Lecture 4
Plan:
1. The Cold War
2. The American Century
1. The Cold war.
The USA was the strongest country on earth in 1945. It had the world’s biggest air force and navy. And it was the only nation armed with atomic bombs. After the USA came the Soviet Union. Its soldiers occupied all Europe from the middle of Germany eastwards. In 1946 Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill, spoke of an “Iron Curtain” across Europe, separating these communist-ruled nations from the countries of the west.
The Americans and the Russians fought Hitler’s armies together as allies. But they were never friends. They were deeply suspicious of one another. People began to speak of a “Cold War” between them. Truman decided to use American power and money to stop Soviet influence from spreading.
In 1937 Truman’s government put forward a plan called the Marshall Plan, to help Europe’s people and also make communism less appealing. Marshall offered to give European countries the goods they needed, but only to non-communist ones. They also did the same to Asia. From 1950 to 1953 American army was engaged in war with Korea, wich ended mostly because of the death of Stalin, who supported Korea and China.
In November 1952 American scientists tested the first H-bomb. And by 1953 the Russians, too, had an H-bomb. And they continued making them. America continued its anti-soviet propaganda, and during these years thousands of refugees fled across the Iron Curtain. They were expecting some help from the West, but didn’t get it. The reason was that The USA was afraid of nuclear war with the Soviets.
Then, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union sent into space the world’s first earth satellite, the Sputnik. This worried the Americans only because the rocket that carried this sputnik could also carry an H-bomb to its target. The American government began to speed up work on rockets of its own. Soon it had a whole range of bomb-carrying rockets called "nuclear missiles".
The biggest were the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles. People started to talk about the “balance of terror”; most of them realized that such situation can end badly for mankind. In August 1963, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a treaty agreeing to stop testing new nuclear weapons in the atmosphere or under water. They also set up a special telephone link between Washington and Moscow. On this “hotline” American and Soviet leaders could talk directly to one another.
In May 1972, President Nixon flew to Moscow to sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the Russians. The idea was to slow down the arms race. Each agreed how many missiles of various types the other should have, how many submarines to fire them from, and so on. But when in December, 1979, the Soviet Union’s army marched into Afghanistan, Congress refused to renew the SALT agreement.
In 1985 a new leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, had come to power. He traveled with his wife to the United States and there he and President Reagan signed another treaty – the International Range Nuclear Force (INF) treaty. Later Gorbachev began to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan. And at that time a lot of countries in Europe set-up multy-party systems and held free elections. By 1990 the Cold War was over.
2. The American Century.
By the end of the century, in many areas of life, American popular tastes and attitudes have conquered the world. There was a powerful new force for it – television. Most early American TV programs were entertaining – comedy, game shows, stories about policemen, westerns, etc. had only one purpose – to attract large audiences of people. Manufacturing firms paid TV companies like NBC and CBS lots of mone to show advertisements for their products. TV became an important part of American export.
In music, the process of Americanisation could be seen most clearly in the huge international popularity of rock. Rock began as rock-and-roll, a music that was first played in the 1950s. It came from the American South and combined black blues with the country music of working class whites. Many of rock-n-roll stars were black, like Chuck Berry, but the king of rock-n-roll was a young southern white named Elvis Presley. He became a symbol of a new culture of youth with its own language, way of dressing and hair styles.
By the 1970s rock-and-roll had blended with the protest songs to become rock, which symbolised opposition to officially approved ideas and standards.
The Americanization of popular taste and habits was not restricted to entertainment. The growing popularity of hamburgers, fried chicken and other "fast food" spread American eating habits all over the world. Blue jeans and T- shirts Americanized the dress of people on every continent.
Supermarkets Americanized the everyday experience of shopping for millions. And in the first half of the 20th century skyscrapers became one of the principal visual symbols of the modern US.