THE RED MENACEmyresource.phoenix.edu/secure/resource/HIS135R4/American... · 2012. 5. 10. · 27 THE COLD WAR THE RED MENACE This 1949 movie poster suggests how much attention was

THE COLD WAR 27

THE RED MENACE This 1949 movie poster suggests how much attention was directed to

the threat of communism. The fi lm, produced by Republic Pictures and directed by R. G.

Springsteen, told the story of a man and woman who joined the Communist Party, only to be-

come disillusioned when they watched the murder of a party member who begins to doubt the

party’s principles. This movie—and most others like it—got poor reviews and did not attract large

audiences. (Photofest/©Republic Pictures)

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SETTING THE STAGE

EVEN BEFORE THE END OF WORLD WAR II, there were signs of tension

between the United States and the Soviet Union. Once the war was over, those tensions quickly grew

to create what became known as the “Cold War”—a tense and dangerous rivalry that, like World War II,

reshaped the world order in important ways. The intense rivalry between the United States and the

Soviet Union—and between democratic capitalism and communism—divided much of the world into

two not-quite-warring camps. Out of this rivalry came a series of new military alliances on both sides

of the confl ict. A new conception of American foreign policy, known as containment, also emerged,

based on the belief that the principal international goal of the United States should be to prevent

communism from spreading beyond its present boundaries. Containment helped keep the tensions

between the rival blocs low enough to avoid a catastrophic nuclear war. But the Cold War world was

far from stable—as two major wars (in Korea and Vietnam) and countless smaller confl icts all over the

world made clear.

The Cold War also cast

its shadow over domestic

life in the United States. It

transformed American politics—weakening the grip of the Democratic Party on

the electorate, making the issue of communism a central part of postwar political

life, and helping to produce a great anticommunist frenzy in the late 1940s and

early 1950s that had corrosive eff ects on American life. Known to many as

“McCarthyism,” after the Wisconsin senator who became the most famous and

notorious voice of anticommunism for a time, the post–World War II Red Scare

was a widespread phenomenon that aff ected almost every area of American life.

L O O K I N G A H E A D

1. What made the growing tension between the United States and the Soviet Union evolve into

the Cold War?

2. What was the theory of containment, and how did it drive U.S. foreign policy and foreign

interventions in the postwar era?

3. Why did the U.S. government and the American people believe that there was a threat of

internal communist subversion?

t

t

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758 • CHAPTER 27

In November 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill traveled to Teheran, Iran, for their fi rst meeting with Stalin. By now, how-ever, Roosevelt’s most eff ective bargaining tool— Stalin’s need for American assistance in his struggle against Germany—had been largely removed. The German advance against Russia had been halted; Soviet forces were now launching their own west-ward off ensive. Nevertheless, the Teheran Conference seemed in most respects a success. Roosevelt and Stalin established a cordial personal relationship. Stalin agreed to an American re-quest that the Soviet Union enter the war in the Pacifi c soon after the end of hostilities in Europe. Roosevelt, in turn, prom-ised that an Anglo-American second front would be established within six months.

On other matters, however, the origins of future disagree-ments were already visible. Most important was the question of

the future of Poland. Roosevelt and Churchill were willing to agree to a movement of the Soviet border westward, allowing Stalin to

annex some historically Polish territory. But on the nature of the postwar government in the rest of Poland, there were sharp diff erences. Roosevelt and Churchill supported the claims of the Polish government-in-exile that had been func-tioning in London since 1940; Stalin wished to install another procommunist exiled government that had spent the war in Lublin, in the Soviet Union. The three leaders avoided a bitter conclusion to the Teheran Conference only by leaving the is-sue unresolved.

Yalta

More than a year later, in February 1945, Roosevelt joined Churchill and Stalin for a great peace conference in the Soviet city of Yalta—a resort on the Red Sea that was once a summer palace for the tsars. On a number of issues, the Big Three reached agreements. In return for Stalin’s renewed promise to enter the Pacifi c war, Roosevelt agreed that the Soviet Union should receive some of the territory in the Pacifi c that Russia had lost in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War.

The negotiators also agreed to a plan for a new international organization, a plan that had been hammered out the previous summer at a conference in Washington, D.C., at the Dumbarton

Oaks estate. The new United Nations would contain a General Assembly, in which every member would be represented, and a Security

Council, with permanent representatives of the fi ve major pow-ers (the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China), each of which would have veto power. The Security Council would also have temporary delegates from several other nations. These agreements became the basis of the United Nations charter, drafted at a conference of fi fty nations begin-ning April 25, 1945, in San Francisco. The U.S. Senate ratifi ed the charter in July by a vote of 80 to 2 (in striking contrast to the slow and painful defeat it had administered to the charter of the League of Nations twenty-fi ve years before).

On other issues, however, the Yalta Conference produced no real accord. Basic disagreement remained about the postwar

ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR

Few issues in twentieth-century American history have aroused more debate than the question of the origins of the Cold War. Some historians have claimed that Soviet duplicity and expan-sionism created the international tensions, while others have proposed that American provocations and imperial ambitions were at least equally to blame. Most historians agree, however, that wherever the preponderance of blame may lie, both the United States and the Soviet Union contributed to the atmo-sphere of hostility and suspicion that quickly clouded the peace. (See “Debating the Past,” pp. 760–761.)

Sources of Soviet-American Tension

At the heart of the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1940s was a fundamental diff erence in the ways the great powers envisioned the postwar world. One vi-

sion, fi rst openly outlined in the Atlantic Charter in 1941, was of a world in which na-tions abandoned their traditional beliefs in military alliances and spheres of infl uence

and governed their relations with one another through demo-cratic processes, with an international organization serving as the arbiter of disputes and the protector of every nation’s right of self-determination. That vision—inspired in part by Woodrow Wilson—appealed to many Americans, including Franklin Roosevelt.

The other vision was that of the Soviet Union and to some ex-tent, it gradually became clear, of Great Britain. Both Stalin and Churchill had signed the Atlantic Charter. But Britain had always

been uneasy about the implications of the self-determination ideal for its own enor-mous empire. And the Soviet Union was de-

termined to create a secure sphere for itself in Central and Eastern Europe as protection against possible future aggression from the West. Both Churchill and Stalin, therefore, tended to envision a postwar structure in which the great powers would control areas of strategic interest to them, in which something vaguely similar to the traditional European balance of power would reemerge. Gradually, the diff erences between these two positions would turn the peacemaking process into a form of warfare.

Wartime Diplomacy

Serious strains had already begun to develop in the alliance with the Soviet Union in January 1943, when Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca, Morocco, to discuss Allied strategy. (Stalin had declined Roosevelt’s invitation to attend.) The two leaders could not accept Stalin’s most important demand—the immedi-ate opening of a second front in western Europe. But they tried to reassure Stalin by announcing that they would accept noth-ing less than the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, thus indicating that they would not negotiate a separate peace with Hitler and leave the Soviets to fi ght on alone.

America’s Postwar Vision

Spheres of Influence

Dispute over Poland

United Nations


THE COLD WAR • 759

governments “broadly representative of all democratic ele-ments” and “responsible to the will of the people.”

The Yalta accords, in other words, were less a settlement of postwar issues than a set of loose principles that sidestepped the most diffi cult questions. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin re-turned home from the conference each apparently convinced that he had signed an important agreement. But the Soviet in-terpretation of the accords diff ered so sharply from the Anglo-American interpretation that the illusion endured only briefl y. In the weeks following the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt watched with growing alarm as the Soviet Union moved systematically to establish pro-communist governments in one Central or Eastern European nation after another and as Stalin refused to make the changes in Poland that the president believed he had promised.

But Roosevelt did not abandon hope. Still believing the dif-ferences could be settled, he left Washington early in the spring for a vacation at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. There, on April 12, 1945, he suff ered a sudden, massive stroke and died.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE PEACE

Harry S. Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt in the presidency, had little familiarity with international issues. And he did not share Roosevelt’s apparent faith in the fl exibility of the Soviet Union. Roosevelt had hoped that Stalin was, essentially, a reasonable

Polish government. Stalin, whose armies now occupied Poland, had already installed a government composed of the pro-communist “Lublin” Poles. Roosevelt and Churchill insisted that the pro-Western “London” Poles must be allowed a place in the Warsaw regime. Roosevelt envisioned a government based on free, democratic elections—which both he and Stalin recog-nized the pro-Western forces would win. Stalin agreed only to a vague compromise by which an unspecifi ed number of pro-Western Poles would be granted a place in the government. He reluctantly consented to hold “free and unfettered elections” in Poland on an unspecifi ed future date. They did not take place for almost fi fty years.

Nor was there agreement about the future of Germany. Roosevelt seemed to want a reconstructed and reunited Germany. Stalin wanted to impose heavy reparations on

Germany and to ensure a permanent dis-memberment of the nation. The fi nal agreement was, like the Polish accord,

vague and unstable. The decision on reparations would be re-ferred to a future commission. The United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union would each control its own “zone of occupation” in Germany—the zones to be determined by the position of troops at the end of the war. Berlin, the German capital, was already well inside the Soviet zone, but because of its symbolic importance it would itself be divided into four sec-tors, one for each nation to occupy. At an unspecifi ed date, Germany would be reunited; but there was no agreement on how the reunifi cation would occur. As for the rest of Europe, the conference produced a murky accord on the establishment of

YALTA Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin (known during the war as the “Big Three”) meet at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945 to try to agree on the outlines of the peace that they

knew was soon to come. Instead, they settled on a series of vague compromises that ultimately left all parties feeling betrayed. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Disagreements over Germany


760 •

1980s, they did not. Other questions remained, above all the question of Germany. To settle them, Truman met in July at Potsdam, in Russian-occupied Germany, with Churchill (who, after elections in Britain in the midst of the talks, was replaced as prime minister by Clement Attlee) and Stalin. Truman reluc-tantly accepted the adjustments of the Polish-German border that Stalin had long demanded; he refused, however, to permit the Russians to claim any reparations from the American, French, and British zones of Germany. This stance eff ectively confi rmed that Germany would remain divided, with the west-ern zones united into one nation, friendly to the United States, and the Russian zone surviving as another nation, with a Soviet-dominated, communist government.

The China Problem

Central to American hopes for an open, peaceful world “po-liced” by the great powers was a strong, independent China. But even before the war ended, the American government was

aware that those hopes faced a major, per-haps insurmountable, obstacle: the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang

man with whom an ultimate accord might be reached. Truman, in contrast, sided with those in the government (and there were many) who considered the Soviet Union fundamentally un-trustworthy and who viewed Stalin himself with suspicion and even loathing.

The Failure of Potsdam

Truman had been in offi ce only a few days before he decided to, as he put it, “get tough” with the Soviet Union. Truman met on

April 23 with Soviet foreign minister Molotov and sharply chastised him for viola-tions of the Yalta accords. In fact, Truman had only limited leverage by which to com-

pel the Soviet Union to carry out its agreements. Truman in-sisted that the United States should be able to get “85 percent” of what it wanted, but he was ultimately forced to settle for much less.

Truman conceded fi rst on Poland. When Stalin made a few minor concessions to the pro-Western exiles, Truman recog-nized the Warsaw government, hoping that noncommunist forces might gradually expand their infl uence there. Until the

DEBATING THE PAST

Origins of the Cold War

THE Cold War may now be over, but the debate over its origins is not.For more than a decade after the end of World War II, few historians in the

United States challenged the offi cial American interpretation of the beginnings of the Cold War. Most students of the confl ict agreed that the breakdown of relations was a direct result of aggressive Soviet policies of expansion and of Stalin’s violation of the Yalta accords. The Soviet imposition of communist regimes in Eastern Europe was part of a larger scheme to spread communism throughout the world. American policy was the logical and necessary response.

Disillusionment with the containment policy and, thus, with the traditional view of the origins of the Cold War produced what would become known as the “revisionist” interpretation of the war. William Appleman Williams, in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), insisted that the Cold War was simply the most recent version of a consistent American effort in the twentieth century, to maintain an “open door” for American trade in world markets. According to Williams, the confrontation with the Soviet Union was less a response to Russian aggressive designs than an expression of the American belief in the necessity of capitalist expansion.

Later revisionists modifi ed many of Williams’s claims, but most accepted some of the basic outlines of his thesis: that the United States had been primarily to blame for the Cold War; that the Soviet Union was too weak and exhausted at the end of World War II to be able to pose a serious threat to America; that the United States had used its nuclear monopoly to attempt to threaten and intimidate Stalin; that Harry Truman had recklessly abandoned the conciliatory policies of Franklin Roosevelt and taken a pro-vocative hard line against the Russians; and that the Soviet response had refl ected a

(National Archives and Records Administration)

Truman’s “Get Tough”

Policy

Chiang Kai-shek

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• 761

communist control. Marshall came to believe that nothing short of an all-out war with China would be necessary to defeat the communists, and he was unwilling to recommend that the president should accept such a war. That decision was the source of many embittered attacks on Marshall, Truman, and many others for decades to come.

Instead, the American government was beginning to con-sider an alternative to China as the strong, pro-Western force

in Asia: a revived Japan. Abandoning the strict occupation policies of the fi rst years after the war (when General Douglas

MacArthur had governed the nation), the United States lifted restrictions on industrial development and encouraged rapid economic growth in Japan. The vision of an open, united world was giving way in Asia, as it was in Europe, to an accep-tance of a divided world with a strong, pro-American sphere of infl uence.

The Containment Doctrine

By the end of 1945, any realistic hope of a postwar world con-structed according to the Atlantic Charter ideals that Roosevelt

was generally friendly to the United States, but his government was corrupt and incompetent with feeble popular support, and Chiang was himself unable or unwilling to face the problems that were threatening to engulf him. Since 1927, the nationalist government he headed had been engaged in a prolonged and bitter rivalry with the communist armies of Mao Zedong. So successful had the communist challenge grown that Mao was in control of one-fourth of the population by 1945.

Some Americans urged the government to try to fi nd a “third force” to support as an alternative to either Chiang or Mao. A few argued that the United States should try to reach some ac-commodation with Mao. Truman, however, decided reluctantly that he had no choice but to continue supporting Chiang. For the next several years, as the long struggle between the national-ists and the communists erupted into a full-scale civil war, the United States continued to send money and weapons to Chiang. Eventually, Truman sent General George Marshall, former army chief of staff and future secretary of state, to study the Chinese problem and recommend a policy for the United States. Many American friends in China—known generally as the China Lobby—pressured Marshall to expand the American mil-itary presence as a way to combat the continuing expansion of

view the Cold War. John Lewis Gaddis, in We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1998) and The Cold War: A History (2005), argues that the strong anticommunist positions of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul II had a larger impact on the weakening of the Soviet Union than was previously understood. In The Global Cold War (2005), Arne Westad, also making use of the released archives, roots the origins of the dangerous instability in the so-called Third World in the frequent interven-tions of both the Soviet Union and the United States in the Cold War era. And John Lewis Gaddis, in The Cold War: A History, looks back on the Cold War that he chronicled for several decades in the midst of the Cold War. He ar-gues that, despite all the anxieties it raised and all the violence it helped to create, the contain-ment policy that shaped American foreign pol-icy beginning in the mid-1940s was in the end a signifi cant success. •

UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, AND EVALUATE

1. What are the traditional and revisionist arguments concerning the origins of the Cold War?

2. How does the postrevisionist view differ from the traditional and revisionist interpretations?

3. Was the Cold War inevitable?

legitimate fear of capitalist encirclement. Walter LaFeber, in America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1967 (1967 and many later editions), maintained that America’s suppos-edly idealistic internationalism at the close of the war was in reality an effort to ensure a world shaped in the American image, with every nation open to American infl uence (and American trade).

Ultimately, the revisionist interpretation began to produce a reaction of its own, a “postrevisionist” view of the confl ict. Some manifestations of this reaction consisted of little more than a reaffi rmation of the traditional view of the Cold War, but the dominant works of postrevisionist scholarship attempted to strike a balance between the two camps, to identify areas of blame and misperception on both sides of the confl ict. Thomas G. Paterson, in Soviet-American Confrontation (1973), viewed Russian hostility and American efforts to dominate the postwar world as equally responsible for the Cold War. John Lewis Gaddis, in The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (1972) and other works, similarly maintained that “neither side can bear sole responsibil-ity for the onset of the Cold War.” American policymakers, he argued, had only limited options because of the pressures of domestic politics. And Stalin was immobilized by his obsessive concern with maintaining his own power and ensuring absolute security for the Soviet Union. But if neither side was entirely to blame, Gaddis concluded, the Soviets must be held more accountable for the problems, for Stalin was in a much better position to compromise, given his broader power within his own government, than the politically hamstrung Truman. Melvyn Leffl er’s Preponderance of Power (1991) argued similarly that American policymakers genuinely believed in the existence of a Soviet threat and were determined to remain consistently stronger than the Soviets in response.

A more complex view of the Cold War has emerged out of the postrevisionist literature. The Cold War, historians now suggest, was not so much the fault of one side or the other as it was the natural, perhaps inevitable, result of tensions between the world’s two most powerful nations—nations that had been suspicious of, if not hostile toward, one another for nearly a century. “The United States and the Soviet Union were doomed to be antago-nists,” Ernest May wrote in 1984. “There probably was never any real possibility that the post-1945 relationship could be anything but hostility verging on confl ict.”

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, scholars have had access to Russian ar-chives that have enriched—though not fundamentally changed—the way historians

Restoring Japan


762 • CHAPTER 27

and Churchill had agreed upon was in shambles. Instead, a new American policy, known as containment, was slowly emerging. Rather than attempt-ing to create a unifi ed, “open” world, the United States and its allies would work to “contain” the threat of further Soviet expansion.

The new doctrine emerged in part as a response to events in Europe in 1946. In Turkey, Stalin was trying to win con-trol over the vital sea lanes to the Mediterranean. In Greece, communist

forces were threat-ening the pro-Western government. The British had announced they could no longer

provide assistance. Faced with these challenges, Truman de-cided to enunciate a fi rm new policy. In doing so, he drew from the ideas of the infl uential American diplomat George F. Kennan, who had warned not long after the war that the only appropriate diplomatic approach to dealing with the Soviet Union was “a long-term, patient but fi rm and vigilant contain-ment of Russian expansive tendencies.” On March 12, 1947, Truman appeared before Congress and used Kennan’s warn-ings as the basis of what became known as the Truman Doctrine. “I believe,” he argued, “that it must be the policy of the United

Truman Doctrine

States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pres-sures.” In the same speech he re-quested $400 million—part of it to bolster the armed forces of Greece and Turkey, another part to provide eco-nomic assistance to Greece. Congress quickly approved the measure.

The American commitment ulti-mately helped ease Soviet pressure on Turkey and helped the Greek govern-ment defeat the communist insur-gents. More important, it established

a basis for American foreign policy that would survive for more than forty years.

The Marshall Plan

An integral part of the containment policy was a proposal to aid in the economic reconstruction of Western Europe. There were

many motives: humanitarian concern for the European people; a fear that Europe would remain an economic drain on the United

States if it could not quickly rebuild and begin to feed itself; a de-sire for a strong European market for American goods. But above all, American policymakers believed that unless something could be done to strengthen the shaky pro-American governments in Western Europe, those governments might fall under the control of rapidly growing domestic communist parties.

In June 1947, therefore, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced a plan to provide economic assistance to all European nations (including the Soviet Union) that would join in drafting a program for recovery. Although Russia and its Eastern satel-lites quickly and predictably rejected the plan, sixteen Western European nations eagerly participated. Whatever domestic op-position to the plan there was in the United States largely van-ished after a sudden coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 that established a Soviet-dominated communist government there. In April, Congress approved the creation of the Economic Cooperation Administration, the agency that would administer the Marshall Plan, as it became known. Over the next three years, the Marshall Plan channeled over $12 billion of American aid into Europe, helping to spark a substantial economic revival. By the end of 1950, European industrial production had risen 64 percent, communist strength in the member nations had de-clined, and opportunities for American trade had revived.

Mobilization at Home

That the United States had accepted a continuing commitment to the containment policy became clear in 1947 and 1948 through a series of measures designed to maintain American military power at near wartime levels. In 1948, at President Truman’s request, Congress approved a new military draft and revived the Selective Service System. In the meantime, the United States, having failed to reach agreement with the Soviet Union on

Rebuilding Europe

SALUTING THE MARSHALL PLAN In another age, a chimney spouting smoke

would evoke environmental damage. But in the aftermath of World War II, the rebuilding

of Europe’s industrial capacity was a great achievement—helped by (and celebrated by)

the United States and the Marshall Plan. (The Granger Collection, New York)

IT MUST BE THE POLICY

OF THE UNITED STATES TO

SUPPORT FREE PEOPLES WHO

ARE RESISTING ATTEMPTED

SUBJUGATION BY ARMED

MINORITIES OR BY OUTSIDE

PRESSURES.

PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN

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The Road to NATO

At about the same time, the United States was moving to strengthen the military capabilities of Western Europe. Convinced that a reconstructed Germany was essential to the hopes of the West, Truman reached an agreement with England and France to merge the three western zones of occu-pation into a new West German republic (which would include the former American, British, and French sectors of Berlin, even though that city lay well within the East German zone). Stalin re-sponded quickly. On June 24, 1948, he imposed a tight blockade around the western sectors of Berlin. If Germany was to be offi cially divided, he was implying, then the country’s western govern-ment would have to abandon its outpost in the heart of the Soviet-controlled eastern zone. Truman refused to do so. Unwilling to risk war through a military challenge to the blockade, he ordered a massive airlift to supply the city with food, fuel, and other needed goods. The airlift continued for more than ten months, transport-ing nearly 2.5 million tons of material, keeping a city of 2 million people alive, and transforming West Berlin into a symbol of the West’s resolve to resist communist expansion. In the spring of 1949, Stalin lifted the now ineff ective blockade. And in October, the division of Germany into two nations—the Federal Republic in the west and the Democratic Republic in the east—became offi cial.

The crisis in Berlin accelerated the consolidation of what was already in eff ect an alliance among the United States and the countries of Western Europe. On April 4, 1949, twelve nations

signed an agreement establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and

declaring that an armed attack against one member would be considered an attack against all. The NATO countries would, moreover, maintain a standing military force in Europe to de-fend against what many policymakers believed was the threat of a Soviet invasion. The formation of NATO eventually spurred the Soviet Union to create an alliance of its own with the com-munist governments in Eastern Europe—an alliance formalized in 1955 by the Warsaw Pact.

Reevaluating Cold War Policy

A series of events in 1949 propelled the Cold War in new direc-tions. An announcement in September that the Soviet Union had successfully exploded its fi rst atomic weapon, years earlier than predicted, shocked and frightened many Americans. So did the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government in China, which occurred with startling speed in the last months of 1949. Chiang fl ed with his political allies and the remnants of his army to the off shore island of Formosa

international control of nuclear weapons, redoubled its own ef-forts in atomic research, elevating nuclear weaponry to a central place in its military arsenal. The Atomic Energy Commission, established in 1946, became the supervisory body charged with overseeing all nuclear research, both civilian and military. And in 1950, the Truman administration approved the development of the new hydrogen bomb, a nuclear weapon far more power-ful than the bombs the United States had used in 1945.

The National Security Act of 1947 reshaped the nation’s ma-jor military and diplomatic institutions. It created a new Department of Defense to oversee all branches of the armed services, combining functions previously performed separately by the War and Navy Departments. A National Security Council

(NSC), operating out of the White House, would oversee foreign and military policy. A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would re-place the wartime Offi ce of Strategic

Services and would be responsible for collecting information through both open and covert methods; as the Cold War contin-ued, the CIA would also engage secretly in political and military operations. The National Security Act, in other words, gave the president expanded powers with which to pursue the nation’s international goals.

National Security Act

of 1947

SURVIVING NUCLEAR WAR Preoccupation with the possibility of a nuclear war reached a fever

pitch in the fi rst years of the atomic era. The Federal Civil Defense Agency, which in 1950 issued these simple

rules for civilians to follow in dealing with an atomic attack, was one of many organizations attempting to

convince the American public that a nuclear war was survivable. (Federal Civil Defense Agency)

NATO


764 • CHAPTER 27

monly known as NSC-68, which outlined a shift in the American position. The fi rst statements of the containment

doctrine—the writings of George Kennan, the Truman Doctrine speech—had made

at least some distinctions between areas of vital interest to the United States and areas of less importance to the nation’s for-eign policy and called on America to share the burden of con-tainment with its allies. But the April 1950 document argued that the United States could no longer rely on other nations to take the initiative in resisting communism. It must itself es-

(Taiwan), and the entire Chinese mainland came under the control of a communist government that many Americans be-lieved to be an extension of the Soviet Union. The United States refused to recognize the new communist regime and, instead, devoted increased attention to the revitalization of Japan as a buff er against Asian communism, ending the American occu-pation in 1952.

In this atmosphere of escalating crisis, Truman called for a thorough review of American foreign policy. The result was a National Security Council report, issued in 1950 and com-

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Copenhagen

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Paris

Madrid

Brussels

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Warsaw

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NATO countries, 1956

Warsaw Pactcountries, 1956

Unaffiliated countries

DIVIDED EUROPE AFTER WORLD WAR II This map shows the sharp division that emerged in Europe after World War II between the area under the control of the

Soviet Union and the area allied with the United States. In the east, Soviet control or infl uence extended into all the nations shaded brown—including the eastern half of Germany.

In the west and south, the green-shaded nations were allied with the United States as members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The countries shaded gold were

aligned with neither of the two superpowers. The small map in the upper right shows the division of Berlin among the various occupying powers at the end of the war. Eventually, the

American, British, and French sectors were combined to create West Berlin, a city governed by West Germany but entirely surrounded by communist East Germany.

• How did the West prevent East Germany from absorbing West Berlin?

NSC-68



The Problems of Reconversion

The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war months earlier than almost anyone had predicted and pro-pelled the nation precipitously into a process of reconversion.

There had been many predictions that peace would bring a return of Depression unemployment, as war production ceased and returning soldiers fl ooded the labor market. But there was no general economic collapse in 1946—for several reasons. Government spending dropped sharply and abruptly, to be sure; $35 billion of war contracts were canceled within weeks of the Japanese surrender. But increased consumer demand soon compensated. Consumer goods had been generally unavailable during the war, so many workers had saved a substantial por-tion of their wages and were now ready to spend. A $6 billion tax cut pumped additional money into general circulation. The

Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill of Rights, pro-

vided economic and educational assistance to veterans, increas-ing spending even further.

This fl ood of consumer demand ensured that there would be no new depression, but it contributed to more than two years of serious infl ation, during which prices rose at rates of 14 to 15 percent annually. In the summer of 1946, President Truman vetoed an extension of the authority of the wartime Offi ce of Price Administration, thus eliminating price controls. (He was opposed not to the controls, but to congressional amendments that had weakened the OPA.) Infl ation soared to 25 percent be-fore he relented a month later and signed a bill little diff erent from the one he had rejected.

Compounding the economic diffi culties was a sharp rise in labor unrest, driven in part by the impact of infl ation. By the end of 1945, there had already been major strikes in the automobile,

tablish fi rm and active leadership of the noncommunist world. And it must move to stop communist expansion virtually any-where it occurred, regardless of the intrinsic strategic or eco-nomic value of the lands in question. Among other things, the report called for a major expansion of American military power, with a defense budget almost four times the previously projected fi gure.

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND POLITICS AFTER THE WAR

The crises overseas were not the only frustrations the American people encountered after the war. The nation also faced seri-ous economic diffi culties in adapting to peacetime. The result-ing instability contributed to an increasingly heated political climate.

GI Bill

PROCLAIMING THE VICTORY OF THE REVOLUTION Chairman Mao

Zedong, standing on the rostrum of the Tiananmen Square Gate in Beijing, speaks by

radio to the Chinese people on October 1, 1949, to proclaim the founding of the People’s

Republic of China. This was shortly after the communist victory in the nation’s civil

war and the departure of Chiang Kai-shek and his followers to the island of Taiwan.

(AP Images)

A GI BILL STUDENT Joe Heinrich, recently returned from service in World War

II, was an aspiring artist and used the benefi ts available to him under the GI Bill to

enroll in art classes in San Francisco in 1946. Heinrich had not yet benefi ted from one

of the other provisions of the GI Bill—housing assistance. Unable to fi nd housing in

San Francisco, he hitchhiked 100 miles each way every day from Sacramento to school.

(Bettmann/Corbis)


766 • CHAPTER 27

But many of the Fair Deal programs fell victim to the same public and con-gressional conservatism that had crip-pled the last years of the New Deal. Indeed, that conservatism seemed to be intensifying, as the November 1946 con-gressional elections suggested. Using the simple but devastating slogan “Had Enough?,” the Republican Party won control of both houses of Congress.

The new Republican Congress quickly moved to reduce government spending and chip away at New Deal reforms. The president bowed to what he claimed was the popular mandate to lift most remaining wage and price con-trols, and Congress moved further to deregulate the economy. Infl ation rapidly increased. When a public outcry arose over the soaring prices for meat, Senator Robert Taft, perhaps the most infl uential Republican conservative in Congress, advised con-sumers to “eat less,” and added, “We have got to break with the corrupting idea that we can legislate prosperity, legislate equal-ity, legislate opportunity.” True to the spirit of Taft’s words, the Republican Congress refused to appropriate funds to aid educa-tion, increase Social Security, or support reclamation and power projects in the West. It defeated a proposal to raise the mini-mum wage. It passed tax measures that cut rates dramatically for high-income families and moderately for those with lower incomes. Only vetoes by the president fi nally forced a more pro-gressive bill.

The most notable action of the new Congress was its assault on the Wagner Act of 1935. Conservatives had always resented

the new powers the legislation had granted unions; and in light of the labor diffi culties during and after the war, such resentments

intensifi ed sharply. The result was the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act. It made illegal the so-called closed shop (a workplace in which no one can be hired without fi rst being a member of a union). And although it continued to permit the creation of so-called union shops (in which workers must join a union after being hired), it permitted states to pass “right-to-work” laws prohibiting even that. Repealing this provision, the controversial Section 14(b), would remain a goal of the labor movement for decades. Outraged workers and union leaders denounced the measure as a “slave labor bill.” Truman vetoed it, but both the House and the Senate easily overruled him the same day.

The Taft-Hartley Act did not destroy the labor movement, as many union leaders had predicted. But it did damage weaker unions in relatively lightly organized industries such as chemi-cals and textiles; and it made more diffi cult the organizing of workers who had never been union members at all, especially women, minorities, and most workers in the South.

The Election of 1948

Truman and his advisers believed the American public was not ready to abandon the achievements of the New Deal, despite the

electrical, and steel industries. In April 1946, John L. Lewis

led the United Mine Workers on strike, shutting down the coal fi elds for forty days. Fears grew rapidly that without vital coal supplies, the entire economy might virtually grind to a halt. Truman fi nally forced the miners to return to work by ordering government seizure of the mines. But in the process, he pressured mine owners to grant the union most of its demands, which he had earlier denounced as infl ationary. Almost simul-taneously, the nation’s railroads suff ered a total shutdown—the fi rst in the nation’s history—as two major unions walked out on strike. By threatening to use the army to run the trains, Truman pressured the workers back to work after only a few days.

Reconversion was particularly diffi cult for the millions of women and minorities who had entered the workforce during the war. With veterans returning home and looking for jobs in the industrial economy, employers tended to push women, blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and others out of the plants to make room for white males. Some of the war workers, particularly women, left the workforce voluntarily, out of a desire to return to their former domestic lives. But as many as 80 percent of women workers, and virtually all black, Hispanic, and Asian males, wanted to continue working. The postwar infl ation, the pressure to meet the rising expectations of a high-consumption society, the growing divorce rate, which left many women re-sponsible for their own economic well-being—all combined to create among women a high demand for paid employment. As they found themselves excluded from industrial jobs, therefore, women workers moved increasingly into other areas of the economy (above all, the service sector).

The Fair Deal Rejected

Days after the Japanese surrender, Truman submitted to Congress a twenty-one-point domestic program outlining what

he later termed the “Fair Deal.” It called for expansion of Social Security benefi ts, the raising of the legal minimum wage from 40

to 65 cents an hour, a program to ensure full employment through aggressive use of federal spending and investment, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Act, public housing and slum clearance, long-range environmental and public works planning, and government promotion of scientifi c research. Weeks later he added other proposals: federal aid to funding for the St. Lawrence Seaway, nationalization of atomic energy, and, perhaps most important, national health insurance—a dream of welfare-state liberals for decades, but one deferred in 1935 when the Social Security Act was written. The president was declaring an end to the wartime moratorium on liberal reform. He was also symbolizing, as he later wrote, “my assumption of the offi ce of President in my own right.”

Truman’s “Fair Deal”

WE HAVE GOT TO BREAK

WITH THE CORRUPTING IDEA THAT

WE CAN LEGISLATE PROSPERITY,

LEGISLATE EQUALITY, LEGISLATE

OPPORTUNITY.

SENATOR ROBERT TAFT

Taft-Hartley Act

Postwar Labor Unrest



(ADA), a coalition of liberals, tried to entice Dwight D. Eisenhower, the popular war hero, to contest the nomination. Only after Eisenhower had refused did liberals bow to the in-evitable and concede the nomination to Truman. The Republicans, in the meantime, had once again nominated Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, whose substantial reelection victory in 1946 had made him one of the nation’s leading political fi gures. Austere, dignifi ed, and competent, he seemed to off er an unbeatable alternative to the president. Polls showed Dewey with an apparently insurmountable lead in September, so much so that some opinion analysts stopped taking surveys. Dewey conducted a subdued, statesmanlike campaign and tried to avoid antagonizing anyone. But Truman, seemingly alone, believed he could win. As the campaign gath-ered momentum, Truman became more and more aggressive, turning the fi re away from himself and toward Dewey and the “do-nothing, good-for-nothing” Republican Congress, which was, he told the voters, responsible for fueling infl ation and abandoning workers and the middle class. To dramatize his point, he called Congress into a special session in July to give it a chance, he said, to enact the liberal measures the Republicans had recently written into their platform. Congress met for two weeks and, predictably, did almost nothing.

The president traveled nearly 32,000 miles and made 356 speeches, deliver-ing blunt, extemporaneous attacks. He had told Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, his running mate, “I’m go-ing to fi ght hard. I’m going to give them hell.” He called for repeal of the

1946 election results. As they planned strategy for the 1948 cam-paign, therefore, they placed their hopes in an appeal to endur-ing Democratic loyalties. Throughout 1948, Truman proposed one reform measure after another. Although Congress ignored or defeated them all, the president was building campaign is-sues for the fall.

There remained, however, the problems of Truman’s per-sonal unpopularity—the belief among much of the electorate

that he and his administration were weak and inept—and the deep divisions within the Democratic Party. At the Democratic

Convention that summer, two factions abandoned the party. Southern conservatives reacted angrily to Truman’s proposed civil rights bill (the fi rst major one of the century) and to the approval at the convention of a civil rights plank in the plat-form (engineered by Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis). They walked out and formed the States’ Rights (or “Dixiecrat”) Party, with Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as its presidential nominee. At the same time, the party’s left wing formed a new Progressive Party, with Henry A. Wallace as its candidate. Wallace supporters ob-jected to what they considered the slow and ineff ective do-mestic policies of the Truman administration, but they resented even more the president’s confrontational stance toward the Soviet Union.

In addition, many Democratic liber-als unwilling to leave the party at-tempted to dump the president in 1948. The Americans for Democratic Action

ELECTION NIGHT, 1948 Throughout

the 1948 campaign, Harry Truman was

considered a very unlikely victor for a new

term as president. But the combination of

an energetic campaign by Truman, a lack

of enthusiasm for his opponent, Thomas

Dewey, and the lingering loyalty to the New

Deal led to a surprise victory. The Chicago

Daily Tribune, a strongly Republican paper,

was so certain of Dewey’s victory that it

published this headline, which hit the

newsstands just after it became clear that

Truman won. This picture is one of the

most famous political photographs of the

twentieth century. (The Granger

Collection, New York)

Democratic Defections

I’M GOING TO FIGHT HARD. I’M

GOING TO GIVE THEM HELL.

PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN

bri06953_ch27_756-777.indd Page 767 4/21/11 2:56 PM user-f494 /207/MHSF265/ste34315_disk1of1/0073534315/ste34315_pagefiles

768 • CHAPTER 27

and extending them to 10 million additional people. And it passed the National Housing Act of 1949, which provided for the construction of 810,000 units of low-income housing, ac-companied by long-term rent subsidies. (Inadequate funding plagued the program for years, and it reached its initial goal only in 1972.)

But on other issues—among them national health insurance and aid to education—Truman made no progress. Nor was he

able to persuade Congress to accept the civil rights legislation he proposed in 1949, which would have made lynching a federal

crime, provided federal protection of black voting rights, abol-ished the poll tax, and established a new Fair Employment Practices Commission to curb discrimination in hiring (to re-place the wartime commission Roosevelt had established in 1941). Southern Democrats fi libustered to kill the bill.

Truman did proceed on his own to battle several forms of racial discrimination. He ordered an end to discrimination in the hiring of government employees. He began to dismantle segregation within the armed forces. And he allowed the Justice Department to become actively involved in court battles against discriminatory statutes. In the meantime, the Supreme Court signaled its own growing awareness of the issue by ruling, in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), that the courts could not be used to enforce private “covenants” meant to bar African Americans from residential neighborhoods.

The Nuclear Age

Looming over the political, economic, and diplomatic struggles of the postwar years was the image of the great and terrible mushroom clouds that had risen over Alamogordo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Americans greeted these terrible new instru-ments of destruction with fear and awe, but also with expecta-

tion. Postwar culture, therefore, was torn in many ways. There was the dark image of the nuclear war that many Americans feared would be a result of the rivalry with the Soviet Union. But there was also the bright

image of a dazzling technological future that atomic power might help to produce.

The fear of nuclear weapons was not hard to fi nd in popular culture, even if it was often disguised in other ways. The late 1940s and early 1950s were the heyday of the fi lm noir, a kind of fi lmmaking that had originated in France and had been named for the dark lighting characteristic of the genre. American fi lm noir movies portrayed the loneliness of individuals in an imper-sonal world—a staple of American culture for many decades—but also suggested the menacing character of the age, the looming possibility of vast destruction. Sometimes, fi lms and television programs addressed nuclear fear explicitly—for ex-ample, the celebrated television show of the 1950s and early 1960s The Twilight Zone, which frequently featured dramatic portrayals of the aftermath of nuclear war; or postwar comic books, which depicted powerful superheroes saving the world from destruction.

Taft-Hartley Act, increased price supports for farmers, and strong civil rights protec-tion for blacks. (He was the fi rst president to campaign in Harlem.) He sought, in short,

to re-create much of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. To the surprise of virtually everyone, he succeeded. On election night, Truman won a narrow but decisive victory: 49.5 percent of the popular vote to Dewey’s 45.1 percent (with the two splin-ter parties dividing the small remainder between them), and an electoral vote margin of 303 to 189. Democrats, in the mean-time, regained both houses of Congress by substantial margins.

The Fair Deal Revived

Despite the Democratic victories, the Eighty-fi rst Congress was little more hospitable to Truman’s Fair Deal reform than its Republican predecessor. Truman did win some important vic-tories. Congress raised the legal minimum wage from 40 cents to 75 cents an hour. It approved an important expansion of the Social Security system, increasing benefi ts by 75 percent

Truman’s Surprising

Victory

Truman Stymied

ELECTION OF 1948 Despite the widespread expectation that the Republican

candidate, Thomas Dewey, would easily defeat Truman in 1948, the president in fact

won a substantial reelection victory that year. This map shows the broad geographic

reach of Truman’s victory. Dewey swept most of the Northeast, but Truman dominated

almost everywhere else. Strom Thurmond, the States’ Rights candidate, carried four

states in the South.

• What had prompted Thurmond to desert the Democratic Party and run for president on his own?

Electoral Vote Popular Vote (%) Candidate (Party)

53% of electorate voting

Thomas E. Dewey(Republican) 189 21,969,170

(45.1)

303 24,105,695(49.5)

Harry S. Truman(Democratic)

391,169,021

(2.4)1,156,103

(2.4)

272,713

Strom Thurmond(States’ Rights)Henry A. Wallace(Progressive)

Other Candidates(Prohibition; Socialist Labor,Socialist, Socialist Workers)

—

—

6

8

4

43

4

4

4

4 410

25

3

6

6

8

23 10

9

15

10

1112

28

19

13 25

11

111

9 11 12

8

8

14

118

35

47

3

5

4

48

16

1638

Conflicting Views of Nuclear Power



when the American government implied that it did not consider South Korea within its own “defense perimeter.” The role of the Soviet Union in North Korea’s calculations prior to the 1950 in-vasion remains unclear; there is reason to believe that the North Koreans acted without Stalin’s prior approval. But the Soviets supported the off ensive once it began.

The Truman administration responded quickly to the inva-sion. On June 27, 1950, the president appealed to the United Nations to intervene. The Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council at the time (to protest the council’s refusal to recognize the new communist government of China) and thus was unable to exercise its veto power. As a result, American delegates were able to win UN agreement to a reso-lution calling for international assistance to the Rhee govern-ment. On June 30, the United States ordered its own ground forces into Korea, and Truman appointed General Douglas MacArthur to command the overwhelmingly American UN operations there.

The intervention in Korea was the fi rst expression of the newly expansive American foreign policy outlined in NSC-68. But the administration quickly went beyond NSC-68 and de-

cided that the war would be an eff ort not simply at containment but also at “libera-

tion.” After a surprise American invasion at Inchon in September had routed the North Korean forces from the south and sent them fl eeing back across the 38th parallel, Truman gave MacArthur permission to pursue the communists into their own territory. His aim, as an American-sponsored UN resolution proclaimed in October, was to create “a unifi ed, inde-pendent and democratic Korea.”

From Invasion to Stalemate

For several weeks, MacArthur’s invasion of North Korea pro-ceeded smoothly. On October 19, the capital, Pyongyang, fell to the UN forces. Victory seemed near—until the new communist government of China, alarmed by the movement of American forces toward its border, intervened. By November 4, eight divi-sions of the Chinese army had entered the war. The UN off en-sive stalled and then collapsed. Through December 1950, outnumbered American forces fought a bitter, losing battle against the Chinese divisions, retreating at almost every junc-ture. Within weeks, communist forces had pushed the Americans back below the 38th parallel once again and had cap-tured the South Korean capital of Seoul a second time. By mid-January 1951 the rout had ceased; and by March the UN armies had managed to regain much of the territory they had recently lost, taking back Seoul and pushing the communists north of the 38th parallel once more. But with that, the war degenerated into a protracted stalemate.

From the start, Truman was determined to avoid a direct confl ict with China, which he feared might lead to a new world war. Once China entered the war, he began seeking a negoti-ated solution to the struggle, and for the next two years he in-sisted that there be no wider war. But he faced a formidable opponent in General MacArthur, who resisted any limits on

Such images resonated with the public because awareness of nuclear weapons was increasingly built into their daily lives. Schools and offi ce buildings had regular air raid drills, to pre-pare people for the possibility of nuclear attack. Radio stations regularly tested the emergency broadcast systems. Fallout shel-ters sprang up in public buildings and private homes, stocked with water and canned goods. America was a nation fi lled with anxiety.

And yet at the same time, the United States was also an exu-berant nation, dazzled by its own prosperity and excited by the technological innovations that were transforming the world. Among those innovations was nuclear power—which off ered the possibility that the same scientifi c knowledge that could de-stroy the world might also lead it into a dazzling future. A

Gallup poll late in 1948 revealed that approx-imately two-thirds of those who had an opinion on the subject believed that, “in the long run,” atomic energy would “do more good than harm.” Nuclear power plants be-

gan to spring up in many areas of the country, welcomed as the source of cheap and unlimited electricity, their potential dan-gers scarcely even discussed by those who celebrated the cre-ation of atomic power.

THE KOREAN WAR

On June 24, 1950, the armies of communist North Korea swept across their southern border and invaded the pro-Western half of the Korean peninsula to the south. Within days, they had occupied much of South Korea, including Seoul, its capital. Almost immediately, the United States committed itself to de-feating the North Korean off ensive. It was the nation’s fi rst mil-itary engagement of the Cold War.

The Divided Peninsula

Before the end of World War II, both the United States and the Soviet Union had sent troops into Korea in an eff ort to weaken Japanese occupation. Once the war was over and the Japanese expelled, the United States and the Soviet Union each sup-ported diff erent governments—the Soviets supporting a com-munist regime in the North and the United States supporting a pro-Western government in the South. Instead, they had di-vided the nation, supposedly temporarily, along the 38th paral-

lel. The Russians departed in 1949, leaving behind a communist government in the north with a strong, Soviet-equipped army.

The Americans left a few months later, handing control to the pro-Western government of Syngman Rhee, who was anticom-munist but only nominally democratic. He had a relatively small military, which he used primarily to suppress internal opposition.

The relative weakness of the south off ered a strong incentive to nationalists in the North Korean government who wanted to reunite the country. The temptation to invade grew stronger

Promise of Cheap

Nuclear Power

Syngman Rhee

“Liberation”


770 • CHAPTER 27

1951, he relieved MacArthur of his command.

There was a storm of public outrage. Sixty-nine percent of the American people supported MacArthur, a Gallup poll reported. When the general re-turned to the United States later in

1951, he was greeted with wild enthusiasm. His televised fare-well appearance before a joint session of Congress—which he concluded by saying, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away”—attracted an audience of millions. Public criticism of Truman abated somewhat when a number of prominent mili-tary fi gures, including General Omar Bradley, publicly sup-

ported the president’s decision. But substantial hostility toward Truman re-mained. In the meantime, the Korean stalemate continued. Negotiations be-tween the opposing forces began at Panmunjom in July 1951, but the talks—and the war—dragged on until 1953.

his military discretion. The United States was fi ghting the Chinese, he ar-gued. It should therefore attack China itself, if not through an actual inva-sion, then at least by bombing com-munist forces massing north of the Chinese border. In March 1951, MacArthur indicated his unhappiness in a public letter to House Republican leader Joseph W. Martin that concluded: “There is no substitute for victory.” His position had wide pop-ular support.

The Martin letter came after nine months during which MacArthur had opposed Truman’s decisions. More than once, the president had warned the

general to keep his objections to him-self. The release of the Martin letter,

therefore, struck the president as in-tolerable insubordination. On April 11,

DISARRAY IN KOREA This disturbing picture by the noted Life magazine photographer Carl Mydans conveys something of the air of catastrophe that surrounded the rout of

Americans from North Korea by the Chinese in 1951. Having approached the Chinese border, the Americans confronted a massive invasion of Korea by Chinese troops, who soon pushed

them back below the border between the North and the South and well beyond. Shown here are Marines following a vehicle carrying corpses after a battle with Chinese and North Korean

troops. They had been trapped by the enemy in North Korea and had fought their way forty miles south before being rescued. (Carl Mydans/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE

FOR VICTORY.

GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE,

THEY JUST FADE AWAY.

GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

Truman-MacArthur Controversy



helped keep the trains running, but it had no eff ect on union demands. Workers ultimately got most of what they had de-manded. In 1952, during a nationwide steel strike, Truman seized the steel mills, citing his powers as commander in chief. But in a 6-to-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the pres-ident had exceeded his authority, and Truman was forced to relent.

The Korean War gave a signifi cant boost to economic growth by pumping new government funds into the economy at a point when many people believed a recession was about to begin. But as the long stalemate continued, leaving 140,000 Americans dead or wounded, frustration turned to anger. Many began to believe that something must be deeply wrong—not only in

Limited Mobilization

Just as the war in Korea produced only a limited American mili-tary commitment abroad, so it created only a limited economic mobilization at home. Still, the government did try to control the wartime economy in several important ways.

First, Truman set up the Offi ce of Defense Mobilization to fi ght infl ation by holding down prices and discouraging high

union wage demands. When these cau-tious regulatory eff orts failed, the president took more drastic action. When railroad workers walked off the job in 1951, Truman

ordered the government to seize control of the railroads. That

lellarap ht83

Tumen

R.

Yalu R.

YellowSea

Sea ofJapan

Yalu

R.

Tumen

R.

lellarap ht83

YellowSea

Sea ofJapan

0 100 mi

0 100 200 km

0 100 mi

0 100 200 km

0 100 mi

0 100 200 km

0 100 mi

0 100 200 km

North Korean forces,June 25, 1950–Sept. 10, 1950

UN counterattackSept. 15, 1950–Nov. 24, 1950

Chinese and North Korean counterattackNov. 26, 1950–Jan. 24, 1951

Final UN counterattackJan. 25, 1951–April 21, 1951

Kaesong

Chosan

Chongjin

Pyongyang

Panmunjom

Pusan

Seoul

Kaesong

Chosan

Chongjin

Panmunjom

Inchon

Pyongyang

Pusan

Seoul

U.N. defensive

MacArthur

line Sept. 10, 1950

Furthest extent ofU.N. counter-offensive

Nov. 24, 1950

Extent ofcommunistcounterattackJan. 12, 1951

Inchon landingSept. 15, 1950

Armistice Line,Nov. 1951–July 1953

SOUTHKOREA

NORTHKOREA

CHINA(MANCHURIA)

SOUTHKOREA

NORTHKOREA

CHINA(MANCHURIA)

North Korean forces,June 25, 1950–Sept. 10, 1950

UN counterattackSept. 15, 1950–Nov. 24, 1950

Chinese and North Korean counterattackNov. 26, 1950–Jan. 24, 1951

Final UN counterattackJan. 25, 1951–April 21, 1951

THE KOREAN WAR, 1950–1953 These two maps illustrate the changing fortunes of UN forces (which were mostly American) during the 1950–1953 Korean War. The map at

the left shows the extent of the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950; communist forces for a time controlled all of Korea except a small area around Pusan in the southeast. On

September 15, 1950, UN troops under Douglas MacArthur landed in force at Inchon and soon drove the North Koreans back across the border. MacArthur then pursued the North

Koreans well into their own territory. The map at right shows the very diff erent circumstances once the Chinese entered the war in November 1950. Chinese forces drove the UN army

back below the 38th parallel and, briefl y, deep into South Korea, below Seoul. The UN troops fought back to the prewar border between North and South Korea late in 1951, but the war

then bogged down into a stalemate that continued for a year and a half.

• What impact did the Korean War have on American politics in the early 1950s?

Wartime Economic

Regulation


772 • CHAPTER 27

prosecution for most crimes after seven years have passed). But largely because of the relentless eff orts of Richard M. Nixon, a freshman Republican congressman from California and a member of HUAC, Hiss was convicted of perjury and served several years in prison. The Hiss case not only discredited a prominent young diplomat; it also cast suspicion on a genera-tion of liberal Democrats and made it possible for many Americans to believe that communists had actually infi ltrated the government.

The Federal Loyalty Program and the Rosenberg Case

Partly to protect itself against Republican attacks, partly to en-courage support for the president’s foreign policy initiatives, the Truman administration in 1947 initiated a widely publicized program to review the loyalty of federal employees. In August 1950, the president authorized sensitive agencies to fi re people deemed “bad security risks.” By 1951, more than 2,000 govern-ment employees had resigned under pressure and 212 had been dismissed.

The employee loyalty program established a widely cited list of supposedly subversive organizations. The director of

the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, investigated and harassed alleged radicals. In 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, requir-ing all communist organizations to register

with the government. Truman vetoed the bill. Congress easily overrode his veto.

The successful Soviet detonation of a nuclear weapon in 1949 convinced many people that there had been a conspiracy to pass American atomic secrets to the Russians. In 1950, Klaus Fuchs, a young British scientist, seemed to confi rm those fears when he testifi ed that he had delivered to the Russians details of the manufacture of the bomb. The case ultimately settled on an obscure New York couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, mem-bers of the Communist Party, whom the federal government claimed had been the masterminds of the conspiracy. The case against them rested in large part on testimony by Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, a machinist who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Greenglass admitted to channeling secret information to the Soviet Union through other agents (includ-ing Fuchs). His sister and brother-in-law had, he claimed, planned and orchestrated the espionage. The Rosenbergs were convicted and, on April 5, 1951, sentenced to death. After two years of appeals and protests by sympathizers, they died in the electric chair on June 19, 1953.

All these factors—the HUAC investigations, the Hiss trial, the loyalty investigations, the McCarran Act, the Rosenberg case—helped to intensify public fear of communist subversion. By the early 1950s, the fear seemed to have gripped much of the country. State and local governments, the judiciary, schools and

universities, labor unions—all sought to purge themselves of real or imagined sub-versives. A pervasive fear settled on the

Korea but within the United States as well. Such fears contrib-uted to the rise of the second major campaign of the century against domestic communism.

THE CRUSADE AGAINST SUBVERSION

Why did the American people develop a growing fear of internal communist subversion that by the early 1950s had reached the point of near hysteria? There are many possible answers, but no single defi nitive explanation.

One factor was obvious. Communism was not an imagined enemy in the 1950s. It had tangible shape, in Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. In addition, America had encountered set-

backs in its battle against communism: the Korean stalemate, the “loss” of China, the Soviet development of an atomic bomb.

Searching for someone to blame, many people were attracted to the idea of a communist conspiracy within American borders. But there were other factors as well, rooted in American domes-tic politics.

HUAC and Alger Hiss

Much of the anticommunist furor emerged out of the Republican Party’s search for an issue with which to attack the Democrats, and out of the Democrats’ eff orts to stifl e that issue. Beginning in 1947 (with Republicans temporarily in control of Congress), the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) held widely publicized investigations to prove that, under Democratic rule, the government had tolerated (if not actually encouraged) communist subversion. The committee turned fi rst to the movie industry, arguing that communists had infi ltrated Hollywood. Writers and producers, some of them former com-munists, were called to testify; and when several of them (“the Hollywood Ten”) refused to answer questions about their own political beliefs and those of their colleagues, they were jailed for contempt. Some writers were barred from employ-ment in the movie industry when Hollywood, attempting to protect its public image, adopted a blacklist of those of “suspi-cious loyalty.”

More alarming to much of the public was HUAC’s investiga-tion into charges of disloyalty leveled against a former high-ranking member of the State Department: Alger Hiss. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a self-avowed former communist agent who had turned vehemently against the party and become an

editor at Time magazine, told the committee that Hiss had passed classifi ed State

Department documents through him to the Soviet Union in 1937 and 1938. When Hiss sued him for slander, Chambers produced microfi lms of the documents (called the “pumpkin papers,” because Chambers had kept them hidden in a pump-kin in his garden). Hiss could not be tried for espionage because of the statute of limitations (a law that protects individuals from

Sources of the Red Scare

Alger Hiss

The McCarran Internal

Security Act

Anticommunist Hysteria



evidence of actual communist subversion. But a growing con-stituency adored him nevertheless for his coarse, “fearless” as-saults on a government establishment that many considered arrogant, elitist, even traitorous. Republicans, in particular, ral-lied to his claims that the Democrats had been responsible for “twenty years of treason,” that only a change of parties could rid

the country of subversion. McCarthy, in short, provided his followers with an issue into which they could channel a wide

range of resentments: fear of communism, animosity toward the country’s “eastern establishment,” and frustrated partisan ambitions.

For a time, McCarthy intimidated all but a few people from opposing him. Even the highly popular Dwight D. Eisenhower, running for president in 1952, did not speak out against him, even though he disliked McCarthy’s tactics and was outraged at, among other things, McCarthy’s attacks on General George Marshall.

The Republican Revival

Public frustration over the stalemate in Korea and popular fears of internal subversion combined to make 1952 a bad year for the Democratic Party. Truman, whose own popularity had greatly diminished, wisely decided not to run again. The party united instead behind Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. Stevenson’s dignity, wit, and eloquence made him a beloved fi gure to many liberals and intellectuals. But Republicans charged that Stevenson lacked the strength or the will to combat communism suffi ciently. McCarthy described him as “soft” and took delight in deliberately confusing him with Alger Hiss.

country—not only the fear of communist infi ltration but also the fear of being suspected of communist subversion. It was a climate that made possible the rise of an extraordinary public fi gure, whose behavior at any other time might have been dis-missed as preposterous.

McCarthyism

Joseph McCarthy was a relatively undistinguished fi rst-term Republican senator from Wisconsin when, in February 1950, he suddenly burst into national prominence. In the midst of a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he raised a sheet of paper and claimed to “hold in my hand” a list of 205 known commu-nists currently working in the American State Department. No person of comparable stature had ever made so bold a charge against the federal government; and in the weeks to come, as McCarthy repeated and expanded his accusations, he emerged as the nation’s most prominent leader of the crusade against domestic subversion.

Within weeks of his charges against the State Department, McCarthy was leveling accusations at other agencies. After 1952, with the Republicans in control of the Senate and McCarthy the chairman of a special subcommittee, he con-ducted highly publicized investigations of subversion in many areas of the government. His ambitious assistants, Roy Cohn and David Schine, sauntered arrogantly through federal offi ces and American embassies overseas looking for evidence of com-munist infl uence. One hapless government offi cial after an-other appeared before McCarthy’s subcommittee, where the senator belligerently and often cruelly badgered witnesses and destroyed public careers. McCarthy never produced solid

THE ROSENBERGS Julius and Ethel Rosenberg leave

federal court in a police van after being convicted in March

1951 of transmitting American atomic secrets to the Soviet

Union. A week later, Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced them

to death. (Bettmann/Corbis)

McCarthyism’s Appeal


774 •

DEBATING THE PAST

“McCarthyism”

WHEN the American Civil Liberties Union warned in the early 1950s, at the peak of the anticommunist fervor that is now known as “McCarthyism,” that “the

threat to civil liberties today is the most serious in the history of our country,” it was expressing a view with which many Americans wholeheartedly agreed. But while many Americans accept that there were unusually powerful challenges to freedom of speech and association in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there is wide disagreement about the causes and meaning of those challenges.

The simplest argument—and one that continues to attract scholarly support—is that the postwar Red Scare expressed real and legitimate concerns about communist subver-sion in the United States. William O’Neill, in A Better World (1982), and Richard Gid Powers, in Not Without Honor (1995), have both argued that anticommunism was a serious, intelligent, and patriotic movement, despite its excesses. The American Communist Party, according to this view, was an agent of Stalin and the Soviet Union within the United States, actively engaged in espionage and subversion. The effort to root communists out of public life was both understandable and justifi able—and the hysteria it sometimes produced was an unhappy but predictable by-product of an es-sentially rational and justifi able effort. “Anticommunism,” Powers wrote, “expressed the essential American determination to stand against attacks on human freedom and fos-ter the growth of democracy throughout the world. . . . To superimpose on this rich history the cartoon features of Joe McCarthy is to reject history for the easy comforts of moralism.”

to “go to Korea” himself ), Nixon eff ectively exploited the issue of communist subversion. After surviving early accusations of fi nancial improprieties (which he eff ectively neutralized in a famous television address, the “Checkers speech”), Nixon went on to launch harsh attacks on Democratic “cowardice,” “ap-peasement,” and “treason.”

Eisenhower won by both a popular and electoral landslide: 55 percent of the popular vote to Stevenson’s 44 percent, 442 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 89. Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for only the second time in two de-cades. The election of 1952 ended twenty years of Democratic government. And while it might not have seemed so at the time, it also signaled the end of some of the worst turbulence of the postwar era.

Stevenson’s greatest problem, however, was the Republican candidate opposing him. Rejecting the eff orts of conservatives to nominate Robert Taft or Douglas MacArthur, the Republicans turned to a man who had no previous identifi cation with the

party: General Dwight D. Eisenhower, mili-tary hero, commander of NATO, president of Columbia University in New York.

Eisenhower won nomination on the fi rst ballot. He chose as his running mate the young California senator who had gained na-tional prominence through his crusade against Alger Hiss: Richard M. Nixon. Eisenhower and Nixon were a powerful com-bination in the autumn campaign. While Eisenhower attracted support through his geniality and his statesmanlike pledges to settle the Korean confl ict (at one point dramatically promising

Dwight Eisenhower

Even during World War II itself, when the United States and the Soviet Union were allies, it was evident to leaders in both nations that America and Russia had quite diff erent visions of

what the postwar world should look like. Very quickly after the war ended, those diff erences became visible to almost everyone, and the once fruitful relationship between the world’s two great-

LOOKING BACK

(Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library

of Congress)


• 775

Are the Crimes (1998), argues that the Red Scare was, at its heart, directed largely against the left and that it was orchestrated by an interlocking cluster of offi cial agencies with a deep commit-ment to the project.

Several scholars, fi nally, have presented an argument that does not so much challenge other interpretations as complement them. Anticommunist zealots were not alone to blame for the excesses of McCarthyism, they argue. It was also the fault of liberals—in politics, in aca-demia, and perhaps above all in the media—who were so intimidated by the political climate, or so imprisoned within the conventions of their pro-fessions, that they found themselves unable to respond effectively to the distortions and ex-cesses they recognized around them. •

UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, AND EVALUATE

1. Why did the American public feel so threat-ened by communism? Who exploited the public’s fears and why?

2. Was the public reaction to the Red Scare a logical response or disproportionate to the actual threat posed by communism?

3. How were party politics and McCarthyism connected? Do you fi nd elements similar to McCarthyism in politics today?

Most interpretations, however, have been much less charitable. In the 1950s, in the midst of the Red Scare itself, an infl uential group of historians and social scientists began to portray the anticommunist fervor of their time as an expression of social maladjustment—an argument perhaps most closely associated with Richard Hofstadter’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” There was, they argued, no logical connection between the modest power of actual communists in the United States and the anticommunist hysteria. The fear of communism, they maintained, was rooted in social and cultural anxieties that had only an indirect connection with the political world. Extreme anticommunism, they claimed, was something close to a pathol-ogy; it expressed fear of and alienation from the modern world. A person affl icted with the “paranoid style,” Hofstadter wrote:

believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, be-

trayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbi-

trarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened

in American politics in the past twenty years.

Other scholars, writing not long after the decline of McCarthyism, rejected the socio-cultural argument but shared the belief that the crusade against subversion was a dis-tortion of normal public life. They saw the anticommunist crusade as an example of party politics run amok. Richard Freeland, in The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (1971), argued that the Democrats began the effort to purge the govern-ment of radicals to protect themselves from attacks by the Republicans. Nelson Polsby, Robert Griffi th, and others have noted how Republicans seized on the issue of commu-nism in government in the late 1940s to reverse their nearly twenty-year exclusion from power. With each party trying to outdo the other in its effort to demonstrate its anticom-munist credentials, it was hardly surprising that the crusade reached extraordinarily in-tense proportions.

Still other historians have emphasized the role of powerful government offi cials and agencies with a strong commitment to anticommunism—most notably J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Athan Theoharis and Kenneth O’Reilly introduced the idea of an anticom-munist bureaucracy in work published in the 1970s and 1980s. Ellen Schrecker, in Many

est powers quickly soured. Americans came to believe that the Soviet Union was an expansionist tyranny little diff erent from Hitler’s Germany, that Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, was bent on world conquest. Soviets came to believe that the United States was trying to protect its own dominance in the world by encircling the Soviet Union and trying to limit its ability to oper-ate as a great power. The result of these tensions was what be-came known by the end of the 1940s as the Cold War.

Actual confl icts in the early years of the Cold War were rela-tively few. Instead, the United States engaged in a series of poli-cies designed to prevent both war and Soviet aggression. It helped rebuild the shattered nations of Western Europe with substantial economic aid, through the Marshall Plan, to stabi-lize those nations and prevent them from becoming commu-nist. America announced a new foreign policy—known as containment—that committed it to an eff ort to keep the Soviet Union from expanding its infl uence further into the world. The United States and Western Europe formed a strong and endur-ing alliance, NATO, to defend Europe against possible Soviet advances.

In 1950, however, the armed forces of communist North Korea launched an invasion of the noncommunist South; and

to most Americans—including, most importantly, President Truman—the confl ict quickly came to be seen as a test of American resolve in the Cold War. The Korean War was long, costly, and unpopular, with many military setbacks and frus-trations. In the end, however, the United States—working through the United Nations—managed to drive the North Koreans out of the south and stabilize the original division of the peninsula.

The Korean War had other eff ects on the domestic life of the United States. It hardened American foreign policy into a much more rigidly anticommunist form. It undermined the Truman administration, and the Democratic Party, and helped strengthen conservatives and Republicans. It greatly strength-ened an already powerful crusade against communists, and those believed to be communists, within the United States—a crusade often known as McCarthyism, because of the notoriety of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, the most celebrated leader of the eff ort.

America after World War II was indisputably the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. But in the harsh climate of the Cold War, neither wealth nor power could obscure deep anxieties and bitter divisions. •


776 • CHAPTER 27

Key Terms/People/Places/Events

Alger Hiss 772Atlantic Charter 758Containment 761Douglas MacArthur 769Fair Deal 766George F. Kennan 764House Un-American Activities

Committee (HUAC) 772Joseph McCarthy 773

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg 772Mao Zedong 761Marshall Plan 762McCarthyism 773National Security Act 763North Atlantic Treaty

Organization (NATO) 763NSC-68 764Syngman Rhee 769

Taft-Hartley Act 766Thomas E. Dewey 767Truman Doctrine 762United Nations 758Warsaw Pact 763Whittaker Chambers 772Yalta Conference 758

SIGNIFICANT EVENTS

1946

Atomic Energy

Commission

established

Roosevelt and Churchill

draft Atlantic Charter

Roosevelt, Churchill, and

Stalin meet at Teheran

Yalta Conference

Roosevelt dies; Harry S.

Truman becomes president

Potsdam Conference

United Nations founded

Truman Doctrine

announced

Marshall Plan proposed

National Security

Act passed

1941 1943 1944

GI Bill of

Rights enacted

1945 1947

Taft-Hartley Act passed

HUAC begins

investigating Hollywood

fi lm industry

1945

bri06953_ch27_756-777.indd Page 776 20/04/11 12:55 PM user-f469 /Volumes/204/MHSF271/swa11528_disk1of1/0078111528/swa11528_pagefiles


RECALL AND REFLECT

1. How did American diplomats plan for the postwar world and settle postwar issues? How did opposing visions of the postwar world order thwart those eff orts?

2. How did postwar economic problems aff ect American poli-tics and society?

3. Why did the United States become involved in the war in Korea? What was the result of U.S. involvement in that war?

4. Why did the fear of communism at home reach such great proportions? What events helped fan that fear?

1949

NATO established

Soviet Union explodes

atomic bomb

1952

American occupation

of Japan ends

1950

Joseph McCarthy

begins campaign

against communists

in government

NSC-68 outlines new

U.S. policy toward

communism

Korean War begins

Communists stage

coup in Czechoslovakia

Communists seize power

in China Dwight D. Eisenhower

elected president

Truman removes

MacArthur from

command in Korea

1948

Berlin blockade

prompts U.S. airlift

Truman elected

president

Hiss case begins

1951


Documents

THE RED MENACEmyresource.phoenix.edu/secure/resource/HIS135R4/American... · 2012. 5. 10. · 27 THE COLD WAR THE RED MENACE This 1949 movie poster suggests how much attention was