Chapter 36: The Cold War Begins

I. Postwar Economic Anxieties 

• The decade of the 1930s had left deep scars. Joblessness and insecurity had pushed up the suicide rate and dampened the marriage rate.
• Real gross national product (GNP) slumped sickeningly in 1946 and 1947 from its wartime peak.
• With the removal of wartime price controls, prices giddily levitated by 33 percent in 1946–1947. An epidemic of strikes swept the country. During 1946 alone some 4.6 million laborers laid down their tools, fearful that soon they could barely afford the autos and other goods they were manufacturing.

2. They had their revenge against labor’s New Deal gains in 1947,when a Republican-controlled Congress (the first infourteen years) passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman’s vigorous veto. Labor leaders condemned the Taft-Hartley Act as a “slave-labor law.” 
3. It outlawed the “closed” (all-union) shop, made unions liable for damages that resulted from jurisdictional disputes among themselves, and required union leaders to take a noncommunist oath.
5. The CIO’s “Operation Dixie,” aimed atunionizing southern textile workers and steelworkers, failed miserably in 1948 to overcome lingering fears of racial mixing.
7. Most dramatic was the passage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—better known as the GI Bill of Rights, or the GI Bill. Enacted partly out of fear that the employment markets would never be able to absorb 15 million returning veterans at war’s end, the GI Bill made generous provisions for sending the former soldiers to school. In the postwar decade, some 8 million veterans advanced their education at Uncle Sam’s expense.
8.  The majority attended technical and vocational schools, but colleges and universities were crowded to the blackboards as more than 2 million ex-GIs stormed the halls of higher learning. 

The total eventually spent for education was some $14.5 billion in taxpayer dollars. The act also enabled the Veterans Administration (VA) to guarantee about $16 billion in loans for veterans to buy homes, farms, and small businesses.

II. The Long Economic Boom, 1950-1970

• Gross national product began to climb haltingly in 1948.
• America’s economic performance became the envy of the world.
• National income nearly doubled in the 1950s and almost doubled again in the 1960s, shooting
• through the trillion-dollar mark in 1973. Americans,some 6 percent of the world’s people, were enjoying about 40 percent of the planet’s wealth.

2. Prosperity underwrote social mobility; it paved the way for the eventual success of the civil rights movement; it funded vast new welfare programs, like Medicare; and it gave Americans the confidence to exercise unprecedented international leadership in the Cold War era.
4. The size of the “middle class,” defined as households earning between $3,000 and $10,000 a year, doubled from pre–Great Depression days and included 60 percent of the American people by the mid-1950s.

By the end of that decade, the vast majority of American families owned their own car and washing machine, and nearly 90 percent owned a television set—a gadget invented in the 1920s but virtually unknown until the late 1940s. In another revolution of sweeping consequences, almost 60 percent of American families owned their own homes by 1960, compared with less than 40 percent in the 1920s.

III. The Roots of Postwar Prosperity

2. The economic upturn of 1950 was fueled by massive appropriations for the Korean War, and defense spending accounted for some 10 percent of the GNP throughout the ensuing decade. Pentagon dollars primed the pumps of high-technology industries such as aerospace, plastics, and electronics—areas in which the United States reigned supreme over all foreign competitors. 
4. American and European companies controlled the flow of abundant petroleum from the sandy expanses of the Middle East, and they kept prices low.
5.  Americans doubled their consumption of inexpensive and seemingly inexhaustible oil in the quarter-century after the war. Anticipating a limitless future of low-cost fuels, they flung out endless ribbons of highways, installed air-conditioning in their homes, and engineered a sixfold increase in the country’s electricity-generating capacity between 1945 and 1970. 

Spidery grids of electrical cables carried the pent-up power of oil, gas, coal,and falling water to activate the tools of workers on the factory floor.

IV. The Smiling Sunbell 

1.  For some three decades after 1945, an average of 30 million people changed residences every year.
2. Families especially felt the strain, as distance divided parents from children, and brothers and sisters from one another.One sign of this sort of stress was the phenomenal popularity of advice books on child-rearing, especially Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. First published in 1945, it instructed millions of parents during the ensuing decades in the kind of homely wisdom that was once transmitted naturally from grandparent to parent, and from parent to child. In fluid postwar neighborhoods, friendships were also hard to sustain.
3. Jobs they found in abundance, especially in the California electronics industry, in the aerospace complexes in Florida and Texas, and in the huge military installations that powerful southern congressional representatives secured for their districts.

V. The Rush to the Suburbs 

1. In all regions America’s modern migrants—if they were white—fled from the cities to the burgeoning new suburbs.

•   Government policies encouraged this momentous movement. Federal
• Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) home-loan guarantees made it moreeconomically attractive to own a home in the suburbs than to rent an apartment in the city.

1.  Taxdeductions for interest payments on home mortgages provided additional financial incentive. And government-built highways that sped commuters from suburban homes to city jobs further facilitated this mass migration. 
2. The construction industry boomed in the 1950s and 1960s to satisfy this demand. Pioneered by innovators like the Levitt brothers, whose first “Levittown” sprouted on New York’s Long Island in the 1940s, builders revolutionized the techniques of home construction. 
3. Migrating blacks from the South filled up the urban neighborhoods that were abandoned by the departing white middle class . 
4. In effect,the incoming blacks imported the grinding poverty of the rural South into the inner cores of northerncities. 

FHA administrators, citing the “risk” of making loans to blacks and other “unharmonious racial or nationality groups,” often refused them mortgages for private home purchases, thus limiting black mobility out of the inner cities and driving many minorities into public housing projects. 

VI. The PostWar Baby Boom

1. After the war, many soldiers returned to their sweethearts and
   married them, then had babies, creating a “Baby Boom” that
   would be felt for generations.
2. As the children grew up collectively, they put strains on
   respective markets, such as manufacturers of baby products in the 1940s
   and 50s, teenage clothing designers in the 60s, and the job market in
   the 70s and 80s.

By around 2020, they will place enormous strains on the Social Security system.

VII. Truman: The "Gulity" Man from Missouri

1. Presiding after World War II was Harry S. Truman, who had come to
   power after Franklin Roosevelt had died from a massive brain
   hemorrhage.
   • The first president in a long time without a college education,
     Truman at first approached his burdens with humility, but he gradually
     evolved into a confident, cocky politician.
   • His cabinet was made up of the old “Missouri gang,”
     which was composed of Truman’s friends from when he was a senator
     in Missouri.
   • Often, Truman would stick to a wrong decision just to prove his decisiveness and power of command.
2. However, even if he was small on the small things, he was big on
   the big things, taking responsibility very seriously and working very
   hard.

VIII. Yalta: Bargain or Betrayal?

1. A final conference of the Big Three had taken place at Yalta in
   February 1945, where Soviet leader Joseph Stalin pledged that Poland
   should have a representative government with free elections, as would
   Bulgaria and Romania. But, Stalin broke those promises.
2. At Yalta, the Soviet Union had agreed to attack Japan three months
   after the fall of Germany, but by the time the Soviets entered the
   Pacific war, the U.S. was about to win anyway, and now, it seemed that
   the U.S.S.R. had entered for the sake of taking spoils.
   • The Soviet Union was also granted control of the Manchurian railroads and received special privileges to Dairen and Port Arthur.
3. Critics of FDR charged that he’d sold China’s Chiang
   Kai-shek down the river, while supporters claimed that the Soviets
   could have taken more of China had they wished, and that the Yalta
   agreements had actually limited the Soviet Union.

IX. The United States and the Soviet Union

1. With the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. as the only world superpowers
   after WWII, trouble seemed imminent, for the U.S. had waited until
   1933, to recognize the U.S.S.R.; the U.S. and Britain had delayed to
   open up a second front during World War II; the U.S. and Britain had
   frozen the Soviets out of developing nuclear arms; and the U.S. had
   withdrawn its vital lend-lease program from the U.S.S.R. in 1945 and
   spurned Moscow’s plea for a $6 billion reconstructive loan while
   approving a similar $3.75 billion loan to Berlin.
2. Stalin wanted a protective sphere around western Russian, for twice
   earlier in the century Russia had been attacked from that direction,
   and that meant taking nations like Poland under its control.
3. Even though both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. were recent newcomers
   to the world stage, they were very advanced and had been isolationist
   before the 20th century, now they found themselves in a political
   stare-down that would turn into the Cold War and last for four and a
   half decades.

X. Shaping the Postwar World

1. However, the U.S. did manage to establish structures that were part of FDR’s open world.
   • At a meeting at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, the Western
     Allies established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to encourage
     world trade by regulating the currency exchange rates.
2. The United Nations opened on April 25, 1945.
   • The member nations drew up a charter similar to that of the old
     League of Nations, formed a Security Council to be headed by five
     permanent powers (China, U.S.S.R., Britain, France, and U.S.A.) that
     had total veto powers, and was headquartered in New York City.
   • The Senate overwhelmingly approved the U.N. by a vote of 89 to 2.
3. The U.N. kept peace in Kashmir and other trouble spots, created the
   new Jewish state of Israel, formed such groups as UNESCO (U.N.
   Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), FAO (Food and
   Agricultural Organization), and WHO (World Health Organization),
   bringing benefits to people all over the globe.
4. However, when U.S. delegate Bernard Baruch called in 1946 for a
   U.N. agency free from the great power veto that could investigate all
   nuclear facilities and weapons, the U.S.S.R. rejected the proposal,
   since it didn’t want to give up its veto power and was opposed to
   “capitalist spies” snooping around in the Soviet Union. The
   small window of regulating nuclear weapons was lost.

XI. The Problem of Germany

1. • Hitler’s ruined Reich posed especially thorny problems for all the wartime Allies. 
2. • They agreed only that 
3. the cancer of Nazism had to be cut out of the German 
4. body politics, which involved punishing Nazi leaders 
5. for war crimes.

• The Allies joined in trying twenty two top culprits at Nuremberg, Germany, during 
• 1945–1961.
• With Germany now split in two, there remained 
  

  the problem of the rubble heap known as Berlin.
• Lying deep within the Soviet zone
  

   this beleaguered isle in a red sea had been 
  broken, like Germany as a whole, into sectors occupied by troops of each of the four victorious powers.

XII. The Cold War Congeals 

1. • 
     When, in 1946, Stalin used his troops to aid a rebel movement in Iran, Truman protested, and the Soviets backed down.
   • Truman soon adopted the “containment policy,” crafted
     by Soviet specialist George F. Kennan, which stated that firm
     containment of Soviet expansion would halt Communist power.
   • On March 12, 1947, Truman requested that the containment policy be
     put into action in what would come to be called the Truman Doctrine:
     $400 million to help Greece and Turkey from falling into communist
     power.
     • So basically, the doctrine said that the U.S. would aid any power
       fighting Communist aggression, an idea later criticized because the
       U.S. would often give money to dictators “fighting
       communism.”
   • In Western Europe, France, Italy, and Germany were still in
     terrible shape, so Truman, with the help of Secretary of State George
     C. Marshall, implemented the Marshall Plan, a miraculous recovery
     effort that had Western Europe up and prosperous in no time.
     • This helped in the forming of the European Community (EC).
     • The plan sent $12.5 billion over four years to 16 cooperating
       nations to aid in recovery, and at first, Congress didn’t want to
       comply, especially when this sum was added to the $2 billion the U.S.
       was already giving to European relief as part of the United Nations
       Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).
     • However, a Soviet-sponsored coup that toppled the government of
       Czechoslovakia finally awakened the Congressmen to their senses, and
       they passed the plan.
   • Truman also recognized Israel on its birthday, May 14, 1948,
     despite heavy Arab opposition and despite the fact that those same
     Arabs controlled the oil supplies in the Middle East.

   
   

   
   

   XIII. America Begins to Rearm
   
   
   

   1. The 1947 National Security Act created the Department of Defense,
      which was housed in the Pentagon and headed by a new cabinet position,
      the Secretary of Defense, under which served civilian secretaries of
      the army, navy, and air force.
   2. The National Security Act also formed the National Security Council
      (NSC) to advise the president on security matters and the Central
      Intelligence Agency (CIA) to coordinate the government’s foreign
      fact-gathering (spying).
   3. The “Voice of America,” a radio broadcast, began
      beaming in 1948, while Congress resurrected the military draft
      (Selective Service System), which redefined many young people’s
      career choices and persuaded them to go to college.
   4. In 1948, the U.S. joined Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands,
      and Luxembourg to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),
      which considered an attack on one NATO member an attack on all, despite
      the U.S.’s policy of traditionally not involving itself in
      entangling alliances.
      • In response, the U.S.S.R. formed the Warsaw Pact, its own alliance system.
      • NATO’s membership grew to fourteen with the 1952 admissions
        of Greece and Turkey, and then to 15 when West Germany joined in 1955.

   XIV. Reconstruction and Revolution in Asia

   1. General Douglas MacArthur headed reconstruction in Japan and tried
      the top Japanese war criminals. He dictated a constitution that was
      adopted in 1946, and democratized Japan.
   2. However, in China, the communist forces, led by Mao Zedong,
      defeated the nationalist forces, led by Chiang Kai-shek, who then fled
      to the island of Formosa (Taiwan) in 1949.
      • With this defeat, one-quarter of the world population (500,000,000 people) plunged under the Communist flag.
      • Critics of Truman assailed that he did not support the nationalists
        enough, but Chiang Kai-shek never had the support of the people to
        begin with.
   3. Then, in September of 1949, Truman announced that the Soviets had
      exploded their first atomic bomb—three years before experts
      thought it was possible, thus eliminating the U.S. monopoly on nuclear
      weapons.
      • The U.S. exploded the hydrogen bomb in 1952, and the Soviets
        followed suit a year later; thus began the dangerous arms race of the
        Cold War.

   XV. Ferreting Out Alleged Communists

   1. An anti-red chase was in full force in the U.S. with the formation
      of the Loyalty Review Board, which investigated more than 3 million
      federal employees.
      • The attorney general also drew up a list of 90 organizations that
        were potentially not loyal to the U.S., and none was given the
        opportunity to defend itself.
   2. In 1949, 11 communists were brought to a New York jury for
      violating the Smith Act of 1940, which had been the first peacetime
      anti-sedition law since 1798.
      • They were convicted, sent to prison, and their conviction was upheld by the 1951 case Dennis v. United States.
   3. The House of Representatives had, in 1938 established the Committee
      on Un-American Activities (“HUAC”) to investigate
      “subversion,” and in 1948, committee member Richard M.
      Nixon prosecuted Alger Hiss.
   4. In February 1950, Joseph R. McCarthy burst upon the scene, charging
      that there were scores of unknown communists in the State Department.
      • He couldn’t prove it, and many American began to fear that
        this red chase was going too far; after all, how could there be freedom
        of speech if saying communist ideas got one arrested?
      • Truman vetoed the McCarran Internal Security Bill, which
        would’ve let the president arrest and detain suspicious people
        during an “internal security emergency.”
   5. The Soviet success of developing nuclear bombs so easily was
      probably due to spies, and in 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were
      brought to trial, convicted, and executed of selling nuclear secrets to
      the Russians.
      • Their sensational trial, electrocution, and sympathy for their two children began to sober America zeal in red hunting.

   XVI. Democratic Divisions in 1948

   1. Republicans won control of the House in 1946 and then nominated
      Thomas E. Dewey to the 1948 ticket, while Democrats were forced to
      choose Truman again when war-hero Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to be
      chosen.
      • Truman’s nomination split the Democratic Party, as Southern
        Democrats (“Dixiecrats”) nominated Governor J. Strom
        Thurmond of South Carolina on a State’s Rights Party ticket.
      • Former vice president Henry A. Wallace also threw his hat into the ring, getting nominated by the new Progressive Party.
   2. With the Democrats totally disorganized, Dewey seemed destined for
      a super-easy victory, and on election night, the Chicago Tribune even
      ran an early edition wrongly proclaiming “DEWEY DEFEATS
      TRUMAN,” but Truman shockingly won, getting 303 electoral votes
      to Dewey’s 189. And to make things better, the Democrats won
      control of Congress again.
      • Truman received critical support from farmers, workers, and blacks.
   3. Truman then called for a new program called “Point
      Four,” which called for financial support of poor, underdeveloped
      lands in hopes of keeping underprivileged peoples from turning
      communist.
   4. At home, Truman outlined a sweeping “Fair Deal”
      program, which called for improved housing, full employment, a higher
      minimum wage, better farm price supports, a new Tennessee Valley
      Authority, and an extension of Social Security.
      • However, the only successes came in raising the minimum wage,
        providing for public housing in the Housing Act of 1949, and extending
        old-age insurance to more beneficiaries with the Social Security Act of
        1950.

   XVII. The Korean Volcano Erupts (1950)

   1. When Russian and American forces withdrew from Korea, they had left
      the place full of weapons and with rival regimes (communist North and
      democratic South).
   2. Then, on June 25, 1950, North Korean forces suddenly invaded South
      Korean, taking the South Koreans by surprise and pushing them
      dangerously south toward Pusan.
      • Truman sprang to action, remembering that the League of Nations had
        failed from inactivity, and ordered U.S. military spending to be
        quadrupled, as desired by the National Security Council Memorandum
        Number 68, or NSC-68.
   3. Truman also used a Soviet absence from the U.N. to label North
      Korea as an aggressor and send U.N. troops to fight against the
      aggressors.
      • He also ordered General MacArthur’s Japan-based troops to Korea.

   XVIII. The Military Seesaw in Korea

   1. General MacArthur landed a brilliant invasion behind enemy forces
      at Inchon on September 15, 1950, and drove the North Koreans back
      across the 38th parallel, towards China and the Yalu River.
      • An overconfident MacArthur boasted that he’d “have the
        boys home by Christmas,” but in November 1950, Chinese
        “volunteers” flooded across the border and pushed the South
        Koreans back to the 38th parallel.
   2. MacArthur, humiliated, wanted to blockade China and bomb Manchuria,
      but Truman didn’t want to enlarge the war beyond necessity, but
      when the angry general began to publicly criticize President Truman and
      spoke of using atomic weapons, Harry had no choice but to remove him
      from command on grounds of insubordination.
      • MacArthur returned to cheers while Truman was scorned as a
        “pig,” an “imbecile,” an appeaser to communist
        Russia and China, and a “Judas.”
      • In July 1951, truce discussions began but immediately snagged over the issue of prisoner exchange.
      • Talks dragged on for two more years as men continued to die.