AMERICAN HISTORY
batmanbaozi
6ColdWarEra1946-19761.pptThe Cold War Years
National Security, Anti-Communism, and the Growth of Corporate Power
The world was now in the nuclear age.
Our ally, the Soviet Union, was once again an enemy in our eyes. The United States, Britain, and France were intent on creating a world that was conducive to international capitalist enterprise. If a “third world” country (meaning a poor, non-industrial nation) did not comply, they would be bribed and bullied. The official line, of course, was that we were doing this for the people of those nations so that would not turn communist.
The Soviet Union had less to bribe with, but they took the opposite side, helping any “third world” country that would oppose capitalism. They unremittingly bullied the nations that bordered the Soviet Union with tremendous brutality. (I can say this safely without italics.)
In essence, the United States and the Soviet Union fought nasty little wars against each other, that killed millions throughout the world, while avoiding a direct confrontation that would have brought on a nuclear holocaust.
Baby Boom Birthrate Up by 20%
Syphilis Up by 42%
The following six slides show the presidents through Gerald Ford. They were largely a group of conservative, belligerent anti-communists.
The Republicans wore their belligerence proudly. The Democrats felt the need to demonstrate their anti-communist credentials, even if their rhetoric leaned toward more toward diplomatic solutions. Even Kennedy, who may have been the most liberal of the group, had been a staunch anti-communist going into the presidency. Oddly, Nixon may have been the most diplomatic of the lot.
The American elite laid out the formula. If you were not anti-communist you were “Un-American” and you would lose the privileges that came with being a true American.
Harry Truman
1945-1953
Rose to power as the lackey of Kansas City gangsters. He replaced Henry Wallace as the vice-presidential candidate in the 1944 elections.
The American Legacy
What would you have done, if you had been in Truman’s position?
Eisenhower
1953-1961
Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party asked the former Supreme Allied Commander to head their tickets. He chose to run as a Republican.
John Kennedy
1961-1963
The son of wealthy U.S. diplomat and bootlegger, Joseph Kennedy, John was sickly and in pain for much of his life, including his presidential years. He worked hard at creating the image of vigorous sportsman.
(He probably earned his reputation as a vigorous philanderer however.)
Lyndon Johnson
1963-1969
Johnson was a long-time leader in the Senate. He was often referred to as the most powerful and most feared man in Congress. He hated the Kennedys, whom he viewed as uncredentialled upstarts, but he would agree to become VP anyway to help beat Nixon.
Richard Nixon
1969-1974
Nixon almost had the last laugh when he won the presidency after Johnson resigned, at least until he was forced to resign himself.
Gerald Ford
1974-1977
He cut a deal with Nixon. In order to become president, he would have to immediately grant Nixon a pardon. In the long run, it was political suicide.
Permanent Members of the Security Council: U.S., UK, USSR, France, China
1946
After the war, there was another attempt to create a global institution that would keep the peace. It would be called the United Nations.
It was set up in such a way that allowed the big countries to dominate.
There was a General Assembly and a Security Council, which would have five permanent members and 10 elected for two-year terms. The permanent members had veto power, meaning that any one of the them could block a resolution voted on by all other members of the UN.
The Soviet Union/Russia and the United States have used the veto far more often than any of the others.
Truman’s National Security Council
Forrestal Marshall Truman
1946 National Security Act
The United States and Soviet Union seemed too intent on world domination to allow human rights to get in the way.
The United States went from being a nation that prized democratic ideals above all (at least rhetorically), to a nation that prized security above all. It became what would be described as a national security state. Democracy was now secondary to security and it was a small elite group that defined just what that “security” entailed.
In 1946, Congress created the National Security Council (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the National Security Act. It consisted of staunch anti-communists. The CIA was originally created to coordinate the intelligence gathered by all of the various intelligence agencies in government. It quickly, however, become a covert operations force that not only spied, but actively engaged in the destabilization of governments that opposed the American agenda.
The National Security Act also changed the name of the Department of War to the Department of Defense in a brilliant bit of rhetorical manipulation.
Wild Bill Donavan/Allen Dulles
From OSS to CIA
The CIA was made up largely of former members of the wartime OSS like Wild Bill Donavan and Allen Dulles – both of whom were highly skilled in covert operations.
Allen Dulles had used his Nazi connections (his law firm had worked with Nazis before the war) to go after communists who were leading the resistance against Hitler. After the war he would bring skilled former Nazis into the U.S. and would also use them as informers and agents against the Soviet Union. His own skills at deception ad manipulation were unparalleled.
He set the course for the development of the CIA, just as J. Edgar Hoover had for the FBI.
Nuremberg Trials
10 Executed: 16 October 1946
While we were giving some Nazis sanctuary, most productively to noted rocket scientist Werner von Braun and others with prized skills, we were making a public statement in Germany itself. (There was a running joke during the space and arms race about whose Nazis were better, the American’s or the Soviet’s.)
The United States conducted war crimes trials to identify and punish the worst offenders of WWII. American judges rejected the “I was only following orders” defense. The facts that came out during the trials horrified the world.
United Mine Workers
Merchant Seamen
Railroad Workers
John L. Lewis
1946
declared illegal, on national security grounds.
Soldiers came home and as they got their old jobs back, women were displaced. Industry had become used to paying lower wages and when the men and their labor unions objected, their strikes were suppressed by Truman and the federal government in the name of National Security.
The era of Frances Perkins and New Deal labor policy was over. The National Recovery Act of 1933 that had protected workers and favored unions, failed to protect them in the post-war climate.
Unlike the postwar optimism of the 20s, the post WWII world was less giddy. There was a much greater emphasis on an almost puritanical work ethic.
The GI Bill helped many young men go to colleges and universities that would otherwise have been financially out of reach. The country began producing engineers and technicians at unprecedented rates. This new veteran driven middle class also got help with mortgages and became the first generation of tract housing owners in the suburbs,
Films of the 40’s
1947
1949
1946
1946
1949
While WWII propaganda films would continue to be made well into the 60s, there was also a shift to religious films which both reflected and encouraged a move toward Christian life.
Disney was churning out family fair, both cartoon and live action.
But there was another type of film that became perhaps more iconic and representative of the age. This was “film noir” which depicted the underbelly of American life. Out of the Past may have been the best of them (it was my favorite anyway).
Virologists
Bacteriologists
Epidemiologists
The government founded the CDC after the war, remembering the flu epidemic after WWI.
It has been invaluable at tracking and mitigating epidemics throughout the past ¾ of a century.
In the summer after the war, the United States tested nuclear bombs at the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. They displaced the indigenous residents but didn’t move them far enough away. After promising that they could return one day (which never happened), they moved them to uninhabitable islands that were blanketed with radiation during the tests. Many of them died in later years from various forms cancers..
This wasn’t the first time that the U.S. government engaged in human experiments.
Nuclear Testing July 1946
1947
Coin Term COLD WAR
Bernard Baruch
Walter Lippmann
New Vocabulary for Americans and Europeans
or
Newspaper Columnist
Winston Churchill refers to an Iron Curtain that separates the Soviet sphere of influence from the West.
Truman and his new National Security Council implemented a policy known as:
Containment
which proposed to stop any Soviet expansion. It is unclear how just how this would be done, but nuclear threat and covert operations would play a major role.
It all got more complicated and more dangerous for the West when the Soviets developed their own bomb in 1949.
Containment
Fighting World Poverty or Fighting Communism?
Bretton Woods
Representatives from the Allied countries had met at Bretton Woods in 1944 to map out postwar monetary and investment policies.
Two important institutions were created at the Bretton Woods Conference – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They were chartered to aid in postwar global economic development, although they came to be weapons of Containment during the Cold War.
To this day, the two institutions play a major role in the relations between the industrial nations and the so-called developing nations.
Author John Perkins wrote a fascinating study of IMF manipulation in Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
One immediate postwar problem was that of overproduction (some would say under-consumption). Americans didn’t have the means to consume all the products produced and Europe, a traditional trade partner, was economically devastated after the war. Europeans were also starving to death (and killing each other at alarming rates due to wartime grudges and inadequate law enforcement).
General George Marshall proposed a plan whereby the United States would give Europe large sums of money and equipment to rebuild their financial institutions and infrastructure. The plan was also meant to and stave off famine. It undoubtedly saved thousands of lives, while at the same time re-invigorating and securing and capitalist markets.
While the U.S. plan was to rebuild the world in our image, its domestic plan was to secure corporate power over American workers. This was achieved in part through the Taft-Hartley Act that undercut union power.
Without the ability to strike at the union’s discretion, the ability of workers to hold businesses liable for unfair employment practices were devastated. This was the beginning of an elite onslaught on unions that would see their biggest decline in the 80s under the Reagan Administration.
Unions would recover briefly in the 60s and 70s, but today represent only a fraction of workers.
1948
FTC warns of growing monopolies.
Unions were in decline and falling into corruption themselves. The Teamsters and Longshoremen on the east coast, notoriously fell under the influence of the mob. As the American worker was going unrepresented, corporate interests and their elite investors were gaining power at alarming rates.
Conservatives were on a campaign to undo the pro-worker advances of the New Deal.
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) warned that monopolies were growing at a pace that would make these large corporations impossible to regulate.
In 1948, Truman ran for his own term against popular Republican Thomas Dewey. Most polls had Dewey winning and some news agencies predicted a Dewey win even in the wee hours of the morning after election day.
When all the ballots were counted, however, Truman had won.
Two
Koreas
Syngman Rhee
Kim Il-Sung
Kim Il-Sung
The United States was concerned with a number of “hot spots” around the world, meaning those regions that were communist or leaning towards communism.
The Soviets had occupied the northern half of Korea toward the end of WWII. The United States had occupied the South. Both wanted to re-unite, but each wanted to end the artificial separation of the country in their own way. The North had adopted communism, the South capitalism.
It was an ideological split that lasts to this day.
Jewish immigrants from Europe migrated to an area of the Middle East under British control known as Palestine. Under the ideology of Zionism, the belief was that European Jews had religious/historical rights to the land in order to resurrect the ancient state of Israel.
In 1947, the UN adopted a partition plan that gave Jews their own region within Palestine. The Palestinian Arabs were given another region. The Jewish immigrants agreed. The Arabs did not.
It was difficult not to sympathize with European Jews (mostly Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish who had suffered under both the Nazis and the Soviets). The indigenous Palestinians were not as impressed with the Jewish claim. Nevertheless, using violent (terrorist) tactics, the Zionists convinced the British to abandon Palestine and the nation of Israel was born in 1948. It was immediately recognized by the United States.
Tensions and wars between Palestinians and surrounding Arab nations have persisted, (but see the Camp David Accords in the next lecture under the Carter years.)
After the war, Germany was split into four occupation zones. The British, French, Americans, and Soviets each took a region. Oddly, Berlin, which sat deeply inside the Russian zone, was also split into four segments.
Stalin thought this was absurd and in 1948 he cut off roads and other supply routes into the Western zones. The United States defied this Soviet action by flying supplies into the Western zones continuously, with every plane that would fly. Stalin finally gave up.
Chambers, Hiss, Nixon and HUAC
Whitaker Chambers accused State Dept. official Alger Hiss of being a communist. He had little to no evidence.
The drama was about to fizzle until young Congressman Richard Nixon of California saw an opportunity to advance his career. With the help of Allen Dulles, he found that Hiss did know communists when he was young and ruined Hiss’ career. Hiss was found guilty, not of being a communist, butfor perjuring himself before Congress.
The American fear of Soviet influence in the United States was most demonstrable in Congress.
The creation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was an attempt to root out communist sympathizers.
In retrospect, these were dark days in America when freedom of speech and thought were suppressed, and the values of American democracy were subordinated to the National Security State.
HUAC tried to suppress free expression in the arts, mostly notably by identifying and effectively banning liberals and leftist from the film industry – e.g. the famous Hollywood Ten.
Helen Gahagan Douglas
Nixon used his new credentials as a “red baiter” (“red” stood for communist) to take the Senate seat of Helen Gahagan Douglas.
He knew she wasn’t a communist, but he scored points by saying that her liberal views made her “pink” and therefore soft on communism.
1949
Anti-Trust Suit v. AT&T Begins
In 1949, the U.S. government started an anti-monopoly suit against AT&T that would last for over two decades. The parties finally agreed to a divesture plan that was implemented in 1984.
Critics claimed that it allowed AT&T to divest itself of its liabilities while allowing it to venture into new business opportunities.
In order to secure Europe and other “free countries” from Soviet aggression, the United States formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Participants received both military and monetary aid in return for allowing the U.S. to staff military bases within their countries.
China
1949 saw the birth of The Peoples’ Republic of China when the communist forces of Mao Zedong defeated the armies of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang.
Americans (and other capitalist nations) were terrified that there were now two large communist powers in the world.
NSC #68
James Forrestal either commits suicide or is murdered May 22, 1949.
Throughout this all, members of Truman’s national security state became more paranoid. The National Security Council produced a document (meant to be secret) that described the Soviet Union is such a way that it could have been describing itself.
NSC #68 is well worth reading if you want to understand what government officials were thinking about the Soviets at the time.
A perhaps paranoid, but clearly depressed James Forrestal, who was recently fired as Secretary of Defense, committed suicide. Some suspect that he was murdered.
(There’s an interesting bit on him in Oliver Stone’s documentary series The Untold History of the United States.)
1950
First Xerox
First Solar Powered House
As the forties became the fifties, culture was changing. American’s felt that they were on top of the world but suspected that they would have to fight to stay there.
Music, such as Bebop (Jazz) and Rock and Roll, popular literature like science fiction and superhero comic books, and professional sports like basketball and football began to occupy youthful imaginations.
In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea in attempt to unify the peninsula under communism. The United States formed a coalition of UN members to fight back. MacArthur, head of the expeditionary forces of the UN pushed the North Korean Army to the Chinese border.
The Chinese entered the Korean War…
…and pushed UN forces South.
MacArthur warns that unless we attack China, Korean War will end in stalemate.
Truman fires him.
Truman signs Executive Order 10241 allowing employees to be fired for disloyalty to the U.S. Gov’t.
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
A sensational spy case would occupy the headline in the early 50s. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were accused of passing nuclear information to the Soviets. Critics claimed that there was no substantiating evidence.
Many at the time felt that they were witnessing a replay of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Recent historical investigations seem to indicate that Julius was indeed passing information, however unimportant that information might have been.
There is no evidence that Ethel was involved. Both were convicted, however.
1952
Frank Jorgenson becomes Christine Jorgenson in America’s first sex reassignment surgery.
While most of the Manhattan Project scientists, including Oppenheimer, were opposed to the expansion of the nuclear arsenal, Edwin Teller, and Eastern European immigrant had other ideas. His hatred for the Soviet Union motivated his development of ever more powerful bombs.
In 1952 he led the testing of the first Hydrogen Bomb. This was a fusion bomb (where a fission bomb would set off a fusion reaction) that was far more powerful than the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.. Soon the Soviets had their own, setting off an arms race that would create arsenals capable of killing everyone on earth.
Nixon’s Checkers Speech
Eisenhower, with running mate Richard Nixon, defeated Adlai Stevenson to become the first Republican president in 20 years.
Eisenhowever wasn’t a fan of Nixon’s, but the latter’s anti-communist credentials were seen as necessary for the campaign.
Nixon overcomes charges of accepting bribes.
*
North Carolina
A black man was convicted of assault for leering at a white woman from seventy-five feet away.
Jim crow was still pervasive in the South.
Ralph Ellison offered his vision of what it was like to grow up black in this country with his brilliantly influential novel -
Invisible Man
1953
Bermuda Shorts
On the lighter side (but with dark implications), American involvements in the South Pacific and the Caribbean spawned new fashion statements – the bikini and Bermuda shorts.
The bikini lasted. The Bermuda short craze ultimately didn’t have legs.
McCarthy
In 1950, having admired Nixon’s tactics, Joseph McCarthy claimed that 205 “Commies” worked in the State Department.
Employing unsubstantiated accusations to advance his career, he went on to lead congressional hearings in 1954 charging that the army was soft on communism.
Joseph McCarthy’s actions would finally be seen for what they were, self promoting “witch hunting.” He would end up being censured by Congress and dying in’57 of alcoholism.
The question is, why did Congress and the American people let HUAC and McCarthyism go on for so long.
People were afraid to publicly criticize the proceedings for fear of being ostracized. Arthur Miller wrote about the Salem Witch Trials in The Crucible to obliquely condemn McCarthyism.
After the H-Bomb tests, many Americans were terrified of a possible nuclear war with the Soviets. Eisenhower, sensing that this fear was getting out of hand, delivered a speech in 1953 calling for the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes – most obviously, for the production of electricity.
His supporters claimed it would bring an age when electricity would be virtually free.
Walt Disney would tout it in his soon to be completed theme park.
Earl Warren
Chief Justice
1953-1969
Korean Armistice
Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He thought he was appointing a conservative.
Warren would preside over what was arguably the most liberal court in U.S. history.
North and South Korea would sign an armistice that is still in effect. In other words, the war is not over.
Despite the lack of evidence against her, Ethel Rosenberg would be executed along with her husband. It was meant to show a zero tolerance for collaboration with or even sympathetic rhetoric for the Soviets.
John Foster Dulles
and the Eisenhower
Doctrine of Massive
Retaliation
Allen Dulles’ brother John Foster Dulles became Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. John Foster was as deeply anti-communist as his brother, though most say he was more level-headed and personable.
Still, it was his idea to implement the doctrine of Massive Retaliation. If the Soviet Union tried to expand, it would face annihilation.
It may have been the most dangerous bluff in history.
DNA
Linus Pauling
Rosalind Franklin
1953
Amidst threats of the total annihilation of human life, scientists like Linus Pauling, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, and James Watson, were reading the code of life itself.
The structure of DNA was identified. The mechanism for heritability and evolutionary change was now not only known, it could be manipulated at the molecular level.
Eisenhower, John and Allen Dulles and Kermit Roosevelt Junior carried out Operation Ajax to overthrow Iranian president Mossadegh in 1953.
Mossadegh had displayed the temerity to remain neutral. Neutrality was a deposable offense during the Cold War.
*
While the public was distracted by science, entertainment and the struggles of daily life, the American government was engaging in covert operations around the world. They were destroying other culture’s democratic efforts in order to preserve “the American way of life.”
Freely elected foreign governments were overthrown by American covert operations teams (the CIA).
The following year, the United States helped United Fruit Company overthrow the freely elected president of Guatemala.
President Arbenz had tried to secure better conditions for Guatemalan citizens (mostly indios) against the abuse of the giant American corporation.
The Dulles brothers’ (Secretary of State John Foster and CIA director Allen) law firm had represented United Fruit. Eisenhower apparently saw no conflict of interest.
1954
United Fruit/CIA overthrow of Arbenz
Armas installed as president.
The grandest distraction of them all opened in 1955. Ever since his dad had talked about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Walt had been dreaming of a Disneyland.
It would mythologize American values and achievements, celebrating American pioneers of the old west and pioneers of the future. It would also celebrate America’s legendary European roots and colonial conquests.
Like the Playboy mansion, Call of Duty, Fast and Furious, and NFL Football, Americans have a genius for making bad behavior a lot of fun.
C. Wright Mills made a living, as a Sociologist, looking at the bad behavior of the rich and powerful. He called them the “Power Elite”.
There was a general sense among the American left that things had gone awry after WWII, that the rich and powerful in the United States, who had real reasons to fear communist expansion, were using American enmity with the Soviet Union as an excuse for the consolidation of power.
Far from the “happy days” of the fifties, having lived through HUAC and the McCarthy years many were seeing an anti-democratic trend.
In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no 'two evils' exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.
W.E.B DuBois
An older DuBois had all but given up. He would move to Ghana in the early sixties.
Automobile styles changed radically in the ‘50s. Alfred Sloan had started a policy known as “planned obsolescence” in the 1920s to compete with Ford. The concept was never more apparent than in ‘50s cars. From year to year, styles would change – fins would go from vertical to horizontal, headlight shapes would change, new combinations of colors would be introduced.
People were envious when their neighbor had the new model, which made them seem out of touch.
To understand this concept see Sneetches by Dr. Seuss.
National Highway Act of 1956
While new roads were needed to handle all of the new traffic, the Eisenhower Administration devised a scheme to build a national highway system. To get backing for this expensive endeavor, the administration touted it as a step towards national security.
It would help troop movements and escape from nuclear holocaust. They also thought it would free the cities from gridlock. (They could never have imagined the 405).
1957
As if to justify the paranoid motivation for the National Highway system, the Soviets launched the world’s first satellite into space.
It terrified the American public. They didn’t know what it was. It seemed possible that it was a new space age weapon meant to annihilate the United States.
It was, in fact, a very small communications satellite, but Sputnik did demonstrate the Soviet superiority in rocket science and space age technology.
Leave It to Beaver
The Honeymooners
It was as if America had been caught napping. They were busy watching TV as the first television generation. While TV shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver demonstrated the daily, if somewhat frivolous predicaments of white middle class life, and movies were largely family safe with cartoon or religious heroes, there was a group of writers and producers who depicted the grittier, even darker side of the fifties utopian dream.
The Honeymooners (TV) and On the Waterfront (Film) depicted the constant stresses of life in the working class. The Blackboard Jungle illustrated the anxieties of growing up as a teen in poor, violent urban neighborhoods.
Films of the Fifties
1955
1953
1956
1953
1959
The Beat Generation
Young people were looking for new ways of seeing the world, and new ways to express their views of the world.
James Dean’s powerful 1955 portrayal of a disaffected teen made a huge impact…
…as did Jack Kerouac’s novel of youthful self discovery, On the Road. Kerouac’s innovative work ushered in a youth-based counter-culture movement called the Beat Generation. To denigrate the lifestyle, critics would later associate them with Soviet influence, calling them “beatniks” (a play on sputnik).
White teens were playing “Black” music. Rock and roll was seen as incendiary and un-American by the older WWII generation (later described by Tom Brokaw as the “greatest generation.” Many would take issue with that characterization.)
“White” radio stations refused to play black music, so white performers became the intermediaries… rockers like Elvis Presley.
(Not to denigrate Presley, but it was like a 1950s version of a minstrel show. Ultimately, however, this phenomenon led to the acceptance of black pop and rock musicians in the mainstream.)
The middle classes and above were enjoying global travel, not just life ‘on the road.” Airlines began to proliferate and carry thousands of passengers to Europe and Asia. American tourism began to change the way the world looked at us. We became admired and resented at the same time, both probably for good reason.
Europeans saw us as wealthy, loud, bumpkins lacking the refined sophistication of the continent. The legend of the “ugly American” was born.
Here’s a personal note on the evolution of travel. My great grandmother, who I spoke of in the Gilded Age lecture, went from traveling around Los Angeles like this in the 1880s…
…to a trip to Paris in this a few years before she died.
She used to tell me that the world had changed, but the people in it hadn’t.
Women’s fashions in the fifties were conservative. There was an attempt to depict innocence, in other words virginity. Women had gone from being celebrated tough industrial workers during the war, to petite, subservient homemakers in the post-war world.
Many women couldn’t handle the demotion to second class citizenry (although some seemed to revel in it – see Phyllis Schlafly and Anita Bryant who apparently wanted to return to the fifties as they denigrated feminists fo the 60s and 70s).
Sylvia Plath: Voice of a Generation?
Poets like Sylvia Plath voiced the angers and frustrations of the feminine circumstance in fifties America. Pharmaceutical companies profited from the psychological damage that followed this cultural oppression. They sold Miltowns, an early mood enhancing drug that kept women under control.
(I grew up in an age when neighborhood women would mix Miltowns and Martinis to get through the day.
I don’t want to give the impression that every women or every working-class man was unhappy. Many find joy in whatever circumstance they are in, and the fifties offered an explosion of new and exciting commodities, but the world of the 1950s was not the joyous middle class, nuclear family utopia depicted in so many iconic images of the day.)
The reliance on pharmaceuticals to treat every social and psychological malaise took a dark turn. The German drug Thalidomide was used to prevent morning sickness in pregnant women. It worked. It also caused birth defects.
While we, as a society were eliminating polio and smallpox, we were also creating a drug dependent generation. The industrial substances were justified for medicinal reasons, even though they were often just prescribed to make people happier.
(The next generation would eliminate the medical justification.)
Pharmaceuticals and Profits
As the decade ended, Americans were seemingly happy with their stuff, but terrified that it could be taken away in a heartbeat. Anti-communism had reached a fever pitch, even though the excesses of HUAC and McCarthyism were over.
Anti-communism had filtered down into the populous so profoundly that the working class was utterly transformed. Both the Republican and Democratic parties filled their campaign speeches with anti-communist rhetoric. It seeming dominated the conversation as talk of the devil dominated fundamentalist Christian discourse.
Nixon and Kennedy had a debate over basic American issues in 1960. It was the first debate on TV. Those who heard it on the radio, generally said that Nixon had won. Those who watched it on TV, were overwhelmingly certain that Kennedy won.
1960 Nixon-Kennedy Presidential Debate
Kennedy won the tight, contentious election (some said it was stolen in Chicago). The young senator from Massachusetts became the 35th President of the United States and presided over one of the most dangerous times in American history. (At least this is how we’ve remembered it. I, personally , believe that we live in far more dangerous times today.)
Before he left office, Dwight Eisenhower delivered an influential speech on the state of America. Without alluding to C. Wright Mills, he warned that an elite group of military and weapons industry power figures were dominating American culture and politics. We were, he said, becoming dangerously dependent on the military-industrial complex as the driving force in our economy. He seemed very prescient on this issue.
Kennedy presented as a bold, young, inventive figure (and this hid his inexperience). He was certainly quick witted and photogenic. He was the first (and only?) rock star president.
So when he decried the superiority of Soviet space technology, he challenged Americans to be on the moon before the end of the decade. It seemed like an impossible pie-in-the–sky dream, but the aero-space industry, guided by NASA, went to work.
Americans were enraptured every step of the way. (I remember listening to the Dodgers and coverage of Alan Shepherd’s first American space flight on two separate radios simultaneously.)
But the United States and the Soviet Union were not only competing in space.
The Cuban Revolution had brought dramatic changes to the Western Hemisphere. Failing to secure recognition from the United States, Fidel Castro looked to the Soviet Union. Many of the anti-Castro population had migrated to Florida (forming anti-Castro militias). The CIA (and Allen Dulles) had plotted with these Cuban exiles to take back Cuba. Eisenhower reluctantly approved the plan. Kennedy, however, knew nothing of it when he came into office. He disapproved the invasion at the last minute, but the exiles had already begun the campaign, landing at the Bay of Pigs. Many were killed or captured.
Kennedy would be seen as the enemy of the right-wing elite forever after.
When Castro invited the Soviets to plant missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba, Kennedy was faced with a potentially deadly dilemma. Kennedy would effectively stare down Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and force the Soviets to remove their missiles (Khrushchev was reportedly impressed with the young president whom he’d previously assessed as a pushover. He would ask that he only put the missiles in Cuba to convince the Americans to take their nuclear weapons out of Turkey.)
Having averted nuclear war, Kennedy gained prestige (at least in some circles). It would be known to history as The Cuban Missile Crisis.
The United States had been involved in Vietnam since the French were kicked out of that country in 1954. We felt that we had to keep Vietnam out of the hands of communists. The so-called domino theory said that if you let one Southeast Asian country go, the rest would fall. The efficacy of out policy of “containment” was at stake.
Kennedy initially supported our involvement in Vietnam but was seriously rethinking that position at the time of his death.
August 28,1963
Martin Luther King, who had become the leading figure in the Civil Rights Movement (which we’ll telescope into later in the lecture), gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in front of thousands of sympathizers in Washington D.C.
He hoped that his children would be judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
J. Edgar Hoover, questioning Kings character had him under surveillance. Hoover hated King and the movement he led.
Hoover also hated Kennedy and was likely not too upset when Kennedy was assassinated a few months later.
On November 22, 1963, America was changed forever. Kennedy was dead and despite the Warren Commission Report’s view that the assassination was perpetrated by a lone gunman (Lee Harvey Oswald), few Americans believed that.
The fact that Allen Dulles, who had been dismissed by Kennedy in 1961 as head of the CIA, was so instrumental in the creation of the report, has created speculation that there was a cover-up.
Unfortunately, there are thousand of theories, some more plausible than others. We may never know what actually happened.
(Vincent Bugliosi, a highly respected prosecutor, wrote thousand-page book supporting the lone gunman thesis. It is an impressive document. I still don’t buy it, but I have difficulty choosing among the alternatives.)
Johnson’s Great Society
Johnson’s War
Lyndon Johnson became president and immediately proposed a new program – his Great Society. This was meant to end poverty in America. It was ambitious and forward thinking. Had it worked, Johnson may have gone down as one of America’s greatest presidents, on the scale of his hero, Franklin Roosevelt.
He unfortunately let anti-communist priorities derail his plans. He led us, instead, further into the Vietnam “quagmire.”
Times They Were A Changin’: The Revival of Folk Music
Pop Music
Music in the early 60s was going through a transformation. As the beatniks became hippies* folk music was returning with its sharp social commentaries (see the works of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez). British rockers were unabashedly stealing from black rockers of the fifties to create new kinds of rock and roll. Americans ate it up.
Black artists were also now making it into the mainstream. The Motown sound was just as influential as the “British invasion” if not more so. But the African American social movement toward freedom and equality was (and is) a long way off.
*…which was another derogatory term that the accused adopted.
Films also took on a new tone. While you still had the almost supernatural saviors of the West and fully supernatural nannies of children’s literature, the sixties would be an age of the “anti-hero.” No one played the part better than Paul Newman (although one suspects that James Dean would have dominated the market had he lived).
A line from the movie Cool Hand Luke seemed to characterize the “generation gap” of the sixties. “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
Older folks thought that the very fabric of American values was endangered by the drug experimenting, free love making hippies. The hippies doubted that these old values that had brought war and anxiety to America were worth saving.
Film in the 60’s
March 31st, 1968
Implying that he had failed the nation, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election. This put the nomination for the Democrat candidacy squarely in the hand of Robert Kennedy, John’s younger brother.
A few days later, Martin Luther King was shot and killed.
It seemed to many Progressives that all of their cultural heroes were being eliminated.
As usual, a lone gunman was blamed, Earl Ray. King’s wife Coretta would later become convinced that Ray was not guilty, as evidence of a larger conspiracy emerged.
Again, we may never know the truth of the matter.
June 4, 1968
Later in the summer, Robert Kennedy was killed. Too many, even critics of Kennedy, were starting to believe that the United States was descending into chaos. Anyone with an alternative viewpoint was a target.
Richard Nixon, who had hated both Kennedys came to the forefront with a campaign promise to end the Vietnam war with honor and to bring order back to nation. He, of course, did neither.
Still, in 1968 the American people elected Richard Nixon, who defeated a weak Democratic alternative to RFK.
Nixon appointed college professor Henry Kissinger to be his chief foreign policy advisor and Secretary of State. Kissinger may arguably have been the most powerful cabinet member of the 20th century.
Perhaps ironically, the Kennedy dream of reaching the moon by the end of the decade came true in the summer of 1969. Nixon would, of course, benefit from American excitement over this achievement.
NASA was now a tremendously powerful agency and we would go to the moon several more times. Its collective vision woud lead to the space shuttle program and to a vast array of communications and experimental technologies in space, including the Hubble Telescope.
July 20th, 1969
Less than three weeks later the euphoria was crushed with news of a horrific murder in LA. When it was revealed that multiple murders were perpetrated by a hippie cult with a maniacal leader, the country seem fascinated and repulsed. The news media made sure that it would not be forgotten.
August 9th, 1969
*
Feb. 1972
While Nixon’s arrogance, political hit-lists, and Watergate crimes will rightfully be his legacy, his foreign policy acumen was admirable.
Fooling even the doubters from his own party, Nixon re-established diplomatic relations with China. It was among the greatest foreign policy initiatives in American history. It also put pressure on the Soviets to normalize relations with the United States.
But, Nixon’s refusal to acknowledge his role in the burglary of the Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate and especially the cover-up of that crime, brought the United States to the brink of a constitutional crisis.
In his arrogance, he had recorded everything said in the White House, imagining that he would go down in history as one of America’s great presidents. In fact, it was these tapes that proved his guilt.
Days before he was to be impeached (meaning to go on trial before Congress), he resigned.
Watergate
As promised earlier in the lecture, we’ll now look at the
The Civil Rights Movement
in greater detail.
1887 Reconstruction Governor William Brownlow who campaigned for passage of the 14th Amendment is removed from the state capitol library as “not worthy of emulation” by the state’s children.
As great as the Civil Rights Movement was, it has not achieved its goals. This remains ahead of us.
Unarmed people of color killed by police.
Brown v. Board of Education
May 17, 1954
We can begin our brief and (woefully incomplete) talk of the civil rights movement with the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. The Board of Education.
Recall Plessy v. Ferguson that decided in favor of the “separate but equal” law that maintained segregation in the South.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) overturned that. Mr. Brown thought that his kids should be able to go to the well funded local school. It was a “white” school. Mr. Brown didn’t feel that there should be such a thing, so he brought a lawsuit. NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall took the case all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
The Court decreed that the Constitution (specifically the 14th Amendment) did not allow segregation; the “separate but equal” laws were invalid.
Now the question for America: “How do we enforce this?”
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
Montgomery, Alabama 1954
Vernon Johns
Martin Luther King
Vernon Johns, pastor of the Dexter Avenue Church, was not only the Baptist minister, he preached Civil Rights. His activism often got him into trouble, even with his own congregation, whom he tried to stir to action. He would become a mentor to his eventual replacement, a young Martin Luther King.
King, a graduate of Morehouse College, took over from Johns in 1954, and continued to teach the gospel of Christianity and of Civil Rights. He became the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, which was a larger southern organization for the protection of African Americans.
August 28,1955
14-Year-Old Emmett Till
In 1955, a young Emmett Till of Chicago went for the summer to Mississippi to live with his uncle. He was there with a group of young teens who would work during the day. After a day of work, Emmett decided to go the store where he met a white woman. She claimed he whistled at her and went back to tell her neighbors what had happened. Whether Till actually did whistle at her is anybody’s guess. Emmett was from Chicago and not schooled in the ways of the South.
The woman’s husband and brother in law took Emmett from his uncle’s house, beat him to death and threw him into the river. The pictures of Emmett after he was taken from the river, along with his mother Mamie’s decision to have an open casket so that the world could see what the white men and done to her baby, set off the Civil Rights Movement.
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam…
…are acquitted then confess.
Dec. 1, 1955 Rosa Parks Refuses to Give Up Her Seat
Dec. ’56 Supreme Court Declares Bus Segregation Unconstitutional
Later in the same year, Rosa Parks, who was part of a Civil Rights group, refused to given up her seat for a white man. Her defiance ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She and the boycott made national news. The boycott was successful, and the Supreme Court later determined that having separate sections on buses for whites and blacks was unconstitutional.
The court’s decision ended any last vestige of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision.
The movement began to pick up.
Feb. 1957
Rustin, Abernathy, King, and John Lewis (later of the SNCC)
Little Rock, Sep. 25th , 1957
In 1957, President Eisenhower called Governor Orville Faubus and told him that he must integrate Arkansas schools. This came after Faubus had denied access of Little Rock High School to a group of African American students. He told Eisenhower that Arkansas wasn’t ready. The President implied that he didn’t like it either (Eisenhower was a Texan), but that this was the law. He then threatened Faubus with Federal troops if he did not comply with the law.
Little Rock High School was integrated when nine extraordinarily courageous African American teenagers entered the previously all white school.
Greensboro Feb. 1960
In 1960, four young African American men sat down at a white only counter in a Woolworth’s diner. The police were called but couldn’t do anything. The young men were not served but did not leave. The event made the local news.
The next day over 300 students showed up, creating a national sensation. This inspired many older African Americans to get involved.
SNCC Founded April ‘60
John Lewis
Fannie Lou Hamer
Stokely Carmichael
Marion Berry
Julian Bond
Bob Moses
Later that year, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was created. It would include some of the most important members of the Civil Rights Movement, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and Julian Bond.
It was a much more radical organization that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, that ultimately rejected the notion of non-violence after several of its members were murdered by whites.
CORE Congress on Racial Equality
University of Mississippi
September ‘62
James Meredith, amid taunts by white students, became the first black man to enter the University of Mississippi. Integration was a slow and often violent process.
April ’63, Birmingham Jail
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
Martin Luther King was jailed in 1963 after a Civil Rights march in Birmingham. The police used brutal tactics against the marchers and jailed many.
King’s Letters From the Birmingham Jail have become highly valued pieces of literature.
The next year, King would be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, which made him even more powerful. People of all colors and ethnicities began to see the truth in what he was saying. J. Edgar Hoover and his allies saw this as a threat.
June ‘63
In the same year that King was arrested in Birmingham, NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated by white supremacist (KKK Member) Byron de la Beckwith.
Despite the fact that his crime was well know within the white community, he was not brought to justice until 1994.
The month after Evers’ murder, King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
August 28, 1963
Dream Speech
One month later, four little girls getting ready to perform at church were murdered when a bomb went off. This was the last straw for many who were sitting on the margins. Almost a decade after the Emmett Till murder, many young African American began to wonder if non-violence was the right approach.
Bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church
Birmingham
September 15, 1963
Murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi
June 21, 1964
Civil Rights workers were being harassed and murdered by white supremacists who felt that they were invulnerable to prosecution.
In 1964, the 24th Amendment was ratified. It made pol taxes illegal. Southern voting boards used to charge African Americans large sums of money to vote.
Later on the “Civil Rights Act” was passed to assure African American rights. Johnson enthusiastically signed it into law. It outlawed discrimination based on race, sex, or religion. Many African American men would lose their civil rights when they were drafted to fight Johnson’s war in Vietnam. (Mexican Americans and poor whites would also suffer the same fate.)
24th Amendment had been ratified in January.
Civil Rights Act 1964
Nobel December ‘64
Selma to Montgomery and Bloody Sunday March ‘65
Voting Rights Act August 6, 1965
Malcolm X Assassinated Feb. 21, 1965
During the hot summer months of 1965, anger boiled over in South Central Los Angeles with the Watts Riots.
People in the neighborhood protesting a confrontation with police soon found themselves joined in a rebellion.
Founded 1966
Bobby Seale and Huey Newton
The people of Oakland sympathized with those in the Watts area of Los Angeles. They had been suffering from confrontations with the police for years. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale decided to start a neighborhood protection organization, which they called the Black Panthers.
The Panthers were not only there to protect citizens from the police, they also started breakfast programs for children and literacy groups. They became highly respected with the community and throughout the nation. Black Panther chapters sprang up in other major cities.
“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America, and shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”
In 1966 Muhammad Ali was sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to fight in Vietnam.
J. Edgar Hoover created the FBI program known as COINTELPRO to spy on and engage in covert operations against American dissidents. He spied on King, planted covert operators to destroy the Black Panthers from the inside, infiltrated the Brown Berets and AIM (American Indian Movement).
People’s lives were destroyed, and, in some cases, people were killed. Whereas the shooting of James Meredith (he didn’t die) was probably a lone supremacist, the murder of Martin Luther King is still open to question.
June ‘66
April ‘68
Dec. 4th, 1969 - The FBI and Chicago police gunned down Panther leader Fred Hampton while he was still in bed. Hampton was considered to be dangerous because he appealed to young people across the races. It was an outright political murder.
COINTELPRO operatives planted seeds of doubt amongst Panther leaders. When LA Black Panther leader Geronimo Pratt was arrested on murder charges, his rival in the Panthers Huey Newton conspired with other Panthers to keep important evidence from the defense. Pratt had actually been in Oakland at a Panther meeting when the murders happened. Pratt was not an innocent, he was a violent man, but he could not have committed the crime he was charged with. Nevertheless, he spent 27 years in jail, after which he was released when his conviction was finally overturned.
Huey Newton was killed by a drug dealer in ‘89, but by then the Black Panther Party had withered away, a victim of COINTELPRO and its own internal dissensions.
Geronimo Pratt ‘72
While the struggle for Civil Rights was making slow and painful progress in the United States, many African Americans and other young men were fighting and dying in Vietnam. It is not an easy story to tell and the following few slides are meant only to inspire you to look into this tragedy for yourselves.
The Vietnam War
French Indochina 1887-1940
We have to go back to the 19th century when the Europeans were colonizing the world. France had conquered and dominated regions in North Africa and also took over the area of Southeast Asia known as Indochina (including the area that is presently Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos).
They created vast plantations and used Vietnamese labor. In order to serve the French colonial effort, they created a modern infrastructure, such as a railroads and communications systems. As in all colonial systems, the locals were essentially slaves except for those who converted to Christianity and began to speak French.
1930 Ho Chi Minh and the Indochinese Communist Party
A young Vietnamese scholar, Nguyen Sinh Cung, who had spent time in both France and the Soviet Union, started the Indochinese Communist Party in an effort to combat French colonialism. He would later take the name Ho Chi Minh.
His party gained in strength and by the time of WWII and the Japanese invasion of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh’s force became a significant opposition to the occupation army. His Viet Minh guerrillas would fight along side of the American OSS and also provide the U.S. intelligence about Japanese troop movements and political actions. Former French colonists, on the other hand, collaborated with the Japanese, much as the Vichy French collaborated with the Nazis back in France.
Japan Occupies Indochina 1940
Maintain French Colonial Structure
Viet Minh 1941
When France becomes one of the Allied victors in Europe, Japan declares Vietnam Independent under hereditary king Bao Dai and Japanese “Protection,” then rids itself of the French bureaucracy.
French Rule Ends
1945
Japan Surrenders
Ho Chi Minh Proclaims Democratic Republic of Vietnam
Later in 1945
Dissolves Indochinese Communist Party
The Roosevelt Administration had promised to recognize a new Republic of Vietnam after the victory over the Japanese, but Roosevelt was dead.
Truman did not honor the promise even after Ho Chi Minh dissolved the Vietnamese Communist Party and wrote a very American like constitution.
Truman felt that in order to stave off Soviet advances in Europe, the alliance with France was more important - and France wanted their Vietnam colony back.
Ho Chi Minh felt that he had no choice but to seek aid from the Soviets and Chinese, making Vietnam an enemy of the American Containment mentality.
France is Back
Cochinchina
under Bao Dai
1946
U.S. Supports French
Russia and China Support Vietnamese
War Begins
1946
After defeating the Japanese, the Vietnamese were back to fighting a war of independence against the French.
Dien Bien Phu
Giap
The Vietnamese defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Eisenhower mediated and forged a deal (Geneva Accords) to move all Frenchmen and Vietnamese collaborators (most of whom were French speaking Catholics) to the South. A DMZ (demilitarized zone) was defined and the refugees moved below that line.
Eisenhower promised to support free elections once the situation was stabilized, but he did not honor his promise and instead recognized The Republic of Vietnam (in the South) as a new nation. He propped up Ngo Dinh Diem, a Francophone Catholic, as president. Now the Buddhist South was ruled by pro-West Catholic. Resistance began immediately.
Geneva Accords
Vietnam Partitioned
1954
Eisenhower then assembled former WWII allies to join in the mutual oversight of Southeast Asia. SEATO (Southeast Asian Treaty Organization) was used to execute the American policy of Containment.
Americans offered a rationale known as the Domino Theory, the idea that if one Asian nation fell, all of the others would fall one by one.
Eisenhower sent in advisors to help Diem with the civil war in the South. The SEATO nations, of course, called it an insurrection.
SEATO
1954
Advisors in Vietnam 1954-1963
Buddhist Protest
A group of Buddhist monks determined that the world was oblivious to the plight of the Vietnamese people and felt they had to make a bold statement. They called in the foreign press as witnesses, then doused themselves with gasoline and sat in the lotus position as they were incinerated. It worked. The images of the immolations were published around the world and global opinion turned against the United States.
Kennedy was now president and he felt he had to remove Diem. He didn’t count on his approved coup leading to the violent deaths of Diem and his brother Nhu. Kennedy himself would die soon after.
Kennedy had been contemplating a withdrawal from Vietnem, but now Johnson was President.
1963
The Assassinations
The Succession
Duong Van Minh ‘63
Nguyen Kanh ‘64
Phan Huy Quat (no picture)‘65
Nguyen Kao Ky ‘65
Nguyen Van Thieu ‘67
The U.S. would appoint a series of successors to Diem.
One of Kennedy’s pet projects was to build a strong counter-insurgency capability in the U.S. Army. The Green Beret’s or Special Forces were born. They were already playing an important role in Vietnam and would expand their role under Johnson.
They were highly trained in the local languages and schooled in the cultures of the indigenous mountain people (Montagnards). For this, they were aided by American anthropologists who had been sent in to study these cultures for later manipulation.
Montagnards
Green Berets and Montagnards
Johnson’s advisor, who had been Kennedy’s advisor, convinced Johnson that the war could be won. His secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, would later change his mind but it was too late.
Johnson did not want to be the first President to lose a war to communists, but there was an election coming up against a perceived war monger (known in those days as a “hawk”). Goldwater had hard core anti-communist credentials, but after the Cuban missile crisis, Johnson knew that the American people were afraid of nuclear war. He took a diplomatic stance of negotiated settlement (Americans who were fundamentally anti-war were known as “doves”).
*
Johnson won the election in a landslide and immediately turned to expansion of the war in Vietnam. Knowing he needed an incident to incite the emotions of the American people, the administration manipulated what turned out to be a non-incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, to justify escalation of the war.
In the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Congress gave Johnson the freedom to prosecute the war as he saw fit. There would eventually be over 500,000 (1968)* American troops in Vietnam at one time.
*http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm