US History (South Dakota) V1

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Printed: June 10, 2015

AUTHORDigital Book

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Contents www.ck12.org

Contents

1 Introduction 11.1 South Dakota US History Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21.2 Guidance for Use of this Learning Resource . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41.3 Flexbook Author Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

2 Era 1: Three Worlds Meet (Beginnings to 1620) 6

3 Era 2: Colonization and Settlement (1585-1763) 7

4 Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s) 8

5 Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861) 9

6 Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877) 10

7 Era 6: The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900) 117.1 Era6:Draft Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

8 Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930) 27

9 Era 8: The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945) 28

10 Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s) 2910.1 Era9:Draft of Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

11 Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present) 42

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CHAPTER 1 IntroductionChapter Outline

1.1 SOUTH DAKOTA US HISTORY STANDARDS

1.2 GUIDANCE FOR USE OF THIS LEARNING RESOURCE

1.3 FLEXBOOK AUTHOR INFORMATION

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1.1. South Dakota US History Standards www.ck12.org

1.1 South Dakota US History Standards

1.1. South Dakota US History Standards

High School US History Note: The South Dakota High School Graduation Requirements include a requirement for1 credit of US History. The standards have been labeled, below, to allow for flexibility within school districts acrossthe state. Those labels indicate course options including Early US History, Modern US History, and ComprehensiveUS History.

K-12.H.1 Students will analyze how major events are chronologically connected and evaluate their impact onone another.

9-12.H.1.3 Describe causes and effects of the process of United States territorial expansion between the foundingand the Civil War. (Courses: Early, Comprehensive)

9-12.H.1.4 Analyze how individuals and groups reacted to social, political, and economic problems in the U.S. fromReconstruction through the Progressive Era. (Courses: Modern, Comprehensive)

9-12.H.1.5 Explain the transformation of America from World War I through the Great Depression. (Courses:Modern, Comprehensive) K-12.H.2 Students will analyze and evaluate the impact of people, events, ideas andsymbols upon history using multiple sources.

9-12.H.2.6 Evaluate the impact the American Revolution had on politics, economy, and society. (Courses: Early,Comprehensive)

9-12.H.2.7 Critique recent developments in the United States addressing the roles of people, ideas, and groupsin terms of foreign & domestic issues. (Courses: Modern, Comprehensive) K-12.H.3 Students will analyze andevaluate historical events from multiple perspectives

9-12.H.3.3 Critique the development of American industrial society including its impacts on migration, systems ofslavery, and the national economy. (Courses: Early, Comprehensive) 39

9-12.H.3.4 Explain causes, events, and effects of the Civil War. (Courses: Early, Comprehensive)

9-12.H.3.5 Assess the causes, events, and impacts of the Cold War on domestic and international affairs in Americanhistory. (Courses: Modern, Comprehensive) K-12.H.4 Students will identify and evaluate the causes and effects ofpast, current and potential events, issues and problems

9-12.H.4.5 Analyze the development of American constitutional frameworks during the Revolutionary Era.(Courses:Early, Comprehensive)

9-12.H.4.6 Evaluate the causes, events, and effects of reform movements stimulated from the 2nd Great Awakening.(Courses: Early, Comprehensive)

9-12.H.4.7 Evaluate the causes and effects of the First World War on the United States. (Courses: Modern,Comprehensive)

9-12.H.4.8 Assess the roots and outcomes of the Great Depression including its transformation of American politicaland economic institutions. (Courses: Modern, Comprehensive)

9-12.H.4.9 Explain the causes, events, and consequences of the Second World War including issues at home andabroad. (Courses: Modern, Comprehensive) K-12.H.5 Students will develop historical research skills.

9-12.H.5.4 Investigate the philosophical foundations, the causes, and the effects of the Revolutionary Era in Ameri-can history. (Courses: Early, Comprehensive)

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9-12.H.5.5 Evaluate to what extent Reconstruction both succeeded and failed in its intentions. (Courses: Modern,Comprehensive)

9-12.H.5.6 Investigate the social, political, and economic transformation of the United States in the aftermath of theSecond World War. (Courses: Modern, Comprehensive)

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1.2. Guidance for Use of this Learning Resource www.ck12.org

1.2 Guidance for Use of this Learning Re-source

This flexbook provides basic content related to US History. It is the belief of the authors that a textbook is only ONEresource that can be used as part of an entire curriculum. The textbook is not the curriculum. Standards provideguidance about what should be included in the curriculum. Educators make daily decisions about how each standardis best learned. They provide the instruction and guidance that makes learning meaningful and engaging for learners.Educators also provide assessment to help learners measure progress toward learning goals.

More basic guidance on how learning facilitators will make best use of this resource will go here, info above is justa sample.

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1.3 Flexbook Author Information

This flexbook was designed by South Dakota Educators as a resource to benefit their colleagues and to promotestudent learning. This flexbook is not mandated by any organization – it is a totally optional resource to supportlearning based on the SD US History content standards.

List of authors who contributed to the project goes here.

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CONCEPT 2 Era 1: Three Worlds Meet(Beginnings to 1620)

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www.ck12.org Concept 3. Era 2: Colonization and Settlement (1585-1763)

CONCEPT 3 Era 2: Colonization andSettlement (1585-1763)

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CONCEPT 4 Era 3: Revolution and theNew Nation (1754-1820s)

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www.ck12.org Concept 5. Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

CONCEPT 5 Era 4: Expansion andReform (1801-1861)

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CONCEPT 6 Era 5: Civil War andReconstruction (1850-1877)

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www.ck12.org Chapter 7. Era 6: The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)

CHAPTER 7 Era 6: The Development ofthe Industrial United States (1870-1900)

Chapter Outline7.1 ERA6:DRAFT CONTENT

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7.1 Era6:Draft Content

HISTORICAL THINKING

r equires understanding and evaluating change and continuity over time, and making appropriate use of historicalevidence in answering questions and developing arguments about the past. It involves going beyond simply asking,“What happened when?” to evaluating why and how events occurred and developments unfolded. It involveslocating and assessing historical sources of many different types to understand the contexts of given historical erasand the perspectives of different individuals and groups within geographic units that range from the local to theglobal. This text serves as A source, and is not intended to be the exclusive source for US History content for anystudent.

Historical thinking is a process of chronological reasoning, which means wrestling with issues of causality, connec-tions, significance, and context with the goal of developing credible explanations of historical events and develop-ments based on reasoned interpretation of evidence.

Historical inquiry involves acquiring knowledge about significant events, developments, individuals, groups, docu-ments, places, and ideas to support investigations about the past. Acquiring relevant knowledge requires assemblinginformation from a wide variety of sources in an integrative process. You might begin with key events or individualsintroduced by your teacher and then investigate them further. Or you might take a source from a seemingly insignif-icant individual and make connections between that person and larger events, or trace the person’s contributions to amajor development.

Scholars, teachers, and students form understandings of what is and what is not significant from the emergence ofnew sources, from current events, you’re your location, and from asking questions about changes that affected largenumbers of people in the past or had enduring consequences. Developing historical knowledge in connection withhistorical investigations not only helps you remember the content better because it has meaning, but also allows youto become better thinkers (adapted from the C3 Framework).

The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)

Content in this section may be utilized in support of standard/s:

9-12.H.1.4 Analyze how individuals and groups reacted to social, political, and economic problems in the U.S. fromReconstruction through the Progressive Era. (Courses: Modern, Comprehensive)

The period in United States history following the Civil War and Reconstruction, lasting from the late 1860s to 1896,is referred to as the "Gilded Age." This term was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their bookThe Gilded Age: A Tale of Today , published in 1873 . The term refers to the gilding of a cheaper metal with a thinlayer of gold. Many critics complained that the era was marked by ostentatious display, crass manners, corruption,and shoddy ethics.

Historians view the Gilded Age as a period of rapid economic, technological, political, and social transformation.This transformation forged a modern, national industrial society out of what had been small regional communities.By the end of the Gilded Age, the United States was at the top end of the world’s leading industrial nations. Inthe Progressive Era that followed the Gilded Age, it became a world power. In the process, there was muchdislocation, including the destruction of the Plains Indians, hardening discrimination against African Americans,and environmental degradation. Two extended nationwide economic depressions followed the Panic of 1873 andthe Panic of 1893 (boundless).

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Settling the West 1865-1900

After the Civil War, many people from the East Coast and Europe were lured west by reports from relatives andby extensive advertising campaigns promising "the Best Prairie Lands," "Low Prices," "Large Discounts For Cash,"and "Better Terms Than Ever! " For a variety of reasons, Americans increasingly felt compelled to fulfill their“Manifest Destiny,” a phrase that came to mean that they were expected to spread across the land given to them byGod and, most importantly, spread predominantly American values to the frontier (cnx.org). New railroads providedthe opportunity for migrants to go out and take a look, with special family tickets, the cost of which could be appliedto land purchases offered by the railroads.

The private profit motive dominated the movement westward, but the federal government played a supporting rolein securing land through treaties and setting up territorial governments , with governors appointed by the president.The federal government first acquired western territory from other nations or native tribes by treaty, then it sentsurveyors to map and document the land. By the 20 th century, Washington bureaucracies managed the federal landssuch as the General Land Office in the Interior department and, after 1891, the Forest Service in the Department ofAgriculture (boundless)

To assist the settlers in their move westward and transform the migration from a trickle into a steady flow, Congresspassed two significant pieces of legislation in 1862: the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act. Born largelyout of President Abraham Lincoln’s growing concern that a potential Union defeat in the early stages of the CivilWar might result in the expansion of slavery westward, Lincoln hoped that such laws would encourage the expansionof a “free soil” mentality across the West.

Figure 2 Map of the United States and territories showing the extent of public surveys, Indian and military reserva-tions, land grant R.R.; rail roads, canals, and other details 1873 LOC

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The Homestead Act allowed any head of household, or individual over the age of twenty-one—including unmarriedwomen—to receive a parcel of 160 acres for only a nominal filing fee. All that recipients were required to doin exchange was to “improve the land” within a period of five years of taking possession. The standards forimprovement were minimal: Owners could clear a few acres, build small houses or barns, or maintain livestock.Under this act, the government transferred over 270 million acres of public domain land to private citizens.

As settlers and homesteaders moved westward to improve the land given to them through the Homestead Act,they faced a difficult and often insurmountable challenge. The land was difficult to farm, there were few buildingmaterials, and harsh weather, insects, and inexperience led to frequent setbacks. The prohibitive prices charged bythe first railroad lines made it expensive to ship crops to market or have goods sent out. Although many farms failed,some survived and grew into large “bonanza” farms that hired additional labor and were able to benefit enoughfrom economies of scale to grow profitable. Still, small family farms, and the settlers who worked them, were hard-pressed to do more than scrape out a living in an unforgiving environment that comprised arid land, violent weathershifts, and other challenges.

Of the hundreds of thousands of settlers who moved west, the vast majority were homesteaders. These pioneers,like the Ingalls family of Little House on the Prairie book and television fame, were seeking land and opportunity.Popularly known as “sodbusters,” these men and women in the Midwest faced a difficult life on the frontier. Theysettled throughout the land that now makes up the Midwestern states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska,and the Dakotas. The weather and environment were bleak, and settlers struggled to eke out a living. Irrigation wasa requirement, but finding water and building adequate systems proved too difficult and expensive for many farmers.It was not until 1902 and the passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act that a system finally existed to set asidefunds from the sale of public lands to build dams for subsequent irrigation efforts. Prior to that, farmers across theGreat Plains relied primarily on dry-farming techniques. A few also began to employ windmill technology to drawwater, although both the drilling and construction of windmills became an added expense that few farmers couldafford.

The first houses built by western settlers were typically made of mud and sod with thatch roofs, as there was littletimber for building.

Rain, when it arrived, presented constant problems for these sod houses, with mud falling into food, and vermin, mostnotably lice, scampering across bedding. Weather patterns not only left the fields dry, they also brought tornadoes,droughts, blizzards, and insect swarms. Tales of swarms of locusts were commonplace, and the crop-eating insectswould at times cover the ground six to twelve inches deep. One frequently quoted Kansas newspaper reported

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a locust swarm in 1878 during which the insects devoured “everything green, stripping the foliage off the bark andfrom the tender twigs of the fruit trees, destroying every plant that is good for food or pleasant to the eye, that manhas planted.”

Farming

Farmers also faced the ever-present threat of debt and farm foreclosure by the banks. While land was essentiallyfree under the Homestead Act, all other farm necessities cost money and were initially difficult to obtain in thenewly settled parts of the country where market economies did not yet fully reach. Horses, livestock, wagons, wells,fencing, seed, and fertilizer were all critical to survival, but often hard to come by as the population initially remainedsparsely settled across vast tracts of land. Railroads charged notoriously high rates for farm equipment and livestock,making it difficult to procure goods or make a profit on anything sent back east. Banks also charged high interestrates, and, in a cycle that replayed itself year after year, farmers would borrow from the bank with the intentionof repaying their debt after the harvest. As the number of farmers moving westward increased, the market priceof their produce steadily declined, even as the value of the actual land increased. Each year, hard-working farmersproduced ever-larger crops, flooding the markets and subsequently driving prices down even further. Although someunderstood the economics of supply and demand, none could overtly control such forces.

Ranching

The role the cattle industry played in western expansion should not be underestimated. For centuries, wild cattleroamed the Spanish borderlands. At the end of the Civil War, as many as five million longhorn steers could be foundalong the Texas frontier, yet few settlers had capitalized on the opportunity to claim them, due to the difficulty oftransporting them to eastern markets. The completion of the first transcontinental railroad and subsequent railroadlines changed the game dramatically. Cattle ranchers and eastern businessmen realized that it was profitable to roundup the wild steers and transport them by rail to be sold in the East for as much as thirty to fifty dollars per head. Theseranchers and businessmen began the rampant speculation in the cattle industry that made and lost many fortunes.

Between 1865 and 1885, as many as forty thousand cowboys roamed the Great Plains, hoping to work for local ranch-ers. They were all men, typically in their twenties, and close to one-third of them were Hispanic or African American.It is worth noting that the stereotype of the American cowboy—and indeed the cowboys themselves—borrowedmuch from the Mexicans who had long ago settled those lands. The saddles, lassos, chaps, and lariats that definecowboy culture all arose from the Mexican ranchers who had used them to great effect before the cowboys arrived.

Life as a cowboy was dirty and decidedly unglamorous. The terrain was difficult; conflicts with Native Americans,especially in Indian territory (now Oklahoma), were notoriously deadly. But the longhorn cattle were hardy stock,

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and could survive and thrive while grazing along the long trail, so cowboys braved the trip for the promise of steadyemployment and satisfying wages (CNX.org).

End of the Open Range

In the north, overgrazing stressed the open range, leading to insufficient winter forage for the cattle and starvation.This was particularly true during the harsh winter of 1886-87, when hundreds of thousands of cattle died acrossthe Northwest, leading to collapse of the cattle industry. By the 1890s, barbed wire fencing was standard in thenorthern plains, railroads had expanded to cover most of the nation, and meat packing plants were built closer tomajor ranching areas. This made long cattle drives from Texas to the railheads in Kansas unnecessary. The age ofthe open range was gone and large cattle drives were over. Meanwhile, ranches multiplied all over the developingwest. At this time, ranchers began to fence off their land and negotiated individual grazing leases with the Americangovernment so that they could keep better control of the pasture land available to their own animals (Boundless).

Mining

Although homestead farming was the primary goal of most western settlers in the latter half of the nineteenth century,a small minority sought to make their fortunes quickly through other means. Specifically, gold (and, later silver andcopper) prospecting attracted thousands of miners looking to “get rich quick” before returning east.

The allure of gold has long sent people on wild chases; in the American West, the possibility of quick riches wasno different. The search for gold represented an opportunity far different from the slow path to prosperity thathomesteading farmers faced. The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California, set a pattern for suchstrikes that was repeated again and again for the next decade, in what collectively became known as the CaliforniaGold Rush.

By the 1860s and 1870s, however, individual efforts to locate precious metals were proving unsuccessful. Eventually,as the ore dried up, most mining towns turned into ghost towns. Even today, a visit through the American West showsold saloons and storefronts, abandoned as the residents moved on to their next shot at riches. The true lasting impactof the early mining efforts was the resulting desire of the U.S. government to bring law and order to the “Wild West”in order to more efficiently extract natural resources and encourage stable growth in the region. As more Americansmoved to the region to seek permanent settlement, as opposed to brief speculative ventures, they also sought thesafety and support that government order could bring. Nevada was admitted to the Union as a state in 1864, withColorado following in 1876, then North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington in 1889; and Idaho andWyoming in 1890 (cnx.org).

In 1874, the U.S. government sent General George Custer on the Black Hills Expedition to choose a locationfor a new Army fort and to investigate the area’s natural resources. The expedition’s confirmation of gold in theregion drew thousands of whites to the Black Hills, ultimately fueling tensions between the whites and the NativeAmericans, leading to the Great Sioux war of 1876 and Custer’s Last Stand (PBS.org) .

Women in the West

Although the West was a male-dominated society, homesteading in particular encouraged the presence of women,families, and a domestic lifestyle, even if such a life was not an easy one. Women faced all the physical hardshipsthat men encountered in terms of weather, illness, and danger, with the added complication of childbirth. Often,there was no doctor or midwife providing assistance, and many women died from treatable complications, as didtheir newborns. While some women could find employment in the newly settled towns as teachers, cooks, orseamstresses, they originally did not enjoy many rights. They could not sell property, sue for divorce, serve onjuries, or vote. And for the vast majority of women, their work was not in towns for money, but on the farm. As lateas 1900, a typical farm wife could expect to devote nine hours per day to chores such as cleaning, sewing, laundering,and preparing food. Two additional hours per day were spent cleaning the barn and chicken coop, milking the cows,caring for the chickens, and tending the family garden. One wife commented in 1879, “[We are] not much betterthan slaves. It is a weary, monotonous round of cooking and washing and mending and as a result the insane asylumis a third filled with wives of farmers.”

Despite this grim image, the challenges of farm life eventually empowered women to break through some legal

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and social barriers. Many lived more equitably as partners with their husbands than did their eastern counterparts,helping each other through both hard times and good. If widowed, a wife typically took over responsibility for thefarm, a level of management that was very rare back east, where the farm would fall to a son or other male relation.Pioneer women made important decisions and were considered by their husbands to be more equal partners in thesuccess of the homestead, due to the necessity that all members had to work hard and contribute to the farmingenterprise for it to succeed. Therefore, it is not surprising that the first states to grant women’s rights, includingthe right to vote, were those in the Pacific Northwest and Upper Midwest, where women pioneers worked the landside by side with men. Some women seemed to be well suited to the challenges that frontier life presented them.Writing to her Aunt Martha from their homestead in Minnesota in 1873, Mary Carpenter refused to complain aboutthe hardships of farm life: “I try to trust in God’s promises, but we can’t expect him to work miracles nowadays.Nevertheless, all that is expected of us is to do the best we can, and that we shall certainly endeavor to do. Even ifwe do freeze and starve in the way of duty, it will not be a dishonorable death.” (Boundless)

While there is much talk—both real and mythical—of the rough men who lived this the life of a miner, relatively fewwomen experienced it. While homesteaders were often families, gold speculators, and cowboys tended to be singlemen in pursuit of fortune, the few women who went to these wild outposts were typically prostitutes, and even theirnumbers were limited. In 1860, in the Comstock Lode region of Nevada, for example, there were reportedly onlythirty women total in a town of twenty-five hundred men. Some of the “painted ladies” who began as prostituteseventually owned brothels and emerged as businesswomen in their own right; however, life for these young womenremained a challenging one as western settlement progressed. A handful of women, numbering no more than sixhundred, braved both the elements and male-dominated culture to become teachers in several of the more establishedcities in the West. Even fewer arrived to support husbands or operate stores in these mining towns.

As wealthy men brought their families west, the lawless landscape began to change slowly. Across the west, womenbegan to organize churches, school, civic clubs, and other community programs to promote family values. Theyfought to remove opportunities for prostitution and all the other vices that they felt threatened the values that theyheld dear. Protestant missionaries eventually joined the women in their efforts, and, while they were not widelysuccessful, they did bring greater attention to the problems. As a response, the U.S. Congress passed both theComstock Law (named after its chief proponent, anti-obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock) in 1873 to ban thespread of “lewd and lascivious literature” through the mail and the subsequent Page Act of 1875 to prohibit thetransportation of women into the United States for employment as prostitutes. However, the “houses of ill repute”continued to operate and remained popular throughout the West despite the efforts of reformers.

Myths of the West

The popular image of the Wild West portrayed in books, television, and film has been one of violence and turmoil.The lure of quick riches through mining or driving cattle meant that much of the West did indeed consist of roughmen living a rough life, although the violence was exaggerated and even glorified in the dime store novels of theday. The exploits of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, and others made for good stories, but the reality was that westernviolence was more isolated than the stories might suggest. These clashes often occurred as people struggled for thescarce resources that could make or break their chance at riches, or as they dealt with the sudden wealth or povertythat prospecting provided.

Where sporadic violence did erupt, it was concentrated largely in mining towns or during range wars among largeand small cattle ranchers. Some mining towns were indeed as rough as the popular stereotype. Men, money, liquor,and disappointment were a recipe for violence. Fights were frequent, deaths were commonplace, and frontier justicereigned. The notorious mining town of Bodie, California, had twenty-nine murders between 1877 and 1883, whichtranslated to a murder rate higher than any other city at that time, and only one person was ever convicted of a crime.The most prolific gunman of the day was John Wesley Hardin, who allegedly killed over twenty men in Texas invarious gunfights, including one victim he killed in a hotel for snoring too loudly.

Ranching brought with it its own dangers and violence. In the Texas cattle lands, owners of large ranches tookadvantage of their wealth and the new invention of barbed wire to claim the prime grazing lands and few significantwatering holes for their herds. Those seeking only to move their few head of cattle to market grew increasinglyfrustrated at their inability to find even a blade of grass for their meager herds. Eventually, frustration turned to

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violence, as several ranchers resorted to vandalizing the barbed wire fences to gain access to grass and water fortheir steers. Such vandalism quickly led to cattle rustling, as these cowboys were not averse to leading a few of therancher’s steers into their own herds as they left.

One example of the violence that bubbled up was the infamous Fence Cutting War in Clay County, Texas (1883–1884).There, cowboys began destroying fences that several ranchers erected along public lands: land they had no right toenclose. Confrontations between the cowboys and armed guards hired by the ranchers resulted in three deaths—hardlya “war,” but enough of a problem to get the governor’s attention. Eventually, a special session of the Texas legislatureaddressed the problem by passing laws to outlaw fence cutting, but also forced ranchers to remove fences illegallyerected along public lands, as well as to place gates for passage where public areas adjoined private lands.

An even more violent confrontation occurred between large ranchers and small farmers in Johnson County, Wyoming,where cattle ranchers organized a “lynching bee” in 1891–1892 to make examples of cattle rustlers. Hiring twenty-two “invaders” from Texas to serve as hired guns, the ranch owners and their foremen hunted and subsequentlykilled the two rustlers best known for organizing the owners of the smaller Wyoming farms. Only the interventionof federal troops, who arrested and then later released the invaders, allowing them to return to Texas, prevented agreater massacre (CNX.org).

The Loss of American Indian Life and Cultur e

As American settlers pushed westward, they inevitably came into conflict with Indian tribes that had long been livingon the land. Although the threat of Indian attacks was quite slim and nowhere proportionate to the number of U.S.Army actions directed against them, the occasional attack—often one of retaliation—was enough to fuel the popularfear of the “savage” Indians. The clashes, when they happened, were indeed brutal, although most of the brutalityoccurred at the hands of the settlers. Ultimately, the settlers, with the support of local militias and, later, with thefederal government behind them, sought to eliminate tribes from the lands they desired. The result was devastatingfor Indian tribes, which lacked weapons and group cohesion to fight back against such well-armed forces. TheManifest Destiny of the settlers spelled an end to the Indian way of life.

Back east, the popular vision of the West was of a vast and empty land. But of course this was an exaggerateddepiction. On the eve of westward expansion, as many as 250,000 Indians, consisting of many different tribes,populated the Great Plains. Previous wars against these tribes in the early nineteenth century, as well as thefailure of earlier treaties, had led to a general policy of the forcible removal of many tribes in the eastern United

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States. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 resulted in the infamous “Trail of Tears,” which saw nearly fifty thousandSeminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek Indians relocated west of the Mississippi River to what is now Oklahomabetween 1831 and 1838. Building upon such a history, the U.S. government was prepared, during the era of westernsettlement, to deal with tribes that settlers viewed as obstacles to expansion.

As settlers sought more land for farming, mining, and cattle ranching, the first strategy employed to deal with theperceived Indian threat was to negotiate settlements to move tribes out of the path of white settlers. In 1851, thechiefs of most of the Great Plains tribes agreed to the First Treaty of Fort Laramie. This agreement establisheddistinct tribal borders, essentially codifying the reservation system. In return for annual payments of $50,000 to thetribes (originally guaranteed for fifty years, but later revised to last for only ten) as well as the hollow promise ofnoninterference from westward settlers, Indians agreed to stay clear of the path of settlement. Due to governmentcorruption, many annuity payments never reached tribes, and some reservations were left destitute and near starving.In addition, within a decade, as the pace and number of western settlers increased, even designated reservationsbecame prime locations for farms and mining. Rather than negotiating new treaties, settlers—oftentimes backed bylocal or state militia units—simply attacked tribes out of fear or to force them from the land. Some Indians resisted,only to then face massacres.

In 1862, frustrated and angered by the lack of annuity payments and the continuous encroachment on their reser-vation lands, Dakota Sioux Indians in Minnesota rebelled in what became known as the Dakota War, killing thewhite settlers who moved onto their tribal lands. Over one thousand white settlers were captured or killed in theattack, before an armed militia regained control. Of the four hundred Sioux captured by U.S. troops, 303 weresentenced to death, but President Lincoln intervened, releasing all but thirty-eight of the men. The thirty-eight whowere found guilty were hanged in the largest mass execution in the country’s history, and the rest of the tribe wasbanished. Settlers in other regions responded to news of this raid with fear and aggression. In Colorado, Arapahoeand Cheyenne tribes fought back against land encroachment; white militias then formed, decimating even someof the tribes that were willing to cooperate. One of the more vicious examples was near Sand Creek, Colorado,where Colonel John Chivington led a militia raid upon a camp in which the leader had already negotiated a peacefulsettlement. The camp was flying both the American flag and the white flag of surrender when Chivington’s troopsmurdered close to one hundred people, the majority of them women and children, in what became known as theSand Creek Massacre. For the rest of his life, Chivington would proudly display his collection of nearly one hundredIndian scalps from that day. Subsequent investigations by the U.S. Army condemned Chivington’s tactics and theirresults; however, the raid served as a model for some settlers who sought any means by which to eradicate theperceived Indian threat.

Hoping to forestall similar uprisings and all-out Indian wars, Congress commissioned a committee to investigate thecauses of such incidents. The subsequent report of their findings led to the passage of two additional treaties: theSecond Treaty of Fort Laramie and the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek, both designed to move the remaining tribesto even more remote reservations. The Second Treaty of Fort Laramie moved the remaining Sioux to the BlackHills in the Dakota Territory and the Treaty of Medicine Lodge Creek moved the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, andComanche to “Indian Territory,” later to become the State of Oklahoma.

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The agreements were short-lived, however. With the subsequent discovery of gold in the Black Hills, settlers seekingtheir fortune began to move upon the newly granted Sioux lands with support from U.S. cavalry troops. By themiddle of 1875, thousands of white prospectors were illegally digging and panning in the area. The Sioux protestedthe invasion of their territory and the violation of sacred ground. The government offered to lease the Black Hills orto pay $6 million if the Indians were willing to sell the land. When the tribes refused, the government imposed whatit considered a fair price for the land, ordered the Indians to move, and in the spring of 1876, made ready to forcethem onto the reservation.

In the Battle of Little Bighorn, perhaps the most famous battle of the American West , a Sioux chieftain, Sitting Bull, urged Indians from all neighboring tribes to join his men in defense of their lands. At the Little Bighorn River,

the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry, led by Colonel George Custer, sought a showdown. Driven by his own personalambition, on June 25, 1876, Custer foolishly attacked what he thought was a minor Indian encampment. Instead,it turned out to be the main Sioux force. The Sioux warriors—nearly three thousand in strength—surrounded andkilled Custer and 262 of his men and support units, in the single greatest loss of U.S. troops to an Indian attack in theera of westward expansion. Eyewitness reports of the attack indicated that the victorious Sioux bathed and wrappedCuster’s body in the tradition of a chieftain burial; however, they dismembered many other soldiers’ corpses in orderfor a few distant observers from Major Marcus Reno’s wounded troops and Captain Frederick Benteen’s companyto report back to government officials about the ferocity of the Sioux enemy.

Despite their success at Little Bighorn, neither the Sioux nor any other Plains tribe followed this battle with anyother armed encounter. Rather, they either returned to tribal life or fled out of fear of remaining troops, until the U.S.Army arrived in greater numbers and began to exterminate Indian encampments and force others to accept paymentfor forcible removal from their lands. Sitting Bull himself fled to Canada, although he later returned in 1881 andsubsequently worked in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show . In Montana, the Blackfoot and Crow were forced to leavetheir tribal lands. In Colorado, the Utes gave up their lands after a brief period of resistance. In Idaho, most of theNez Perce gave up their lands peacefully, although in an incredible episode, a band of some eight hundred Indianssought to evade U.S. troops and escape into Canada.

The final episode in the Indian Wars occurred in 1890, at the Battle of Wounded Knee in South Dakota. On theirreservation, Sioux had begun to perform the “Ghost Dance,” which told of an Indian Messiah who would deliver thetribe from its hardship, with such frequency that white settlers began to worry that another uprising would occur. Themilitia prepared to round up the Sioux. The tribe, after the death of Sitting Bull, who had been arrested, shot, andkilled in 1890, prepared to surrender at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890. Although accountsdiffer, an apparent accidental rifle discharge by a young male Indian preparing to lay down his weapon led the U.S.soldiers to begin firing indiscriminately upon the Indians. What little resistance the Indians mounted with a handfulof concealed rifles at the outset of the fight diminished quickly, with the troops eventually massacring between 150and 300 men, women, and children. The U.S. troops suffered twenty-five fatalities, some of which were the resultof their own crossfire. Captain Edward Godfrey of the Seventh Cavalry later commented, “I know the men did notaim deliberately and they were greatly excited. I don’t believe they saw their sights. They fired rapidly but it seemedto me only a few seconds till there was not a living thing before us; warriors, squaws, children , ponies, and dogs. . . went down before that unarmed fire.” With this last show of brutality, the Indian Wars came to a close. U.S.government officials had already begun the process of seeking an alternative to the meaningless treaties and costlybattles. A more effective means with which to address the public perception of the “Indian threat” was needed.Americanization provided the answer.

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Through the years of the Indian Wars of the 1870s and early 1880s, opinion back east was mixed. There were manywho felt, as General Philip Sheridan (appointed in 1867 to pacify the Plains Indians) allegedly said, that the onlygood Indian was a dead Indian. But increasingly, several American reformers who would later form the backboneof the Progressive Era had begun to criticize the violence, arguing that the Indians should be helped through “Americanization” to become assimilated into American society . Individual land ownership, Christian worship, andeducation for children became the cornerstones of this new, and final, assault on Indian life and culture.

Beginning in the 1880s, clergymen, government officials, and social workers all worked to assimilate Indians intoAmerican life. The government permitted reformers to remove Indian children from their homes and place themin boarding schools , such as the Carlisle Indian School or the Hampton Institute, where they were taught toabandon their tribal traditions and embrace the tools of American productivity, modesty, and sanctity through totalimmersion. Such schools not only acculturated Indian boys and girls, but also provided vocational training for malesand domestic science classes for females. Adults were also targeted by religious reformers, specifically evangelicalProtestants as well as a number of Catholics, who sought to convince Indians to abandon their language, clothing,and social customs for a more Euro-American lifestyle.

A vital part of the assimilation effort was land reform. During earlier negotiations, the government had respectedthat the Indian tribes used their land communally. Most Indian belief structures did not allow for the concept ofindividual land ownership; rather, land was available for all to use, and required responsibility from all to protect it.As a part of their plan to Americanize the tribes, reformers sought legislation to replace this concept with the popularEuro-American notion of real estate ownership and self-reliance.

One such law was the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, named after a reformer and senator from Massachusetts, whichstruck a deadly blow to the Indian way of life (CNX.org).

The Dawes Act, also called General Allotment Act, or Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, adopted by Congress in 1887,authorized the President to survey Indian tribal land and divide it into allotments for individual Indians. The DawesAct was amended in 1891 and again in 1906 by the Burke Act. The stated objective of the Dawes Act was tostimulate assimilation of Indians into American society. Individual ownership of land was seen as an essential step.The act also provided that the government would purchase Indian land "excess" to that needed for allotment andopen it up for settlement by non-Indians.

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Provisions of the Dawes Act

1. A head of family would receive a grant of 160 acres (0.65 km2), a single person or orphan under 18 years ofage would receive a grant of 80 acres (320,000 m2), and persons under the age of 18 would receive 40 acres(160,000 m2) each;

2. The allotments would be held in trust by the U.S. Government for 25 years;3. Eligible Indians had four years to select their land; afterwards the selection would be made for them by the

Secretary of the Interior.

The Dawes Act had a negative effect on American Indians, as it ended their communal holding of property by whichthey had ensured that everyone had a home and a place in the tribe. It was followed by the Curtis Act of 1898, whichdissolved tribal courts and governments. Land owned by Indians decreased from 138 million acres (560,000 km2)in 1887 to 48 million acres (190,000 km2) in 1934.

The land granted to most allottees was not sufficient for economic viability, and division of land between heirs uponthe allottees’ deaths resulted in land fractionalization. Most allotment land, which could be sold after a statutoryperiod of 25 years, was eventually sold to non-Native buyers at bargain prices. Additionally, land deemed to be"surplus" beyond what was needed for allotment was opened to white settlers, with the proceeds from the sales ofthese lands meant for programs to aid American Indians. Over the 47 years of the Act’s life, American Indianslost about 90 million acres (360,000 km2) of treaty land, or about two-thirds of the 1887 land base. About 90,000American Indians were made landless. (Boundless)

Figure 11 U.S. map 1900, cartoko.com

• Lessons ideas to consider

The Settlement of the American West from the National Archives

The Impact of Westward Expansion on Native American Communities from the National Archives

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Industrialization 1865-1901

Industrial Growth

The Gilded Age saw impressive economic growth and the unprecedented growth of major cities. Chicago’s pop-ulation increased tenfold from 1870 to 1900, for example. Technological innovations of the time included thetelephone, steel production, skyscrapers, refrigerator, car, linotype machine , chromolithography, electric light bulb,typewriter, electric motors, and many others. These inventions provided the basis for modern consumerism andindustrial productivity.

During the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. economy rose at the fastest rate in its history, with real wages, wealth, GDP,and capital formation all increasing rapidly. By the beginning of the 20 th century, per capita income and industrialproduction in the United States led the world, with per capita incomes double that of Germany or France, and 50%higher than Britain. The businessmen of the Second Industrial Revolution created industrial towns and cities in theNortheast with new factories, and hired an ethnically diverse industrial working class, many of them new immigrants from Europe. The corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolutiontransformed business operations.

The super-rich industrialists and financiers such as John D. Rockefeller , Andrew W. Mellon, Andrew Carnegie,Henry Flagler, Henry H. Rogers, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt of the Vanderbilt family, and the prominent Astorfamily were labeled as "robber barons" by the public, who felt they cheated to get their money and lorded it over thecommon people. The wealth of the period is highlighted by the American upper class’ opulence, but also by the riseof American philanthropy (referred to by Andrew Carnegie as the " Gospel of Wealth ") that used private moneyto endow thousands of colleges, hospitals, museums, academies, schools, opera houses, public libraries, symphonyorchestras, and charities. John D. Rockefeller, for example, donated over $500 million to various charities, slightlyover half his entire net worth.

Politically, the period saw the two major parties in very close parity, with occasional third-party political campaignsby farmers and labor unions, civil service reform , organized movements that enlisted many women working forprohibition and women’s suffrage , the strengthening of big city machines, and the transition from party to moderninterest group politics. Socially, the period was marked by large-scale immigration from Germany and Scandinaviato the industrial centers and to western farmlands, the deepening of religious organizations, the rapid growth of highschools, and the emergence of a managerial and professional middle class.

The rapid economic development following the Civil War laid the groundwork for the modern U.S. industrial economy . By 1890, the USA leaped ahead of Britain for first place in manufacturing output. An explosion of newdiscoveries and inventions took place, a process called the "Second Industrial Revolution ."

Steel mills thrived in places where these coal and iron ore could be brought together to produce steel. Large copperand silver mines opened, followed by lead mines and cement factories. In 1913, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line , a step in the process that became known as mass-production. Frederick W. Taylor pioneered the field ofscientific management in the late 19 th century, carefully plotting the functions of various workers and then devisingnew, more efficient ways for them to do their jobs. After 1910, mass production was sped by the electrification offactories, which replaced water power .

The " Gilded Age " of the second half of the 19 th century was the epoch of tycoons. Many Americans came to ideal-ize these businessmen who amassed vast financial empires. Often their success lay in seeing the long-range potentialfor a new service or product, as John D. Rockefeller did with oil. They were fierce competitors, single-minded intheir pursuit of financial success and power. Other giants in addition to Rockefeller and Ford included Jay Gould,

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who made his money in railroads, J. Pierpont Morgan in banking, and Andrew Carnegie in steel. Some tycoonswere honest according to business standards of their day. Others, however, used force, bribery, and guile to achievetheir wealth and power. For better or worse, business interests acquired significant influence over government. Whileupper-class European intellectuals generally looked on commerce with disdain, most Americans—living in a societywith a more fluid class structure—enthusiastically embraced the idea of moneymaking. They enjoyed the risk andexcitement of business enterprise, as well as the higher living standards and potential rewards of power and acclaimthat business success brought.

The Gilded Age saw the greatest period of economic growth in American history. After the short-lived panic of 1873 , the economy recovered with the advent of hard money policies and industrialization . From 1869 to 1879, theU.S. economy grew at a rate of 6.8% for real GDP and 4.5% for real GDP per capita, despite the panic of 1873. Theeconomy repeated this period of growth in the 1880s, in which the wealth of the nation grew at an annual rate of3.8%, while the GDP was also doubled.

The American labor movement began with the first significant labor union , the Knights of Labor in 1869. TheKnights collapsed in the 1880s and were displaced by strong international unions that banded together as theAmerican Federation of Labor under Samuel Gompers . Rejecting socialism , the AFL unions negotiated withowners for higher wages and better working conditions. Union growth was slow until 1900, then grew to a peakduring World War I. To modernize traditional agriculture reformers founded the Grange movement, in 1867. Federal land grants helped each state create an agricultural college and a network of extension agents who demonstratedmodern techniques to farmers. Wheat and cotton farmers in the 1890s supported the Populist movement, but failedin their demands for free silver and inflation . Instead, the 1896 election committed the nation to the gold standardand a program of sustained industrialization.

During the Gilded Age , American manufacturing production surpassed that of Britain and took world leadership.Railroad mileage tripled between 1860 and 1880, and tripled again by 1920, opening new areas to commercial farming , creating a truly national marketplace, and inspiring a boom in coal mining and steel production. The voraciousappetite for capital of the great trunk railroads facilitated the consolidation of the nation’s financial market inWall Street. By 1900, the process of economic concentration had extended into most branches of industry—a fewlarge corporations, some organized as "trusts" (e.g. Standard Oil), dominated in steel, oil, sugar, meatpacking, andthe manufacture of agriculture machinery. New methods for manufacturing steel, such as the Bessemer process,contributed to the manufacture of this infrastructure . United States Steel was the first billion-dollar corporation. Itwas formed in 1901 by financier J. P. Morgan, who purchased and consolidated steel firms built by Andrew Carnegieand others.

The United States became a world leader in applied technology. From 1860 to 1890, 500,000 patents were issued fornew inventions—over ten times the number issued in the previous seventy years. George Westinghouse invented airbrakes for trains (making them both safer and faster). Westinghouse was aided by Nikola Tesla in developing alternating current long distance transmission networks. Theodore Vail established the American Telephone & TelegraphCompany. Thomas A. Edison, the founder of General Electric, invented a remarkable number of electrical devices,including many hardware items used in the transmission, distribution, and end uses of electricity as well as theintegrated power plant capable of lighting multiple buildings simultaneously. Oil became an important resource,beginning with the Pennsylvania oil fields. Kerosene replaced whale oil and candles for lighting. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil Company to consolidate the oil industry—which mostly produced kerosene before theautomobile created a demand for gasoline in the 1900s century.

At the end of the century, workers experienced the "second industrial revolution," which involved mass production,scientific management , and the rapid development of managerial skills. The new technology was hard for youngpeople to handle, leading to a sharp drop (1890–1930) in the demand for workers under age 16. This resulted in adramatic expansion of the high school system. (boundless)

The Gilded Age saw the greatest period of economic growth in American history. During the period, a series ofrecessions happened. The Panic of 1873 had New York Stock Exchange closed for ten days. Of the country’s 364railroads, 89 went bankrupt. A total of 18,000 businesses failed between 1873 and 1875, unemployment reached14% by 1876, during a time which became known as the Long Depression. The end of the Gilded Age coincided

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with the Panic of 1893 , a deep depression that lasted until 1897 and marked a major political realignment in theelection of 1896. This productive but divisive era was followed by the Progressive Era.

Text Source: Boundless. “The Gilded Age.” Boundless U.S. History . Boundless, 14 Nov. 2014. Retrieved12 May. 2015 from https://www.boundless.com/u-s-history/textbooks/boundless-u-s-history-textbook/the-gilded-age-1870-1900-20/the-gilded-age-143/the-gilded-age-759-2406/

• Lessons ideas to consider

The Gilded Age unit plan from SHEG free account sign up- “ The Reading Like a Historian curriculum engagesstudents in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features sets of primarydocuments designed for groups of students with diverse reading skills and abilities.”

Railroads

The Pacific Railway Act was pivotal in helping settlers move west more quickly, as well as move their farm products,and later cattle and mining deposits, back east. The first of many railway initiatives, this act commissioned the UnionPacific Railroad to build new track west from Omaha, Nebraska, while the Central Pacific Railroad moved east fromSacramento, California. The law provided each company with ownership of all public lands within two hundred feeton either side of the track laid, as well as additional land grants and payment through load bonds, prorated on thedifficulty of the terrain it crossed. Because of these provisions, both companies made a significant profit, whetherthey were crossing hundreds of miles of open plains, or working their way through the Sierra Nevada Mountains ofCalifornia. As a result, the nation’s first transcontinental railroad was completed when the two companies connectedtheir tracks at Promontory Point, Utah, in the spring of 1869. Other tracks, including lines radiating from this originalone, subsequently created a network that linked all corners of the nation (CNX.org)

Many Army veterans and Irish emigrants were the main workers on the Union Pacific , while most of the engineerswere ex-Army men who had learned their trade keeping the trains running during the American Civil War. TheCentral Pacific Railroad, facing a labor shortage in the more sparsely-settled West, relied on Chinese laborers whodid prodigious work building the line over and through the Sierra Nevada mountains and then across Nevada to theirmeeting in northern Utah. (Boundless)

Source: Boundless. “The Transformed National Economy.” Boundless U.S. History . Boundless, 14 Nov. 2014. Re-trieved 13 May. 2015 from https://www.boundless.com/u-s-history/textbooks/boundless-u-s-history-textbook/the-gilded-age-1870-1900-20/the-second-industrial-revolution-144/the-transformed-national-economy-760-8194/ http://cnx.org/contents/a7ba2fb8-8925-4987-b182-5f4429d48daa@3.12:86/U.S._History

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/timeline/custer-timeline/

http://www.cartoko.com/content/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Paullin_1932_pl_36a.jpg

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1. http://www.sd4history.com/Unit6/hsandtblesson1.htm2. http://www.loc.gov/item/gm700053703. http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/wilder/1880.pdf4. http://amhistory.si.edu/ourstory/activities/sodhouse/more.html5. https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/South_Dakota_Land_and_Property6. 1117. http://www.ndstudies.org/resources/IndianStudies/standingrock/1851treaty.html8. http://www.ndstudies.org/resources/IndianStudies/standingrock/historical_gs_reservation.html9. http://archive.argusleader.com/article/DF/20130210/NEWS/302100019/Sacred-ground-sale-Wounded-Knee

10. http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/thomas-alva-edison-was-an-american-inventor-high-res-stock-photography/128627403

11. http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/political-cartoon-by-thomas-nast-depicting-american-news-photo/3248868

12. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2012648714/

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CONCEPT 8 Era 7: The Emergence ofModern America (1890-1930)

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CONCEPT 9 Era 8: The Great Depressionand World War II (1929-1945)

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CHAPTER 10 Era 9: Postwar UnitedStates (1945 to early 1970s)

Chapter Outline10.1 ERA9:DRAFT OF CONTENT

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10.1 Era9:Draft of Content

POSTWAR AMERICA AND THE COLD WAR

1945-1960

INTRODUCTION

The cartoon above, demonstrates a popular sentiment of Americans, the fear that Communism was taking overthe world. The United States and the Soviet Union, allies during World War II, had different visions for thepostwar world. As Joseph Stalin, premier of the Soviet Union, tightened his grip on the countries of Eastern Europe,Americans began to fear that it was his goal to spread the Communist revolution throughout the world and makenewly independent nations puppets of the Soviet Union. These fears dominated American life following World WarII and affected foreign policy, military strategy, urban planning, popular culture, and the civil rights movement.

SECTION 1: The Challenges of Peacetime

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify the issues that the nation faced during demobilization

• Explain the goals and objectives of the Truman administration

• Evaluate the actions taken by the U.S. government to address the concerns of returning veterans

The decade and a half immediately following the end of World War II was one in which middle- and working-classAmericans hoped for a better life than the one they lived before the war. These hopes were tainted by fears ofeconomic hardship, as many who experienced the Great Depression feared a return to economic decline. Othersclamored for the opportunity to spend the savings they had accumulated through long hours on the job during thewar when consumer goods were rarely available.

African Americans who had served in the armed forces and worked in the defense industry did not wish to return to“normal.” Instead, they wanted the same rights and opportunities that other Americans had. Still other citizens wereless concerned with the economy or civil rights; instead, they looked with suspicion at the Soviet presence in EasternEurope. What would happen now that the United States and the Soviet Union were no longer allies, and the othernations that had long helped maintain a balance of power were left seriously damaged by the war? Harry Truman,president for less than a year when the war ended, was charged with addressing all of these concerns and giving theAmerican people a “fair deal.”

DEMOBILIZATION AND THE RETURN TO CIVILIAN LIFE

The most immediate task to be completed after World War II was demobilizing the military and reintegrating the

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veterans into civilian life. In response to popular pressure and concerns over the budget, the United States soughtto demobilize its armed forces as quickly as possible. Many servicemen, labeled the “Ohio boys” (Over the Hill inOctober), threatened to vote Republican if they were not home by Christmas 1946. Understandably, this placed agreat deal of pressure on the still-inexperienced president to shrink the size of the U.S. military.

Not everyone wanted the government to reduce America’s military might, however. Secretary of the Navy JamesForrestal and Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson warned Truman in October 1945 that an overly rapid demobi-lization jeopardized the nation’s strategic position in the world. While Truman agreed with their assessment, he feltpowerless to put a halt to demobilization. In response to mounting political pressure, the government reduced thesize of the U.S. military from a high of 12 million in June 1945 to 1.5 million in June 1947—still more troops thanthe nation ever had in arms during peacetime. Soldiers and sailors were not the only ones dismissed from service.As the war drew to a close, millions of women working the jobs of men who had gone off to fight were dismissedby their employers, often because the demand for war materiel had declined and because government propagandaencouraged them to go home to make way for the returning troops. While most women workers surveyed at theend of the war wished to keep their jobs (75–90 percent, depending on the study), many did in fact leave them.Nevertheless, throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s, women continued to make up approximately one-third of theU.S. labor force.

Readjustment to postwar life was difficult for the returning troops. The U.S. Army estimated that, as many of 20percent of its casualties were psychological. Although many eagerly awaited their return to civilian status, othersfeared that they would not be able to resume a humdrum existence after the experience of fighting on the front lines.Veterans also worried that they wouldn’t find work and that civilian defense workers were better positioned to takeadvantage of the new jobs opening up in the peacetime economy. Some felt that their wives and children wouldnot welcome their presence, and some children did indeed resent the return of fathers who threatened to disrupt themother-child household. Those on the home front worried as well. Doctors warned fiancées, wives, and mothersthat soldiers might return with psychological problems that would make them difficult to live with.

The GI Bill of Rights

Well before the end of the war, Congress had passed one of the most significant and far-reaching pieces of legislationto ease veterans’ transition into civilian life: the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, also known as the GI Bill ( Figure1 ). Every honorably discharged veteran who had seen active duty, but not necessarily combat, was eligible toreceive a year’s worth of unemployment compensation. This provision not only calmed veterans’ fears regardingtheir ability to support themselves, but it also prevented large numbers of men—as well as some women—fromsuddenly entering a job market that did not have enough positions for them. Another way that the GI Bill averted aglut in the labor market was by giving returning veterans the opportunity to pursue an education; it paid for tuitionat a college or vocational school, and gave them a stipend to live on while they completed their studies.

Figure 1 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, or GI Bill, on June 22,1944,just weeks after the Allied invasion of Normandy, France, and more than a year before the end of the war.

The result was a dramatic increase in the number of students—especially male ones—enrolled in American collegesand universities. In 1940, only 5.5 percent of American men had a college degree. By 1950, that percentage hadincreased to 7.3 percent, as more than two million servicemen took advantage of the benefits offered by the GI Bill tocomplete college. The numbers continued to grow throughout the 1950s. Upon graduation, these men were preparedfor skilled blue-collar or white-collar jobs that paved the way for many to enter the middle class. The creation of a

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well-educated, skilled labor force helped the U.S. economy as well. Other benefits offered by the GI Bill includedlow-interest loans to purchase homes or start small businesses. However, not all veterans were able to take advantageof the GI Bill. African American veterans could use their educational benefits only to attend schools that acceptedblack students. Benefits for some Mexican American veterans, mainly in Texas, were also denied or delayed.

The Return of the Japanese

While most veterans received assistance to help in their adjustment to postwar life, others returned home to anuncertain future without the promise of government aid to help them resume their prewar lives. Japanese Americansfrom the West Coast who had been interned during the war also confronted the task of rebuilding their lives. InDecember 1944, Franklin Roosevelt had declared an end to the forced relocation of Japanese Americans, and as ofJanuary 1945, they were free to return to their homes. In many areas, however, neighbors clung to their prejudicesand denounced those of Japanese descent as disloyal and dangerous. These feelings had been worsened by wartimepropaganda, which often featured horrific accounts of Japanese mistreatment of prisoners, and by the statementsof military officers to the effect that the Japanese were inherently savage. Facing such animosity, many JapaneseAmerican families chose to move elsewhere. Those who did return often found that in their absence, “friends” andneighbors had sold possessions that had been left with them for safekeeping. Many homes had been vandalizedand farms destroyed. When Japanese Americans reopened their businesses, former customers sometimes boycottedthem.

CLICK AND EXPLORE

For more on the experiences of Japanese Americans, watch the following video:

A Return Home about youth returning to their communities in the San Fernando Valley in California.

THE FAIR DEAL

Early in his presidency, Truman sought to build on the promises of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Besides demobilizingthe armed forces and preparing for the homecoming of servicemen and women, he also had to guide the nationthrough the process of returning to a peacetime economy. To this end, he proposed an ambitious program of sociallegislation that included establishing a federal minimum wage, expanding Social Security and public housing, andprohibiting child labor. Wartime price controls were retained for some items but removed from others, like meat.In his 1949 inaugural address, Truman referred to his programs as the “Fair Deal,” a nod to his predecessor’s NewDeal. He wanted the Fair Deal to include Americans of color and became the first president to address the NationalAssociation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He also took decisive steps towards extending civilrights to African Americans by establishing, by executive order in December 1946, a Presidential Committee on CivilRights to investigate racial discrimination in the United States. Truman also desegregated the armed forces, again byexecutive order, in July 1948, overriding many objections that the military was no place for social experimentation.

Congress, however, which was dominated by Republicans and southern conservative Democrats, refused to passmore “radical” pieces of legislation, such as a bill providing for national healthcare. The American MedicalAssociation spent some $1.5 million to defeat Truman’s healthcare proposal, which it sought to discredit as socializedmedicine in order to appeal to Americans’ fear of Communism. The same Congress also refused to make lynchinga federal crime or outlaw the poll tax that reduced the access of poor Americans to the ballot box. Congress alsorejected a bill that would have made Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, which prohibited racialdiscrimination by companies doing business with the federal government, permanent. At the same time, they passedmany conservative pieces of legislation. For example, the Taft-Hartley Act, which limited the power of unions,became law despite Truman’s veto.

SECTION 2: The Cold War

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain how and why the Cold War emerged in the wake of World War II

• Describe the steps taken by the U.S. government to oppose Communist expansion in

Europe and Asia

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• Discuss the government’s efforts to root out Communist influences in the United States

As World War II drew to a close, the alliance that had made the United States and the Soviet Union partners in theirdefeat of the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—began to fall apart. Both sides realized that their visions forthe future of Europe and the world were incompatible. Joseph Stalin, the premier of the Soviet Union, wished toretain hold of Eastern Europe and establish Communist, pro- Soviet governments there, in an effort to both expandSoviet influence and protect the Soviet Union from future invasions. He also sought to bring Communist revolutionto Asia and to developing nations elsewhere in the world. The United States wanted to expand its influence as wellby protecting or installing democratic governments throughout the world. It sought to combat the influence of theSoviet Union by forming alliances with Asian, African, and Latin American nations, and by helping these countriesto establish or expand prosperous, free-market economies. The end of the war left the industrialized nations ofEurope and Asia physically devastated and economically exhausted by years of invasion, battle, and bombardment.With Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and China reduced to shadows of their former selves, the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union emerged as the last two superpowers and quickly found themselves locked in a contestfor military, economic, social, technological, and ideological supremacy.

FROM ISOLATIONISM TO ENGAGEMENT

The United States had a long history of avoiding foreign alliances that might require the commitment of its troopsabroad. However, in accepting the realities of the post-World War II world, in which traditional powers like GreatBritain or France were no longer strong enough to police the globe, the United States realized that it would have tomake a permanent change in its foreign policy, shifting from relative isolation to active engagement.

On assuming the office of president upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman was already troubled bySoviet actions in Europe. He disliked the concessions made by Roosevelt at Yalta, which had allowed the SovietUnion to install a Communist government in Poland. At the Potsdam conference, held from July 17 to August 2,1945, Truman also opposed Stalin’s plans to demand large reparations from Germany. He feared the burden that thiswould impose on Germany might lead to another cycle of German rearmament and aggression—a fear based on thatnation’s development after World War I (Figure 2).

Figure 2 At the postwar conference in Potsdam, Germany, Harry Truman stands between Joseph Stalin (right)

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and Clement Atlee (left). Atlee became prime minister of Great Britain, replacing Winston Churchill, while theconference was taking place.

Although the United States and the Soviet Union did finally reach an agreement at Potsdam, this was the finaloccasion on which they cooperated for quite some time. Each remained convinced that its own economic andpolitical systems were superior to the other’s, and the two superpowers quickly found themselves drawn into conflict.The decades-long struggle between them for technological and ideological supremacy became known as the ColdWar. So called because it did not include direct military confrontation between Soviet and U.S. troops, the ColdWar was fought with a variety of other weapons: espionage and surveillance, political assassinations, propaganda,and the formation of alliances with other nations. It also became an arms race, as both countries competed to buildthe greatest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and proxy wars were fought on their behalf, primarily by the citizens ofpoorer nations, such as Korea and Vietnam.

CONTAINMENT ABROAD

In February 1946, George Kennan, a State Department official stationed at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, sent aneight-thousand-word message to Washington, DC. In what became known as the “Long Telegram,” Kennan main-tained that Soviet leaders believed that the only way to protect the Soviet Union was to destroy “rival” nations andtheir influence over weaker nations. According to Kennan, the Soviet Union was not so much a revolutionary regimeas a totalitarian bureaucracy that was unable to accept the prospect of a peaceful coexistence of the United States anditself. He advised that the best way to thwart Soviet plans for the world was to contain Soviet influence—primarilythrough economic policy—to those places where it already existed and prevent its political expansion into new areas.This strategy, which came to be known as the policy of containment, formed the basis for U.S. foreign policy andmilitary decision making for more than thirty years.

As Communist governments came to power elsewhere in the world, American policymakers extended their strategyof containment to what became known as the domino theory under the Eisenhower administration: Neighbors toCommunist nations, so was the assumption, were likely to succumb to the same allegedly dangerous and infectiousideology. Like dominos toppling one another, entire regions would eventually be controlled by the Soviets. Thedemand for anti-Communist containment appeared as early as March 1946 in a speech by Winston Churchill, inwhich he referred to an Iron Curtain that divided Europe into the “free” West and the Communist East controlled bythe Soviet Union.

The commitment to containing Soviet expansion made necessary the ability to mount a strong military offense anddefense. In pursuit of this goal, the U.S. military was reorganized under the National Security Act of 1947. Thisact streamlined the government in matters of security by creating the National Security Council and establishingthe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct surveillance and espionage in foreign nations. It also created theDepartment of the Air Force, which was combined with the Departments of the Army and Navy in 1949 to form oneDepartment of Defense.

The Truman Doctrine

In Europe, the end of World War II witnessed the rise of a number of internal struggles for control of countries thathad been occupied by Nazi Germany. Great Britain occupied Greece as the Nazi regime there collapsed. The Britishaided the authoritarian government of Greece in its battles against Greek Communists. In March 1947, Great Britainannounced that it could no longer afford the cost of supporting government military activities and withdrew fromparticipation in the Greek civil war. Stepping into this power vacuum, the United States announced the TrumanDoctrine, which offered support to Greece and Turkey in the form of financial assistance, weaponry, and troops tohelp train their militaries and bolster their governments against Communism. Eventually, the program was expandedto include any state trying to withstand a Communist takeover. The Truman Doctrine thus became a hallmark ofU.S. Cold War policy.

[U+FFFC]The Truman Doctrine

In 1947, Great Britain, which had assumed responsibility for the disarming of German troops in Greece at the endof World War II, could no longer afford to provide financial support for the authoritarian Greek government, which

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was attempting to win a civil war against Greek leftist rebels. President Truman, unwilling to allow a Communistgovernment to come to power there, requested Congress to provide funds for the government of Greece to continueits fight against the rebels. Truman also requested aid for the government of Turkey to fight the forces of Communismin that country. He said:

“At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. Thechoice is too often not a free one.

Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as tothe East.

The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of povertyand strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hopealive.

The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms.

If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare ofour own nation.

Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events.

I am confident that the Congress will face these responsibilities squarely.”

What role is Truman suggesting that the United States assume in the postwar world? Does the United States stillassume this role?

[U+FFFC][U+FFFC] The Marshall Plan

By 1946, the American economy was growing significantly. At the same time, the economic situation in Europewas disastrous. The war had turned much of Western Europe into a battlefield, and the rebuilding of factories,public transportation systems, and power stations progressed exceedingly slowly. Starvation loomed as a realpossibility for many. As a result of these conditions, Communism was making significant inroads in both Italyand France. These concerns led Truman, along with Secretary of State George C. Marshall, to propose to Congressthe European Recovery Program, popularly known as the Marshall Plan. Between its implantation in April 1948 andits termination in 1951, this program gave $13 billion in economic aid to European nations.

Truman’s motivation was economic and political, as well as humanitarian. The plan stipulated that the Europeannations had to work together in order to receive aid, thus enforcing unity through enticement, while seeking toundercut the political popularity of French and Italian Communists and dissuading moderates from forming coalitiongovernments with them. Likewise, much of the money had to be spent on American goods, boosting the postwareconomy of the United States as well as the American cultural presence in Europe. Stalin regarded the program as aform of bribery. The Soviet Union refused to accept aid from the Marshall Plan, even though it could have done so,and forbade the Communist states of Eastern Europe to accept U.S. funds as well. Those states that did accept aidbegan to experience an economic recovery.

[U+FFFC][U+FFFC] MY STORY

[U+FFFC]George C. Marshall and the Nobel Peace Prize

The youngest child of a Pennsylvania businessman and Democrat, George C. Marshall (Figure 3) chose a militarycareer. He attended the Virginia Military Institute, was a veteran of World War I, and spent the rest of his life eitherin the military or otherwise in the service of his country, including as President Truman’s Secretary of State. Hewas awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, the only soldier to ever receive that honor. Below is an excerpt of hisremarks as he accepted the award.

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Figure 3 During World War II, George C. Marshall was responsible for expanding the 189,000-member U.S. Armyinto a modern, fighting force of eight million by 1942. As Secretary of State under Truman, he proposed theEuropean Recovery Program to aid European economies struggling after the war.

“There has been considerable comment over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a soldier. I am afraid thisdoes not seem as remarkable to me as it quite evidently appears to others. I know a great deal of the horrors andtragedies of war. Today, as chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission, it is my duty to supervisethe construction and maintenance of military cemeteries in many countries overseas, particularly in Western Europe.The cost of war in human lives is constantly spread before me, written neatly in many ledgers whose columns aregravestones. I am deeply moved to find some means or method of avoiding another calamity of war. Almost daily Ihear from the wives, or mothers, or families of the fallen. The tragedy of the aftermath is almost constantly beforeme.

I share with you an active concern for some practical method for avoiding war. . . . A very strong military posture isvitally necessary today. How long it must continue I am not prepared to estimate, but I am sure that it is too narrowa basis on which to build a dependable, long-enduring peace. The guarantee for a long continued peace will dependon other factors in addition to a moderated military strength, and no less important. Perhaps the most importantsingle factor will be a spiritual regeneration to develop goodwill, faith, and understanding among nations. Economicfactors will undoubtedly play an important part. Agreements to secure a balance of power, however disagreeablethey may seem, must likewise be considered. And with all these there must be wisdom and the will to act on thatwisdom.”

What steps did Marshall recommend be taken to maintain a lasting peace? To what extent have today’s nations

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heeded his advice?

[U+FFFC][U+FFFC][U+FFFC]

Showdown in Europe

The lack of consensus with the Soviets on the future of Germany led the United States, Great Britain, and Franceto support joining their respective occupation zones into a single, independent state. In December 1946, they tooksteps to do so, but the Soviet Union did not wish the western zones of the country to unify under a democratic,pro-capitalist government. The Soviet Union also feared the possibility of a unified West Berlin, located entirelywithin the Soviet sector. Three days after the western allies authorized the introduction of a new currency in WesternGermany—the Deutsche Mark—Stalin ordered all land and water routes to the western zones of the city Berlin tobe cut off in June 1948. Hoping to starve the western parts of the city into submission, the Berlin blockade was alsoa test of the emerging U.S. policy of containment.

Unwilling to abandon Berlin, the United States, Great Britain, and France began to deliver all needed supplies toWest Berlin by air (Figure 4). In April 1949, the three countries joined Canada and eight Western European nationsto form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance pledging its members to mutual defense in theevent of attack. On May 12, 1949, a year and approximately two million tons of supplies later, the Soviets admitteddefeat and ended the blockade of Berlin. On May 23, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), consisting of theunified western zones and commonly referred to as West Germany, was formed. The Soviets responded by creatingthe German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, in October 1949.

(a) (b)

Figure 4 American C-47 transport planes (a) are loaded with staged supplies at a French airport before taking off forBerlin. Residents of Berlin wait for a U.S. plane (b) carrying needed supplies to land at Templehof Airport in theAmerican sector of the city.

CONTAINMENT AT HOME

In 1949, two incidents severely disrupted American confidence in the ability of the United States to contain thespread of Communism and limit Soviet power in the world. First, on August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union explodedits first atomic bomb—no longer did the United States have a monopoly on nuclear power. A few months later, onOctober 1, 1949, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong announced the triumph of the Chinese Communists

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over their Nationalist foes in a civil war that had been raging since 1927. The Nationalist forces, under their leaderChiang Kai-shek, departed for Taiwan in December 1949. Immediately, there were suspicions that spies had passedbomb-making secrets to the Soviets and that Communist sympathizers in the U.S. State Department had hiddeninformation that might have enabled the United States to ward off the Communist victory in China. Indeed, inFebruary 1950, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican, charged in a speech that the State Departmentwas filled with Communists. Also in 1950, the imprisonment in Great Britain of Klaus Fuchs, a German-bornphysicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project and was then convicted of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets,increased American fears. Information given by Fuchs to the British implicated a number of American citizens aswell. The most infamous trial of suspected American spies was that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who wereexecuted in June 1953 despite a lack of evidence against them. Several decades later, evidence was found that Julius,but not Ethel, had in fact given information to the Soviet Union.

Fears that Communists within the United States were jeopardizing the country’s security had existed even before thevictory of Mao Zedong and the arrest and conviction of the atomic spies. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Truman’s FairDeal were often criticized as “socialist,” which many mistakenly associated with Communism, and Democrats wereoften branded Communists by Republicans. In response, on March 21, 1947, Truman signed Executive Order 9835,which provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation with broad powers to investigate federal employees and identifypotential security risks. State and municipal governments instituted their own loyalty boards to find and dismisspotentially disloyal workers.

In addition to loyalty review boards, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), established in1938 to investigate suspected Nazi sympathizers, after World War II also sought to root out suspected Communistsin business, academia, and the media. HUAC was particularly interested in Hollywood because it feared thatCommunist sympathizers might use motion pictures as pro-Soviet propaganda. Witnesses were subpoenaed andrequired to testify before the committee; refusal could result in imprisonment. Those who invoked Fifth Amendmentprotections, or were otherwise suspected of Communist sympathies, often lost their jobs or found themselves on ablacklist, which prevented them from securing employment. Notable artists who were blacklisted in the 1940sand 1950s include composer Leonard Bernstein, novelist Dashiell Hammett, playwright and screenwriter LillianHellman, actor and singer Paul Robeson, and musician Artie Shaw.

TO THE TRENCHES AGAIN

Just as the U.S. government feared the possibility of Communist infiltration of the United States, so too was it alertfor signs that Communist forces were on the move elsewhere. The Soviet Union had been granted control of thenorthern half of the Korean peninsula at the end of World War II, and the United States had control of the southernportion. The Soviets displayed little interest in extending its power into South Korea, and Stalin did not wish to riskconfrontation with the United States over Korea. North Korea’s leaders, however, wished to reunify the peninsulaunder Communist rule. In April 1950, Stalin finally gave permission to North Korea’s leader Kim Il Sung to invadeSouth Korea and provided the North Koreans with weapons and military advisors.

On June 25, 1950, troops of the North Korean People’s Democratic Army crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, theborder between North and South Korea. The first major test of the U.S. policy of containment in Asia had begun,for the domino theory held that a victory by North Korea might lead to further Communist expansion in Asia, in thevirtual backyard of the United States’ chief new ally in East Asia—Japan. The United Nations (UN), which had beenestablished in 1945, was quick to react. On June 27, the UN Security Council denounced North Korea’s actions andcalled upon UN members to help South Korea defeat the invading forces. As a permanent member of the SecurityCouncil, the Soviet Union could have vetoed the action, but it had boycotted UN meetings following the awardingof China’s seat on the Security Council to Taiwan instead of to Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China.

On June 27, Truman ordered U.S. military forces into South Korea. They established a defensive line on the farsouthern part of the Korean peninsula near the town of Pusan. A U.S.-led invasion at Inchon on September 15 haltedthe North Korean advance and turned it into a retreat (Figure 5). As North Korean forces moved back across thethirty-eighth parallel, UN forces under the command of U.S. General Douglas MacArthur followed. MacArthur’sgoal was not only to drive the North Korean army out of South Korea but to destroy Communist North Korea aswell. At this stage, he had the support of President Truman; however, as UN forces approached the Yalu River,

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the border between China and North Korea, MacArthur’s and Truman’s objectives diverged. Chinese premier ZhouEnlai, who had provided supplies and military advisors for North Korea before the conflict began, sent troops intobattle to support North Korea and caught U.S. troops by surprise. Following a costly retreat from North Korea’sChosin Reservoir,

a swift advance of Chinese and North Korean forces and another invasion of Seoul, MacArthur urged Truman todeploy nuclear weapons against China. Truman, however, did not wish to risk a broader war in Asia. MacArthurcriticized Truman’s decision and voiced his disagreement in a letter to a Republican congressman, who subsequentlyallowed the letter to become public. In April 1951, Truman accused MacArthur of insubordination and relieved himof his command. The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed, calling the escalation MacArthur had called for “the wrong war,at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” Nonetheless, the public gave MacArthur a hero’swelcome in New York with the largest ticker tape parade in the nation’s history.

Figure 5 After the initial invasion of South Korea by the North Korean People’s Democratic Army, the UnitedNations established a defensive line in the southern part of the country. The landing at Inchon in September reversedthe tide of the war and allowed UN forces under General Douglas MacArthur to retake the city of Seoul, which hadfallen to North Korean troops in the early days of the war.

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By July 1951, the UN forces had recovered from the setbacks earlier in the year and pushed North Korean andChinese forces back across the thirty-eighth parallel, and peace talks began. However, combat raged on for morethan two additional years. The primary source of contention was the fate of prisoners of war. The Chinese andNorth Koreans insisted that their prisoners be returned to them, but many of these men did not wish to be repatriated.Finally, an armistice agreement was signed on July 27, 1953. A border between North and South Korea, one quiteclose to the original thirty-eighth parallel line, was agreed upon. A demilitarized zone between the two nationswas established, and both sides agreed that prisoners of war would be allowed to choose whether to be returned totheir homelands. Five million people died in the three-year conflict. Of these, around 36,500 were U.S. soldiers; amajority were Korean civilians.

[U+FFFC][U+FFFC][U+FFFC]Click and Explore

[U+FFFC][U+FFFC]Read firsthand accounts of U.S. soldiers who served in Korea, including prisoners of war.

Recollections From The Front

As the war in Korea came to an end, so did one of the most frightening anti-Communist campaigns in the UnitedStates. After charging the U.S. State Department with harboring Communists, Senator Joseph McCarthy hadcontinued to make similar accusations against other government agencies. Prominent Republicans like SenatorRobert Taft and Congressman Richard Nixon regarded McCarthy as an asset who targeted Democratic politicians,and they supported his actions. In 1953, as chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, McCarthyinvestigated the Voice of America, which broadcast news and pro- U.S. propaganda to foreign countries, and theState Department’s overseas libraries. After an aborted effort to investigate Protestant clergy, McCarthy turned hisattention to the U.S. Army. This proved to be the end of the senator’s political career. From April to June 1954,the Army-McCarthy Hearings were televised, and the American public, able to witness his use of intimidation andinnuendo firsthand, rejected McCarthy’s approach to rooting out Communism in the United States (Figure 6). InDecember 1954, the U.S. Senate officially condemned his actions with a censure, ending his prospects for politicalleadership.

Figure 6 Senator Joseph McCarthy (left) consults with Roy Cohn (right) during the Army-McCarthy hearings.Cohn, a lawyer who worked for McCarthy, was responsible for investigating State Department libraries overseasfor “subversive” books.

SECTION 3: The American Dream

[U+FFFC][U+FFFC]By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s domestic and foreign policies

• Discuss the growth of the suburbs and the effect of suburbanization on American

society

• Discuss gender roles in the 1950s

WE LIKE IKE

SUBURBANIZATION

THE ORGANIZATION MAN

SECTION 4: Popular Culture and Mass Media

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[U+FFFC][U+FFFC]By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe Americans’ different responses to rock and roll music

• Discuss the way contemporary movies and television reflected postwar American

society

ROCKING AROUND THE CLOCK

HOLLYWOOD ON THE DEFENSIVE

THE TRIUMPH OF TELEVISION

Key Terms

This section would include key terms that will be bold faced from each section.

Section Summaries

This section would include a brief summary of each section

Review Questions

This section would include multiple choice review questions, as well as, free response essay questions from thechapter.

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CONCEPT 11 Era 10: ContemporaryUnited States (1968 to the present)

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