Discussion questions
10.1 Origins of the Cold War
World War II left most of Europe in shambles. Millions were homeless because the war destroyed thousands of homes, businesses, and public buildings. The European economy was similarly devastated, with much of the industrial infrastructure destroyed or heavily damaged. Great Britain was heavily in debt to the United States and was forced to borrow even more to begin reconstruction. The Soviet Union had suffered severe population losses, including nearly 8.7 million military deaths and 19 million noncombat deaths from starvation, disease, and German prison camps and mass shootings. The USSR also experienced a significant reduction in industrial and food production in the immediate postwar period.
Unable to quickly rebuild, European business elites, conservatives, and even liberals lost ground to Socialists and Communists, who supported the nationalization of banks, manufacturing, and utilities. Smaller European nations such as Greece and Italy also saw major advances by their own homegrown Communist parties. At the war’s end, the United States, with its political stability and rapid economic growth, stood as the lone strong nation among the struggling former combatants. Still, some feared that a Communist upsurge could shake the United States and challenge the nation’s traditions of free enterprise and capitalism.
In this uncertain environment, despite its huge losses, the Soviet Union was the only other world power that had the ideological confidence and military might to join the United States in shaping the new world order. Although the United States and the USSR depended on one another for victory in the war, the alliance between them was tenuous. The Soviets’ Communist-based ideology, culture, and economic system, as well as the dictatorial control of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, stood in stark contrast to American democratic values and capitalism. Although some hoped that the alliance between the two nations would last beyond the war, the relationship quickly began to unravel once the common threat of German aggression was removed.
The United States and the Soviet Union became locked in a protracted struggle in which their clash of ideas and values was as central as their military and diplomatic rivalry. Beginning in the immediate postwar era, this so-called Cold War was as integral to the restructuring of the new world order as was the physical rebuilding of war-torn Europe and Japan.
Roots of the Conflict
When Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency following Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he faced some of the most delicate and worrisome troubles of any American president. With little experience in international affairs, he confronted the growing division between the United States and the Soviet Union that began during the war, as evidenced in the tensions over Poland at the Yalta conference. His decisions during and immediately after World War II fostered a half century of global competition with the USSR that held dramatic consequences for the entire world.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union hoped to reshape the world according to their own values, beliefs, and economic systems. The growth of global institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank fostered the American vision of a world based on democracy, international cooperation, and economic prosperity, especially in Western Europe and Asia. The Soviets, who occupied significant parts of Eastern Europe and Germany at the war’s end, sought to spread their influence and Communist system to that region of the world. Concern arose that the Soviets were building an empire of sorts through their influence in Eastern Europe and that the free Polish elections Stalin had promised at Yalta would not materialize.
Truman’s response to these developments included actions that were intended to win allies and achieve access to free markets and raw materials, as well as spread freedom and democracy. As president, he bore responsibility for maintaining a precarious balance between actions that enhanced postwar economic growth and those that might halt the spread of Soviet influence.
American diplomat George Kennan offered Truman and his secretary of state a close assessment of the USSR in his so-called Long Telegram, issued from Moscow in February 1946. He told the president that it appeared the Soviets were seeking to expand their power. He advised that the Soviets’ “neurotic view of world affairs” was rooted in a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.” Kennan worried that the Soviets would spread their influence to people “in Europe at least, [who] are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security” (Kennan, 1946). He advised the United States to take action to contain or counter this Soviet expansionism. This was the first assertion of the containment policy that came to guide American actions during the Cold War (Casey, 2001).
The first conflict of the Cold War emerged from the Soviet occupation of northern Iran, where Stalin sought control over that nation’s immense oil resources. Pressure from the United States and Britain, and especially a resolution from the UN Security Council, resulted in a withdrawal, but the USSR was not so willing to back away from Eastern Europe, which it had occupied since the end of the war.
At Yalta, Britain and the United States tacitly agreed to allow the Soviet Union to influence Eastern European nations and direct reconstruction there. The Soviets installed and supported Communist-friendly governments in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. Some of the governments of Eastern Europe were chosen through elections, as Stalin had promised, but manipulation of the electoral process assured that Soviet Communist influence spread to the region. Instead of developing free and democratic governments, these Eastern European nations fell under Soviet control and aligned ideologically with communism. The Soviets justified their actions in Eastern Europe as analogous to Britain’s empire building in Asia and Africa or U.S. interventions in Latin America.
Fear of spreading communism was a real and palpable concern for leaders elsewhere in Europe as well. Citizens of many European nations welcomed the ideas behind the Communist philosophy. Government control of transportation systems and utilities, for example, helped restore badly needed services to war-torn areas, and many supported whatever measures would restore prewar life as soon as possible. For these reasons, Communist Party membership increased dramatically from the Depression era through 1947. In Italy, party membership grew from 5,000 to an incredible 1.7 million. In Czechoslovakia, Communist numbers rose from 28,000 to 750,000, and in Greece from 17,000 to 70,000 (Goldberg, Rearden, & Condit, 1984).
By stark contrast, the United States witnessed a sharp decline in Communist Party membership. Peaking at between 75,000 and 85,000 members in 1945, mostly union workers, by 1956 the party held fewer than 22,000 members and continued to steadily decline (Davis, 1992).
Containment and the Truman Doctrine
Early in 1947, conflict in Greece and Turkey spurred Truman to make his first application of the containment policy. A civil war in Greece pitted a weak monarch against a growing Communist rebellion. Farther to the south and east, Turkey was under pressure from the Soviets to allow them access to the waterway linking the Black and the Mediterranean Seas. Both nations struggled with corrupt and undemocratic governments. Initially receiving British aid, both governments faced possible overthrow when the British announced they were no longer able to afford to keep their troops in that region and planned to focus attention on their own reconstruction. The British asked the Americans to take over their role and especially to provide monetary aid.
Although neither country faced a direct Soviet takeover, American officials, concerned that instability in the region might cut off Western access to the oil-rich Middle East, urged action. Senate leader Arthur Vandenberg advised the president to intervene in Greece and Turkey, a radical departure for American foreign policy (T. Morgan, 2003). According to Vandenberg, if Truman wanted to get people to support this new direction, he should “make a personal appearance before Congress and scare hell out of the country” (as cited in Lucas, 1999, p. 8).
On March 12, 1947, Truman addressed a joint session of Congress and declared, “At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.” He then presented two options. One choice was for nations to be governed by the will of the majority. This occurred, as in the United States, when nations had representative governments and supported freedoms of speech, liberty, and religion.
The other option, the one chosen by the Soviet Union, was government by the will of the minority and the use of terror and oppression to impose a way of life. Soviet officials fixed elections, controlled the press, and suppressed personal freedoms. Truman concluded by saying:
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. . . . We must take immediate and resolute action. (as cited in Merrill & Paterson, 2009, p. 201)
This new policy, dubbed the Truman Doctrine, fundamentally shaped the United States’ approach to the Cold War by providing justification for America to exert its influence, promote the growth of democracy, and resist the spread of communism throughout the world. Truman argued, for example, that on the basis of this policy the United States should support the pro-Western government in Greece with a monetary commitment, though not with American troops.
Some in Congress expressed concern that the plan increased the powers of the president and represented a significant economic burden, but the growing fears about a world split between communism and democracy overrode those reservations. Initiating a long-lasting Cold War consensus in Congress, Republicans and Democrats authorized $400 million to support Greece in its civil war and neighboring Turkey with military aid (T. Morgan, 2003). “Scaring the hell” out of the American people helped set the stage for the paranoid tone of the Cold War.
The United States and the World
The shift in foreign policy under the Truman Doctrine necessitated a reorganization and redirection of diplomatic energy and the creation of new government structures aimed at containing communism. The National Security Act of 1947 combined the Department of War and the Department of the Navy to create a Department of Defense and further defined and consolidated military command. A Joint Chiefs of Staff composed of a representative from each military division advised the secretary of defense, a new cabinet-level post. The act also created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to engage in secret military actions and gather intelligence abroad. Coordinating actions of the CIA and various military branches was the National Security Council, a body of presidential advisors knowledgeable on issues of foreign policy and military action (Walker, 1993).
Military power and covert intelligence gathering thus formed one arm of the nation’s containment policy. Economic aid and stimulus to rebuild war-torn Europe formed a separate and softer means of enticing Europeans to look favorably on the democratic philosophy of the United States. In Asia the United States sought to use economic and political tools to transform Japan from an enemy into a regional anti-Communist ally. None of these efforts, however, could completely forestall a more direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The Marshall Plan
Two years after the war, much of Europe had yet to rebuild; many nations experienced widespread food and supply shortages. Dealing with millions of displaced citizens and the destruction of infrastructure and industry proved to be a daunting task. Despite internal European efforts, reconstruction was a slow process, and Americans grew concerned that more of these vulnerable nations could fall under Soviet influence and control. From the Soviet perspective, the slow reconstruction provided a compelling argument that capitalism was failing in Europe and that communism had more to offer the war-torn nations.
The Americans therefore viewed an economic plan to rebuild Europe as a nonmilitary form of containment, which would also provide important new markets for American manufactured goods. Secretary of State George Marshall outlined such a plan for European recovery in his commencement address before the graduating class of Harvard University in June 1947. Instead of the usual oratory dwelling on the graduates’ future achievement, Marshall detailed the rationale for promoting economic stability that he believed would engender political strength in Europe.
As army chief of staff during the war, Marshall had overseen the country’s massive military expansion and planned many of its military campaigns, and he was intimately familiar with Europe’s postwar needs. A career soldier from rural Pennsylvania and a distant descendant of Chief Justice John Marshall, his extensive military and diplomatic experience lent his Marshall Plan much credibility.
Marshall’s plan required all European nations to organize and administer American aid themselves. It also did not exclude the Soviet Union. Marshall told the graduates:
Any government that is willing to assist in recovery will find full co-operation on the part of the USA. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. (as cited in Schain, 2001)
The United States committed billions of dollars, eventually spending more than $12 billion, for the rebuilding effort. The aid went entirely to Western European nations, since the Soviets rejected it and urged those Eastern European countries under its sphere of influence to reject it as well. Accepting aid from the United States would have undermined the Soviet’s superpower standing, and the plan’s provision requiring American review of recipient nations’ finances was seen as an unreasonable imposition on Soviet sovereignty.
American leaders were not surprised and never expected to extend aid to the Soviets. Although the financial assistance was desperately needed, the plan came with strings attached. It was devised to adhere Europeans to the United States and prevent the rise of radical leaders and the spread of communism. The Marshall Plan thus helped define the line dividing communism and democracy in Europe.
Within 3 years the plan was so successful that Western European nations regained prewar production and consumption levels; in addition, their consumers became reliant on American manufactured and consumer products. The financial investment further spurred the U.S. economy because American firms and factories produced the goods and services necessary for rebuilding. In addition to direct financial aid, the United States negotiated trade agreements, known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade with more than 20 European nations. These provided for free trade among member nations and solidified important markets for American products (Walker, 1993). In 1953 Secretary of State Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts at restructuring the European economy.
Rebuilding Japan and a New Alliance
Allied military occupation followed Japan’s surrender in August 1945. Acting as supreme commander, U.S. general Douglas MacArthur guided the nation until a democratic constitution was enacted in 1948. Shaped by MacArthur’s strong influence, the constitution renounced any future involvement in war and disbanded Japan’s military, leaving only a small force for basic defense. Constructed under military occupation, Japan’s new constitution expanded democracy, giving women the right to vote for the first time in the nation’s history (Fujimura-Fanselow & Kameda, 1995).
The economic rebuilding of Japan also concerned the United States. At first aiming to demolish Japanese industries linked to military buildup, American policy shifted when, in October 1949, just a month after the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapon, the lengthy civil war within China ended with Communist Mao Tse-tung ousting China’s nationalist government and creating the People’s Republic of China.
Mao’s alliance with Stalin sparked fears that most of Asia would fall under Communist control. The United States refocused energy on the economic reconstruction of Japan, shoring up its position as an anti-Communist ally in the region. Thanks to U.S. support and limited military spending, the Japanese economy boomed in the 1950s, leading it to become an important economic force in the second half of the 20th century.
Berlin Blockade
Economic redevelopment initiatives could not completely subvert growing military tensions. The Berlin Blockade, lasting from June 24, 1948 to May 12, 1949, was an early international crisis of the emerging Cold War. Like Japan, Germany came under allied occupation at the end of World War II, and it was divided into four zones, each governed by one of the major Allied powers. Berlin, the historic capital, fell in the Soviet zone but remained under joint control. As Cold War tensions grew, the United States, Britain, and France sought to combine their German zones into a new nation called West Germany, with its own currency and closer alignment with the democratic West. The Soviet Union responded to this move by blocking Allied access to resupply their sectors of Berlin.
For 11 months the Allies airlifted supplies to the citizens of West Berlin. In what was dubbed “Operation Vittles,” U.S. Air Force pilots flew hundreds of missions to drop bundles of food, fuel, and other necessities to be collected by waiting Berliners. In addition to basic provisions, some pilots dropped chocolate bars, chewing gum, and other treats meant especially for the German children.
A leader of Operation Vittles was Col. Gail S. “Hal” Halvorsen, dubbed the “Candy Pilot.” Beginning with just a few dropped treats, Halvorsen’s movement gained press attention, and subsequent donations allowed him and other pilots to drop more than 23 tons of candies and treats bundled and attached to little parachutes. American schoolchildren collected candy and assembled parachutes. German youth, accustomed during the war to hide at the sound of approaching airplanes, soon learned to run to try to grab as many bundles as possible.
Halvorsen recalled, “When I flew over the airport I could see the children down below, I wiggled my wings and the little group went crazy. I can still see their arms in the air, waving at me” (as cited in Tunnell, 2010, p. ix). More than providing a treats to the children of Berlin and other provisions, the airlift succeeded in breaking the blockade, which Stalin lifted in June 1949. The airlift was also a victory for containment policy, preventing the spread of communism into West Germany. Ideological division of Berlin and of Germany continued for the remainder of the Cold War, finally ending with German reunification in 1991.
Collective Security
As the world moved to rebuild in the postwar period, thoughts also turned toward preventing future conflict and establishing collective security measures. Securing a lasting peace guided the ideology of American policy makers, as did preventing the spread of Soviet influence beyond Eastern Europe. Although the U.S. isolationist philosophy had prevented involvement in the League of Nations in 1920, following World War II the United States stood as one of two superpowers and accepted its role in the global community.
Once the Soviet Union demonstrated its military might by testing its own atomic weapon, it was even more essential to check further conflict. Those European nations subjected to Nazi occupation also feared the rearmament of Germany and sought protection. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) formed as an intergovernmental military alliance to provide mutual defense in the event of a future attack by a non-NATO member, especially the Soviet Union. At its founding the organization’s 12 members included all of the Western European Allies and the United States. Central also to NATO was West Germany, which was under control of NATO member nations.
10.2 The Postwar Era at Home
Cold War concerns did not stop Americans from experiencing prosperity and growth. Programs such as the GI Bill, formally the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, offered veterans substantial benefits. Low-interest mortgages and business loans, tuition payments for college, and a year of unemployment compensation helped to reintegrate service members and elevate their economic status. Record union membership across such important industries as auto and steel production raised many into the swelling middle class. Expanding military spending brought even more employment opportunities, and new government-sponsored technology transferred into the design and production of new consumer goods, including personal computers, computer operating systems, and nuclear-powered energy.
The postwar era was also fraught with domestic conflict, however. Believing that the growth of unions gave the working class too much power and increased the cost of doing business, some pushed to restrict collective bargaining rights. Other segments of society sought to suppress the rising expectations of African Americans, including many who served valiantly during the war. A political movement in the southern states sought to ensure the continuance of Jim Crow segregation and White supremacy.
Truman’s Fair Deal
Although he embraced many of the policies of his predecessor, Truman also established his own domestic agenda, known as the Fair Deal. It included 21 provisions, many of which proposed to greatly expand the social welfare programs of the New Deal. Truman sought to expand benefits for returning veterans, enhance unemployment insurance, and increase subsidies for farmers. He called for more public works programs to build up the nation’s infrastructure, a standard minimum wage of 75 cents per hour, environmental conservation, and a major overhaul of the tax structure. Most controversially, his Fair Deal proposed a national system of health insurance and revisions to the Social Security Act to provide pensions to the disabled and to expand its roles to include previously excluded occupations such as farm labor and domestic service.
Liberals and labor leaders backed Truman’s programs, but he did not enjoy the congressional Democratic majority of FDR’s presidency. Large numbers of Republicans prevailed in the 1946 midterm elections, giving the party control of both houses of Congress for the first time in more than 2 decades. Republicans in Congress refused to take up many of Truman’s Fair Deal policies and instead pushed their own agenda.
Postwar Labor and Operation Dixie
After the war, the nation’s most powerful labor unions, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, sponsored a series of strikes, and the CIO launched Operation Dixie, a drive to bring collective bargaining to workers in southern states. In response, while Truman pushed to expand liberal-minded policies through his Fair Deal, congressional politics turned more conservative, seeking among other things to rein in labor militancy.
Despite the guarantees under the 1935 Wagner Act, conservative business leaders and politicians had minimized the impact of unions in most southern industries during the Depression. During World War II, labor shortages finally pushed southern wages up, and more than 800,000 workers in the region, including a significant number of African Americans, joined unions. In 1946 labor leaders pressed to extend the gains before the momentum waned. Operation Dixie thus pitted entrenched conservatives against liberal-minded labor advocates.
Van A. Bittner of the United Steelworkers was among the more than 200 labor organizers seeking to unionize workers in textile mills and other industries across the South beginning in the summer of 1946. Along with leaders of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA), Bittner focused operations on three southern states with the largest number of mills: North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
A balding man with glasses, Bittner hardly fit the stereotype of the union organizer as a heavily muscled and unintelligent thug, an image left over from the early years of the labor struggles. He issued press releases calling the union drive a “great crusading movement on behalf of humanity” (as cited in Minchin, 1997). The goal was raising wages through unionization, because Bittner and his colleagues believed that only economic improvement could lead to political change.
Operation Dixie proved to be an utter failure. Bittner and other organizers underestimated the resistance from the political and industrial leadership of the South. When Bittner was unable to provide immediate results, the international council of the CIO cut funding for the unionization drive, and in succeeding years the number of textile workers enjoying collective bargaining actually shrank.
Funding cuts were only one reason the drive failed. Textile mills tended to operate in tightly organized company towns, where industrialists controlled housing, schools, and churches. Many southern workers were suspicious of outside union organizers, and police, local politicians, and community leaders were sometimes outright hostile to men such as Bittner. Organizers did make some inroads in organizing African American workers, but many working-class White people rejected interracial solidarity.
Undoing Labor’s New Deal
The failure of Operation Dixie and the triumph of Republicans in Congress brought a surge in conservative policies. Congress pushed aside Truman’s Fair Deal and instead passed a series of laws designed to benefit the interests of business and the rich. Overriding Truman’s veto, Republicans lowered taxes across the nation by $5.5 billion, with wealthy Americans benefiting most (McNeese, 2010b).
Congress also moved to push back labor gains of the previous decade and a half. In 1947, again over Truman’s veto, Congress passed the Taft–Hartley Act to amend the New Deal’s Wagner Act. Robert Taft and Fred Hartley, Republican senators from Ohio and New Jersey, respectively, devised the plan, which was officially called the Labor–Management Relations Act of 1947. It reduced the powers of labor unions while at the same time increasing the legal reporting unions were required to provide the federal government.
Among its several provisions, Taft–Hartley permitted states to enact what were known as right-to-work laws that prohibited “closed shops” or “union shops,” where union membership was required for employment. It also outlawed labor unions’ contributions to federal primary and general election campaigns. Supporters argued that the law reduced irresponsible and illegal actions by labor leaders. Detractors saw it as a “slave-labor law,” arguing that it stripped workers of their rights and placed total power in the workplace in the hands of employers.
In his veto message Truman said the bill represented a bitter divide between Democrats and Republicans. Taft–Hartley proved to be one of the most consequential laws of the 20th century. It fostered the pushback of union gains under the New Deal and tempered the wage and benefit gains of the war years. Many states, particularly in the U.S. South, passed right-to-work laws that effectively limited workers from joining unions and stopped national unionization drives in their tracks. Eventually, when international economic competition threatened, industrialists would move their operations to right-to-work states to reduce labor costs.
The 1948 Election
Truman’s Fair Deal agenda did not achieve what he had hoped, and his political future was at stake as the 1948 presidential election approached. Doubling down on his liberal domestic initiatives, he followed the advice of a special commission on civil rights and lent support, though somewhat reluctantly, to a program pressing for civil rights and equal treatment of African Americans and other minorities in housing, employment, education, and the court system. Never working too hard on his legislative agenda, Truman waited for Congress to act on the proposal, but a coalition of some Republicans and southern Democrats blocked each measure.
When the liberal wing of the Democratic Party called for desegregation of the military at its 1948 nominating convention, Truman responded on July 26 with Executive Order 9981, which provided the president’s guarantee that all members of the U.S. military receive equal treatment and opportunity regardless of their race, color, religion, or national origin. Opposition among military leaders would delay full implementation of desegregation until the Korean War erupted in 1950, but Truman’s record favoring civil rights legislation provoked rapid response among his party’s southern delegates.
A group of southern Democrats led by South Carolinian Strom Thurmond stormed out of the convention and created a distinct party, known as the States’ Rights Party, or the Dixiecrats, which aimed to maintain Jim Crow laws, White supremacy, and racial segregation. The Dixiecrats posed a serious threat to the future of the Democratic Party. Through the first half of the 20th century, southern Whites voted solidly Democratic, but opposition to liberal ideas, and the increasing push for civil rights, weakened the party’s hold on the so-called solid South (Karabell, 2000).
Another fragmentation split the Democratic Party on the left. Those opposing Truman’s Cold War policies nominated former vice president Henry Wallace under the banner of the Progressive Party. Women such as Eslanda Goode Robeson, Shirley Du Bois (both African American), and Betty Friedan formed an important block of Progressive Party supporters. Robeson, an anthropologist, was the wife of the actor Paul Robeson, and Du Bois, a writer, was wed to scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Friedan, at the time a journalist for a labor publication, later became the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and published The Feminine Mystique, which sparked the second wave of feminism in the United States.
Through the Progressive Party these women and others pushed for an end to segregation, for world peace, and for an acceptance of Soviet influence in Europe (Castledine, 2012). Wallace’s candidacy also attracted liberals, Communists, and Socialists, later bringing party members under close scrutiny for potential disloyalty.
Truman won the Democratic nomination and faced Republican New York governor Thomas Dewey, as well as Thurmond and Wallace, in November. The president launched a whistle-stop campaign, riding a train through the country and giving speeches along the way. He worked tirelessly to win votes, gaining strength from enthusiastic audience shouts like, “Give ‘em hell, Harry!” Even with these grassroots efforts, Dewey’s lead appeared insurmountable. Dewey’s widespread appeal resulted from his support and advocacy of the business community. During the campaign he spoke out against government inefficiency and the Communist threat but avoided military or defense issues.
It seemed so certain that Dewey would win on the night of the election that the Chicago Tribune printed the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” for the morning edition (as cited in Halberstam, 2008). Surprising nearly everyone, the final tally of the actual votes in the early morning hours showed that Truman was victorious, earning nearly 50% of the popular vote. The election also gave Democrats control of both the House and Senate, a gain not seen since 1932.
Anticommunism and the Cold War at Home
Cold War ideology and policies altered life in America. The military buildup begun during World War II continued in the postwar era, and national security became the buzzword justifying spending. Government funding supported new research programs at major universities, and a system of federal highways seemed necessary to easily evacuate large populations should a nuclear attack materialize. The Federal Highway Act of 1956, for example, appropriated $25 billion for the construction of an interstate highway system to be completed over a 10-year period.
Infrastructure construction and military spending prevented a postwar economic downturn as programs for new and improved aircraft, weapons, and even the first computers took shape. Much of the government defense spending funneled into Sunbelt states, those south from Virginia to Florida and west to the Pacific coast. New weaponry and military installations located there largely thanks to powerful senators and representatives from those states. Funds for highway and infrastructure construction also heavily favored the Sunbelt as evidenced by the construction of Interstate 10, which stretches from Florida to California.
Despite the economic benefits of the Cold War, many Americans began to look on the government with suspicion. The Cold War led to secret government operations that left the public wondering about the government’s motives and activities during the Cold War and beyond. To give just one example, testing of atomic weapons continued in the desert of Nevada without the warning that each explosion exposed nearby residents to dangerous levels of radiation.
Americans also began to consider how divisions within U.S. society influenced safety at home and abroad. In the wake of growing independence movements in colonial Africa and Asia, for instance, some began to rethink racial policies that permitted segregation and discrimination. Immigration restriction polices were also relaxed, to a degree, to allow in a few refugees from Communist-controlled countries.
While some Americans began to regard the government with suspicion, many more turned a watchful eye on their fellow citizens. Americans began to redefine what it meant to be patriotic, expecting loyal citizens to salute the flag, support the military and the government, and be ready to call out Communist or disloyal activity. A growing number of U.S. residents and others soon found themselves considered disloyal. These included, as in years past, radicals and Communists, but suspicion extended as well to those who expressed any dissent.
Almost as soon as the Cold War was underway, fear arose that communism would take root in the United States. The National Security Council warned that the Communists’ “preferred technique is to subvert by infiltration and intimidation” (as cited in Field, 2005, pp. 3–4). It insisted that Americans must be alert to the potential Communist penetration of “labor unions, civic enterprises, schools, churches, and all media for influencing opinion” (as cited in Field, 2005, p. 4). Fear that communism could spread into American politics, culture, and other important institutions drove a movement to identify elements of disloyalty and eradicate them.
Anti-Communist Politics
Anticommunism influenced partisan politics at both the national and grassroots level. A number of national politicians called for investigations to preserve internal security. In 1947, just before announcing the Truman Doctrine, Truman increased FBI funding and implemented a screening system for federal employees to root out Communists and Communist sympathizers. He also asked the attorney general to compile a list of potentially subversive organizations.
Meanwhile, congressional committees conducted more than 75 hearings on Communist subversion between 1945 and 1952, most famously those held by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Originally created in 1938, the HUAC investigated potential disloyalty among Hollywood actors and directors, college professors, labor leaders, writers, and even federal employees. Those appearing before the committee were urged to affirm their U.S. loyalty and also to name other known Communists.
Many entertainers, including Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, were placed on a Hollywood blacklist and became unable to work in the motion picture industry. Walt Disney, the founder and head of Disney Studios, testified that communism was rampant in the entertainment industry. Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan provided the committee with the names of a number of actors he believed to be Communist sympathizers (Cannon, 2003).
Homosexuals and Disloyalty
The well-publicized House committee and other government investigations also targeted segments of society and organizations that appeared to be gaining too much social ground. Some believed, for instance, that Communists funded African American organizations such as the NAACP, and others perceived racial advances such as the desegregation of the military as Communist plots.
The anti-Communist hysteria also subjected homosexuals to suspicion. Of special concern was evidence that homosexuals, who were considered “deviants,” passed as straight, in the same way that Communists might operate without detection in government positions. As both a gay man and an African American, novelist James Baldwin came under the watchful eye of the FBI, which eventually compiled a 1,700-page file on his writings and personal behavior.
Baldwin found his name placed on the Security Index, a list of so-called dangerous individuals who purportedly posed a threat to national security. The author of multiple novels, plays, essays, and poems detailing the lives of African Americans, Baldwin voluntarily left the United States for Paris in 1948. Although considered one of the most prolific African American writers of the 20th century, Baldwin was not welcome in Cold War America (Field, 2005).
10.3 Republicans Resurgent
Popular dissent and disagreement with Truman’s policies allowed the Republican Party to look forward to potential victory in the 1952 presidential election. One of the major sources of discontent was Truman’s handling of an escalating conflict within the Asian nation of Korea, the first military conflict of the Cold War.
The Korean War
The Berlin Blockade was a minor skirmish in comparison to the Cold War escalation that followed. Once both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed atomic weapons, the possibility of nuclear war began to loom large. In 1950 the National Security Council encouraged a massive military rearmament. Issuing a 50-page secret document, National Security Council paper 68, known as NSC-68, the council also forcefully restated Kennan’s containment policy, claiming that the United States must take the lead in preventing the spread of communism. Historians also suggest that the military buildup added importantly to restoring economic stability and balance between the United States and the nations aided under the Marshall Plan (Cardwell, 2011).
Despite the ideological conflicts and growing nuclear arsenal, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States directly attacked the other during the Cold War. Instead, they played out the conflict in other, smaller regions. One of the first of these was Korea. In the aftermath of World War II, American and Russian troops occupied portions of the country, and both nations were reluctant to relinquish territory. Much like in postwar Germany, the leaders divided the nation, splitting Korea at the 38th parallel, with the United States occupying the South and the Soviets the North. Both nations ceased their occupation in 1949, but the Soviets left a Communist regime in the North. At the same time, South Korea’s government was friendly toward the United States.
One year later, North Korea invaded South Korea, taking over its capital in Seoul. The United States, drawing on the containment policy and especially NSC-68, immediately pledged military assistance to South Korea. The United Nations similarly condemned the invasion in UN Security Council Resolution 82, and in a subsequent resolution it recommended a member state military force to deal with the conflict. Truman appointed Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the commander of a United Nations force, but in reality it was predominantly made up of American troops.
This began the Korean War, a dangerous time when the Cold War “turned hot” and brought the world to the brink of another world war. Like the conflict over Berlin, this marked a moment when the United States drew a line and told the Soviet Union that it would not tolerate further expansion. According to some, the conflict was “a war we can’t win, we can’t lose, and we can’t quit” (Dickson, 2004, p. 257).
U.S. troops were central to the UN fighting force and especially to the Battle of Inchon in September 1950. MacArthur’s amphibious landing led to an attack behind North Korean lines, resulting in a UN victory and, within 2 weeks, the recapture of the South Korean capital at Seoul and the eventual occupation of much of the North. In October, however, the tide turned when the UN forces approached North Korea’s border with China. The Chinese warned MacArthur not to cross the Yalu River, but he refused to respect this boundary. More than 100,000 Chinese troops flooded into to the conflict, driving MacArthur’s force back across the 38th parallel.
The war demonstrated one of the downsides to limited warfare. Even though the United States was a strong military power and possessed a nuclear arsenal, some feared the other nations might interpret its reluctance to use its most devastating weapons as cowardice. There was direct evidence of this perspective from Mao Tse-tung, who in a 1946 interview with the journalist Anna Louise Strong, said:
The atom bomb is a paper tiger with which the US reactionaries try to terrify the people. It looks terrible, but in fact is not. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass destruction, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new weapons. (as cited in Engelhardt, 2007, p. 160)
The final battles in Korea during the first half of 1951 were more political than military, which seemed to reinforce Mao’s sentiment. While Truman attempted to negotiate a settlement, MacArthur took matters in his own hands and issued his own, unauthorized ultimatum to China in which he demanded peace and threatened all-out war. He tried to convince Truman that he should pursue the Chinese and push northward, or even possibly use nuclear weapons. The president disagreed, and MacArthur publicly criticized Truman’s decision. The general believed that as a professional military leader, he knew more about the proper way to manage the conflict, and he chafed at the civilian (presidential) military control inherent in the American tradition.
The president was incensed by the action and fired MacArthur for insubordination. MacArthur returned to the United States and was met with enthusiastic supporters. In his final speech, he said, “I am closing 52 years of military service. . . . Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. I now close my military career and just fade away. Goodbye” (as cited in Imparato, 2000, p. 167). Although the nation’s top military leaders supported MacArthur’s removal, the political fallout followed him. The peace negotiations that began in July 1951 dragged on for 2 more years while thousands more U.S. servicemen died. The nation was poised for a change.
Eisenhower and the Republican Cold War
The 1952 presidential election gave Republicans their first chance to regain the White House since the Great Depression. Foreign policy challenges emanating from his containment policy, the failure of his domestic agenda, and finally his firing of the popular MacArthur ruined Truman’s chances for reelection. He had underestimated the public reaction to his Korea strategy, and his approval numbers plummeted. Republican senator Robert Taft even threatened impeachment.
Amid the controversy, Truman bowed out of contention for the Democratic nomination. After much scrambling at their convention, the Democrats nominated Illinois governor Adlai E. Stevenson, whose moderate political stance proved acceptable to both labor and southern party loyalists.
Former Allied supreme commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower claimed the Republican nomination. As a military hero he supported Truman’s foreign policy agenda, but he argued that the Democratic Party had mismanaged the Korean War and the attack on communism. His military hero popularity won him the Republican nomination over Ohio senator Robert Taft, the other leading Republican contender. Taft believed in nonintervention and planned to cut military spending. Campaigning under the slogan “I like Ike,” Eisenhower’s Republican agenda argued for a campaign against “communism, Korea, and corruption” (Polsby, Wildavsky, Schier, & Hopkins, 2012, p. 244). His vice presidential running mate was a young Richard Nixon, a California senator.
Eisenhower’s military expertise proved helpful in settling the Korean conflict. He personally traveled to Korea in December 1952, where he visited troops and subsequently used both diplomacy and a threat of additional military action to force an end to the fighting. An armistice negotiated in July 1953 left Korea divided at the 38th parallel. A 2-mile-wide demilitarized zone separated North and South Korea, and communism was contained to the north. As many as 20,000 American troops remain in the conflict zone even in the early 21st century, and the dispute between North and South Korea has yet to be resolved.
Spending for the Korean War had expanded U.S. defenses across the globe, making America the world’s supreme military power. But the massive military buildup that NSC-68 recommended was tempered following the war. Military spending peaked in 1953, after which spending on traditional military equipment and armaments dropped (McClenahan & Becker, 2011). Eisenhower’s Cold War strategy focused on covert actions by the CIA or small military assignments through special operations engagements. He saw this as more efficient and effective means of pursuing the nation’s goal of containing communism.
The Korean War taught U.S. commanders an important lesson. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, Eisenhower’s army chief of staff, warned of the dangers of ever fighting another land war in Asia, and the president agreed. Yet the United States was already funneling aid to the French in Indochina (today’s Vietnam) in the hope that the French could maintain their colonial holdings and stave off the encroachment of communism in that region.
Massive Retaliation
Containment was the guiding principle during the Truman years, but during the Eisenhower administration Secretary of State John Foster Dulles redefined America’s foreign policy as massive retaliation. In his opinion, the Truman administration responded too passively to the Communist threat. His goal was to not just prevent the spread of communism, but to also build such a stockpile of nuclear weapons that the Soviets would retreat from their plans of world domination (George & Smoke, 1974).
Eisenhower believed nuclear weapons made military and economic sense. It was more cost-effective to build and house a vast nuclear arsenal than it was to enlist, equip, and train a large military force. Dulles agreed and said nuclear weapons provided “more bang for the buck” or, in terms that the Soviets would understand, “More rubble for the Ruble” (as cited in Evangelista, 2002, p. 95). Another term for this new U.S. military strategy was brinkmanship. This meant that America was now willing to press the Soviet Union as far as it had to, even to the brink of war, in order to stop communism.
The Indochina Quagmire
Many thought a region in Southeast Asia called Indochina (encompassing the modern nations of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; see Figure 10.3) controlled the floodgates of communism (Herring, 2002). This region was a colony of France—though during World War II, the French lost control of it to Japan. After the war France wanted to return to power, but Ho Chi Minh, the Communist prime minister of Vietnam from 1945 to 1955, opposed outside occupation and pushed for independence (Duiker, 2000).
Ho’s inspiration was the United States, and in fact the American government supported him during World War II as he attempted to resist the Japanese. At the war’s end, Ho was able to secure control of North Vietnam. As a nationalist, however, he sought to unify the entire country. Modeling his Vietnamese policy of independence after Thomas Jefferson’s own words in the Declaration of Independence, it seemed to Ho that American support would continue.
But the United States withdrew its support because of Ho’s political ties. Although he had asked for some support to stave off French intervention following World War I, only the Soviets offered support for an independent Vietnam. As a result, it is not surprising that he favored communism, studied in Russia, and led American leaders to speculate that he was a puppet of Stalin. Eisenhower opposed his plans to reunify the region and offered whatever support he could to the French to stop him.
In November 1953 the French occupied Dien Bien Phu, a small village near the Vietnamese border with Laos. Vietnamese opposition forces in support of Ho entered the region, and conflict erupted in early 1954 between the Vietnamese and French forces. By mid-1954, Ho was receiving aid from both the Soviet Union and China. France appeared unable to thwart Ho’s regional goals, even with American help, and the French hold on the region collapsed.
Domino Theory
Vietnam, a part of French Indochina, did not have vital natural resources, nor was it of strategic interest to staging a war in another country. Prior to this period, the United States had no economic or political ties there. And yet it quickly became a major focus of the nation’s foreign policy.
Eisenhower explained the country’s newfound importance at a conference on April 7, 1954. A reporter asked him to comment on the importance of Indochina, as many Americans were unclear about the region’s significance. Eisenhower responded with a few details, such as why the United States could not tolerate any people being subjugated under the control of a dictator. Then he got to the real reason that he was supporting military aid to the French: He outlined the domino principle, wherein one piece falls quickly after another in sequence.
Expanding on this domino theory, Eisenhower listed other nations that would quickly fall if Vietnam became Communist, including Burma, Thailand, and Indonesia. He concluded his press conference saying, “The possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world” (as cited in Katsiaficas, 1992, p. 34).
Despite this conviction, Eisenhower did not want to send American ground troops to the region. As the French continued to fare poorly in the region, Eisenhower and the National Security Council debated this option, but the president said that he “simply could not imagine the United States putting ground forces anywhere in Southeast Asia” (as cited in Khong, 1992, p. 75). The extent of American aid to this point primarily meant economic support for those who resisted Communist expansion in Vietnam.
The Geneva Accords
French troops continued to fare poorly in their efforts to stop the Viet Minh, Ho Chi Minh’s forces. When the French lost control of the village of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, French and Vietnamese agents, as well as the Soviets, Chinese, British, and Americans, held negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland, to try to end the fighting. The resulting Geneva Accords divided the country at the 17th parallel, with the Viet Minh in control of the North and a pro-Western coalition in the South. The agreement also stated that in 1956 Vietnam would have its first democratic election, which would choose a government for the entire country.
These accords signified the end of French involvement in Vietnam. The United States stepped in when France stepped down and began to support Ngo Dinh Diem to control South Vietnam. American leaders trusted him because of his close ties to the United States. He had gone to school in a New Jersey Catholic seminary, and he was firmly against holding “free” elections as stipulated by the Geneva Accords because he thought the North would falsify the results no matter the votes of the people.
Western accolades for Diem did not hold true for the larger Vietnamese population, many of whom viewed his Western education and conversion to Catholicism to be in opposition to the mainstream Buddhist religion and traditional values among the nation’s larger population. Surprising many Westerners, Ho Chi Minh was actually very popular among the Vietnamese population, and under free and fair elections, he would likely have won.
Secretary of State Dulles supported Diem in his decision to renege on the 1956 elections. Dulles also did not want the United States to go it alone in Vietnam and worked quickly to form a defense alliance known as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), made up of the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
Many expressed concern that, between NATO and SEATO, the United States was forming too many alliances and promising to defend too many regions of the world. Critics began to complain about “pactomania” (Clemens, 2000). Despite the detractors, the administration no longer considered neutrality an option. Nations, according to Dulles, had to stand either with or against communism. There was no middle ground.
Cold War Blame
After World War I, when the United States had its first “red scare,” communism and democracy came to be perceived as competing ideologies. In the 1920s Lenin openly expressed his Marxist philosophy, predicting that nationalism and capitalism would disintegrate under the rising strength of socialism (Pipes, 1997). This viewpoint did not lessen over the decades, and the only reason that Roosevelt was willing to ally with the Soviet Union in World War II was because he saw a greater evil in Hitler.
After the war, communism became an even larger threat for two main reasons. First, leaders like Stalin believed that the West’s goal was world domination through the spread of capitalism and democracy. Second, from an ideological perspective, there was no middle ground between communism and democracy upon which to compromise. Communism outlawed the right to private property, the family unit had less authority than the community, and religion was banned. There appeared no other choice, from the democratic perspective, but to contain and suppress this ideology.
Historians have debated and changed their interpretations of who was to blame for the Cold War over the past 50 years. The traditional view was that the Soviets were aggressors and that they caused the Cold War because the United States had no other recourse but to try to contain them. Later revisionist historians placed more blame on the United States, claiming that it exaggerated the Soviet threat as a rationale to secure its own power. Today the prevailing postrevisionist viewpoint is that both the United States and the Soviet Union were equally to blame. Both nations sought power and, in the process, misunderstood and exaggerated the threats of the other and exacerbated them with their policies.
11.1 Consumer Society and Its Discontents
The 1950s was an era of social, cultural, and economic change. Americans, profoundly influenced by the experience of the Great Depression and World War II, had little desire to return to more traditional ways of life. Those living through the 1950s, especially the expanding White middle class, carved out a new way of life and shaped an America distinct from that of the prewar era. As the Cold War expanded, federal spending on the military–industrial complex—the term for the relationship between congressional monetary and policy committees and the military—helped the United States lead the world in economic growth. The decade witnessed a rapid expansion in consumer spending, a “baby boom” made up of tens of millions of newborns, and the relocation of many families to the suburbs, thanks in part to GI Bill–sponsored low-interest loans. Spurred by these and other government and social programs, and despite several short recessions, the nation’s economy surged forward. At the decade’s end, consumer spending stood strong and unemployment remained low.
As Rosa Parks’s example suggests, however, not all Americans benefited from suburbanization or participated widely in consumerism. The decade produced both a growing consumer culture and rising demands among the discontented still seeking a place at the nation’s table.
As middle-class families moved to the suburbs, the working class and people of color remained in the cities. This process of “White flight” created racially segregated neighborhoods in cities across America. There neighborhoods and schools became increasingly African American or Latino, and services shrank with a reduced tax base. The incomes of those remaining were often not enough to support street repair and school improvements. Businesses such as grocery stores and other retail outlets followed the more affluent, relocating in suburban strip malls and leaving city residents with little access to the new consumer goods in their neighborhoods.
The Postwar Boom and a Consumer Nation
Many Americans in the postwar era experienced a renewed quality of life, as measured by consumption of material goods. The domestic demand for new products expanded dramatically, and the United States also pumped consumer goods into the recovery of Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. Following the deprivation and penny-pinching years of the Depression and World War II, consumers responded to sophisticated advertisements for new technological wonders, automobiles, and appliances.
Department store credit made it easy for Americans to purchase on time through an installment plan and with freedom of choice. By the end of the 1950s the first consumer credit cards, Diners Club and American Express, allowed cardholders to purchase on credit from multiple vendors. Consumer credit, and especially credit cards, also reinforced the gender bias of postwar society. Although many women worked outside the home, and in many cases headed households, the new credit cards were available only to men. Legislation in the 1960s opened the door for women to obtain some limited credit, especially if they had a male cosigner, but it was not until the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act that women gained equal access to credit.
Sears department store issued millions of credit cards by the decade’s end, becoming the nation’s leading extender of short-term credit. Sears operated both retail stores and a mail order catalog, and it drove new fashion trends aimed at the nation’s middle-class families. Mass production reduced prices and helped fashion and clothing production become one of the nation’s largest industries. Fashion expert Dorothy Shaver described 1950s clothing styles as an
expression of a particular way of life, the expression of a free people, a happy people, a prosperous people, a young people . . . to the rest of the civilized world, American fashions are a symbol of our democracy, proof that here one need not be rich to be well dressed. (as cited in Olian, 2002, p. vii)
Clothing trended toward casual and brightly colored fabrics. For teenage girls the sweater and poodle skirt became a ubiquitous style. The full, swinging skirts were so named because each had the image of a poodle embossed near the hem. For young men the “preppy” look popularized cardigan sweaters and madras plaid shirts. The 1950s also gave life to the two-piece bikini, which became popular among young women.
Through retail outlets and catalogs, Americans accessed the latest trends for their new suburban lifestyles. Women found capri pants, frilly aprons, and sweaters that promoted a happy housewife image, as they were freed from the expectation of always wearing a dress. Men’s offerings included sport coats, shirts, and corduroy pants. Widespread advertising helped consumers determine the appropriate attire for the postwar era.
Business leaders and politicians came to understand that consumption, not production, drove the nation’s economy. Through popular publications such as Look and Life magazines, readers learned that American economic success depended on their purchases of new houses and durable goods to put in them. Shiny new family sedans and the latest kitchen appliances symbolized the material success of a rapidly growing middle class. Mass consumption was celebrated as a feature of postwar society that held potential to bring universal prosperity and full employment to all Americans.
In the era of the Cold War, material prosperity soon became associated with patriotism. This notion was reinforced during the 1959 Kitchen Debate between U.S. vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. At an exhibit of American material goods and technology in Moscow, the two world leaders engaged in a series of unplanned exchanges in which Nixon extolled the virtues of the American way of life and the Soviet leader upheld the superiority of communism.
Recorded and later televised, the leaders “debated” in the kitchen of a model house filled with the latest modern conveniences and recreational devices, which any American family could supposedly afford. Nixon argued that the suburban home and the distinct family gender roles within it represented the essence of American freedom. In the United States women did not have to be hardworking, because their husbands provided them with the latest in labor-saving conveniences. American women were therefore able to spend time on cultivating good looks and charm.
The Soviet leader responded that, since many Soviet women lived in communal situations where meal preparation and housekeeping was handled by the collective, they were released from the drudgery of housework altogether and were instead independent and self-supporting.
In addition to demonstrating the disparities between capitalism and communism, the exchange also exposed the leaders’ insensitivity to their female constituents. The interchange perpetuated the stereotype of the attractive American housewife and the plain, work-worn, and unfeminine Soviet woman. Nixon also implied that being self-supporting was somehow un-American. In the Cold War culture of the 1950s, American housewives enjoying all of the modern conveniences of the suburban home became a powerful symbol of the success of capitalism and the ideal American way of life (May, 2008). That vision held little room for independent working women or those who chose another lifestyle.
Life in the Suburbs and the Baby Boom
The modern ranch-style home with its convenient appliances featured in the Kitchen Debate represented the affluent lifestyle to which many Americans aspired. In the suburbs communism and class conflict seemed distant concerns. The invisible walls of these growing postwar communities enveloped many White working-class and middle-class families. Other working-class families aspired to move to the suburbs as soon as they were able, but minority families often found those invisible walls formed real barriers.
By the end of the 1950s almost half of the American population lived in the suburbs. Suburban communities were often called Levittowns, after William and Alfred Levitt, who built their first suburban subdivision on Long Island, outside New York City, in 1947. Levittown’s developers assembled more than 10,000 houses from prefabricated parts, creating affordable housing for American families. The new neighborhood housed 40,000 people when it was completed in 1951. Similar construction across the United States saw the number of houses double by the decade’s end. Like many suburban divisions, Levittowns excluded African Americans from purchasing homes until federal courts forced the issue.
Construction of interstate highways, begun in the late 1950s, spurred the growth of suburbs. The wide concrete highways fundamentally altered community development in the United States, transporting people to and from the suburbs, but also bisecting or destroying established neighborhoods under the guise of urban renewal. In Birmingham, Alabama, for example, the construction of Interstate 59 required razing many houses in the predominately African American Tuxedo neighborhood. When complete, the interstate divided the small remaining Tuxedo neighborhood from the growing, largely White suburb to the south of the highway. The construction established a pattern of racial segregation that persists even today (Connerly, 2005).
Expanding families also pushed many Americans into the suburbs. Birthrates had declined during the Great Depression as couples postponed marriage, but they rebounded after World War II. The nation’s demographics radically altered with the record births of more than 75 million babies between 1946 and 1964. This baby boom swelled the nation’s population from 153 million in 1950 to 170 million in 1960, the greatest ever 10-year increase. During the 1950s foreign visitors often remarked on the amazing number of pregnant women all across the United States. The population growth contributed to the need for new home and school construction and created a new youth culture by the 1960s (Monhollan, 2010).
Historian Lizabeth Cohen represents the generation of suburban children making up the postwar baby boom. When she was born in 1952, her parents had just moved from an apartment to a new ranch-style house in the suburb of Paramus, New Jersey. As a World War II veteran, Cohen’s father qualified for 4.5% mortgage subsidized through the GI Bill. Four years later the family moved to an even larger and more expensive house in Westchester County, New York, where all the residents were affluent and the schools nationally recognized as outstanding.
While the neighborhood in Paramus included a diverse mix of working- and middle-class families, as well as Protestants, Jews, and Catholics, in her new neighborhood there were few blue-collar families. Cohen describes her family’s upward mobility as measured “through their serial acquisition of more expensive homes in communities of ever higher socioeconomic profiles” (Cohen, 2008, p. 6). As it did for the Cohens, this sort of suburbanization often resulted in de facto segregation, in which upwardly mobile families became separated from the working class and often from African Americans or other minorities.
Whose Good Life?
Not all Americans enjoyed the affluence of upward mobility in the 1950s. As the middle class deserted cities for the suburbs, those left behind, many of them people of color and the working poor whose jobs gave them limited access to the new affluence, struggled. As businesses and services moved from the cities to suburbs, city residents had to deal with vacant buildings, deteriorating neighborhoods, and increased crime. Cities with declining populations lost their tax bases and found it difficult to maintain quality schools and municipal services.
A widely read 1962 study by political scientist Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, revealed the widening divide between the affluent and the poor, as well as the consequences of the new de facto segregation that suburbanization created. Harrington revealed that as many as 1 in 4 Americans lived in poverty. He argued, “The American poor are pessimistic and defeated, and they are victimized by mental suffering to a degree unknown in Suburbia” (Harrington, 1997, p. 2).
In many cities the federal government stepped in, subsidizing the construction of public housing units and funneling money to redevelopment agencies to demolish old buildings in abandoned neighborhoods. This era of urban renewal aimed to revitalize downtown areas and construct better housing for the urban working class. In reality, results were mixed.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, revitalized its Triangle area with sports stadiums and other attractions that pulled residents downtown, and Boston’s Government Center thrived, but in other cities urban renewal simply shifted low-cost housing from one part of the city to another. Building contractors and landlords profited from a common form of urban renewal that often replaced working-class housing with more attractive and more expensive homes or apartments. Those displaced could rarely afford to move back to their old neighborhoods.
Minorities who could afford to move out of the declining cities often found their options limited through racially restrictive covenants attached to property deeds. Applying to houses in designated neighborhoods, restrictive covenants prohibited owners from selling their property to members of specific ethnic groups, such as African Americans or Jews. In the 1948 case of Shelley v. Kraemer, the Supreme Court ruled the covenants legally unenforceable but did not stop their use. Realtors and neighborhood leaders continued to informally intimidate both minorities and homeowners to keep neighborhoods racially and ethnically segregated.
Jewish immigrant Richard Ornstein discovered the informal power of restrictive covenants when he contracted to purchase a home in the affluent Sand Point Country Club area of Seattle, Washington, in 1952. Neither he nor the home’s owner were aware of a restriction banning non-Whites and Jews from purchasing homes in the neighborhood. Although the covenant could not be legally enforced, the head of the country club association told Ornstein’s realtor that the community would not stand for a Jewish resident.
The association head intimidated Ornstein with threats of ways the neighbors would make him and his family unwelcome if they proceeded with the sale, telling his prospective neighbor that his driveway could be blocked, his utilities turned off, or his children hassled. Ornstein backed out of the sale, declining to move his family into an unwelcoming neighborhood (Silva, 2009).
A Segregated Society
Although racial segregation and restrictive covenants kept even affluent African American families from moving into developing suburban communities in the North and West, in the South the African American middle class experienced its own unique community growth. New construction on the fringes of such cities as New Orleans, Miami, and Atlanta housed growing numbers of middle-class African American families by 1960.
White and African American civic leaders collaborated to meet the postwar housing demands through the creation of new Black-only developments. Motives for these new communities differed. Whites were most concerned with maintaining racial segregation, and African Americans compromised because it meant building better housing and neighborhoods outside the declining city centers. These communities created a separate space for self-expression, independence, and cultural celebration. Like the White-only suburbs, these subdivisions removed middle-class African Americans spatially from the urban working class and redefined their social and economic status (Wiese, 2004).
Selling Free Enterprise
Some, such as Michael Harrington, came to believe that the rise of suburbia and expanding consumerism undermined traditional American values of thrift and moderation. John Kenneth Galbraith declared that the nation had become a great salesroom under the manipulation of corporations. The Harvard economist outlined his critique in one of the decade’s best-selling nonfiction books, The Affluent Society (Galbraith, 1958). While acknowledging that much of the nation experienced financial gain, Galbraith contended it did so at the expense of a rising cultural materialism, and he worried at the increasing contrast between private wealth and public austerity.
He outlined a plan calling for greater spending on public education, price controls to curb outrageous profits, and a national sales tax to fund needed social services. Although Galbraith and other critics enjoyed a wide audience, their ideas brought little change. Americans did become more materialistic in the 1950s, but important traditional values such as a strong work ethic and competing for personal and national advancement were as evident as ever and were not limited to the suburbs (Patterson, 1996).
Mass Culture and Its Alternatives
A distinct mass culture emerged as a companion to the growing consumerism of the postwar era. Popular forms of entertainment shifted along with new technologies such as television and with the ability of more Americans to own automobiles. Earlier in the 20th century, mass popular culture often centered on public events and venues. City streetcar lines carried middle- and working-class families to baseball and amusement parks. After World War II, leisure activities followed the middle class to the suburbs, where every household had a television and where movie theaters, shopping malls, and new theme parks left little reason to travel into the declining cities.
TV Land
A novel technology when network programming began in 1948, few Americans had ever seen a television program. Instead, most listened to programming on one of the nation’s 1,600 radio stations. By 1955 there were 32 million televisions in use, and by 1960 some 90% of U.S. households owned at least one set. White, middle-class individuals and families were the first to adopt the new technology and incorporate it into their leisure activities.
At first, programming copied popular radio shows, but the medium soon developed its own unique flare. Early stars, including comedians Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, and Lucille Ball, entered American homes each week, and families stopped what they were doing to watch. In 1954 frozen TV dinners, a new modern convenience, supplemented the nation’s fascination with the new medium. By 1956 the Swanson Company sold 13 million TV dinners annually, and it was common to find entire families eating in front of the television set (Smith & Kraig, 2013).
Television reinforced the retreat to the suburbs and the privatization of the American family. Although early shows depicted the lives of working-class Americans—such as Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners about a New York City bus driver and his family—situation comedies, dramas, and westerns that blurred the line of class and ethnicity soon dominated.
One of the most enduring was Father Knows Best, which depicted the Anderson family inhabiting the new world of suburban respectability in the fictional town of Springfield. The show aimed to reproduce the “reality” of family life. Patriarch Jim Anderson (Robert Young) worked as an insurance executive, made no political or controversial statements, and ruled his family with benevolence. His wife (Jane Wyatt) managed a spotless and orderly home for her husband and three children. Their oldest daughter, a high-achieving high school student played by Elinor Donahue, bore the nickname Princess. Middle son Bud (Billy Gray) and precocious younger daughter Kathy (Lauren Chapin) rounded out the family.
The producers peppered the show’s 203 episodes with moral lessons. Father Knows Best hardly reflected reality, but Americans craved the inward-looking, egalitarian world the Andersons inhabited and tuned in weekly to see its portrayal of the ideal modern family life (Newcomb, 2004).
Theme Parks: Disney and the Baby Boom
Amusement parks such as New York’s Coney Island and Youngstown, Ohio’s Idora Park once served as inexpensive and accessible forms of entertainment. Peaking in the 1920s, attendance lagged during the Great Depression and further declined in the era of suburbanization. In the postwar era a new movement linked middle-class baby boomer families to theme parks, which quickly became “regarded as the essential vacation, one’s childhood pilgrimage” (Jackson & West, 2011). The most successful and prestigious of these, Disneyland, opened in Anaheim, California, in 1955.
Capitalizing on the popularity of television, creator Walt Disney debuted a weekly show, Disneyland, a year before the park’s opening. It showcased the park’s themes and rides, and it used Disney’s large archive of classic animated films and new materials to whet Americans’ appetite for such beloved characters as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Just after the park’s opening, The Mickey Mouse Club television show began a successful 5-year run. This variety show for children featured musical talent, a newsreel, and cartoons starring familiar Disney characters, all of which created links to the park as a place to celebrate those characters and stories. Disneyland offered the middle class a safe, clean, and morally upright amusement park suitable for the entire family. The park also reflected the move toward suburbanization and residential segregation in the postwar era. Visitors to the park walked through a perfect American town, Main Street USA, to reach the other amusements. Disney’s theme park strategies grew increasingly popular and made an indelible mark on American popular culture. Many competing parks followed suit, but none was as successful.
The Beat Generation
The homogenized culture of television and the suburbs dominated America during the postwar era, but there were some challenges to mass modern culture. Beginning in New York City in the 1940s and expanding in the 1950s, the Beat literary movement mocked the values of mainstream America through poetry and literature. Led by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and other writers, the Beats raged against suburban complacency in the face of the Cold War’s potential nuclear annihilation. What good were a good job and a nice house with a picket fence if one had to dig a fallout shelter in the backyard?
Beat poets glorified African Americans, especially jazz musicians, and the art of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, and they incorporated these styles in their writing. Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), a novel tracing his travels across the country with several friends, stands as the seminal publication of the Beat and counterculture movement. Portraying key writers of the Beat movement in fictional form, the novel follows their lives filled with jazz, poetry, and illegal drug use. The New York Times and Time magazine hailed the novel as one of the best of the 20th century.
Always a minority, the Beats gained notoriety and sparked controversy through their “beatnik” style of dressing in all black, with men wearing goatees and women severe ponytails, and their expression of ideals contrary to the emerging mainstream. Many believed Beat literature implicitly endorsed a wide variety of controversial behavior, including race mixing, homosexuality, and alternative lifestyles. National media, including Life and Esquire magazines, compared the Beat movement to juvenile delinquency and derided its followers as threats to Western civilization. Ironically, several of the Beat authors later enjoyed established academic careers and won honors, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, for their writing (Lawlor, 2005).
11.2 The Modern Republican Era
While some segments of society were attracted to beatnik counterculture, the nation’s political leaders during this era were decidedly traditional. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican president in more than 2 decades, led the United States through a series of cultural and social changes that defined the Cold War at home and abroad. His fatherly appearance (he was 62 when first elected) seemed fitting and comforting to American voters, and his traditional politics, at least in the domestic realm, suited the nation’s mood. The Eisenhower era proved to be a much-needed interlude between the conflicts of the Truman presidency and the military struggles and social upheaval of the 1960s. Even organized labor and business managed to make peace, negotiating an accord that aligned with the prosperity of the decade.
The Eisenhower Years
Eisenhower appointed prominent business leaders to important cabinet posts, including making former General Motors head Charles Wilson defense secretary. Ike, as Eisenhower was affectionately known, supported the business community and a cautious spending agenda. As a fiscal conservative he worked to scale back government spending, including military spending.
Some conservative Republicans viewed his presidency as an opportunity to roll back the social contract of the New Deal, but he was not willing to make major cuts in social programs, and his Modern Republicanism actually strengthened some hallmarks of the Depression era. To the chagrin of ultraconservatives, Eisenhower argued that government should provide additional benefits to American citizens.
Fearing the nation still blamed the Republicans for failing to respond to the Depression, Eisenhower believed in a new direction for the party. Preserving individual freedom and the market economy was essential, but so was providing aid to the unemployed and senior citizens (Miller Center, 2013). Although he had campaigned against Truman’s Fair Deal during the 1952 election, during his first term he expanded Social Security, increased the federal minimum wage and created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to protect the health of citizens and to oversee essential human services.
Ike also increased funding for infrastructure projects, including the St. Lawrence Seaway, which improved transportation from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, and 41,000 miles of interstate highways (see Chapter 10). He viewed infrastructure improvement as being as vital to a modern America as expanding the social support network. Making highways a priority in his 1955 State of the Union message to Congress, Eisenhower declared, “A modern, efficient highway system is essential to meet the needs of our grown population, our expanding economy, and our national security” (as cited in U.S. Department of Transportation, 2013).
Labor and the Social Contract
Despite the conservative nature of politics, in the postwar era more Americans belonged to labor unions than at any time in the nation’s history. Despite the passage of the Taft–Hartley Act, which stymied union drives in the southern states (see Chapter 10), unionized workers in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions formed a powerful political block. Rising wages for union-protected factory and mill work helped blur the income division between blue- and white-collar workers, and many working-class men and women were able to move their families into suburban communities.
Despite the rising numbers of organized workers, several factors pushed union leaders into a less confrontational relationship with management. McCarthyism and its attack on labor leaders left Americans suspicious of unions. Labor leaders also found that their former confrontational methods had little impact in the 1950s. Instead, in exchange for a promise not to strike until a contract’s expiration, union leaders negotiated a wealth of higher wages and benefits. Known as the labor–management accord, or the “social contract,” the agreement guaranteed high wages to union members and protected the members of leading unions from corporate assault. Major businesses found that curbing costly strikes that curtailed production was in the best interest of both parties.
The accord included two important elements. Corporations within a single industry agreed to avoid competition over wages and other labor costs. Once a leading firm, such as Goodyear in the tire industry, reached an agreement with its union, others adopted the same terms. Second, a guaranteed cost of living adjustment (COLA) ensured workers’ wages kept pace with inflation.
The United Automobile Workers was the first union to secure a contract providing for a COLA in addition to wage increases and retirement pensions. By the end of the Eisenhower era, more than half of all union contracts included similar wage and benefit structures. Employers in nonunion industries were also influenced to provide competitive pay and benefit packages in their anxiety to keep unions out (Boris & Lichtenstein, 2003).
Labor’s economic gains came with a price, as both union activism and democracy within the workplace declined. Professional labor leaders replaced union stewards and officers who worked on the factory floor, and policing the contract, rather than managing the workplace, became a major function of the union. For the quarter century after 1950, most negotiations and occasional strikes aimed at winning higher wage and benefit packages but not at changing the power structure within the workplace.
In a move to further guarantee the power of organized labor, the rival American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955 to form one large union. Once the main organization protecting the rights of skilled workers, the AFL had competed frequently with the CIO since the latter’s inception in 1935. As more and more industries adopted the labor–management accord, the two groups realized they would be stronger and more effective as a single organization. The new union, the AFL–CIO, continues to fight for workers’ rights today.
Ike’s Second Term and the Democratic Challenge
In his first term Ike ended the Korean War, and many Americans enjoyed a renewed economic prosperity. Ike enjoyed considerable support and respect from working-class unionists as well as more conservative citizens. His popularity ensured that he easily won reelection in 1956 over Adlai E. Stevenson, the same Democratic challenger he had faced in 1952. His second term proved more challenging. An economic recession struck in 1958, and Democrats substantially increased their numbers on Capitol Hill during that year’s midterm elections.
Although the incumbent president’s party often loses seats in a midterm election, 1958 was a landslide for Democrats. In the Senate, Democrats gained 16 seats to enjoy a 65 to 35 majority, and in the House, Democrats similarly boosted their control when the Republicans lost 48 districts. Democrats demanded recession relief in the form of expanded federal spending on public works and a general tax cut. The most liberal, including Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, demanded more progress on social legislation, including a national system of health insurance and government assistance to specified depressed areas.
Overall, the demands of liberal Democrats remained off the table. Instead, more moderate voices set the agenda for the upcoming 1960 presidential election. Democratic representative Sam Rayburn and Democratic senator Lyndon Johnson, both of Texas, set their sights on a Democratic victory and led the party through a waiting period that brought little challenge to Eisenhower’s popularity. As a result, as Ike’s presidency wound to a close, no liberal bills of any significance succeeded, and liberals remained frustrated as the new election approached (Patterson, 1996).
11.3 The Freedom Movement Begins
Eisenhower’s handling of the emerging civil rights movement proved to be the greatest failure of his presidency and clearly frustrated liberals in the Democratic Party. The president did not like meddling in racial issues, but a growing push for equal rights and protection under federal law forced his hand.
In a compelling opening to his acclaimed book The Struggle for Black Equality, historian Harvard Sitkoff wrote, “Nourished by anger, revolutions are born of hope” (Sitkoff, 1995, p. 3). Like the polarity of affluence and anxiety in the 1950s, Sitkoff’s statement about the civil rights movement in this decade alludes to the opposites of anger and hope. Though these emotions rarely come together to establish and sustain a social movement of change, remarkably, they did for African Americans in their hopeful struggle during the 1950s and early 1960s.
Both World War II and the Cold War significantly influenced the timing and direction of the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s. The war created a climate of rising expectations among African Americans, especially those who served overseas during the conflict. Traveling beyond the borders of the United States, they witnessed people of color in other cultures and learned that discrimination and segregation were not universal conditions. Abroad they recognized the incongruity of fighting for the freedom and rights of people overseas while not enjoying those rights themselves. Returning to demand their own place at the American table, many veterans were unwilling to wait for their rights.
The Cold War made racial discrimination an international concern. As European empires in Africa and Asia began to slip and independence movements rose, both the United States and Soviet Union competed for influence. The Soviets portrayed the Americans as racist and decried treatment of African Americans as second-class citizens. In this Cold War climate, where communism was to be contained at all costs, racial segregation in America became an embarrassment and political liability.
Well before the 1950s, a group of African American lawyers decided that the legal system offered the best way to combat segregation. One of these was Charles Houston, the dean of the law school at Howard University, an historically African American university in Washington, D.C. Houston began his mission in the 1920s and assembled promising African American lawyers to coordinate what he knew would be a long legal fight. The integrated NAACP, with its ability to organize at both the local and national levels and to count on some White cooperation, was essential to this plan. Houston called it the “crystallizing force” (as cited in Hine, 2003, p. 211).
As Houston searched for African American scholars for his law program, he discovered future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, who became his most promising student. While some advocated immediate change, Marshall argued that the path to equality would be a slow one that should be fought in the courts and not the streets. After law school, Marshall went to work for the NAACP, where he reinforced his commitment to American values and the ideal of its justice system. He wrote, “Oh, we’re going to have our setbacks, we’re bound to have them, but it’ll work. You’ll never find a better Constitution than this one” (as cited in Tushnet, 1994, p. 5).
Slowly, over the course of 2 decades (from the 1930s to the 1940s), Marshall made several small gains in the court system, most notably the Smith v. Allright case in 1944, which ended segregation in the Texas state primary. But his most famous case came a decade later and shook the segregated nation to its foundation.
Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
School segregation, whether legal or customary, plagued many states and localities in the United States and affected all levels of education and multiple races and ethnicities. Some states voluntarily ended segregation, but for most the practice ended only after legal challenges.
In 1945 Mexican American parents challenged the segregation of their children in the Orange County, California, schools. In an early victory for desegregation, a federal appeals court ruled in Mendez v. Westminster that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students in separate schools was unconstitutional. In 1947 New Jersey banned school segregation through a constitutional amendment, and 2 years later an Illinois law withheld funds from school districts that remained segregated.
A number of other states, including Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Kansas, began to dismantle local school segregation policies at the community level (Klarman, 2004). In other localities, such as the city of Boston, however, segregation persisted a decade or more after it was abolished in southern states. Although desegregation seemed to proceed without federal intervention in some northern and western states, in the southern states, where race relations showed little improvement, codified school segregation was persistent and was only overturned after an intense legal and social battle by civil rights activists and their allies.
The Supreme Court case Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) paved the way for dismantling school segregation. The Brown case, a class-action suit that combined five challenges to legalized segregation in public schools, named Topeka, Kansas, as its lead target.
The named plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was a well-respected member of Topeka’s African American community. He worked as a welder and was a lay pastor at his church. Local NAACP lawyers convinced Brown to join the suit on behalf of his daughter Linda, a third-grade student. Linda’s daily journey to the segregated Monroe Elementary School required walking six blocks to board a school bus that took her another mile or so to the school. A Whites-only elementary school was a mere seven blocks from the Brown home.
In the fall of 1950, Oliver Brown and several other African American parents tried unsuccessfully to enroll their children at the all-White Sumner Elementary. The case wound its way through the legal system to the U.S. Supreme Court, with Thurgood Marshall serving as one of the plaintiffs’ lead attorneys. Chief Justice Earl Warren presented the unanimous ruling: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (as cited in Russo, 2008, p. 128). Warren argued that even if African Americans and Whites had access to schools of identical quality, the very act of separating students by race created inequality.
The ruling overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that justified legal separation of the races in public accommodations, including schools. The federal backing for separate but equal facilities for Whites and African Americans was now removed. The Brown decision called into question hundreds of state and local laws designating separate public facilities like drinking fountains, restrooms, and schools throughout the South. Even courthouses used separate Bibles to swear in White and African American witnesses. Overturning Plessy v. Ferguson paved the way for a full-fledged civil rights movement, but also for a wave of massive resistance as southern Whites fought to maintain the social status quo.
Brown II: With All Deliberate Speed
Initially, civil rights activists celebrated the Brown ruling, believing the end to segregation was near. However, the decision included no provision for the actual enactment of desegregation in resistant areas. While some communities continued the process of desegregation begun before the Supreme Court ruling, southern proponents of racial separation refused to budge. Southern states filed suit, asking for exemption from desegregation, and this case reached the nation’s highest court in 1955.
In a decision known as Brown II, the justices offered a mixed message. Upholding that “racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional” and that “all provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting such discrimination must yield to this principle” (Brown v. Board of Education, 1955), the court also gave southern states an escape. The court placed the responsibility for enacting desegregation in the hands of local school boards and ambiguously decreed that the process of desegregation should be carried out with “all deliberate speed” (Brown v. Board of Education, 1955). This confusing statement led to much delay, and few African American students entered desegregated schools before the 1960s (Klarman, 2004).
Eisenhower refused to publicly offer his opinion either for or against the Brown decision. To reporters he said, “I think it makes no difference whether or not I endorse it” (as cited in Patterson, 1996, p. 394). However, he did give some indication of his feelings on the matter when he told one of his speech writers:
I am convinced that the Supreme Court decision set back progress in the South at least 15 years. . . . It’s all very well to talk about school integration—if you remember that you may also be talking about social disintegration. Feelings are deep on this, especially where children are involved. . . . We can’t demand perfection in these moral things. . . . And the fellow who tries to tell me that you can do these things by FORCE is NUTS. (as cited in Patterson, 1996, p. 394)
Broadening the Agenda
The slow enforcement of the Brown decision did not stop African Americans from gaining inspiration from its language. The NAACP urged African Americans to petition school boards and to try to enroll their students at White schools, actions that would never have happened in the deepest areas of the South before the Supreme Court ruling. Brown also inspired legal challenges to segregation outside the education system.
Just a few days after the ruling, Jo Ann Robinson, head of the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama, threatened a boycott of city buses unless segregation on them ended. Although there was no direct relationship between the Supreme Court decision and the events unfolding in Montgomery, the ruling was of symbolic importance. One African American newspaper expressed the widely held sentiment that the decision marked “the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation” (as cited in Klarman, 2004, p. 369) that was the beginning of the end of the institution of slavery.
The Brown ruling marked the start of the activist phase of the movement for civil rights. Leaders emerged from the African American church, the NAACP, and local organizations to push the civil rights movement forward. A movement culture began to emerge that included the tactics of civil disobedience and nonviolence, Christianity, freedom songs, and writings. An emphasis on interracial organization marked the first phase of the movement, but the strongest leaders to emerge came from within the African American community, and especially the African American church.
Another driving force behind the movement was righteous anger and the desire to stop violence against African Americans. Throughout the civil rights movement a tension existed between the anger African Americans felt in the face of social injustice and the need to convince mainstream America that their cause was just and worthy.
The Emergence of King as a Leader
The bus boycott coincided with a new grassroots leadership within the African American community. The emerging civil rights movement brought women such as Robinson and Rosa Parks together with ministers from several African American denominations. The movement relied on leaders from multiple segments of the African American community, but one emerged as a national symbol.
Baptist clergyman Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Montgomery in 1954, where, at age 25, he became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. King grew up in Atlanta, and then earned a doctoral degree in theology at Boston University. At the onset of the protest, he was elected head of the Montgomery Improvement Association, newly created to manage the events. A powerful and charismatic speaker, he soon gained national attention as the leading spokesperson for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Ministers historically formed the core of leadership with the African American community, but King proved to be especially effective in mobilizing support for the boycott and future civil rights actions.
The Murder of Emmett Till
As King emerged as an early movement leader in Alabama, in Mississippi the outrageous murder of a 14-year-old African American boy mobilized the civil rights community and brought the horrors of lynching to national attention. Emmett Till was born and raised in Chicago, and in the summer of 1955 went to visit relatives in Mississippi. He unknowingly violated southern conventions when he crossed the color line to interact with a 21-year-old White woman, the wife of a local grocery store owner. Believing Till acted inappropriately, the storeowner, Roy Bryant and another man pulled Till from his great uncle’s house a few nights later. The pair beat the boy, gouged out his eye, and finally shot him in the head and left his body in a nearby river.
When the body was discovered and returned to Chicago, Till’s mother insisted on a public funeral service so the world might see what had befallen her son. Thousands attended the service, and images of his mutilated body were published in the African American press and seen by millions of Americans. When the two men responsible were acquitted of wrongdoing in the case and later bragged to Look magazine that they had committed the crime, many expressed outrage. Emmett Till soon became a symbol of the urgent need for racial equality and justice in America. His murder also galvanized activists across the nation, with many realizing that the civil rights struggle was not limited to the U.S. South.
Nonviolence and Civil Disobedience
After the Brown decision, southern White resistance to desegregation crystalized and after Till’s murder, tension between the races escalated. King and other protest leaders urged boycotters not to respond to violent confrontation at all costs. A philosophy of nonviolence characterized King’s leadership throughout the civil rights movement. Inspired by the teachings of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, he believed that spontaneous and planned acts of civil disobedience, or the active refusal to obey unjust laws, would ultimately win support for African American rights. Like Gandhi, who led the Indian independence movement, King also attracted attention from the international community, which eventually added pressure for change. King’s highly publicized arrest and nonviolent leadership gained significant attention for the civil rights movement.
Following his plan, Montgomery residents avoided physical violence as best they could during the long year of the boycott. Meanwhile, King was regularly harassed and received threatening phone calls, and in late January 1956 someone in an angry White mob threw a bomb into his home. The following month a rally of some 10,000 Whites cheered the city commissioners for resisting bus desegregation, and in the spring King and others were arrested under a little known Alabama boycott conspiracy law. Although convicted, he paid a fine to avoid long-term incarceration.
In February 1957, after the Montgomery Bus Boycott’s ultimate success, Martin Luther King appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which featured a lengthy story on the events in Alabama. The yearlong struggle marked the beginning of the freedom movement. It also established King as the nation’s most recognizable civil rights leader.
The Little Rock Nine
Montgomery demonstrated that the struggle for civil rights would be long and hard. By the third anniversary of the Brown decision in May 1957 public schools in most southern states remained segregated. During his reelection campaign, Eisenhower said little about civil rights. Once elected president, he did support the Civil Rights Act of 1957, especially the voting rights provision and signed it into law. A weak bill aiming to circumvent poll taxes, literacy tests and other discriminatory voter registration rules, the act also demonstrated Congress’s divided support for the Brown decision. Georgia senator Richard Russell, a Democrat, was among those opposing the bill, fearing that one section would aid in school desegregation. The bill passed only after that section, Title III, was removed (Nichols, 2007).
Nevertheless, the bill was the first federal civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction era and most, but not all, southern congressional delegates strongly opposed it. South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, the staunch segregationist who led the splintering of the Democratic Party during Truman’s presidency, single-handedly sustained a filibuster against the bill for more than 24 hours. Democratic senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, also a southerner, supported the bill and carefully negotiated its passage over the objections of Thurmond, Russell, and others. He received kudos from civil rights activists for his effort, but in its final watered-down state it offered few protections for African Americans.
Eisenhower’s tepid support for this bill and for civil rights in general stemmed from his belief that equality could not be forced on an unwilling nation. He urged moderation and made it clear that he did not support federal military intervention to enforce desegregation, as some impatient civil rights activists desired. Specifically seeking to reassure anxious southerners, in July 1957 he declared:
I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send federal troops into any area to enforce the orders of a federal court, because I believe that [the] common sense of America will never require it. (as cited in Patterson, 1996, p. 412).
Before long, however, Ike changed his mind. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus vehemently opposed the Brown decision, and when the Little Rock school board and the city’s mayor planned to comply with the court’s ruling, he reacted. Learning of the plan to enroll nine African Americans in Central High School that fall, he assembled the Arkansas National Guard to prevent their entry. On the day before school was set to begin, 270 National Guardsmen set up barricades around the school, purportedly to maintain law and order.
On September 4 Elizabeth Eckford walked alone toward the school. She had missed a call and did not know that the other eight African American students planned to arrive together and with escorts from the African American community. As she turned the corner toward Central High School, Elizabeth was suddenly confronted by an angry mob of White women and men and armed National Guard troops. As the crowd surrounded her, she continued to walk toward the school door, but a soldier turned her away. She heard middle-class housewives shouting, “Two, four, six eight, we ain’t going to integrate!” (as cited in Little Rock Nine, 2010).
Eckford gave up on attending school, sat down on the curb, and waiting desperately for the bus that would take her home. She remembered:
I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the mob—someone who maybe would help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me. (as cited in Little Rock Nine, 2010)
Over the next 3 weeks, television cameras broadcast images of taunting and cursing crowds, armed soldiers, and the Little Rock Nine, (as the students came to be known) and their escorts standing passively but daily denied entry to the high school. Eisenhower tried desperately for more than 2 weeks to negotiate a peaceful settlement. The students finally entered the school through a back door on September 23 after a federal court order removed the troops. Upon learning that the students managed to get inside the school, an angry White mob gathered outside threatening violence. The Little Rock mayor sent an urgent message to the White House asking Eisenhower to dispatch federal troops (Patterson, 1996).
Although he still believed it the wrong course, in order to keep order and prevent a riot, Eisenhower sent paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division and federalized the Arkansas National Guard, taking them out of the governor’s control. With personal military escorts throughout the school day, the nine students were finally able to attend school. Eight of them, including Elizabeth Eckford, finished the year at Central High, and one, Ernest Green, graduated and moved on to attend Michigan State University.
Proving that White supremacy remained strong despite federal intervention, Arkansans gladly reelected Faubus in 1958. The following year he closed all public high schools in Little Rock rather than allow integration. In what became known as the “lost year,” high school teachers tended empty classrooms in the public high schools, but eventually private schools opened to educate the displaced White students.
White students attended private academies rather than integrate their school systems in other states across the South as well. Virginia closed a portion of schools in four counties in 1958. In 1960 Louisiana Whites boycotted desegregation in New Orleans public schools. The resistance spread to higher education. In 1961 the University of Georgia refused admittance to two African American students, acquiescing only after a federal ruling ordered their admission.
More famously, James Meredith challenged the segregated policy of the University of Mississippi in 1962. Riots and violence erupted when he tried to attend classes. Two were killed, and the unrest continued until 31,000 federalized National Guardsmen restored order. Meredith became the first African American student to integrate a Mississippi educational institution since the 1954 Brown ruling declared segregation unconstitutional. The struggle for integration and for civil rights continued into the 1960s, and the active movement lasted through two more presidential administrations.
12.1 The Kennedy Years
Beginning with Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the federal government expanded its influence over Americans’ daily lives. The expansion continued during World War II, when the government controlled numerous industries in support of the war effort. While these returned to private hands after the war, increased spending on social welfare programs and national defense continued. The Democrats wanted to continue the growth of the welfare state and sought to achieve initiatives such as federal health insurance and more sweeping social benefits.
Though Republicans limited several of these attempts, the political landscape was changing. Even the presidential campaigns themselves reflected a significant difference from the recent past, especially with the prevalence of television requiring candidates to become much more media savvy. The 1960 election exemplified all of these political trends. It was a campaign that set the stage for three future presidents, and it was one of the closest elections in American history.
Kennedy and Nixon
By 1960 Eisenhower had reached the end of his term limit; he was the first president to be affected by the 22nd Amendment, which stated that presidents could only run for two terms. With Eisenhower unable to run for reelection, the Republicans nominated Vice President Richard Nixon to run, and John F. Kennedy and his vice presidential nominee, Lyndon Johnson, headed the Democratic ticket. Kennedy was a young Massachusetts senator and just the second Catholic ever nominated to run for president. He came from a wealthy family with several generations of political connections. His grandfather had served as the mayor of Boston and a three-term congressman. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, made a huge fortune in the stock market and later became the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. Johnson, a senator from Texas with a long-standing political record, balanced the ticket by attracting southern Democrats.
The Republican strategy was to contrast Nixon’s experience with Kennedy’s youth. The election introduced many of the features that currently dominate political campaigns, such as massive advertising on radio and television, wealthy donors making contributions, and the voters making decisions based more on the candidate than the party.
It also demonstrated how a single misstep with the press could negatively affect an entire campaign. When a reporter asked Eisenhower if Nixon contributed anything important to his presidency, Eisenhower quipped, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember” (as cited in Jamieson, 1996, p. 146). Although he later indicated the remark was in jest, the Kennedy campaign highlighted the remark in a political ad that succeeded in calling Nixon’s credibility into question.
Another key moment in the election was the first Kennedy–Nixon debate, the first presidential debate to be televised. Kennedy’s smooth and charismatic style appealed to television audiences better than Nixon’s stiff formality. Nixon was also recovering from a knee injury that required a 2-week hospital stay, had a five-o’clock shadow, and sweated profusely under the lights. It was the first time that most Americans had seen the candidates together; 70 million people watched the debate and focused more on what they saw than what they heard.
Kennedy won the Electoral College by 303 to 219, but his margin of victory in the popular election was just one tenth of 1%. His campaign raised concerns over the Soviet Union’s success in launching Sputnik, the first satellite, into orbit in 1957. The satellite’s launch surprised the American public and raised fears that the Soviets were eclipsing the United States in the race for space technology. Kennedy also emphasized the so-called missile gap created when the Soviets tested the first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Although American technology far surpassed that of the Soviets, Kennedy argued that under the Republicans’ watch, the United States had lost its focus and direction in fighting the Cold War.
Embarking on the New Frontier
In keeping with presidents assigning names to their domestic programs, Kennedy called his the New Frontier. The name invoked the daring, adventure, and hope symbolized by the physical frontiers in American history, and the program called for the largest set of domestic legislation since the New Deal. Kennedy told the American people:
Today, some would say that . . . all the horizons have been explored, that all the battles have been won, that there is no longer an American frontier. We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats. (as cited in Limerick, White, & Grossman, 1994, p. 81)
Kennedy was president for fewer than 3 years, but his image stands larger than life in American culture. A young man when he entered the White House—he was elected at 43—Kennedy’s style and manner was a marked contrast to that of the fatherly Eisenhower. He appeared frequently on television and was the first president to conduct televised press conferences.
His wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, became a fashion icon and, after overseeing a massive redecoration project, led the nation on a televised tour of the White House. The first family included two young children, Caroline and John Jr. (a third child died a few days after being born in August 1963). The nation looked on as famous writers, artists, and entertainers visited the White House, revealing the family’s commitment to high culture (Patterson, 1996).
The conditions Kennedy encountered on the campaign trail in rural West Virginia turned poverty relief into one of his top policy goals. While seeking the votes of rural Americans, he witnessed firsthand the abysmal circumstances that pushed many Appalachians to leave their homes for industrial jobs outside the region (see Chapter 11). In 1962 Kennedy secured more than $2 billion from Congress for his urban renewal plan. The measure established job-training programs for the unemployed and economic incentives for businesses to relocate to economically depressed areas. The following year he formed a joint federal and state committee to develop a regional approach to solving poverty issues in Appalachia (Duncan, 2013).
Kennedy’s agenda extended to other measures that pushed the nation toward economic and social justice. Promising economic growth, he convinced Congress to increase the social welfare safety net by raising the minimum wage, expanding unemployment benefits, and enhancing Social Security. He also initiated a large series of tax cuts that were opposed by conservative Republicans, who argued for the necessity of maintaining a balanced budget.
In contrast, Kennedy embraced Keynesian economics, the notion that government spending, strategic tax cuts, and other policies could stimulate the economy, especially in times of economic slowdown, as the best way to ensure the nation’s economic health. At the time he proposed tax cuts, the top income tax rate, for those with incomes over $3 million, stood at 91%, and the lowest marginal rate, for incomes up to $30,000, was 20%.
Finally passed in February 1964, 3 months after Kennedy’s death, the tax cuts helped spur an economic boom and contributed to the creation of thousands of jobs. Tax rates for the nation’s top earners dropped to 77%, and those in the lower income brackets also benefited substantially. The average worker, who earned about $6,500 in 1965 (about $48,000 in today’s dollars), paid only 16% in federal taxes under the new measure.
Kennedy and the World
Although he made some important efforts on the domestic front, it was foreign affairs, and especially the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, that occupied most of Kennedy’s attention. In one of his first acts as president, he issued an executive order creating the Peace Corps, which sent American men and women abroad to aid developing nations in establishing educational and economic institutions that would promote prosperity and reduce poverty. Kennedy also hoped the young Americans would improve the image of the United States abroad and adhere developing countries to America. The men and women of the Peace Corps also supported the national Cold War agenda by sharing America’s democratic values abroad.
In a speech before potential Peace Corps recruits at the University of Michigan in October 1960, Kennedy warned that the Soviet Union “had hundreds of men and women, scientists, physicists, teachers, engineers, doctors, and nurses . . . prepared to spend their lives abroad in the service of world communism” (as cited in Crotty, 2010). The Peace Corps was Kennedy’s parallel plan for actively supporting the development of democracy and freedom in the world community.
Kennedy’s plans for volunteers to serve abroad struck home with thousands who, like Ron Kovic, responded to the president’s call to do something for their country. Enthusiastic and confident, it is not surprising that Kennedy moved thousands of young men and women to serve their country, whether in the U.S. military, the Peace Corps, or in domestic programs. One early volunteer recalled, “I’d never done anything political, patriotic or unselfish because nobody ever asked me to. Kennedy asked” (Wilson & Wilson, 2011, p. 7).
Most Peace Corps volunteers were young, but not all. Bill Bridges was nearly 50 when he left his job processing disability applications for the state of Kentucky to serve 2 years in Bangladesh. Nancy Dare and her husband, Phil, volunteered together for service in Malaysia educating local children, especially teaching English. Nancy remembered, “We were answering the call, thinking that maybe we could do something to help” (as cited in Wilson & Wilson, 2011, p. 8).
Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis
While American volunteers spread the message of U.S. goodwill in the developing world, Kennedy faced concerns closer to home. Nations in the Western Hemisphere historically fell under the influence of the United States, but Cuba had slipped from American influence following the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the last year of Eisenhower’s presidency. Latin American nations, including Guatemala and Cuba, grew increasingly unhappy with American political intervention and the economic dominance of U.S. corporations such as the United Fruit Company. In 1954 Eisenhower had approved a covert CIA operation that overthrew Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz, and following his ouster that nation was ruled by U.S.-backed military regimes.
Eisenhower planned a similar intervention in Cuba after Fidel Castro, a Marxist rebel leader, ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista and began nationalizing the Cuban property of American businessmen. Shunning American influence, Castro allied with the Communist Soviet Union. Eisenhower suspended trade with the island nation and authorized CIA training of anti-Castro exiles for an invasion to retake the country. Kennedy inherited this crisis when he took office.
When the CIA-trained insurgents landed at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in April 1961, they expected American air and ground support. However, fearing an escalation in the conflict with the Soviet Union, Kennedy canceled American reinforcement. The invasion collapsed, with 300 of the insurgents killed by Castro’s tanks and guns and 1,100 captured by his army. Kennedy accepted blame for the humiliating and tragic fiasco. In a conversation with White House special counsel Ted Sorensen, he said, “How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?” (as cited in Jones, 2009, p. 110). A New York Times reporter editorialized that the United States “looked like fools to our friends, rascals to our enemies, and incompetents to the rest” (Woods, 2005, p. 213).
America’s weakness at the Bay of Pigs gave Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev incentive to further test Kennedy’s resolve and courage. Another factor was a series of provocative military exercises Kennedy initiated on islands in close proximity to Cuba. Khrushchev thus saw Cuba (just 90 miles south of Florida) as the perfect place to establish an offensive show of power, and he authorized the construction of missile sites there.
Flying over the region in October 1962, American spy planes uncovered the installation of missiles capable of reaching the United States. In the ensuing 13 days, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the nations to the brink of nuclear war. Kennedy’s military advisors urged an attack on Cuba that would surely provoke a Soviet response, but instead Kennedy ordered a blockade of the island that prevented Soviet access by air and sea and demanded the removal of the installations.
In a series of tense negotiations that occurred largely behind the scenes, Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missile installments in exchange for an American agreement not to invade Cuba. In addition, Kennedy pledged to remove American missiles located in Turkey and Italy, where they could easily be launched into the Soviet Union.
The resolution of the crisis marked a temporary improvement in relations between the two nations, and for the first time, the Kremlin and the White House established a permanent hotline for direct communication. Kennedy himself described calling the Soviets’ bluff as “one hell of a gamble” (as cited in Fursenko & Naftali, 1997, p. ix). It represented the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, when any misstep on either side could have resulted in nuclear war (Fursenko & Naftali, 1997).
Berlin
Two months after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy traveled to Vienna, Austria, to meet with Khrushchev. The meeting accomplished little except for some antagonistic exchanges between them, along with a threat from Khrushchev insinuating that he would begin restricting American access to West Berlin. A dispute over the Berlin Wall quickly became Kennedy’s most perplexing international concern. Built in 1961 to divide East Berlin (controlled by the Soviet Union) and West Berlin (under Western European and U.S. influence), it was one of the only places in the world where Cold War participants confronted each other eye to eye.
In June 1963 Kennedy flew to West Berlin to personally address the people of the city. Though he knew no German, he wanted to include a phrase in the native language that would resonate with his audience. He recalled from his history classes that Roman citizens proudly said Civis romanium sum, which meant “I am a citizen of Rome” in Latin. Kennedy thought that a similar sentiment in German, Ich bin ein Berliner, meaning “I am a Berliner,” would inspire his German audience.
The speech, well received among West Berliners, formed an iconic moment in the Cold War, expressing America’s strength and commitment to its partners and allies in the fight against communism (Smyser, 2009). Khrushchev derided Kennedy’s determined tone but agreed to continue seeking a middle ground. Following the close call of the Cuban Missile Crisis, both world leaders recognized the real danger nuclear attacks posed for both Americans and Soviets.
Kennedy used this change in momentum to achieve some positive gains in the United States’ relationship with the Soviet Union. Among his important accomplishments was the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed on August 5, 1963. It banned all nuclear tests except those conducted underground. The treaty was an important step in soothing fears of nuclear contamination but did not stop the production and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, which continued throughout the Cold War.
Southeast Asia
During his tenure in office, Kennedy significantly increased the U.S. military commitment to Southeast Asia. He accepted Eisenhower’s domino theory but differed from his predecessor in important ways. While Eisenhower primarily sent economic aid and military equipment to the region, Kennedy sent 16,000 combat advisors into Vietnam because he believed that the nation symbolized the wider Cold War competition for the hearts and minds of the non-White world (Melanson, 2005). Faced with growing movements for civil rights among multiple minority groups at home, a commitment to help the Asian nation in its struggle to remain free made America seem more tolerant.
By 1963, however, the troubles in Vietnam were worsening almost daily. The U.S.-supported premier of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, a devout Catholic in a largely Buddhist nation, was corrupt, repressive, and out of touch with his people. His attempts to convert the nation to Catholicism sparked intense protest. The most shocking of these was conducted by a Buddhist monk who protested Diem’s policies by sitting on the street, pouring gasoline over his head, and lighting himself on fire. Other monks soon followed suit.
The horrific photographs of such protestors outraged millions of people worldwide. Madame Nhu, the premier’s sister-in-law, made the situation worse when she said that she clapped her hands with each suicide and called them “barbecued monks” (as cited in Hatcher, 1990, p. 141). At this moment the Kennedy administration knew it needed a dramatic change in course (Hatcher, 1990).
In the fall of 1963, American CIA operatives learned of a military plan to assassinate and overthrow Diem, and though U.S. officials did not directly support it, they did nothing to prevent it from happening or to inform Diem his life was in danger. Instead, American officials signaled a willingness to work with a new government in Vietnam. On November 2 a group of Army of the Republic of Vietnam officers captured Diem, assassinated him in the back of a car, and dumped his body in an unmarked grave next to the house of the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam (Herring, 2002). The people of South Vietnam largely applauded Diem’s death and celebrated with street demonstrations, but the Soviet Union and China condemned the act.
Assassination
Three weeks after Diem’s assassination, at 1:40 p.m. on Friday, November 22, 1963, Walter Cronkite broke into regularly scheduled CBS television broadcasts with a somber announcement. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, while traveling in a motorcade. Vice President Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office onboard Air Force One as Kennedy’s body was transferred back to Washington, DC.
For the next 4 days, CBS covered the story nonstop, without commercial interruptions. Authorities arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, claiming that his rifle shots from the Texas School Book Depository building mortally wounded the president in the back of the head. Just 2 days later, while Oswald was being transferred to jail, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shoved a pistol in Oswald’s ribs and killed him, further obscuring the details of the event and preventing Oswald from sharing his motives.
Speculation about a conspiracy to kill the president continues even today. Some claimed it was impossible for Oswald, a former marine with mental health issues, to have acted alone, and pointed to possible evidence of a second shooter. Other speculation even suggested CIA or even Soviet involvement. To search for the truth, Johnson appointed a special commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, which eventually concluded that Oswald operated alone.
12.2 The Freedom Movement Expands
Prior to his death, President Kennedy was poised to make substantial civil rights advances as the movement gained momentum in the 1960s. The civil rights activism of the 1950s took a new turn during his presidency and received considerable support from both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists wanted to spread the momentum of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (see Chapter 11) to a full-fledged movement against segregation across the South.
Along with other southern ministers, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, but the organization struggled to gain traction after Montgomery. The number of African American voters in southern states actually decreased between 1956 and 1960 because militant local Whites employed violence, intimidation, and fraudulent registration tactics to suppress their exercise of the franchise (Aldridge, 2011). In the 1960s a new generation of civil rights activists emerged to drive the movement and the SCLC in new directions.
New Tactics
African American college students in the South, whom established African American leaders, including King, had once criticized as apathetic and apolitical, pushed the movement for civil rights forward in the 1960s. Influencing members of the SCLC and inspiring others to join in peaceful acts of civil disobedience, they were responsible for dramatic changes that continue to impact Americans in the 21st century.
Sit-Ins
On February 1, 1960, four African American students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University entered a Woolworth’s drugstore in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat at the Whites-only lunch counter. African Americans were permitted to shop in stores such as Woolworth’s but were denied service at the lunch counter. Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, all freshmen, acted out of frustration and impatience with the slow, legalistic methods of King and older civil rights activists. Like other politically aware and well-educated African American youth, they rejected the conservative and cautious methods of their elders and were determined to take matters in their own hands.
When the four students were asked to leave, they did so, but the following day 29 students appeared at the lunch counter. Over succeeding days the protest grew until hundreds of students, African American and White, occupied the lunch counter. They sat quietly and endured taunts, curses, and even being spat upon. The protest spread to other stores in other cities across the South. Police generally left the protesters alone, but when violence erupted, protestors and their White challengers were often arrested. Although college student protestors generally retained their cool and held to nonviolent principles, when high school students joined the protests it was common for fights to ensue as tempers flared. In Portsmouth, Virginia, White and African American high school students were arrested for exchanging blows after a sit-in. Violence following a Chattanooga, Tennessee, sit-in on February 23 involved more than 1,000 people, leading to the arrest of 30 White people and ending only after police turned fire hoses on the crowd (Carson, 1981). Fearing a loss of business, some stores quickly opened lunch counters to all shoppers, but others closed their restaurants to impede protests. The Greensboro Woolworth’s held out through more than 6 months of protests before finally integrating at the national corporation’s order (Aldridge, 2011).
SNCC and the Freedom Riders
The sit-ins were widely publicized, including features in newspapers and the nightly news broadcasts. The vision of well-dressed and well-mannered students politely protesting segregation gained the student movement favor. To better coordinate activities, student leaders formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an integrated organization that soon had chapters throughout the South. Between 1960 and 1965 SNCC was an important driving force in the civil rights movement, pushing older activists to go along with its vocally assertive tactics.
SNCC’s tactics inspired an older civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), to sponsor a series of “Freedom Rides” to force southern states to comply with a 1960 Supreme Court ruling banning segregation in public interstate travel. Taking routes across multiple southern states, White and African American volunteers, carefully selected by CORE, sat together on buses and used restrooms and waiting areas in bus stations without regard to segregation rules. It was one of the most dangerous strategies of the civil rights movement, and riders took a special course in nonviolent resistance in anticipation of physical attack by organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and other advocates of maintaining segregation.
Freedom Riders hailed from all walks of life. Walter Bergman, a retired Michigan college professor, was among the riders aboard two buses, a Greyhound and a Trailways, that departed from Washington, D.C., bound for New Orleans in May 1961. Bergman was a longtime advocate of social justice causes and believed the New Deal had not gone far enough in its attack on poverty (New York Times, 1999).
Traveling across several southern states, one of the buses carrying Bergman and the other Freedom Riders made a scheduled stop in Anniston, Alabama, on May 14, 1961. It was Mother’s Day, and many local residents were just finishing a midday family meal. Media accounts let them know when the buses were scheduled to arrive, and a mob of angry Whites headed by Ku Klux Klan leader Kenneth Adams intercepted the Greyhound.
The mob slashed the bus’s tires, but the driver managed to speed away. Six miles out of town, now on flat tires, the driver stopped the bus and fled as dozens of cars filled with angry Whites converged. A firebomb crashed through a window, setting the bus on fire. The mob held the doors closed, temporarily preventing the riders’ escape, but there were no major injuries.
A second Trailways bus carrying more Freedom Riders arrived in Anniston an hour later, and its riders suffered an even worse fate. Whites boarded the bus at the station and brutally beat the Freedom Riders, including Walter Bergman, with clubs and soda bottles (Noble, 2013). Media images of the burning bus and beaten riders gained public sympathy for the cause, but Bergman was severely injured. Beaten unconscious, he suffered a stroke a few days later and remained wheelchair-bound for the remainder of his life. Like Ron Kovic, Bergman did not let his disability stop him, and he remained an outspoken advocate of freedom and justice.
Following the events in Alabama, the Freedom Riders continued to Mississippi, reinforced with members of CORE and SNCC to replace the wounded riders. When they entered Jackson on May 24, state police and National Guard troops surrounded the buses. When the riders tried to use the Whites-only facilities in the bus depot, they were promptly arrested.
Aiming to fill the jails, the subsequent buses also headed for Jackson, where Yale University chaplain William Coffin joined southern ministers Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth in the city jail. When the local jail filled, officials transferred the Freedom Riders to the state penitentiary, where at one point as many as 300 endured harsh treatment. The violence the Freedom Rides provoked shocked the nation and brought much needed attention to the civil rights cause.
March on Washington
Sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and other tactics kept the demand for civil rights at the forefront of the nation’s attention during Kennedy’s presidency and prompted him to craft a civil rights bill. Early in his presidency Kennedy was reluctant to speak out in favor of civil rights for African Americans, largely because he feared losing the support of White southerners. After observing the actions of civil rights activists in their struggle to integrate public schools, lunch counters, universities, and other venues, however, the president shifted toward a strong support for the movement. To support the civil rights bill that would advance the cause of African American rights, the leaders of multiple freedom, economic, and civil rights organizations came together for a gathering in the nation’s capital. Planned as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, this largest ever political rally for human rights on August 28, 1963, is considered by many as the most memorable moment in the civil rights movement.
In the days leading up to the event, the president and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy grew ever more anxious. At one point, the Kennedy administration sought to stop the march, weighing the enormous possibility for change against the potential for domestic unrest. Both men worried about the reaction of White Americans but also realized that the moment marked a turning point in the movement and for U.S. society. At risk was the fate of major civil rights legislation that President Kennedy supported. Attorney General Kennedy assigned a small number of Justice Department staff to help with the event’s coordination. Despite the concerns, the event proved a success. Standing before a crowd of nearly 250,000, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Few would have guessed that within 3 months the president who proposed the civil rights bill they celebrated would be gone.
Midmovement Achievement
President Kennedy supported a broad-based bill that would end discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, but at the time of his death it was stalled in the House of Representatives. Upon assuming the presidency, Johnson used his political influence to propel the measure through Congress by suggesting that the bill honored the legacy of the fallen president. Even though he realized that the bill could swing southern political support toward the Republican Party, Johnson pushed ahead. Addressing a joint session of Congress in November 1963, he said, “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long” (as cited in Loevy, 1997, p. 159). The House voted 289 to 126 on the final bill, and the Senate approved it by a measure of 73 to 27.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 counts as a major victory of the civil rights movement. It outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin when hiring, promoting, or firing employees; in public accommodations; and in all programs receiving federal funding. At the last moment conservative Virginia representative Howard W. Smith added the word sex to the final language in the hope that adding women into the mix would kill the bill. Despite his intention, the final law also included a ban on gender discrimination.
The act also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission within the Justice Department to oversee its implementation and enforce its antidiscriminatory provisions. Finally, it expanded the right of the federal government to prosecute civil rights violations in southern states.
Freedom Summer
Voting rights stood out as the major civil rights hurdle not addressed by the 1964 law. Most southern states had disfranchised African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through violence and intimidation as well as unfair poll taxes and literacy tests. Invigorated by recent victories, multiple civil rights organizations and White northerners moved into Mississippi, a state widely known for strident opposition to African American civil rights, in the summer of 1964 to participate in drives to register African American voters. Although most of the leadership and financing came from SNCC, other groups including CORE and the NAACP, and King’s SCLC also lent support.
Mississippi’s White residents resented the intrusion of outsiders bent on forcing social change. Almost immediately, activists faced physical attack. On June 21 a deputy sheriff arrested three CORE organizers; one African American, James Chaney; and two Whites, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. After they were released later that night, a group of angry residents murdered all three, and their bodies were later found hastily buried nearby.
Reports of their disappearance and subsequent murder, and especially of the two White northern organizers, galvanized the nation and brought critical attention to the issue of voting rights. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allowed the federal government to conduct a criminal investigation in the case, Mississippi State prosecutors refused to try the 18 men the FBI arrested. It was not until 2005 that some of those responsible came to trial and were convicted.
Freedom advocates also sought a way around the White domination of Mississippi’s political system. Civil rights organizers formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) that aimed to take the state’s seats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. A televised hearing examined the credentials of party delegates, including SNCC organizer Fannie Lou Hamer, known for singing Christian hymns during voter registration drives.
Elected vice chair of the MFDP delegation, Hamer testified to the violence and intimidation she and other African Americans faced in their drive to vote or help register others. At the end of her testimony, she declared:
If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America? (as cited in Lee, 1999, p. 89)
Convention organizers offered to seat two African American delegates as a compromise and to reform the selection process for succeeding conventions, but the MFDP refused.
The Voting Rights Act
Hamer’s impassioned testimony failed to win her party seats at the convention but did heighten awareness of the problem of African American disfranchisement. It was primarily, however, the continued violent attacks upon nonviolent protestors that finally moved the nation and Johnson to act. In January 1965 Martin Luther King Jr. initiated a voting rights campaign focusing on the city of Selma, Alabama, where only a few hundred of the city’s 15,000 African Americans had registered to vote.
The culmination of the drive was to be a peaceful march covering the 54 miles between Selma and the state capital at Montgomery. On two occasions television cameras captured marchers under police assault as officers attacked them with cattle prods, tear gas, and clubs.
Moved to act, Johnson addressed Congress, asking that it enact a law guaranteeing all Americans the right to vote. Closing his speech with the language of the civil rights movement, he assured the nation, “we shall overcome” (as cited in Albert & Hoffman, 1990, p. 212). Congress quickly passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Johnson signed into law on August 6. The law established federal jurisdiction over elections and required certain jurisdictions (mostly in the South) to seek the attorney general’s approval before implementing changes that affect voting, such as redrawing districts (Aldridge, 2011).
Expanding the Fight for Equality
A host of groups paralleled and followed the African American civil rights movement, redefining what it meant to be an American and challenging the conservative status quo that dominated the postwar era. Often referred to as part of the New Left, these groups sought a broad range of economic and social reforms. Unlike the Communist Party sympathizers of an earlier generation, they rejected the Soviet Union as a model and generally eschewed involvement in labor politics. Instead, they emphasized the liberalism of the New Deal as a model for economic justice. They emulated the tactics of the civil rights movement, including sit-ins, boycotts, and peaceful protests, and applied them to their own causes.
Women’s Liberation
One movement challenged the secondary status of women in American society. Early in the 20th century, women’s rights activists had focused their energy on winning the right to vote, but with that battle won, 1960s feminists emphasized a broad range of issues, including official legal inequalities, sexuality, the workplace, and reproductive rights (Horowitz, 1998). In 1957 writer and journalist Betty Friedan conducted a survey of her college classmates for their upcoming 15th reunion. She found that most of her fellow graduates of Smith College were unhappy in their traditional roles as housewives. Even affluent women living in the suburbs with all the modern conveniences felt unfulfilled. She continued to research the issue and published her findings in The Feminine Mystique, the 1963 best seller that sparked the beginning of second-wave feminism.
Friedan’s Feminine Mystique resonated most strongly with White middle-class women. She urged women to seek a career path for fulfillment. At the time of the book’s publication, single women did not have access to birth control, and married women did not have access to credit independent of their husbands. Access to birth control and family planning, which Friedan supported, gave women the ability to pace the birth of their children, plan careers, and pursue professional goals. Earning their own wages also offered women more financial freedom and purchasing power of their own.
Seeking economic and social justice, feminists formed consciousness-raising groups throughout the United States. In 1966 the National Organization for Women (NOW) formed with Friedan as its first president. Modeled on civil rights groups, NOW called for equal opportunity in the workplace and education and objected to media portrayals of women.
Some feminists gained militant reputations as they publicly rejected things they regarded as objects of female oppression, such as bras, girdles, and high-heeled shoes. Stereotypes of women as “bra burners” did not depict reality, however. Feminists sought equality of the sexes, and they did not burn their undergarments in protest. Instead, they organized and worked diligently to overturn laws and support new legislation.
Women of color and working-class women often did not relate to Friedan’s brand of feminism, however. Many of these women, who never had a choice but to work, endured an ever-widening wage gap and were relegated to clerical jobs, sales jobs, or other so-called women’s work. Some feminists came to embrace a more radical form of feminism and joined groups such as the Redstockings movement, which formed in 1969 to raise public consciousness about women’s oppression in a male-dominated society and to call for supportive legislation for family planning and other women’s issues (Rosen, 2013).
Latino Civil Rights
Hispanic Americans began demanding equal rights in the 1940s, but in the 1960s Latinos formally organized in support of economic justice and legal equality. Hispanic Americans in eastern cities such as Philadelphia and New York, largely Puerto Ricans, faced issues of urban poverty and discrimination and focused on those needs. In the West, where many Mexican Americans worked in agriculture, the struggle for civil rights was more closely linked to the labor movement. In California, César Chávez emerged in 1965 as leader of a 5-year struggle to organize migrant farmworkers and improve the working and living conditions of Latinos in the Southwest.
The son of migrant farmworkers, Chávez watched and admired the activism of Martin Luther King Jr. He patterned his struggle in the fields after King’s nonviolent protests, using marches, rallies, and hunger strikes to bring attention to the United Farm Workers’ cause. A national grape boycott finally pressured growers to agree to a contract that gave workers better pay and living conditions. Chávez became a nationally recognized labor and civil rights leader and continued to fight for change through the 1970s.
Red Power
Native Americans also saw the 1960s as an opportunity to raise their voices against inequity. They successfully fought against a federal attempt to terminate the sovereignty guaranteed them under the reservation system, and Johnson’s policies made special efforts to extend programs to Native American tribes (Shriver, 1966). In 1968 the American Indian Movement (AIM) organized protests to bring attention to Native American issues and to inspire the renewal of native culture. AIM also coordinated education and employment programs among rural and urban Native American communities and demanded the restoration of commitments from earlier treaties with the U.S. government.
More militant Native American activists gained national intention in 1969 by occupying Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. The Red Power group claimed that under an old treaty, all abandoned federal land reverted to Native Americans. The federal prison on Alcatraz closed in 1963, so the group argued it could rightfully reclaim ownership. Calling themselves Indians of All Tribes, the group members held the island for 19 months until they were forcibly removed in June 1971. Although their claim failed, in succeeding years the federal government became more responsive to Native American activism, and many tribes regained important control over their reservation policies and programs linked to economics and education.
Gay Rights
Gay men and lesbians did not enjoy much tolerance in 1960s America, and they were often forced to conceal their identities to avoid derision and discrimination. Until 1973 the American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental illness, and in most states homosexual sex was outlawed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not apply to gays, who could be fired from their jobs, arrested for sexual behavior, or even have their children taken away.
A vibrant but underground gay community emerged in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. As early as 1953 the pro-gay ONE Magazine began publishing from Los Angeles, although the following year the U.S. Post Office declared it to be an obscene publication and banned its circulation in the mail. After winning an important First Amendment legal battle in the Supreme Court case of One, Inc. v. Olesen, it began circulating again, and until 1967 it provided an important forum for gay news and dialog among subscribers in cities across the nation.
Subscribers often wrote to detail the discrimination and violence the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community experienced. Many detailed the urban antigay crackdown as police in disguise raided gay bars or otherwise tried to entrap unsuspecting men. One correspondent informed ONE readers of recent activity in the Northeast: “Philadelphia raided twice. Carted the boys to jail for a nite for ‘frequenting a disorderly place’” and “NYC still quiet and closed down fairly tight, so streets are busy” (Loftin, 2012, pp. 109–110). New York City would not remain quiet for long. Despite the risks, some gays did organize to demand equality.
A gay rights movement emerged from a series of violent protests and demonstrations that began on June 29, 1969. That night police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York’s Greenwich Village where gay men, transvestites, and lesbians regularly gathered. Refusing to submit to police, the bar’s patrons fought back, resisting arrest and in one case trying to overturn a police vehicle. This confrontation sparked a series of protests known as the Stonewall Riots that continued over the next 6 days.
After the initial violence, more peaceful protests took place in a nearby park, and activists began to form a more coordinated gay rights movement. Two important organizations came out of the protests. The Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance were emblematic of new gay rights organizations that inspired thousands of gay men and lesbians across the United States to demand civil and human rights (Carter, 2004). Their collective strength created a movement to overturn antigay laws and to push for gay rights.
Black Power
Federal backing for civil and voting rights concentrated in the South, but African Americans in other areas of the country expressed their own desires for change. Uttered in 1966 by SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, Black Power became a phrase associated with calls for African Americans all over the United States to unify to support community change and to celebrate their heritage. The movement argued that all people of African descent should come together to achieve self-determination and to oppose the oppression of people of color by the White race.
Carmichael and others also used the term to express their frustration with the slow and moderate gains of the nonviolent civil rights movement. The Black Power movement gave expression to a growing belief that African Americans should not have to ask White society to support them in a struggle for civil rights. Instead, they demanded that they be accorded the rights guaranteed them as Americans. Through Black Power, young civil rights activists articulated a more militant stance and set of tactics in pursuit of black freedom.
Malcolm X
The militant and sometimes threatening expression of Black Power is most associated with the influence of Malcolm X. Born Malcolm Little in Nebraska in 1925, he grew up in a household far removed from the Jim Crow South with a father who supported the Black Nationalism of Marcus Garvey (see Chapter 5).
While imprisoned for burglary, Little became affiliated with the Nation of Islam, which had formed in the 1930s and celebrated African American self-actualization and cultural contributions to American society. Changing his name to Malcolm X because he believed Little was a slave surname, he became the movement’s leading spokesman. Under his leadership, the Nation of Islam swelled to more than 30,000 members by 1963.
Malcolm X challenged the nonviolent tactics and philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the early student movement. He called for African American pride and separation from White society, and he urged African Americans to resist White violence “by any means necessary.” Carmichael and student leaders of SNCC agreed and began to emphasize African American pride and to seek solidarity with people of color around the world.
Other organizations followed his lead as well, including the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, which formed in Oakland, California, in 1966 to combat police brutality. The organization also supported community programs for youth and provided social programming and meal services to poor African American neighborhoods. The Black Power movement received unprecedented attention from the national press and faced considerable backlash from White Americans. Images of Black Panther members dressed in black leather and holding rifles made a shocking contrast to the nonviolent protests in the South. With the rise of African American militancy, national support for civil rights began to diminish.
Urban Riots
Adding to militants’ demands for change were a series of uprisings in northern and western cities. In many states African American unemployment was double the rate for Whites, and working African Americans routinely earned less than Whites. Rising expectations for equality and social change moved faster than economic change. African Americans found that new civil rights guarantees did little to improve their financial conditions, and many still lived below the poverty level. From the mid-1960s, pressures stemming from this reality led to violent riots in urban centers outside the South.
One of the largest uprisings, which took place in August 1965 in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, was triggered by the arrest of African American motorist Marquette Frye. His brother and mother somehow came into contact with police as well, and they were also arrested. A crowd that gathered during the altercation grew as rumors of police brutality spread, and soon rioting erupted. For 6 days as many as 50,000 city residents attacked police and firefighters, looted White-owned businesses, and burned buildings. Finally subdued with the help of the National Guard, the Watts uprising resulted in $40 million in property damage as well as 34 deaths and more than 1,000 injuries (Campbell, 2008).
The Watts Riot marked the tipping point for urban unrest. Similar violence soon erupted in the northern cities of Newark, New Jersey; Detroit; and Cleveland. In 1967 Johnson appointed a special commission to study the cause of the rioting, but no clear proposal for change emerged.
By the late 1960s poverty moved front and center among some civil rights and antiwar activists. The issues of poverty and war coalesced as working-class young men disproportionately filled the ranks of the military while middle- and upper class youth remained in college, exempted from the draft. Established civil rights leaders turned their attention to urban living conditions and poverty. Martin Luther King Jr. refocused his efforts on his Poor People’s Campaign, an effort to gain economic justice for the millions of Americans living below the poverty line. However, by 1967 the escalation of the Vietnam War subsumed the nation’s attention and its resources.
12.3 Johnson’s Great Society
Although John F. Kennedy proposed the New Frontier, it was Lyndon Johnson who was referred to as the “last frontiersman” (Alsop, 1973, p. 8). Emerging from humble beginnings in the Texas Hill Country, Johnson was one of the most skilled politicians ever to assume the presidency. Before entering politics, Johnson earned a teaching degree and briefly taught high school in Texas. He also became a champion for Latino civil rights. During the New Deal he headed the National Youth Administration in Texas, where he used his teaching experience to expand educational opportunities for Texas youth. He left after 2 years to run for Congress.
First elected as a Democrat to the House of Representatives in 1937, he moved on to the Senate in 1948, where he served as majority leader. Johnson was committed to an agenda of liberal reform, and upon assuming the presidency he moved to complete Kennedy’s outstanding goals and to extend his own program of social welfare and civil rights. Although not as media savvy as Kennedy, Johnson worked behind the scenes to convince members of Congress to support his legislative agenda. In his first address to Congress, Johnson also assured the nation of his commitment to continue Kennedy’s actions in South Vietnam.
He proclaimed that he and the nation needed to “resolve that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not live—or die—in vain” (as cited in Waldman, 2010, p. 192). The tax cut came next on the unfinished Kennedy agenda, and Johnson signed it into law in February 1964. Civil rights proved a tougher sell in Congress, where southern Democrats provided staunch opposition, and Johnson turned his attention toward equality for all Americans as the fall election began to consume the nation’s attention.
Johnson’s Social Programs
In the year before the 1964 election, Johnson also began his own domestic legislative agenda under the umbrella of a program known as the Great Society. Johnson’s domestic goals were broad and aimed at eliminating poverty, increasing educational opportunities, and securing racial justice. He proposed a broad range of new spending programs to address the needs of education, the nation’s health care, and both urban and rural poverty.
Declaring a War on Poverty in his January 1964 State of the Union address, Johnson sought a range of legislation to address the struggles shared by poor families in their efforts to obtain food, education, work, and medical care. He promoted his plan with an April trip to the Appalachian town of Inez, Kentucky, where cameras captured his visit to the three-room cabin that was home to Tom Fletcher, his wife, and eight children. Johnson sat on Fletcher’s porch and listened to his story. Fletcher was an unemployed coal miner who sometimes spent his nights caring for a sick neighbor who was too poor to go to the hospital. His family had very little food, two of his children had stopped going to school, and he had little hope for the future.
The White House had specifically chosen the compelling image of the president sitting on the porch of an ordinary American, one whose face was etched in misery, to personalize poverty and to serve as a symbol of the 35 million Americans who lived below the poverty level. Johnson said, “I don’t know if I’ll pass a single law or get a single dollar appropriated, but before I’m through, no community in America will be able to ignore the poverty in its midst” (as cited in Gillette, 2010, p. xi).
At the president’s urging, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act in August 1964, creating 10 new programs aimed at reducing poverty in America. Congress also allocated a staggering $800 million to the programs for the first year. Controversial among the programs was the Community Action Program, which empowered poor people to oversee programs in their own communities, including early childhood education through Head Start, home weatherization programs, and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Operating with various degrees of success, Community Action organizations relied heavily on volunteers and a combination of federal, state, and local funding.
The Landslide 1964 Election
Although he had held office less than a year before seeking the 1964 Democratic nomination, Johnson and his agenda proved widely popular, even with Republican voters. A pollster canvassing in rural Texas, a region long considered a conservative stronghold, was amazed at what he discovered. Many of those polled compared Johnson to FDR, and not one opposed his candidacy. One woman, who claimed she had not voted for a Democrat since 1936, declared, “I’m not just for him, I’ll fight for him!” (as cited in Bernstein, 1996, p. 26).
The election of 1964 turned out to be one of the most lopsided in the nation’s history. Johnson promised a series of social reforms, including poverty relief and an end to segregation, under his Great Society. His Republican opponent, Arizona businessman Barry Goldwater, stood in stark contrast, considered too conservative even by many party stalwarts. Credited with reviving the modern conservative movement, Goldwater mobilized opposition to the New Deal–like ideals and programs of his opponent, but his ideas proved to have little voter appeal in this election.
Johnson won 44 of the 50 states, and an amazing 61% of the popular vote. It was the mandate he needed to finish his reform agenda. The election also strengthened the Democratic majority in Congress. In the House the Democratic majority approached two thirds after it took 36 seats from Republicans. The party’s lead of 68 to 32 in the Senate exceeded two thirds, although Democrats picked up only two seats.
The Great Society Continues
The election gave Johnson a mandate to press forward with his Great Society initiatives. He used evidence gathered from his trip to Appalachia and from the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission, begun under Kennedy’s administration, to support the Appalachian Regional Development Act. Signed into law in March 1965, it created a permanent federally funded agency, known as the Appalachian Regional Commission, that aimed to increase employment, improve infrastructure, and reduce regional isolation through construction of a highway system.
The Great Society approached the nation’s education needs through two important pieces of legislation. The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act allotted $1 billion in federal grants to states to aid schools in areas with high concentrations of poverty. The most far-reaching congressionally passed education measure, the bill aimed to provide equal access to education and to create a system of accountability without enacting a national curriculum. The Higher Education Act of 1965 similarly offered federal support and funding for state colleges and universities and established scholarships and student loans. The new law made it possible for millions of American youth to afford a university education and established a long-lasting trend of public funding for higher education.
One of the most visible and long-lasting legacies of the Great Society came with revisions to the Social Security system to provide government insured health care services to the elderly and poor under the Medicaid and Medicare programs. Debate over a national health insurance program was not new, but the large Democratic majority in Congress finally made it a serious possibility. Although conservative Republicans, including future president Ronald Reagan, condemned it as socialism, the bill passed the House by a margin of 313 to 115 and the Senate by a margin of 68 to 21. Johnson signed it into law on July 30, 1965 (Oberlander, 2003).
12.4 The Vietnam War
Johnson’s Great Society eventually took a backseat to the growing military and diplomatic crisis in Southeast Asia. In the months after the assassinations of South Vietnamese leader Diem and President Kennedy, political disarray and guerilla insurgency in South Vietnam made U.S. experts fear the capital of Saigon would fall to the enemy. Soviet support for the already Communist North Vietnam was expanding. Many of Johnson’s close advisors, including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, urged military escalation, but the president hesitated.
Entering the Quagmire
Johnson overcame his reluctance in August 1964, when North Vietnamese torpedo boats apparently fired twice on an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin in the South China Sea. Much later, once documentation became public, the public learned that the second attack had never occurred. Although intelligence services were still gathering evidence about the attacks, Johnson declared the incident an act of aggression and asked Congress to pass a joint resolution that gave him the authority “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” (as cited in McMahon, 2003, p. 145). Only two senators opposed the measure (Hall, 2007).
Americanization of the War
American troops acted in an advisory capacity before the escalation of the ground war in Vietnam, with just over 23,000 in the country in 1964. Johnson waited until after the fall election to begin openly supporting escalation of U.S. involvement, which became known as Americanization, but his show of strength in asking for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution helped cement his victory.
By that point, continued instability in South Vietnam after the ousting of the dictator Diem became a rising concern. In the spring of 1965, the South Vietnam–based Viet Cong, who opposed the southern government and detested the presence of U.S. military advisors, also began to step up attacks against American personnel. McNamara urged action, including committing thousands of American combat troops. He called the operation Rolling Thunder.
The swell of American ground troops began in 1965, and within 3 years more than a half million U.S. soldiers were “in country,” a term used by U.S. soldiers to mean they were in Vietnam. More soldiers meant more Americans killed, missing, or wounded in action. Total U.S. casualties grew from 2,500 at the end of 1965 to over 130,000 at the end of 1968, which marked the high point of American troop presence. Troops fought regular North Vietnamese army troops but also the Viet Cong, who were more difficult to identify because they were often disguised as civilians.
Fighting in the humid jungles of Southeast Asia was difficult, so to aid American and South Vietnamese fighting forces, the U.S. military sprayed toxic chemical defoliants, including Agent Orange, to help clear the forests. Hitting millions of acres, the defoliants destroyed half of the nation’s timber. There was little consideration of the long-term effect of the chemicals on human and animal life (Patterson, 1996). Although evidence is not completely conclusive, studies show increased rates of cancer, as well as nerve and digestive disorders, among veterans exposed to the defoliant.
Despite employing the full force of the U.S. military, troops made little progress in pushing the North Vietnamese forces out of the region. The North Vietnamese relied heavily on guerilla tactics and on sympathetic southern residents and political activists known as the Viet Cong, and they were willing to suffer high casualties.
The geography of Vietnam proved another problem for combat troops. Jungles dense with foliage, wet marshes, and even razor-sharp elephant grass made the combat mission almost unbearable. The North Vietnamese imprisoned U.S. soldiers in deplorable conditions and fought relentlessly. As U.S. casualty figures rose, some began to question the war’s goals and blamed the president for involving the nation in “Mr. Johnson’s War.”
Media and the War
Thanks to modern media, Americans watched war developments on their televisions as war correspondents, including CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, reported directly from the conflict zone. During World War II and the Korean War, media coverage had been limited due to technological limitations and government censorship. Newspaper and radio accounts and short newsreels that aired in movie theaters before a feature film provided the main images and news of war in the 1940s. Television improved steadily in the 1950s, and networks provided some war coverage, but Cronkite’s coverage of Vietnam brought the war home to millions of Americans.
Cronkite arrived in Southeast Asia shortly after the conclusion of the Tet Offensive, in which the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched a series of surprise attacks against the South and U.S. troops. Beginning in January 1968 on Tet, or the Lunar New Year holiday, and lasting well into February, it caught American and allied forces off guard and forced them to struggle to maintain control of several important cities. Although the assaults were ultimately repelled, the high number of casualties created a crisis for the Johnson administration and turned public opinion against the war.
Upon Cronkite’s return to the United States, CBS aired a special news broadcast focusing on the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. One of the most trusted men in America, Cronkite used the opportunity to express his own loss of faith in the American mission. He told viewers:
It seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. (as cited in Oberdorfer, 1971, p. 251)
Investigative reporters, photojournalists, and war correspondents bombarded the American public with news and images of the war. These also influenced a growing antiwar sentiment.
Just weeks after the end of the Tet Offensive, on March 16, 1968, U.S. Army infantry soldiers participated in a shocking massacre of between 347 and 504 unarmed men, women, and children in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai. The soldiers also committed gang rape. Photographs and news of the My Lai Massacre shocked the world, although it took nearly 2 years to uncover the full story. Although more than two dozen soldiers faced charges, only one served jail time. Convicted of killing 22 civilians, Lt. William Calley Jr. ultimately served less than 4 years in prison. His trial sparked a growth in those opposed to the war (Hall, 2007).
The Antiwar Movement
As casualty numbers rose and images of the horrors of war reached the United States, the American public began to question the Cold War consensus. At first dissenters came largely from the ranks of student protestors and intellectuals. At the beginning of Americanization in 1965, only 24% of Americans surveyed in a Gallup Poll believed U.S. involvement in Vietnam was a mistake. By September 1968, 54% believed involvement to be a mistake, and that figure rose steadily to 60% on the eve of withdrawal in January 1973 (Gillespie, 2000).
Student radicals formed one leading group, Students for a Democratic Society, in 1962 to argue that “the war is immoral at its root” and “is foreclosing the hope of making America a decent and truly democratic society” (McMahon, 2003, p 428). Media images stereotyped antiwar advocates as young, radical, and disaffected, but their ranks swelled following the Tet Offensive (McMahon, 2003).
Young men expressed dissent by burning their draft cards, and a number fled to Canada to avoid military service. Antiwar protesters gathered in groups large and small. One of the largest, in October 1967, saw nearly 100,000 gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. By 1968 antiwar sentiment emanated from powerful members of the business and financial communities, the media, and even the government. All came to question the reasons underlying American commitment to Vietnam. Public opinion polls showed a steady erosion of support as the presidential election of 1968 approached (McMahon, 2003).
1968
As discord grew, confidence in Johnson’s ability to win the war waned. Antiwar Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota announced that he would challenge the president for the 1968 Democratic nomination. His campaign gained momentum with the support of the growing antiwar protests, and he came within 7 points of winning in the important New Hampshire primary.
Johnson was shocked at his poor showing in the primary, and also worried that Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney general and brother of John F. Kennedy, would also draw votes. Concerned about his ability even to secure his party’s nomination, Johnson made it easier for a whole field of potential opponents when he surprisingly announced in March that he would not seek reelection.
More stunning events rocked the nation in the months leading up to the August Democratic National Convention. On April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee, a White assassin killed Martin Luther King Jr. as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. King had come to the city to join a sanitation workers’ strike. The news sent shockwaves throughout the nation and sparked another intense round of urban rioting and violence. In cities with large African American communities, such as Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, the unrest lasted for days. In Baltimore crowds filled the streets and burned and looted businesses. It took police and the National Guard until April 14 to fully restore order.
With Johnson out of the race, Kennedy challenged McCarthy for the Democratic nomination. On June 4 he narrowly beat McCarthy to win the California primary. The Kennedy campaign celebrated early into the morning of June 5, but as Kennedy exited the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel (through the kitchen so as not to disturb the party), Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant from Jordan, shot him in the head with a small caliber bullet. Kennedy died in the early hours of the next day.
The Democratic Party limped on toward its primary in August. Held at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre, it turned into one of the most chaotic political events in U.S history. Outside the convention hall, 10,000 antiwar protestors marched in the streets and were met by 23,000 Chicago police and National Guardsmen. Police attacked demonstrators with nightsticks, and the entire event was televised live on network news. Inside the convention hall delegates began to demand a return to the usual establishment politics that would be evident in the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. McCarthy supporters protested, but in the end Humphrey gained the nomination.
Nixon and the Silent Majority
Meanwhile, the Republicans had resurrected the political career of former vice president Richard Nixon, who won the election by a narrow margin, campaigning on his tremendous political experience. He promised stability for a nation that was weary of war, protest, social unrest, and assassinations. Nixon appealed to what he believed was the so-called Silent Majority of Americans whose opinions were rarely expressed, especially in the turbulent months leading up to the 1968 election. He pleaded for the votes of those citizens who had neither protested the Vietnam War nor joined in any counterculture movement. Upon taking office, he and his special assistant for national security affairs, Henry Kissinger, began to devise a way to achieve “peace with honor” in Vietnam.
