History of the USA

power to secure 80-day "cooling off periods" by court injunction. As union

benefits increased nationwide, however, industrial warfare quieted. In 1948

the United Automobile Workers won automatic "cost of living" pay increases

in their contracts and in 1955 the guaranteed annual wage. In 1955 merger

negotiations were completed for the formation of the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF

LABOR AND CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (AFL-CIO); more than 85

percent of all union members were now in one organization.

Fears that Russian communism was taking over the entire world were

pervasive during the Truman years. Soviet spy rings were discovered in the

United States, Canada, and Great Britain. In 1948-50 a sensational trial

for perjury led to the conviction of a former State Department official,

Alger HISS, on the grounds that while in the department he had been part of

a Communist cell and had passed secrets to the Soviets. In 1950 a Soviet

spy ring was uncovered in the Los Alamos atomic installation. These events,

together with the explosion (1949) of a Soviet atomic bomb and the victory

(1949) of the Communists in China, prompted a widespread conviction that

subversive conspiracies within the American government were leading toward

Soviet triumph.

In February 1950, Republican Sen. Joseph R. MCCARTHY of Wisconsin began a 4-

year national crisis, during which he insisted repeatedly that he had

direct evidence of such conspiracies in the federal government, even in the

army. The entire country seemed swept up in a hysteria in which anyone left

of center was attacked as a subversive. A program to root out alleged

security risks in the national government led to a massive collapse in

morale in its departments; it destroyed the State Department's corps of

experts on Far Eastern and Soviet affairs. The Truman administration's

practice of foreign policy was brought practically to a halt. In 1952,

Dwight D. EISENHOWER, nationally revered supreme commander in Europe during

World War II, was elected president (1953-61) on the Republican ticket, but

soon McCarthy was attacking him as well for running a "weak, immoral, and

cowardly" foreign policy. In 1954 a long and dramatic series of

congressional hearings, the first to be nationally televised, destroyed

McCarthy's credibility. He was censured by the Senate, and a measure of

national stability returned.

The Eisenhower Years

Eisenhower declared himself uninterested in repealing the New Deal, but he

was socially and economically conservative and his presidency saw the

enactment of few reforms. His appointment of Earl WARREN as chief justice

of the Supreme Court, however, led to a Court that suddenly seized so bold

and active a role in national life that many called it revolutionary.

During Warren's long tenure (1953-69), the Court swept away the legal basis

for racial discrimination; ruled that every person must be represented

equally in state legislatures and in the U.S. House of Representatives;

changed criminal-justice procedures by ensuring crucial rights to the

accused; broadened the artist's right to publish works shocking to the

general public; and in major ways limited the government's ability to

penalize individuals for their beliefs or associations.

No decision of the Warren Court was more historic than that in BROWN V.

BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS (1954), which ruled unanimously that

racial segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional. This great

decision--followed by others that struck down segregation in all public

facilities and in elections and marriage laws--sparked a revolution in race-

relations law. The separate-but-equal principle was cast aside, and the

Second Reconstruction could get underway. Now black Americans could charge

that the statutory discrimination that tied them down and kept them in a

secondary caste was illegal, a fact that added enormous moral weight to

their cause. Resistance by southern whites to desegregated public education

would make the advance of that cause frustratingly slow, however. By 1965

black children had been admitted to white schools in fewer than 25 percent

of southern school districts. The fight for racial equality was not limited

to the South, for by 1960 only 60 percent of black Americans remained

there; 73 percent of them also lived in cities: they were no longer simply

a scattered, powerless rural labor force in the South.

In 1957 the Soviet government launched its first orbiting satellite,

Sputnik, and a national controversy erupted. Why are we so far behind in

the crucial area of rocketry? Americans asked. Many critics replied that

weaknesses in public education, especially in science and technology, were

the root cause. In 1958, Congress enacted the first general education law

since the Morrill Act of 1862--the NATIONAL DEFENSE EDUCATION ACT. It

authorized $1 billion for education from primary level through university

graduate training, inaugurating a national policy that became permanent

thereafter and that resulted in the spending of huge sums and the

transformation of American public education.

Eisenhower's foreign policy, under Secretary of State John Foster DULLES,

was more nationalist and unilateral than Truman's. American-dominated

alliances ringed the Soviet and Chinese perimeters. Little consultation

with Western European allies preceded major American initiatives, and in

consequence the United States and Western Europe began drifting apart.

Persistent recessions in the American economy hobbled the national growth

rate while the Soviet and Western European economies surged dramatically.

An aggressive Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet premier, trumpeted that communism

would bury capitalism and boasted of Moscow's powerful intercontinental

missiles while encouraging so-called wars of liberation in Southeast Asia

and elsewhere.

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1960: NEW CHALLENGES TO THEAMERICAN SYSTEM

During the 1960s and 1970s cold-war concerns gave way as attention focused

on social and cultural rebellions at home. Involvement in a long and

indecisive war in Asia and scandals that reached into the White House

eroded the confidence of many Americans in their country's values and

system of government. The United States survived such challenges, however,

and emerged from the 1970s subdued but intact.

The Exuberant Kennedy Years

The Democratic senator John F. KENNEDY, asserting that he wanted to "get

the country moving again,"won the presidency in a narrow victory over Vice-

President Richard M. NIXON in 1960. The charismatic Kennedy stimulated a

startling burst of national enthusiasm and aroused high hopes among the

young and the disadvantaged. Within 3 years his Peace Corps (see ACTION)

sent about 10,000 Americans (mostly young people) abroad to work in 46

countries. Kennedy's ALLIANCE FOR PROGRESS proposed a 10-year plan to

transform the economies of the Latin American nations (partially

successful, it sunk out of sight during the Vietnam War). He also proposed

massive tariff cuts between the increasingly protectionist European Common

Market and the world at large. (The so-called Kennedy Round of tariff

negotiations concluded in 1967 with the largest and widest tariff cuts in

modern history.) In June 1961, Kennedy pulled together the disparate,

disorganized space effort by giving it a common goal: placing an American

on the moon. Responding enthusiastically, Congress poured out billions of

dollars to finance the project. (After the APOLLO PROGRAM succeeded, on

July 20, 1969, in landing astronauts on the moon, the space effort remained

in motion, if at a reduced pace.)

Kennedy blundered into a major defeat within 3 months of entering the White

House. He kept in motion a plan sponsored by the CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

AGENCY (CIA) and begun by the Eisenhower administration to land an invasion

force in Cuba, which under Fidel Castro had become a Communist state and a

Soviet state. The BAY OF PIGS INVASION failed, utterly and completely. The

force was quickly smashed when it struggled onto the beaches of the Bay of

Pigs in April 1961. During the succeeding 2 years, Kennedy labored to break

the rigid cold-war relationship with the USSR. In October 1962, however, he

discovered that the Soviets were rapidly building missile emplacements in

Cuba. Surrounding the island with a naval blockade, he induced the Soviets

to desist, and the sites were eventually dismantled. The relieved world

discovered that, when pushed to the crisis point, the two major powers

could stop short of nuclear war. This CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS effectively

ended the cold war.

The atomic bomb now seemed defused, and Moscow seemed ready to negotiate on

crucial issues (perhaps, it was suggested 15 years later, to give the

Soviets time to build a far more powerful armaments system). A new and more

relaxed relationship developed slowly into the U.S.-Soviet DETENTE that

emerged in the late 1960s and persisted through the 1970s. A test-ban

treaty, the Moscow Agreement (see ARMS CONTROL), signed in October 1963

symbolized the opening of the new relationship. Three of the world's

nuclear powers (Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR--the fourth,

France, did not sign) agreed to end the detonation of atomic explosions in

the atmosphere.

In this new environment of security, American culture, long restrained by

the sense of team spirit and conformity that the crises of depression, war,

and cold war had induced, broke loose into multiplying swift changes.

People now began talking excitedly of "doing their own thing." The media

were filled with discussions of the rapidly changing styles of dress and

behavior among the young; of the "new woman" (or the "liberated woman," as

she became known); of new sexual practices and attitudes and new styles of

living. The sense of community faded. Romanticism shaped the new mood, with

its emphasis on instinct and impulse rather than reason, ecstatic release

rather than restraint, individualism and self-gratification rather than

group discipline.

Assassination and Cultural Rebellion

The excitement of Kennedy's presidency and his calls to youth to serve the

nation had inspired the young, both black and white. His assassination in

November 1963 shocked and dismayed Americans of all ages, and the

psychological links he had fashioned between "the system" and young people

began to dissolve. His successor, Lyndon B. JOHNSON, later shouldering the

onus of an unpopular war, was unable to build a reservoir of trust among

the young. As the large demographic group that had constituted the "baby

boom" of the post-World War II years reached college age, it became the

"wild generation" of student radicals and "hippies" who rebelled against

political and cultural authority.

Styles of life changed swiftly. Effective oral contraceptives, Playboy

magazine, and crucial Supreme Court decisions helped make the United

States, long one of the world's most prudish nations in sexual matters, one

of its most liberated. The drug culture mushroomed. Communal living groups

of "dropouts" who rejected mass culture received widespread attention.

People more than 30 years old reacted angrily against the flamboyant youth

(always a small minority of the young generation) who flouted traditional

standards, glorified self-indulgence, and scorned discipline.

In the second half of the 1960s this generation gap widened as many of the

young (along with large numbers of older people) questioned U.S.

involvement in Vietnam. Peaceful protests led to violent confrontations,

and differences concerning styles of life blurred with disagreements about

the degree of allegiance that individuals owed to the American system. In

1968 the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther KING, Jr., and President

Kennedy's brother Robert F. KENNEDY seemed to confirm suspicions that dark

currents of violence underlay many elements in American society.

Race Relations during the 1960s and 1970s

Race relations was one area with great potential for violence, although

many black leaders stressed nonviolence. Since the mid -1950s, King and

others had been leading disciplined mass protests of black Americans in the

South against segregation, emphasizing appeals to the conscience of the

white majority. The appeals of these leaders and judicial rulings on the

illegality of segregationist practices were vital parts of the Second

Reconstruction, which transformed the role and status of black Americans,

energizing every other cultural movement as well. At the same time,

southern white resistance to the ending of segregation, with its attendant

violence, stimulated a northern-dominated Congress to enact (1957) the

first civil rights law since 1875, creating the Commission on Civil Rights

and prohibiting interference with the right to vote (blacks were still

massively disenfranchised in many southern states). A second enactment

(1960) provided federal referees to aid blacks in registering for and

voting in federal elections. In 1962, President Kennedy dispatched troops

to force the University of Mississippi (a state institution) to admit James

Meredith, a black student. At the same time, he forbade racial or religious

discrimination in federally financed housing.

Kennedy then asked Congress to enact a law to guarantee equal access to all

public accommodations, forbid discrimination in any state program receiving

federal aid, and outlaw discrimination in employment and voting. After

Kennedy's death, President Johnson prodded Congress into enacting (August

1965) a voting-rights bill that eliminated all qualifying tests for

registration that had as their objective limiting the right to vote to

whites. Thereafter, massive voter registration drives in the South sent the

proportion of registered blacks spurting upward from less than 30 to over

53 percent in 1966.

The civil rights phase of the black revolution had reached its legislative

and judicial summit. Then, from 1964 to 1968, more than a hundred American

cities were swept by RACE RIOTS, which included dynamitings, guerrilla

warfare, and huge conflagrations, as the anger of the northern black

community at its relatively low income, high unemployment, and social

exclusion exploded. At this violent expression of hopelessness the northern

white community drew back rapidly from its reformist stance on the race

issue (the so-called white backlash). In 1968, swinging rightward in its

politics, the nation chose as president Richard M. Nixon, who was not in

favor of using federal power to aid the disadvantaged. Individual

advancement, he believed, had to come by individual effort.

Nonetheless, fundamental changes continued in relations between white and

black. Although the economic disparity in income did not disappear--indeed,

it widened, as unemployment within black ghettos and among black youths

remained at a high level in the 1970s--white-dominated American culture

opened itself significantly toward black people. Entrance requirements for

schools and colleges were changed; hundreds of communities sought to work

out equitable arrangements to end de facto segregation in the schools

(usually with limited success, and to the accompaniment of a white flight

to different school districts); graduate programs searched for black

applicants; and integration in jobs and in the professions expanded. Blacks

moved into the mainstream of the party system, for the voting- rights

enactments transformed national politics. The daily impact of television

helped make blacks, seen in shows and commercial advertisements, seem an

integral part of a pluralistic nation.

Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were also becoming more prominent in

American life. Reaching the level of 9 million by the 1960s, Spanish-

surnamed Americans had become the second largest ethnic minority; they,

too, were asserting their right to equitable treatment in politics, in

culture, and in economic affairs.

Kennedy-Johnson Legislative Accomplishments

In his first 3 months of office, Kennedy sent 39 messages and letters to

Congress asking for reform legislation--messages dealing with health care,

education, housing and community development, civil rights, transportation,

and many other areas. His narrow margin of victory in 1960, however, had

not seemed a mandate for change, and an entrenched coalition of Republicans

and conservative southern Democrats in Congress had prevented the

achievement of many of Kennedy's legislative goals by the time of his

death. Johnson, who in 1964 won an enormous victory over the Republican

presidential candidate, Barry GOLDWATER, and carried on his coattails a

large Democratic congressional majority, proceeded with consummate

political skill to enact this broad program.

Johnson launched his WAR ON POVERTY, which focused on children and young

people, providing them with better education and remedial training, and

Congress created a domestic Peace Corps (VISTA). Huge sums went to the

states for education. MEDICARE was enacted in 1965, providing millions of

elderly Americans a kind of security from the costs of illness that they

had never known before. Following Kennedy's Clean Air Act of 1963, the

Water Quality Act of 1965 broadened the effort to combat pollution. New

national parks were established, and a Wilderness Act to protect primeval

regions was passed. The Economic Development Administration moved into

depressed areas, such as Appalachia. Billions were appropriated for urban

redevelopment and public housing.

At War in Vietnam

The VIETNAM WAR, however, destroyed the Johnson presidency. The United

States had been the protector of South Vietnam since 1954, when the Geneva

Conference had divided Vietnam into a communist North and a pro-Western

South. By 1961 an internal revolution had brought the South Vietnamese

regime to the point of toppling. President Kennedy, deciding that South

Vietnam was salvageable and that he could not allow another communist

victory, sent in 15,000 military advisors and large supplies of munitions.

By 1964 it was clear that a collapse was again impending (the CIA warned

that the reason was the regime's harshness and corruption), and Johnson

decided to escalate American involvement. After his electoral victory that

year, he began aerial bombardment of North Vietnam, which persisted almost

continuously for 3 years to no apparent result other than the destruction

of large parts of the North and heavy loss of life. Meanwhile, the world at

large (and many Americans) condemned the U.S. military actions.

In April 1965, Johnson began sending American ground troops to Vietnam, the

total reaching nearly 550,000 in early 1969. (In that year alone, with a

full-scale naval, aerial, and ground war being waged in Vietnam, total

expenditures there reached $100 billion.) Huge regions in the South were

laid waste by American troops in search of hostile forces. Still victory

eluded. Responding to mass public protests that went on year after year and

put the United States in a state of near- insurrection--and in recognition

of fruitless American casualties, which in 1967 passed 100,000--Johnson

decided in March 1968 to halt the bombing of the North and to begin

deescalation. At the same time he announced that he would not run for

reelection. From being an immensely popular president, he had descended to

a position as one of the most hated and reviled occupants of that office.

Foreign Policy under Nixon

When Richard M. Nixon became president in 1969, he profoundly changed U.S.

foreign policy. The new theme was withdrawal from commitments around the

globe. Nixon revived the kind of nationalist, unilateral foreign policy

that, since Theodore Roosevelt, presidents of his political tradition had

preferred. With Henry KISSINGER as an advisor and later as secretary of

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