History of the United States since 1865 Assignment | Custom Assignment Help
The book used is: David Emory Shi’s America: A Narrative History, Brief Eleventh Edition (or Brief 11E), Volume 2, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2019, ISBN 978-0-393-66897-1 (MUST HAVE BOOK!) Short answers need to contain: • a concise thesis sentence that also provides a time period • at least three sentences that support and give evidence • a concluding sentence that summed up the point made • six sentences (five is the minimum, seven the maximum) There are 3 questions, and each question need it’s own short answer. The questions are from chapter 27-29. Chapter 27 • Question: What events led to the “Second Red Scare” of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and what were U.S. reactions to this perceived threat? Chapter 28 • Question: How did President Eisenhower’s “Moderate Republicanism” create friction within the GOP? Chapter 29 • Question: Demonstrate how the Civil Rights Movement changed in character over the course of the 1960s. Just to be clear, you may use information from the lecture and/or the text to aid in your answer.
2020, HIS-109, 2359, SUMMER, LECTURE SIX, CHAPTERS 27-29
Chapter 27, “The Cold War and the Fair Deal, 1945-1952”
I do not have much to say on this chapter. Shi explains everything quite nicely. But, here are three things to keep in mind.
The Beginnings of the “Cold War”
When I was growing up the Soviet Union was America’s biggest economic, political, and military rival. And where I lived, the Russians’ ideological outlook was fiercely opposed by almost all my adult relatives as well as those of my friends’. Naturally, such viewpoints trickled down in a distorted way to us kids – I mean here children between roughly five and eleven years old. Therefore, having heard our parents talk negatively about this country called Russia, I and my peers had to make sure that in our “wargames” the Russians went down to defeat. It did not matter that we had no understanding of the contentious relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was either them or us.
Yet, where did such distrust of Soviet Russia originate? For an answer to this question, pay close attention to the sections in Chapter 27 entitled “Truman and the Cold War” as well as “The Containment Policy.”
A Word on Joseph McCarthy
There is discussion in Chapter 27 of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. And make no mistake, Senator McCarthy was a bully. He made his name investigating possible Communist-backed subversion in the U.S. federal government during the Second Red Scare. However, his actions during those committee meetings are hard to watch. McCarthy badgered and led witnesses, and the more he did so the more he appeared to gain a greater conceit of himself. He was the patent demagogue, and in the end received his comeuppance. However, and this is something for you to think about, he was right to have his suspicions about communist infiltration into the federal government. Remember, Whittaker Chambers admitted to being a spy for the Soviet Union. And, though the jury is still out on this matter, Alger Hiss might have been one as well. Moreover, the section in the text on page 1141, entitled “Atomic Spying,” indicates that there were spies in the United States passing on secrets to Soviet Russia. So perhaps McCarthy was not overreacting. Or then again, perhaps he was being too melodramatic, had no clue about the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States, and simply wanted attention and power (see John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, 32-33, 45-46, 349).
The Opening Actions of a More Determined Civil Rights Movement
Finally, World War II invigorated the nation’s African American population, who now took up the call for an end to segregation, both of the de jure and de facto kind. It was clear to leaders in the African American community that Jim Crow legislation could not continue. African American soldiers helped defeat the racial ideology of Nazi Germany as well as the ethnic policies of Imperial Japan. They could not return to America and suffer what you see in the following picture from Winona, Mississippi. (A word of warning, I refuse to censor the picture in any way; it may offend, but it is an important historical document).
(see http://www.thenation.com/blog/157372/michael-vick-racial-history-and-animal-rights#)
Hence, over the next twenty years African Americans engaged in a struggle to correct a political, social, and economic condition that stretched back to before the Civil War (see Patterson, Grand Expectations, 10-38). You will see that journey starting in Chapter 27.
[A word of clarification is needed. The racial policies of Nazi Germany are well known, yet those of Japan not so much. By the 1930s the Japanese considered themselves the cream of the racial crop in Asia, and planned to settle thousands of Japanese on the Chinese mainland in a manner similar to Nazi plans for Eastern Europe. In fact, the politician and industrialist, Nakajima Chikuhei, noted that the Japanese were superior to all races because they had yet to mix with any other ethnic groups and were descended from gods (see Lynn, Battle, 225-28).]
Chapter 28, “America in the Fifties”
Here are some things in Chapter 28 that may pique your curiosity –
Moderate Republicanism, 1950s
Among the GOP faithful, President Eisenhower’s “moderate Republicanism” was a divisive issue. For instance, his stance on the Civil Rights Movement found favor among conservative Republicans who did not want the federal government to interfere in local matters. While these same Republicans may have found Jim Crow policies personally distasteful, they argued that segregation’s dismantling must come from processes undertaken within the locality or state in question. For most of the 1950s, Eisenhower’s actions appeared to follow this course. But then, reacting to events associated with the 1957 integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, the president federalized the state’s National Guard and sent in elements of the 101st Airborne to keep the peace. Though Eisenhower claimed such action was to prevent unnecessary bloodshed, it set a precedent that worried the more conservative parts of the GOP. Would the federal government involve itself in such state matters from now on?
Eisenhower’s refusal to dismantle New Deal social and economic programs created additional friction within the GOP. Today it may seem surprising that members of the Republican Party would support such “liberal” legislation. But in the 1950s the majority of them did. You see, the GOP of the mid twentieth century was a different beast from the one you find two generations later. Back in the Fifties the Republican political vision derived from the Whig Party of the early nineteenth century and the GOP that arose from the Whigs’ destruction in the mid 1850s. Both Whig and early Republican platforms held that opportunity came from a combination of personal effort and government support. Over the next century that philosophy hung on among most Republicans, so it was not surprising that New Deal policies found favor among them. Hence, killing off FDR’s legacy was not among their top priorities.
Still, a sizable number of conservative Republicans found the president’s refusal to bury the New Deal unpalatable. They argued that the New Deal and Truman’s subsequent Fair Deal contained programs that were expensive and unnecessary. Their maintenance on the books, so to speak, continued the nation’s trend toward socialism. The decade’s general prosperity, claimed GOP conservatives, should allow the states as well as private concerns the flexibility to provide aid for housing, agriculture, and the like. Therefore, Eisenhower’s continued acceptance of the liberal agenda was a slap in the face of personal and fiscal responsibility.
Finally, the Eisenhower Administration’s disjointed approach to the spread of communism made a number of Republicans figuratively throw up their hands in confusion. On the one hand John Foster Dulles’ rejection of Truman’s containment doctrine pleased Republicans. Instead of being reactive, the secretary of state offered a proactive policy. America would directly help nations threatened by communist insurrection. When this approach was coupled to Dulles’ strategy of massive nuclear retaliation, it sounded like Eisenhower was taking a page out of the Theodore Roosevelt book of foreign diplomacy – “Watch it or down comes this big stick.”
Yet, the results of Dulles’ anti-communist foreign policy were decidedly mixed, and this frustrated the GOP. Sure, the Eisenhower Administration reached a truce with North Korea in 1953 that brought an end to the fighting there. Nonetheless, it was just a truce. A state of war still existed between the United States and North Korea, and the latter remained under communist rule. True, the United States refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords that split Vietnam into a communist North and non-communist South. Yet, America had not helped France during the disastrous Battle of Dien Bien Phu, a defeat that in the long run forced the French to the bargaining table. And, most certainly, U.S. forces had been sent into nations around the Caribbean and the Middle East – either overtly or covertly – to prevent communist infiltration and subversion. Still, nothing was done in 1956 when Soviet forces crushed an uprising in Hungary, despite Dulles’ pledges earlier in the decade that the U.S. would help Eastern Europe throw off the yoke of communism.
Therefore, Eisenhower’s terms as president witnessed a Republican Party seemingly united behind their president, especially when it came to the general elections of 1952 and 1956. But when one looked closer and deeper into the GOP of that decade, one saw distinct elements of dissatisfaction (see Lewis L. Gould, The Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans, 333-45).
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-56
Here are some questions to consider when remembering the popular story of Rosa Parks and her actions on 1 December 1955.
- Was Rosa Parks tired?
- Did her feet hurt?
- Did she sit down in the “White’s Only” section of that bus in Montgomery, Alabama?
- Was what she did a spontaneous act of rebellion?
- Was the boycott itself equally spontaneous?
And the answers?
- It depends on how one defines the word “tired.” Rosa Parks admitted that she was not physically tired when she boarded the bus. However, Ms. Parks did say that she was fed up with submitting to the Jim Crow system of segregation. So, in a manner of speaking, Rosa Parks was tired.
- If you take into account Ms. Parks’ admission that she was not tired in the physical sense, then most likely her feet did not hurt.
- No, Ms. Parks did not sit down in the “White’s Only” section at the front of the bus. She took a seat in the first row of the “Colored’s Section.” When the number of whites entering the bus filled all the seats forward of where she sat, by law Ms. Parks had to give up her seat to a standing white person. That she did not do.
- Figuring out the answer to this question is more difficult. As stated above, Rosa Parks did not sit down in the “White’s Only” section of the bus. If she had, then trouble would have come right then and there. Parks knew as much, so at first glance her decision to remain seated was made at that moment. Moreover, Rosa Parks’ own testimony appears to support this conclusion. However, contrary to the popular story, Ms. Parks was not just a seamstress. She had served as secretary to E.D. Nixon, the president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In this position Ms. Parks was a dedicated civil rights worker, and she knew first hand that Montgomery’s NAACP leadership was looking for a test case to challenge segregation on the city’s buses. In March 1955 Nixon believed he had found such a case in the person of Claudette Colvin, a teenager who had refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger. However, when Ms. Colvin became pregnant, the NAACP chapter decided against using her. Given her association with the NAACP, Rosa Parks’ situation was more powerful. So by not removing herself from that seat, Ms. Parks had to know something important was going to happen. And it did.
- Seeing that E.D. Nixon was looking for ways to challenge Montgomery’s Jim Crow bus laws, and knowing that preparations among local NAACP leaders included plans for a boycott, the machinery for such a measure already was in place. All one had to do was get the machine going.
The popular tale of Rosa Parks being tired and wanting to rest her feet, and Montgomery’s African American leadership impulsively following her lead, is just that – a tale. Does the more accurate story diminish the historical significance of what they did? Not in the least (see Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Alan Steinberg, Black Profiles in Courage: A Legacy of African American Achievement, 220-48).
The “Little Rock Nine”
There is an error in the text, and it concerns the September 1957 integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. On page 1175 Shi states the following: “At that point, President Eisenhower . . . reluctantly dispatched 1,000 army paratroopers to protect the brave black students as they entered the school.” Then a bit further down the page, Shi writes, “The soldiers stayed in Little Rock through the school year.”
Yes, soldiers did protect the Little Rock Nine during the rest of the year, but they were not the army paratroopers (from the 101st Airborne.) These soldiers left Little Rock in November 1957. The remainder of the year federalized National Guardsmen patrolled Central High School.
Despite this gaffe on Shi’s part, one can take two important things from the episode at Central High School. First, grassroots organizations led the charge against Jim Crow, but at times the federal government had to join in to deliver the final blows. This course was apparent with Brown v. Board in 1954, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56, and especially Central High School’s integration. You will see this dynamic happen again in Chapter 29. Second, those who resisted desegregation were not happy to see the federal government get involved in what they thought was a state matter. And in the case of Central High School, the involvement of the U.S. Army and the federalization of Arkansas’ National Guard was, to the anti-desegregation camp, a clear sign of federal tyranny. The followers of Senator Harry Byrd’s “massive resistance” to integration would not forget it (see Philip Grey, “The 101st at Little Rock: Striking a Spark for Freedom,” Clarksville [TN], Leaf Chronicle, 15 June 2012, 1-4; also Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture, 3-22).
Anti-Communist Movies!
The 1950s are replete with movies castigating the Communist political/social system and extolling, either directly or indirectly, that of the United States. One of those films is an all-time favorite of mine – The Thing from Another World (1951) directed by Howard Hawks. Now, do not get Hawks’ movie confused with John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). The latter is a completely different film theme-wise . . . but also one of my all-time favorite films. [Well, actually, Carpenter’s movie is more true to the John W. Campbell story entitled Who Goes There?, on which both films are based. But I digress.] If you can, watch Hawks’ film and keep in mind what the “Thing” is, how it acts, and what the creature plans to do. Then relate the “Thing” and the movie as a whole to the anti-Communist rhetoric employed by the United States during the 1950s. Who knows, you may just get a question about this film.
OK, OK, The Thing from Another World also fits within the “suspicious-of-science; look-what-the-bomb-will-do-to-us” trope of 1950s’ movies such as Them! (1954) and the original Godzilla (1954). But I am not going to ask a question about said trope. Focus instead on the anti-communist theme.
Chapter 29, “A New Frontier and a Great Society, 1960-1968”
I am going to say three things about Chapter 29, and here they are.
The Failure of the Great Society
As the text states, the “Great Society” was President Lyndon Johnson’s series of policies aimed at combatting poverty, expanding education, and improving public health. The key element of the three was the first, for by increasing opportunities for prosperity the success of the other two would be more likely. However, this “War on Poverty” failed, and it did so because of lack of funds, lack of training, social friction, and local priorities.
From 1963 through 1964, when the War on Poverty was getting ramped up, Congress did provide funding for several federal projects aimed at improving lives in poorer regions of the nation. However, that funding got thinner and thinner as the costs of the Vietnam War dragged on. By 1968-69, America’s attempt to fight both a domestic and a foreign war began to wear on the economy. The federal government was spending money it did not have and inflation was going up. Cuts had to be made somewhere, and eventually the domestic programs took the hit.
Still, to blame the failure of the War on Poverty entirely on a lack of funds is simplistic. Two of the biggest problems stemmed from the lack of training among federal field agents and the social friction it caused. When President Kennedy became interested in tackling the nation’s poverty problem, he looked around for experts to guide federal policies. Unfortunately, there were very few who could do so. Not many academicians or federal bureaucrats knew how to define poverty in a way lucid enough to set strategy. Those that had some inkling of what might be done were thinking along the line of baby steps – you do a bit over here and get some data, you do something over there and get some data, and then in a few years you engage the problem in an informed manner.
These federal officials were thinking much like one does in the military when embarking on an operation – first you recon and gather information, then you set the plan and contingency designs, next you gather the resources necessary to execute the plan, and then launch the assault. But when Kennedy was assassinated, and President Johnson was apprised of his predecessor’s plans for eliminating poverty in America, the latter demanded rapid action on as broad a scale as possible. Johnson had to make hay with the mourning period after Kennedy’s death or risk losing support for crucial domestic programs further down the road. So, there was no adequate preparation for federal bureaucrats who later went into the field to oversee anti-poverty programs. When these agents tried to work with locals – whether in the valleys and hollows of Appalachia, the South Side of Chicago, or East L.A. – they did not understand the culture of the people living in these regions. And in turn, the locals did not appreciate the federal workers’ attitudes; too often the former believed the latter were snobbish, conceited, and condescending. Therefore, there was too much talk, too much finger pointing, and not enough action.
These problems segue into the final one – local priorities. One of the federal programs to combat local poverty consisted of setting up dozens of Community Action Programs or CAPs. The idea was to instruct locals on how to reduce the social and economic factors that restricted their access to prosperity. In a way it was the old idea of “teach a man to fish and he will eat forever, instead of simply providing him with the fish to eat for a day.” Hopefully, the community in question would latch onto the idea and work as a unit to reduce poverty. However, for the most part that is not what happened. In some areas local politicians siphoned away the funds earmarked for CAPs. In others local militant groups did the same. And in still other cases, the locals did want the handout and not the instruction. After suffering from a generation or more of poverty, their situation was so desperate that relief was needed now, not in months or even years. So when community members saw and heard these federal bureaucrats and agents vouching the merits of a CAP, but in terms that denoted success over a period of time, locals either rejected the program or simply used up its funds as soon as possible.
Therefore, the Great Society was dealt a great blow (see Allen J. Matusow, The Unravelling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s, 97-127, 217-74).
The Civil Rights Movement Goes Radical
One of the things you must remember about segregation in the U.S. during the Jim Crow years was that it took two forms. The first form, referred to as de jure segregation, was segregation by law. This system of discrimination meant various states of the Union passed statutes barring African Americans – and in some cases other minorities – from doing certain things or going certain places. Said statutes legally sanctioned the creation and maintenance of a caste system. The second method of segregation was de facto discrimination. This term meant that there was no legal prohibition of activities favored by a person or group of people, but these same entities knew they could not go here or do that. If they did, retribution would be swift. It was an unwritten code that everyone knew and by which all abided. So whereas most de jure segregation was gone from the North and West of the United States by 1900, its de facto cousin was alive and strong in those regions after that year.
The problem with de facto segregation during the mid twentieth century was that it was hard to combat. There were no laws on the books that one could point to and say, “This is the target of our action.” That is why going after de jure segregation in the South was easier for civil rights activists in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. But by doing such a thing, it left African Americans – and American Indians, and Hispanics, and Asian Americans – residing outside the South out of the loop.
What is more, by the mid to late 1960s, there were many more African Americans living in cities in the North and West than there ever had been before. As Shi states, African Americans had been leaving the South in ever growing numbers since the First World War. During the 1940s and 1950s, the movement became a veritable flood that would not trail off until the early 1970s. But what did African Americans find in those cities during the two to three decades after the end of World War II? They discovered a decreasing number of high paying jobs, white flight, an eroding tax base, and crumbling infrastructure. When attempts were made to ease this situation, African American communities often were met with some measure of de facto discrimination – the best example probably being the existence of “sundown towns,” where African Americans had to be out of town or on “their side of the tracks” by the time the sun set. Naturally, such conditions created a state of discontent that the Civil Rights Movement in the South was not addressing. The end result were the explosions of anger in Watts, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, and other major cities outside the South during the mid to late 1960s. That is why groups such as the Black Panthers and people like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X also became popular among African Americans (see Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party, 1-88; also Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, 268-345).
The Lessons of Vietnam
Quite a few years back, I was in a night class on post-Civil War U.S. historiography, which means I was studying how historians interpret American history in the years since the Civil War. Of course, when we began discussing the Vietnam War and the United States’ role in it, things got a bit heated. One of my fellow students, Scott, began to say how the United States won the war on the military side, but lost the peace on the civilian side . . . and he repeated this adamantly several times. I said nothing then, but when the class ended and Scott and I returned to the graduate student office I spoke to him. Here, as close as I can remember, is what I said:
Scott, I know you are passionate about twentieth-century U.S. History, and particularly its subfields in military and diplomatic studies. However, your statements in class tonight were off base. By declaring your views on the Vietnam conflict the way you did, you forgot your basic von Clausewitz.
Scott looked at me for a long second, and then let out an expletive. He said I was correct, and then we went with the rest of the class to a local “watering hole” for a pint.
Some of you might know who this Carl von Clausewitz is or was. But for those of you who do not, let me briefly enlighten you.
Clausewitz was a Prussian officer in the early 1800s who wrote a tome called On War. Among the things he said in this work was that in European/American civilization, as it stood in the first half of the nineteenth century, you could not separate war from peace; or better yet, the civilian side of the military equation from the warrior side. They were part and parcel of the same dynamic, with one affecting the other in a continual interplay of forces and factors. Therefore if during wartime the civilian populace and its leadership lost faith in the military’s prosecution of said conflict, then the war would cease. If the opposite occurred, then war might continue. However, given the historical trend in European and American society, i.e. the growth of republican/democratic participation in governmental institutions, such situations would become ever rarer. Hence, the soldier/civilian relationship in Western Civilization was witnessing the warrior submit to the non-warrior’s leadership.
By the late mid to late twentieth century, for the most part, Clausewitz’ observation had come to pass. And what happened to the United States in Vietnam was an excellent example of that dynamic. Scott’s mistake was separating the U.S.’s efforts in Southeast Asia into mutually exclusive civilian and military spheres. As became apparent, when American military action could not deliver a clear-cut final victory, civilian support of the war began to wane. And even when the United States was successful in major engagements, the downward trend continued.
Take for example the Tet Offensive of early 1968 or the North Vietnamese Easter Offensive of 1972. In both cases the United States devastated the enemy. During the former the Viet Cong ceased to be a major combatant for the rest of the war and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) suffered tremendous casualties. Indeed, so bad were these losses that it took the NVA four years to recover. When it came out again in 1972, American air power helped stomp the NVA once more. Yet, the U.S. military could not put away the NVA, and the major reason was because it lost support for the war back home. America’s armed forces were restricted in what it could do by a civilian government; it was plagued by a media submitting pictures and stories of atrocities and inefficiencies; and it could not recruit from the entire U.S. civilian populace. Concerning the last of those problems, the U.S. Army and Marines filled its ranks with recruits from those lower on the social scale. Their inability to acquire soldiers and marines from throughout the nation’s entire social strata made the conflict in Vietnam look like a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. This situation only created more dissatisfaction on the home front. Finally, the war was costing beaucoup money, even with domestic programs being slashed, and eventually the nation decided enough was enough.
So, with civilian support eroding, the United States military mission drew down until it ceased all together in 1973. Clausewitz’ principle had been proved correct, and that principle is what Scott had forgotten (see Chris McNab and Andy Wiest, The Illustrated History of the Vietnam War, 122-143, 182-219; also Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, 587-790.)
(Of note, there has been debate of late among Vietnam War historians concerning the U.S. military being unable to recruit from the nation’s entire social spectrum. Some evidence indicates that recruiters were pulling in volunteers from all social classes until almost the end of American military involvement in Vietnam. However, the jury is still out on this matter. I await more evidence.)
