943. Skyscrapers and mass transit. As more and more people crowded into the large cities, the value of urban land increased. The solution to rising costs of real estate and the need to maximize the use of available space was to build up. The availability of cheap cast iron and, later, structural steel, improved fireproofing, and the electric elevator allowed for the construction of taller and taller buildings. The first skyscraper was the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, completed in 1884. Chicago became the home of the skyscraper because of the disastrous fire of 1871 that destroyed most of the central business district. The building codes that went into effect after the fire required that all new construction use noncombustible materials. Office buildings of 20 or more stories were common in large cities throughout the country by the end of the nineteenth century. The advances in architecture and design that skyscrapers represented did not extend to residential housing; the high-rise apartment house was a twentieth-century phenomenon. One attempt at improving housing for the poor actually had the opposite effect. The dumbbell tenement, which was introduced in New York in 1879, had four apartments and two toilets on each floor and was indented in the middle, producing its characteristic “dumbbell” shape. When two tenements were built next to each other, the indentations created an airshaft that provided limited ventilation and light to the interior apartments. Developers seized on the design, because it allowed them to make full use of the small 25-x-100-foot city building lots. A block lined with dumbbell tenements housed more than 4,000 people, significantly adding to overcrowding in poor neighborhoods; future construction was banned in New York in 1901.

U.S. HISTORY II

27 333

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Improved urban transportation helped shape the modern city. Early developments included elevated steam-driven trains (1870) and the introduction of the cable car in San Francisco (1873). The use of electricity in the 1880s led to innovations such as trolleys in many cities, the first underground trains (Boston, 1897), and New York’s famed subway system (1904). Mass transit helped to change living patterns. As trolley or subway lines extended beyond what used to be the city limits, the first suburbs were created, resulting in residential segregation by income. While immigrants and the poor remained in the central city, the middle class could live further away from their jobs and commute to work. Bridges also contributed to the outward expansion of cities. Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883 and the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time, linked the then city of Brooklyn with Manhattan. Urban politics and reform. In the late nineteenth century, municipal government often failed to meet the needs of its constituents — citizen and immigrant alike. In many cities across the country, power rested not in the hands of elected officials but with the boss who handpicked the candidates for office and controlled the vote through the political machine, or organization, that he ran. Some of the bosses were New York’s William Marcy Tweed and George Washington Plunkitt, Kansas City’s “Big Jim” Pendergast, and Cincinnati’s George Cox. Although reformers bitterly attacked the corruption and inefficiency that went along with boss politics, the system did provide valuable services. In return for immigrants’ votes and help organizing campaigns, bosses could arrange jobs on the growing city payrolls for them or their children. Bosses also provided the poor with money and food and helped them work out problems with the police or other city agencies. In sum, political machines ran a large-scale welfare system at a time when even the concept of a social safety net was unheard of. The strong late-nineteenth-century impulse to help the poor and recent immigrant arrivals often had a distinctly Christian overtone. Groups like the Young Men’s Christian Association, whose North American branch was founded in 1851, grew rapidly after the Civil War, and an American branch of the Salvation Army was established

28

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

in 1880. Charitable assistance was encouraged by the Social Gospel, a philosophy embraced by a number of Protestant ministers, which noted that personal salvation came through the betterment of society and that churches could help bring this about by fighting poverty, slum conditions, and drunkenness. Churches built gymnasiums, opened libraries, set up lectures, and took on social programs in the hope of attracting the working poor. The settlement house movement was a nonsectarian approach to the same problems addressed by the churches. Established in the poorest neighborhoods, settlement houses served as community centers whose primary function was to help immigrant families adjust to life in the United States. They offered a variety of services, including nurseries and kindergartens, classes on sewing, cooking, and English, and a range of sports and recreation programs. The first settlement house was the Neighborhood Guild in New York (1886), but the most famous were the Hull House in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams in 1889, and the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, founded by Lillian Wald in 1893. College-educated middleclass women, who in effect created the field of social work, generally ran the settlement houses. As professionals, they were interested in gathering information on a wide range of urban problems. The data they collected helped bring about changes in building codes, improved health care and factory safety, and highlighted the need for new child labor laws.

African-Americans after Reconstruction In much of the country in the late nineteenth century, social tensions were defined in terms of rich versus poor, native-born versus immigrant, and worker versus capitalist. In the states of the former Confederacy, despite all the calls for a New South in the years after Reconstruction, tensions continued to center upon the relations between blacks and whites. Although a small percentage of AfricanAmericans found work in the new iron foundries and steel mills, they were generally barred from the textile mills that grew into the region’s major industry. Mill owners preferred to use white women and chil-

U.S. HISTORY II

29 333

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

dren rather than blacks, who were increasingly portrayed as lazy, ignorant, and shiftless. Consequently, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans were tied to the land as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. By 1900, segregation was institutionalized throughout the South, and the civil rights of blacks were sharply curtailed. Jim Crow laws and segregation. Under the Civil Rights Act of 1875, racial discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels, railroads, and theaters was prohibited. Several challenges to the law were mounted in the courts. In 1883 the Supreme Court ruled in the Civil Rights Cases that the Act was invalid because it addressed social as opposed to civil rights. Furthermore, the Court noted that the Fourteenth Amendment protected people against violations of their civil rights by states, not by the actions of individuals (for example, when the owner of a hotel refused to rent a room to an AfricanAmerican). In the wake of the decision, state legislatures throughout the South enacted laws that legalized racial segregation in essentially all public places, from schools to hospitals to restaurants. The Supreme Court upheld such Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in its landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In this case, the Court set forth its famous separate but equal doctrine, which stated that segregation in itself did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, provided the facilities for blacks and whites were equal. Segregated facilities, whether schools or public transportation, were rarely equal. For example, while several Southern states spent nearly the same amount on the education of whites and blacks in 1890, there was a tremendous disparity in spending in favor of whites within 20 years. Legalized segregation also reinforced the notions of white racial superiority and African-American inferiority, creating an atmosphere that encouraged violence, and during the 1890s lynchings of blacks rose significantly. Despite these obvious problems, the concept of separate but equal was not overturned by the Supreme Court until 1954.

30

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Losing the right to vote. The end of Reconstruction did not mean an end to African-American political influence in the South. Blacks continued to serve in several state legislatures as late as 1900 and were even elected to Congress after 1877, albeit from all-black districts. However, a change took place in the 1890s as attitudes about race became more strongly felt and the prospect of an electoral alliance between poor whites and blacks that could threaten the power structure became a possibility. While the Fifteenth Amendment ensured that African-Americans could not be denied the right to vote simply because they were African-American, the southern states came up with various ways to disenfranchise blacks. Mississippi’s 1890 constitution imposed limitations on voting that were aimed primarily at African-Americans. These limitations included residency requirements, disqualification of individuals convicted of even minor crimes, payment of all taxes (including the poll tax), and a literacy test. Loopholes existed within these restrictions to favor whites who might have been otherwise ineligible to vote. For example, an illiterate person who could demonstrate to the registrar that he “understood” the constitution would be allowed to vote. Louisiana adopted the so-called grandfather clause, which allowed men to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had been eligible to vote as of January 1, 1867. No blacks had the right to vote anywhere in the South at that time. Although the Supreme Court ultimately declared the grandfather clause unconstitutional, this and similar laws drastically cut African-American voter registration in the South by 1900. The African-American response. Blacks responded to increasing discrimination in several ways. The initial wave of the Great Migration of African-Americans, moving from the rural South to the urban North, began in the 1890s, and there was a very small emigration back to Africa as well. Former slaves established all-black towns in Tennessee, Kansas, and the Oklahoma Territory, and organized early civil rights organizations such as the Citizens Equal Rights Association (1887) and the Afro-American League (1890). The divisions within the African-American community on how best to

U.S. HISTORY II

31 333

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

achieve equality were reflected in the disparate philosophies of two men: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. The founder of the Tuskegee Institute (1882), an agricultural and vocational training school in Alabama, Washington believed that blacks should concentrate on economic self-improvement rather than on demanding social equality and civil rights. After he outlined his views in a speech in Atlanta in 1895, which included an apparent acceptance of segregation, his accommodationist position became known as the Atlanta Compromise. Massachusetts-born and Harvard-trained Du Bois attacked Washington’s philosophy in his The Souls of Black Folks (1903). He believed that education for blacks had to include more than learning a trade, and he demanded access to higher education. Indeed, Du Bois believed it would be this educated African-American elite that would lead the way to equality by using the ballot box in states where they could vote and “agitation,” or protest, where they could not.

Everyday Life in America In the decades after the Civil War, Americans experienced remarkable changes in their everyday life, from the clothes they wore and food they ate to their opportunities for recreation. Mail order catalogs allowed rural residents to buy new equipment and follow the latest trends in fashion or household appliances without ever going to a store. The public school and university systems grew and developed as the demand for education increased. Meanwhile, Americans filled their leisure time with a diverse range of activities, from sports to vaudeville to amusement parks. The impact of these changes in lifestyle was reflected in both the serious and popular literature of the time, which emphasized realism and targeted the growing middle class. The impact of mass production. Mass production changed the way Americans dressed, shopped, and ate. After the Civil War, handmade clothing quickly gave way to ready-to-wear clothes sold through retail outlets. But people did not have to live in large cities or even

32

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

visit the stores themselves to buy what they needed. In 1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward opened the first mail-order retail business and issued a one-page catalog featuring nearly 150 items; by 1884 the catalog contained more than 200 pages and listed over 10,000 items. Montgomery Ward and its more successful competitor Sears, Roebuck and Company brought the benefits of mass production to farms and small towns by selling everything from clothes to agricultural implements through their catalogs. Mail-order buying was made even more accessible in 1896 with the first rural free delivery (RFD) service. The variety of foods available also increased dramatically. By the 1880s, Easterners could buy California oranges, Wyoming beef, and fresh milk shipped from rural dairies by rail in refrigerated cars. More and more women shopped for commercially prepared food and did less baking and canning. Many of today’s best known brand names — Campbell’s soup, Nabisco crackers, and Coca-Cola — were introduced in the 1890s. These products were marketed through grocery chain stores like the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, or A & P, which added foodstuffs and household products to its inventory in the 1870s. Perhaps the best known example of the chain store was the “five and dime,” created by F. W. Woolworth in 1879. Like the new department stores, the retailing success of A & P and Woolworth’s was due to large-volume buying and heavy advertising. The expansion of education. Public-school enrollment doubled between 1870 and 1900, including a significant jump in the number of high school students during the same period. Both trends contributed to a sharp drop in illiteracy in the United States. The growth in elementary education reflected the influx of immigrants. Immigrant parents wanted their children to go to school as a means of getting ahead, while educators and public officials saw schools as the best instruments for acculturation. Children of the middle class, however, accounted for the increase in the secondary-school population. New classes in American history, the sciences, and the “manual arts” were added to the basic curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the first vocational high schools were established by the turn of the century. U.S. HISTORY II

33 333

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Higher education also expanded. As a result of both public and private investment, American colleges and universities had almost 250,000 students by 1900, four times the number 30 years earlier. The Morrill Act of 1862 led to the creation of 12 new state colleges, 8 agricultural and mechanical colleges, and 6 black colleges, and the federal government provided partial funding for these institutions through the Second Morrill Act (1890). At the same time, wealthy entrepreneurs and philanthropists endowed new schools, such as Johns Hopkins University (1873), Stanford University (1885), and the University of Chicago (1890). Higher education became more accessible to women as several women’s colleges, such as Vassar (1861) and Smith (1871), were founded and state land-grant universities became coeducational. In fact, women accounted for nearly 20 percent of college graduates in 1900. Not everyone fully shared in these changes though. Although a number of all-black colleges were established, African-Americans certainly did not benefit as much as middle-class whites from the expansion of public education. The use of leisure time. Sports became a popular pastime for many Americans in the late nineteenth century. Golf, tennis, and bicycling (which became a short-lived national craze in the 1890s) attracted middle-class and well-to-do men and women, while baseball drew more diverse and much larger crowds. Not long after the professional Cincinnati Red Stockings began barnstorming around the country, the National League was formed (1876) and the rules of the modern game took shape. The rival American League began play in 1901, and the inaugural World Series was held two years later. Prizefighting, long considered a working man’s sport, gained wider acceptance with the introduction of the Queensberry rules, which mandated the use of gloves, set the length of a round at three minutes, and outlawed wrestling holds; no less a figure than Theodore Roosevelt endorsed boxing as a manly sport. Football quickly became the premier collegiate spectator sport, and Dr. James Naismith invented basketball in 1891 as an indoor game that could be played between the football and baseball seasons.

34

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Vaudeville, which grew out of the pre-Civil War minstrel shows, was an important form of family entertainment. A variety of acts, including dancing, singing, magic, juggling, acrobatic, and trainedanimal, toured on circuits organized by theater owners. For more highbrow tastes, almost every major American city had a symphony orchestra by the turn of the century. Band performances, both openair and in concert halls, were well attended in cities and small towns across the county. The repertoire relied heavily on patriotic marches such as John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Ragtime, which came out of the African-American tradition, became part of American popular music. The publication of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1899 brought syncopated rhythms of the saloons and black community to a wider audience. New York’s Coney Island became the first and best known of the great amusement parks, which offered exhilarating rides, strange sideshows, and cheap food. A smaller number of Americans had the opportunity to see the wondrous products of the industrial age and the cornucopia from the country’s farms at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Literature and popular reading. Realism was the central literary style in the works of American writers after the Civil War. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was the first major American writer born west of the Appalachian Mountains. His most famous works — The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) — drew on his experiences of life in Missouri and along the Mississippi River before the Civil War. Among Twain’s contemporaries were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) portrays the newly rich middle class and is among the earliest fictional accounts of an American businessman, while James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) examines a young American woman’s experiences in the European societies of England and Italy. Influenced by the deterministic aspects of Darwinism, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser used naturalism — a form of realism emphasizing the role of environment and fate in characters’ lives — to present a more pessimistic depiction of society and human existence. U.S. HISTORY II

35 333

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) tells the story of the slums of New York and an innocent woman’s fall into prostitution and death. In Sister Carrie (1900), Dreiser describes how a young country girl is literally seduced by her own ambition and city life. One of the most popular books of the late nineteenth century was not a realistic depiction of urban life but a utopian novel. Edward Bellamy,mn’s Looking Backward (1888) is set in the year 2000 when poverty, crime, and corruption have disappeared and everyone is working for a governmentowned-and-operated trust for the same pay. Popular reading was often geared to a specific audience. As the tide of immigration grew, so did the number of ethnic newspapers published in the United States. The foreign-language press included dailies and weeklies in French, German, Greek, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish (the language spoken and read by East European Jews). Magazines aimed primarily at middle-class women appeared, such as Harper’s Bazar (1867), Ladies Home Journal (1883), and Ladies’ Home Companion (1886). An enduring notion of post-Civil War America perpetuated in popular reading was that anyone could be successful through hard work and perseverance. Horatio Alger, who wrote more than 100 young-adult novels beginning with the best seller Ragged Dick (1867), did more than anyone else to popularize the “rags-to-riches” myth. In fact, his heroes managed to pull themselves up more by luck than by sheer determination — they saved the life of the daughter of a wealthy businessman and got a job with the company as a reward. Alger’s suggestion that anyone could succeed did not match the reality of social mobility. Successful men usually came from a middle or upper class background and had fathers who were in commerce, banking, or the professions.

36

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE, 1876 — 1900

I

n the period from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the twentieth century, there was little difference between the agendas of Republicans and Democrats. Both parties were generally pro-business, despite the fact that steps were taken to regulate the railroads and the trusts, and neither was concerned with the economic and social dislocations brought about by industrialization and urbanization. The questions that dominated domestic politics in the late nineteenth century appear rather mundane — monetary policy, civil service reform, and the tariff. The failure of the federal government to seriously address the problems facing agriculture forced farmers to organize and pursue political action on their own. Although domestic issues occupied the nation for most of the period, foreign policy questions dominated the last years of the century. In a remarkably short time, the United States acquired an overseas empire in the Pacific and the Caribbean and became a major force in world affairs.

Domestic Politics Republicans and Democrats were relatively evenly matched in the political arena. Although the Republicans controlled the White House for all but eight years between 1876 and 1900, presidential elections were close and the winner rarely received more than 50 percent of the popular vote. Congress was usually divided with a Republican majority in the Senate and a Democratic majority in the House. The reason for such an even political balance was that neither party had a truly national base of support. Democrats could count on the “solid” South (as the states of the former Confederacy were called) and the southern parts of the border states, as well as recent immigrants, Catholics, and the working class in the larger cities of the Midwest and Northeast where political machines got out the vote. Republicans, on the other hand, had strongholds in smaller cities, towns, and the rural areas of the Midwest and New England, and were also backed by the business community, the growing middle class, and AfricanAmericans (to the extent that they could and did go to the polls). These generalizations about party loyalty had many exceptions, of course. For instance, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Ohio,

U.S. HISTORY II

37 333

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE

Indiana, and Illinois were swing states, meaning that they might vote either Democrat or Republican in a presidential election. Greenbacks and silver. The nation’s monetary system was chaotic after the Civil War, with gold, silver, and paper money all circulating simultaneously. Gold circulated in twenty-, ten-, and five-dollar coins known as “double eagles,” “eagles,” and “half-eagles” while silver coins were minted as dollar, half-dollar, quarter, dime, and half-dime coins. Greenbacks, the paper money printed by the Union during the Civil War, remained in circulation and could be redeemed for gold or silver. Banks, meanwhile, were printing their own notes (another form of paper money), often in excess of their assets. As individuals and institutions struggled to find security within the country’s complicated financial system, two approaches to managing the system emerged — one that favored restricting the money in circulation and another that favored expanding it. Supporters of a restricted currency felt that limiting the money supply would keep the economy stable and prices low. Advocates of an expanded currency, however, believed that increasing the money supply would make it easier for debtors, particularly farmers, to pay off what they owed and create increased prices for farm products. Those who supported an inflated currency, as well as mining interests in the West that had just found major deposits of silver, were outraged when the Coinage Act of 1873 ordered the U.S. Mint to stop issuing silver dollars; they derided the new law as “the Crime of ‘73.” In 1878, the Greenback Labor party, which was quite successful in that year’s Congressional elections, called for the unlimited coinage of silver. In the same year, the silverbackers secured passage of the Bland-Allison Act, which required the Treasury to buy between two and four million dollars worth of silver per month. Treasury officials, however, purchased the minimum amount of silver required under the law and did not put the new coins produced into circulation. Congressional supporters of a silver standard passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1890, under which 4.5 million ounces of silver were bought each month (effectively the entire output of the western silver mines) and Treasury notes were made redeemable in gold or silver. While the money supply did increase slightly, the currency

38

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE

question remained unresolved and became the central issue in the 1896 presidential election. Civil service reform. Angered by the scandals of the Grant administration and political corruption in general, Americans demanded changes in the way government jobs were given out. Common practice was to rely on the spoils system, in which the party that won the presidency replaced office holders in the federal bureaucracy with members of its own party. Critics charged that such “rotation in office” resulted in a considerable loss of experience and expertise. The Republican party was split into two factions on the issue of civil service reform. The Half-Breeds, led by Senators Carl Schurz and James G. Blaine, along with newspaper editor Edwin L. Godkin, favored an end to the spoils system, while the Stalwarts, led by Senator Roscoe Conkling, felt that control of patronage jobs was essential. When the Republican convention deadlocked on the issue in 1880, the party compromised and nominated Half-Breed James A. Garfield for president and Stalwart Chester A. Arthur for vice president. Although Garfield won the close election, he was assassinated four months after taking office by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled office seeker and self-proclaimed Stalwart. The country was so outraged by the murder that the Pendelton Civil Service Act was passed by Congress and signed by new pro-spoils President Arthur in 1883. The law created an independent Civil Service Commission and determined which jobs in the federal government would be filled on a merit basis through competitive examinations rather than through political appointment. Although the percentage of positions covered by the law was small at first, subsequent legislation expanded the commission’s reach and significantly improved the quality of federal employees. Considered by his peers to be a hack politician and a mediocre president, Chester Arthur was pushed aside by the Republicans in 1884 in favor of James G. Blaine, whose career in the Senate was tarnished by trading political favors for railroad stock. The Democrats, who had captured the House in 1882, sensed a chance to gain the White House for the first time since 1856. They selected Grover Cleveland, who had risen from the mayor of Buffalo, New York, to U.S. HISTORY II

39 333

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE

the governor of the state in a remarkably short period of time. The campaign was a dirty one, with the Republicans claiming that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child; he admitted that he had accepted his responsibility for the child and was paying support to its mother. A remark by a Protestant minister (who was a Blaine supporter) that the Democrats were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” was not disavowed quickly enough by the Republicans, and this helped Cleveland to win a close election. The tariff question. Tariffs were the one issue that seriously divided the two parties. Republicans favored high tariffs to help subsidize American industry by keeping cheaper imported goods out of the country; Democrats wanted to lower duties to reduce prices. Tariff schedules — what rates were charged on which products — were always changing to reflect new commodities on the market or the political strategies of Members of Congress who used the tariffs for their own advantage. A senator from Iowa, for example, would support a low rate for iron ore since none was mined in his state and a high rate on imported grain to protect Iowa corn. Toward the end of his term, Grover Cleveland proposed a major overhaul of the country’s tariff policy. The high rates, he argued, had created a sizable federal surplus that pushed the cost of living up for everyone while benefiting only a few. Congress refused to enact tariff reform, and Cleveland’s position cost him the next election. Although receiving more of the popular vote, he lost to Benjamin Harrison, the Republican senator from Ohio, in the electoral college. Emboldened by their victory in 1888, the Republicans raised rates in 1890 (the McKinley Tariff) and again in 1897 (the Dingley Tariff). In the interim, during Cleveland’s second term (1892–97), a modest reduction was enacted in the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894. The law included a personal income tax to make up for the revenue lost due to the lower rates, a provision the Supreme Court later declared unconstitutional.

40

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE

The Revolt of the Farmers American farmers faced a myriad of problems in the late nineteenth century. Agricultural prices steadily declined after 1870 as a result of domestic overproduction and foreign competition. The high rates charged by grain elevator operators and railroads to store and ship crops were a constant source of complaint, while high tariffs made the goods farmers had to buy, such as farm machinery, more expensive. Forced to borrow money to pay for their land or equipment, many farmers were in debt and favored keeping the amount of money in circulation high, either through printing greenbacks or the unlimited coinage of silver. The Grange and Farmers’ Alliances. Farmers began to organize soon after the Civil War. The Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, was established in 1867 to sponsor educational and social programs for farmers and later encouraged farmer-owned cooperatives. In the political arena, the Grange successfully secured legislation in several states to regulate railroad and warehousing rates, and many of its members supported the Greenback Labor party. As the Grange declined in the late 1870s, new farmer groups known as Farmers’ Alliances came to the fore. By 1890, the two largest were the Northwestern Alliance and the Southern Alliance, which, despite their regional names, had more than three million members nationwide. Although the Alliance movement encouraged the participation of women, who were among some of its most outspoken leaders, the Southern Alliance was segregated. As a result, African-American farmers in the Deep South formed the National Colored Farmers Alliance. Representatives of this organization met with the Southern Alliance and the Farmers’ Mutual Benefit Association in Ocala, Florida, in December of 1890 to develop a platform that became known as the Ocala Demands. These demands called for the abolition of national banks, the creation of federal sub-treasuries that would provide low-interest loans to farmers against the value of their crops, the unlimited coinage of silver, an end to high tariffs, strict con-

U.S. HISTORY II

41 333

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE

trol over transportation and communication, a graduated income tax, and the direct election of senators. The Southern Alliance stayed within the Democratic party, and following the 1890 elections the Alliance gained control of eight state legislatures, elected four governors, and sent forty-four representatives and two senators to Washington. In the Plains, the Alliance ran thirdparty candidates with very similar results. Kansas and South Dakota had senators who were Populists, as the new political movement was called, and both houses of the Nebraska legislature were in their hands as well. These victories soon led to the creation of a national party. The Populist party. The Populist, or People’s, party was officially organized in St. Louis in February 1892 and held its first nominating convention in Omaha in July. Dominated by farmers, the party also reached out to labor and reform-minded groups and reflected this broader constituency in its platform. In addition to restating the Ocala Demands, the platform called for an eight-hour workday and immigration restriction, strongly condemned the use of Pinkerton detectives against strikers, and supported such political reforms as the secret ballot, initiative, and referendum. The Populists took a somewhat more radical stand on government ownership, implying that the railroads should be nationalized without delay. In the 1892 presidential race, the Populists nominated James B. Weaver, a former general in the Union army who had previously run for president as the Greenback Labor party’s candidate. Although he received more than 1 million popular votes and 22 in the electoral college (including Kansas, Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada) Weaver and the Populist party lacked support in key areas. Southerners did not back Weaver because he had fought for the North during the Civil War and because of the fear that a Populist victory would lead African-Americans to demand their full civil rights. Nor was the party’s appeal to labor groups very successful, because higher agricultural prices meant higher food prices and lower tariffs meant more competition from abroad, which could result in layoffs. Although the Populists elected five senators and ten representatives, Democrat Grover Cleveland took the White House for a second time.

42

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE

The crisis of the 1890s. Cleveland had barely taken office when the nation was hit by the worst economic crisis in its history up to that time. Triggered by the bankruptcy of several railroads and the failure of a British bank that caused many British investors to exchange their American stocks for gold, the Panic of 1893 led to a depression that lasted for four years. The nation’s gold reserves fell dramatically between January 1892 and March 1893, 600 banks had closed their doors by the end of the year, more than three million people — about 20 percent of the workforce — were unemployed, and wheat and corn prices fell precipitously. Cleveland failed to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster. To stop the drain of gold, the President asked for and received the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. This stopped the issuance of silver certificates that were redeemable in gold, but it did not solve the problem. The federal government was forced to secure a loan from a banking syndicate headed by J. Pierpont Morgan to buy 3.5 million ounces of gold in order to meet the Treasury emergency. Throughout the crisis, Cleveland maintained that boom-and-bust cycles were inevitable and that little could be done about them. Indeed, he strongly believed that responsibility for the social costs of depression did not fall to the government, at any level. Jacob Coxey, a Populist from Ohio, disagreed. He led a group of 400 men on a protest march to Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1894 and demanded that the federal government set up a $500 million public works project for the unemployed. Coxey’s Army quickly disbanded when Coxey and other leaders were arrested for trespassing. The election of 1896. The Democrats were certainly hurt by the Panic of 1893; both the Republicans and Populists gained seats in the 1894 congressional elections. As the country anticipated the presidential campaign of 1896, it was clear that the main campaign issue would be whether to have a silver or gold monetary standard. The Republicans nominated William McKinley of Ohio on a platform supporting the gold standard and high tariffs. Democrats were split between the silverites, who supported a silver standard, and the goldbugs, who supported currency that was based on gold. Silverite William Jennings Bryan, a former Congressman from Nebraska, U.S. HISTORY II

43 333

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE

guaranteed himself the Democratic nomination through his famous “Cross of Gold” speech before the convention. The selection of Bryan created a serious problem for the Populists. Party leaders realized that running their own candidate would split the silver vote and hand the election to the Republicans. At the same time, “free silver” was just one plank in the Populist program and backing the Democrats would mean a loss of independence and identity. Ultimately, the Populist party decided to nominate Bryan for president as well and made Tom Watson of Georgia its candidate for vice president. The Republicans dramatically outspent the Democrats in promoting their campaign and trumpeted that a vote for McKinley was a vote for prosperity. Meanwhile, the Democrats discovered that Bryan had very little appeal among immigrants, factory workers, and the middle class. McKinley’s victory was decisive; for the first time since 1872, a candidate for president won more than 50 percent of the vote. By committing the 1896 campaign platform to the single issue of free silver, the Populists lost momentum on their other reform proposals. When Bryan ran against McKinley for a second time in 1900, the Populists again endorsed him and shared his second defeat. By this time, the party was no longer winning state and local elections and was clearly in decline. Circumstances more than his program made McKinley’s administration a successful one. Certainly the high rates of the Dingley Tariff did little to solve the country’s economic ills, but an increase in farm prices, the excitement of finding gold in the Klondike, and restored prosperity helped the Panic of 1893 fade into a bad memory. Americans were also turning their attention to a new issue — the idea of overseas expansion.

The United States as a World Power Around the time of the Civil War, the majority of Americans showed little interest in foreign policy; national concerns were industrialization, the settlement of the West, and domestic politics. Nonetheless, steps were taken to extend American influence beyond the continental United States. Before and after the war, several small islands in the

44

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE

Pacific were acquired as coaling stations for American ships: Howland and Baker Islands in 1857 and the Midway Islands in 1867. The purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, though derided at the time as “Seward’s Folly,” was seen by Secretary of State William H. Seward as an important step in establishing a foothold in Asian markets. In 1878, a treaty was negotiated that gave the United States the right to establish a naval station at Pago Pago in Samoa. The true prize in the Pacific, however, was the Hawaiian Islands. The annexation of Hawaii. American missionaries and commercial interests had long been active in Hawaii; by the 1840s, they controlled the sugar plantations and held positions in government. The United States was given the right to build a naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1887, and, in the same year, Americans on the islands forced the Hawaiian rulers to create a constitutional monarchy under American control. In 1891, Queen Liliuokalani assumed the throne and tried to reassert Hawaiian sovereignty, but this brief interlude of independence came to an end two years later when the planters, with the help of American gunboats, staged a successful coup. President Cleveland refused to annex Hawaii and preferred the restoration of a constitutional monarchy, but the leaders of the coup rejected that solution and instead proclaimed The Republic of Hawaii on July 4, 1894. The United States quickly recognized the new republic, but this did not end the matter. McKinley ran on a platform that called for the annexation of Hawaii, and the island became a U.S. territory in 1898, just as European and U.S. imperialism boiled over into the SpanishAmerican War. Justifications for expansion. Since 1870, European nations such as Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy had been seizing territory and establishing colonies in Africa and Asia. Several factors contributed to the United States’ somewhat belated participation in this Age of Imperialism. Both industrial output and agricultural production were far exceeding the ability of the nation’s consumers to absorb them, and foreign markets were thereby deemed essential to continued economic growth. Business leaders believed that huge profits could be made by selling American goods in Central and South U.S. HISTORY II

45 333

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE

America and Asia as well as by directly investing in the development of the natural resources of those countries. The clamor to annex Hawaii, for example, came first and foremost from the American sugar cane planters on the islands. The proponents of a strong navy also recognized the value of overseas trade. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan argued in The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) that a nation’s greatness depended on its navy, and that countries with the greatest fleets played a decisive role in shaping history. His vision for the United States included overseas colonies and control of a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across either Panama or Nicaragua. Mahan’s ideas influenced men like Theodore Roosevelt, who served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under McKinley, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a supporter of American expansion. In addition to national prestige, race theory was another justification for American imperialism. In 1885 Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong published Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, in which he argued that the United States, as the home of the “superior” Anglo-Saxon race, had an obligation to spread political liberty, Christianity, and civilization. He wrote, “This powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond.” The popularity of Strong’s book (the first edition sold 158,000 copies) indicated that public opinion supported the concept of the “white man’s burden” and social Darwinism, or the survival of the fittest society. Such beliefs in moral and societal superiority helped Americans to rationalize U.S. involvement in foreign affairs. The war with Spain. Spain’s misrule of Cuba alarmed many American businessmen who had more than $50 million invested on the island. When the Spanish government attempted to harshly suppress a revolt, dramatic stories describing brutal atrocities circulated in the American press. Two leading American newspaper publishers, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, used the Cuban tragedy to boost circulation through sensationalist reporting known as yellow journalism. The newspaper accounts succeeded in stirring anti-Spanish and pro-Cuban sentiment in the United States. The pub-

46

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE

lication of the de Lome Letter, a letter from the Spanish Minister Depuy de Lome in which he called President McKinley a weak politician, heightened anti-Spanish feelings in the United States as well. On February 15, 1898, less than a week after the letter appeared in the press, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor with the loss of 260 men. Although the cause of the explosion could not be determined, Hearst loss no time in blaming Spain for the incident, his newspapers declaring “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!” McKinley did not want open hostilities, and there is ample evidence that Spain was ready to make major concessions in Cuba, but public opinion demanded action. The two countries were at war on April 21. The first victory of the Spanish-American War came far from Cuba, in the Phillipines. On May 1, under the command of Commodore George Dewey, the U.S. Asiatic Squadron destroyed or captured the entire Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay. American forces took Manila with the help of Filipino insurrectionists and began the military occupation of the islands in August. In June, 17,000 American troops, a combination of the regular Army and volunteers (including a cavalry regiment popularly known as the “Rough Riders,” organized by Theodore Roosevelt), landed in Cuba. Strategic points on the island fell to the Americans in two major land engagements on July 1, and the American fleet made short work of the Spanish ships that tried to run the blockade of Santiago harbor a few days later. By July 26, Spain was asking for peace, and the armistice to end what was called the “splendid little war” was signed on August 12. Of the almost 5,500 men who died during the war, less than 400 were killed in battle, the majority falling victim to diseases such as yellow fever and malaria. To many, this seemed a small price to pay for an empire. At the start of the war, the United States had disavowed all territorial claims to Cuba, but this pledge did not apply to other strategic islands or Spanish possessions. While Cuba became independent under the Treaty of Paris (December 10, 1898), which formally ended the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico and Guam were ceded to the United States. The United States also gained control of the Philippines in return for a payment to Spain of $20 million. American acquisition of the Philippines was the most controversial aspect of the

U.S. HISTORY II

47 333

POLITICS, THE FARMER’S REVOLT, EMPIRE

war, and the dissension was reflected in the debate between the imperialists and anti-imperialists in the Senate regarding the ratification of the treaty. The Filipinos had fully expected the United States to grant them independence after Spain was defeated, and when that did not occur, a revolt against American rule began. Fought from 1899 to 1902, the Philippine Insurrection was more costly than the SpanishAmerican War. Over 125,000 American troops were sent to the Philippines and fought a protracted guerrilla war that resulted in more than 4,000 U.S. and nearly 20,000 Filipino combat deaths. The cost of administering an empire proved high indeed. China and the Open Door policy. By the 1890s, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan had carved out special trading privileges and spheres of influence for themselves in China. Not to be left out of a very lucrative market, Secretary of State John Hay issued a series of diplomatic notes between 1899 and 1900 that outlined what became known as the Open Door policy. The first note called on all countries to allow open access to trade with China. Even though formal responses were never received from any nation except Great Britain, Hay announced that everyone supported the American initiative. A new obstacle to trade in China arose in June 1900 when Chinese nationalists organized a revolt, the Boxer Rebellion, against foreign influence and laid siege to several embassies in Peking. Afraid that the revolt would be used as an excuse to break up the Chinese Empire, Hay called on all countries to respect the territorial and administrative integrity of China. On August 14, a joint American, British, German, Russian, and Japanese expeditionary force arrived in Peking and put down the rebellion. The United States would continue to make its presence felt in Asia as well as the Caribbean and Central America in the first decades of the twentieth century.

48

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA, 1900 – 1920

D

uring the Progressive Era (1900–1920), the country grappled with the problems caused by industrialization and urbanization. Progressivism, an urban, middle-class reform movement, supported the government taking a greater role in addressing such issues as the control of big business and the welfare of the public. Many of its accomplishments were based on efforts of earlier reform movements. The federal income tax and the direct election of senators, for example, were a part of the Populist program, and Prohibition grew from a pre-Civil War anti-alcohol reform tradition. Although the Progressives formed their own political party in 1912, the movement had broad support among both Democrats and Republicans. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft (Republicans) and Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) all claimed the Progressive mantle.

Political and Social Reforms The need for reform was highlighted by a group of journalists and writers known as the muckrakers, who made Americans aware of the serious failings in society and built public support for change. Exposés such as Lincoln Steffens’ The Shame of the Cities (1904), an attack on municipal corruption, and Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), which chronicled John D. Rockefeller’s ruthless business practices, often first appeared in the new mass circulation magazines, such as McClure’s and Cosmopolitan, and were later published as books. The muckrakers’ impact could be powerful, as in the case of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), a book whose vivid descriptions of working and sanitary conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants led directly to federal laws regulating the industry. Making government more responsive and efficient. Two important objectives of Progressivism were giving the public the opportunity to participate more directly in the political process and limiting the power of big city bosses. Progressives hoped to accomplish these goals through a variety of political reforms. These reforms included U.S. HISTORY II

49 333

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

the direct primary, a preliminary election giving all members of a party the chance to take part in a nomination and that was intended to limit the influence of political machines in selecting candidates; initiative, a process for putting a proposition or proposed law on a ballot (usually by getting a specified number of signatures on a petition), and referendum, the voting on an initiative, allowing the people to enact legislation that a state legislature is either unwilling or unable to do; and recall, a process giving voters the power to remove elected officials from office through petition and a vote. Governor Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin championed these reforms, and their implementation in his state became the model for the rest of the country (the Wisconsin Idea). Meanwhile, making the national government more responsive to the people was expressed through the Seventeenth Amendment (1913) which provided for the direct election of senators rather than their selection by the state legislatures. State legislatures were also increasingly concerned about the welfare of their citizens. In 1902, Maryland became the first state to offer workmen’s compensation, payments to workers or their families for disability or death suffered on the job. Some protection was offered to federal employees under the 1916 Workmen’s Compensation Act. Progressives were also fascinated by efficiency and scientific management. In 1900, when a hurricane and flood destroyed much of the infrastructure of Galveston, Texas, the mayor and city council were replaced with a commission made up of nonpartisan administrators who ran each of the city’s municipal departments. The commission form of government became popular in small and medium-sized cities throughout the country. Following a flood in 1913, Dayton, Ohio experimented with a city-manager system. Under this plan, the structure of a city government followed that of a business corporation, with a city administrator acting as a manager reporting to a board of directors made up of a mayor and city council. The Progressive Era also saw the growth of the public ownership of water, gas, and electric service; municipally owned utilities offered consumers lower rates than private companies. Utilities that remained in private hands invariably came under the jurisdiction of regulatory commissions that reviewed rates, mergers, and other business activities. Railroads and urban

50

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

transportation systems were under similar regulation. Progressive reform measures, however, extended beyond restructuring the government and addressed social problems as well. Prohibition. The campaign against the evils of alcohol made little progress until the formation of the Anti-Saloon League in 1893. Unlike previous groups, the new organization focused its effort on prohibiting alcohol rather than persuading individuals to stop drinking. Supported by Protestant churches, it pioneered single-issue politics and backed only “dry” candidates for elected office. This strategy worked, and by 1917 almost two thirds of the states had banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol. With German Americans prominent in the brewing and distillery industries, American participation in the First World War added allegedly patriotic motives to the calls for a constitutional amendment on prohibition. In December 1917, Congress adopted the Eighteenth Amendment, which was approved by the states in January 1919 and went into effect a year later, banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol nationwide. Child labor and women’s rights. The National Child Labor Committee coordinated a movement to address the exploitation of children. One of the most effective weapons in its campaign were photographs taken by Lewis Hine that showed boys and girls as young as eight years of age working with dangerous equipment in coal mines and factories. By 1910, many states had enacted legislation establishing the minimum legal age when children could work (between 12 and 16) and the maximum length of a workday or week. It is not clear, however, what had more of an impact on child labor — these laws or the state compulsory school attendance requirements that were becoming more widespread at the same time. Progressives also wanted to limit how long women could work, arguing that long hours in a factory were detrimental to a woman’s well being. The Supreme Court agreed in Muller v. Oregon (1908) and upheld a state law that limited women laundry workers to working no more than ten hours a day. The case was significant because the Court accepted the Brandeis Brief, a wealth of sociological, economic, and medical evidence submitted by attorney Louis Brandeis U.S. HISTORY II

51 333

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

demonstrating that the health of the women was impaired by long factory hours. Sometimes, however, change came only as a result of tragedy. On March 25, 1911, almost 150 people, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrant women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. In response, the New York State legislature established a 54-hour workweek for women, prohibited children under 14 from working, and imposed new building regulations and factory safety rules. Although the cause of equal opportunity in the workplace was pushed back by the Progressive’s argument that women were weaker than men, women finally did get the right to vote. A number of western states had already granted suffrage (enfranchisement, or voting privileges) — Wyoming (1890), Colorado (1893), Utah (1896), and Washington (1910) — and the Democratic Party platform in 1916 called on the remaining states to do the same. While the National American Woman Suffrage Association relied on patient organizing, militant groups adopted more direct tactics. The Congressional Union, for example, was committed to gaining the vote through the passage of a constitutional amendment rather than securing it piecemeal state by state, and the National Woman’s Party used picket lines, marches, and hunger strikes to build momentum for their cause. Women’s participation in World War I, through service in the military and work in defense plants and the Red Cross, heightened the momentum. The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote, passed the Senate in June 1919 and was ratified by the states in August 1920, more than 70 years after the first women’s rights meeting in Seneca Falls, New York.

Progressivism in the White House: Roosevelt and Taft On September 6, 1901, an anarchist shot President William McKinley, who died a few days later. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt returned from a camping trip to take the oath of office. Although he was the youngest person ever to hold the office, Roosevelt had considerable political experience. The vice president previously served as a member of the New York State Assembly, commissioner of the New York City police, assistant secretary of the

52

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

Navy, a leader of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, and governor of New York. Just as Progressives believed that state and local governments had an expanded role to play in controlling big business and public welfare, so did Roosevelt believe that the federal government and the presidency itself had a greater job to do. Roosevelt and big business. Roosevelt had a well-deserved reputation as a “trustbuster.” During his administration (1901–09), 44 antitrust actions were filed against the nation’s largest corporations, including the Northern Securities Company (a railway holding company). But the essence of the president’s Square Deal — Roosevelt’s approach to social problems, big business, and labor unions — was that he distinguished between “good” and “bad” trusts and strongly preferred to regulate corporations for the public welfare rather than destroy them. In the case of the railroads, for example, the practice of rebating was eliminated through the Elkins Act (1903), and the Hepburn Act (1906) allowed the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to set maximum railroad rates. The Hepburn Act also expanded the ICC’s jurisdiction to include pipelines, ferries, sleeping cars, and bridges and made the ICC’s orders on carriers binding, pending a court ruling. Regulation meant protecting the interests of consumers as well as controlling the power of big business. The muckrakers had raised serious questions about such problems as the utility of the patent medicines sold to Americans and sounded the alarm that meat infected with disease or covered in rat droppings was processed and sold to the public. Congress reacted to these revelations by passing the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of food or drugs in interstate commerce that had been adulterated or fraudulently labeled. The Meat Inspection Act, which was enacted in the same year, sought to enforce sanitary conditions in the packing industry and authorized the Department of Agriculture to inspect meat sold through interstate commerce.

U.S. HISTORY II

53 333

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

Conservation of natural resources. Outdoorsman, hunter, and naturalist in his own right, Roosevelt was the first president to actively promote the conservation of the country’s natural resources. Under his administration, millions of acres were set aside as national forest lands; coal and oil reserves as well as hydroelectric power sites were placed in the public domain; and the national park system was enlarged. For Roosevelt, conservation meant wise use, and this was the theme of the White House Conference on Conservation (1908) that brought together members of the Cabinet and Congress as well as the governors of most of the states. The president’s utilitarian approach was championed by the head of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, and was reflected in such legislation as the National Reclamation Act of 1902, which directed that proceeds from the sale of public lands be used to finance irrigation projects in the West. Taft as a progressive. After the 1904 election, Roosevelt stated that he would not run for president again. Four years later, William Howard Taft, his handpicked successor, easily defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan in his third and final run for the White House. Although Taft had never held elective office, he did have years of public service behind him. He had been a prosecutor and judge, U.S. solicitor general under President Harrison, the first civilian governor of the Philippines, and Roosevelt’s Secretary of War. Although more conservative than his predecessor, Taft filed twice the number of antitrust suits as Roosevelt, and the Supreme Court upheld the breakup of Standard Oil under the Sherman Antitrust Act (1911) during his administration. Through the Mann-Elkins Act (1910), the authority of the ICC was again expanded to cover regulation of telephone, telegraph, and cable companies. The act also enabled the commission to suspend rates set by railroads pending investigations or court actions. Taft actively supported both the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments (which provided for the federal income tax and direct election of senators, respectively) and established new agencies, such as the Bureau of Mines, which set standards of mine safety, and the Federal Children’s Bureau.

54

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

Despite his strong reform record, the president lost support within the Republican Party and among Progressives. Taft ran into trouble with a group of Progressive Republicans in Congress known as the Insurgents, led by Senator Robert La Follette. Although the president wanted lower duties on imports, he was unable to stop the conservative Republicans from pushing through the Payne-Aldrich Tariff (1909) which kept rates on some products high over the objections of the Insurgents. Taft sided with Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon in his struggle to hold on to his power against congressional reformers. When the Speaker’s authority was weakened through changes in the House rules, the president also lost influence. In the meantime, a dispute over conservation policy between the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service ultimately caused Taft to fire Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s close friend and the man who epitomized the federal government’s commitment to the environment. Early into Taft’s term a major split in Republican ranks between conservatives and progressives became apparent. Whatever other goals they had, the Progressive Republicans were determined to gain control of the party and deny Taft’s nomination for a second term. Roosevelt began to seriously consider running again when he returned from a safari in Africa in 1910, and LaFollette was clearly a candidate in 1911. The election of 1912. Roosevelt indicated early in 1912 that he would accept the Republican nomination if it was offered to him. Even though the former president won several primaries and carried a number of state conventions, Republican conservatives controlled the nominating convention and made sure Taft was chosen to run for a second term. Roosevelt and his supporters bolted and formed the Progressive Party, whose platform called for presidential primaries, direct election of senators, the vote for women, greater regulation of the trusts, and a ban on child labor. The Democrats selected the past president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, as their nominee. Although put into the State House by the Democratic bosses, Governor Wilson had proved himself to be a reformer, pushing through a direct primary law, workmen’s compensation, and public utility regulation. U.S. HISTORY II

55 333

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

The election of 1912 was a contest between Roosevelt and Wilson and their respective progressive philosophies. Roosevelt campaigned for his New Nationalism, which maintained that large corporations were an integral part of modern industrial society. The responsibility of the federal government was to regulate, not to destroy, business combinations while protecting the interests of the underprivileged. Wilson’s New Freedom called for restoring competition through elimination of the trusts and lowering tariffs. Although recognizing that federal power was necessary to accomplish these goals, he was just as concerned with big government as big business; any expansion of authority from Washington he considered to be only a temporary expedient. With the Republican vote split between Roosevelt and Taft, Wilson won with the largest electoral majority of any presidential candidate up to that time.

Progressivism in the White House: Wilson The election of Wilson was significant in several respects. First, it brought the Democrats back to power for the first time since the Civil War. The party controlled not only the White House but both houses of Congress as well, which had happened only briefly (1893–95) under Cleveland. The election also represented the political resurgence of the South. Despite spending most of his working life in the North, Wilson was born and raised in the South. In addition to making William Jennings Bryan, who had long enjoyed strong southern support, his secretary of state, Wilson appointed a number of other southerners to the Cabinet and Colonel Edward House of Texas as his chief political advisor. Because of the seniority system, the chairs of many key House and Senate committees were southern Democrats. Tariff and banking reform. Staying true to his campaign promises, Wilson tackled the tariff issue first. The Underwood-Simmons Tariff (1913) was the first law to substantially lower rates in 50 years, and the free list of goods, on which no import duties were charged, was expanded to include iron, steel, raw wool, and sugar. To make up for the revenue shortfall that the reduction in rates caused, the law

56

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

included a provision for implementing the federal income tax provided for in the just-ratified Sixteenth Amendment. It levied a tax of one percent on all incomes over $4,000 (the majority of Americans made considerably less than that and therefore paid no income tax), with the tax rate going up to 7 percent for the highest earners. Wilson’s most important domestic program, however, was the reorganization of the nation’s banking system. A congressional investigation found that the country’s credit and money policies were largely controlled by a handful of eastern banks. The administration’s response to this discovery was the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Under the Federal Reserve Act (1913), Federal Reserve banks were set up in 12 regions across the United States. These were, in effect, “banks for banks,” and they became the depositories for all national banks and those state banks that wished to join. The Federal Reserve banks took over the outstanding loans of their members in return for Federal Reserve notes, or paper money. The Federal Reserve Board, appointed by the president, oversaw the system and, by setting the interest rates charged on loans to its member banks, could seriously impact the economy. Lower interest rates tended to stimulate business by making more money available for expansion, while higher rates helped control economic growth and cap inflation. Antitrust legislation. The cornerstone of Wilson’s antitrust policy was the Federal Trade Commission (1914) which was intended to control unfair competition in interstate commerce. It was empowered to investigate individuals and corporations suspected of unfair practices, and it could issue cease-and-desist orders to stop a company from hindering competition. Already existing antitrust laws were strengthened with the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914). It outlawed specific business practices such as price discrimination, “tying” (an agreement that required a buyer not purchase products from a competitor of the seller), and the acquisition of stock in a competing company. Of particular importance given the way antitrust legislation had been interpreted in the past, was the Clayton Act’s specific statement that farm organizations and labor unions were not “unlawful combinations in restraint of trade.” The use of injunctions U.S. HISTORY II

57 333

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

against strikes was also prohibited, unless it could be shown that irreparable damage to property was likely. However, the degree of protection these provisions actually offered unions depended on court interpretations. Wilson showed little interest in the social concerns associated with progressivism during his first term. With the Republican Party on the mend as the 1916 election approached, he began to include more reforms in his domestic agenda. For farmers, a program of lowinterest loans through Federal Reserve banks was put in place. Child labor was addressed in the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, which prohibited interstate commerce in products made by children under the age of 16. Although the law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1918, the Court did uphold legislation that set an eight-hour day and time-and-a-half pay for overtime for railroad workers handling cars in interstate traffic. In women’s rights, Wilson did not openly support a constitutional amendment to give women the right to vote, but he backed action by the individual states as called for in the Democratic Party platform. Immigrants and African-Americans. Two groups did not benefit from the reforming zeal of the Progressive Era: immigrants and African-Americans. Immigration to the United States reached its high tide before World War I, with immigration numbers topping the one million mark six times between 1900 and 1914. During this same period, demands for immigration restriction found growing public support. By 1903, the original list of people who could not enter the country (compiled in 1882) was expanded to include anarchists, prostitutes, paupers, and all those likely to become a public charge (in need of some type of welfare). When the San Francisco School Board ordered Chinese, Japanese, and Korean students to attend segregated schools in 1906, President Roosevelt intervened and the decision was reversed. In return, Japan agreed to voluntarily limit the number of its laborers emigrating to the United States through what became known as the Gentlemen’s Agreement (1907). Americans who favored significantly reducing immigration pinned their hopes on a literacy test for those who wished to permanently settle in the United States. Presidents Cleveland (1897), Taft (1913), and Wilson (1915 and 1917)

58

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

vetoed bills containing requirements for such a test. Wilson’s second veto was overriden by Congress, however, and a literacy test became part of immigration law. What direct effect the test had on immigration is difficult to assess because immigration had already declined sharply because of World War I. The legislation did mark an end to the more or less open immigration policy and paved the way for the quota system that would be implemented in the early 1920s. In 1900, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans lived in the rural South, where segregation was established as a legal institution, and the denial of civil rights to blacks, particularly the right to vote, was an accomplished fact. Conditions in the South and economic opportunities in the North, particularly as the country began to mobilize for war, led to a significant shift in black population. The Great Migration refers to the internal movement of AfricanAmericans from the farms of the South to the factories of the industrial North. Organizations like the Negro Fellowship League, founded by Ida Wells-Barnet in Chicago, and the National Urban League helped the migrants adjust to life in the cities. The North was not free from prejudice, however. Competition for jobs in defense plants and for housing were contributing factors to the violent race riots that broke out in East St. Louis in 1917 and Chicago in 1919. Although President Roosevelt broke with precedent and invited Booker T. Washington for lunch at the White House (1901), the federal government did little to help African-Americans. The driving forces for change were men like Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, whose Niagara Movement (1905) pressed for political and economic equality for blacks. In 1910, his group joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), established a year earlier by white social-justice progressives and African-Americans to work for equality within the system. The NAACP was most successful in mounting legal challenges aimed at making sure the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were enforced. In 1915, for example, its attorneys persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the grandfather clause in Guinn v. United States that had been used in Maryland and Oklahoma to deny blacks the right to vote.

U.S. HISTORY II

59 333

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER

I

n the wake of the Spanish-American War, the United States joined the ranks of the imperial powers with possessions that stretched halfway around the globe, from Puerto Rico in the Caribbean to the Philippines in the Pacific. In the years leading up to its entry into World War I, America did its best to maintain its influence in Asia through diplomacy while following an aggressive foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere. The United States showed little interest in European affairs until the outbreak of war in August 1914 and even then remained officially neutral for almost three years. The commitment of American troops in 1917 was a significant factor in the Allied victory and earned President Wilson the right to help shape the peace settlement. The failure of the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, however, marked a shift toward a more isolationist foreign policy.

Foreign Policy in the Progressive Era As a two-ocean conflict, the Spanish-American War underscored the value of a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The French had tried but failed to construct a canal across the Isthmus of Panama in the 1880s, so the United States decided to take over the project. Under the Hay-Herran Treaty (1903), Columbia agreed to a 99-year lease of a six-mile-wide strip of land in Panama (a province of Columbia at the time) in return for a $10 million cash payment and an annual fee of $250,000. When the Columbian Senate refused to ratify the treaty, the Panamanians mounted a successful revolt that had the tacit approval of the Roosevelt Administration. Sending warships to prevent Columbia from taking action, the United States quickly recognized Panama’s independence. A new agreement — the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty — gave the United States full control and sovereignty over the Canal Zone (an area ten miles wide across the Isthmus) in return for the same financial arrangements made with Columbia. Construction on the Panama Canal began in 1904, and the first ship passed through the locks in 1914. While the canal construction was a major feat of engineering, medical advances that occurred

U.S. HISTORY II

61 333

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER

during the ten-year period, such as the eradication of yellow fever and better control over malaria and other tropical diseases were important accomplishments as well. American intervention in the Caribbean and Central America. Throughout the Progressive Era and well into the 1920s, the United States followed a policy of intervention in the Caribbean and Central America. Under the Platt Amendment (1901), which was incorporated into the Cuban constitution and a Cuban-American treaty, the United States could intervene to preserve the independence or political and social stability of Cuba. Furthermore, Cuba agreed to grant land for an American naval base on the island (Guantanamo Bay), not to sign a treaty with another country that impaired Cuba’s sovereignty, and not to incur a debt that could not be repaid out of current revenues. The U.S. government used this amendment as the justification for sending American troops into Cuba in 1906, 1912, and 1917. Similarly, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904) maintained that “chronic wrongdoing” by any nation in the Western Hemisphere might force the United States to exercise its “international police power”; that is, it would intervene. Under this principle, the finances of the Dominican Republic came under American control through a treaty, and after a revolution threatened these arrangements in 1916, U.S. troops occupied the country for the next eight years. Essentially the same policy was applied to Haiti, where American civilian personnel and military forces remained on the island from 1915 to 1934. When a revolt against the government jeopardized American interests in Nicaragua in 1912, U.S. Marines arrived and stayed until 1925. They were back a year later to put down another round of civil unrest. As a possible site for a second interocean canal, Nicaragua was particularly important, and the United States wanted to make sure no foreign power gained control of the route.

62

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER

U.S. policy in Asia. At the turn of the century, Japan was the major power in Asia. Fearful of Japanese dominance, Roosevelt played peacemaker in the conflict that broke out between Japan and Russia in 1904 in the hope of limiting Japanese gains. The Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), which ended the Russo-Japanese War and earned the president the Nobel Peace Prize, recognized Japan’s influence in Manchuria (a province of China) but did not include a cash indemnity and required Russia to give up only half of Sakhalin Island. At the same time, in the Taft-Katsura Agreement (1905), the United States and Japan acknowledged the United States’ control of the Philippines and Japan’s control of Korea. Despite the tensions that arose because of immigration and the Gentlemen’s Agreement (see the chapter “The Progressive Era, 1900–1920”), relations between the two countries remained good. They agreed to respect the territorial integrity of each other’s possessions in Asia, and Japan reconfirmed its support for the Open Door Policy through the Root-Takahira Agreement (1908). Taft’s foreign policy relied on dollar diplomacy — spreading American influence through the economic penetration of overseas markets by U.S. corporations. In an attempt to maintain the independence of China, the administration unsuccessfully tried to establish an international banking syndicate that would buy back the railroads in Manchuria that were in the hands of the Japanese. The combination of a Japanese-Russian alliance and a lack of support from the Wilson administration led U.S. investors to reject the project. On the whole, dollar diplomacy was more effective in Central and South America than it was in Asia. Relations with Mexico. Opposing the regime of General Victoriano Huerta, who had come to power in Mexico following the May 1911 revolt, the Wilson administration supported the revolutionary movement headed by Venustiano Carranza. American troops attacked Veracruz in April 1914, which ultimately led to Huerta leaving office and Carranza and his supporters occupying Mexico City. These developments were soon marred by infighting between Carranza and one of his generals, Pancho Villa. When Villa’s forces raided a town in New Mexico in 1916, Wilson ordered the U.S. Army to mount a U.S. HISTORY II

63 333

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER

punitive expedition into Mexico to capture him. This prolonged intrusion brought the United States and Mexico to the brink of war until the troops were withdrawn in January 1917.

The United States in World War I On June 28, 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. Austria demanded indemnities from Serbia for the assassination. The Serbian government denied any involvement with the murder and, when Austria issued an ultimatum, turned to its ally, Russia, for help. When Russia began to mobilize its army, Europe’s alliance system, ironically intended to maintain the balance of power on the continent, drew one country after another into war. Austria’s ally, Germany, declared war on Russia on August 1 and on France (which was allied with Russia) two days later. Great Britain entered the war on August 4, following Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium. By the end of August 1914, most of Europe had chosen sides: the Central Powers — Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) — were up against the Allied Powers — principally Great Britain, France, Russia, and Serbia. Japan joined the Allied cause in August 1914, in hopes of seizing German possessions in the Pacific and expanding Japanese influence in China. This action threatened the Open Door Policy and led to increased tensions with the United States. Originally an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Italy entered the war in 1915 on the side of Britain and France because they had agreed to Italian territorial demands in a secret treaty (the Treaty of London). American neutrality. When the war began, President Wilson quickly proclaimed the neutrality of the United States and called on the American people to be “impartial in thought as well as in action.” Absolute neutrality was difficult to achieve. German Americans tended to support the Central Powers, while Irish Americans had strong animosity toward Great Britain, and recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe wanted a Russian defeat. On the other hand, the Allies, at least England and France, represented democracy to many

64

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER

Americans; the Allies had strong emotional support in the higher circles of government, especially in the State Department and the White House. Moreover, investors in the United States provided billions of dollars in loans to the Allies, and the balance of American trade with the warring countries was overwhelmingly in favor of Great Britain and France. Although the United States objected to the British blockade in the North Sea, a much greater threat to American neutrality was Germany’s use of unrestricted submarine warfare against shipping in the North Atlantic. In May 1915, Germany sunk the British oceanliner Lusitania, causing the loss of almost 1,200 lives, including 128 Americans. Although the United States strongly protested the incident (even though the ship was carrying contraband to Britain), there were several more sinkings before Germany, through the Sussex pledge (May 1916), agreed not to attack passenger ships without warning and to make provisions for the safety of noncombatants. The sinking of the Lusitania did raise questions about America’s preparedness, however, and steps were taken to get the country ready for war. The National Defense Act provided for the immediate expansion of the regular Army to 175,000 men and a maximum of almost 250,000 troops, while the Naval Construction Act instituted a threeyear building program for the navy. The Council of National Defense was established to coordinate and mobilize industry, available natural resources, and labor in the event of hostilities with Germany. In the 1916 presidential election, Wilson faced Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, a Supreme Court justice. The Progressive Party had nominated Theodore Roosevelt again, but he declined to run and threw his support to Hughes. Wilson campaigned as the peace candidate. Although the slogan “He kept us out of war” proved effective, the election was extremely close, with the vote in California for Wilson determining the outcome. The Democrats also kept control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Before his inauguration, Wilson pressed the Allies and the Central Powers to clearly state their war aims and outlined his own ideas for “peace without victory” and an international organization to guarantee that peace.

U.S. HISTORY II

65 333

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER

These overtures became moot when Germany announced the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on all neutral or Allied shipping, effective February 1, 1917. The United States quickly broke diplomatic relations with Germany. In March, the State Department released the Zimmerman Telegram, a message intercepted from the German foreign minister to the German ambassador in Mexico that proposed an alliance with Mexico in the event of war with the United States. Mexico would reclaim Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona and was expected to persuade Japan to join the Central Powers. The publication of the message did little to enhance Germany in the eyes of Americans. March also witnessed a revolution in Russia that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and put a democratic provisional government into power. The events in Russia were significant. When Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in April, largely on the basis of its submarine policy, he could do so with greater justification than before the Russian Revolution, arguing that the purpose of the war was to make the world “safe for democracy.” The United States enters the war. The weakened condition of the Allied forces in the spring of 1917 made it clear that the United States would have to provide more troops than perhaps originally anticipated. In May, the Selective Service Act was passed, which made all men between the ages of 21 and 30 eligible for the draft; the age range was soon expanded to 18 to 45. Of the almost 5 million men who served in the military during World War I, 2.8 million were drafted. A total of 1.4 million Americans saw combat. The Selective Service Act did not discriminate against AfricanAmericans, and many were drafted or volunteered. There was a widespread belief in the black community that military service would help break down prejudice and lead to political and economic gains. However, African-Americans served in segregated units under white officers, and an overwhelming majority were relegated to menial jobs far behind the front lines. Over the objections of Allied commanders, who wanted to use American troops to fill in their own lines, the American Expeditionary Force under General John J. Pershing fought as a distinct component on its own section of the front in eastern France.

66

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER

The first U.S. Army units landed in June 1917, but Americans did not see significant action until the German offensive in the spring of 1918. After initial successes, the Germans were pushed back in several major engagements in which American forces played a decisive role. The battles of Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood (June 1918) blunted the German drive to the west, and the Second Battle of the Marne (July – August 1918) effectively ended the German threat to Paris. The first major American offensive of the war was the attack on the German units at St. Mihiel (September 1918), w h i c h wa s f o l l ow e d b y t h e M e u s e - A rg o n n e o f f e n s ive (September – November 1918). More than one million American soldiers fought in the Meuse-Argonne and suffered a roughly 10 percent casualty rate, but the battle was the last confrontation of the war. With its military situation rapidly deteriorating, Germany asked for peace on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, a statement of American war aims that the president had presented to Congress in January 1918. Great Britain and France reluctantly agreed to these terms with the provision that Germany pay reparations for the damages caused by the war. The armistice to end the fighting was signed on November 11, 1918. By the end of the war, U.S. forces had suffered more than 53,000 combat deaths and over 200,000 wounded men. The total number of military deaths was considerably higher due to the worldwide influenza pandemic that struck the United States in 1918. But the end to the fighting on the Western front did not mean the quick repatriation of American soldiers from Europe. In November 1917, the Bolsheviks (Communists) came to power in Russia. In exchange for diplomatic and financial support for their administration, they signed a separate peace treaty with Germany (the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk) in March 1918 and took Russia out of the war. Ostensibly to protect Allied supplies but more importantly to support the White anticommunist forces fighting the Red Army of the Bolsheviks, the United States and fourteen other countries sent troops to northern Russia in August 1918, and a smaller American force was sent to the Russian Far East soon after. The Allied intervention in Russia did not end until April 1920.

U.S. HISTORY II

67 333

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER

The home front during the war. To ensure support for the war effort, the Committee on Public Information (sometimes known as the Creel Committee after its head administrator, journalist George Creel) organized a propaganda campaign that portrayed Germans as barbarous Huns while stressing that Americans were fighting for democracy and freedom. Anti-German sentiment reached ridiculous heights — many school districts across the country stopped teaching the German language, sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage,” and German measles became “liberty measles.” The freedom to express dissent was also a casualty of the war. The Espionage Act of 1917 mandated imprisonment and fines for persons who aided the enemy or caused insubordination or disloyalty in the military. Newspapers, magazines, and other printed matter deemed as advocating treason were not allowed to be mailed. Under the Sedition Act (1918), it became a crime to make disparaging or profane comments against the government, flag, or the uniforms of the United States. Several thousand people were arrested under these laws, the constitutionality of which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Schenk v. United States (1919). The Court found that limitations on freedom of speech in wartime were legitimate if the speech constituted a “clear and present danger” to the public. In addition to the Council of National Defense, a number of federal agencies were created to manage the economy. The Fuel Administration allocated supplies of petroleum and coal between industrial and domestic consumption and controlled the prices of these goods while the Railroad Administration coordinated rail traffic. The War Industries Board, under financier Bernard Baruch, converted America’s factories to wartime production, directed the allocation of raw materials, and, when necessary, fixed prices. By promoting Victory Gardens and “Meatless Tuesdays,” the Food Administration, headed by future president Herbert Hoover, tried to increase agricultural production and limit civilian consumption. Following an unprecedented number of strikes in 1917, the National War Labor Board was created to arbitrate disputes between management and workers as well as to raise wages and shorten hours. Unions were permitted to organize and enter into collective bargaining for

68

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER

their members if they took a no-strike pledge. In fact, union membership, particularly in the American Federation of Labor, grew significantly during the war. The nature of the work force also changed. The severe labor shortage caused by the draft and the tapering off of immigration accelerated African-American migration to northern industries from the South. Many young and single women also took on new jobs in the defense plants, although most lost those jobs when veterans returned from the war. The sense of patriotism that was at least partially responsible for bringing blacks and women into the factories in large numbers was also used to sell low-interest government bonds, known as Liberty Bonds, to help finance the war. A sharp increase in taxes on profits, estates, and personal income increased revenues as well.

Wilson and the Peace Settlement Under the armistice agreement, Wilson’s Fourteen Points were the basis for the peace settlement with Germany and the Central Powers. This declaration of American war aims called for open diplomacy (an end to secret treaties), freedom of the seas, removal of trade barriers, impartial adjustment of colonial claims that recognized the interests of indigenous peoples, the application of national self-determination in Central and Eastern Europe (eight of the Fourteen Points dealt with this issue), and the creation of an association of nations that would guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of all countries. This association of nations became the League of Nations and was always considered by Wilson to be the most important of the Fourteen Points. The Paris Peace Conference. The Paris Peace Conference was held from January to June 1919. Wilson led the American delegation, which did not include any prominent Republicans. This was a major blunder in light of the midterm elections. Even with the fighting still going on, Wilson neglected to build on the support he had during in the war from both Republicans and Democrats. Instead, he actively U.S. HISTORY II

69 333

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER

campaigned for Democratic candidates in 1918 and his partisan strategy backfired — the Republicans regained control of both the House and the Senate, and the Senate would be responsible for ratifying any treaty that Wilson negotiated in Paris. From the beginning, the peace conference violated the spirit of the Fourteen Points. All the decisions were made by the leaders of the victorious allies, or the Big Four, as David Lloyd George of Great Britain, George Clemenceau of France, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, and Wilson were called. Moreover, Britain and France were determined to see that Germany paid a heavy price for the war, while Italy insisted the conference adhere to the territorial changes promised in the secret treaty it had signed with Britain and France. A war guilt clause, which blamed Germany alone for starting the war, was accepted to justify reparations that grew to more than $56 billion. Further, Germany lost all of its colonies and some territory to France and newly independent Poland, and was substantially disarmed. These terms were hardly “peace without victory.” On the other hand, the principle of national self-determination was generally recognized in Europe, even though the countries that lost land — Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia — were not present. National self-determination meant that peoples who shared the same language, history, and territory had the right to political independence. The new nations carved out of the old empires were Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Although Germany’s leaders complained strongly that the harsh terms of the treaty violated both the spirit and letter of the Fourteen Points, they had little choice but to sign the treaty (June 28, 1919). Wilson was willing to make major concessions to ensure that the League of Nations was included in the treaty. Article 10 of the League’s charter was, in the President’s opinion, key to the success of the new international organization. It called on all member states to respect and preserve the independence and territorial integrity of all member nations through collective action. Mindful of the concerns of Senate Republicans, Wilson agreed to amendments to the charter: The League could not interfere in domestic matters, members could withdraw on two-years’ notice, and regional agreements such as the

70

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER

Monroe Doctrine were exempt from League action. These changes were included in the covenant of the League of Nations that was attached to the Treaty of Versailles. The debate over ratification. The Treaty of Versailles was submitted to the Senate for ratification in July 1919. It was clear from the outset that the Senate was bitterly divided over the League. While Democrats favored immediate ratification, there was a small group of Republican senators known as the Irreconcilables who rejected the treaty entirely. In the middle were moderates who favored participation in the League but wanted further modifications to protect American interests. Led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, these moderates were known as the Reservationists. Some historians divide the Reservationists into two groups — those favoring minor, interpretative changes and those, like Lodge, advocating major changes that required Allied approval. While the Foreign Relations Committee debated the treaty, Wilson impatiently embarked on a nationwide speaking tour in the hope that public opinion would put enough pressure on senators to support ratification. The President gave 37 speeches in just 22 days as he crisscrossed the country by rail, and the trip took its toll. Wilson collapsed on September 25 and suffered a major stroke a week later. For the rest of his term, he remained an invalid, doing only the simplest tasks under the supervision of his wife and physician. The treaty was presented to the full Senate in November 1919 with 14 amendments, the most important of which limited the obligations of the United States under Article 10 of the League by requiring congressional approval of any American action. Wilson refused to accept the change and ordered the Senate Democrats to vote with the Irreconcilables to defeat the Lodge reservations. Although the treaty did eventually get the support of a majority of the senators, it failed to receive the two-thirds vote needed for ratification. The United States entered into separate peace treaties with Germany, Austria, and Hungary, and never did join the League of Nations.

U.S. HISTORY II

71 333

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

With the end of World War I and the passage of the Eighteenth

Amendment, Americans entered the distinctive 1920s — an era of Republican leadership, nationalistic and fundamentalist movements, and changing social conventions. Electing Republican presidents who favored business expansion rather than regulation, the American public enjoyed apparently unlimited prosperity, while fear of radicals and foreigners combined to almost completely close off America to immigration and contributed to the resurgence of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Religious fundamentalism revived as new moral and social attitudes came into vogue. Additionally, the first radio broadcasts and motion pictures expanded Americans’ access to news and entertainment.

Politics in the 1920s During the 1920s, three Republicans occupied the White House: Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. Harding was inept, Coolidge was mediocre, and Hoover was overcome by circumstances he neither understood nor could control. Harding’s campaign slogan, “A return to normalcy,” aptly described American politics for the entire period. The nation turned away from the reforming zeal of the Progressive Era and the moral vision of Wilson’s wartime leadership toward a government whose domestic economic policies opposed federal regulation and encouraged business expansion. The Harding administration. Although he was affable and popular, Harding’s naivete made him a disaster as president. Mindful of his own weaknesses, he tried to select the best men possible for his cabinet, with Charles Evans Hughes as Secretary of State, Henry C. Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture, Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce, and Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury. These men were responsible for the accomplishments of Harding’s brief administration, which included stimulating business growth, cutting taxes, and negotiating disarmament treaties.

U.S. HISTORY II

73 333

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

Several of Harding’s other appointments left much to be desired, however, and resulted in major scandals that rocked the government. Charles Forbes, for example, headed the newly formed Veteran’s Bureau, even though he had carefully avoided the draft. He was convicted of fraud and related felonies involving the agency’s hospital construction funds. Meanwhile, Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was at the center of the Teapot Dome scandal, in which he secretly leased naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, to private companies headed by Edward Doheny and Harry F. Sinclair in return for no-interest, noncollateral “loans.” After resigning his office, Fall was convicted of bribery, and the government canceled the leases. The administration was further disgraced when Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty was implicated in a bribery case involving an official in the Alien Property Office and indicted but acquitted for taking money from liquor dealers evading Prohibition. Harding was not directly involved with the corruption, and he died in office (August 2, 1923) before the charges against his appointees became public. Coolidge and the election of 1924. Harding’s vice president, Calvin Coolidge, came to national attention in 1919 when, as governor of Massachusetts, he ended the Boston police strike. Coolidge did not believe the president should take an activist role in government, and he was as opposed to the regulation of business as Harding had been. His famous quip “The business of America is business” summed up the Republican creed of the 1920s. An honest if taciturn man who had no connection with the scandals of his predecessor’s cronies, Coolidge was the Republican choice for president in 1924. The Democrats found it harder to choose a candidate. The two main Democratic contenders mirrored the split in American society that existed during the ’20s. William Gibbs McAdoo represented the rural, Protestant, and “dry” (proProhibition) parts of the country, while the urban, immigrant, and “wet” (anti-Prohibition) population supported Alfred E. Smith, the Irish-American, Roman Catholic governor of New York. With neither candidate able to sway enough votes, the Democratic convention compromised on the conservative Wall Street lawyer, John W. Davis

74

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

on the 103rd ballot. The election picture was complicated somewhat by Robert LaFollette’s revival of the Progressive party, which organized a coalition of farm groups and unions, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Davis was strong only in the South and LaFollette took his own state of Wisconsin; Coolidge won decisively in both the popular and electoral vote. The election of Hoover. When Coolidge decided not to run for a second term in 1928, the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover. Even though he had never held elective office, Secretary of Commerce Hoover had a distinguished career in public service and was well regarded for his work with the Food Administration and in relief efforts after the war. The Democrats, operating with a stronger urban wing than in the previous election, nominated Governor Al Smith for a second time. With the country still riding the high tide of prosperity that the Republicans took full credit for, Hoover was nearly impossible to beat, especially with Smith’s serious drawbacks as a candidate. The Democratic Party’s platform supported Prohibition, but Smith favored the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. Additionally, antiCatholicism remained a factor in American politics. Many Protestant churches, both fundamentalist and mainstream denominations, urged their parishioners to vote their faith. The combination of Prohibition and religion cost Smith several states in the Deep South and contributed to Hoover’s landslide victory. A closer look at the election results gave the Democrats some hope for the future. Although they did not add any electoral votes to his column, Western farmers abandoned their traditional home in the Republic party and supported Smith. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the nation’s 12 largest cities that voted Republican in 1924 also switched allegiance four years later. This trend suggested that with a candidate who did not have Smith’s obvious weaknesses, the Democrats might be able to forge a winning coalition by holding on to the Deep South and building a stronger base in the urban Northeast and Midwest.

U.S. HISTORY II

75 333

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

Domestic Economic Policy Throughout the ’20s, the government’s pro-business policies were reflected in tax cuts, a reduction in federal spending, and high tariffs. Under Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, who served all three Republican presidents, the maximum rate on personal income was significantly lowered, as were estate taxes and taxes on excess profits. Mellon’s tax program directly benefited the rich based on the assumption that they would invest their money and stimulate the economy. The economy was also aided by the decrease in government expenditures; Mellon managed to balance the budget, and his programs helped to lower the national debt by nearly $10 billion between 1919 and 1929. The government also tried to shield domestic interests from foreign competition through the FordneyMcCumber Tariff (1922) which increased rates, removed items from the free list, and raised duties on farm products. However, high tariffs had several unintended consequences. They made it more difficult for Europeans to pay their war debts to the United States, and farmers, while protected from foreign imports, found themselves paying more for their machinery. Regulatory enforcement was lax during the 1920s, but the government did promote new industries. Civil aviation, for example, was helped by the government’s putting U.S. airmail contracts up for private bids (1925). The Air Commerce Act of 1926, which included federal funding for airport construction, also aided the expansion of this new form of transportation. Agriculture did not share in the prosperity of the rest of the economy. The boom years for farmers came to an end in 1920, when grain and commodity prices fell sharply. The cause of the crisis was the same as it had been in the late nineteenth century — overproduction. The McNary-Haugen Bill, first introduced in 1924, attempted to deal with the problem by proposing that the government purchase farm surpluses of such staples as corn, cotton, and wheat, and either keep them off the market until prices rose or sell them on the world market. Congress finally passed the legislation in 1927, but President Coolidge vetoed it twice. Neither the McNary-Haugen Bill or the more modest Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 provided farmers

76

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

with incentives to limit production, which later experience would show to be the only way out of the price spiral.

Reaction in the 1920s The 1920s were a period of dramatic changes. More than half of all Americans now lived in cities and the growing affordability of the automobile made people more mobile than ever. Although the decade was known as the era of the Charleston dance craze, jazz, and flapper fashions, in many respects it was also quite conservative. At the same time as hemlines went up and moral values seemed to decline, the nation saw the end of its open immigration policy, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and the trial of a Tennessee high-school teacher for teaching evolution. The Red Scare and immigration policy. In the first few years after World War I, the country experienced a brief period of antiradical hysteria known as the Red Scare. Widespread labor unrest in 1919, combined with a wave of bombings, the Communists in power in Russia, and the short-lived Communist revolt in Hungary, fed the fear that the United States was also on the verge of revolution. Under the direction of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, thousands of suspected radicals were arrested in 1919 and 1920; those that were aliens were deported. Although the Red Scare faded quickly after 1920, it strengthened the widespread belief in a strong connection between foreigners and radicalism. The bias against foreigners was exemplified in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born, self-admitted anarchists who, in 1920, were indicted for robbery and murder in Massachusetts; they were found guilty and sentenced to death in July 1921. Their supporters claimed that they were convicted for their ethnic background and beliefs rather than on conclusive evidence. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in August 1927 after all their appeals were exhausted. Hostility toward foreigners was also reflected in a fundamental change in American immigration policy. In 1920, the flow of new immigrants approached pre-war levels. Congress responded in 1921 U.S. HISTORY II

77 333

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

with the Quota Act, which set the maximum number of immigrants entering the United States annually at 350,000, apportioned at 3 percent of each nationality living in the country in 1910 (based on the 1910 census). However, this act still allowed for a significant immigration from southern and eastern Europe, alleged hotbeds of radicalism. Consequently, the National Origins Act of 1924 reduced the total number of immigrants to 150,000 a year, with quotas set at 2 percent of each nationality’s population in the United States in 1890. Under this formula, the quota was less than 4,000 for Italy and around 6,000 for Poland, while the quotas for Great Britain and Germany were 34,000 and 50,000 per year, respectively. In addition to limiting immigration as much as possible, the intent of the legislation was to allow the “more desirable” immigrants from northern and western Europe to come into the United States in higher numbers. The Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan, an organization formed by white southerners during Reconstruction, was revived in Georgia in 1915. The new Klan was particularly strong in the Midwest and Southwest as well as in cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and Indianapolis. According to its supporters, it stood for law and order, “old time religion” and the moral values associated with it, immigration restriction, and opposed groups who were not 100 percent American — foreigners, Catholics, Jews, and African-Americans. The KKK was open only to native-born white Protestants and drew its strongest support from the working class members of that group who were in competition with blacks and new immigrants for jobs and housing. A potent force in American politics in the mid-1920s with between three and eight million members, the Klan controlled the legislatures in Indiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas and was key to the election of several governors and numerous local officials. The Klan declined rapidly after 1925 due to scandals involving its leadership and the drop in immigration numbers caused by the National Origins Act. Prohibition was one of the programs the Klan supported. When the Eighteenth Amendment became effective in January 1920, Congress passed the Volstead Act to implement it. Although alcohol consumption in the United States did drop by as much as half during

78

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

the ’20s, people who wanted to drink found it easy to do so either by brewing their own alcohol (which was legal, as long as it was not sold) or by buying “bootleg” liquor in illegal saloons known as speakeasies that had sprung up everywhere. Enforcement of Prohibition was never adequately staffed or funded, and the illicit trade in alcohol contributed to the growth of organized crime. By the end of the decade, many Americans recognized that Prohibition may well have caused more problems than it solved. A national debate was joined during the 1928 presidential campaign when Smith called for an end to the “noble experiment.” Prohibition was finally repealed in December 1933 with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment. The fundamentalist revival. Fundamentalist Protestants felt their beliefs challenged in the 1920s. Secular culture of the time seemed to have little place for religion, and church attendance was in decline. A movement to defend traditional religion by emphasizing a literal interpretation of the Bible gained momentum in the ’20s and especially targeted Darwin’s theory of evolution as a symbol for what was wrong in modern society. By the mid-1920s, a number of states had enacted laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution. The law was challenged in Tennessee by a young high school biology teacher named John Scopes. Popularly known as the monkey trial, Scopes’s trial was the first ever broadcast over radio and became a national event primarily because of the notoriety of the attorneys representing each side. The American Civil Liberties Union brought in Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense lawyer in the country, for Scopes, while the World Christian Fundamentalist Union engaged William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and the former secretary of state, to assist the prosecution. The trial was a clash between these two men and the beliefs they represented. The high point came when Darrow called Bryan, a recognized lay authority on the Bible, as a witness, and Bryan admitted on the stand that it was possible that creation may not have taken place in six, 24-hour days, thereby refuting a literal interpretation of the Bible. Nonetheless, the jury found

U.S. HISTORY II

79 333

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

Scopes guilty of violating the state’s anti-evolution statute and fined him $100.

The New Society A tide of economic and social change swept across the country in the 1920s. Nicknames for the decade, such as “the Jazz Age” or “the Roaring Twenties,” convey something of the excitement and the changes in social conventions that were taking place at the time. As the economy boomed, wages rose for most Americans and prices fell, resulting in a higher standard of living and a dramatic increase in consumer consumption. Although most women’s lives were not radically transformed by “labor-saving” home appliances or gaining the right to vote, young American women were changing the way they dressed, thought, and acted in a manner that shocked their more traditional parents. These changes were encouraged by the new mass media that included radio and motion pictures. Booming economy and consumerism. The American economy’s phenomenal growth rate during the ’20s was led by the automobile industry. The number of cars on the road almost tripled between 1920 and 1929, stimulating the production of steel, rubber, plate glass, and other materials that went into making an automobile. Henry Ford pioneered the two key developments that made this industry growth possible — standardization and mass production. Standardization meant making every car basically the same, which led to jokes that a customer could get a car in any color as long as it was black. Mass production used standardized parts and division of labor on an assembly line (introduced by Ford before the war) to produce cars more quickly and efficiently. Both innovations had a dramatic impact on price: the Model T that sold for $850 in 1908 sold for $290 in 1924. Ford also created new management techniques that became known as welfare capitalism. To build worker loyalty and blunt the development of unions, Ford paid the highest wages in the industry and established the 5-day, 40-hour workweek. Other companies followed suit, improving working conditions, setting up company

80

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

unions, offering health insurance and profit-sharing plans, and developing recreational programs. These tactics, along with yellow dog contracts, through which employees agreed not to join a union, worked; union membership dropped by almost two million between 1920 and 1929. American industry produced thousands of consumer goods in the 1920s, everything from automobiles to washing machines to electric razors. Mass consumption was encouraged through a combination of advertising, which created a demand for a particular product, and installment buying, which enabled people to actually purchase the product. The power of advertising to shape public attitudes had been demonstrated through the Committee on Public Information’s use of media to marshal public support during World War I. When peace came, ad agencies used newspapers, mass circulation magazines, and radio to effect consumption patterns. They were able to blur the distinction between “want” and “need” by creating a fantasy world in which love, youth, or elegance was available to anyone who bought a brand of toothpaste, a model car, or a new perfume. The power of advertising even influenced religion. Bruce Barton’s 1925 bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, portrayed Jesus Christ as a master salesman and the spread of Christianity as a successful advertising campaign. Providing the opportunity to buy on credit was also a powerful marketing tool. Businesses exhorted consumers to put a small amount down and pay off the balance in monthly installments, instead of saving money for an item and purchasing it with cash. As a result, Americans’ savings rate dropped sharply in the ’20s, and their personal debt rose. The new woman and minorities. One of the most enduring images of the 1920s is that of the flapper, a young woman with short hair, wearing a knee-length dress, rolled-up stockings, and unbuttoned rain boots that flapped (hence the name) when she walked. With a new look came new viewpoints and values, including a more open attitude toward premarital sex. Margaret Sanger, who had first promoted birth control before World War I as a means of sparing poor women from unwanted pregnancies, argued that the diaphragm gave women more sexual freedom. The new woman’s mystique was exemplified by the

U.S. HISTORY II

81 333

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

heroines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925) and film stars such as Gloria Swanson. But the flapper represented only a small percentage of American women; for the overwhelming majority, life did not change that much. The sharp increase in the number of women in the labor force during World War I ended abruptly with the armistice. Female employment grew slowly in the 1920s, mostly in occupations traditionally identified with women — office and social work, teaching, nursing, and apparel manufacturing — and women who worked were usually single, divorced, or widowed. Even with more women in the workplace, no progress was made on issues such as job discrimination or equal pay. At home, despite claims of creating increased leisure time, the myriad of electrical appliances on the market actually did little to alleviate the amount of housework women had to do. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, women’s political progress also slowed. When given the vote, for example, women cast their ballot much the same way that men did, basing their decisions on class, regional, and ethnic loyalties rather than gender. Furthermore, although the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1923, and Nellie Ross became the first woman elected the governor of a state (Wyoming) in the following year, there were still parts of the country were women could not hold public office. During the ‘20s, the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North continued. The black population of Chicago grew from less than 50,000 in 1910 to almost a 250,000 by 1930. The 1920s were also the time for new political and cultural developments within the African-American community. Marcus Garvey, who advocated black pride and supported a “back to Africa” movement among American blacks, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which espoused black economic cooperation and established black-owned grocery stores, restaurants, and even a steamship company known as the Black Star Line. Although Garvey was arrested and convicted of fraud, the UNIA had more than 80,000 members at its height and was the country’s first mass African-American organization. At the same time, New York’s preeminent black neighborhood, Harlem, became a magnet for

82

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

African-American artists, writers, scholars, and musicians. The creative exploration of the black experience by men and women such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Nella Larsen became known as the Harlem Renaissance. Blacks were not the only minority on the move in the 1920s. Neither the Quota Act nor the National Origins Act limited immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere, and nearly 500,000 Mexicans entered the United States between 1921 and 1930. Although most of the Spanish-speaking population lived in the Southwest and California and worked as farm laborers, a small percentage found factory jobs in the Midwest and were sometimes recruited by American companies. Popular culture. Commercial radio began in 1920 when Pittsburgh station KDKA broadcast the results of the presidential election. As the number of homes with radios rapidly increased (from 60,000 in 1922 to more than 10 million in 1929), the airwaves became the medium over which Americans got their news and entertainment. The business of radio was simple and supported the growing consumer culture: local radio stations affiliated themselves with national networks, such as NBC (1926) or CBS (1927), which provided programming underwritten by companies who bought air time for their commercials. Motion pictures also became a major entertainment industry during the ’20s, and the leading stars of the time — Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and Rudolph Valentino — became popular icons. Studios built theaters that resembled palaces, featuring mirrors, lush carpeting, and grand names such as the Rialto and the Ritz. “Going to the movies” became a social occasion and one of the main activities for young people and turned into an even greater phenomenon with the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, the first “talking” motion picture. As the plots and themes of movies grew more suggestive and after Hollywood experienced a series of scandals, government censorship seemed likely if the industry did not “clean up its act.” In 1922, the studios established the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, better known

U.S. HISTORY II

83 333

AMERICA IN THE TWENTIES

as the Hays Office (after its first president Will H. Hays), to control the content of films. The print media also expanded during the ’20s. The exploits of celebrities were splashed across the pages of the new tabloid newspapers such as New York City’s Daily News and Daily Mirror or were covered more sedately in Henry Luce’s weekly newsmagazine Time (1923). Reader’s Digest, founded in 1921, made it easy to keep up with current events because its contents were condensed versions of articles from a variety of magazines. The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild, both started in 1926, revolutionized publishing by offering significant discounts on the “best” books that they declared everyone should read. The bestseller lists of the 1920s featured novels that were destined to become classics, such as Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920), a critique of small town life and society, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), the story of expatriate Americans in France and Spain after World War I. On the stage, playwrights turned their attention to topics that had not been addressed before. All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924) by Eugene O’Neill dealt with the relations between an African-American man and a white women; the black actor and tenor Paul Robeson played the male lead. In This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald wrote that his generation, labeled by writer Gertrude Stein as the “lost generation,” had “grown up to find all gods dead.” Although many of Fitzgerald’s disillusioned contemporaries claimed that there were no heroes in post-war America, the ’20s actually produced heroes of a new type. Sports figures like baseball’s Babe Ruth, boxing heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, and football’s Red Grange were household names whose exploits were followed by millions in newspapers and on the radio. Daring feats could also turn people into instant celebrities, as in the case of Gertrude Ederle in 1926 when she became the first woman to swim the English Channel. Richard Byrd’s 1926 flight over the North Pole earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor, and he received international renown for his explorations of Antarctica. Similarly, following his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in March 1927, Charles Lindbergh became without question the most famous person in America and perhaps the world.

84

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

T

he stock market crash of October 1929 marked the beginning of the worst depression in American history, from which the country did not really begin to rebound until the start of World War II. The human toll of the economic collapse is difficult to calculate. By 1933, more than 13 million Americans were out of work, tens of thousands of business had failed, and the number of farm foreclosures grew. The problems of agriculture were made worse by several years of drought that turned a good part of the Great Plains into a dust bowl and triggered an internal migration of destitute farmers to California. Blamed for the Depression, the Republicans lost control of both Congress and the White House for almost two decades. Elected in a landslide in 1932 for the first of his four terms, Franklin Roosevelt tried to bring the country out of the Depression through a combination of deficit spending and federal programs known as the New Deal.

The Beginnings of the Great Depression Even before the stock market crash, there were signs that the prosperity of the 1920s was on shaky ground. As early as 1927, business inventories began to rise as consumer spending declined. The Federal Reserve Board tried to curb speculation by raising interest rates in July 1928, but the banks continued to make questionable loans. Agriculture had been depressed since the end of World War I, and both industrial production and the employment level dipped in mid 1929. The warning signs were there but went largely unheeded by the government and public alike. The stock market crash. Stocks were bought on credit like many other commodities in the ’20s. Millions of investors paid as little as 25 percent of the face value of a stock, and paid off the balance when the stock was sold after the price went up. This practice of buying on margin contributed to the rampant speculation in the market. Americans who had no knowledge of what to do in the market put their money in “investment trusts,” a forerunner of today’s mutual funds, and let professionals determine which stocks to buy. Everybody profited as long

U.S. HISTORY II

85 333

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

as prices continued to go up, and the market value of stocks did climb from $27 billion to $87 billion between 1925 and 1929. Stock prices began to decline in early September 1929, however. On October 24 (known as Black Thursday) prices fell sharply as investors unloaded their stocks. The following Tuesday, 16 million shares were sold — a record at the time — and the market dropped 43 points. Brokers called in their margin debts, which few could pay, and people who had been millionaires on paper (because of the value of the stock they held) became paupers overnight. Stories of ruined men jumping to their deaths from their office windows underscored just how terribly the crash affected investors. Despite pronouncements by President Hoover, John D. Rockefeller, and other business leaders that the economy was fundamentally sound, it was impossible to stem the panic in the market. By the end of October, $30 million worth of stock had vanished. In the wake of the crash, caution replaced speculation in how people spent their money, which in turn affected the ability of the economy to recover. Installment buying in the ‘20s had masked the fact that most Americans did not earn enough to purchase the number of goods being produced. As consumer spending declined, companies cut back production and fired employees. Automobiles and construction, two of the boom industries of the 1920s, were among the first sectors of the economy hit. By 1933, about a quarter of the labor force was out of work. The nation’s gross national product, the total value of goods and services, fell by more than 40 percent between 1929 and 1932. As borrowers defaulted on their loans, banks were unable to pay off depositors and were forced to close. Millions in savings were lost as a result of the banking crisis. Additionally, farm prices continued their decade-long fall. Wheat that had sold for more than two dollars a bushel in 1919 was worth just over 30 cents in 1932. Even as thousands in the cities stood in bread lines and waited in soup kitchens for food, some farmers burned their crops and poured milk on highways as a form of protest and in a desperate attempt to drive prices high enough to cover their costs.

86

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

Hoover’s response to the Depression. Direct federal relief to the unemployed ran counter to Hoover’s strong beliefs about the limited role of government. As a result, he responded to the economic crisis with a goal of getting people back to work rather than directly granting relief. The President’s Emergency Committee for Employment (later renamed the President’s Organization for Unemployment Relief) was established in October 1930 to coordinate the efforts of local welfare agencies. As the Depression worsened, however, charitable organizations were simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem, and Hoover tried new ideas to stimulate the economy. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) (1932) provided railroads, banks, and other financial institutions with money for loans, and the Glass-Steagall Act (1932) made getting commercial credit easier and released $750 million in gold reserves for additional business loans. The Emergency Relief and Construction Act (1932) provided funds to the RFC to make loans for relief to the states and included additional money for local, state, and federal public works projects. Despite Hoover’s efforts to revitalize the economy, the public blamed him for the Great Depression, calling the tarpaper-shack shantytowns “Hoovervilles” and empty pockets “Hoover flags.” One group that thought it deserved better from the government — World War I veterans — made its opinions known in a dramatic way. In 1924, Congress had approved a cash disbursement to veterans that was due in 1945. During the spring of 1932, 15,000 veterans marched on Washington demanding an early payment of the bonus. When the Senate failed to approve a bonus bill, most of the veterans decided to go home. The 2,000 who remained encamped at Anacostia Flats and were forcibly removed by the Army at Hoover’s direction at the end of July. The troops were under the command of General Douglas MacArthur and led by such officers as George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower. The spectacle of soldiers confronting unarmed veterans and their families with bayonets, tear gas, machine guns, and tanks did little for Hoover’s popularity or reelection chances.

U.S. HISTORY II

87 333

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

The election of 1932. With a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, the Republicans nominated Hoover for a second term. The Democrats, confident of victory, chose New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. A distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, FDR (as he was popularly known) had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson and had been nominated as the 1920 Democratic vicepresidential candidate largely on the basis of his name. In 1921 Roosevelt was stricken with polio, which left him paralyzed from the waist down. In 1924 he began his political comeback when he gave the keynote address at the Democratic convention, and in 1928 and 1930 he was elected governor of New York. During his presidential campaign, although he promised the American people a “new deal,” Roosevelt did not outline a clear and specific program for responding to the Depression. Instead, his message was a combination of vague liberal and conservative principles. Roosevelt talked about helping “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” and suggested that the government was responsible for a more equitable distribution of wealth. At the same time, he also called for reduced federal spending and a balanced budget. Roosevelt was obviously extremely cautious and, given how unpopular Hoover was, the election was Roosevelt’s to win. The results were a Democratic landslide: Roosevelt received more than 57 percent of the popular vote and 472 electoral votes, and the Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress with substantial majorities.

Roosevelt and the New Deal The Twentieth Amendment, which moved the presidential inauguration from March 4 to January 20, was ratified in early 1933, making Roosevelt the last president elected under the old system. In the four-month interregnum between the election and the inauguration, the economy deteriorated rapidly. Industrial production fell to its lowest level, more Americans lost their jobs, and banks failed at such an alarming rate that virtually all were closed by the time Roosevelt took the oath of office. With the aid of a group of economic and academic advisors known as the brain trust and a cabinet that included

88

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

the first woman (Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor), Roosevelt met the devastation of the Depression with a willingness to act and experiment. Through his speeches and famous radio addresses (popularly called “fireside chats”), he encouraged Americans to have confidence in the future. The Hundred Days. The Hundred Days refers to the almost frantic period of legislative activity initiated by the White House between March and June 1933 to deal with the immediate economic crisis and the country’s long-term recovery. On March 5, Roosevelt declared a four-day bank holiday. All financial institutions in the country were closed and, under the Emergency Banking Reform Act (March 9), only those that were fiscally sound were allowed to reopen. Roosevelt’s quick action did much to restore faith in the banking system. The Glass-Steagall Banking Act (June 16) boosted confidence even further by setting up the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which guaranteed bank deposits up to $5,000. The Civilian Conservation Corps (March 31) addressed unemployment and provided work for young men between the ages of 18 and 25 in national parks and on road building, reforestation, and floodcontrol projects. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), headed by social worker Harry Hopkins, provided money to states and municipalities for direct relief through massive public works projects. During the Hundred Days, the administration also implemented a regional planning program. In preparing for war in 1916, the federal government had developed hydroelectric-power and nitrate plants at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. After the war, the future of the Muscle Shoals plants was caught up in the struggle between private utilities and public power. An advocate for public power while governor of New York, Roosevelt supported the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), established May 18. Building dams and power plants and stringing transmission lines, the TVA brought electricity, flood control, and recreational facilities to the seven states through which the Tennessee River flowed, substantially improving the economy and daily lives of the people in one of the poorest

U.S. HISTORY II

89 333

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

regions of the country. As useful as much of the Hundred Days legislation was, however, the two most important and controversial acts passed in that period dealt with agriculture and industry. Changes in agriculture. The New Deal significantly enlarged the role the federal government played in agriculture. Its emphasis was on those who were severely hurt by the Depression, and it had significant success in restoring a measure of prosperity to agriculture even before the start of World War II. The Farm Credit Act (1933) protected farmers against foreclosure on their property, while the Commodity Credit Corporation extended loans to farmers on their crops. The loans made to electrical cooperatives through the Rural Electrification Administration (1935) doubled the number of farms receiving electricity by 1941. Meanwhile, agencies such as the Soil Conservation Service (1935), the Resettlement Administration (1935), and the Farm Security Administration (1937) were committed to improving farming techniques as well as the lot of migrant farm workers, tenant farmers and sharecroppers, and the rural poor. The most important New Deal program aimed at helping agriculture, however, was the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), passed on May 12. The purpose of the AAA was to get at the root of the farmers’ dilemma — whenever prices fell, farmers increased production, which caused a market glut and depressed prices further. Through the AAA, farmers were paid to reduce their crops, either by plowing them under or by not cultivating a certain amount of acreage. The targeted commodities were wheat, cotton, corn, tobacco, rice, milk, and hogs (young livestock were slaughtered). The cost of the program was assumed by a tax on middlemen and food processors, such as grain elevator operators and meatpacking companies. The goal was to restore parity, or to give the American farmer the same purchasing power he enjoyed in the boom years between 1909 and 1914. By 1934, the production of several staple crops had decreased and farm prices, as well as farm income, rose accordingly. The overall upward trend in farm prices and income was helped, ironically, by several years of drought in the mid 1930s that turned much of the topsoil of the Great Plains farmland into dust and made producing crops in these regions impossible. The farmers living in

90

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

the drought-stricken areas watched their crops, grass, and livestock slowly die. Although some impoverished families migrated to California in the hope of finding work, the majority of farmers remained on their land and endured the dust storms and hardships of the drought until it broke in 1939. Industrial recovery. The New Deal also expanded the government’s role in industry. Passed on June 16, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) suspended antitrust laws and instituted codes of fair competition in each industry. The legislation recognized the right of workers to organize and engage in collective bargaining, and the labor provisions of the fair-competition codes established the 40hour week, set a minimum weekly wage, and prohibited child labor under the age of 16. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) pushed the drafting of codes by rallying public support behind the program; shops, stores, and business that complied with the codes in their industry were encouraged to display the “Blue Eagle” symbol of the NRA and consumers were expected to patronize those establishments. The codes seemed to encourage increases in both wages and prices, but critics claimed the NRA actually limited competition and encouraged monopoly. The NIRA was ultimately declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935. The NIRA also earmarked $3.3 billion for public works through the Public Works Administration (PWA). The purpose of the PWA was to “prime the pump” — in other words, government spending would provide jobs that would both increase consumer buying power and provide industry with a much needed stimulus. Under Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who also served as the head of the PWA, the effort focused on permanent and socially useful projects, including the first federal housing program, support for public power through reclamation projects in the West, and a range of public improvements from bridges to lighthouses.

U.S. HISTORY II

91 333

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

The Second New Deal The impact of the early New Deal programs was mixed at best. While the gross national product did inch upward between 1933 and 1935, about ten million Americans remained out of work. Public support for Roosevelt remained strong, however. The 1934 congressional elections broke tradition and resulted in the Democrats actually increasing their numbers in the House and the Senate. The period after the midterm elections, often called the Second New Deal, had a stronger focus on social reform. It was also the time that the president’s policies faced challenges from the left and the right, as well as from the Supreme Court. Challenges to the New Deal. Although an early supporter of the president, Senator Huey Long of Louisiana was seen as a potential rival for Roosevelt in 1936 or a strong candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1940. Long developed his own economic recovery program, known as Share the Wealth, which called for giving every American family $5,000 to buy a house, car, and radio, plus a guaranteed annual income of $2,500. Long was assassinated in 1935, but his ideas on the redistribution of wealth remained popular. Dr. Frances Townsend, a retired physician, responded to the plight of the elderly with a plan to give $200 a month (raised from a tax on business transactions) to every American over the age of 60 who was retired or agreed to retire. Townsend believed that early retirement would open up jobs for younger workers and that the requirement for all the money to be spent within the month would stimulate the economy. By 1936, Townsend Clubs across the country boasted 3.5 million members, making senior citizens a potent political force. On the extreme right, the Detroit-based Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin founded the National Union of Social Justice and used his weekly radio program to blame the country’s economic woes on a conspiracy of bankers and Jews. His anti-Semitic diatribes reached 30 to 40 million listeners. The Supreme Court also challenged Roosevelt, declaring key elements of the New Deal unconstitutional. The NIRA was struck down

92

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

in 1935 in Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States, popularly known as the “sick chicken case.” The plaintiffs were accused of violating the NRA fair-competition codes for selling chicken that was unfit to eat. Additionally, the Court found that the legislation gave too much power to the executive branch in drafting the codes and went beyond the Constitution by attempting to regulate intrastate commerce. In the following year, the AAA was invalidated due to the processing tax on middlemen in United States v. Butler. New laws were enacted, such as the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act (1936) and the Second Agricultural Adjustment Act (1938), to maintain the program of reducing production while meeting the objections of the Court. New federal programs. In April 1935, Congress passed the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act with the largest portion of its funding earmarked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Over the next eight years, the WPA provided 8.5 million Americans with jobs building highways, parks, bridges, and airports. The new agency also expanded the definition of relief to include men and women in the arts who were on welfare. A series of programs provided employment to writers (Federal Writers’ Project), actors (Federal Theater Project), artists (Federal Art Project), and musicians (Federal Music Project). The WPA was renamed the Works Projects Administration in 1939. Roosevelt’s answer to the Townsend Plan was the Social Security Act (August 1935), which has proved to be the most enduring legislation of the New Deal. Its key feature created a pension fund for retired people over the age of 65 and their survivors that was financed by a small payroll tax paid by both workers and employers. Payments were initially quite small ($22 a month in 1940), and the administration emphasized that social security was intended to supplement other sources of retirement income. The act also established an unemployment compensation program with the states based on an additional payroll tax paid by employers. The Social Security Act also provided money to states to help them meet the cost of their own pension plans and helped to fund state old-age assistance, dependent children and child welfare, and public heath programs. However, the U.S. HISTORY II

93 333

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

Social Security Act had several drawbacks — farm workers, domestics, and the self-employed were not covered, and the payroll tax, in addition to reducing the income of the working poor, took a considerable amount of money out of circulation at a time when spending was needed to improve the economy. The labor movement won a significant victory with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (1935). Popularly known as the Wagner Act after its chief sponsor, Senator Robert Wagner of New York, the law restored the protections given to workers under the NIRA, such as the right of unions to organize and to enter into collective bargaining agreements. The National Labor Relations Board was established to supervise union elections, to certify the results, and to investigate alleged unfair labor practices by employers. The Wagner Act led to a growth in union membership, as did the Committee for Industrial Organization (1935) that attracted unskilled workers in industrial unions. Originally part of the American Federation of Labor, it was reorganized as a separate and competing group as the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1938. The CIO had success in unionizing both the automobile and steel industries through several major and occasionally violent strikes in 1937. Minorities, women, and the New Deal. African-Americans were hard hit by the Depression, and although the social programs of the New Deal helped many, discrimination persisted. The CCC camps were segregated, the administration’s agricultural policies had the effect of driving black farmers (often tenants or sharecroppers) off the land, and relief payments for blacks were significantly lower than for whites in the South. However, African-Americans were employed in New Deal agencies and more were appointed to jobs with the federal government than ever before. Mary McLeod Bethune, for example, served on the advisory committee of the National Youth Administration and was a leader of the so-called “black cabinet” that met in her home. But the president was not a civil rights advocate. Because he needed the southern vote, Roosevelt supported neither anti-lynching legislation nor a bill to abolish the poll tax. Eleanor

94

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

Roosevelt, on the other hand, openly supported African-American causes. When the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow the black singer Marion Anderson to use Constitution Hall, the First Lady resigned her membership in the organization and arranged for Anderson to give a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Depression and the Roosevelt administration affected other minorities as well. Beginning during World War I and continuing into the 1920s, a large number of Mexicans were recruited for jobs in factories and on farms in the United States. As industrial unemployment soared and the depression in agriculture intensified, the response on all levels of government was to deport or “repatriate” workers and their families, including American-born children who were U.S. citizens, back to Mexico. According to one estimate, the Spanish-speaking population of the country declined by half a million during the 1930s as a result of this policy. A significant change in policy toward Native Americans also occurred during the Roosevelt years. Under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the assimilationist goals of the past were abandoned in favor of a new respect for tribal culture. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 provided for tribal control over the land, removed Native Americans from the jurisdiction of the state courts, and supported reviving old customs and traditions. The reforms met with a mixed response from the tribes themselves. The New Deal also created employment opportunities for women, including bringing more women into the federal government. The appointment of Frances Perkins to the cabinet was an important milestone, and Perkins, in turn, placed women in key positions in the Department of Labor. Under Roosevelt, the first women also served as ambassadors and on the federal bench. Even though no women worked in the CCC, about 500,000 did find employment through the WPA, albeit at lower wages than men. This discrepancy is not surprising since the NRA codes for industries that had a large number of female workers (for example, clothing manufacture) also set their minimum wages lower. Although Eleanor Roosevelt was certainly a positive role model, the perception of women in the 1930s as primarily housewives and mothers did not change dramatically.

U.S. HISTORY II

95 333

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

The election of 1936. Roosevelt accepted the nomination for a second term and considered the election a referendum on himself and his policies. The “New Deal coalition,” which included immigrants (including second and third generation Catholics and Jews), urban voters, Southerners, Midwest farmers, and labor organizations, supported him. Additionally, African-Americans, who had traditionally voted Republican since Reconstruction, switched to the Democratic Party in significant numbers for the first time. The results of the election were never in doubt. Roosevelt defeated Governor Alf Landon of Kansas with 523 electoral votes to 8 and almost 28 million popular votes to Landon’s less than 17 million.

The End of the New Deal Roosevelt began his second term confident that the election results gave him a strong mandate from the American people to continue making sweeping changes. However, he quickly ran into problems with his plan to reorganize the federal judiciary and faced a serious downturn in the economy in the late summer of 1937. Dealing with these issues slowed the momentum of the administration’s legislative agenda. Moreover, with war clouds gathering over Europe and the Japanese threat in the Pacific, the president was increasingly forced to turn his attention to foreign policy. “Packing” the Supreme Court. The key element in Roosevelt’s proposal to reorganize the federal judiciary focused on the Supreme Court. The Court had already invalidated two major pieces of New Deal legislation, the AAA and the NIRA, and other laws were under legal challenge. Roosevelt wanted the authority to increase the size of the Court from 9 to 15 by appointing one new justice for each justice over the age of 70 who did not retire. This power would have allowed him to immediately appoint members who were sympathetic to the New Deal. The ploy fooled no one, and Congress, many Democrats included, rejected the proposal at the cost of considerable political capital for Roosevelt. Ironically, the president got what he wanted anyway. The Court upheld a number of programs of the

96

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

Second New Deal, including the Social Security and Wagner Acts, and retirements and deaths allowed Roosevelt to appoint his own justices: Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, and William O. Douglas. The recession of 1937. Although unemployment remained high, the economy had steadily improved from 1933 through the first half of 1937. In the late summer of 1937, however, the country entered a deep recession that lasted almost a year. This major slump was caused by the sharp cuts in federal spending that the administration thought were necessary to control the growing deficit and by a reduction in disposable income due to Social Security payroll taxes. Industrial production declined, the number of people out of work grew, and stock prices fell. By the spring, Roosevelt reversed course and called on Congress to pass a massive public works spending program. The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act (June 1938) created more jobs through the WPA and made more money for direct relief and government loans available. At the same time, the Federal Reserve Board adopted an easier credit policy. Roosevelt’s attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court combined with the recession to undercut the New Deal. Politically, Roosevelt faced a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats willing to exercise its muscle. When the president called Congress into special session in the fall of 1937 to enact a broad range of legislation, including the reorganization of the executive branch, the coalition prevented the passage of all the bills. The two major accomplishments during this period of the president’s second term were the Second Agricultural Adjustment Act (February 1938) and the Fair Labor Standards Act, also known as the Wages and Hours Act (June 1938). The Second AAA provided for the storage of surplus crops in government warehouses and made loans to farmers in years of overproduction to compensate for lower market prices. The Wages and Hours Act phased in minimum wage and maximum hour (40 hours per week) requirements for businesses that engaged in or were affected by interstate commerce, and provided time-and-a-half for overtime work. The statute also prohibited labor by children under the age of 16 and restricted those under 18 to non-hazardous work. Although the Democrats retained their control of Congress in 1938, the

U.S. HISTORY II

97 333

DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL

Republicans gained seats in the House and the Senate for the first time since 1928. In the wake of the elections, Roosevelt did not offer any new domestic programs in his State of the Union address (January 1939) but focused instead on the threat that aggressor nations posed to international peace.

98

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

The Senate’s repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles following World

War I is often seen as ushering in a period of isolationism in American foreign policy. It was impossible for the United States to withdraw completely from world affairs, however, because American possessions stretched from the Caribbean to the Pacific and because the First World War had transformed the country into the world’s leading creditor nation. As the threat of war grew in the 1930s — with the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Japanese aggression in China — Congress tried to insulate the United States from potential hostilities through neutrality legislation. While public sentiment remained strongly in favor of staying out of a European conflict, isolationism became increasingly difficult after war broke out in Europe in September 1939.

American Foreign Policy in the ’20s Although the United States did not join the League of Nations, it did cooperate with international agencies throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s on such matters as trade and drug trafficking. The United States also headed efforts to advance diplomatic talks on limited disarmament, to resolve the tangled questions of war debts and reparations, and to maintain international peace, all while remaining deeply involved in Western Hemisphere affairs, particularly in Central America. American foreign policy was far from isolationist in the ’20s. Disarmament. Two factors prompted American calls for disarmament during the 1920s. First, many Americans believed the arms buildup, particularly the Anglo-German naval rivalry, was a cause of World War I and that reducing military strength would therefore help prevent another war. Furthermore, the United States was concerned that the growing military power of Japan, which had taken advantage of the war to seize German possessions in China and the western Pacific, was a threat to American interests in the region. Limiting Japan’s military capabilities would protect those interests. At the Washington Armaments Conference (November 1921 – February 1922), the United States, Japan, Great Britain, France, and Italy U.S. HISTORY II

99 333

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

signed the Five-Power Treaty, which limited the tonnage of their navies and placed a ten-year moratorium on the construction of aircraft carriers and battleships. The treaty did not place any restrictions on the construction of non-capital ships, such as cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. Several diplomatic agreements were also reached in Washington that focused on maintaining the status quo in Asia. Japan, Great Britain, France, and the United States, for example, recognized each other’s possessions in Asia and agreed to consult on outside threats or to settle disputes among themselves. In the Nine-Power Treaty, a wider circle of nations (Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, China, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United States) pledged to support the Open Door Policy and respect the territorial integrity of China. Subsequent attempts at disarmament did not prove as successful. In 1927, President Coolidge called the signatories of the Five-Power Treaty together in Geneva to work out limits on the building of smaller ships. France and Italy refused to attend, and Great Britain, the United States, and Japan could not reach an agreement on restrictions. At the 1930 London Naval Conference, Great Britain, the United States, and Japan signed a treaty that required scrapping some battleships and placed limitations on cruisers and submarines; France and Italy accepted some of the terms but were not formal signatories. The agreement, however, did not forestall Japanese aggression in Manchuria the following year. War debts and reparations. The total war debt incurred by Europe exceeded $10 billion, the bulk of which Great Britain and France owed to the United States. Although the nation’s wartime allies wanted the United States to cancel the debts altogether, both the Harding and Coolidge administrations approved only reducing the interest rates and forgiving a portion of the obligation. For example, the interest rate Italy paid was lowered to .4 percent and more than 80 percent of Italy’s debt was canceled in 1926. Even with these adjustments, European countries found it difficult to pay off their loans. They argued that the high rates imposed by the Fordney-McCumber Tariff (1922) dramatically reduced the amount of U.S. dollars they could earn through exports and also that they would not be able to pay back their war debts

100

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

until Germany paid them reparations. Germany, however, was unable to make its reparations payments. Germany defaulted on its reparations in early 1923. French troops responded by occupying the industrial Ruhr Valley. As German workers protested the occupation with a strike, runaway inflation hit Germany’s economy. To avert an international financial crisis, President Coolidge appointed a number of American businessmen, including Charles Dawes and Owen Young, to an international group of experts investigating the problem. The resulting Dawes Plan (1924) fixed Germany’s payments over the next five years and provided for a rather large foreign loan, with most of the funds coming from American banks. Essentially, the plan allowed Germany to meet its reparations obligations with U.S. money and for Great Britain and France to use the reparations they received from Germany to pay off their debts to the United States. The Young Plan (1929) reduced the total amount of reparations due from Germany and extended the payment period until 1988 at a fixed interest rate. The plan also provided for the possibility of additional reductions if the United States was willing to cut Allied debts further. The onset of a worldwide depression soon made the entire war debt and reparations question moot. The Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. In August 1928, the United States and France, along with 13 other nations, signed the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. Officially known as the Pact of Paris, the agreement outlawed war as an instrument of foreign policy, although all of the signatories (which eventually included 62 countries around the world) reserved the right to defend themselves in the event of an attack. Events that occurred in China after the signing of the pact, however, made it clear that there were no means of enforcing the treaty — beyond whatever force international public opinion might carry. From 1931 to 1932, Japan occupied Manchuria and set up a puppet state called Manchukuo. This action was a clear violation of the Peace Pact as well as the Nine-Power Treaty and the League of Nations Covenant. Despite pleas from China for assistance, neither the League nor the United States took any action to punish Japanese aggression. Rather than imposing military or economic sanctions, the American response was to simply refuse to recognize territorial U.S. HISTORY II

101 333

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

changes in China achieved by force of arms. This policy of nonrecognition was known as the Stimson Doctrine, after then Secretary of State Henry Stimson. Developments in the Western Hemisphere. American relations with Caribbean and Central American countries were mixed during the 1920s. In the Dominican Republic, for example, the Marines were withdrawn in 1924 following the election of a constitutional president. Although American troops left Nicaragua in 1925, they returned in 1927 when a civil war broke out. In his message to Congress announcing the intervention, President Coolidge justified the action by stating that its purpose was to protect American business interests, investments, and property rights in the country. A shift in policy, however, became evident during the Hoover administration. Through the Clark Memorandum (1928), the State Department repudiated the decades old Roosevelt Corollary and maintained that the Monroe Doctrine could not be used to justify American intervention in the Western Hemisphere. Hoover went on a ten-nation goodwill tour of Latin America in 1928 and was quite well-received.

Foreign Policy and the New Deal The Franklin Roosevelt administration promoted change in two areas of foreign policy. Using the groundwork for change laid by Hoover, Roosevelt adopted the Good Neighbor policy and formally abandoned military intervention in the Western Hemisphere. Another important change was the extension of diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. As peace in Europe became increasingly fragile — with the Fascists in power in Italy and Adolph Hitler as chancellor of Germany — Congress passed a series of laws designed to keep Americans from fighting in another European war. The president initially supported and then strongly opposed this move toward isolationism.

102

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

The Good Neighbor policy. Roosevelt announced the intention of the United States to be a “good neighbor” in his first inaugural address. The administration deemed improving relations with countries in the Western Hemisphere essential to increasing trade and strengthening the nation’s strategic position in the region. The first concrete results of the new policy came at the Pan-American Conference held in Montevideo, Uruguay, in December 1933, when the United States accepted a nonintervention provision in the Convention on Rights and Duties of States. A new treaty with Cuba (May 1934) ended the Platt Amendment that had restricted the Cuban government’s powers and had authorized U.S. military intervention in Cuba. American troops were withdrawn from Haiti (August 1934), and Panama gained additional commercial rights in the Canal Zone through an agreement signed in 1936 and ratified by the Senate in 1939. When Mexico nationalized the property of American oil companies in 1938, Secretary of State Cordell Hull recognized Mexico’s right to take the property but demanded that a compensation plan be negotiated between the two countries. Even with these nonintervention approaches to Latin American countries, American foreign policy in the region continued to support conservative governments that promoted stability and protected U.S. economic interests. Following the 1933 meeting in Montevideo, the United States continued to push hemispheric solidarity through a series of international conferences, especially as the threat from Nazi Germany grew. Recognition of the Soviet Union. The United States had refused to recognize the Soviet Union because the Soviet government would not assume Russia’s debts, and it actively promoted revolution. For their part, the leaders of the Soviet Union found it difficult to forget that American troops had participated in the Allied intervention during the Russian revolution in 1918. As with Central and South America, a combination of economic and security concerns contributed to the development of a new policy toward the Soviet Union. For the Roosevelt administration, the possibility of extensive trade with the USSR and the potential value of the Soviet Union as an ally against Japanese expansion led to the reestablishment of diplomatic relations in 1933. As the price for recognition, the Soviet Union agreed not to

U.S. HISTORY II

103 333

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

spread propaganda in the United States, to protect the rights of Americans residing in the USSR, and to consider a settlement of the war debt question. None of these promises were kept. The Nye Committee and neutrality legislation. Between 1934 and 1937, Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota chaired a Senate committee investigating American involvement in the First World War. The committee concluded that bankers and arms dealers, the so-called “merchants of death,” had made enormous profits during the war. Although unable to show a direct cause-and-effect relationship between either the finance or the munitions industry and the U.S. declaration of war, Congress believed that identifying the way the United States had been drawn into war in 1917 was key to keeping the country out of a future conflict. The neutrality laws passed between 1935 and 1937 reflected this attitude. Enacted in response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in May 1935, the Neutrality Act of 1935 prohibited the sales of arms and munitions to countries that were at war and prohibited Americans from traveling on warring countries’ ships, except at their own risk. The Neutrality Act of 1936 extended the legislation and added an additional ban on making loans or extending credit to belligerents (nations at war). In 1937, Congress reacted to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (which pitted the pro-Fascist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco against those loyal to the Spanish government) by expanding the neutrality laws to cover civil conflicts. Legislation adopted in May completely banned travel by Americans on warring countries’ ships and empowered the president to identify commodities that could be sold to belligerents on a cash-and-carry basis only. With the cash-and-carry policy, goods had to be paid for immediately, and belligerents’ ships (not the U.S. merchant marine) had to pick up and transport the goods. Although support for isolationism as expressed in the neutrality acts was strong, some Americans believed that collective security — determined action by the nations of the world against those who committed aggression — was the best way to prevent war. During a speech in Chicago in October 1937, the president called on countries to “quarantine the aggressor” through economic boycott, a statement

104

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

viewed by many as a call for collective security and a change in American foreign policy. Public response to the speech was mixed. Isolationists criticized Roosevelt’s stance, while others supported his internationalist approach to the problems in Europe and Asia. A sentiment was growing in the United States that blanket neutrality laws that did not distinguish between aggressor states and victims actually encouraged more aggression.

The Outbreak of War in Europe Conditions in Europe rapidly deteriorated between 1936 and 1939. In March 1936, Germany violated the Treaty of Versailles and reoccupied the Rhineland. In November 1937, Italy joined Germany and Japan in the Anti-Comintern Pact, which united the three countries against the Soviet Union. Germany then annexed Austria in March 1938 and, at the Munich Conference in September 1938, Great Britain and France agreed to give Germany the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia (the Sudentenland) in return for “peace in our time.” By March 1939, Hitler annexed the rest of the country, and an independent Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. The August 1939 signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, in which Germany and the Soviet Union agreed not to attack each other, gave Germany a green light to invade Poland on September 1. This aggression in turn caused Great Britain and France, who had formed a military alliance with Poland that guaranteed Poland’s independence, to declare war on Germany on September 3. The Second World War had begun. American response to the war. Although Roosevelt quickly announced that the United States would remain neutral, he did not ask the American people to be neutral in thought, as Wilson had done in 1914. Although most Americans still wanted to stay out of the war, they had little sympathy for Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Americans’ attitudes were reflected in the change of policy that occurred with the Neutrality Act of 1939, which repealed the 1935 arms embargo on belligerents and provided for the export of military equipment on a cash-and-carry basis. U.S. HISTORY II

105 333

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

In the spring of 1940, after a seven-month lull known as the Phony War, the German army began its march again. Denmark and Norway were invaded in April, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg fell in May, and France sued for peace in June. Any pretense of American neutrality ended as Great Britain stood alone. Defense spending and military production accelerated, with the focus on airplanes and motorized equipment. In September, Britain and the United States entered into the “destroyer–naval-base deal” — the exchange of 50 aging American destroyers for leases to British naval and air bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and British Guiana. The first peacetime draft was provided for in the Selective Training and Service Act, which registered men between the ages of 21 and 35 and planned to train more than 1.2 million troops and 800,000 reserves within a year. The election of 1940. Germany’s aggression and British requests for aid convinced Roosevelt to be “drafted” by the Democrats to run for an unprecedented third term. Even anti-New Deal Democrats believed the president was the best person to respond to the volatile international crisis. To give his foreign policy a more bipartisan appeal, Roosevelt appointed Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox to Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy, respectively, in June 1940. Meanwhile, the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, a young, wealthy New York businessman, who had voted for Roosevelt in 1932. Both Roosevelt and Wilkie were internationalists who supported military preparedness and advocated providing as much assistance to Great Britain as possible. They also repeatedly stressed a determination to keep the United States out of the war. Diehard isolationists believed that Roosevelt’s and Wilkie’s internationalist outlook would eventually drag the country into another European conflict. The America First Committee, whose most noted spokesperson was aviator Charles Lindbergh, argued that a Nazi victory would not directly threaten U.S. national security. American public opinion, however, strongly favored backing the

106

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

British “in their finest hour.” Although the popular vote was the closest since 1916, and Willkie ran considerably better than either Hoover or Landon, Roosevelt won an easy electoral victory, 449 votes to Wilkie’s 82. The “arsenal of democracy.” In a fireside chat after the election, Roosevelt called on Americans to become the “arsenal of democracy” — remaining out of the war but giving the British what they needed to fight. To implement this idea, he submitted the lend-lease bill to Congress in January 1941. It gave the president the authority to lend, lease, sell, transfer, or exchange military equipment and other supplies to any country whose defense was deemed vital to American security. Although the isolationists opposed the legislation, the Lend-Lease Act passed the House and the Senate in March, and the initial appropriation of seven billion dollars went primarily to Great Britain. Not long after the unexpected German invasion of Russia in June 1941, lend-lease aid was also extended to the Soviet Union. During the spring and summer of 1941, the United States steadily prepared itself for the possibility of war. Providing direct aid to the British and the Russians meant transporting supplies on merchant ships across the Atlantic Ocean. Because German U-boats (submarines) sank millions of tons of shipping during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1941, the U.S. Navy began escorting ships further from American shores. American troops were sent to both Greenland and Iceland to forestall Germans from occupying and using these locations as bases of operations against the Western Hemisphere. British and American military planners met secretly to map out strategy for the war, agreeing that if both countries were fighting Germany and Japan, the defeat of Germany would take precedence. In August 1941, in a more public show of solidarity, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, a joint statement of their war aims that called for self-determination, free trade and freedom of the seas, equal access to raw materials, and a new system of collective security. By the fall of 1941, the United States and Germany were already fighting an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic. When a German submarine fired upon an American destroyer in September, Roosevelt

U.S. HISTORY II

107 333

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

ordered the Navy to “shoot on sight” any enemy warships in the western Atlantic. After the destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed on October 31 with the loss of 115 lives, Congress approved the president’s request to arm merchant ships and to allow them to sail through combat zones to the ports of belligerents. The sinking of the Reuben James effectively scrapped the Neutrality Acts, and any further incident could have led to a formal declaration of war against Germany.

The Road to Pearl Harbor As the dominant power in Asia, Japan had long resented that the United States, Great Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands controlled parts of the Asian mainland and the Pacific. It wanted to replace these colonial powers with its own Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere and was prepared to use force to achieve this goal. Japan followed up the occupation of Manchuria with the bombing of Shanghai in 1932 and began a full-scale war in China in 1937. Japan’s action in China led to an informal American boycott of Japanese goods as well as a major building program that would prepare the U.S. Navy to fight in both the Atlantic and Pacific. By 1940, Japan was planning to extend its control to the natural-resource-rich French colonies in southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies. Growing tensions with the United States. During the summer of 1940, the collaborationist Vichy government in France gave the Japanese military access to Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). In September, Japan formally joined the Axis by signing the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. The treaty committed the signatories to declare war on any nation that attacked one of them. By the time the mutual assistance pact was signed, the United States had already announced restrictions on exports of aviation fuel and scrap metal to the Japanese. With the exception of coal, Japan was heavily dependent on other countries for raw materials, and the United States hoped to exploit this weakness through economic sanctions. Negotiations during the spring of 1941 to resolve outstanding differences were ineffective, however.

108

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

By July 1941, the Japanese occupied all of French Indochina in a prelude to invading the Dutch East Indies, an important source of oil and rubber. Roosevelt froze all Japanese assets in the United States, bringing an end to trade between the two countries. Although Japanese leaders approved an attack against American forces in the Pacific as early as September, talks continued and Japan presented a formal proposal for a peaceful settlement to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on November 20. In the proposal, Japan agreed to cease its southern expansion if the United States would cut off aid to China, restore trade, and help secure access to supplies that Japanese industry needed from the Dutch East Indies. This was not a serious offer. The party supporting war had already taken over the Japanese government in October when General Hideki Tojo became prime minister. As Tojo expected, the United States rejected the proposal and instead called for Japan to immediately withdraw from Indochina and China. On the same day (November 26), a task force of Japanese carriers left for Pearl Harbor. The attack on Pearl Harbor. American cryptographers had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and knew that an attack was imminent by the end of November. Even though the War and Navy Departments believed that the most likely targets were either the Philippines or southeast Asia, they issued warnings to all U.S. commanders in the Pacific. At Hickham Field in Hawaii, General Walter Short was more concerned about sabotage than an air attack and placed his planes wing tip to wing tip to make it easier for the sentries to patrol. His decision proved disastrous when Japanese planes dropped their bombs on the morning of December 7, 1941. Japanese military planners realized they could not win a protracted war with the United States. They pinned their hopes on quickly knocking out the U.S. Navy with a single blow against Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii, the home base of the Pacific fleet. The air attack was the costliest naval defeat in American history — 19 ships were either sunk or severely damaged (including 3 battleships), about 150 planes were lost, and more than 2,300 soldiers and sailors were killed. But the attack failed in two important respects. The destruction of the fleet was not as complete as the Japanese had planned; the U.S. HISTORY II

109 333

FROM ISOLATION TO WORLD WAR II

three American aircraft carriers stationed at Pearl Harbor were on maneuvers and were not in port on December 7. Moreover, the oil depots were not bombed. Their loss would have forced the surviving ships to return to the mainland for refueling. The Japanese government had intended to present its final message breaking off negotiations with the United States to the State Department before the air attack began, but the message was delivered an hour late. When the Japanese envoys (who were unaware that the war had already started) met with Hull, the secretary scathingly told them what their country had done. In addition to Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces were also attacking the Philippines, Guam, and Midway Island, as well as the British in Hong Kong and Malaysia on December 7, in a coordinated strike across the Pacific. Roosevelt asked Congress for a formal declaration of war against the Empire of Japan on December 8, 1941. Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who had also voted against war in 1917, cast the only dissenting vote. Three days later (December 11), Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The war in Europe and the war in Asia had merged into a global conflict.

110

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE SECOND WORLD WAR, 1941 – 1945

Even though the draft was instituted in 1940, and rearmament began

before Pearl Harbor, the full mobilization of the United States for war required a Herculean effort. Fifteen million American men and women ultimately served in the armed forces during the Second World War, and wartime production reached unprecedented levels. The gross national product rose from $91 billion in 1939 to $166 billion in 1945, and 17 million new jobs were created during the same period. Americans were fighting a two-front war. In Europe, the Allies were initially divided on the best and quickest way to defeat Nazi Germany; the military and diplomatic decisions that were made between 1942 and 1945 planted the seeds of the Cold War. Meanwhile in the Pacific, after some initial setbacks, the United States went on the offensive against Japan. The first major action was the August 1942 invasion of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The difficult island-hopping campaign that ensued during the next three years culminated with the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ushered in the Nuclear Age.

The Home Front The war brought an end to the Great Depression. Unemployment, which stood at more than 17 percent in 1939, dropped to an all-time low of 1.2 percent by 1944. The labor problem in the war years was too few workers, not too few jobs, and in factories across the country, millions of women replaced men who were in the service. Although almost every family had someone in uniform, the war was still remote to many Americans. Support for the war was built through bond drives, which raised revenue to help finance the war, and through movies, which presented the war in a way that promoted patriotism. Shortages in food and raw materials led to “victory gardens” and well-publicized campaigns to collect rubber and scrap metals, adding to the public’s sense of participation in the war effort. But there were some Americans, such as African-Americans, Hispanics, and particularly Japanese-Americans, who did not benefit from the war and whose wartime hardships and sacrifices were oftentimes the results of discrimination. U.S. HISTORY II

111 333

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

The wartime economy. Success on the battlefield hinged on the rapid conversion of American industry from producing consumer goods to making planes, ships, and tanks. This transformation was overseen by a new federal agency, the War Production Board (WPB), which was responsible for the allocation of scarce raw materials and supplies. By early 1942, automobiles, refrigerators, washing machines, and even tennis balls ceased to be manufactured because the steel and rubber were needed for the war. Private residential housing construction also ceased because lumber was critical to the war effort. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation made loans available for businesses to expand plants and finance new equipment. Government contracts also guaranteed war-related industries significant profits and exemption from antitrust action. The demands of war made the manufacturing process highly efficient — a “Liberty” ship (a merchant ship which, according to Roosevelt, would bring liberty to Europe) that took about 180 days to build in 1941 could be finished in less than two weeks in 1943. A shortage of workers meant higher salaries, and as personal incomes rose and spending increased, the government became concerned about inflation. One check on inflation was the Office of Price Administration (OPA), which established rent ceilings and maximum prices on thousands of commodities, including farm products. The OPA was also responsible for implementing the nation’s rationing program, beginning in December 1941 with tires and eventually expanding to include gasoline, shoes, and foodstuffs, such as sugar, coffee, meats, butter, cheese, and fats and oils. Wages were controlled by the National War Labor Board (NWLB), which also set hours, monitored working conditions, and mediated labor disputes. Workers were allowed to retain their union membership under war contracts in return for a “no strike pledge.” That pledge was broken in May 1943, however, when the United Mine Workers struck for higher wages. The federal government ended the strike by taking over the mines. Similarly, the Army ran the railroads throughout the country for a brief period in December 1943 to avert a work stoppage. The government financed the war through a combination of taxation and borrowing. The Revenue Act of 1942 raised tax rates on both individuals and corporations and significantly increased taxes

112

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

on excess profits. With the broadening of the tax base during the war, many Americans paid federal income taxes for the first time, and in 1943, these taxes began to be withheld in the form of payroll deductions. Federal tax policy also helped to curb inflation and brought about a limited redistribution of wealth in the United States. Altogether, taxes paid for approximately 40 percent of the cost of the war, with the remainder coming from the sale of war bonds and direct borrowing from banks. Life for women, African-Americans, and Hispanics. More than 200,000 women served in the military, primarily in the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) and its Navy counterpart, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). The number of women in the workplace grew by more than five million between 1941 and 1943, with many women taking nontraditional jobs in defense plants. “Rosie the Riveter,” the symbol of all women in the factory, was one of the most enduring images of the home front. Typically, female workers were married and older than those in the prewar labor force and were motivated by a combination of patriotism, a desire to get out of the house, and the opportunity to make additional money. Overall, they received lower wages than men, even if they had the same level of experience at the same job, and most left work when the war ended either by choice or because companies were required to hire returning veterans. African-Americans still found it difficult to find work, even with the return of prosperity. Those African-Americans who enlisted or were drafted into the military found themselves in segregated units being trained for menial jobs and commanded by white officers. The situation led A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to organize a march on Washington protesting hiring policies and segregation in the military. The march, which was set for July 1, 1941, was called off when President Roosevelt bowed to the pressure and issued Executive Order 8802 prohibiting discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origin in defense-industry and federal-government jobs; the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) was established to enforce the order. Although the FEPC had only moderate success, nearly two million blacks were U.S. HISTORY II

113 333

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

working in war plants by 1944, and the number of African-Americans in combat grew as well. The most well-known all-black unit was the Army Air Corps 99th Pursuit Squadron, the famous “Tuskegee Airmen.” During the war, Americans were a people on the move. More than 700,000 African-Americans left the South as jobs became available in the cities of the North and West. The influx of newcomers, both black and white, along with a severe housing shortage and limited recreational facilities, heightened racial tensions in several communities. A race riot in Detroit in June 1943 left 25 blacks and 9 whites dead before the Army restored order. Mexican-Americans were also targets of prejudice and violence, despite their heroism on the battlefield, which won a high proportion of Spanish-speaking soldiers and sailors the Congressional Medal of Honor and other citations for bravery during the war. In Los Angeles, many young MexicanAmerican men adopted a fashion fad begun in Harlem known as the zoot suit — a long jacket with padded shoulders and tapered pants, often worn with a wide-brim hat and a big keychain. On the nights of June 3–7, 1943, white sailors roamed Mexican neighborhoods in Los Angeles and indiscriminately beat up “zooters” while the local police and Navy officials took no action. Internment of Japanese Americans. The outbreak of the war only intensified long-held prejudices against Japanese living on the West Coast. Rumors of possible invasion and acts of sabotage created an anti-Japanese hysteria that pressured Roosevelt to take action. Executive Order 9066 (February 19, 1942) effectively authorized the removal of persons of Japanese ancestry from the strategically sensitive areas of California, Oregon, and Washington. The evacuation began in late March. By September, more than 110,000 men, women, and children — two-thirds of whom were born in the United States and were therefore American citizens — had been placed in ten “relocation centers” in Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. The internment was, without a doubt, racially motivated. No credible security threat existed; the FBI, which had no input on the policy, already had the names of enemy aliens to detain when the war began. Japanese-Americans were not evacuated from

114

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Hawaii, and no incidents of sabotage occurred there. Additionally, no comparable action was taken against Italian or German Americans, and, in fact, travel restrictions against Italian-American resident aliens were rescinded in October 1942. Despite internment in what critics called “America’s concentration camps” and the forced liquidation of their homes and businesses at a fraction of their true value, Japanese-Americans enlisted or were drafted into the armed forces and fought in segregated units under white officers, just as African-Americans did. The all-Nisei (Japanese-American citizen) 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which saw action in Italy, was the most decorated unit of the Second World War. When the constitutionality of internment was challenged in Korematsu v. the United States, the Supreme Court upheld the legislation on the basis of national security. The federal government did not admit the injustice of the policy until 1982. In 1988, Congress approved limited compensation ($20,000) to Japanese-American survivors of the camps. Politics in war. Roosevelt stayed out of the 1942 congressional elections. Although the Democrats remained in control of Congress, the Republicans made significant gains in both the House and the Senate. Indeed, a coalition of Republicans and conservative southern Democrats had enough votes to determine the legislative agenda, and, as a result, several major New Deal social programs were terminated, and the Works Projects Administration and the National Youth Alliance were quickly scrapped in 1943. Perhaps the most important domestic initiative passed during the war years was the “GI Bill of Rights” (March 1944), officially known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act. The law provided returning veterans a wide range of benefits, including preference in hiring, subsidized loans to buy businesses or homes, and tuition allowances for education. The fact that men and women in uniform in the United States and war zones could vote in 1944 was certainly a factor in the bill’s enactment. With the war still going on, Roosevelt decided to run for a fourth term in 1944, in spite of his poor health. The Democrats replaced liberal vice president Henry Wallace with the more moderate Senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, who had gained a degree of national U.S. HISTORY II

115 333

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

recognition as chair of the watchdog Senate Select Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, who had been a contender for the nomination in 1940, was the Republican choice. Roosevelt won easily, although his popular vote margin was the lowest of all his presidential elections — 53.5percent. The American people, including the four million soldiers and sailors who cast ballots, were not about to change leaders during the war.

The World at War The United States could not fight all out in two theaters of war, so the decision was made — even before Pearl Harbor — to concentrate on first defeating Germany. Against Japan, the strategy that evolved during 1942 was to use Australia as a base of operations for retaking the Philippines and the south coast of China while defeating the Japanese fleet and capturing the islands in the Central Pacific. In Europe, America’s entry into the war helped to revitalize the Allied forces. The Soviet Union pressed for the United States and Great Britain to open a second front with an Allied invasion of France as soon as possible, hoping a western front would force the Germans to redistribute their troops that were currently fighting against the USSR in the east. However, the British, remembering the heavy casualties in France during the First World War, were extremely reluctant to send their troops into Europe, and an invasion across the English Channel was postponed several times until June 1944. In the interim, British and American forces drove the Germans out of North Africa and invaded Sicily and Italy while Soviet troops pushed westward into Eastern Europe. Naval war in the Pacific. In the days and weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded Malaya and captured Singapore, Guam, and Wake Island. Hong Kong was soon taken, and Japanese troops landed in the Philippines. When American forces on Bataan and Corregidor surrendered in the spring of 1942, General Douglas MacArthur left for Australia. Early in 1942, Japan also occupied the Dutch East

116

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Indies and Burma. Although U.S. bombers from the carrier Hornet did attack Tokyo (April 18, 1942), the famed Doolittle raid’s primary purpose was to boost Allied moral; it did little damage. The key engagements early in the Pacific war took place at sea. In May 1942, carrier-based planes from the Japanese and American fleets met in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Although the American Navy suffered heavy losses, Japan’s attempt to seize Port Moresby in southern New Guinea and cut off Australia failed. Less than a month later (June 3–6, 1942), Japan’s attempt to take Midway Island was also thwarted. The Japanese lost four aircraft carriers and almost 300 planes in the Battle of Midway, which ended the threat to Hawaii. American troops went on the offensive in August 1942 with the invasion of the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomons. The intense fighting and naval engagements on and around Guadalcanal lasted until February 1943 when the Japanese, unable to land additional troops, abandoned the island. Under MacArthur, American and Australian troops gained control of the northern coast of New Guinea by the end of 1943. The campaign in the Central Pacific then moved from the Gilbert to the Marshall to the Mariana Islands, which provided the bases from which the new American plane, the B-29 Superfortress, began the systematic bombing of Japan in June 1944. MacArthur returned to the Philippines in October 1944, and what remained of the Japanese fleet was decisively beaten at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. By the spring of 1945, U.S. troops had captured Manila, the capital of the Philippines. The war in the Pacific, however, was far from over, and the Japanese fought harder as Allied forces moved closer to their home islands. North Africa, Sicily, and the Italian campaign. Almost from the moment that Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Russian leader Joseph Stalin demanded the opening of a western front to relieve pressure on his army, which was fighting the bulk of the enemy forces. Although the United States was willing to consider an offensive in Europe, the British were reluctant. Neither country was prepared to mount a major campaign in France in 1942, and they decided instead to invade North Africa. A combined Anglo-American U.S. HISTORY II

117 333

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

force commanded by General Dwight Eisenhower landed in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942. The inexperienced American troops suffered major setbacks, but by the spring of 1943, all of North Africa was under Allied control. While the fighting was still going on, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Morocco to discuss strategy. At the Casablanca Conference (January 1943), the leaders agreed that the war would continue until the “unconditional surrender” of Germany and Japan. While this decision was intended to calm Stalin’s fears about Great Britain and the United States negotiating a separate treaty with the Axis powers, the cross-Channel invasion was postponed again in favor of an attack against what Churchill called “the soft underbelly of Europe” — Sicily and Italy. The Allied invasion of Sicily (July–August 1943) was a complete success, but securing Italy was another matter. Although Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had been overthrown (July 25), and Italy had surrendered (September 8), German troops still fought back. British and American forces took Naples less than a month after the initial landings at Salerno (September 1943), but difficult fighting during the winter of 1943–44 brought them only within reach of Rome. Americans did not liberate Rome until June 4, 1944, just two days before the Normandy invasion. During the same period, the Russians inflicted a major defeat on the Germans in the Battle of Stalingrad (January 1943) and began to push west along the thousand-mile eastern front. The Teheran Conference and D-Day. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, known as the Big Three, met for the first time at the Teheran Conference in November 1943. They agreed that the cross-Channel invasion would take place in the following spring along with a Russian offensive in the east. This decision meant that while the British and American forces would control Western Europe, Soviet troops would liberate Eastern Europe and would probably remain in control there when the war ended. Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan after Germany was defeated, a pledge the United States believed was critical to victory in the Pacific. The three leaders also discussed postwar Germany and the formation

118

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

of a new international organization to replace the League of Nations but made no final decisions. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the second front was finally opened when American, British, Canadian, and free-French forces stormed the beaches of Normandy in Operation Overlord. Although there was stiff resistance at Omaha Beach, the invasion surprised the Germans, who expected the attack to come at the narrower Channel crossing near Pas de Calais. The Allied troops broke out of the Normandy beachhead in July and drove toward Paris, which was liberated in August. At the same time, the Allies launched another invasion of southern France. By September, the German army was driven out of France and Belgium, but the Allied advance stalled late in the year because of a lack of supplies. On the eastern front, Soviet forces were poised to move into Germany in late 1944.

Toward Final Victory During the spring and summer of 1945, the Big Three met for a second time, at the Yalta Conference, to decide the shape of the postwar world. Two months after the Yalta conference, Roosevelt was dead (April 12, 1945) and it was left to Harry Truman to bring the United States to victory in Europe and against Japan. While Nazi Germany collapsed in May, fighting in the Pacific was some of the heaviest in the war and American casualties were mounting. The prospect of even higher causalities prompted the United States to use a new weapon — the atomic bomb — to bring the war against Japan to an end. The Yalta Conference. At Yalta, a resort on Russia’s Crimean coast, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed to divide Germany into four zones of occupation, with France, Great Britain, and the United States in the west and the Soviet Union in the east. Although entirely within the Russian zone, Berlin would be administered by all four powers. The same arrangement would apply to Austria and Vienna. Stalin insisted that Russia keep the Polish territory it had occupied between 1939 and 1941 and suggested compensating Poland for its losses with German lands in the west. While he agreed in principal to holding U.S. HISTORY II

119 333

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

free elections in Eastern Europe, Stalin supported the pro-Communist government that was running Poland at the time and also demanded “friendly states” on the borders of the USSR. Roosevelt appreciated that it would be difficult to ensure a noncommunist Eastern Europe with Soviet troops on the ground but was willing to make concessions to ensure that the Russians would join in the war against Japan. Stalin confirmed at Yalta that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan two or three months after Germany’s surrender. The defeat of Germany. The Germans launched a major offensive in the weeks before Christmas 1944 in the Ardennes Forest in France. This offensive, the Battle of the Bulge (December 16 – January 16), proved only a short-lived success, however, and British and American forces soon pushed into Germany from the west while the Russians advanced from the east. By the end of April, American and Soviet troops met at the Elbe River, and the battle for Berlin was in its final days. Adolph Hitler committed suicide in his bunker under the city on April 30, and the German military unconditionally surrendered to the Allies on May 8, 1945. As the war in Europe ended, delegates from 50 countries met in San Francisco to create the United Nations. The structure of the new international organization, whose charter was signed in June 1945, included the General Assembly, in which each member state had a vote. At Stalin’s insistence, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed at Yalta to give the Soviet Union three seats — one for the USSR and one each for the republics of Belorussia and the Ukraine. The General Assembly was little more than a forum for discussing world issues, however, and the additional votes had little impact. Responsibility for maintaining peace fell to the Security Council, in which the five permanent members — China, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States — have veto power. In addition, the charter provided for a number of agencies under the U.N. umbrella, such as the International Court of Justice and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

120

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Decision to drop the bomb. American troops in the Pacific faced a difficult fight as the war moved closer to the Japanese islands. The battle of Iwo Jima (February – March 1945) cost U.S. Marines more 20,000 casualties. During the three-month battle for Okinawa (April – June 1945), only 350 miles from Japan, 12,000 Americans were killed and 36 wounded. Attacks by Japanese suicide planes, the kamikaze (or “divine wind”) caused the heaviest damage ever to the U.S. Navy. The invasion of Japan itself, which was being planned for late 1945, would mean even greater losses, perhaps as many as a million men, according to some estimates. These circumstances were the context in which the decision to use the atomic bomb was made. The result of a scientific, technical, and industrial program known as the Manhattan Project, the first atomic bomb was successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. President Truman received word about the test as he met with Stalin and British Prime Minister Clement Atlee (who had replaced Churchill due to the Labour Party victory in the 1945 parliamentary elections) at the Potsdam Conference, held in a suburb of Berlin. The United States and its Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration (July 26) that promised “prompt and utter destruction” if Japan did not unconditionally surrender — an ultimatum Japan rejected on July 29. An atomic bomb was used against Hiroshima on August 6, completely destroying four square miles of the city and killing more than 70,000 people upon impact. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, causing 40,000 deaths. Emperor Hirohito, long a figurehead in Japanese politics, then insisted on surrender. The Japanese agreed to Allied terms on August 14, thus ending World War II. The decision to use an atomic bomb has long been and continues to be controversial. Historians argue that by the summer of 1945, Japan was on the verge of collapse, and the continued air attacks would have led to surrender. Some claim that the real reason the bombs were used was as a show of American strength for the Soviet Union, a theory that would make Hiroshima the first salvo of the Cold War, the icy U.S. – Soviet rivalry that followed World War II. Others maintain that racism was a factor, insisting that the bomb would never have been used against Germany, for example. Scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project wanted, in fact, to demonstrate the destruc-

U.S. HISTORY II

121 333

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

tive force of the bomb for the Japanese military in one more test, hoping that witnessing the power the United States could unleash would cause Japan to surrender. In the end, however, the fact remains that Japan refused to surrender. Faced with the possible loss of tens of thousands of American troops in an invasion, Truman and his military advisors were determined to use every weapon available. Truman noted that the bomb ended the war quickly and that in so doing, it saved not only American lives but Japanese as well.

122

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR, 1945 – 1953

With a monopoly on the atomic bomb and an economy fortified by

World War II, the United States in 1945 was the strongest nation in the world. The country demobilized quickly, and Americans were determined to enjoy the fruits of peace after years of depression and wartime sacrifice. The end of the war did not initiate retreat from international responsibilities, as it had after World War I, however. As tensions with the Soviet Union intensified into a cycle of political and economic antagonism known as the Cold War, the United States combated the threat posed by the USSR by forming new alliances and providing economic and military assistance to weakened democracies. The onset of the Cold War also affected domestic politics. Fear of internal subversion allowed anticommunist demagogues, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, to wield considerable political power and led to congressional investigations of Communist infiltration of the government, the film industry and even the U.S. Army.

Postwar America After V-J Day, when Japan surrendered, men and women in uniform and civilians alike expected the government to “bring the troops home by Christmas.” Indeed, demobilization of the armed forces and reconversion of the economy occurred faster than anyone expected. The size of the armed forces was reduced from 12 million at the end of the war to 3 million by mid 1946 and to 1.5 million in 1947. Across the country, defense plants shifted back to producing civilian goods, so quickly, in fact, that the first new automobiles were ready to roll off the assembly line for the 1946 model year. By and large, the economy was ready to absorb the returning veterans. About two million took advantage of the GI Bill, returning to school rather than entering the labor market immediately. Those veterans who did need a job usually found one since pent-up demand for consumer goods drove the creation of jobs to produce those goods. Additionally, millions of women who had entered the workforce during the war were either laid off or left their jobs when the war ended. However, even though the postwar depression that people feared would occur never materialized, the country did face economic and social challenges.

U.S. HISTORY II

123 333

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR

Inflation and labor unrest. The country’s main economic concern in the immediate postwar years was inflation. The president worried that a sudden end to price and wage controls would result in a dramatic rise in prices. Under pressure from both workers and business leaders to end wartime restrictions as quickly as possible, Truman reluctantly ended most price controls in the summer of 1946 and all wage controls in November 1946. The result was a nearly 25 percent jump in the overall consumer price index and an even greater increase in food prices. This decrease in purchasing power did not sit well with either consumers or organized labor. Not only were people able to buy less because of inflation, but they were earning less due to the end of the double shifts and overtime hours that were common during the war. The response was a wave of strikes in 1946 for higher wages involving more than 4.5 million workers. Truman reacted strongly to the labor unrest. When the United Mine Workers struck, he ordered the federal government to seize the coal mines. When a national railroad strike loomed, he threatened to do the same thing and even asked for the authority to draft striking railroad workers into the Army. These actions cost the Democrats labor support, allowing the Republicans to use the public’s dissatisfaction with Truman’s handling of the economy to their advantage and win control of both the House and the Senate in 1946. The new Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman’s veto in 1947. Widely seen as an antilabor measure, the legislation gave the president the authority to order striking workers back to work for an 80day “cooling-off” period. The act also prohibited strikes by federal employees, banned the closed shop (workplaces that did not allow the hiring of nonunion workers), and permitted the union shop (workplaces that hired both union and nonunion workers, but required nonunion workers to join the union after being hired), except in states that had right-to-work laws. (Right-to-work laws state that union membership or nonmembership is irrelevant in getting or keeping a job.) Many states, particularly in the South, adopted such laws in the wake of the Taft-Hartley Act.

124

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR

The baby boom and suburbia. Making up for lost time, millions of returning veterans soon married and started families. Indeed, twice as many Americans were married in 1946 as in 1932. The birth rate soared between 1946 and 1964, reaching its highest level in 1952. During this baby boom, about 76 million children were born, which contributed to the expanding postwar economy and also created an enormous demand for housing. Because of the housing shortage, young families often moved in with their parents, couples shared living space until an apartment became available, and wartime Quonset huts on college campuses became married-student housing for those on the GI Bill. When these families did find housing, it was usually a home that they owned in the suburbs rather than an apartment they rented in the city. William Levitt first introduced small, massproduced, and relatively inexpensive suburban homes on Long Island in 1947. His “Levittowns” soon sprang up in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the pattern of suburban development was repeated in Chicago and Los Angeles. The government supported suburban growth by making money available for homes through the GI Bill and authorizing the Federal Housing Administration to insure loans for up to 95 percent of the value of a home. Because the overwhelming majority of those who moved to the suburbs were white, the ethnic composition of urban America began to change. Many of the new housing developments had restrictive covenants that prohibited sales to African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, and other minorities, so a home in the suburbs was not an option for them. Consequently, as whites left the cities, blacks and other minorities made up a larger and larger percentage of inner-city residents in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia. In Los Angeles, the Mexican-American population also increased, especially as whites spread out in suburban neighborhoods across Los Angeles and Orange Counties. The rise of suburbia was also part of a larger migratory pattern. Blacks continued to desert the South for the Midwest and Northeast, while whites in those regions began to settle in the sunbelt states of Florida and California.

U.S. HISTORY II

125 333

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR

The election of 1948 and the Fair Deal. Few thought Truman could win an election in his own right in 1948. Inflation was still a problem, the Republican Congress had blocked his legislative program, and the Democratic Party was badly split. The left wing of the party backed Henry Wallace, who had served under Roosevelt as Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, and Vice President. Wallace ran as the Progressive Party candidate on a platform that supported expanding the New Deal and improving relations with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, several Southern delegations bolted the Democratic convention because of the inclusion of a civil rights plank in the platform. Called the Dixiecrats, they formed the States Rights Party and nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president. Campaigning against the “do-nothing” Eightieth Congress, Truman managed to keep most of the Roosevelt coalition together and upset Republican candidate Thomas Dewey to win the election. Despite the loss of four states to Thurmond, Truman won most of the electoral votes in the South and received strong support from African-Americans, Catholics, Jews, farmers, and organized labor. Truman announced an ambitious domestic agenda, known as the Fair Deal, at his inauguration in January 1949. Some Fair Deal programs that were implemented included an increase in the minimum wage, an expansion of Social Security, funding for low-income public housing, and farm price supports. However, even with Democrats back in control of both houses, the president could not get Congress to back other key elements of the Fair Deal. Conservatives in both parties were able to muster enough votes to block his really significant policy initiatives, such as civil rights legislation that would expand on Truman’s executive orders prohibiting discrimination in federal government hiring and ending segregation in the armed services; national health insurance (which the American Medical Association labeled “socialized medicine”); federal aid to education; and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. The president’s foreign policy had broader bipartisan support.

126

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR

The Origins of the Cold War The Cold War had its roots in World War II, when the repeated delays in opening a second front in Europe made the Russians suspicious of the Western Allies’ motives. Those concerns were heightened when the United States discontinued lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union soon after the war ended. Stalin’s commitment at Yalta to allow free elections in Eastern Europe was quickly broken. To ensure “friendly states” on its western borders, the USSR supported and helped install Communist-dominated governments in Poland, Bulgaria, and Rumania (Romania) in the spring and summer of 1945. Within a year, as Winston Churchill told an American audience, an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, separating the “free” democratic nations of the West from the “captive” Communist nations of the East. The containment policy and the Truman Doctrine. George Kennan, a State Department official stationed in Moscow, developed a strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union in the postwar years. In a lengthy telegram to Washington in February 1946, he outlined what became known as the containment policy. Kennan argued that while the USSR was determined to extend its influence around the world, its leaders were cautious and did not take risks. Faced with determined opposition (from the United States, for example), Kennan postulated that the Soviet Union would back down. The policy was concerned with future Soviet expansion and accepted, in effect, Russian control over Eastern Europe. An early test of containment came in Greece and Turkey. In 1946, a civil war broke out in Greece, pitting Communist groups against the British-supported government. At the same time, the Soviet Union was pressuring Turkey to allow it to build naval bases on its northwestern coast, thereby giving the Soviet Black Sea Fleet easy access to the Mediterranean. When Great Britain announced it no longer had the resources to help the two countries meet the threats to their independence, the United States stepped in. Truman asked Congress for $400 million in military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey in March 1947, citing the United States’ obligation to back free peoples

U.S. HISTORY II

127 333

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR

resisting control by an armed minority or outside pressures. This policy, known as the Truman Doctrine, appeared to work: the Communists were defeated in the Greek Civil War in October 1949, and the foreign aid helped strengthen the Turkish economy. The Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift. Two years after the end of World War II, much of Europe still lay in shambles; European countries struggled to rebuild their devastated infrastructures, and the continuing hardships people faced contributed to the growing electoral strength of the Communist parties in France and Italy. The United States recognized that bolstering the economies of the European states would not only undercut Communist influence but would also provide markets for American goods. Consequently, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced a massive commitment of financial assistance to Europe in June 1947. Between 1948 and 1951, more than $13 billion was funneled to 16 countries through the Marshall Plan, contributing significantly to the reconstruction of Western Europe. The United States was also ready to provide help to the USSR and Eastern Europe, but the Soviet Union flatly refused to participate in the aid program. The first direct confrontation between Russia and the West came over Germany. In 1948, Britain, France, and the United States began to merge their zones of occupation into a unified state. The Soviet Union responded by blocking all access to Berlin in June 1948. With the blockade, Stalin hoped to force the Western powers to either relinquish Berlin to the Communists or end the plan to unify West Germany. Truman avoided a direct confrontation with the USSR by ordering a massive airlift of supplies to the two million residents of West Berlin. For almost a year, British and American planes landed around the clock at Tempelhof Airport and unloaded food, clothing, and coal. The president also sent B-29 bombers, the only planes that could carry atomic bombs, to bases in Britain as a clear warning to the Soviet Union about how far the United States was prepared to go. Seeing that the Berlin airlift could continue indefinitely, the Russians ended the blockade in May 1949.

128

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR

Another factor in ending the Berlin crisis was the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in April 1949. Under its terms, the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland agreed that an attack against one country would be treated as an attack against all. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created in the following year to integrate the military forces of the member states in Europe. NATO was expanded in 1952 to include Greece and Turkey, and the admission of West Germany in 1955 caused the Soviet Union to establish a counterpart to the alliance through the Warsaw Pact. The Cold War in Asia. In October 1949, the Communist party, led by Mao Zedong, came to power in China. The Communists had been fighting the Chinese Nationalists since the 1920s, and although the civil war ended in 1937 because of the war against Japan, the fighting between Communists and Nationalists resumed in 1946. Corruption within the administration of nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) cost the Nationalists considerable popular support that even two billion dollars in American aid could not shore up. When the Nationalist government collapsed in 1949 and the Communists established the People’s Republic of China, Jiang and the Nationalists retreated to the island of Formosa (Taiwan). The United States continued to recognize Jiang’s party as the legitimate Chinese government until 1972. While the Communist victory sparked a debate over “who lost China,” most historians agree that there was little the United States could have done, short of providing direct military assistance to the Nationalists. Less than a year after the Communist takeover in China, the United States did commit American troops to fight Communism in Asia when North Korea invaded South Korea. In 1948, the Korean Peninsula, which had been occupied by the Russians and the Americans since the end of World War II, was split into two separate countries — the Communist-run People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, north of the 38th parallel, and the U.S.-supported Republic of Korea in the south. In June 1950, the North Korean army invaded South Korea. Truman brought the matter to the United

U.S. HISTORY II

129 333

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR

Nations Security Council, which called on member states to provide South Korea with all possible aid to resist the aggression. The Security Council was able to take action because the Russian representative was not present to exercise the Soviet Union’s veto. (The Russians were boycotting the Council because of the United Nations’ refusal to admit the People’s Republic of China.) Although 16 countries sent troops, the Korean War was largely a United States operation, loosely under U.N. auspices. The U.N. troops were under American command — first by General Douglas MacArthur and then by General Matthew Ridgeway — and about 90 percent of those troops were American. Altogether, more than 1.5 million American men and women served in Korea. The North Koreans were successful in the early months of the war. In the fall of 1950, however, MacArthur’s forces landed at Inchon behind the North Korean lines, captured Seoul, and moved north of the 38th parallel. When they advanced toward the Chinese border at the Yalu River, Chinese “volunteers” intervened (October – November 1950) and forced a general retreat to the south. By March 1951, the fighting had stabilized, and Truman was ready to negotiate a settlement to restore the pre-invasion boundary. Wanting total victory, MacArthur opposed the settlement. He undermined the president and threatened to attack China directly, causing Truman to relieve him of his command in April 1951. Talks between North and South Korea finally began in July but dragged on for two full years. By the time a truce was signed in July 1953, more than 30,000 Americans had been killed and the truce line was pushed slightly north of the 38th parallel.

The Cold War at Home The Cold War shaped more than American foreign policy. As the perception of the Soviet Union changed from wartime ally to dangerous adversary, concern grew regarding Communist subversion within the United States. The existence of the Soviet-controlled Eastern bloc in Europe, the “loss” of China to communism, and the fact that the USSR had exploded an atomic bomb (1949), long before anyone

130

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR

expected it to, fueled suspicions that some Americans were actively working to aid the Communist cause and hoping to overthrow the U.S. government. The period of anticommunist hysteria lasted from the late 1940s well into the 1950s. Loyalty checks and internal security. Under Executive Order 9835 (March 1947), President Truman created the Federal Employee Loyalty Program. More than three million government workers were investigated and cleared, 2,000 resigned, and just over 200 were dismissed from their jobs. The small number of dismissals is surprising considering that an employee could be suspected of subversion merely by being perceived as “potentially disloyal” or considered a security risk. People viewed as security risks included homosexuals, alcoholics, and those who were in debt and needed money. States and municipalities followed the administration’s example and required many of their workers to take a loyalty oath as a condition of employment. The oaths typically stated that a person was not and had never been a member of the Communist party or any organization that advocated the overthrow of the government of the United States. Teachers were often targets of suspicion. When the Supreme Court ruled in Tolman v. Underhill (1953) that professors at the University of California could not be singled out, the state required all of its employees to take loyalty oaths. In 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security Act (known as the McCarran Act after its author, Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada) that required Communists and Communist-front organizations to register with the attorney general. The act also authorized internment of individuals during periods of national emergency, and prohibited the employment of Communists in defense industries. The law went into effect over Truman’s veto at a time when the threat of subversion seemed very real. In March 1950, for example, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born scientist, was convicted in Great Britain of providing information to the Soviet Union about the atomic bomb. Evidence that came out at his trial led to the 1951 U.S. trial and conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges and their execution two years later.

U.S. HISTORY II

131 333

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR

The House Committee on Un-American Activities. Created in 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was charged with examining internal subversion in the United States. In 1947, the committee turned its attention to the extent of communist influence in the motion picture industry. Although many witnesses called before HUAC identified individuals who had been Communists or supporters of left-wing causes, a group of writers known as the Hollywood Ten refused to testify. They were found guilty of contempt of Congress and were sentenced to terms in federal prison. Out of the hearings came the infamous blacklist — anyone accused or even suspected of being a Communist or a Communist sympathizer was barred from working in Hollywood. A more prominent matter before HUAC was the investigation of Alger Hiss, who had worked in the Department of Agriculture during the New Deal and had served as an assistant secretary of state. Whittaker Chambers, who left the Communist party in 1938 and became an editor at Time magazine, claimed in 1948 that Hiss had been a Communist in the 1930s. When Hiss sued him for libel, Chambers produced microfilm of classified documents that Hiss had allegedly given to him to turn over to the Soviet Union. Hiss was charged with lying to the committee about his relationship with Chambers and was eventually convicted of perjury, even though the evidence against him was shaky. Besides providing proof of subversion to those who believed that communist infiltration of the government was widespread, the Hiss case made the career of Richard Nixon. The young congressman from California was a high-profile member of the committee during the investigation, which helped him get elected to the Senate in 1950 and to win the Republican vice-presidential nomination in 1952. Senator Joseph McCarthy. The politician whose name became synonymous with the anticommunist crusade of the early 1950s was Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. He seized upon communists in the government as the issue that would get him elected to a second term in 1952. In a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, McCarthy claimed to have the names of 205 Communists working in the State Department. Despite the fact that

132

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR

he often changed the number of communists, never identified a single communist in the State Department, and had no evidence to back up the charges, his popularity grew. The start of the Korean War and the arrest and trial of the Rosenbergs played into McCarthy’s hands. The fact that all of his targets were Democrats made him acceptable to the Republican leadership. McCarthy became more powerful when the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1952. As chair of the Government Operations Committee, he used its Permanent Investigations Subcommittee as a base for his ongoing search for subversives. McCarthy, who had questioned the loyalty of Secretary of Defense George Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, overstepped his bounds when he took on the U.S. Army after his former assistant, G. David Shine was drafted. The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised nationally between April and June 1954 and did more than anything else to erode his public support. The absurdity of the charge that the Army was “soft” on communism aside, McCarthy came across as a bully and a demagogue. He was censured by the Senate in December 1954 and died a broken man three years later. The election of 1952. As the Korean War dragged on, Truman’s popularity fell. After he lost the New Hampshire presidential primary to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, he decided not to run for a second term in 1952. The president’s decision opened up the race for the Democratic nomination, which was won on the third ballot by Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. To prevent a repeat of 1948 when several southern states had voted for the Dixiecrat party, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama was chosen as Stevenson’s running mate. At the Republican convention, two potential candidates emerged — Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, who represented the party’s conservative wing, and General Dwight Eisenhower, who had just relinquished his post as the Supreme Commander of NATO and was backed by the Republican moderates. Eisenhower was nominated on the first ballot with the delegates convinced that he was the only candidate who could guarantee victory in November. The Republicans balanced the ticket and placated the anticommunist party members by selecting Richard Nixon as Eisenhower’s running mate. U.S. HISTORY II

133 333

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR

During the campaign, the Republicans focused on three issues — Korea, corruption, and communism. With a stalemate at the Korean truce talks and American casualties continuing to mount, Eisenhower’s pledge to go to Korea if elected was a powerful slogan; the public believed that he could bring the war to an end. Meanwhile, public support for the Democrats suffered as the Truman administration was plagued by charges of cronyism and political favoritism. In response to charges of inefficiency and corruption, Truman had proposed a major reorganization of the Bureau of Internal Revenue in early 1952 that replaced political appointees with district commissioners drawn from the ranks of the civil service. Despite the loyalty program, the Hiss and Rosenberg cases made the Democrats susceptible to charges that they were not vigilant enough against the Communist threat. The Republicans were not free from scandal, however. In the midst of the campaign, newspaper reports claimed that businessmen in California had provided Nixon with a slush fund for his personal expenses. Nixon went on television to defend himself against the charges and told the national audience that one of the gifts he received and would not return was a cocker spaniel puppy that his daughter had named Checkers. The “Checkers” speech ensured that Nixon would stay on the ticket. The 1952 election was a smashing Republican success. Eisenhower easily defeated Stevenson by more than 6 million votes and won 442 electoral votes, including several key southern states — Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. In addition to breaking into the Solid South, Eisenhower did well among white ethnics and Catholics in cities that had traditionally been part of the New Deal coalition.

134

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

The 1950s are often seen as a counterpoint to the decades that fol-

lowed it — a period of conformity, prosperity, and peace (after the Korean War ended), as compared to the rebellion, unrest, and war that began in the 1960s. However, the decade was not without its problems. Many domestic and foreign policy issues surfaced in the ’50s that the United States would grapple with in the years ahead. Throughout the country, while many Americans enjoyed the fruits of an “affluent society,” poverty was more widespread than most believed, and the struggle for civil rights by minorities, particularly African-Americans, became a national concern. Internationally, the Cold War continued. Although Eisenhower initiated the first steps toward improving relations with the Soviet Union, the United States became involved in Southeast Asia and offered pro-Western governments in the Middle East and Latin America financial and military support.

The Affluent Society For middle-class Americans, the 1950s were a time of prosperity. Even with three recessions during the eight years of the Eisenhower administration, the country’s per capita income rose and inflation remained low. Americans had more discretionary income, and they spent it on cars, homes, television sets, and an array of other household appliances. By 1960, more than 60 percent of Americans owned their own homes, and three quarters of the households in the country had television sets. Much of this consumer spending was done on credit, with bank loans, installment buying, and credit cards (which were introduced in 1950). The physical well being of Americans was as good as their economic health. Advances in medicine included new antibiotics and, perhaps most important, a successful vaccine against poliomyelitis, a disease that had crippled millions of children. Dr. Jonas Salk announced his discovery of a polio vaccine in 1953, and four years later, Dr. Albert Sabin developed a vaccine that could be taken orally. With a nationwide inoculation program, polio disappeared from the United States.

U.S. HISTORY II

135 333

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

Suburban America. The influx of people to the suburbs that began after World War II continued unabated throughout the 1950s. Meanwhile, population growth slowed in cities and decreased in rural areas, and by 1960, nearly 40 percent of all Americans lived in suburbia. The growth of these “bedroom” communities, where residents lived on the outskirts of town and commuted to work, meant that the automobile became more important than ever before. As the number of cars increased, so did the demand for gasoline and better roads. Although people were willing to drive or take public transportation to work, they were not willing to go to the city to shop. Consequently, shopping centers became a distinctive feature on the suburban landscape during the decade, and cities’ central business districts showed signs of decline. Labor in the Fifties. The composition of the labor force changed dramatically in the 1950s. Factory employment declined because of improvements in productivity and technology, while the number of white-collar jobs in the clerical, sales, and service sectors grew. Although union membership began to drop late in the decade, organized labor made significant gains. The internal strife within the union movement ended in 1955 with the merging of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations into the AFL-CIO. Workers in many industries won settlements that linked wages to cost-of-living increases. The number of women working outside the home increased significantly in the ’50s. By 1960, nearly 40 percent of American women had joined the workforce, and married women with school-age children represented a significant proportion of that number. Women continued to earn considerably less than men for doing the same job, regardless of whether they worked in a factory or office, or in a profession such as teaching or nursing. The fact that so many women worked outside the home ran counter to the myth in popular culture that emphasized the importance of traditional gender roles. Advertising, mass circulation magazines such as Life, and television’s situation comedies sent the message that women should focus on creating a beautiful home and raising a family.

136

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

Modern Republicanism. Although some Republicans hoped that Eisenhower would dismantle all of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the president realized that doing so was neither possible nor desirable. In fact, Eisenhower supported some components of the New Deal, such as Social Security, whose coverage was expanded to the self-employed, farm workers, and military personnel; and the federal minimum wage, which rose to $1 an hour during his administration. However, the president’s domestic agenda did reverse some New Deal trends. For example, Eisenhower focused on reducing the federal budget, which included cutting farm subsidies, abolishing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, keeping inflation in check, and promoting private rather than public development of the nation’s energy resources. Despite Eisenhower’s concern for fiscal responsibility, he was prepared to increase spending to get the country out of the 1953, 1957, and 1958 recessions. Modern Republicanism represented a pragmatic approach to domestic policy. Committed to limiting the role of the government in the economy, the administration was ready to act when circumstances demanded it. Eisenhower’s modern Republicanism embraced two major public works projects — the St. Lawrence Seaway and the interstate highway system. The Seaway, a joint American-Canadian effort completed in 1959, gave ocean-going ships access to the Great Lakes. The Interstate Highway Act, passed in 1956, authorized the federal government to finance 90 percent of the cost of building the interstate system through a tax on automobiles, parts, and gasoline that went into the Highway Trust Fund. The 30-year construction program skewed the nation’s transportation policy in favor of cars and trucks and resulted in reduced spending on urban mass transit and railroads. The Other America. Although the economy grew in the 1950s, not everyone experienced prosperity. Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962) documented poverty in the United States and revealed that, by 1960, 35 million Americans lived below the poverty line (defined as a family of four with an annual income of less than $3,000). Despite the expansion of Social Security, older Americans often lived in substandard housing with inadequate food and medical care. Poverty crossed color lines, affecting whites in rural Appalachia, U.S. HISTORY II

137 333

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

Mexican-American migrant farm workers in the Southwest and California, Native Americans on reservations, and inner-city minorities, including blacks and Puerto Ricans. Because poverty was not recognized as a national problem until the 1960s, federal policy in the 1950s often contributed to the situation rather than to help resolve it. During and after World War II, for example, the bracero program brought Mexican workers to the United States to work on American farms. Although the workers were expected to return to Mexico at the end of the harvest or the labor contract, many opted to stay and became illegal aliens. Millions were deported in 1953–55 when a recession made having jobs available for American citizens essential. One of the most notable “roundups” of illegal immigrants occurred in Texas during the summer and fall of 1954 when 80,000 Mexicans were deported in Operation Wetback. When prosperity returned in the mid-1950s, so did invitations to Mexican guest workers. Popular culture. In 1954, Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and the phrase “In God We Trust” was included on all U.S. currency in the following year. While these changes were subtle reminders of the ideological struggle of the Cold War (Americans believed in God; Communists were atheists), they also reflected the mood of the country. The United States experienced a religious revival in the 1950s, with more than 60 percent of Americans reporting they belonged to a church or synagogue, as opposed to less than 50 percent before World War II. Evangelist Billy Graham, Protestant minister Norman Vincent Peale, and Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen emerged as the spokespersons for the revival, and they used the newest mass medium — television — to carry their message to millions of Americans. Sheen had a weekly television program called Life is Worth Living, and Graham’s crusades were later televised as well. Television replaced the radio as the dominant form of home entertainment. The number of television sets in American homes grew from a few thousand at the end of World War II to nearly 46 million by 1960. TV Guide became the nation’s leading magazine, and food companies introduced frozen meals called TV dinners. Although

138

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

the most popular television programs were situation comedies (I Love Lucy), game shows (The $64,000 Question), and adult westerns (Gunsmoke), television in the 1950s was not the “vast wasteland” that critics often claimed. Television proved that it could be a potent force in shaping politics and public opinion. For example, Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, which was carried on TV, kept him in the running for vice president in 1952, and the televised Army-McCarthy hearings proved that the senator from Wisconsin was a dangerous demagogue, a point that was emphasized on Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now exposé in 1954. Murrow’s series, which ran from 1951 to 1958, also brought the plight of migrant farm workers to the attention of Americans. Drawing the largest audience of teenage television viewers was Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, a program showcasing the music of rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll grew out of the African-American rhythm and blues (R & B) tradition when, around 1954, white singers began imitating R & B groups or melding R & B and country styles. Despite charges that it was “race music” and contributed to juvenile delinquency, performers such as Bill Haley and the Comets (“Rock Around the Clock”) and, most notably, Elvis Presley made rock ’n’ roll a youth music phenomenon. Rock ’n’ roll also helped to bring black artists such as Chuck Berry into the entertainment mainstream.

American Foreign Policy Although during his 1952 campaign Eisenhower attacked the Truman administration’s containment policy as not forceful enough, Eisenhower made no attempt to “roll back” communism during his eight years in office. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles frequently spoke of helping to liberate the “captive peoples” of Eastern Europe, but when opportunities to do so arose during East Germany’s labor unrest in 1953 and Hungary’s revolt against the Soviet Union in 1956, the United States offered no assistance. Eisenhower favored a less confrontational approach to the USSR and sought a variety of means to check Russian influence around the world.

U.S. HISTORY II

139 333

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

Brinkmanship, massive retaliation, and the domino theory. Possession of nuclear weapons gave the United States leverage in foreign relations, allowing it to use the strategy of brinkmanship and the threat of massive retaliation to deter communist expansion. Brinkmanship indicated a willingness to go to the very brink of war, including the determination to use nuclear weapons, to force a belligerent country to back down. Massive retaliation referred to American readiness to use its large nuclear arsenal to stop aggression. Both concepts were tied to the economics of the Cold War: brinkmanship and massive retaliation relied on the nuclear deterrent to intimidate the Soviet Union and China, and it was considered much cheaper than building up conventional armed forces to do the same job. The nuclear option provided the United States with “more bang for the buck.” In 1953, Eisenhower’s threat of a nuclear strike broke the deadlock in the Korean truce talks. The United States was also prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend the islands of Quemoy and Matsu claimed by Taiwan (Nationalist China) in 1955 against aggression from Communist China. Foreign policy was also shaped by the domino theory, which claimed that if one country in a region fell to communism, the other countries in that area would quickly follow. Eisenhower first outlined the theory in response to events in Indochina. France’s long struggle to hold on to its colony in Asia ended in 1954 with the signing of the Geneva Accords. Under the terms of the Accords, Laos and Cambodia became neutral states, while Vietnam was divided along the 17th parallel, with the Vietminh under nationalist Communist leader Ho Chi Minh in control of the North and France and the State of Vietnam (which became the Republic of Vietnam in 1955) governing the South. Elections were to be held in 1956 to unify the country. Worried that the Communists would gain control of the entire country in the elections, neither the United States nor the South Vietnamese supported the Accords. American policy at the juncture was twofold: The United States offered support, including military aid, to Ngo Dinh Diem’s South Vietnam government, (even as communist guerrilla activity increased in the late 1950s), and it created a new alliance partnership — the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) — to prevent the spread of communism in southeast Asia.

140

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

Despite its name, SEATO was not a defensive pact and did not have an “attack against one is an attack against all” provision, as NATO did. SEATO’s members — the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, France, and the United States — agreed to do little more than consult. The Middle East and the Western Hemisphere. Eisenhower’s policy in the Middle East was to restrict Russian influence and to keep the oil supply open to the United States and other Western countries. Both of these ends were served in 1953 when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engineered a coup in Iran that returned the pro-Western shah to power. In the mid-’50s, tensions arose in Egypt when Gamal Abdel Nasser, an Egyptian nationalist who came to power in 1952, decided to build a dam on the Nile at Aswan and to use the hydroelectric power to modernize his country. The United States and Great Britain had planned to provide financial assistance for the project, but they backed out of the loan in 1956 when Egypt established stronger ties with the USSR and Eastern Europe. Nasser responded to the withdrawal of funds by announcing plans to nationalize the Suez Canal and use the revenues from the tolls for the Aswan High Dam project. This announcement prompted Israel to invade the Sinai Peninsula in late October, followed by a joint British-French attack on Egypt in early November. Opposing the military action, the United States and the Soviet Union worked through the United Nations to bring about the withdrawal of the foreign troops. Even though American support was critical in ending the Suez Crisis, the position of the Soviet Union in the Middle East was stronger in its wake. The president’s reaction to the heightened Soviet influence was to state that the United States would use military force if necessary to resist communist aggression in the region. Under this policy, known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, more than 14,000 American soldiers were sent to Lebanon in 1958 at the request of the pro-Western government. Although the era of direct American intervention in the affairs of countries in the Western Hemisphere ended with Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in the 1930s, the United States continued to influence Latin American politics, using covert operations to bring about political change. In 1954, for example, the CIA supported the U.S. HISTORY II

141 333

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

overthrow of the government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala, as it had done in Iran the year before. Coming to power through a democratic election, Arbenz supported agrarian land reform, and his order expropriating unused land from the Americanbased United Fruit Company triggered the coup. The United States’ involvement in the revolt was well known and spurred anti-American demonstrations during Vice President Richard Nixon’s goodwill tour of Latin America in 1958. Meanwhile, on New Year’s Day 1959, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba. The Cuban Revolution was approved of by the United States until Castro began to fill key posts in his government with communists. When the United States placed an embargo on Cuban sugar exports, Castro turned to the Soviet Union for economic and military aid. Relations with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower believed that the best way to improve Soviet-American relations was through face-to-face meetings, or summit conferences. The first summit conference with the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France was held in Geneva in 1955. Although nothing substantive came out of the summit, there was a noticeable lessening of tensions between the countries that was attributed to the “spirit of Geneva.” That spirit quickly dissipated, however, when Russian tanks put down the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and after the USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957, demonstrating that the Soviet Union could launch long-range nuclear missiles against the United States. Sputnik also triggered the “space race,” generated talk of a “missile gap” between the United States and the USSR, and led to the passage of the National Defense Education Act (1958), which provided funding for programs in science, math, and foreign language studies, as well as student loans and fellowships. Summit diplomacy resumed in 1959, when Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev met at Camp David, the U.S. presidential retreat, and the Soviet leader toured the country. However, a summit conference in Paris in May 1960 ended almost as soon as it began when Khrushchev revealed that an American U-2 spy plane had been shot down over the USSR. Eisenhower tried to claim that the plane had strayed off course while collecting weather data, but Khrushchev was

142

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

able to show the world the captured pilot (Francis Gary Powers), the spy cameras, and the photographs of missile sites. Faced with such evidence, Eisenhower was forced to admit that U-2 spy missions had been operating over Russia for four years. Although his personal diplomatic efforts with the Soviet Union ultimately failed, the president did leave an important legacy in foreign policy. In a speech he gave shortly before leaving office, Eisenhower warned of the close relationship that had developed between the armed services and American industry. Since the end of World War II, military contracts had become a major source of income for many sectors of the economy. Eisenhower cautioned that the military-industrial complex had become powerful enough to exert an “unwarranted influence” on how the United States acted in the world arena.

The Civil Rights Movement What little had been accomplished during the Truman Administration with regard to civil rights was done by the president himself through executive orders that prohibited discrimination in the federal government and ended segregation in the armed services. During the Eisenhower administration, Supreme Court decisions and organized protests by African-Americans themselves challenged Jim Crow laws. Eisenhower, although he had little faith in the power of the judiciary alone to end discrimination, assumed full responsibility for seeing that the rulings of federal courts were obeyed. Congress, on the other hand, moved slowly to enhance the legal status of blacks and other minorities. Brown v. Board of Education. In 1950, the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund decided to challenge the legal heart of segregation — the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which had established the “separate but equal” doctrine. Several cases on publicschool segregation were making their way through the federal judiciary at this time, and the first to reach the Supreme Court was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In 1954, the Court, under U.S. HISTORY II

143 333

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

the new Eisenhower-appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled that “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites were inherently unequal and therefore were a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A former attorney general and governor of California, Warren recognized that the decision had to be unanimous if it was going to have a significant impact across the country, and he worked hard with the other justices to gain consensus. Although the Court did not provide a blueprint as to how the decision should be carried out, in 1955 it ordered the desegregation of the public schools “with all deliberate speed.” Eisenhower ordered the immediate desegregation of schools in Washington, D.C., which were under federal jurisdiction, and the process went smoothly in some of the 21 states that had legally segregated school systems. In other states, however, opposition to desegregation was strong. The Brown decision led to a revival of the Ku Klux Klan and to the creation of White Citizens Councils in the South to defend segregation. In March 1956, 100 southern senators and congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto, which accused the Court of abuse of judicial power and sought the restoration of “legal” segregation. The most direct confrontation came at the beginning of the 1957 school year in Little Rock, Arkansas. In September, nine AfricanAmerican students were scheduled to enroll in the all-white Central High School. Defying the federal order to integrate, Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the nine students from entering the school. Faubus withdrew the Guard in response to a court order, but when the teenagers tried to attend classes, an angry mob surrounded the school and the students were forced to leave. As a result, President Eisenhower sent in the Regular Army and federalized the National Guard to protect the students and to make sure they were allowed to go to school. The incident had important consequences. It marked the first time since Reconstruction that the federal government had taken concerted action to protect the rights of African-Americans. Additionally, television extensively covered the events in Little Rock, and the virulent racism of white students and adults built support for the civil rights movement.

144

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

The Montgomery bus boycott. While riding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person, as the law required. She was arrested and fined. The African-American community in Montgomery, under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., responded with a boycott of the city bus system. Because blacks made up the majority of riders, the action had a serious effect on transit revenues, but local leaders still refused to change the law. The boycott continued until November 1956 when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public transportation was unconstitutional. The events in Montgomery helped make King the recognized leader of the civil rights movement and gave credence to his nonviolent approach to racial justice. He became the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. Congress could not help but notice both the decisions of the Supreme Court and the growing activism of African-Americans themselves. With the backing of Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 created the Commission on Civil Rights to investigate cases in which the right to vote was denied on the basis of race or where the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was violated. The law was strengthened somewhat through the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which gave federal judges the power to appoint arbitrators to ensure that blacks were allowed to register and vote. Hispanics and Native Americans. The discrimination faced by other minorities in the United States did not attract the same public attention as the struggle of blacks and, in some instances, was more subtle. For instance, Mexican-Americans might not be served in a restaurant in Texas, but no body of law existed (as in the case of African-Americans) that regulated their interactions with whites. Official segregation of Mexican-Americans in public education began to unravel in the late 1940s through action of the federal and local courts, and their integration was never as contentious an issue as it was with African-Americans. Like blacks, Hispanics formed their own organizations to press for full equality. One such organization, the American GI Forum, was established when a Texas funeral U.S. HISTORY II

145 333

AMERICA IN THE FIFTIES

home refused to bury a Mexican-American veteran of World War II. The League of United Latin American Citizens, better known as LULAC, was another important voice for Hispanics in the 1950s. The Eisenhower administration was intent on fully integrating Native Americans into the dominant culture. In 1953, the government instituted the so-called termination policy, under which the Bureau of Indian Affairs provided fewer federal services to Native Americans, encouraged tribes to sell off their lands, and offered incentives to individuals and families to leave the reservations. At the heart of termination was not only the belief that the maintenance of the reservation system prevented full assimilation but also pressure from states and corporations that wanted to gain control of tribal lands containing valuable timber and mineral resources. Although the policy was phased out in the late 1950s, it did bring about a significant rise in the number of Native Americans living in cities. However, only 10 percent of those who left the reservations found jobs, and for many, urban life meant unemployment, poverty, and alcoholism.

146

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

F

rom the aura of idealism surrounding John F. Kennedy, the youngest person ever elected president, to the confrontations in the streets at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the 1960s began as an era of expectation and hope and drew to a close in discord and division. Throughout the ’60s, the country experienced upheavals created by an increasingly unpopular war, a civil rights movement that led to demands for ethnic power, and political violence on an unprecedented scale, including the assassinations of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. The decade was also a time of heightened social awareness, in which legal barriers to equality began to tumble, and a concerted effort was made, albeit unsuccessfully, to address the problems of the poor and underprivileged.

The Kennedy Years In 1960, the Republicans chose Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s Vice President, for their presidential candidate and named Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., former Massachusetts senator and the ambassador to the United Nations, as his running mate. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts emerged from a crowded Democratic field to win his party’s nomination, and he selected Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas to balance the ticket. Kennedy’s success in the primaries had eliminated any concerns that his being a Roman Catholic would become an issue in the campaign. The 1960 campaign was hard fought. Nixon had been a highly visible vice president, having assumed some presidential duties when Eisenhower was hospitalized twice during his administration with a heart condition. Even so, Kennedy — who was less well known and had, at best, a mediocre record in Congress — managed to put Nixon on the defensive by blaming the Eisenhower administration for the economic recession that the country was experiencing and by decrying the decline of American international influence. The turning point in the race was a series of four debates between the two candidates that were televised nationwide. Although most people believed that in substance the candidates’ arguments were evenly matched,

U.S. HISTORY II

147 333

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

Kennedy looked better than Nixon on television; he appeared younger and more in control. On election night, Kennedy’s margin of victory in the popular vote was just over 100,000, the smallest amount in 75 years. The shift of a few thousand votes in pivotal states like Illinois would have given the election to Nixon. The New Frontier. Kennedy referred to his domestic and foreign programs as “a New Frontier.” However, with no clear electoral mandate and a conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans in control of Congress, Kennedy was unable to get major pieces of his domestic program approved. Significant federal aid to education that was earmarked for school construction, teacher salaries, and scholarships failed. Legislation for hospital and nursing care for the elderly, known as Medicare, faced the determined opposition of the American Medical Association, as Truman’s proposals had a decade earlier. The plan for a Department of Urban Affairs, which would have addressed the problems of housing and crime in the nation’s cities, was also rejected. Despite the resistance he met in Congress, Kennedy did succeed in getting some significant portions of his domestic agenda enacted during his 1,000 days in office. The Housing Act (1961), for example, provided $5 billion for urban renewal and new housing construction. The Minimum Wage Act (1961) raised the minimum wage to $1.25 an hour and increased the number of workers eligible for minimum wage. Additionally, the Social Security Act was amended in 1961 to provide benefits to those who retired at the age of 62 rather than 65. Kennedy’s most enduring legacy, the Peace Corps, was the embodiment of his inaugural address challenge to Americans to serve their country. Created by executive order in 1961, the Peace Corps bridged the gap between domestic and foreign policy. Through the program, Americans volunteered in developing countries around the world as teachers or to share their technical skills. The president also had success in reviving the economy through increased defense spending and tax cuts, all the while keeping inflation under control. Foreign trade was given a boost by the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which gave Kennedy the authority to significantly lower tariffs and to eliminate duties completely on certain goods exported by both the

148

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

United States and the newly formed European Economic Community (the Common Market). Kennedy and civil rights. Throughout most of his presidency, Kennedy paid little attention to civil rights. He introduced civil rights legislation only in June 1963, and by that time, African-Americans were pushing the movement in new directions. In early 1960, demonstrations known as sit-ins began to force the desegregation of lunch counters and restaurants in the South. Blacks, often college students, sat down at a lunch counter and refused to leave until they were served. Getting service could sometimes take months. Similar nonviolent tactics were used to integrate other public facilities, such as libraries, beaches, and swimming pools. In the following year, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the first “freedom rides,” in which both blacks and whites rode buses throughout the South to integrate bus terminals and to demand the enforcement of the Supreme Court decision banning segregation from interstate transportation. Through these efforts, Jim Crow laws gradually lost their influence. In the fall of 1962, James Meredith, an African-American student, obtained a federal court order allowing him to enroll at the University of Mississippi. When Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett prevented him from doing so twice, U.S. Marshals were sent to enforce the court ruling. Violence erupted on campus, leading to two deaths and several injuries. At this point, Kennedy sent in federal troops to restore calm and to ensure that Meredith was protected while he attended class. In June 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace personally kept two black students from attending summer school at the University of Alabama. He quickly backed down, however, when the president federalized the Alabama National Guard and sent it to the university. To pressure Congress to enact Kennedy’s civil rights bill, black leaders organized a massive march on Washington, D.C., in August 1963. More than 200,000 blacks and whites gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Although certainly a high point in what has been called the “integrationist” phase of the civil rights movement, the U.S. HISTORY II

149 333

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

march did not fulfill its objective. Congress had still taken no action on civil rights legislation when the president was assassinated in November 1963. Kennedy’s foreign policy. Cuba provided the Kennedy administration with both its greatest foreign policy failure and its greatest success. Soon after taking office, Kennedy learned of a CIA plan to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro using Cuban exiles living in the United States. Although the president approved the Bay of Pigs invasion (April 1961), he withheld crucial American air support at the last minute. The operation was a disaster and resulted in the Soviet Union increasing direct military aid to Cuba. Tensions between the USSR and the United States, which were already high because of Berlin and the construction of the Berlin Wall (August 1961), intensified in October 1962, when aerial photographs revealed that the Russians were constructing medium-range missile sites in Cuba. Faced with this nuclear threat to the United States, Kennedy acted quickly. On October 22, he ordered a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent the Soviet Union from bringing in any more missiles and insisted that the Russians dismantle and remove any missiles already there. The Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, ended four days later when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev backed down and conceded to Kennedy’s demands. The missiles were shipped back to the USSR, and in return, the United States promised not to invade Cuba and (in a much less publicized move) removed its own missiles from Turkey. Soon after the missile crisis, American-Soviet relations began to improve. A “hot line” telephone link was established between Washington and Moscow to facilitate communications between the superpowers. In August 1963, with the Soviet Union increasingly concerned about a possible threat from China, the USSR, Great Britain, and the United States signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear testing in the atmosphere or underwater. France and China, who had recently become nuclear powers, refused to sign the agreement. The signing of the treaty with the Soviet Union did not mean, however, that Kennedy was no longer wary of communist expansion.

150

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

Kennedy significantly increased American aid to South Vietnam, in the form of both military equipment and advisers. By the end of 1963, there were 16,000 U.S. military personnel in the region. As the communist Viet Cong increased their presence in the countryside, the Kennedy administration supported the plans of the South Vietnamese Army to depose the increasingly unpopular President Ngo Dinh Diem. After Diem was killed during the coup on November 1, 1963, the United States recognized the new government, which turned out to be a succession of military leaders who hardly bothered to construct even a facade of democracy. Kennedy supporters claim that the president was moving toward a withdrawal from Vietnam after the 1964 election; critics believe that he accepted the domino theory, viewing Communism as a monolithic entity, and would have escalated U.S. participation in the conflict. In any event, Lyndon Johnson made the critical decisions about American involvement in Vietnam. The assassination of Kennedy. President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, while riding in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas. The president was in Texas to help resolve the differences between the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party in the state before his 1964 reelection bid. Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine with ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba, was accused of the murder. A few days after Oswald’s arrest, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby killed Oswald — an event that was captured on national television. Kennedy’s death shocked the nation and the world. President Johnson appointed a 17-member commission, chaired by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren, to investigate the assassination. The Warren Commission issued its report in September 1964, concluding that Oswald had killed Kennedy and that both Oswald and Ruby had acted alone. The report, however, left many questions unanswered and did not put to rest the idea that the assassination was the culmination of a conspiracy.

U.S. HISTORY II

151 333

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

Johnson and the Great Society Johnson’s personality and political style contrasted sharply with the urbane and cultured Kennedy. A rough-edged Texan with a vulgar vocabulary, Johnson had supported New Deal reforms and had wielded considerable political power as Senate majority leader. As president, he used his political skills to enact what remained of Kennedy’s programs. He also used his influence to push through a flood of new laws intended to help the poor and minorities and to create what he called the Great Society — a country in which poverty, disease, and racial injustice would be eliminated through government reforms. Unfortunately, his domestic initiatives fell victim to the deepening crisis in Vietnam, which drained valuable resources from domestic concerns and eroded Johnson’s public support. The Great Society. Johnson was able to persuade Congress to enact a wide range of programs following Kennedy’s assassination. Having grown up poor, the president knew first hand what poverty meant, and he declared a war on poverty early in 1964 through the Economic Opportunity Act. The act provided funds for the Job Corps, which secured employment for inner city youths; established the Head Start program, to give disadvantaged preschoolers an early opportunity in education; and set up a domestic version of the Peace Corps known as VISTA, or Volunteers in Service to America. Following his landslide victory over Republican conservative Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, Johnson used his popular mandate to expand the Great Society. In 1965, after almost 20 years of inaction on the issue, Congress finally passed Medicare, which provided Americans over the age of 65 with medical insurance, and Medicaid, which allotted federal grants to states for medical coverage of the poor. Money was earmarked for the Appalachian area, one of the most severe pockets of poverty in the country, through the Appalachian Regional Development Act (1965). Billions of dollars were channeled into housing reform through rent subsidies for lowincome families and the “model cities” program to rehabilitate substandard residential buildings. The nation’s schools received the

152

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

federal funding promised under Kennedy with substantial grants to both elementary and secondary school education. Also created were the Department of Housing and Urban Development (1965 — headed by Robert C. Weaver, the first African-American to serve in the cabinet) and the Department of Transportation (1966), as well as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1965). Additionally, the first serious attention was given to the environment with the enactment of the Water Quality Act (1965) and the Air Quality Act (1967). Civil rights under Johnson. Johnson’s Great Society also addressed racial injustice. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public accommodations, authorized the attorney general to file suits to desegregate schools, and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate complaints of job discrimination. During the “freedom summer” of 1964, CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized the Mississippi Summer Project, a voter-registration drive in the South. In March of 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., coordinated a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for black voting rights that was often marred by violence. Combined with the ratification of the Twenty-fourth Amendment, which outlawed the poll tax in federal elections, the Selma march marked a shift in civil rights tactics from seeking integration to stressing political power. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended literacy tests in counties where less than 50 percent of the eligible voters had cast ballots in 1964, provided for federal examiners to register voters, and gave the attorney general the authority to begin litigation against the poll tax. In 1966, the Supreme Court struck down the poll tax in all elections. The combined effect of these measures was to dramatically increase the number of African-Americans registered in the South, from approximately one million in 1964 to more than three million by 1968, which ultimately transformed the Southern political landscape. Neither the Great Society programs nor the civil rights legislation could prevent outbreaks of violence in the black neighborhoods of American cities in the 1960s. At the heart of the issues in the urban north was the lack of economic opportunity and political power. U.S. HISTORY II

153 333

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

A major riot broke out in Los Angeles in August 1965 that left 34 people dead and cost more than $30 million in property damage. Rioting continued over the next several summers in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Newark. Finally, in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968, unrest broke out in more than 100 communities across the country. At the same time, new black leaders were emerging to challenge King’s integrationist and nonviolent philosophy. Malcolm X, the leader of the Black Muslim movement (also called the Nation of Islam), rejected integration and preached pride in the African heritage. He was assassinated in 1965 after he broke with the Nation of Islam. Similarly, Stokely Carmichael of the SNCC became an advocate of Black Power and moved the SNCC away from its original coalition of black and white students into black militancy. He became involved with the radical Black Panther Party that was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. The shift from integration to separatism cost the civil rights movement white support in the late 1960s. Blacks were not the only minority struggling for equality. Cesar Chavez, the founder of the National Farm Workers Association (1962), organized a nationwide strike of grape pickers and boycott of grapes (and then lettuce) to fight for improved wages and working conditions for migrant labor. Meanwhile, young Mexican-American activists called themselves Chicanos and demanded bilingual education programs in the public schools and Chicano studies at universities. Of all the ethnic groups in the country, however, Native Americans were in the most desperate position; they had the highest unemployment rate and the lowest life expectancy. In 1968, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded to advocate for Native American rights. In the following year, Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay to dramatize their demands for enforcement of their legal rights, tribal autonomy, and restoration of tribal lands. Johnson and Vietnam. In August 1964, two North Vietnamese patrol boats reportedly fired on American destroyers operating in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson charged that these were unprovoked attacks and used the incident to persuade Congress to act. Through the Gulf of

154

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

Tonkin Resolution (August 1964), the president was authorized to take any action necessary to repel attacks against U.S. forces and to prevent further aggression. The resolution became the official sanction to escalate American involvement in Vietnam. In early 1965, Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam to stop the flow of men and material to the south. Operation Rolling Thunder, as the air campaign was called, continued until the spring of 1968. The first American combat troops were sent to Vietnam in March 1965 and the scope of their responsibility quickly shifted from defensive (protecting U.S. installations) to offensive operations. The number of ground troops rose incrementally, and just under 500,000 were committed to the war by 1968. Much like the troop build-up, opposition to the war in the United States developed slowly. The first teach-ins, which questioned why the United States was fighting in Asia, were held on college campuses in the spring of 1965. Antiwar protests increased over the next several years, and more and more criticism was heard from the mainstream of American society, including such senators as William Fulbright and Robert Kennedy, who argued against Johnson’s policies. Opposition grew as the cost of the war (which gutted many Great Society programs) rose, the number of American casualties mounted, and people’s horror intensified as they viewed the conflict — America’s first televised war — each evening on television. A key factor in shaping the public’s attitudes toward the war was the Tet Offensive, which began on January 30, 1968. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces took advantage of the lunar New Year (Tet) truce to launch a month-long attack against more than 100 cities and military bases in South Vietnam. During the offensive, Hue, the former administrative seat of Southern Vietnam fell, and the American embassy in Saigon was briefly occupied. Although the campaign proved to be a military disaster for the North, it had a great psychological impact in the United States. Public opinion shifted against the war as many Americans became convinced that the war could not be won in the traditional sense. Tet also had a direct effect on American politics. Johnson’s popularity plummeted in the wake of the offensive, and the president announced that he would not seek a second term. He also stopped most of the bombing over the

U.S. HISTORY II

155 333

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

North and peace talks with the North Vietnamese began in Paris in May 1968.

The Counterculture of the 1960s The 1960s were a period when long-held values and norms of behavior seemed to break down, particularly among the young. Many college-age men and women became political activists and were the driving force behind the civil rights and antiwar movements. Other young people simply “dropped out” and separated themselves from mainstream culture through their appearance and lifestyle. Attitudes toward sexuality appeared to loosen, and women began to openly protest the traditional roles of housewife and mother that society had assigned to them. The New Left. Left-wing politics in the 1960s attracted primarily middle-class college students. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded at the University of Michigan in 1960, was the organizational base for the New Left. The term “New Left” was coined in the group’s 1962 Port Huron Statement, which criticized the lack of individual freedom and the power of bureaucracy in government, universities, and corporations and called for participatory democracy. Leaders of the SDS believed that colleges were a natural base from which to promote social change. Before opposition to the Vietnam War mushroomed, issues that touched on student freedom, such as dress codes, course requirements, discrimination by sororities and fraternities, and minority admissions, were hot topics on campus. When the administration tried to control political activity at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1964, the Free Speech Movement was formed. The tactics the Berkeley students used at the time — sit-ins and taking over college buildings — became common forms of antiwar protest. In the spring of 1965, SDS supported a nationwide campaign against the draft. On campuses, demonstrations included draft card burnings, confrontations with military recruiters, and sit-ins to protest ROTC programs. Additionally, companies that were closely involved with the war effort, such as

156

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

Dow Chemical (which manufactured napalm), were targeted when they came to a university to recruit. Off campus, antiwar protestors demonstrated at Army induction centers with picket lines and sit-ins. In the first six months of 1968, more than 200 major demonstrations took place at 100 colleges and universities across the country, involving more than 40,000 students. The most celebrated of these early demonstrations was the confrontation at Columbia University in April 1968. The issue being protested was not the war, but the school’s decision to displace black housing to build a gymnasium. The local SDS chapter, along with black students, commandeered several buildings on campus for almost a week. When the police were called in, 700 students were arrested and 150 injured as the buildings were cleared out. The occupation received national and international news coverage, Columbia’s president resigned, and the plans for the gymnasium were dropped. It was an apparent victory for the SDS, but it was short-lived. The organization soon splintered, with its more radical elements, such as the Weathermen, openly espousing confrontational politics. The best known off-campus violent episode involving the New Left occurred in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention when police brutally confronted antiwar demonstrators from the Youth International Party (Yippies) and the National Mobilization Against the War in Vietnam organization. Hippies. Like the members of the New Left, the Hippies were mostly middle-class whites but without the political drive. Their hallmarks were a particular style of dress that included jeans, tiedyed shirts, sandals, beards, long hair, and a lifestyle that embraced sexual promiscuity and recreational drugs, including marijuana and the hallucinogenic LSD. The sex and drug culture were reflected in the rock music of the time by such groups as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and performers like Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. Although some young people established communes in the countryside, hippies were primarily an urban phenomenon. The Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco and the East Village in New York were the focal points of the counterculture for a brief period from 1965 to 1967.

U.S. HISTORY II

157 333

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

A landmark counterculture event was the Woodstock Festival, held in upstate New York in August 1969. Billed as “three days of peace, music, and love,” the promoters expected a large crowd but not the 300,000 to 400,000 people who actually attended. In spite of the large numbers, there were no serious problems; adequate medical care was available — mainly for drug-related emergencies — and the police decided not to try to enforce drug laws. A Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway in California a few months later did not go as well. With the police unable to provide adequate security because they did not have enough notice of the event, Hell’s Angels were hired for crowd control. The bikers beat one person to death, and several more deaths resulted from accidents and drug overdoses. Sexual politics. While the general permissiveness of the counterculture encouraged sexual freedom, other factors also contributed to the change in attitudes toward sexuality. Oral contraceptives became available, and by 1970, 12 million women were “on the pill.” The use of other means of birth control, such as diaphragms and IUDs, also increased. Many states had already legalized abortion, and the new women’s movement was committed to making the procedure even more widely available. Throughout the sexual revolution, which lasted until the onset of the AIDS crisis in the mid-’80s, the birth rate declined and the number of abortions, unwed mothers, and divorces rose. The starting point for contemporary feminism was the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which argued that women should be allowed to find their own identity, an identity not necessarily limited to the traditional roles of wife and mother. The number of women attending college skyrocketed during the 1960s, and many became involved with both the New Left and the civil rights movement. Even these organizations remained dominated by men, however. During the takeover at Columbia University, for instance, women were assigned duties such as making coffee and typing. Consequently, although the political activism of the 1960s was a catalyst for women’s liberation, feminism became most effective when it created its own groups. In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed to address such issues as allotting federal aid for day-care centers for working mothers, guaranteeing

158

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE NEW FRONTIER AND THE GREAT SOCIETY

women the right to an abortion, eliminating gender-based job discrimination, and ensuring equal pay for equal work. Women, however, were not the only group that began to demand equality in the 1960s. Laws against homosexuals were common, and groups like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis had campaigned for years with little effect against gay discrimination. In June 1969, the attempt by the New York City police to close down the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Manhattan, led to days of rioting and to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front. The treatment of homosexuals and lesbians gradually became a national civil rights issue.

U.S. HISTORY II

159 333

FROM NIXON TO CARTER, 1968 – 1980

In March 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would

not seek a second term, a decision due at least in part to the strong showing of Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota in the New Hampshire primary. After Johnson’s announcement, Vice President Hubert Humphrey entered the race, and soon he and Senator Robert Kennedy of New York were the main contenders for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968 after his victory in the California primary, and Humphrey won the nomination at the violence-marred Democratic convention in Chicago in August. The Republicans turned to Richard Nixon, who had made a remarkable political recovery following his defeats in the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 gubernatorial race in California. Nixon chose Spiro Agnew, the little-known governor of Maryland, as his running mate. While Humphrey defended the Johnson Administration’s Vietnam policy, Nixon emphasized law and order and his “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. American Independent party candidate George Wallace of Alabama appealed more directly to conservatives who were frustrated with the counterculture and the inability of the United States to win the war. Although his standing was damaged somewhat by the demonstrations at the Democratic convention, Humphrey gained popular support as the election drew near. Nixon won by a narrow victory in the popular vote, with just over 500,000 votes separating him from Humphrey; Nixon’s margin was much more decisive in the electoral college, where he had 301 votes to Humphrey’s 191. Wallace ran a national campaign, but his base of support was primarily in the Deep South, where he took five states. The Democrats remained in control of both the House and the Senate.

The Nixon Presidency Nixon’s major accomplishments were in foreign policy. He formally ended the more than 20-year freeze in American relations with the People’s Republic of China and promoted closer ties with the Soviet Union through détente, the use of increased contact between countries to reduce political tensions. Nixon’s domestic agenda included the New Federalism, a policy that sought to limit the power of the

U.S. HISTORY II

161 333

FROM NIXON TO CARTER

federal government, and the challenge of keeping inflation under control while the country drifted in and out of recession. Whatever successes Nixon had on the world scene or at home were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal, which ultimately cost him his presidency. Nixon and Vietnam. Nixon’s secret plan for ending the war was Vietnamization, in which the South Vietnamese gradually took over the fighting while the United States withdrew American troops, intensified the bombing of North Vietnam, and continued to provide financial support to South Vietnam for the war effort. Between 1969 and 1972, U.S. forces shrunk from 500,000 to 30,000, and peace talks continued in Paris. Although Vietnamization allowed the United States to extricate itself from the war, the policy did little to weaken the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in the field. Nixon was also responsible for expanding the war. In March 1969, the United States began bombing North Vietnamese supply routes in Cambodia, and ground troops invaded the country in April 1970. Widening the war to a neutral country provoked new demonstrations on college campuses, and four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. There appeared to be a breakthrough at the Paris Peace Talks as the 1972 elections approached, but it did not materialize. In December 1972, Nixon ordered heavy bombing of the North and the mining of the Haiphong harbor. Although this “Christmas bombing” was widely criticized, it led to the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973. Under the terms of the accords, the last American combat troops left Vietnam in March, and North Vietnam released the final group of U.S. prisoners of war. U.S. involvement in the war had cost 58,000 Americans lives and $150 billion. A few months after the cease-fire went into effect, the fighting resumed between North and South Vietnamese forces. North Vietnam launched a major offensive in the spring of 1975 that led to the fall of Saigon in April and the subsequent unification of Vietnam under northern control. China, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East. In 1969, Chinese and Russian troops clashed along their common border, and the long-

162

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

FROM NIXON TO CARTER

standing rift between the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union seemed to be widening. Nixon recognized that the old view of a monolithic communist world was obsolete and saw an opportunity to play China and the USSR against each other to the advantage of the United States. He also believed that improving relations with China might lead China to put pressure on North Vietnam to end the war. An American table tennis team was welcomed in China in 1971, and this incident of “ping-pong diplomacy” paved the way for a secret visit by Nixon’s top foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger, in July. In February 1972, the president himself visited China and normalized relations between the two countries. Formal diplomatic relations were not established until 1979, but trade and cultural exchanges increased almost immediately. Just a few months after his China visit, Nixon met with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. In addition to agreeing to a sale of surplus American wheat to the USSR, the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (or SALT) agreement was signed. Both countries agreed not to develop new antiballistic missile (ABM) systems and to limit the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles each country was able to deploy. The Soviet Union had achieved rough parity with the United States in nuclear weapons, and the parameters of the agreement forestalled a costly new arms race that the Russian economy could not have afforded. The SALT I agreement (there would later be a second set of SALT negotiations, known as SALT II) did not mean that the Cold War was over. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in October 1973, the United States provided massive aid to Israel that helped turn the tide of the Yom Kippur War, while the Soviet Union supported the Arab states. The most important consequence of the conflict was the decision of the Arab countries to place an embargo on oil shipments to the United States. The embargo lasted from October 1973 to March 1974 and was accompanied by a substantial increase in crude oil prices by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Americans faced a major fuel shortage (which underscored how dependent the country had become on foreign oil), and gasoline prices skyrocketed, contributing to rising rates of inflation.

U.S. HISTORY II

163 333

FROM NIXON TO CARTER

Nixon’s domestic policy. An important element of Nixon’s domestic policy was the restoration of power to state and local governments. At the heart of his New Federalism was revenue sharing. Congress passed revenue sharing legislation in 1972, which allowed Washington to provide grants to states and cities to use as they saw fit, rather than having the federal bureaucracy set the priorities. The president also tried, with less success, to overhaul the welfare system. Key parts of the plan, drafted by liberal sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called for providing recipients with a minimum annual income and requiring them to work or enter job-training programs. Despite his stand against big government, Nixon supported programs that increased federal regulatory authority. He backed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which was passed in 1969 and established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, and he endorsed the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1971 to enforce appropriate workplace standards to protect labor. Nixon was less sympathetic to minorities than Johnson had been. Believing that integration was moving too far too fast, he wanted to delay the desegregation of the schools in Mississippi and opposed court-ordered busing. The four justices Nixon appointed to the Supreme Court where not judicial activists, and the Court became more conservative on social issues. The most daunting domestic issue Nixon faced was the economy. Fighting the war in Vietnam and paying for Johnson’s Great Society had led to inflation, which Nixon first tried to control by increasing interest rates and cutting federal spending. Inflation remained high and unemployment increased, a condition that economists labeled stagflation. Early in 1971, Nixon accepted a deficit budget that he hoped would stimulate the economy. He then instituted wage and price controls in August that remained in effect until January 1973. When most of the controls were lifted, inflation returned and worsened with the onset of the energy crisis later in the year. Economists and the government would grapple with the problem for most of the decade. Watergate. In June 1972, five men were arrested while breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate

164

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

FROM NIXON TO CARTER

Hotel in Washington, D.C. After it was revealed that one of the men arrested was James McCord, the security coordinator for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), the White House denied any culpability for the break-in. Nixon went on to win a landslide victory for a second term over Democratic candidate Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, but the Watergate scandal would not go away. The investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post prompted the Senate in February 1973 to open hearings on the administration’s involvement in the burglary. Televised Watergate hearings began in May 1973, and the American people were shocked as the widening scandal unfolded with testimony about the Nixon administration’s enemies list, misuse of government agencies, and trading for political favors. When the Senate committee learned about the taping system in the Oval Office in July 1973, it demanded that the tapes be turned over. Nixon claimed executive privilege and refused to give them up. In October 1973, he ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was investigating the matter for the Justice Department. Richardson refused and resigned, as did the deputy attorney general. When Nixon ordered Solicitor General Robert Bork to fire Cox, Bork complied, and Leon Jowarski replaced Cox. The resignations and dismissal became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. As the Watergate scandal continued, Vice President Agnew resigned and pleaded no contest to charges of income tax evasion and bribery in a case stemming from his term as governor of Maryland. Nixon named Congressman Gerald Ford as the new vice president, and Congress confirmed the appointment. After a year of legal wrangling, the Supreme Court ordered the president to turn over the Oval Office tapes to the House Judiciary Committee, which was considering impeachment, in July 1974. The committee approved three articles of impeachment covering obstruction of justice and abuse of power, and it was clear that the full House of Representatives would vote for impeachment. Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974, and Gerald Ford became president.

U.S. HISTORY II

165 333

FROM NIXON TO CARTER

The United States under Ford and Carter Watergate seriously eroded public confidence in government, and the task of Nixon’s successors was to restore that confidence. Faith in Washington was not easily regained, especially when, after just a month in office, Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed while he was president. Although the pardon was intended to put the Watergate scandal behind the nation, many saw it as politics as usual. Jimmy Carter’s ensuing promise never to lie to the American people helped to get him elected, but he did not work well with Congress and lacked the leadership the country needed. Ford’s challenges. Gerald Ford faced the same economic problems as Nixon and was no more successful in dealing with them. The unexpected combination of inflation and high unemployment continued to plague the country. The president focused on inflation and launched the Whip Inflation Now (WIN) campaign, a voluntary effort that called on Americans to save their money rather than spend it. The campaign, with its red and white WIN buttons, had little effect. Ford also reduced spending and the Federal Reserve Board raised interest rates, but the recession worsened and unemployment reached nine percent. Only then did the administration shift gears and try to stimulate the economy through a large tax cut. In foreign affairs, Henry Kissinger stayed on as secretary of state, providing continuity for American foreign policy. Détente with the Soviet Union remained a high priority, and in late 1974, Ford and Brezhnev met to work out the basis for the SALT II agreement (the negotiations of which had begun in 1972 and would continue into the Carter administration). In August 1975, at a summit conference held in Helsinki, the two leaders agreed to recognize the postwar boundaries of Western and Eastern Europe. Brezhnev also agreed to permit more Soviet Jews to emigrate, a decision helped perhaps by Congress having linked trade with the Soviet Union to Jewish emigration. In the Middle East, Kissinger continued his shuttle diplomacy of traveling back and forth between Israel and Egypt, begun after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the fall of 1975, Israel agreed to return most of

166

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

FROM NIXON TO CARTER

the Sinai Peninsula, which had been captured during the 1967 SixDay War, to Egypt. The Ford administration also presided over the final act of the Vietnam War. In April 1975, the president asked Congress for $1 billion in aid for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and was refused. However, by that time, no amount of money could have prevented the North’s victory, and news footage of the South Vietnamese civilians desperately trying to get in to the American embassy in the hours before Saigon fell provided some of the most enduring images of the end of the conflict. The election of 1976. Ford faced a serious challenge for the Republican nomination from Ronald Reagan, the conservative former governor of California. Although Ford was named the presidential candidate at the convention, the platform that he ran on reflected the views of Reagan and the right wing of the Republican Party — an increase in military spending, opposition to détente, a balanced budget, and school prayer. To ensure conservative support, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas was chosen as the vice-presidential candidate. The unlikely Democratic nominee was Jimmy Carter, who had served one term as governor of Georgia. He struck a responsive chord among the voters with his honesty, easy-going style, and the fact that he was a Washington outsider. To balance the Democratic ticket, Carter chose Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota — a man with strong liberal credentials and experience in Congress — as his running mate. The election did not generate a great deal of public interest. In fact, voter turnout was the lowest in almost 30 years. Carter was able to rebuild the New Deal coalition of labor, minorities, the South, and urban voters with an important twist. His success in the South, where he won every state except Virginia, had less to do with his own background than the overwhelming support he received from AfricanAmericans. Ford, on the other hand, was strong among whites, consistently so across the Midwest and West. Although by the end of the campaign he was able to close the large lead that Carter had in the polls, it was not enough. Carter won by nearly 1.7 million popular votes, and a comfortable margin in the electoral college, with 297 votes to Ford’s 241.

U.S. HISTORY II

167 333

FROM NIXON TO CARTER

The economy and the energy crisis. The economy remained the country’s main domestic issue. Carter reversed Ford’s policy of dealing with the inflation side of stagflation by first attacking high unemployment. Carter found, as his predecessors had, that there was a serious cost for increasing spending on public works to provide jobs — inflation soared. In fact, during his four years in office, inflation doubled in part because of a new round of oil price increases by OPEC and also because using interest rates to moderate the problem was not effective. Interest rates were so high that both new home construction and the sale of older houses dropped sharply. Even before oil prices went up for the second time in the decade, the United States was in the midst of a major energy crisis. In the spring of 1977, the president submitted a comprehensive package of energy legislation to Congress that included the creation of the Department of Energy, the use of higher taxes and tax incentives to encourage conservation, the development of new sources of oil and natural gas, and the promotion of alternative fuels and nuclear power. Only the Department of Energy was approved; furthermore, an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in March 1979 discredited nuclear energy in the United States. OPEC price increases in 1979 raised the cost of a barrel of crude to over $30 (compared to $3 dollars in 1973) and resulted in gasoline price hikes to more than a $1 a gallon (as opposed to 40 cents in 1973) and the return of long lines at the gas pumps. Carter’s foreign policy. Carter was a strong advocate of human rights as an element of American foreign policy. He sought better relations with the black nations of Africa, strongly opposed the apartheid policies in South Africa, and pressed countries such as Chile and South Korea to improve the treatment of their own citizens as a criteria for American support. Human rights violations in Nicaragua, for example, prompted the administration to end military and economic aid to the Somoza regime. Additionally, despite considerable conservative opposition, the president persuaded Congress to ratify two treaties that provided for the transfer of the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone to Panamanian control in 1999.

168

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

FROM NIXON TO CARTER

In June 1979, Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II accord, which reduced the nuclear arsenals of both nations. But the progress of détente between the two nations came to an abrupt halt in January 1980 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support its threatened communist government. SALT II was withdrawn from Senate consideration, an embargo on grain shipments to the USSR was put in place, and the president called for an international boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. None of these actions brought about any change in Soviet policy. The Middle East represented the high point and the low point of the administration’s foreign policy. Carter was responsible for the signing of the first peace treaty between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors, Egypt. After the unprecedented visit of President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt to Israel in 1977, both Sadat and Israeli leader Menachem Begin were invited to the United States to work out a permanent settlement to their countries’ differences. Under the Camp David Accords (September 1978), Israel completely withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula and normal diplomatic relations were established between Israel and Egypt. The formal peace treaty was signed in Washington in March 1979. Carter’s success at Camp David was offset by his failure to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis. In November 1979, Islamic militants overran the American embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year. The president seemed to be at a loss on how to handle the situation. He tried negotiations, and when those failed, he ordered a rescue attempt that turned out to be poorly planned and unsuccessful. His inability to free the hostages was a major factor in his defeat in the 1980 election. Iran let the hostages go on the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president (January 20, 1981).

America in the 1970s The activism of the 1960s continued into the ’70s, particularly for women and other minorities. As the war in Vietnam came to an end, new social causes came to the fore, especially environmentalism. The

U.S. HISTORY II

169 333

FROM NIXON TO CARTER

country celebrated the first “Earth Day” on April 22, 1970, and while the environmental movement was successful in raising awareness about the need to protect the environment, it did not win all of its political battles. Activists triumphed, for instance, when plans for SST (Supersonic Transport) planes were scrapped because of noise pollution and danger to the ozone level. However, they were unable to prevent construction from starting on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in 1973. Besides continued activism on several fronts, the United States also faced significant changes in its demographic portrait because of the economic problems the country faced and changes in immigration laws. The women’s movement. Women continued to campaign, with mixed success, for both political and economic equality through such organizations as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the National Women’s Political Caucus (1971). In 1972, Congress approved the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which stated that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” The constitutional amendment was quickly approved by 28 states before determined opposition mounted, and it failed to win ratification by the required three-fourths of the states. Meanwhile, in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court struck down laws in 46 states that limited a woman’s access to abortions in the first three months of pregnancy. Those opposed to abortion began to organize as the “Right-To-Life” movement, pushing for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. Congress cut off Medicaid funding for most abortions in 1976, limiting the access of poor women to the procedure. Economic equality of the sexes still proved an elusive goal. Even as women moved into nontraditional jobs and many companies established new job-training programs and opened day care centers for working mothers, disparities in pay for men and women doing the same job remained significant. Businesswomen pointed to the existence of a “glass ceiling,” meaning that women could go so far up the corporate ladder but no farther. At the same time, gender stereotyping began to wane. The use of gender-neutral terms for certain jobs

170

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

FROM NIXON TO CARTER

became part of the American lexicon — policemen became police officers, firemen became fire fighters, mailmen are now mail carriers, and stewardesses are flight attendants. The status of minorities. With Jim Crow discrimination essentially eliminated through civil rights legislation and court decisions, the issue for minorities in the 1970s was how to combat inequality not rooted in laws and how the impact of past discrimination could be remedied. Desegregation efforts in public education shifted from the South to the urban North, where housing patterns resulted in allminority inner-city schools. The reliance on busing to achieve racial balance in Los Angeles and Boston generated considerable controversy, and the Supreme Court ruled in 1974 that requiring the transfer of students from city to suburban schools to achieve integration was unconstitutional. Through affirmative action programs, employers were expected to make every effort to hire and promote minority workers, and a similar approach was taken to increase minority enrollment in higher education. Critics maintained that such programs were tantamount to reverse discrimination, or discrimination against the dominant group in the population, especially white males. In 1978, the Supreme Court limited the use of numerical quotas but recognized that race could be used as one of the factors in admissions policies of colleges and universities. The case involved a white applicant who was not accepted to a medical school that set aside a specific number of places for nonwhite candidates. Among minorities, Mexican-American and Native-American groups especially achieved significant advances in the ’70s. The Mexican-American-based United Farm Workers, for example, won an important victory in 1975 when California required growers to collectively bargain with the elected representatives from the union. Additionally, La Raza Unida (The United People) party, which was founded in Texas in 1970, promoted Mexican-American candidates for political office in the Southwest and West. Meanwhile, in 1973, Native Americans occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the last confrontation between the Sioux and the Army in 1890. Although the occupation attracted headlines, the government was already making considerable changes in its Native-American policy. Nixon rejected “termination” in favor of supporting tribal autonomy, U.S. HISTORY II

171 333

FROM NIXON TO CARTER

and as a result, the Indian Self-Determination Act (1974) gave the tribes control over federal-aid programs that benefited them. The tribes also became more active in legal action pressing for the treaty rights to land, mineral resources, water, and fisheries. Demographic changes. The 1980 census revealed that the composition and distribution of American society was changing. First, the growth rate of the population during the ’70s was one of the lowest in U.S. history; the baby boom was clearly over. Divorce became more and more common, as did “nonfamily” households in which people lived together who were not related. The population was getting older, and the mandatory retirement age had been raised from 65 to 70 in 1978. New York State actually lost population during the decade, and population growth was extremely modest in the industrial states of the East and Midwest, causing them to be known as the Rust Belt. In contrast, populations in the Sun Belt — Florida, Texas and the Southwest, and California — grew considerably. The Immigration Act of 1965 had ended the national-origins system that had been in place since the 1920s, favoring Northern and Western Europeans. It had also ended the race-based restrictions on immigration from Asia, and these changes in the law were immediately reflected in the ’70s statistics that showed the overwhelming majority of legal immigrants to the United States coming from Asia and Latin America. The fall of South Vietnam created a refugee crisis of major proportions, and 500,000 South Vietnamese entered the country in the last half of the decade. As was historically the case, economic conditions in immigrants’ native countries and the opportunities offered by the United States were the factors that triggered the movement of peoples from around the world. The same factors accounted for increasing illegal immigration during the decade, particularly from Mexico and Central and South America, a trend that continued into the 1980s.

172

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

T

he last two decades of the twentieth century were a time of bold contrasts. During the 1980s, the Cold War intensified, and both the United States and the Soviet Union were menacing superpowers. With the breakup of the USSR, however, the focus of American foreign policy shifted from containing communism to controlling rogue nations (such as Iraq), ethnic conflicts, and international terrorism. The economy remained problematic throughout much of the ’80s, with recession and an exploding deficit. But during the ’90s, the country experienced the most sustained period of economic expansion in its history; talk of keeping the budget balanced gave way to discussions on how to spend the surplus. Meanwhile, beginning with the Reagan presidency, cultural conservatives gained considerable influence in politics through such groups as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. Their impact clearly waned at the end of the century, however, as demonstrated by the country’s lack of support for the impeachment and removal of a president for a sexual affair.

The Reagan Administration Although President Jimmy Carter withstood a challenge in the primaries from Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, he was clearly a weakened president as the 1980 election approached. He was haunted by the Iranian hostage crisis, which seemed to underscore his lack of leadership, the economy had not rebounded, and the Democratic Party remained splintered. The Republicans had gone through primary battles as well but came out of their convention unified behind the ideologically balanced ticket of conservative Ronald Reagan and George Bush (who had attacked Reagan’s economic program as “voodoo economics” before being chosen as his running mate). Although Republican moderate John Anderson of Illinois ran as a third-party candidate, his defection from the Republicans did not effect the outcome of the election. Reagan’s message of lower taxes, smaller government, and renewed American power struck a responsive chord among those people who actually voted. Voter turnout was the lowest since 1948, especially among African-Americans — a group that had supported Carter strongly four years before. Not only

U.S. HISTORY II

173 333

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

did Reagan win an easy electoral and popular victory, but the Republicans also gained a majority in the Senate. Reagan’s economic policies. Reagan proposed using supply-side economics to cut inflation and increase employment. He believed that lower taxes would lead to an expansion of the economy through greater investment, and more revenue would be generated as business grew. In August 1981, Congress passed the Economic Recovery Tax Act, which cut personal income taxes by 25 percent over a three-year period, reduced the maximum tax rate from 70 to 50 percent, and lowered the capital gains tax. In addition to this act, more than $30 billion was cut from an array of social programs, including housing, job training, and school lunches. The theory did not work as planned, however. Although the president claimed that there was still a “safety net” for those truly in need, the number of Americans living in poverty rose. The tax cut was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the military budget, which not even reduced spending on domestic programs could offset. As a result, the budget deficit and the national debt soared to unprecedented levels. To combat inflation, the Federal Reserve Board raised interest rates. With world oil prices falling at the same time, inflation was brought under control. However, the high rates produced a recession, and unemployment climbed to more than 10 percent in 1982. The balance of trade also suffered. Foreign money poured into the United States, as did imports — particularly consumer electronics and cars from Japan. The economy did not begin to recover until 1983, when interest rates fell as inflation dropped and the tax cuts began to stimulate economic growth. With the stock market, consumer spending, and production all up, Reagan coasted to an easy victory in the 1984 election against Carter’s vice president Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run on a major party’s ticket. Mondale did not help his cause when he announced at the Democratic convention that he would raise taxes if elected. Reduction in the size of government was an important element of Reagan’s domestic agenda. This deregulation of key sectors of the economy, such as airlines, savings and loan institutions, and communications, was done with the belief that increased competition would

174

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

ultimately benefit the consumer through better service and lower costs. At the same time, federal agencies and departments either eliminated or did not aggressively enforce regulations already in effect. This policy loosened air pollution control requirements, restrictions on the private use of public lands, and motor vehicle safety regulations (causing a delay in the introduction of air bags). The Cold War revisited. Reagan was a cold warrior of the old school, and he viewed the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” intent on promoting communist revolutions around the world. This perception was reflected in American policy in Central America and the Caribbean. In El Salvador, for example, the United States provided military advisers and financial aid to the right-wing junta (a small administrative council) that was fighting leftist guerrillas backed by Cuba and Nicaragua. Additionally, breaking with the Carter administration’s policy, Reagan turned against the Cuban-supported Sandanista government in Nicaragua and used the CIA to arm and train an opposition force known as the Contras. Even after Congress imposed a ban on such interference in Nicaraguan affairs, assistance to the Contras continued covertly, which contributed to a major scandal during the president’s second term. Meanwhile, in October 1983, American troops invaded the island nation of Grenada and overthrew the leftist, pro-Cuban government. Attempts to project American power beyond the Western Hemisphere were not as successful. In June 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon and drove the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) north to Beirut. This action only further weakened the Lebanese government, which was already facing a civil war between rival Muslim and Christian militia groups. The United States, along with France and Italy, agreed to send troops into Lebanon to maintain order. The peacekeeping force became a target of terrorist groups, and on October 23, 1983, suicide bombers from the Islamic Jihad blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing more than 200 U.S. soldiers. By early 1984, all American forces in Lebanon were withdrawn to ships in the Mediterranean. Terrorism continued to plague the region as Americans and other foreign nationals were taken hostage in Beirut by Iranian-backed factions. The Reagan adminisU.S. HISTORY II

175 333

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

tration had little success in handling the continuing problems in Lebanon or the long-standing issues between Israel and the Palestinians. Arms buildup and the Soviet Union. The perceived threat from the Soviet Union increased Reagan’s commitment to strengthen the military position of the United States. Military spending grew by more than $100 billion during his first term, with the bulk of that money spent on nuclear weapons, such as the cruise missiles that were based in Western Europe. In 1983, the president proposed the most controversial element of his military buildup plan — the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a space-based system that would have the capability to destroy incoming missiles. Critics of SDI dubbed it “Star Wars” and stated that the project did not seem technologically feasible, was far too expensive, and violated the SALT I antiballistic missile provisions. Relations with the Soviet Union were decidedly cool until Reagan’s second term. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev — a proponent of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform) — came to power, and détente seemed to be back on track. The two leaders met in Geneva in 1985 and in Reykjavik, Iceland a year later without coming to any agreement on the major issues that separated the two countries. The key stumbling block in U.S. – Soviet negotiations was Reagan’s insistence on moving ahead with SDI. Reagan and Gorbachev finally achieved a breakthrough on arms reduction in December 1987 during the summit in Washington, D.C., where they signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which eliminated medium-range missiles from Europe. In the treaty, both sides agreed to destroy more than 2,500 nuclear warheads with ranges between 300 and 3,000 miles. The treaty also allowed for on-site inspection to verify compliance. Relations between the two countries visibly improved, and Reagan received a warm welcome when he visited Moscow in May 1988, while Gorbachev announced the start of the withdrawal of Russian troops from Afghanistan at the same time.

176

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

Reagan’s second term. Outside of the INF Treaty, political scandals and problems on Wall Street marred Reagan’s second term. In November 1986, the country learned that the United States had sold arms, primarily antitank missiles, to Iran. The administration justified the arms sales by saying that the United States was supporting moderate elements in Iran. However, it soon became clear that the arms shipments were intended to win the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon by pro-Iranian groups, even though the president had promised on several occasions that the United States would never negotiate with terrorists. The scope of the controversy widened when it was revealed that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a Marine on the staff of the National Security Council, had funneled profits from the arms sales in Iran to the Contras in Nicaragua. This support of the Contras was a clear violation of congressional legislation against providing aid to the guerilla army. In what became known as the IranContra scandal, hearings before a joint House-Senate Committee in 1987 implicated two National Security advisers, the director of the CIA, and the secretaries of Defense and State, and handed down indictments by a special prosecutor. Although the president was not directly implicated in the arms sales or the diversion of the funds, his popularity declined. As Iran-Contra played itself out, the long rise in stock prices during the 1980s came to an end. On October 19, 1987, the stock market crashed, losing more than 500 points in a single day. Reagan claimed that the American economy was fundamentally sound, and many on Wall Street believed the collapse was due to “program trading” — the use of computer programs to buy and sell large blocks of stock. Even so, economists also recognized that the nation’s budget deficit was too high, both the federal government and individual Americans borrowed too much, and imports were far outstripping exports. Many of the problems created during the “Reagan Revolution” would need to be faced by his successor.

U.S. HISTORY II

177 333

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

The Bush Years The Democrats had regained control of the Senate in 1986 and were confident as they went into the 1988 presidential election. During the primaries, there were several interesting challengers for the Democratic nomination, among them Reverend Jesse Jackson, the African-American civil rights leader. In the end, the party turned to Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts who had balanced the state’s budget and had a reputation as a good manager. On the Republican side, Vice President George Bush was chosen as Reagan’s successor, and Reagan campaigned hard for the Bush ticket, which had a relatively unknown senator from Indiana, Dan Quayle, in the second spot. Dukakis ran a surprisingly weak campaign and squandered the substantial lead he had secured in the early polls. Bush went on the offensive with negative ads that attacked Dukakis as being soft on crime, and he questioned his patriotism. The campaign generated no public enthusiasm. Less than half of those eligible to vote actually voted — the smallest turnout in American history — and Bush won a clear victory. The savings and loan crisis and the budget. A former envoy to China, United Nations ambassador, and CIA director, Bush was more comfortable dealing with foreign policy than he was with domestic issues. But domestic problems — especially economic difficulties — plagued his administration. One of the first economic crises Bush faced was the savings and loan (S&L) crisis. Deregulation of the S&L industry in the 1980s had allowed thrift institutions (S&Ls, credit unions, and savings banks) to compete with commercial banks. They began to put money into real estate development, junk bonds, and other high-risk investments. When these investments went bad, hundreds of S&Ls failed. To recoup the depositors’ losses, the Resolution Trust Corporation was set up in 1989 to sell off the banks and their assets. Estimates are that S&L bailout cost American taxpayers between $300 billion and $500 billion. At the Republican convention and during the campaign, Bush had repeatedly emphasized that he would not raise taxes, stating

178

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

“Read my lips: ‘No new taxes.’” Faced with a national debt that was approaching $3 trillion and a deficit that was out of control, the president was forced to renege on that pledge. The budget agreement worked out with Congress in the fall of 1990 combined tax increases with spending cuts both in defense and on social programs and was intended to reduce the deficit by almost $400 billion by 1995. By the time this compromise was worked out, the country was already in the midst of a serious recession. Recession and social problems. The recession began in the summer of 1990 with the typical signs — a fall in retail sales, a drop in the number of new houses being built and, most important, a rise in unemployment. While inflation was not a problem, the unemployment rate reached about 7 percent and affected both white- and bluecollar workers. Many of the nation’s largest companies announced they were downsizing, or dramatically cutting their labor force to trim costs and remain competitive. As many as 25 million Americans were out of work at some time during 1991, and the number of Americans living in poverty rose by two million. Bush’s plan to deal with the recession included a middle-class tax cut, financial help to families buying their first house, tax credits for health insurance, and lower taxes on capital gains. In the eyes of many, these actions came too late. Social ills that had surfaced in the 1980s continued to plague the country. Little progress was made in stemming the tide of the homeless, who included not only drug addicts and the mentally ill but entire families who had slipped from working-poor status to living on the streets. Although the black middle class grew, African-Americans made up a much larger percentage of those in poverty than either Hispanics or whites. Teen pregnancy, violence, and drug addiction were endemic problems in minority communities across the country. Bush declared a war on drugs, but his policy of emphasizing stricter law enforcement, wider use of drug testing, and the interdiction of supply rather than focusing on prevention and treatment proved to be ineffective.

U.S. HISTORY II

179 333

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

Additionally, the federal government had responded slowly to the AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) epidemic when it surfaced in the early 1980s; gay rights activists claimed this was because the disease afflicted homosexuals and intravenous drug users. By the ’90s, the profile of AIDS victims began to change as more women and male heterosexuals were infected. Even without the AIDS crisis, it was becoming very clear that there were serious problems with the nation’s health care system, not the least of which was that more than 30 million Americans had no health insurance at all. The end of the Cold War. In July 1989, Gorbachev repudiated the Brezhnev Doctrine, which had justified the intervention of the Soviet Union in the affairs of communist countries. Within a few months of his statement, the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed — Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, followed by Bulgaria and Romania. The Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, and East and West Germany were reunited within the year. Czechoslovakia eventually split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia with little trouble, but the end of the Yugoslav Federation in 1991 led to years of violence and ethnic cleansing (the expulsion of an ethnic population from a geographic area), particularly in BosniaHerzegovina. The Soviet Union also broke up, not long after an attempted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, and the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania were the first to gain their independence. That December, Gorbachev stepped down and was Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The CIS quickly disappeared, and the republics that had once made up the Soviet Union were recognized as sovereign nations. The end of the Cold War led directly to major nuclear weapons reduction agreements between Bush and the Russian leaders, as well as significant cutbacks in the number of troops the United States committed to the defense of NATO. Other parts of the world presented a challenge to American foreign policy. In the spring of 1989, pro-democracy demonstrations led mostly by students began in Beijing’s Tianamen Square. The Chinese government’s decision to use force to end the protests impaired relations with the United States. Closer to home, Bush ordered the

180

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

invasion of Panama (December 1989) with the goal of removing President Manuel Noriega from power and bringing him to the United States to stand trial for drug trafficking. U.S. forces easily defeated the Panamanian army, but Noriega escaped the dragnet for a time. When he finally gave himself up to American officials, he was tried, convicted, and sent to prison for drug-related crimes, and in the process he revealed his long-time connections with the CIA. However, the most serious challenge to the United States came from Iraq. The Persian Gulf War. In August 1990, Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, invaded and occupied its neighbor Kuwait in a clear act of aggression. The United Nations Security Council condemned Iraq and imposed an international trade embargo on the country. The United States responded with Operation Desert Shield, a buildup of military forces — including troops, aircraft, and ships — in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. This effort quickly became an international operation, with Great Britain, France, and a number of Arab countries providing troops and equipment. By the end of November, the United Nations had approved the use of force to free Kuwait and set January 15, 1991, as the deadline for Iraqi withdrawal. A few days before the deadline, both the House and the Senate authorized the use of the more than 500,000 American troops in the Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf War, officially known as Operation Desert Storm, began on January 17 with a massive air campaign against Iraqi forces in Kuwait and Iraq proper, including Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. Hussein attempted to weaken the international coalition by attacking Israel with SCUD missiles. He hoped that this action would bring Israel into the war and alienate the Arab nations, which were normally anti-Israel, from the coalition. With American Patriot antimissile missiles protecting Israel, Hussein’s attempt to widen the war failed. The ground war began on February 23 and lasted only a few days. The Iraqi troops were decimated, thousands surrendered without a fight, and the remainder fled back into Iraq. The war had freed Kuwait, but it had also left Saddam Hussein still in power, and despite extremely heavy losses, left the Republican Guards — the best of his army — intact. Several other important problems remained unaddressed as well, such as the extent of Iraq’s nuclear, biological, U.S. HISTORY II

181 333

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

and chemical weapons program and the fates of the Kurd minority in the north of the country and that of the Shiite Muslims in the south. Many believed at the time that the international forces should have invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein from power. Iraq and Hussein remained problematic for the United States throughout the 1990s.

The Century’s Last President In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Bush’s popularity reached its high point, and conventional wisdom was that he was almost guaranteed a second term. He and Dan Quayle easily won the Republican nomination for the 1992 election, while Bill Clinton, the little-known governor of Arkansas, headed the Democratic ticket along with Tennessee senator Al Gore. Both Clinton and Gore were baby boomers, and their platform called for job creation, environmental protection, and health care reform. During the primaries and in the campaign, Clinton overcame allegations of marital infidelity to gain popularity in the polls. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the 1992 campaign was the third-party candidacy of H. Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire who understood that the election hinged on Bush’s weakness — the economy. Perot offered an array of solutions to the country’s economic problems, but he was an erratic candidate, dropping out of the race in July and reentering it in October. Although he did not win any one state, Perot took 19 percent of the popular vote, mainly from Republicans. Clinton won the election with 370 electoral votes to Bush’s 168. Health care reform and NAFTA. Clinton’s strength was expected to be domestic policy, but he faced a number of setbacks early in his first term. Congress balked at his $30 billion economic stimulus package, and his proposal that homosexuals be allowed to serve openly in the armed forces generated strong opposition from the military and criticism from the public. Clinton was forced to compromise with a policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” which satisfied neither the Pentagon nor gay rights activists. The most significant early

182

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

setback for the Clinton Administration was the failure of health care reform. There was widespread agreement that the health care system in the United States was in crisis, both in terms of spiraling costs and availability of coverage. The president appointed his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to head a task force examining the problem, but the program that was developed was considered too complicated and relied too heavily on the federal government and employer mandates to win congressional support. One of the major issues of the 1992 election was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which would establish a free trade zone between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. NAFTA was strongly opposed by organized labor, which feared that American companies would shift production to Mexico to take advantage of a cheap workforce. Environmentalists also attacked the agreement, noting that Mexican industry was not subject to the same pollution controls that applied in the United States. The president supported amendments that addressed these concerns, and NAFTA was approved in November 1993. A month later, Clinton won approval for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which lowered trade barriers around the world. The economy rebounds. The Democratic Party suffered a major political defeat when the Republicans gained control of both the Senate and the House in the 1994 midterm elections. Under the leadership of the new Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Republican conservatives put forward a legislative program known as the Contract with America that included a balanced budget. Although Clinton appeared to be seriously weakened politically by the election results, the president was able to hold his own against the Republican Congress. Indeed, as the deficit was reduced and unemployment declined, Clinton sought and received the lion’s share of the credit for the improving economy. (Economists and the administration recognized that the policies of Federal Reserve Board Chair Alan Greenspan to control inflation were also an important factor.) Part of the reason for Clinton’s success was that he began taking a more moderate position on a number of key issues. For instance, despite the opposition of his core liberal constituencies, the president signed the U.S. HISTORY II

183 333

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

Welfare Reform Act (August 1996) that changed Aid to Families with Dependent Children distributions from direct federal assistance to individuals over to block grants to the states to use as they saw fit. Along with its work and training requirements, the legislation marked a major change in welfare policy. The strength of the economy was a key factor in Clinton’s victory in the 1996 election against Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, and he became the first Democrat reelected to the White House since Franklin Roosevelt. Although the Republicans continued to hold a majority in the House and Senate, the president and Congress were able to compromise on deficit-reduction legislation in 1997. The economic growth was so robust that the reduction targets were met much sooner than expected. The budget shortfall that had stood at $290 billion in 1992 turned into a surplus of almost $80 billion in 1999. The stock market remained strong throughout the Clinton presidency, and the unemployment rate dropped to just over 4 percent, which many economists consider full employment. From Whitewater to impeachment. The Clinton administration was plagued by scandal. Early in Clinton’s first term, a special prosecutor was appointed to investigate the Whitewater real estate deal in Arkansas that both the president and first lady were involved in before the 1992 election. After Kenneth Starr became special prosecutor in 1994, the probe was expanded to include the firing of White House travel office personnel, the suicide of a White House lawyer, and the inappropriate use of FBI security files. There were also charges, examined by a Senate committee that the Democrats had engaged in illegal campaign fundraising activities in 1996. Ultimately, however, it was the allegations of sexual misconduct that led to Clinton’s impeachment. Reports surfaced in January 1998 that Clinton had an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Although the affair itself was not illegal, Starr asserted that the president lied about the affair in testimony he gave in a sexual harassment case (stemming from events that occurred when he was governor of Arkansas). Starr maintained that Clinton had encouraged Lewinsky to lie in her affidavit in the same case, and that Clinton had not told the truth about his

184

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

relationship with Lewinsky before a federal grand jury investigating his conduct. Starr submitted his evidence to the House Judiciary Committee in September. Despite the fact that Clinton’s approval rating remained high, the House of Representatives voted, for only the second time in history, to impeach a sitting president. The Senate refused to convict and remove him from office on either the charge of perjury or obstruction of justice. Clinton’s foreign policy. In the 1990s, the United States became the world’s only superpower. Relations with Russia and the People’s Republic of China primarily revolved around trade and economic assistance, rather than strategic confrontation. In Haiti, Clinton’s Administration was successful in forcing the military regime to step down in favor of an elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. In other parts of the world, Clinton tried, as Bush had done, to exercise American foreign policy within an international framework, such as the United Nations or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The president used military force against Iraq to enforce UN sanctions (particularly inspections seeking evidence of weapons of mass destruction) and to respond to Saddam Hussein’s provocations against his neighbors and the Iraqi Kurds. One of the most intractable problems in the 1990s was the Balkans. In 1993, the United States pressed its NATO allies to take action to stop the ethnic cleansing occurring in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Although reluctant to commit American ground troops, the United States allowed American aircraft to take part in United Nationsapproved attacks against Serbian forces in the region. U.S. soldiers participated as peacekeepers in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the Dayton Accords (November 1995), which were negotiated by State Department official Richard Holbrook. Clinton was determined to keep the ethnic conflict from spreading throughout the region, but this goal proved impossible to accomplish. Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovicz intensified his campaign against ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo in 1998. Although the conflict was a civil war between the ethnic-Albanian-based Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian troops and police, acts of violence against the ethnic Albanian civilian population by Serbian forces brought international U.S. HISTORY II

185 333

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1980

condemnation. When Milosovicz refused to end the conflict through a political settlement, NATO — with the United States assuming the lead — began a massive air campaign against targets in Serbia and Kosovo.

186

CLIFFS QUICK REVIEW