A Few Lessons from American History. Reader for Students of English

LESSON 10

Post-war America and the Civil Rights Movement

(1946–1964)

At the end of World War II, the United States and the USSR emerged as the world’s major powers. They also became involved in the Cold War, a state of hostility between the two nations. The United States and the USSR had different ideologies, and they mistrusted each other. The Soviet Union feared that the United States sought the downfall of Communism. The United States felt threatened by Soviet expansionism in Europe, Asia, and the western hemisphere.

Policy of Containment

Containment of the Soviet Union became American policy in the postwar years. The United States and the Soviet Union disagreed over postwar policy in central and eastern Europe. In 1947 the Cold War conflict centred on Greece, where a Communist-led resistance movement, supported by the USSR and Communist Yugoslavia, threatened to overthrow the Greek monarchical government, supported by Britain. When the British declared that they were unable to aid the imperiled Greek monarchists, the United States acted. In March 1947 the president announced the Truman Doctrine: The United States would help stabilize legal foreign governments threatened by revolutionary minorities and outside pressures. Congress appropriated $400 million to support anti-Communist forces in Turkey and Greece. By giving aid, the United States signalled that it would bolster regimes that claimed to face Communist threats. As George Kennan explained in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1947, ‘containment’ meant using ‘unalterable counterforce at every point’ until Soviet power ended or faded.

61

LESSON 10

In 1947 the United States further pursued its Cold War goals in Europe, where shaky postwar economies seemed to present opportunities for Communist gains. The American Marshall Plan, an ambitious economic recovery program, sought to restore productivity and prosperity to Europe and thereby prevent Communist inroads. The plan ultimately pumped more than $13 billion into western European economies, including occupied Germany. Stalin responded to the new U.S. policy in Europe by trying to force Britain, France, and the United States out of Berlin. The city was split between the Western powers and the USSR, although it was deep within the Soviet zone of Germany. The Soviets cut off all access to Berlin from the parts of Germany controlled by the West. Truman, however, aided West Berlin by airlifting supplies to the city from June 1948 to May 1949.

The Korean War that broke out in 1950 demonstrated that the United States was committed to the containment of communism not only in Western Europe but throughout the world.

After World War II, Korea was divided along the 38th parallel into the Communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north and the U.S.-backed Republic of Korea in the south. In 1950 North Korean troops invaded South Korea. Truman committed US forces to Korea and asked the United Nations to help protect South Korea from conquest. The Americans drove the North Koreans back to the dividing line. Truman then ordered American troops to cross the 38th parallel and press on to the Chinese border. China responded in November 1950 with a huge counterattack that decimated U.S. armies. The Korean War did not officially end until 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower imposed a precarious armistice. Meanwhile, the Korean War had brought about rearmament, hiked the U.S. military budget, and increased fears of Communist aggression abroad and at home.

Finally, to stop the USSR from spreading Communism, the United States also became involved in Indochina and the Middle East. An international peace conference in Geneva divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel. The United States sent economic

62

Post-war America and the Civil Rights Movement (1946–1964)

aid and military advisers to South Vietnam from 1954 to 1961. Although Eisenhower feared further involvement in Vietnam, he supported what was called the domino theory: If Vietnam fell to Communism, all of Southeast Asia might follow.

McCarthyism

Fears of Communist aggression also determined the domestic policy. On 9th February, 1950, Joseph McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin, made a speech claiming to have a list of 205 people in the State Department that were known to be members of the American Communist Party (later he reduced this figure to 57). The list of names was not a secret and had been in fact published by the Secretary of State in 1946. These people had been identified during a preliminary screening of 3,000 federal employees.

The American public were genuinely frightened about the possibilities of internal subversion. McCarthy was made chairman of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate, and this gave him the opportunity to investigate the possibility of communist subversion. For the next two years McCarthy’s committee investigated various government departments and questioned a large number of people about their political past. Some lost their jobs after they admitted they had been members of the Communist Party. McCarthy made it clear to the witnesses that the only way of showing that they had abandoned their leftwing views was by naming other members of the party. This witch-hunt and anti-communist hysteria became known as McCarthyism.

The Civil Rights Movement

African Americans became increasingly restive in the postwar years. During the war they had challenged discrimination in the military services and in the work force, and they had made limited gains. Millions of African Americans had left Southern farms for Northern cities, where they hoped to find better jobs. They found instead crowded conditions in urban slums. Now, AfricanAmerican servicemen returned home, many intent on rejecting second-class citizenship.

63

LESSON 10

African Americans in the South in the 1950s still enjoyed few, if any, civil and political rights. In general, they could not vote. Those who tried to register faced the likelihood of beatings, loss of job, loss of credit, or eviction from their land. Occasional lynchings still occurred. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation of the races in streetcars, trains, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, recreational facilities, and employment.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in efforts to overturn the judicial doctrine, established in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, that segregation of African-American and white students was constitutional if facilities were ‘separate but equal’. That decree had been used for decades to sanction rigid segregation in all aspects of Southern life, where facilities were seldom, if ever, equal.

African Americans achieved their goal of overturning Plessy in 1954 when the Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The Court declared unanimously that ‘separate facilities are inherently unequal’, and decreed that the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine could no longer be used in public schools.

Another milestone in the civil rights movement occurred in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African-American seamstress who was also secretary of the state chapter of the NAACP, sat down in the front of a bus in a section reserved by law and custom for whites. Ordered to move to the back, she refused. Police came and arrested her for violating the segregation statutes. African-American leaders, who had been waiting for just such a case, organized a boycott of the bus system. About a year later, the Supreme Court affirmed that bus segregation, like school segregation, was unconstitutional.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first measure in 82 years, also marked a step forward, as it authorized federal intervention in cases where African Americans were denied the chance to vote.

The civil rights movement expanded on February 1, 1960, when four black college students at North Carolina A&T University began protesting racial segregation in restaurants by sitting at

64

LESSON 11

The Great Society, Nixon and Watergate

(1964–1974)

By 1960 government had become an increasingly powerful force in people’s lives. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, new executive agencies were created to deal with many aspects of American life. During World War II, the number of civilians employed by the federal government rose from one million to 3.8 million, then stabilized at 2.5 million in the 1950s. Federal expenditures, which had stood at $3,100-million in 1929, increased to $75,000-million in 1953 and passed $150,000-million in the 1960s.

Most Americans accepted government’s expanded role, even as they disagreed about how far that expansion should continue. Democrats generally wanted the government to ensure growth and stability. They wanted to extend federal benefits for education, health, and welfare. Many Republicans accepted a level of government responsibility, but hoped to cap spending and restore a larger measure of individual initiative.

In 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson envisioned a society without poverty or discrimination, in which all Americans enjoyed equal educational and job opportunities. He called his vision the ‘Great Society’. A major feature of Johnson’s Great Society was the ‘War on Poverty’. The federal government raised the minimum wage and enacted programs to train poorer Americans for new and better jobs.

To promote education, Congress passed the Higher Education Act in 1965 to provide student loans and scholarships, the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act of 1965 to pay for

66

The Great Society, Nixon and Watergate (1964–1974)

textbooks, and the Educational Opportunity Act of 1968 to help the poor finance college educations. To address the nation’s health needs, the Child Health Improvement and Protection Act of 1968 provided for prenatal and postnatal care, the Medicaid Act of 1968 paid for the medical expenses of the poor, and Medicare, established in 1965, extended medical insurance to older Americans under the Social Security system.

By 1966, Johnson was pleased with the progress he had made. But soon events in Southeast Asia began to overshadow his domestic achievements. Funds he had envisioned to fight his war on poverty were now diverted to the war in Vietnam. By 1968, his hopes of leaving a legacy of domestic reform were in serious jeopardy.

The Vietnam War had far-reaching consequences for the United States. It led Congress to replace the military draft with an all-volunteer force and the country to reduce the voting age to 18 (the 26th Amendment, ratified in 1971). It also inspired Congress to attack the ‘imperial’ presidency through the War Powers Act, restricting a president’s ability to send American forces into combat without explicit Congressional approval. Its passage reflected legislators’ desire to restrain presidential power and to prevent US involvement in a war like that in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War also severely damaged the U.S. economy. Unwilling to raise taxes to pay for the war, President Johnson unleashed a cycle of inflation.

In 1968 the Republican candidate Richard Nixon promised to eliminate ‘wasteful’ federal antipoverty programs and to name ‘strict constructionists’ to the Supreme Court. As president, Nixon moved quickly to keep his commitments. The administration urged Congress not to extend the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and to end the Fair Housing Enforcement Program.

Nixon also made a series of Supreme Court appointments that brought to an end the liberal activist era of the Court. During the 1960s, the Supreme Court greatly increased the ability of criminal defendants to defend themselves. In Mapp v. Ohio (1961), the high

67

LESSON 11

court ruled that evidence secured by the police through unreasonable searches must be excluded from trial. In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), it declared that indigent defendants have a right to a courtappointed attorney. In Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), it ruled that suspects being interrogated by police have a right to legal counsel.

As president, Nixon promised to alter the balance between the rights of criminal defendants and society’s rights. He selected Warren Burger, a moderate conservative, to replace Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Under Chief Justice Burger and his successor William Rehnquist, the Supreme Court clarified the remedies that could be used to correct past racial discrimination. In 1974, the Court limited the use of school busing for purposes of racial desegregation by declaring that busing could not take place across school district lines. In 1978, in the landmark Bakke case, the Court held that educational institutions could take race into account when screening applicants, but could not use rigid racial quotas. The following year, however, the court ruled that employers and unions could legally establish voluntary programs, including the use of quotas, to aid minorities and women in employment.

Watergate

Nixon’s rhetoric about the need for ‘law and order’ in the face of rising crime rates, increased drug use, and more permissive views about sex resonated with more Americans than not. But this concern was insufficient to quell concerns about the Watergate break-in and the economy.

On June 17, 1972, with a presidential campaign in progress, police officers in Washington, D.C., arrested five men caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, located in a residence complex called the Watergate. The incident initially attracted little attention, but two Washington Post reporters began investigating the break-in. From their articles and from Senate hearings, Americans learned that the president, his aides, and campaign officials had conspired to sabotage Nixon’s political foes. Nixon initially denied involvement in the scheme. But a series of special prosecutors, whom the president was forced

68

The Great Society, Nixon and Watergate (1964–1974)

to appoint, investigated the scandal. They soon determined that Nixon and his aides tried to cover up the president’s link with the Watergate break-in and to obstruct the Watergate investigation.

The Watergate scandal gradually came to encompass not only the cover-up but a wide range of presidential wrongdoings. These transgressions included extending political favors to powerful business groups in exchange for campaign contributions; misusing public funds; deceiving Congress and the public about the secret bombing of Cambodia; authorizing illegal domestic political surveillance and espionage against dissidents, political opponents, and journalists.

In July 1974 the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to produce tape recordings that he made of conversations in the White House. The transcripts contained evidence that Nixon had broken the law and knew about the cover-up. At the end of the month, the House Judiciary Committee adopted three articles of impeachment that charged Nixon with abusing power, obstructing justice, and defying Judiciary Committee subpoenas. Before the House could vote on Nixon’s impeachment, the president resigned, on August 9, 1974. Vice President Gerald Ford assumed the presidency and pardoned Nixon in September.

Watergate undermined presidential authority and made citizens fear excessive state power. Congress enacted a series of reforms that would make future abuses of presidential authority less likely. In the process, Congress recaptured constitutional powers that had been ceded to an increasingly dominant executive branch.

Disclosures during the Watergate investigations of moneylaundering led Congress to provide public financing of presidential elections, public disclosure of sources of funding, limits on private campaign contributions and spending, and to enforce campaign finance laws by an independent Federal Election Commission.

To make it easier for the Justice Department to investigate crimes in the executive branch, Congress now requires the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate accusations of illegal activities.

69