Assignment

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Week 8 Assignment: Journal Entry

Instructions
For this activity, reflect on the course content and address the following:

  • Identify and elaborate on one or two lessons you have learned from our study of United States history that affect you today in your daily life and/or work.
  • Provide advice to the next group of students who will be taking this course.
    • How has this course affected you today in your daily life and/or work?
    • What should incoming students be aware of regarding this class?
    • What strategies did you use that they may find useful?
    • What advice can you provide to help them earn an A?

Writing Requirements

  • Length: 2-3 pages (not including title page)
  • 1-inch margins
  • Double spaced
  • 12-point Times New Roman font
  • Title page

 

Leson:Week 7: Postwar America: Cold War and the Civil Rights Era

 

Introduction

At the end of World War II, Europe lay in ruins. In the West, only two superpowers remained – the United States and the Soviet Union. Their relationship would soon be marked by a Cold War that lasted for more than 40 years (1947-1991). This coincided with the ultimate victory of Communism in China and led to the Korean War (1950-53) and the Vietnam War (1954-1975). These events would profoundly shape postwar America.

The Cold War: Containment and Confrontation

The Soviet Union appeared to most Americans as an enigmatic and threatening presence on the world scene. Stalin’s insistence on maintaining a Soviet sphere of influence would dictate American foreign policy for the next 40 years. One approach to Soviet expansionism was drawn from the general history of empires. In the past, aggressive empires were contained by diplomatic and political sanctions. The most logical response was to constrain its expansionist tendencies through a policy of containment.

The principal architect of containment was George F. Keenan (1904-2005). Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Keenan made his way to the United States Foreign Service, with early appointments to Germany and the Baltic countries. He became a leading expert on Russian affairs during the 1930s and was a key member of the United States Embassy in Moscow at that time. After World War II, Keenan served as deputy head of the United States mission in Moscow, and at the end of his term in 1946 sent his now-famous “long telegram,” perhaps the best-known cable in American diplomatic history, to James Byrnes, President Harry S. Truman’s Secretary of State. Keenan argued that Stalin used Communist ideology to legitimize his own autocratic leadership and protect his own self-interests. Keenan’s strategy was to contain Soviet power by a system of alliances and foreign aid. He belittled the idea that Stalin was determined to destroy the United States and argued that, when pressured, he [Stalin] would back down. Keenan’s ideas became the basis of both the Truman Doctrine (1947) and the Marshall Plan (1947).

The posturing of both the United States and the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War was dangerous. There were several occasions when the leaders of each nation had backed the other into a corner with few options for retreat. The U-2 Spy Plane Crisis of 1960 anticipated the Cuban Missile Crisis and granted important context to the larger crisis.

Click on the following link to view a video of President Kennedy’s speech on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Click on the play button once the website opens.

The Cuban Mssile Crisis

In his Memoirs, Keenan later regretted that his policies were often associated with the massive build-up of conventional and nuclear weapons that characterized the 1950s, but confrontation could not be avoided in Cuba. During the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1952-1960), Fidel Castro, a young Cuban lawyer, led a successful revolution against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Castro entered Havana in triumph, but soon imposed harsh socialist rule. Thousands of Batista supporters were executed, American holdings were confiscated, and many Cubans fled to Florida. President John F. Kennedy (1960-1963) decided to use a CIA plan from the previous administration to secretly invade Cuba, but the Bay of Pigs invasion was a total failure and set the stage for a more deadly confrontation with both Cuba and the Soviet Union. When a U-2 spy plane detected Soviet missile bases being constructed in Cuba in October 1962, President Kennedy issued an ultimatum to Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev to remove the missiles. Kennedy then ordered a naval blockade (or “quarantine”) of Cuba. When a U-2 plane strayed from Alaska into Soviet territory, negotiations reached a critical turning point. After ten days of intense political and military maneuvering, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles if the United States would end the quarantine and not invade Cuba. This was the closest the United States and the Soviet Union ever came to war.

The Cold War: Anti-Communism

While the United States policy of containment ultimately proved to be successful, there were moments in American history when this policy was put aside in favor of a more virulent anti-Communism. This was particularly evident during the 1950s. The John Birch Society was founded as a radical anti-Communist organization. Financed by wealthy conservatives, the group claimed that Communists and Communist sympathizers had infiltrated all levels of government. They even accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren of being part of a Communist conspiracy. Among the supporters of the John Birch Society was Senator Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy became nationally famous when he charged that the United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson knew the names of more than 200 Communist sympathizers.

 

 

McCarthy became chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and the subcommittee on investigations. Among those called before the committee were playwright Arthur Miller, musician Leonard Bernstein, and actor Charlie Chaplin. Hundreds of Hollywood writers and actors were blacklisted as Communists or Communist sympathizers.

 

The End of the Cold War

The Cold War ended as George Keenan predicted, from its own inability to sustain itself. Internal reforms brought economic turmoil and food shortages. Gorbachev instituted a series of economic and democratic reforms that are grouped under the terms glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring), and demokratizatsiia (democratization). Maintaining a balance of power with the United States was as much a concern for the Soviets as it was for the Americans. Germany remained the most visible symbol of the Communist and non-Communist worlds. A line divided the country into western and eastern halves; Berlin itself remained divided, with West Berlin sitting dangerously within East German territory. When the East German government put up a wall through Berlin in 1961 to stop the flow of refugees going into West Berlin, the Iron Curtain had descended in a very physical way. A quarter century later, United States President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) would stand in front of the wall and say, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” (Robinson, 2007, para. 4). It came down suddenly and abruptly in November 1989.

View the following video on the speech given at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on June 12, 1987:

President Ronald Reagan’s Speech at the Berlin Wall (26:20)

 

 

The Civil Rights Movement

In the 1960s, one event that touched nearly every American was the Civil Rights Movement. The election of President Kennedy ushered the United States into the 1960s with the New Frontier: a bold set of expectations, desires, and liberalism that expanded highly under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and quickly dissolved as the domestic environment of the United States fell into chaos and disarray. With the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, expanding drug culture and race riots transformed the United States from a land of unparalleled possibilities in the early 1960s to a nation facing numerous domestic challenges. In the end, the Civil Rights Movement granted equality to all minority groups and slowly moved the United Stated toward diversity.

View the following video showing the organization of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s Jr. speech “I Have a Dream” in August of 1963:

1963 March on Washington (4:38)