þÿAn Industrial Society,1900 1920 
W 
ith the collapse of populism in 1896 and the end of the depression in 1897, the 
American economy embarked on a remarkable stretch of growth. By 1910, the 
United States had secured its status as the world s greatest industrial power. 
Corporations were changing the face of America. Their railroad and telegraph lines 
crisscrossed the country. Their factories employed millions. Their production and man- 
agement techniques became the envy of the industrialized world. A new kind of building  
the skyscraper came to symbolize America s corporate power. These modern towers 
were made possible by the use of steel rather than stone framework and by the invention 
of electrically powered elevators. 
Impelled upward by rising real estate values, they were intended to evoke the same 
sense of grandeur as Europe s medieval cathedrals. But these monuments celebrated man, 
not God; material wealth, not spiritual riches; science, not faith; corporations, not the 
commonweal. Reaching into the sky, dwarfing Europe s cathedrals, they were convincing 
embodiments of America s worldly might. 
This chapter continues the story begun in the last chapter about how the newly pow- 
erful corporations transformed America: how they intensified their search for new forms 
of production and management; how the jobs they generated attracted millions of immi- 
grants, southern blacks, and young single women to northern cities; and how they trig- 
gered an urban cultural revolution that made amusement parks,An Industrial Society,1900 1920 
W 
ith the collapse of populism in 1896 and the end of the depression in 1897, the 
American economy embarked on a remarkable stretch of growth. By 1910, the 
United States had secured its status as the world s greatest industrial power. 
Corporations were changing the face of America. Their railroad and telegraph lines 
crisscrossed the country. Their factories employed millions. Their production and man- 
agement techniques became the envy of the industrialized world. A new kind of building  
the skyscraper came to symbolize America s corporate power. These modern towers 
were made possible by the use of steel rather than stone framework and by the invention 
of electrically powered elevators. 
Impelled upward by rising real estate values, they were intended to evoke the same 
sense of grandeur as Europe s medieval cathedrals. But these monuments celebrated man, 
not God; material wealth, not spiritual riches; science, not faith; corporations, not the 
commonweal. Reaching into the sky, dwarfing Europe s cathedrals, they were convincing 
embodiments of America s worldly might. 
This chapter continues the story begun in the last chapter about how the newly pow- 
erful corporations transformed America: how they intensified their search for new forms 
of production and management; how the jobs they generated attracted millions of immi- 
grants, southern blacks, and young single women to northern cities; and how they trig- 
gered an urban cultural revolution that made amusement parks, dance halls, vaudeville 
theater, and movies integral features of American life. 
The power of the corporations dwarfed that of individual wage earners, but wage 
earners sought to limit the power of corporations through labor unions and strikes 
and by organizing institutions of collective self-help within their own ethnic or racial 
communities. Many found opportunities and liberties they had not known before. 
Immigrant entrepreneurs invented ways to make money through legal and illegal 
enterprise; young, single, working-class women pioneered a sexual revolution; and 
radicals dared to imagine building a new society where no one suffered from poverty, 
inequality, and powerlessness. The power of the new corporations, in other words, did 
not go unchallenged. Even so, a more egalitarian society would prove difficult to 
attain. 
20 

Sources of Economic Growth 
736  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
Focus Question 
How did corporations respond to the economic opportunities and turmoil of the 
late 19th century? 
A series of technological innovations in the late 19th century fired up the nation s eco- 
nomic engine, but technological breakthroughs alone do not fully explain the nation s 
spectacular economic boom. New corporate structures and new management techniques  
in combination with the new technology created the conditions that powered economic 
growth. 
1897 Depression ends; prosperity returns 
1899 Theodore Roosevelt urges Americans to live the  strenuous life  
1900 14 Immigration averages more than 1 million per year 
1901 U.S. Steel is formed from 200 separate companies  " Andrew Carnegie devotes himself to philanthropic 
pursuits  " 1 of every 400 railroad workers dies on the job 
1904 20 percent of the North s urban population lives below poverty line 
1905 Lochnerv. New York:Supreme Court declares unconstitutional a New York state law limiting the workday 
of bakery employees  " Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founded 
1907 11 An average of 73 of every 100 Italian immigrants return to Italy 
1909 Henry Ford unveils his Model T  " Immigrants and their children constitute more than 96 percent of labor 
force building and maintaining railroads 
1910 Black skilled tradesmen in northern cities reduced to 10 percent of total skilled trades workforce  " 20,000 
nickelodeons dot northern cities 
1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire kills 146 workers  " Frederick Winslow Taylor publishes The Principles of 
Scientific Management 
1913 Henry Ford introduces the first moving assembly line  " 66 men, women, and children killed in  Ludlow 
massacre   " John D. Rockefeller establishes Rockefeller Foundation 
1914 Henry Ford introduces the $5-per-day wage  " Theda Bara, movies  first sex symbol, debuts  " The Masses, 
a radical journal, begins publication 
1919 Japanese farmers in California sell $67 million in agricultural goods, 10 percent of state s total 
1920 Nation s urban population outstrips rural population for first time 
1921 1,250,000 Model Ts sold, a 16-fold increase over 1912 
C HR O NO L O G Y 
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Technology 
Two of the most important new technologies were the harnessing of electric power and the 
invention of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine. Scientists had long been 
fascinated by electricity, but only in the late 19th century did they find ways to make it 
practically useful. The work of Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla 
produced the incandescent bulb that brought electric lighting into homes and offices and 
the alternating current (AC) that made electric transmission possible over long distances. 
From 1890 to 1920, the proportion of American industry powered by electricity rose from 
virtually nil to almost one-third. Older industries switched from expensive and cumber- 
some steam power to more efficient and cleaner electrical power. New sectors of the met- 
alworking and machine-tool industries arose in response to the demand for electric gen- 
erators and related equipment. Between 1900 and 1920, virtually every major city built 
electric-powered transit systems to replace horse-drawn trolleys and carriages. By 1912, 
some 40,000 miles of electric railway and trolley track had been laid. In New York City, 
electricity made possible the construction of the first subways. Electric lighting on city 
streets, in department store windows, in brilliantly lit amusement parks such as New 
York s Coney Island gave cities a new allure. The public also fell in love with the movies, 
which depended on electricity to project images onto a screen. Electric power, in short, 
stimulated capital investment and accelerated economic growth. 
Sources of Economic Growth " 737 
Surf Avenue and Luna Park, Coney Island, 1913 With its 1 million lights, Surf Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, advertised 
itself as the most brilliantly lit thoroughfare in the world. The avenue included the entrance to Luna Park, one of Coney Island s 
most popular attractions. 
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The first gasoline engine was patented in the United States in 1878, and the first  horse- 
less carriages  began appearing on European and American roads in the 1890s, but few 
thought of them as serious rivals to trains and horses. Rather, they were seen as playthings 
for the wealthy, who liked to race them along country roads. 
In 1900, Henry Ford was an eccentric 37-year-old mechanic who built race cars in 
Michigan. In 1909, Ford unveiled his Model T: an unadorned, even homely car, but reli- 
able enough to travel hundreds of miles without servicing and cheap enough to be afford- 
able to most working Americans. Ford had dreamed of creating an automobile civilization 
with his Model T, and Americans began buying his car by the millions. The stimulus this 
insatiable demand gave to the economy can scarcely be exaggerated. Millions of cars 
required millions of pounds of steel alloys, glass, rubber, petroleum, and other material. 
Millions of jobs in coal and iron-ore mining, oil refining and rubber manufacturing, steel- 
making and machine tooling, road construction, and service stations came to depend on 
automobile manufacturing. 
Corporate Growth 
Successful inventions such as the automobile required more than the mechanical ingenu- 
ity and social vision of inventors such as Henry Ford. They relied on corporations with 
sophisticated organizational and technical know-how to mass-produce and mass- 
distribute the newly invented products. Corporations had played an important role in the 
nation s economic life since the 1840s, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they 
underwent significant changes. The most obvious change was in their size. Employment 
in Chicago s International Harvester factory, where agricultural implements were built, 
nearly quadrupled from 4,000 in 1900 to 15,000 in 1916. Delaware s DuPont Corpora- 
tion, a munitions and chemical manufacturer, employed 1,500 workers in 1902 and 
31,000 workers in 1920. Founded with a few hundred employees in 1903, the Ford Motor 
Company employed 33,000 at its Detroit Highland Park plant by 1916 and 42,000 by 
1924. That same year, the 68,000 workers employed at Ford s River Rouge plant (just out- 
side Detroit) made it the largest factory in the world. 
This growth in scale was in part a response to the enormous domestic market. By 1900, 
railroads provided the country with an efficient transportation system that allowed corpo- 
rations to ship goods virtually anywhere in the United States. A national network of tele- 
graph lines allowed constant communication between buyers and sellers separated by 
thousands of miles. And the population, which was expanding rapidly, demonstrated an 
ever-growing appetite for goods and services. 
Mass Production and Distribution 
Manufacturers responded to this burgeoning domestic market by developing mass- 
productiontechniques that increased production speed and lowered unit costs. Mass pro- 
duction often meant replacing skilled workers with machines that were coordinated to 
738  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
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permit high-speed, uninterrupted production at every stage of the manufacturing process. 
Mass-production techniques had become widespread in basic steel manufacturing and 
sugar refining by the 1890s, and they spread to the machine-tool industry and automobile 
manufacturing in the first two decades of the 20th century. 
Such production techniques were profitable only if large quantities of output could be 
sold. Although the domestic market offered a vast potential for sales, manufacturers often 
found distribution systems inadequate. This was the case with North Carolina smoking 
tobacco manufacturer James Buchanan Duke, who almost single-handedly transformed 
the cigarette into one of the best-selling commodities in American history. In 1885, at a 
time when relatively few Americans smoked, Duke invested in several Bonsack cigarette 
machines, each of which manufactured 120,000 cigarettes per day. To create a market for 
the millions of cigarettes he was producing, Duke advertised his product aggressively 
throughout the country. He also established regional sales offices so that his sales repre- 
sentatives could keep in touch with local jobbers and retailers. As cigarette sales skyrock- 
eted, more corporations sought to emulate Duke s techniques. Over the course of the next 
20 years, those corporations that integrated mass production and mass distribution, as 
Duke did in the 1880s and 1890s, came to define American  big business.  (See Map 20.1, 
Industrial America, 1900 1920, in the color insert following p. 816.) 
Corporate Consolidation 
Corporate expansion also reflected a desire to avoid market instability. The rapid indus- 
trial growth of the late 19th century had unsettled industrialists. As promising economic 
opportunities arose, more industrialists sought to take advantage of them, but overexpan- 
sion and increasingly furious competition often turned rosy prospects into less-than-rosy 
results. Bankrupting busts quickly followed buoyant booms. Soon, corporations began 
looking for ways to insulate themselves from harrowing downturns in the business cycle. 
The railroads led the way in tackling this problem. Rather than engaging in ruinous rate 
wars, railroads began cooperating. They shared information on costs and profits, estab- 
lished standardized rates, and allocated discrete portions of the freight business among 
themselves. These cooperative arrangements were variously called  pools,   cartels,  or 
 trusts.  The 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act declared such cartel-like practices illegal, but the 
law s enforcement proved to be short-lived (see chapter 19). Still, the railroads  efforts 
rarely succeeded for long because they depended heavily on voluntary compliance. Dur- 
ing difficult economic times, the temptation to lower freight rates and exceed one s mar- 
ket share could become too strong to resist. 
Corporations  efforts to restrain competition and inject order into the economic envi- 
ronment continued unabated, however. Mergers now emerged as the favored instrument 
of control. By the 1890s, investment bankers, such as J. P. Morgan, possessed both the 
capital and the financial skills to engineer the complicated stock transfers and ownership 
renegotiations that mergers required. James Duke again led the way in 1890 when he and 
four competitors merged to form the American Tobacco Company. Over the next eight 
Sources of Economic Growth " 739 
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years, the quantity of cigarettes produced by Duke-controlled companies quadrupled, 
from 1 billion to almost 4 billion per year. Moreover, American Tobacco used its power- 
ful position in cigarette manufacture to achieve dominance in pipe tobacco, chewing 
tobacco, and snuff manufacture as well. 
The merger movementintensified as the depression of the 1890s lifted. In the years 
from 1898 to 1904, many of the corporations that would dominate American business 
throughout most of the 20th century acquired their modern form: Armour and Swift in 
meatpacking, Standard Oil in petroleum, General Electric and Westinghouse in electrical 
manufacture, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) in communications, Interna- 
tional Harvester in the manufacture of agricultural implements, and DuPont in munitions 
and chemical processing. The largest merger occurred in steel in 1901, when Andrew 
Carnegie and J. P. Morgan together fashioned the U.S. Steel Corporation from 200 sepa- 
rate iron and steel companies. U.S. Steel, with its 112 blast furnaces and 170,000 
steelworkers, controlled 60 percent of the country s steelmaking capacity. Moreover, 
its 78 iron-ore boats and 1,000 miles of railroad gave it substantial control over procuring 
raw materials and distributing finished steel products. 
Revolution in Management 
The growth in the number and size of corporations revolutionized corporate management. 
The ranks of managers mushroomed, as elaborate corporate hierarchies defined both the 
status and the duties of individual managers. Increasingly, senior managers took over from 
owners the responsibility for long-term planning. Day-to-day operations fell to middle 
managers who oversaw particular departments (e.g., purchasing, research, production, 
labor) in corporate headquarters or who supervised regional sales offices or directed par- 
ticular factories. Middle managers also managed the people accountants, clerks, fore- 
men, engineers, salesmen in these departments, offices, or factories. The rapid expansion 
within corporate managerial ranks created a new middle class, whose members were 
intensely loyal to their employers but at odds both with blue-collar workers and with the 
older middle class of shopkeepers, small businessmen, and independent craftsmen. 
As management techniques grew in importance, companies tried to make them more 
scientific. Firms introduced cost-accounting methods into purchasing and other depart- 
ments charged with controlling the inflow of materials and the outflow of goods. Many 
corporations began requiring college or university training in science, engineering, or 
accounting for entry into middle management. Corporations that had built their success 
on a profitable invention or discovery sought to maintain their competitive edge by creat- 
ing research departments and hiring professional scientists those with doctorates from 
American or European universities to come up with new technological and scientific 
breakthroughs. Such departments were modeled on the industrial research laboratory 
set up by the inventor-entrepreneur Thomas Edison in Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876 
(see chapter 19). 
740  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
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Scientific Management on the Factory Floor 
The most controversial and, in some respects, the most ambitious effort to introduce sci- 
entific practices into management occurred in production. Managers understood that 
improvements in factory organization as well as technological innovation could enhance 
the speed and efficiency of mass production. So, in league with engineers, they sought 
optimal arrangements of machines and deployments of workers that would achieve the 
highest speed in production with the fewest human or mechanical interruptions. Some of 
these managers, such as Frederick Winslow Taylor, the chief engineer at Philadelphia s 
Midvale Steel Company in the 1880s, styled themselves as the architects of scientific 
management. They examined every human task and mechanical movement involved in 
each production process. In  time-and-motion studies,  they recorded every distinct 
movement a worker made in performing his or her job, how long it took, and how often 
it was performed. They hoped thereby to identify and eliminate wasted human energy. 
Eliminating waste might mean reorganizing a floor of machinery so as to reduce  down 
time  between production steps; it might mean instructing workers to perform their tasks 
differently; or it might mean replacing uncooperative skilled workers with machines 
tended by unskilled, low-wage laborers. Regardless of the method chosen, the goal was the 
same: to make human labor emulate the smooth and apparently effortless operation of an 
automatic, perfectly calibrated piece of machinery. 
Taylor publicized his vision, first through speeches to fellow engineers and managers, 
and then through his writings. By the time he published The Principles of Scientific Man- 
agement (1911), his ideas had already captivated countless corporate managers and engi- 
neers, many of whom sought to introduce  Taylorism  into their own production systems. 
Introducing scientific management practices rarely proceeded easily. Time-and-motion 
studies were costly, and Taylor s formulas for increasing efficiency and reducing waste 
often were less scientific than he claimed. Taylor also overestimated workers  willingness 
to play the mechanical role he assigned them. Skilled workers and general foremen whom 
Taylor sought to eliminate often resisted his schemes. In the end, managers and engineers 
who persisted in their efforts to apply scientific management usually modified Taylor s 
principles. 
Henry Ford s engineers initially adopted Taylorism and with apparent success. By 
1910, they had broken down automobile manufacturing into a series of simple, sequen- 
tial tasks. Each worker performed only one task: adding a carburetor to an engine, 
inserting a windshield, mounting tires onto wheels. Then, in 1913, Ford s engineers 
introduced the first moving assembly line, a continuously moving conveyor belt that 
carried cars in production through each workstation. This innovation eliminated pre- 
cious time previously wasted in transporting car parts (or partially built cars) by crane 
or truck from one work area to another. It also limited the time available to workers to 
perform their assigned tasks. Only the foreman, not the workers, could stop the line or 
change its speed. 
Sources of Economic Growth " 741 
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By 1913, the continuous assembly line made Ford Motor Company s new Highland 
Park plant the most tightly integrated and continuously moving production system in 
American industry. The pace of production exceeded all expectations. Between 1910 and 
1914, production time on Ford Model Ts dropped by 90 percent, from an average of more 
than 12 hours per car to 1.5 hours. A thousand Model Ts began rolling off the assembly 
line each day. This striking increase in the rate of production enabled Ford to slash the 
price of a Model T from $950 in 1909 to only $295 in 1923, a reduction of 70 percent. 
The number of Model Ts purchased by Americans increased 16-fold between 1912 and 
1921, from 79,000 to 1,250,000. The assembly line quickly became the most admired  
and most feared symbol of American mass production. 
Problems immediately beset the system, however. Repeating a single motion all day 
long induced mental stupor, and managerial efforts to speed up the line produced physical 
exhaustion both of which increased the incidence of error and injury. Some workers tried 
to organize a union to gain a voice in production matters, but most Ford workersexpressed 
their dissatisfaction simply by quitting. By 1913, employee turnover at Highland Park 
742  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
The World s First Automobile Assembly Line Introduced at his Highland Park plant in 1913, this innovation cut 
production time on Model Ts by 90 percent, allowing Ford to reduce the price of his cars by more than half and to double the 
hourly wages of his employees. 
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had reached the astounding rate of 370 percent per year. At that rate, Ford had to hire 
51,800 workers every year just to keep his factory fully staffed at 14,000. 
A problem of that magnitude demanded a dramatic solution. Ford provided it in 1914 
by raising the wage he paid his assembly-line workers to $5 per day, double the average 
manufacturing wage then prevalent in American industry. The result: Workers, especially 
young and single men, flocked to Detroit. Highland Park s high productivity rate permit- 
ted Ford to absorb the wage increase without cutting substantially into profits. 
Taylor had believed that improved efficiency would lead to dramatic wage gains. With his 
decision to raise wages, Ford was being true to Taylor s principles.  Ford went even further, 
however, in his innovations. He set up a sociology department, forerunner of the personnel 
department, to collect job, family, and other information about his employees. He sent social 
workers into workers  homes to inquire into (and  improve ) their personal lives. For the 
foreign-born, he instituted Americanization classes. He offered his employees housing sub- 
sidies, medical care, and other benefits. In short, Ford recognized that workers were more 
complex than Taylor had allowed and that high wages alone would not transform them into 
the perfectly functioning parts of the mass-production system Taylor had envisioned. 
Sources of Economic Growth " 743 
1,500,000 
1,350,000 
1,200,000 
1,050,000 
900,000 
750,000 
600,000 
450,000 
300,000 
150,000 
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Year 
1000 
900 
800 
700 
600 
500 
400 
300 
200 
100 
0 
1909 1911 1913 1915 1917 1919 1921 1923 
(approximate) 
Sales Data 
Price Data 
Model T Prices and Sales, 1909 1923 
Source: From Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., ed., Giant Enterprise: Ford, General Motors, and 
the Automobile Industry(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), pp. 32 33. 
11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd  6/4/07  11:44 AM  Page 743
Although Ford s success impelled others to move in his direction, it would take time 
for modern management to come of age. Not until the 1920s did a substantial number of 
corporations establish personnel departments, institute welfare and recreational programs 
for employees, and hire psychologists to improve human relations in the workplace. 
 Robber Barons No More 
744  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
Focus Question 
How and why did American elites seek to alter their robber baron image in the late 
19th and early 20th centuries? 
Innovations in corporate management were part of a broader effort among elite industri- 
alists to shed their  robber baron  image. The swashbuckling entrepreneurs of the 19th 
century men such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Jay Cooke, and Leland Stanford  
had wielded their economic power brashly and ruthlessly, while lavishing money on 
European-style palaces, private yachts, personal art collections, and extravagant entertain- 
ments. But the depression of the 1890s along with the populist political movement and 
labor protests such as the Homestead and Pullman strikes shook the confidence of mem- 
bers of this elite. Industrialists were terrified when in 1892 anarchist Alexander Berkman 
marched into the office of Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie sright-hand man, and 
shot him at point-blank range (Frick survived). Although such physical assaults were rare, 
anger over ill-gotten and ill-spent wealth was widespread. In the 1890s, popular rage 
forced Mrs. Bradley Martin and her husband to flee to England after she spent $370,000 
(roughly $3.5 million in 2007 dollars) on one evening of entertainment for her friends in 
New York s high society. 
Seeking a more favorable image, some industrialists began to restrain their displays of 
wealth and use their private fortunes to advance the public welfare. As early as 1889, 
Andrew Carnegie had advocated a  gospel of wealth.  The wealthy, he believed, should con- 
sider all income in excess of their needs as a  trust fund  for their communities. In 1901, 
the year in which he formed U.S. Steel, Carnegie withdrew from industry and devoted him- 
self to philanthropic pursuits, especially in art and education. By the time he died in 1919, 
he had given away or entrusted to several Carnegie foundations 90 percent of his fortune. 
Among the projects he funded were New York s Carnegie Hall, Pittsburgh s Carnegie Insti- 
tute (now Carnegie-Mellon University), and 2,500 public libraries throughout the country. 
Other industrialists, including John D. Rockefeller, soon followed Carnegie s lead. A 
devout Baptist with an ascetic bent, Rockefeller had never flaunted his wealth (unlike the 
Vanderbilts and others), but his ruthless business methods in assembling the Standard Oil 
Company and in crushing his competition made him one of the most reviled of the rob- 
ber barons. In the wake of journalist Ida Tarbell s stinging 1904 exposé of Standard Oil s 
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business practices, and of the federal government s subsequent prosecution of Standard 
Oil for monopolistic practices in 1906, Rockefeller transformed himself into a public- 
spirited philanthropist. Between 1913 and 1919, his Rockefeller Foundation dispersed 
an estimated $500 million. His most significant gifts included money to establish the 
University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (later renamed 
Rockefeller University). His charitable efforts did not escape criticism, however; many 
Americans interpreted them as an attempt to establish control over American universi- 
ties, scientific research, and public policy. Still, Rockefeller s largesse helped build for 
the Rockefeller family a reputation for public-spiritedness and good works, one that 
grew even stronger in the 1920s and 1930s. Many other business leaders, such as Julius 
Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck and Daniel and Simon Guggenheim of the American 
Smelting and Refining Company, also dedicated themselves to philanthropy during this 
time. 
Obsession with Physical and Racial Fitness 
The fractious events of the 1890s also induced many wealthy Americans to engage in what 
Theodore Roosevelt dubbed  the strenuous life.  In an 1899 essay with that title, Roosevelt 
exhorted Americans to live vigorously, to test their physical strength and endurance in 
competitive athletics, and to experience nature through hiking, hunting, and mountain 
climbing. He articulated a way of life that influenced countless Americans from a variety 
of classes and cultures. 
The 1890s were a time of heightened enthusiasm for competitive sports, physical fit- 
ness, and outdoor recreation. Millions of Americans began riding bicycles and eating 
healthier foods. A passion for athletic competition gripped American universities. The 
power and violence of football helped make it the sport of choice at the nation s elite cam- 
puses, and, for 20 years, Ivy League schools were the nation s football powerhouses. In 
athletic competition, as in nature, one could discover and recapture one s manhood, one s 
virility. The words  sissy  and  pussyfoot  entered common usage in the 1890s as insults 
hurled at men whose masculinity was found wanting. 
In the vigorous new climate of the 1890s, young women began to engage in sports and 
other activities. They put away their corsets and long dresses and began wearing simple 
skirts, shirtwaists, and other clothing that gave them more comfort and freedom of move- 
ment. By the standards of the 1920s, these changes would seem mild, but in the 1890s, 
they were radical. 
In the country at large, the new enthusiasm for athletics and the outdoor life reflected 
a widespread dissatisfaction with the growing regimentation of industrial society. Among 
wealthy Americans, the quest for physical superiority reflected a deeper and more ambigu- 
ous anxiety: their racial fitness. Most of them were native-born Americans whose families 
had lived in the United States for several generations and whose ancestors had come from 
Obsession with Physical and Racial Fitness  " 745 
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the British Isles, the Netherlands, or some other region of northwestern Europe. Having 
embraced the principles of Social Darwinism (see chapter 19), they liked to attribute their 
success and good fortune to their  racial superiority.  They saw themselves as  natural  
leaders, members of a noble Anglo-Saxon race endowed with uncommon intelligence, 
imagination, and discipline. But events of the 1890s had challenged the legitimacy of the 
elite s wealth and authority, and the ensuing depression mocked their ability to exert eco- 
nomic leadership. The immigrant masses laboring in factories, despite their poverty and 
alleged racial inferiority, seemed to possess a vitality that the  superior  Anglo-Saxons 
lacked. Immigrant families were overflowing with children. The city neighborhoods where 
these families lived exhibited social and cultural energy (especially apparent in popular 
entertainments vaudeville, amusement parks, nickelodeons, and dance halls) that were 
missing in the sedate environs of the wealthy. 
Some rich Americans, such as Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, and other members 
of Boston s declining political elite, reacted to the immigrants  vigor and industry by call- 
ing for a halt to further immigration, but not the ebullient Roosevelt; he argued instead for 
American men to live the strenuous life and to test themselves unceasingly at work and at 
play. Through such struggles, the dominance of the  English-speaking peoples  would 
reassert itself and allow them to enjoy the rewards that racial superiority and racial fitness 
had put within their grasp: power, prosperity, civilization, and liberty. Roosevelt called on 
each married American woman, meanwhile, to have at least four children an absolute 
necessity, he declared, in order to reproduce the  race  in numbers sufficient to maintain 
its vigor and dominance. 
Immigration 
746  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
Focus Question 
What hardships and successes did immigrants experience in the United States? 
A key factor causing this racial consternation among American elites was the extraordi- 
narily large numbers of immigrants in America. The United States had always been a 
nation of immigrants, but never had so many come in so short a time. Between 1880 and 
1920, some 23 million immigrants came to a country that numbered only 76 million in 
1900. From 1900 to 1914, an average of 1 million immigrants arrived each year. In many 
cities of the Northeast and Midwest, immigrants and their children constituted a majority 
of the population. In 1920s Boston, New York City, Chicago, and Milwaukee, immigrants 
accounted for more than 70 percent of the total population; in Buffalo, Detroit, and Min- 
neapolis, more than 60 percent; and in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Seattle, more than 50 
percent. Everywhere in the country, except in the South, the working class was over- 
whelmingly ethnic. 
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Immigration " 747 
European immigration accounted for approximately three-fourths of the total. Some 
states received significant numbers of non-European immigrants Chinese, Japanese, and 
Filipinos in California; Mexicans in California and the Southwest; and French Canadians 
in New England. Although their presence profoundly affected regional economies, poli- 
tics, and culture, their numbers, relative to the number of European immigrants, were 
small. Immigrants from Latin America were free to enter the United States throughout this 
period, but few did until 1910, when the social disorder caused by the Mexican Revolu- 
tion propelled a stream of refugees to southwestern parts of the United States. One-half 
million French Canadians had migrated to New England and the upper Midwest between 
1867 and 1901. After that, the rate slowed as the pace of industrialization in their Quebec 
homeland quickened. 
European Immigration 
Most of the European immigrants who arrived between 1880 and 1914 came from East- 
ern and Southern Europe. Among them were 3 to 4 million Italians, 2 million Russian and 
Polish Jews, 2 million Hungarians, and an estimated 5 million Slavs and other peoples 
from eastern and southeastern Europe (Poles, Bohemians, Slovaks, Russians, Ukrainians, 
Lithuanians, Serbians, Croatians, Slovenians, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Macedonians, and 
Greeks). Hundreds of thousands came as well from Turkey, Armenia, Lebanon, Syria, and 
other Near Eastern lands abutting the European continent. 
These post-1880 arrivals were called  new immigrants  to underscore the cultural gap 
separating them from the  old immigrants,  who had come from northwestern Europe  
Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany. Old immigrants were regarded as racially fit, 
German 
28% 
British 
18% 
Irish 
15% 
Scandinavian 
11% 
Other Central 
European 
10% 
Italian 
8% 
Eastern European 
6% 
Other Northwestern 
European 4% 
1860 1900 
Italian 22% 
Austro-Hungarian 
22% 
Russian and Baltic states 
18% 
Other 
Northwestern 
European 
18% 
Canadian 6% 
Asian 4% 
German 4% 
All Others 6% 
1900 1920 
Sources of Immigration 
Source: Data from Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970(White Plains, NY: Kraus International, 1989), pp. 105 109. 
11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd  6/4/07  11:44 AM  Page 747
culturally sophisticated, and politically mature. The new immigrants, by contrast, were 
often regarded as racially inferior, culturally impoverished, and incapable of assimilating 
American values and traditions. This negative view of the new immigrants reflected in part 
a fear of their alien languages, religions, and economic backgrounds. Few spoke English, 
and most adhered to Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or Judaism rather than Protestantism. Most, 
with the exception of  Jewish immigrants, were peasants, unaccustomed to urban indus- 
trial life, but they were not as different from the old immigrants as the label implied. For 
example, many of the earlier-arriving Catholic peasants from Ireland and Germany had 
had no more familiarity with American values and traditions than did the Italians and Slavs 
who arrived later. 
In fact, the old and new European immigrants were more similar than different. Both 
came to America for the same reasons: either to flee religious or political persecution or to 
escape economic hardship. The United States attracted a small but steady stream of polit- 
ical refugees throughout the 19th century: labor militants from England; nationalists from 
Ireland; socialists and anarchists from Germany, Russia, Finland, and Italy. Many of these 
people possessed talents as skilled workers, labor organizers, political agitators, and news- 
paper editors and thus exercised influence in their ethnic communities. However, only the 
anti-Semitic policies of Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries triggered a mass 
emigration (in this case Jewish) of political refugees. 
Most mass immigration was propelled instead by economic hardship. Europe s rural 
population was growing faster than the land could support. European factories absorbed 
some, but not all, of the rural surplus. Industrialization and urbanization were affecting 
the European countryside in ways that disrupted rural ways of life. As railroads penetrated 
rural areas, village artisans found themselves unable to compete with the cheap manufac- 
tured goods that arrived from city factories. These handicraftsmen were among the first to 
emigrate. Meanwhile, rising demand for food in the cities accelerated the growth of com- 
mercial agriculture in the hinterland. Some peasant families lost their land. Others turned 
to producing crops for the market, only to discover that they could not compete with 
larger, more efficient producers. In addition, by the last third of the 19th century, peas- 
ants faced competition from North American farmers. Prices for agricultural commodities 
plummeted everywhere. The economic squeeze that spread distress among American 
farmers in the 1880s and 1890s caused even more hardship among Europe s peasantry, 
and many of them decided to try their luck in the New World. 
An individual s or family s decision to emigrate often depended on having a con- 
tact a family member, relative, or fellow villager already established in an Ameri- 
can city. These people provided immigrants with a destination, inspiration (they were 
examples of success in America), advice about jobs, and financial aid. Sometimes 
whole villages in southern Italy or western Russia or at least all of the young men  
seemed to disappear, only to reappear in a certain section of Chicago, Pittsburgh, or 
New York. Villages without contacts in the United States were relatively unaffected by 
the emigration mania. 
748  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
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Most immigrants viewed their trip to the United States as a temporary sojourn. They 
came not in search of permanent settlement but in search of high wages that would enable 
them to improve their economic standing in their homeland. For them, America was a 
land of economic opportunity, not a land to call home. This attitude explains why men 
vastly outnumbered women and children in the migration stream. From 1899 to 1910, 
three-fourths of the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were adult men. Some 
had left wives and children behind; more were single. Most wanted merely to make 
enough money to buy a farm in their native land. True to their dream, many did return 
home. For every 100 Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1907 
and 1911, for example, 73 returned to Italy. Before the First World War, an estimated 
60 percentto 80 percent of all Slavic immigrants eventually returned to the land of their birth. 
The rate of return was negligible among certain groups, however. Jews had little desire 
to return to the religious persecution they had fled, and only 5 percent returned to Europe. 
The rate of return was also low among the Irish, who saw few opportunities in their long- 
suffering (although much-loved) Emerald Isle. In the early 20th century, however, such 
groups were exceptional. Most immigrants looked forward to returning to Europe. Not 
until the First World War shut down transatlantic travel did most immigrants begin to 
regard their presence in the United States as permanent. 
Immigration tended to move in rhythm with the U.S. business cycle. It rose in boom 
years and fell off during depressions. It remained high during the first 14 years of the new 
century when the U.S. economy experienced sustained growth, broken only briefly by the 
Panic of 1907 08. 
Chinese and Japanese Immigration 
The relatively small numbers of Chinese and Japanese immigrants who came to the United 
States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reflected the efforts of native-born Americans 
and their allies to keep them out. As many as 300,000 Chinese immigrants arrived in the 
United States between 1851 and 1882, and more than 200,000 Japanese immigrants jour- 
neyed to Hawaii and the western continental United States between 1891 and 1907. They 
contributed in major ways to the development of two of the West s major industries: rail- 
road building and commercial agriculture. These two immigrant groups might have 
formed two of America s largest, each numbering in the millions, but the U.S. government 
began to exclude Chinese immigrant laborers in 1882 (The Chinese Exclusion Act) and 
Japanese immigrant laborers in 1907 (see chapter 22). The government also interpreted a 
1790 law to mean that Chinese, Japanese, and other East Asian immigrants were ineligi- 
ble for citizenship. These exclusions remained in force until the 1940s and 1950s. They 
expressed the racial prejudice felt by most native-born white Americans toward nonwhite 
Asian immigrants, and they also revealed how determined America was to remain a nation 
of European immigrants and their descendants. 
The factors propelling Chinese and Japanese immigrants were similar to those motivat- 
ing their European counterparts. The rural population in those countries was increasing at 
Immigration " 749 
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a rate faster than the rural economies could support. Chinese and Japanese rural peas- 
ants were being integrated into an international market for agriculture, contributing to 
the global oversupply of agricultural goods and depressing prices. Many Chinese and 
Japanese immigrants, like their European counterparts, conceived of their movement 
beyond their countries  borders as temporary. They intended to move abroad just long 
enough to make enough money to establish themselves economically in their home- 
lands. Thus the early streams of Chinese and Japanese migration to the United States 
were overwhelmingly composed of men looking for work. Similar to the European 
immigrants, the Chinese and Japanese sojourners tended to follow precise migratory 
paths from one region or village in China or Japan to one city or region in the United 
States. 
Conditions in China were more desperate than those in Japan, where industrializa- 
tion had begun to generate new wealth and absorb some of the rural population. Chi- 
nese immigrants, as a result, often suffered greater hardship than did their Japanese 
counterparts. In the 19th century, many were forced to sign contracts with suppliers of 
overseas laborers that subjected them to slave-like conditions: They were herded onto 
boats for the transpacific voyage, bound to particular employers for years on end, thrust 
into dangerous working conditions, and paid paltry wages. The conditions of their labor 
in the western states where they tended to settle inflamed the sentiments of white work- 
ing men, who saw the Asian migration as a threat to their own wages and livelihoods. 
These white workers might have made common cause with Asian immigrant workers, 
but the racial prejudice they harbored toward the  yellow hordes  was simply too great. 
White workers became leaders of the movements in the western states to keep these 
immigrants out. 
Significant numbers of Chinese and Japanese immigrants continued to try to enter the 
United States during the period of Asian immigrant exclusion after 1882 in the case of 
the Chinese and 1907 in the case of the Japanese. Some were desperate to reunite them- 
selves with family members already living in the United States, while others were driven 
by deteriorating economic circumstances in their homeland. Many attempted to enter the 
United States with forged papers declaring them to be merchants (a permitted class of Chinese 
and Japanese immigrants) when they were not, or to have been resident in the United 
States before the exclusion laws had gone into effect (and thus entitled to return). San 
Francisco was their principal port of entry, and Angel Island, in San Francisco harbor, 
became the counterpart of Ellis Island in New York harbor: the place where inspectors for 
the U.S. Bureau of Immigration interrogated them and scrutinized their documents and, 
more often than not, sent them back to Asia. 
Other East Asian immigrants attempted to enter the United States through Canada or 
Mexico, hoping to find an unpatrolled part of the land border and to cross into the United 
States undetected. They became, in effect, America s first illegal aliens. That a certain per- 
centage of East Asian immigrants were illegals subject to deportation generated considerable 
750  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
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fear among the Asian immigrant populations resident in the United States, deepening 
tendencies within these communities to secrecy and to separation from mainstream 
American culture and society. Despite these considerable hardships, Asian immigrants 
would prove to be resourceful and to find ways to build homes and livelihoods in 
America. 
Immigrant Labor 
In the first decade of the 20th century, immigrant men and their male children constituted 
70 percent of the workforce in 15 of the 19 leading U.S. industries. They concentrated in 
industries where work was the most backbreaking. Immigrants built the nation s railroads 
and tunnels; mined its coal, iron ore, and other minerals; stoked its hot and sometimes 
deadly steel furnaces; and slaughtered and packed its meat in Chicago s putrid packing- 
houses. In 1909, first- and second-generation immigrants especially Greeks, Italians, 
Japanese, and Mexicans constituted more than 96 percent of the labor force that built and 
Immigration " 751 
Immigrant Japanese Children Arrive at Angel Island, San Francisco Harbor, 1905 Beginning in 1907, as a result 
of the  gentlemen s agreement  between the United States and Japanese governments, it would no longer be possible for 
Japanese immigrants such as these children to come to the United States. 
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11019_20_ch20_p0735-0770.qxd  6/4/07  11:44 AM  Page 751
752  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
maintained the nation s railroads. Of the 750,000 Slovaks who arrived in America before 
1913, at least 600,000 headed for the coal mines and steel mills of western Pennsylvania. 
The steel mills of Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago also attracted dispropor- 
tionately large numbers of Poles and other Slavs. 
Immigrants also performed  lighter  but no less arduous work. Jews and Italians pre- 
dominated in the garment manufacturing shops of New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, 
Baltimore, and Boston. In 1900, French-Canadian immigrants and their children held 
one of every two jobs in New England s cotton textile industry. By 1920, the prosperity 
of California s rapidly growing agricultural industry depended primarily on Mexican and 
Filipino labor. In these industries, immigrant women and children, who worked for lower 
wages than men, formed a large part of the labor force. Few states restricted child labor. 
More than 25 percent of boys and 10 percent of girls aged 10 to 15 were  gainfully 
employed.  
Immigrants were as essential as fossil fuels to the smooth operation of the American eco- 
nomic machine. Sometimes, however, the machine consumed workers as well as coal and 
oil. Those who worked in heavy industry, mining, or railroading were especially vulnera- 
ble to accident and injury. In 1901, for instance, 1 in every 400 railroad workers died on 
the job and 1 in every 26 suffered injury. Between the years 1906 and 1911, almost one- 
quarter of the recent immigrants employed at the U.S. Steel Corporation s South Works 
(Pittsburgh) were injured or killed on the job. Lax attention to safety rendered even light 
industry hazardous and sometimes fatal. In 1911, a fire broke out on an upper floor of the 
Triangle Shirtwaist Company,a New York City garment factory. The building had no fire 
escapes. The owners of the factory, moreover, had locked the entrances to each floor as a 
way of keeping their employees at work. A total of 146 workers, mostly young Jewish and 
Italian women, perished in the fire or from desperate nine-story leaps to the pavement 
below. 
Chronic fatigue and inadequate nourishment increased the risk of accident and injury. 
Workweeks averaged 60 hours 10 hours every day except Sunday. Workers who were 
granted Saturday afternoons off, thus reducing their workweek to a mere 55 hours, con- 
sidered themselves fortunate. Steelworkers were not so lucky. They labored from 72 to 
89 hours per week and were required to work one 24-hour shift every two weeks. 
Most workers had to labor long hours simply to eke out a meager living. In 1900, the 
annual earnings of American manufacturing workers averaged only $400 to $500 per 
year. Skilled jobs offered immigrants far more (as much as $1,500 to $2,000 per year), 
but most of them were held by Yankees and by the Germans, Irish, Welsh, and other 
Europeans who had come as part of the old immigration. Through their unions, workers 
of Northern European extraction also controlled access to new jobs that opened up and 
usually managed to fill them with a son, relative, or fellow countryman. Consequently, 
relatively few of the new immigrants rose into the prosperous ranks of skilled labor. In 
any case, employers were replacing many skilled workers with machines operated by 
cheaply paid operatives. 
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From the 1870s to 1910, real wages paid to factory workers and common laborers did 
rise, but not steadily. Wages fell sharply during depressions, and the hope for increases 
during periods of recovery often collapsed under the weight of renewed mass immigration, 
which brought hundreds of thousands of new job seekers into the labor market. One of 
every five industrial workers was unemployed, even during the boom years of the early 
20th century. 
Most working families required two or three wage earners to survive. If a mother 
could not go out to work because she had small children at home, she might rent rooms 
to some of the many single men who had recently immigrated. But economic security 
was difficult to attain. In his 1904 book, Poverty, social investigator Robert Hunter con- 
servatively estimated that 20 percent of the industrial population of the North lived in 
poverty. 
Living Conditions 
Strained economic circumstances confined many working-class families to cramped and 
dilapidated living quarters. Many of them lived in two- or three-room apartments, with 
several people sleeping in each room. To make ends meet, one immigrant New York City 
family of eight living in a two-room apartment took in six boarders. Some boarders con- 
sidered themselves lucky to have their own bed. That luxury was denied the 14 Slovaks 
who shared eight beds in a small Pittsburgh apartment and the New York City printer 
who slept on a door he unhinged every night and balanced across two chairs. The lack 
of windows in city tenements allowed little light or air into these apartments, and few 
had their own toilets or running water. Crowding was endemic. The population den- 
sity of New York City s Lower East Side where most of the city s Jewish immigrants 
settled reached 700 per acre in 1900, a density greater than that of the poorest sec- 
tions of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India. Overcrowding and poor sanitation 
resulted in high rates of infectious diseases, especially diphtheria, typhoid fever, and 
pneumonia. 
By 1900, this crisis in urban living had begun to yield to the insistence of urban reform- 
ers that cities adopt housing codes and improve sanitation. Between 1880 and 1900, hous- 
ing inspectors condemned the worst of the tenements and ordered landlords to make 
improvements. City governments built reservoirs, pipes, and sewers to carry clean water 
to the tenements and to carry away human waste. Newly paved roads lessened the dirt, 
mud, and stagnant pools of water and thus further curtailed the spread of disease. As a 
result, urban mortality rates fell in the 1880s and 1890s. 
Nevertheless, improvements came far more slowly to the urban poor than they did 
to the middle and upper classes. Cities such as Pittsburgh built extensive systems of 
paved roads in wealthy districts but not in working-class areas. Water supplies and 
pressures were far better in prosperous than in poor neighborhoods. At the outbreak of 
the First World War, many working-class families still lacked running water in their 
homes. 
Immigration " 753 
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Building Ethnic Communities 
The immigrants may have been poor, but they were not helpless. Migration had required 
a good deal of resourcefulness, self-help, and mutual aid assets that survived in the new 
surroundings of American cities. 
A Network of Institutions 
Each ethnic group quickly established a network of institutions that supplied a sense of 
community and multiplied sources of communal assistance. Some immigrants simply 
reproduced those institutions that had been important to them in the Old Country. The 
devout established churches and synagogues. Lithuanian, Jewish, and Italian radicals 
reestablished Old World socialist and anarchist organizations. Irish nationalists set up 
clandestine chapters of the Clan Na Gael to keep alive the struggle to free Ireland from the 
English. Germans felt at home in their traditional Turnevereins (athletic clubs) and musi- 
cal societies. 
Immigrants developed new institutions as well. In the larger cities, foreign-language 
newspapers disseminated news, advice, and culture. Each ethnic group created fraternal 
societies to bring together immigrants who had known each other in the Old Country, or 
who shared the same craft, or who had come from the same town or region. Most of these 
societies provided members with a death benefit (ranging from a few hundred to a thou- 
sand dollars) that guaranteed the deceased a decent burial and the family a bit of cash. 
Some fraternal societies made small loans as well. Among those ethnic groups that prized 
home ownership, especially the Slavic groups, the fraternal societies also provided mort- 
gage money. And all of them served as centers of sociability places to have a drink, play 
cards, or simply relax with fellow countrymen. The joy, solace, and solidarity these groups 
generated helped countless immigrants adjust to American life. 
The Emergence of an Ethnic Middle Class 
Within each ethnic group, a sizable minority directed their talents and ambitions toward 
economic gain. Some of these entrepreneurs first addressed their communities  needs for 
basic goods and services. Immigrants preferred to buy from fellow countrymen with 
whom they shared a language, a history, and presumably a bond of trust. Enterprising 
individuals responded by opening dry-goods stores, food shops, butcher shops, and 
saloons in their ethnic neighborhoods. Those who could not afford to rent a store hawked 
their fruit, clothing, or dry goods from portable stands, wagons, or sacks carried on their 
backs. The work was endless and the competition tough. Men often enlisted the entire 
family wife, older children, younger children in their undertakings. Few family mem- 
bers were ever paid for their labor, no matter how long or hard they worked. Although 
many of these small businesses failed, enough survived to give some immigrants and their 
children a toehold in the middle class. 
754  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
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Other immigrants turned to small industry, particularly garment manufacture, truck 
farming, and construction. A clothing manufacturer needed only a few sewing machines 
to become competitive. Many Jewish immigrants, having been tailors in Russia and 
Poland, opened such facilities. If a rented space proved beyond their means, they set up 
shop in their own apartments. Competition among these small manufacturers was fierce, 
and work environments were condemned by critics as  sweatshops.  Workers suffered 
from inadequate lighting, heat, and ventilation; 12-hour workdays and 70-hour work- 
weeks during peak seasons, with every hour spent bent over a sewing machine; and poor 
pay and no employment security, especially for the women and children who made up a 
large part of this labor force. Even at this level of exploitation, many small manufacturers 
failed, but over time, significant numbers of them managed to firm up their position as 
manufacturers and to evolve into stable, responsible employers. Their success contributed 
to the emergence of a Jewish middle class. 
The story was much the same in urban construction, where Italians who had estab- 
lished themselves as labor contractors, or padroni, went into business for themselves to 
take advantage of the rapid expansion of American cities. Although few became general 
contractors on major downtown projects, many of them did well building family resi- 
dences or serving as subcontractors on larger buildings. 
One who did make the leap from small to big business was Amadeo P. Giannini, the 
son of Italian immigrants, who used his savings from a San Francisco fruit and vegetable 
stand to launch a career in banking. Determined to make bank loans available and afford- 
able to people of ordinary means, Giannini generated a huge business in small loans. 
Expanding on his ethnic base of small depositors, he eventually made his bank the Bank 
of America into the country s largest financial institution. 
In southern California, Japanese immigrants chose agriculture as their route to the mid- 
dle class.Working as agricultural laborers in the 1890s, they began to acquire their own land 
in the early years of the 20th century. Altogether, they owned only 1 percent of California s 
total farm acreage. Their specialization in fresh vegetables and fruits (particularly 
strawberries), combined with their family-labor-intensive agricultural methods, was yielding 
$67 million in annual revenues by 1919 one-tenth of the total California agriculture rev- 
enue that year. Japanese farmers sold their produce to Japanese fruit and vegetable whole- 
salers in Los Angeles, who had chosen a mercantile route to middle-class status. The suc- 
cess of Japanese farmers was all the more impressive given that the state of California had 
passed the Alien Land Law in 1913, prohibiting Japanese and other Asian aliens from own- 
ing property in the state. Japanese immigrant farmers thus depended on their native-born 
children or friendly whites to acquire land for them, arrangements that made them more 
vulnerable to losing the land or control of it than if they had been able to own it out- 
right themselves. 
Each ethnic group created its own history of economic success and social mobility. 
From the emerging middle classes came leaders who would provide their ethnic groups 
Building Ethnic Communities  " 755 
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with identity, legitimacy, and power and would lead the way toward Americanization and 
assimilation. Their children tended to do better in school than the children of working-class 
ethnics, and academic success served as a ticket to upward social mobility in a society that 
increasingly depended on university-trained engineers, managers, lawyers, doctors, and 
other professionals. 
Political Machines and Organized Crime 
The underside of this success story was the rise of government corruption and organized 
crime. Many ethnic entrepreneurs operated on the margins of economic failure and bank- 
ruptcy, and some accepted the help of those who promised financial assistance. Some- 
times the help came from honest unions and upright government officials, but other 
times it did not. Unions were generally weak, and some government officials, lacking 
experience and economic security, were susceptible to bribery. Economic necessity 
became a breeding ground for government corruption and greed. A contractor who was 
eager to win a city contract to build a trolley system, a sewer line, or a new city hall, for 
example would find it necessary to pay off government officials who could throw the 
contract his way. By 1900, such payments, referred to as  graft,  had become essential to 
the day-to-day operation of government in most large cities. Graft, in turn, made local 
officeholding a source of economic gain. Politicians began building political organizations 
called machines to guarantee their success in municipal elections. The machine  bosses  
used a variety of legal and illegal means to bring victory on election day. They won the 
loyalty of urban voters especially immigrants by providing poor neighborhoods with 
paved roads and sewer systems. They helped newly arrived immigrants find jobs (often 
on city payrolls) and occasionally provided food, fuel, or clothing to families in dire need. 
Many of their clients were grateful for these services in an age when government provided 
little public assistance. 
The bosses who ran the political machines including  King Richard  Croker in New 
York, James Michael Curley in Boston, Tom Pendergast in Kansas City, Martin Behrman 
in New Orleans, and Abe Ruef in San Francisco served their own needs first. They saw 
to it that construction contracts went to those who offered the most graft, not to those who 
were likely to do the best job. They protected gamblers, pimps, and other purveyors of 
urban vice who contributed large amounts to their machine coffers. They often required 
city employees to contribute to their campaign chests, to solicit political contributions, and 
to get out the vote on election day. And they engaged in widespread election fraud by 
rounding up truckloads of newly arrived immigrants and paying them to vote a certain 
way; having their supporters vote two or three times; and stuffing ballot boxes with the 
votes of phantom citizens who had died, moved away, or never been born. 
Big-city machines, then, were both positive and negative forces in urban life. Reform- 
ers despised them for disregarding election laws and encouraging vice, but many immi- 
grants valued them for providing social welfare services and for creating opportunities for 
upward mobility. 
756  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
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The history of President John F. Kennedy s family offers one example of the economic 
and political opportunities opened up by machine politics. Both of Kennedy s grandfa- 
thers, John Francis Fitzgerald ( Honey Fitz ) and Patrick Joseph Kennedy, were the chil- 
dren of penniless Irish immigrants who arrived in Boston in the 1840s. Fitzgerald excelled 
at academics and won a coveted place in Harvard s Medical School, but left Harvard that 
same year, choosing a career in politics instead. Between 1891 and 1905, Fitzgerald served 
as a Boston city councilor, Massachusetts state congressman and senator, U.S. congress- 
man, and mayor of Boston. For much of this period, he derived considerable income and 
power from his position as the North End ward boss, where he supervised the trading of 
jobs for votes and favors for cash in his section of Boston s Democratic and Irish- 
dominated political machine. 
Patrick Kennedy, an East Boston tavern owner and liquor merchant, became an 
equally important figure in Boston city politics. In addition to running the Democratic 
Party s affairs in Ward Two, he served on the Strategy Board, a secret council of 
Boston s machine politicians that met regularly to devise policies, settle disputes, and 
divide up  graft. Both Fitzgerald and Kennedy derived a substantial income from their 
political work and used it to lift their families into middle-class prosperity. Kennedy s 
son (and the future president s father), Joseph P. Kennedy, would go on to make a for- 
tune as a Wall Street speculator and liquor distributor and to groom his sons for Har- 
vard and the highest political offices in the land. But his rapid economic and social 
ascent had been made possible by his father s and father-in-law s earlier success in 
Boston machine politics. 
Underworld figures, too, influenced urban life. In the early years of the 20th century, 
gangsterism was a scourge of Italian neighborhoods, where Sicilian immigrants had 
established outposts of the notorious Mafia, and in Irish, Jewish, Chinese, and other eth- 
nic communities as well. Favorite targets of these gangsters were small-scale manufac- 
turers and contractors, who were threatened with violence and economic ruin if they did 
not pay a gang for  protection.  Gangsters enforced their demands with physical force, 
beating up or killing those who failed to abide by the  rules.  In Chinese communities, 
secret societies originating in China, or tongs, and initially set up in America to 
strengthen communal life among the immigrants, occasionally crossed the line into 
crime. Sometimes this transition resulted from good intentions for example, tong 
members might smuggle into the United States the wife and children of an immigrant 
Chinese man who had no legal way of reuniting his family but other times, tongs 
enmeshed themselves in far more damaging criminal activities such as the opium trade, 
prostitution, and gambling. 
Greedy for money, power, and fame, and willing to use any means necessary, many 
immigrant and ethnic criminals considered themselves authentic entrepreneurs cut from 
the American mold. By the 1920s, petty extortion had escalated in urban areas, and under- 
world crime had become big business. Al Capone, the ruthless Chicago mobster who made 
a fortune from gambling, prostitution, and bootleg liquor during Prohibition, once 
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claimed:  Prohibition is a business. All I do is to supply a public demand. I do it in the 
best and least harmful way I can.  New York City s Arnold Rothstein, whose financial 
sophistication won him a gambling empire and the power to fix the 1919 World Series, 
nurtured his reputation as  the J. P. Morgan of the underworld.  Mobsters like Roth- 
stein and Capone were charismatic figures, both in their ethnic communities and in the 
nation at large. Few immigrants, however, followed their criminal path to economic 
success. 
African American Labor and Community 
758  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
Focus Question 
What were the similarities and differences between the immigrant and African 
American experiences in the early 20th century? 
Unlike immigrants, African Americans remained a predominantly rural and southern 
people in the early 20th century. Most blacks were sharecroppers and tenant farmers. 
The markets for cotton and other southern crops had stabilized in the early 20th cen- 
tury, but black farmers remained vulnerable to exploitation. Landowners, most of 
whom were white, often forced sharecroppers to accept artificially low prices for their 
crops. At the same time, they charged high prices for seed, tools, and groceries at the 
local stores they controlled. Few rural areas generated enough business to support 
more than one store or to create a competitive climate that might force prices down. 
Those sharecroppers who traveled elsewhere to sell their crops or purchase their 
necessities risked retaliation  either physical assaults by white vigilantes or eviction 
from their land. Thus most remained beholden to their landowners, mired in poverty 
and debt. 
Some African Americans sought a better life by migrating to industrial areas of the 
South and the North. In the South, they worked in iron and coal mines, in furniture 
and cigarette manufacture, as railroad track layers and longshoremen, and as laborers 
in the steel mills of Birmingham, Alabama. By the early 20th century, their presence 
was growing in the urban North as well, where they worked on the fringes of industry 
as janitors, elevator operators, teamsters, longshoremen, and servants of various kinds. 
Altogether, about 200,000 blacks left the South for the North and West between 1890 
and 1910. 
In southern industries, blacks were subjected to hardships and indignities that even the 
newest immigrants were not expected to endure. Railroad contractors in the South, for 
example, treated their black track layers like prisoners. Armed guards marched them to 
work in the morning and back at night. Track layers were paid only once a month and 
forced to purchase food at the company commissary, where the high prices claimed most 
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of what they earned. Their belongings were locked up to discourage them from run- 
ning away. Although other southern employers of black workers did not engage in 
labor practices as harsh as those of the railroad contractors, they still confined blacks 
to the dirtiest and most grueling jobs. The  Jim Crow  laws passed by every southern 
state legislature in the 1890s legalized this rigid separation of the black and white races 
(see chapter 18). 
The nation s worsening racial climate adversely affected southern blacks who came 
north, even though these migrants had moved to states that generally did not have Jim 
Crow laws. Northern industrialists generally refused to hire black migrants for manufac- 
turing jobs, preferring the labor of European immigrants. Only when those immigrants 
went on strike did employers turn to African Americans. Black workers first gained a 
foothold in the Chicago meatpacking industry in 1904, when 28,000 immigrant packing- 
house workers walked off their jobs. Employers hoped that the use of black strike-breakers 
would inflame racial tensions between white and black workers and thus undermine labor 
unity and strength. 
African Americans who had long resided in northern urban areas also experienced 
intensifying discrimination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1870, about one- 
third of the black men in many northern cities had been skilled tradesmen: blacksmiths, 
painters, shoemakers, and carpenters. Serving both black and white clients, these men 
enjoyed steady work and good pay, but by 1910 only 10 percent of black men made a liv- 
ing in this way. In many cities, the number of barber shops and food catering businesses 
owned by blacks also went into sharp decline, as did black representation in the ranks of 
restaurant and hotel waiters. These barbers, food caterers, and waiters had formed a black 
middle class whose livelihood depended on the patronage of white clients. By the early 
20th century, this middle class was in decline, the victim of growing racism. Whites were 
no longer willing to engage the services of blacks, preferring to have their hair cut, beards 
shaved, and food prepared and served by European immigrants. The residential segrega- 
tion of northern blacks also rose in these years, as whites excluded them from growing 
numbers of urban neighborhoods. 
African Americans did not lack for resourcefulness. In urban areas of settlement, they 
laced their communities with the same array of institutions churches, fraternal insurance 
societies, political organizations that solidified ethnic neighborhoods. A new black mid- 
dle class arose, consisting of ministers, professionals, and businesspeople who serviced the 
needs of their racial group. Black-owned real estate agencies, funeral homes, doctors  
offices, newspapers, groceries, restaurants, and bars opened for business on the commer- 
cial thoroughfares of African American neighborhoods. Many businessmen had been 
inspired by the words of black educator Booker T. Washington, and specifically by his 
argument that blacks should devote themselves to self-help and self-sufficiency. Madame 
C. J. Walkeroffers one example of a black woman who built a lucrative business from the 
hair and skin lotions she devised and sold to black customers throughout the country. In 
many cities, African American real estate agents achieved significant wealth and power. 
African American Labor and Community  " 759 
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Nevertheless, entrepreneurial success remained a tougher task among African Amer- 
icans than among immigrants. Black communities were often smaller and poorer than 
their white ethnic ones; economic opportunities were fewer, and black businessmen 
found it more difficult than their white ethnic counterparts to cultivate customers out- 
side of their core community. Racial prejudice stood as an obstacle to black business 
T 
he Jazz Singer was a sensation when it opened 
because it was the first movie to use sound 
(although relatively few words of dialogue were actu- 
ally spoken). It also starred Al Jolson, the era s most 
popular Broadway entertainer, and bravely explored an 
issue that the film industry usually avoided the reli- 
gious culture and generational dynamics of a  new 
immigrant  family. 
The movie focuses on Jake Rabinowitz and his 
immigrant parents, who are Jewish and devout. Jake s 
father is a fifth-generation cantor whose job it is to fill 
his New York City synagogue with ancient and uplifting 
melodies on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. Cantor 
Rabinowitz looks upon his work as sacred, and he 
expects Jake to take his place one day. But Jake has 
other ideas. He loves music but is drawn to the new 
rhythmic ragtime and sensual jazz melodies emerging 
from his American surroundings. In an early scene, we 
encounter Jake at a dance hall, absorbed in playing and 
singing ragtime tunes and forgetting that he should be 
at home preparing for Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the 
Jewish calendar. His distraught father finds him and 
whips him, and Jake, in anger and pain, runs away. 
These early scenes allow us to glimpse important 
themes in the immigrant experience of the early 20th 
century: the deep attraction among the children of 
immigrants to the energy and vitality of American pop- 
ular culture and the strains that this attraction often 
caused between these children and parents desperate 
to maintain the traditions they had brought with them 
from Europe. 
Jake s estrangement from his family and commu- 
nity gives him the space to reinvent himself as Jack 
Robin, the jazz singer. His love relationship with a 
prominent (and non-Jewish) stage actress, Mary Dale, 
brings him the big break he needs, a starring role in a 
Broadway show. Jack hopes to use his return to New 
York to reconcile with his father. This eventually hap- 
pens when Jake, on the eve of Yom Kippur once again, 
agrees to skip his show s premiere in order to take his 
ailing father s place as cantor in the synagogue. Jake s 
melodies soar and reach his bedridden father who, 
thinking that his son has succeeded him as cantor and 
thus fulfilled his (the father s) deepest wish, peacefully 
dies. 
His father is deceived, for Jake returns to his Broad- 
way show as soon as Yom Kippur ends to deliver an 
outstanding performance as the  Jazz Singer.  His 
THE JAZZ SINGER (1927) 
Directed by Alan Crosland. Starring Al Jolson (Jake Rabinowitz/Jack Robin), May McAvoy 
(Mary Dale),and Warner Oland (Cantor Rabinowitz). 
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success. Meanwhile, blacks were so marginalized in politics that they had little opportu- 
nity to gain power or wealth through holding political office or controlling a political 
machine. Thus the African American middle class remained smaller and more precarious 
than did its counterpart in ethnic communities, less able to lead the way toward afflu- 
ence and assimilation. 
Americans by participating in tradition popular among 
white American entertainers. Ironically,  blacking up  
may have been a way for an entertainer to embrace 
not black but white America, and for someone like 
Jake to be accepted by non-Jewish white Americans as 
one of their own. 
future lies with Broadway rather than with 
a synagogue, and with the gentile Mary. 
The movie, however, makes it seem as 
though everything will work out: Jake s 
mother is in the audience for the Broadway 
show, enjoying her son s success and, in 
effect, blessing him for the career and 
woman he has chosen. That this resolution 
requires misleading the father reminds us, 
however, that the strains between immi- 
grant parents and their American-born chil- 
dren could be deep and sometimes not 
resolvable. 
The movie also allows us to ask ques- 
tions about the relationship between 
immigrants and African Americans. As part 
of his Broadway performance, Jake does a 
blackface routine, using burnt cork to turn 
his face and neck black and thus to appear 
to audiences as a  black  entertainer. From 
the early 19th to the early 20th centuries, 
 blacking up  was a performance style 
popular among white entertainers who 
wanted both to appropriate and ridicule 
expressive aspects of black culture. What 
did it mean for a child of Jewish immigrants, himself 
vulnerable to being stigmatized as an outsider in 
America, to  black up ? Jake may have been express- 
ing in part his desire to draw closer to rich elements in 
black musical culture. But Jake may also have been 
signaling his desire to distance himself from African 
A billboard in New York City advertising TheJazz Singer. Al Jolson is 
shown in blackface. 
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Workers and Unions 
Middle-class success eluded most immigrants and blacks in the years before the First 
World War. Even among Jews, whose rate of social mobility was rapid, most immigrants 
were working class. For most workers, the path toward a better life lay in improving their 
working conditions, not in escape from the working class. Henry Ford s $5-per-day wage, 
double the average manufacturing wage, raised the hopes of many. Young immigrant men, 
in particular, flocked to Detroit to work for Ford. But in the early decades of the 20th century, 
few other manufacturers were prepared to follow Ford s lead, and most factory workers 
remained in a fragile economic state. 
Samuel F. Gompers and the AFL 
For those workers, the only hope for economic improvement lay in organizing unions 
powerful enough to wrest wage concessions from reluctant employers. This was not an 
easy task. The charged, often violent, labor protests of the Gilded Age had been put down. 
Labor organizations, such as the Knights of Labor, that had unified workers had been 
defeated. Federal and state governments had shown themselves ready to use military force 
to break strikes. The courts, following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court, repeatedly found 
unions in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, even though that act had been intended 
762  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
Madame C. J. Walker This prominent African American entrepreneur, pictured here behind the wheel of her car, built 
a successful business selling hair and skin lotions to black customers throughout the country. 
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to control corporations, not unions. Judges in most states usually granted employer 
requests for injunctions court orders that barred striking workers from picketing their 
place of employment (and thus from obstructing employer efforts to hire replacement 
workers). Before 1916, no federal laws protected workers  right to organize or required 
employers to bargain with the unions to which their workers belonged. 
This hostile legal environment retarded the growth of unions from the 1890s through 
the 1920s. It also made the major labor organization of those years, the American Feder- 
ation of Labor (AFL), more timid and conservative than it had been before the depression 
of the 1890s. In the aftermath of that depression, the AFL focused on organizing craft, or 
skilled, workers such as carpenters, typographers, plumbers, painters, and machinists. 
Because of their skills, these workers commanded more respect from employers than did 
the unskilled laborers. Employers negotiated contracts, or trade agreements, with craft 
unions that stipulated the wages workers were to be paid, the hours they were to work, 
and the rules under which new workers would be accepted into the trade. These agree- 
ments were accorded the same legal protection that American law bestowed on other com- 
mercial contracts. 
As the AFL emphasized these bread-and-butter issues, it withdrew from the political 
activism that had once occupied its attention. It no longer agitated for governmental reg- 
ulation of the economy and the workplace. The AFL had concluded that labor s power- 
ful opponents in the legislatures and the courts would find ways to undermine whatever 
governmental gains organized labor managed to achieve. That conclusion was reinforced 
by a 1905 ruling, Lochner v. New York, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared 
unconstitutional a seemingly innocent New York state law limiting bakery employees to 
a 10-hour day. 
The AFL s  business  unionism took its most forceful expression from its president, 
Samuel F. Gompers. A onetime Marxist and cigarmaker who had helped found the AFL 
in 1886, Gompers was reelected to the AFL presidency every year from 1896 until his 
death in 1924. The AFL showed considerable vitality under his leadership, especially in 
the early years when its membership quadrupled from less than a half million in 1897 to 
more than 2 million in 1904. Aware of the AFL s growing significance and conservatism, 
the National Civic Federation, a newly formed council of corporate executives, agreed to 
meet periodically with the organization s leaders to discuss the nation s industrial and 
labor problems. 
Nevertheless, the AFL had limited success. Its 2 million members represented only a 
small portion of the industrial workforce. Its concentration among craft workers, more- 
over, distanced it from most workers, who were not skilled. Unskilled and semiskilled 
workers could only be organized into an industrial union that offered membership to all 
workers in a particular industry. Gompers understood the importance of such unions and 
allowed several of them, including the United Mine Workers (UMW) and the International 
Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), to participate in the AFL. But AFL ranks 
remained dominated by skilled workers who looked down upon the unskilled. Ethnic 
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background intensified these craftsmen s sense of superiority over the unskilled. Most 
skilled workers were from old immigrant stock particularly English, Scottish, German, 
and Irish and they shared the common prejudice against immigrants from Southern and 
Eastern Europe. 
AFL members demonstrated even worse prejudice toward black workers. In the early 
20th century, more than 10 AFL unions excluded African Americans from membership. 
The AFL s racist policies partially account for the shrinking numbers of black tradesmen 
between 1870 and 1910. White and black workers sometimes managed to set aside their 
suspicions of each other and cooperate. The UMW allowed black workers to join and to 
rise to positions of leadership. In New Orleans, black and white dockworkers constructed 
a remarkable experiment in biracial unionism that flourished from the 1890s through the 
early 1920s. But these moments of cooperation were rare. 
Although blacks made up too small a percentage of the working class to build alterna- 
tive labor organizations that would counteract the influence of the AFL, the new immi- 
grants from Eastern and Southern Europe were too numerous to be ignored. Their partic- 
ipation in the UMW enabled that union to grow from only 14,000 in 1897 to more than 
300,000 in 1914. In 1909, a strike of 20,000 women workers against the owners of New 
York City s garment factories inspired tens of thousands of workers, male and female, to 
join the ILGWU. 
 Big Bill Haywood and the IWW 
When the AFL failed to help them organize, immigrants turned to other unions. The most 
important was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded by western miners in 
1905 and led by William  Big Bill  Haywood. The IWW rejected the AFL principle of craft 
organization, hoping instead to organize all workers into  one big union.  It scorned the 
notion that only a conservative union could survive in American society, declaring its com- 
mitment to revolution instead. 
The IWW refused to sign collective bargaining agreements with employers, arguing 
that such agreements only trapped workers in capitalist property relations. Capitalism 
had to be overthrown through struggles between workers and their employers at the 
point of production. Although hundreds of thousands of workers passed through its 
ranks or participated in its strikes, the IWW s membership rarely exceeded 20,000. Nev- 
ertheless, few labor organizations inspired as much fear. The IWW organized the poor- 
est and most isolated workers lumbermen, miners, and trackmen in the West, textile 
workers and longshoremen in the East. Emboldened by IWW leaders, these workers 
waged strikes against employers who were unaccustomed to having their authority chal- 
lenged. Violence lurked beneath the surface of these strikes and occasionally erupted in 
bloody skirmishes between strikers and police, National Guardsmen, or the private secu- 
rity forces hired by employers. Some blamed the IWW for the violence, seeing it as a 
direct outgrowth of calls for a  class war.  Others understood that the IWW was not 
solely responsible. Employers had shown themselves quite willing to resort to violence to 
764  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
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enforce their will on employees. In 1913, for example, at Ludlow, Colorado, the Col- 
orado Fuel and Iron Company, a subsidiary of Rockefeller s Standard Oil Company, 
brought in a private security force and the local militia (which it controlled) to break up 
a UMW strike. When the company evicted strikers and their families from their homes, 
the union set up 13 tent colonies to obstruct the entrances to the mines. The standoff 
came to a bloody conclusion in April 1914 when company police, firing into one colony 
of tents, killed 66 men, women, and children. 
The  Ludlow massacre outraged the nation. At hearings held by the U.S. Commis- 
sion on Industrial Relations, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was humiliated by Commissioner 
Frank Walsh s disclosure that the industrialist had been complicit in the events leading up 
to the violence. The massacre revealed yet again what the IWW strikes had already demon- 
strated: that many American workers resented their low wages and poor working condi- 
tions; that neither the government nor employers offered workers a mechanism for airing 
and peacefully resolving their grievances; and that workers, as a result, felt compelled to 
protest through joining unions and waging strikes, even if it meant risking their lives. On 
the eve of the First World War, almost 40 years after the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 
(chapter 19), industrial conflict still plagued the nation. 
Workers and Unions  " 765 
Men at Work This photo of male workers stoking a boiler conveys some of the grime and heat associated with much early- 
1900s blue-collar work as well as the strength and concentration required of workmen. 
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The Joys of the City 
Industrial workers might be missing their fair share of the nation s prosperity, but they 
were crowding the dance halls, vaudeville theaters, amusement parks, and ballparks 
offered by the new world of commercial entertainment. Above all, they were embracing a 
new technological marvel, the movies. 
Movies were well suited to poor city dwellers with little money, little free time, and lit- 
tle command of the English language. Initially, the movies cost only a nickel. The  nick- 
elodeons where they were shown were usually converted storefronts in working-class 
neighborhoods. Movies required little leisure time because at first they lasted only 15 min- 
utes on average. Viewers with more time on their hands could stay for a cycle of two or 
three films (or for several cycles). And even non-English-speakers could understand what 
was happening on the  silent screen.  By 1910, at least 20,000 nickelodeons dotted north- 
ern cities. 
These early  moving pictures  were primitive by today s standards, but they were thrilling 
just the same. The figures appearing on the screen were  larger than life.  Moviegoers could 
transport themselves to parts of the world they would otherwise never see, encounter peo- 
ple they would otherwise never meet, and watch boxing matches they could otherwise not 
afford to attend. The darkened theater provided a setting in which secret desires, especially 
sexual ones, could be explored. As one newspaper innocently commented in 1899:  For the 
first time in the history of the world it is possible to see what a kiss looks like.  
No easy generalizations are possible about the content of these early films, more than 
half of which came from France, Germany, and Italy. American-made films tended toward 
slapstick comedies, adventure stories, and romances. Producers did not yet shy away, as 
they soon would, from the lustier or seedier sides of American life. The Hollywood for- 
mula of happy endings had yet to be worked out. In fact, the industry, centered in New 
766  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
Nickelodeons in Major American Cities, 1910 
Nickelodeons Seating Population 
Cities Population (estimate) Capacity per Seat 
New York 4,338,322 450 150,000 29 
Chicago 2,000,000 310 93,000 22 
Philadelphia 1,491,082 160 57,000 26 
St. Louis 824,000 142 50,410 16 
Cleveland 600,000 75 22,500 27 
Baltimore 600,000 83 24,900 24 
San Francisco 400,000 68 32,400 12 
Cincinnati 350,000 75 22,500 16 
New Orleans 325,000 28 5,600 58 
Source:Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art(Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), p. 46. 
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York City and Fort Lee, New Jersey, had yet to locate itself in cheery southern California. 
In 1914, the movies  first sex symbol, Theda Bara, debuted in a movie that showed her 
tempting an upstanding American ambassador into infidelity and ruin. She would be the 
first of the big screen s vamps, so-called because the characters they portrayed, like vam- 
pires, thrived on the blood (and death) of men. 
The New Sexuality and the Rise of Feminism 
The appearance of the vamp was one sign that popular culture had become an arena in 
which Americans were beginning to experiment with more open expressions of sexuality. 
Another sign was the growing numbers of women who began insisting that they be 
accorded the same sexual freedom long enjoyed by men. This impulse was strongest 
among young, single, working-class women who were entering the workforce in large 
numbers and mixing at workplaces, in loosely supervised ways, with men their own age. 
The associations between young men and women that sprang up at work carried over into 
their leisure. Young people of both sexes flocked to the dance halls that were opening in 
every major city. They rejected the stiff formality of earlier ballroom dances such as the 
cotillion or the waltz for the freedom and intimacy of newer forms, such as the fox trot, 
tango, and bunny-hug. They went to movies and to amusement parks together, and they 
engaged, far more than their parents had, in premarital sex. It is estimated that the pro- 
portion of women having sex before marriage rose from 10 percent to 25 percent in the 
generation that was coming of age between 1910 and 1920. 
Feminism 
This movement toward sexual freedom was one expression of women s dissatisfaction with 
the restrictions that had been imposed on them by earlier generations. By the second decade 
of the 20th century, eloquent spokeswomen had emerged to make the case for full female 
freedom and equality. The author Charlotte Perkins Gilman called for the release of women 
from domestic chores through the collectivization of housekeeping. Social activist Margaret 
Sanger insisted, in her lectures on birth control, that women should be free to enjoy sexual 
relations without having to worry about unwanted motherhood. The anarchist Emma Gold- 
man denounced marriage as a kind of prostitution and embraced the ideal of  free love   
love unburdened by contractual commitment. Alice Paul, founder of the National Women s 
Party, brought a new militancy to the campaign for woman suffrage (see chapter 21). 
These women were among the first to use the term feminismto describe their desire 
for complete equality with men. Some of them came together in Greenwich Village, a 
community of radical artists and writers in lower Manhattan, where they found a sup- 
portive environment in which to express and live by their feminist ideals. Crystal Eastman, 
a leader of the feminist Greenwich Villagegroup called Heterodoxy, defined the feminist 
challenge as  how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance 
to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined 
by the accident of their sex to one field of activity.  
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The movement for sexual and gender equality aroused considerable anxiety. Parents 
worried about the promiscuity of their children. Conservatives were certain that sexual 
assertiveness among women would transform American cities into dens of iniquity. Vice 
commissions sprang up in every major city to clamp down on prostitution, drunkenness, 
and pornography. The campaign for prohibition a ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages  
gathered steam. Movie theater owners were pressured into excluding  indecent  films from 
their screens. Many believed the lurid tales of international vice lords scouring foreign 
lands for innocent girls who could be delivered to American brothel owners. This  white 
slave trade  inspired passage of the 1910 Mann Act, which made the transportation of 
women across state lines for immoral purposes a federal crime. 
Nor did it escape the attention of conservatives that Greenwich Village was home not only 
to the dangerous exponents of  free love  but also to equally dangerous advocates of class 
warfare. Prominent IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a member of Heterodoxy; her 
lover, Carlo Tresca, was an IWW theoretician.  Big Bill  Haywood also frequented Greenwich 
Village, where he was lionized as a working-class hero. When Greenwich Villageradicals 
began publishing an avant-garde artistic journal in 1914, they called it The Masses; its editor 
was Max Eastman, the brother of Crystal. This convergence of labor and feminist militancy 
intensified conservative feeling that the nation had strayed too far from its roots. 
768  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
Margaret Sanger on Trial, 1916 Feminist Margaret Sanger, left, was put on trial for using 
the U.S. mail service to circulate her book  The Woman Rebel,which advocated birth control. A 
federal law barred the use of the mails to spread birth control advice or techniques. 
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Cultural conservatism was strongest in those areas of the country that were least 
involved in the ongoing industrial and sexual revolutions: in farming communities and 
small towns; in the South, where industrialization and urbanization were proceeding at a 
slower rate than elsewhere; and among old social elites, who felt pushed aside by the new 
corporate men of power. 
Conservatives and radicals alike shared a conviction that the country could not afford to 
ignore its social problems the power of the corporations; the poverty and powerlessness of 
wage earners; the role of women and African Americans. Conservatives were as determined to 
restore 19th-century moral standards as radicals were determined to achieve working-class 
emancipation and women s equality. But in politics, neither would become the dominant 
force. That role would fall to the so-called progressives, a diverse group of reformers who con- 
fidently and optimistically believed they could bring order and justice to the new society. 
Conclusion 
Between 1900 and 1920, corporate power, innovation, and demands had stimulated the 
growth of cities, attracted millions of immigrants, enhanced commercial opportunities, 
and created the conditions for a vibrant urban culture. Many Americans thrived in this 
new environment, taking advantage of business opportunities or, as in the case of women, 
discovering liberties in dress, employment, dating, and sex that they had not known. Mil- 
lions of Americans, however, remained impoverished, unable to rise in the social order or 
to earn enough in wages to support their families. African Americans who had migrated to 
the North in search of economic opportunity suffered more than any other single group, 
as they found themselves shut out of most industrial and commercial employment. 
Henry Ford, whose generous $5-per-day wage drew tens of thousands to his Detroit 
factories, was an exceptional employer. Although other employers had learned to restrain 
their crass displays of wealth and had turned toward philanthropy in search of a better 
public image, they remained reluctant to follow Ford s lead in improving the conditions in 
which their employees labored. 
Working-class Americans proved resourceful in creating self-help institutions to serve 
their own and each other s needs. In some cities, they gained a measure of power through 
the establishment of political machines. Labor unions arose and fought for a variety of 
reforms, but their success was limited. How to inject greater equality and opportunity into 
an industrial society in which the gap between rich and poor had reached alarming pro- 
portions remained a daunting challenge. 
S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS 
For a general overview of the period, see Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibil- 
ity and the Liberal State(1991) andNell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United 
States, 1877 1919(1987). On economic growth and corporate development, see Harold G. Vatter, 
Conclusion " 769 
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The Drive to Industrial Maturity: The United States Economy, 1860 1914(1975); Glenn Porter, 
The Rise of Big Business, 1860 1910(1973); and Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick 
Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency(1997). For a discussion of Ford s labor policies and 
their impact on immigrant workers, see Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Man- 
agement and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908 1921 (1981). 
On the changing character of American elites, see Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., Rul- 
ing America: Wealth and Power in a Democracy(2005). For an excellent overview concerning 
immigration, consult Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity 
in American Life(2002). The best single-volume history of eastern and southern European immi- 
grants during this period is John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigration(1985). 
For an innovative account of European immigrants  encounters with racial patterns in the United 
States, seeMatthew Frye Jacobson,Whiteness of a Different Color: European Americans and the 
Alchemy of Race(1998). 
The experience of Chinese immigrants during the period of American exclusion is discussed 
in Erika Lee, At America s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882 1943 
(2003), while Steven P. Erie, Rainbow s End: Irish Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban 
Machine Politics, 1840 1945 (1988), insightfully examines the benefits and costs of big-city 
machines. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 1865 1925(1987) andHerbert 
Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America(1976) are essential sources on 
both immigrant and nonimmigrant labor during this period. 
John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro 
Americans, 8th ed. (2000) offers a comprehensive account of African American life, while an 
important account of black female workers can be found in Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, 
Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present(1985). On the 
rise of mass culture, see David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements 
(1993) and Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in 
the Twentieth Century(1984). On the new woman and feminism, consult Nancy F. Cott, The 
Grounding of Modern Feminism(1987) and Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian 
New York and the Creation of a New Century(2000). 
770  "CHAPTER 20  "An Industrial Society, 1900 1920 
Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to 
this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin 
Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is 
an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and 
efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want NOW! 
www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 
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Progressivism 
P 
rogressivism was a reform movement that took its name from individuals who left the 
Republican Party in 1912 to join Theodore Roosevelt s new party, the Progressive 
Party. The term progressive, however, refers to a much larger and more varied group of 
reformers than those who gathered around Roosevelt in 1912. 
As early as 1900, these reformers had set out to cleanse and reinvigorate an America 
whose politics and society they considered in decline. Progressives wanted to rid politics 
of corruption, tame the power of the  trusts,  and, in the process, inject more liberty into 
American life. They fought against prostitution, gambling, drinking, and other forms of 
vice. They first appeared in municipal politics, organizing movements to oust crooked 
mayors and to break up local gas or streetcar monopolies. They carried their fights to the 
states and finally to the nation. Two presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, 
placed themselves at the head of this movement. 
Progressivism was popular among a variety of groups who brought to the movement dis- 
tinct, and often conflicting, aims. On one issue, however, most progressives agreed: the need 
for an activist government to right political, economic, and social wrongs. Some progressives 
wanted government to become active only long enough to clean up the political process, root 
out vice, upgrade the electorate, and break up trusts. These problems were so difficult to solve 
that many other progressives endorsed the notion of a permanently active government with 
the power to tax income, regulate industry, protect consumers from fraud, empower workers, 
safeguard the environment, and provide social welfare. Many progressives, in other words, 
came to see the federal government as the institution best equipped to solve social problems. 
Such positive attitudes toward government power marked an important change in 
American politics. Americans had long been suspicious of centralized government, view- 
ing it as the enemy of liberty. The Populists had broken with that view (see chapter 19), 
but they had been defeated. The progressives had to build a new case for strong govern- 
ment as the protector of liberty and equality. 
Progressivism and the Protestant Spirit 
21 
Focus Question 
Which groups of Americans spearheaded the progressive movement? 
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Progressivism emerged first and most strongly among young, mainly Protestant, middle- 
class Americans who felt alienated from their society. Many had been raised in devout 
Protestant homes in which religious conviction had often been a spur to social action. 
They were expected to become ministers or missionaries or to serve their church in some 
other way. They had abandoned this path, but they never lost their zeal for righting moral 
wrongs and for uplifting the human spirit. They were distressed by the immorality and 
772  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
1889 Hull House established 
1890 1904 All ex-Confederate states pass laws designed to disenfranchise black voters  " Virtually all states adopt the 
Australian (secret) ballot 
1900 La Follette elected governor of Wisconsin  " City commission plan introduced in Galveston, Texas 
1901 14 More than 1,000 African Americans lynched 
1901 Johnson elected reform mayor of Cleveland  " McKinley assassinated; Roosevelt becomes president 
1902 Direct primary introduced in Mississippi  " Initiative and referendum introduced in Oregon  " Roosevelt 
sides with workers in coal strike 
1903 McClure s Magazinepublishes Standard Oil exposé  " Federal court dissolves Northern Security Company 
1904 Roosevelt defeats Alton B. Parker for presidency 
1905 National Forest Service established 
1906 La Follette elected to U.S. Senate  " Congress passes Hepburn Act  " Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle " 
Congress passes Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act 
1907 Reformer Hughes elected New York governor  " Financial panic shakes economy 
1908 Taft defeats Bryan for presidency 
1909 Congress passes Payne-Aldrich tariff bill 
1910 Ballinger-Pinchot controversy  " NAACP founded  " Wilson elected governor of New Jersey 
1911 National Urban League founded  " City manager plan introduced in Sumter, South Carolina  " Wisconsin 
Industrial Commission established 
1912 Roosevelt forms Progressive Party  " Wilson defeats Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs for presidency 
1913 16th and 17th Amendments ratified  " Congress passes Underwood-Simmons Tariff  " Congress establishes 
Federal Reserve 
1914 Congress establishes Federal Trade Commission  " Congress passes Clayton Antitrust Act 
1916 Louis Brandeis appointed to Supreme Court  " Kern-McGillicuddy Act, Keating-Owen Act, and Adamson Act 
passed  " National Park Service formed  " National Women s Party founded 
1919 18th Amendment ratified 
1920 19th Amendment ratified 
C HR O NO L O G Y 
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corruption in American politics and by the gap that separated rich from poor. They became, 
in the words of one historian,  ministers of reform.  
Other Protestant reformers retained their faith. This was true of William Jennings 
Bryan, the former Populist leader who became an ardent progressive and evangelical. 
Throughout his political career, Bryan always insisted that Christian piety and American 
democracy were integrally related. Billy Sunday, a former major league baseball player 
who became the most theatrical evangelical preacher of his day, elevated opposition to 
saloons and the  liquor trust  into a righteous crusade. And Walter Rauschenbusch led a 
movement known as the Social Gospel, which emphasized the duty of Christians to work 
for the social good. 
Protestants formed a large and diverse population, sizable sections of which showed lit- 
tle interest in reform. Thus it is important to identify smaller and more cohesive groups of 
reformers. Of the many that arose, three were of particular importance, especially in the 
early years: investigative journalists, who were called  muckrakers ; the founders and 
supporters of settlement houses; and socialists. 
Muckrakers,Magazines,and the Turn toward  Realism  
The term muckrakerwas coined by Theodore Roosevelt, who had intended it as a criticism 
of newspaper and magazine reporters who, for no purpose other than monetary reward, 
wrote stories about scandalous situations. But the label became a badge of honor among 
journalists who were committed to exposing repugnant aspects of American life. During 
the first decade of the 20th century, they presented the public with one startling revela- 
tion after another. Ida Tarbell revealed the shady practices by which John D. Rockefeller 
had transformed his Standard Oil Company into a monopoly. Lincoln Steffens unraveled 
the webs of bribery and corruption that were strangling local governments in the nation s 
cities. George Kibbe Turner documented the extent of prostitution and family disintegra- 
tion in the ethnic ghettos of those cities. These muckrakers wanted to shock the public 
into recognizing the shameful state of political, economic, and social affairs and to prompt 
 the people  to take action. 
The tradition of investigative journalism reached back at least to the 1870s, when news- 
paper and magazine writers exposed the corrupt practices of New York City s Boss Tweed 
and his Tammany Hall machine. The 20th-century rise of the muckrakers reflected two 
factors, one economic expanded newspaper and magazine circulation and the other 
intellectual increased interest in  realism.  Together they transformed investigative 
reporting into something of national importance. 
From 1870 to 1909, daily newspapers rose in number from 574 to 2,600, and their cir- 
culation increased from less than 3 million to more than 24 million. During the first 
decade of the 20th century, the magazine revolution of the 1880s and 1890s (see chapter 
19) accelerated. Cheap, 10-cent periodicals such as McClure s Magazine andLadies  Home 
Journal, with circulations of 400,000 to 1 million, began to displace genteel and relatively 
Muckrakers, Magazines, and the Turn toward  Realism   " 773 
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774  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
expensive 35-cent publications such as Harper s andThe Atlantic Monthly. The expanded 
readership brought journalists considerably more money and prestige and attracted many 
talented and ambitious men and women to the profession. Wider circulation also made 
magazine publishers more receptive to stories particularly sensational ones about ill-gotten 
economic power, government corruption, and urban vice that might appeal to their 
expanded readership. 
The American middle class s growing intellectual interest in  realism  also favored the 
muckrakers.  Realism  was a way of thinking that prized detachment, objectivity, and 
skepticism. Those who embraced it pointed out that constitutional theory, with its 
emphasis on citizenship, elections, and democratic procedures, had little to do with the 
Pioneering Investigative Journalism This Christmas 1903 issue of 
McClure s Magazine featured the second part of Ida Tarbell s exposé of John 
D. Rockefeller s business practices. Tarbell s revelations were regarded as 
sensational, and they convinced many middle-class Americans of the need 
for economic and political reform. 
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way government in the United States actually worked. What could one learn about 
bosses, machines, and graft from studying the Constitution? There was also a sense that 
the nation s glorification of the  self-made man  and of  individualism  was preventing 
Americans from coping effectively with large-scale organizations corporations, banks, 
labor unions and their sudden centrality to the nation s economy and to society. The 
realists, finally, criticized the tendency, which was prevalent among American writers and 
artists, to emulate European styles, and they called on them to pioneer new styles that 
would be better able to capture American life and thought. 
By the first decade of the 20th century, intellectuals and artists of all sorts philosophers 
John Dewey and William James; social scientists Thorstein Veblen and Charles Beard; nov- 
elists Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair; painters John Sloan, George 
Bellows, and other members of the  Ashcan School ; photographers Jacob Riis and Lewis 
Hine; architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright; jurists Oliver Wendell Holmes 
and Louis Brandeis were attempting to create truer, more realistic ways of representing 
and analyzing American society. Many of them were inspired by the work of investigative 
journalists, and some had been newspapermen. Years of firsthand observation enabled 
them to describe American society as it  truly was.  They brought shadowy figures vividly 
to life. They pictured for Americans the captain of industry who ruthlessly destroyed his 
competitors; the con artist who tricked young people new to city life; the innocent immi- 
grant girl who fell prey to the white slave traders; the corrupt policeman under whose pro- 
tection urban vice flourished. 
A large middle class, uneasy about the state of American society, applauded the muck- 
rakers for telling these stories and became interested in reform. Members of this class pres- 
sured city and state governments to send crooked government officials to jail and to stamp 
out the sources of corruption and vice. Between 1902 and 1916, more than 100 cities 
launched investigations of the prostitution trade. At the federal level, all three branches of 
government felt compelled to address the question of  the trusts  the concentration of 
power in the hands of a few industrialists and financiers. Progressivism began to crystallize 
into a political movement centered on the abuses the muckrakers had exposed. 
Settlement Houses and Women s Activism 
Established by middle-class reformers, settlement houses were intended to help the largely 
immigrant urban poor cope with the harsh conditions of city life. Much of the inspiration 
for settlement houses came from young, college-educated, Protestant women who were 
from comfortable but not particularly wealthy backgrounds. Some had imbibed a com- 
mitment to social justice from parents and grandparents who had fought to abolish slav- 
ery. Highly educated, talented, and sensitive to social injustice, they rebelled against being 
relegated solely to the roles of wife and mother and sought to assert their independence in 
socially useful ways. 
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Hull House 
Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established the nation s first settlement house, in Chicago, 
in 1889. The two women had been inspired by a visit the year before to London s Toynbee 
Hall, where a small group of middle-class men had been living and working with that city s 
poor since 1884. Addams and Starr bought a decaying mansion that had once been the 
country home of a prominent Chicagoan, Charles J. Hull. By 1889,  Hull House stood 
amidst factories, churches, saloons, and tenements inhabited by poor, largely foreign-born 
working-class families. 
Addams quickly emerged as the guiding spirit of Hull House. She moved into the 
building and demanded that all who worked there do the same. She and Starr enlisted 
extraordinary women such as Florence Kelley, Alice Hamilton, and Julia Lathrop. They 
set up a nursery for the children of working mothers, a penny savings bank, and an 
employment bureau, soon followed by a baby clinic, a neighborhood playground, and 
social clubs. Determined to minister to cultural as well as economic needs, Hull House 
sponsored an orchestra, reading groups, and a lecture series. Members of Chicago s 
widening circle of reform-minded intellectuals, artists, and politicians contributed their 
energies to the enterprise. John Dewey taught philosophy and Frank Lloyd Wright lec- 
tured on architecture. Clarence Darrow, the workingman s lawyer, and Henry Demarest 
Lloyd, Chicago s radical muckraker, spent considerable time at Hull House. In 1893, Illinois 
Governor John P. Altgeld named Hull House worker Florence Kelley as the state s chief 
factory inspector. Her investigations led to Illinois s first factory law, which prohibited 
child labor, limited the employment of women to eight hours a day, and authorized the 
state to hire inspectors to enforce the law. 
The Hull House activists seemed to have unlimited energy, imagination, and commit- 
ment. Julia Lathrop used her appointment to the State Board of Charities to agitate for 
776  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
Women Enrolled in Institutions of Higher Education, 1870 1930 
Women s Colleges Coed Institutions Total Percentage of 
Year (thousands of students) (thousands of students) (thousands of students) All Students Enrolled 
1870 6.5 4.6 11.1 21.0% 
1880 15.7 23.9 39.6 33.4 
1890 16.8 39.5 56.3 35.9 
1900 24.4 61.0 85.4 36.8 
1910 34.1 106.5 140.6 39.6 
1920 52.9 230.0 282.9 47.3 
1930 82.1 398.7 480.8 43.7 
Source:From Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for American Women(New York: Harper and Row, 1959), p. 46. 
11019_21_ch21_p0771-0808.qxd  6/4/07  11:50 AM  Page 776
improvements in the care of the poor, the handicapped, and the delinquent. With Edith 
Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge, she established the Department of Social Research 
at the University of Chicago (which would evolve into the nation s first school of social 
work). Alice Hamilton, who had overcome gender discrimination to become a doctor, pio- 
neered in the field of public health. 
The Hull House leaders did not command the instant fame accorded the muckrakers. 
Nevertheless, they were steadily drawn into the public arena. Thousands of women across 
Settlement Houses and Women s Activism " 777 
Jane Addams The founder of the settlement house movement, Addams was the 
most famous woman reformer of the progressive era. This photograph dates from 
the 1890s or 1900s, Hull House s formative period. 
B 
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778  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
the country were inspired to build their own settlement houses on the Hull House model 
(eventually more than 400 settlement houses would open nationwide). By 1910, Jane Addams 
had become one of the nation s most famous women. She and other settlement house work- 
ers played a critical role in fashioning the progressive agenda and in drafting piecesof pro- 
gressive legislation. 
The Cultural Conservatism of Progressive Reformers 
In general, settlement house workers were more sympathetic toward the poor, the illiterate, 
and the downtrodden than the muckrakers were. Although she disapproved of machine 
politics, Jane Addams saw firsthand the benefits that machine politicians delivered to their 
constituents. She respected the cultural inheritance of the immigrants and admired their 
resourcefulness. Although she wanted them to become Americans, she encouraged them to 
integrate their  immigrant gifts  into their new identities. Those attitudes were more liberal 
than those of other reformers, who considered many immigrants to be culturally, even 
racially, inferior. 
But there were limits even to Addams s sympathy for the immigrants. In particular, 
she disapproved of the new working-class entertainments that gave adolescents exten- 
sive and unregulated opportunities for intimate association. She was also troubled by the 
emerging sexual revolution (see chapter 20). Addams tended to equate female sexuality 
with prostitution, and she joined many other women reformers in a campaign to sup- 
press both. Addams and others had identified a serious problem in American cities, 
where significant numbers of immigrant and rural women new to urban life were lured 
into prostitution or chose it as a job preferable to 65 poorly paid hours per week in a 
sweatshop. 
The reformers  zeal on this matter, however, exaggerated the dimensions of the prob- 
lem and led to some questionable legislation, such as the Mann Act (1910), which made 
it illegal to transport a woman across state lines  for immoral purposes.  If this law per- 
mitted the prosecution of true traffickers in women, it also allowed the government to 
interfere in the private sexual relations of consenting adults. This is what happened in the 
case of Jack Johnson, the African American heavyweight boxing champion, who was 
arrested and convicted for  transporting  his white secretary, Lucy Cameron, across state 
lines. That Johnson s and Cameron s relationship was consensual and would culminate in 
marriage did not deter the authorities, who wanted to punish Johnson for his dominance 
of white boxers and his relationship with a white woman. 
The cultural conservatism evident in the attitudes of Jane Addams and others on female 
sexuality also emerged in their attitudes toward alcohol. Drinking rivaled prostitution as a 
problem in poor, working-class areas. Many men wasted their hard-earned money on drinks 
at the local saloon, a drain on meager family resources that created tension between these 
men and their wives. Domestic fights and family violence sometimes ensued. Settlement 
house workers were well aware of the ill effects of alcoholism (250 saloons did business in 
Chicago s 19th Ward alone) and sought to combat it. They called on working people to 
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Settlement Houses and Women s Activism " 779 
Jack Johnson, Heavyweight Boxing Champion Johnson angered whites in America both for defeating white 
boxers in the ring and for dating and marrying white women. The identity of Johnson s female companion in this photograph 
is not known. 
© 
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refrain from drink and pushed legislation that would shut down the saloons. The progres- 
sives joined forces with the Women s Christian Temperance Union (245,000 members 
strong by 1911) and the Anti-Saloon League. By 1916, through their collective efforts, these 
groups had won prohibition of the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages in 16 states. 
In 1919, their crowning achievement was the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 
making prohibition the law of the land (see chapter 23). 
In depicting alcohol and saloons as unmitigated evils, however, the prohibition 
movement ignored the role saloons played in ethnic, working-class communities. On 
Chicago s South Side, for example, saloons provided  thousands of workers with the only 
decent place to eat lunch. The meatpacking plants where they labored had no cafeterias, 
and few workers could stomach eating their lunch where animals were slaughtered, 
dressed, and packed. Some saloons catered to particular ethnic groups: They served tra- 
ditional foods and drinks, provided meeting space for fraternal organizations, and 
offered camaraderie to men longing to speak in their native tongue. Saloonkeepers 
sometimes functioned as informal bankers, cashing checks and making small loans. Not 
surprisingly, many immigrants shunned the prohibition movement. They had no inter- 
est in being  uplifted  and  reformed  in this way. Here was a gulf separating the immi- 
grant masses from the Protestant middle class that even compassionate reformers such 
as Jane Addams could not bridge. 
A Nation of Clubwomen 
Settlement house workers comprised only one part of a vast network of female reform- 
ers. Hundreds of thousands of women belonged to local women s clubs. Conceived in 
the 1860s and 1870s as self-help organizations in which women would be encouraged 
to sharpen their minds, refine their domestic skills, and strengthen their moral faculties 
(see chapter 19), these clubs, by 1900, began taking on tasks of social reform. Clubwomen 
typically focused their energies on improving schools, building libraries and playgrounds, 
expanding educational and vocational opportunities for girls, and securing fire and san- 
itation codes for tenement houses. In so doing, they made traditional female concerns  
the nurturing and education of children, the care of the home questions of public 
policy. 
Clubwomen rose to prominence in black communities, too, and addressed similar sorts 
of issues; on matters of sexuality and alcohol, they often shared the conservative senti- 
ments of their white counterparts. Some groups of black clubwomen ventured into com- 
munity affairs more boldly than their white counterparts, however, especially in southern 
states, where black men were being stripped of the right to vote, to serve on juries, and to 
hold political office. Whites were prepared to punish any African American, male or 
female, who showed too much initiative or was thought to be challenging the principles 
of white supremacy. Even so, many black female activists persevered in the face of such 
threats, determined to provide leadership in their communities and voice their people s 
concerns. 
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Socialism and Progressivism 
Issues such as women s sexuality and men s alcoholism drew progressives in a conserva- 
tive direction, but other issues drew them to socialism. In the early 20th century, social- 
ism stood for the transfer of control over big businesses from the capitalists who owned 
them to the laboring masses who worked in them. Socialists believed that such a transfer, 
usually defined in terms of government ownership and operation of corporations, would 
make it impossible for wealthy elites to control society. 
The Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901, became a political force during the 
first 16 years of the century, and socialist ideas influenced progressivism. In 1912, at the 
peak of its influence, the Socialist Party enrolled more than 115,000 members. Its presi- 
dential candidate, the charismatic Eugene Victor Debsof Terre Haute, Indiana, attracted 
almost a million votes 6 percent of the total votes cast that year. In that same year, 1,200 
Socialists held elective office in 340 different municipalities. Of these, 79 were mayors of 
cities as geographically and demographically diverse as Schenectady, New York; Milwaukee, 
Wisconsin; Butte, Montana; and Berkeley, California. More than 300 newspapers and peri- 
odicals, with a combined circulation exceeding 2 million, spread the socialist gospel. The 
most important socialist publication was Appeal to Reason, published by Julius Wayland 
from Kansas and sent out each week to 750,000 subscribers. In 1905, Wayland published, 
in serial form, a novel by an obscure muckraker named Upton Sinclair, which depicted the 
scandalous working conditions in Chicago s meatpacking industry. When it was later pub- 
lished in book form in 1906,The Jungle created such an outcry that the federal government 
was forced to regulate the meat industry. 
The Many Faces of Socialism 
Socialists came in many varieties. In Milwaukee, they consisted of predominantly German 
working-class immigrants and their descendants; in New York City, their numbers were 
strongest among Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In the Southwest, tens of 
thousands of disgruntled native-born farmers who had been Populists in the 1890s 
now flocked to the socialist banner. In Oklahoma alone, these erstwhile Populists were 
numerous enough by 1912 to support 11 socialist weeklies. In that same year, Oklahoma 
voters gave a higher percentage of their votes, more than 16 percent, to the Socialist can- 
didate Debs than did the voters of any other state. In the West, socialism was popular 
among miners, timber cutters, and others who labored in isolated areas where industri- 
alists possessed extraordinary power over work, politics, and community life. These rad- 
icals gravitated to the militant labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 
(see chapter 20), which found a home in the Socialist Party from 1905 to 1913. 
Socialists differed from each other not only in their occupations and ethnic origins but 
also in their politics. The IWW was the most radical socialist group, with its incessant calls 
for revolution. By contrast, mainstream socialism, as articulated by Debs, was more 
respectful of American political, cultural, and religious traditions. Mainstream socialists 
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saw themselves as the saviors rather than the destroyers of the American republic as the 
true heirs of Thomas Jefferson. Their confidence that the nation could be redeemed through 
conventional politics through the election of Debs as president is evidence of their affec- 
tion for American democracy. And their faith in redemption reveals the degree to which 
Protestant religious beliefs underlay their quest for social justice and what they called a 
 cooperative commonwealth.  Evolutionary socialists, led by Victor Berger of Milwaukee, 
abandoned talk of revolution altogether and chose instead an aggressive brand of reform 
politics. They were dubbed  gas and water socialists because of their interest in improv- 
ing city services. 
These differences would, after 1912, fragment the socialist movement. For a decade or 
so, however, these divergent groups managed to coexist in a single political party, thanks, 
largely, to the leadership of Debs. When he was released from a Chicago jail in 1895 after 
serving time for his role in the strike against the Pullman Company (see chapter 19), Debs 
declared to a gathering of 100,000 admirers:  Manifestly the spirit of  76 still survives. The 
fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished. . . . The vindication and glori- 
fication of American principles of government, as proclaimed to the world in the Declaration 
of Independence, is the high purpose of this convocation.  
Socialists and Progressives 
Debs s speeches both attracted and disturbed progressives. On the one hand, he spoke 
compellingly about the dangers of unregulated capitalism and excessively concentrated 
wealth, both progressive concerns. His confidence that a strong state could bring the eco- 
nomic system under control mirrored the progressives  own faith in the positive uses of 
government. Progressives often worked hand-in-hand with socialists to win economic and 
political reforms, especially at the municipal and state levels, and many intellectuals and 
reformers easily moved back and forth between socialism and progressivism. Florence 
Kelley, Hull House reformer and Illinois factory inspector, was one such person; Clarence 
Darrow, a Chicago trial lawyer who successfully defended the IWW s William Haywood 
in 1907 against charges that he had murdered a former Idaho governor, was another. Walter 
Lippmann, who would become a close adviser to President Wilson during the First World 
War, began his political career in 1912 as an assistant to the Socialist mayor of Schenectady. 
Several of the era s most prominent intellectuals, including John Dewey, Richard Ely, and 
Thorstein Veblen, also traveled back and forth between the socialist and progressive 
camps. So did Helen Keller, the country s leading spokesperson for the disabled. 
On the other hand, Debs s talk of revolution scared progressives, as did his efforts to 
organize a working-class political movement independent of middle-class involvement or 
control. Although progressives wanted to tame capitalism, they stopped short of wanting 
to eliminate it. They wanted to improve working and living conditions for the masses but 
not cede political control to them. The progressives hoped to offer a political program with 
enough socialist elements to counter the appeal of Debs s more radical movement. In this, 
they were successful. 
782  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
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Municipal Reform 
Progressive-era reform battles first erupted over control of municipal transportation networks 
and utilities. Private corporations typically owned and operated street railways and electrical 
and gas systems. Many of the corporations used their monopoly power to charge exorbitant 
fares and rates, and they often won that power by bribing city officials who belonged to 
one of the political machines. Corporations achieved generous reductions in real estate 
taxes in the same way. 
The attack on private utilities and their protectors in city government gained momentum 
in the mid-1890s. In Detroit, reform-minded Mayor Hazen S. Pingree led successful fights 
to control the city s gas, telephone, and trolley companies. In Chicago in 1896 and 1897, a 
group of middle-class reformers ousted a corrupt city council and elected a mayor, Carter 
Harrison, Jr., who promised to protect Chicago s streetcar riders from exploitation. In 
Cleveland,the crusading reformer Tom Johnson won election as mayor in 1901, curbed the 
power of the streetcar interests, and brought honest and efficient government to the city. 
Occasionally, a reform politician of Johnson s caliber would rise to power through one 
of the regular political parties. But this path to power was a difficult one, especially in cities 
where the political parties were controlled by machines. Consequently, progressives 
worked for reforms that would strip the parties of their power. Two of their favorite 
reforms were the city commission and the city manager forms of government. 
The City Commission Plan 
First introduced in Galveston, Texas, in 1900, in the wake of a devastating tidal wave, the 
city commission shifted municipal power from the mayor and his aldermen to five city 
commissioners, each responsible for a different department of city government. In Galveston 
and elsewhere, the impetus for this reform came from civic-minded businessmen who 
were determined to rebuild government on the same principles of efficient and scientific 
management that had energized the private sector. The results were often impressive. The 
Galveston commissioners restored the city s credit after a brush with bankruptcy, improved 
the city s harbor, and built a massive seawall to protect the city from future floods. They 
accomplished all of this on budgets that had been cut by one-third. In Houston, Texas; 
Des Moines, Iowa; Dayton, Ohio; Oakland, California; and elsewhere, city commissioners 
similarly improved urban infrastructures, expanded city services, and strengthened the 
financial health of the cities. Many commissions established publicly owned utilities. By 
1913, more than 300 cities, most of them small to middling in size, had adopted the city 
commission plan. 
The City Manager Plan 
The city commission system did not always work to perfection, however. Sometimes the com- 
missioners used their position to reward electoral supporters with jobs and contracts; other 
times, they pursued power and prestige for their respective departments. The city manager 
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plan was meant to overcome such problems. Under this plan, the commissioners continued 
to set policy, but policy implementation now rested with a  chief executive.  This official, 
who was not elected but appointed by the commissioners, would curtail rivalries among 
commissioners and ensure that no outside influences interfered with the impartial, busi- 
nesslike management of the city. The job of city manager was explicitly modeled after that 
of a corporation executive. First introduced in Sumter, South Carolina, in 1911 and then in 
Dayton, Ohio, in 1913, by 1919 the city manager plan had spread to 130 cities. 
The Costs of Reform 
Although these reforms limited corruption and improved services, they were not uni- 
versally popular. Poor and minority voters, in particular, found that their influence in 
local affairs was weakened by the shift to city commissioners and city managers. Previ- 
ously, candidates for municipal office (other than the mayor) competed in ward elec- 
tions rather than in citywide elections. Voters in working-class wards commonly elected 
workingmen to represent them, and voters in immigrant wards made sure that fellow 
ethnics represented their interests on city councils. Citywide elections diluted the 
strength of these constituencies. Candidates from poor districts often lacked the money 
needed to mount a citywide campaign, and they were further hampered by the nonpar- 
tisan nature of such elections. Denied the support of a political party or platform, they 
had to make themselves personally known to voters throughout the city. That was a 
much easier task for the city s  leading citizens  manufacturers, merchants, and 
lawyers than it was for workingmen. In Dayton, the percentage of citizens voting Social- 
ist rose from 25 percent to 44 percent in the years following the introduction of the com- 
mission manager system, but the number of Socialists elected to office declined from five 
to zero. Progressive political reforms thus frequently reduced the influence of radicals, 
minorities, and the poor in elections. 
Political Reform in the States 
784  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
Focus Question 
How did progressive reformers hope to create a  responsible  and  virtuous  electorate? 
What were the consequences of their reforms? 
As at the local level, political parties at the state level were often dominated by corrupt 
politicians who did the bidding of powerful private lobbies. In New Jersey in 1903, for 
example, industrial and financial interests, working through the Republican Party 
machine, controlled numerous appointments to state government, including the chief justice 
of the state supreme court, the attorney general, and the commissioner of banking and insur- 
ance. Such webs of influence ensured that New Jersey would provide large corporationssuch 
as the railroads with favorable political and economic legislation. 
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Restoring Sovereignty to  the People  
Progressives introduced reforms designed to undermine the power of party bosses, restore 
sovereignty to  the people,  and encourage honest, talented individuals to enter politics. 
One such reform was the direct primary, a mechanism that enabled voters, rather than 
party bosses, to choose party candidates. Mississippi introduced this reform in 1902 and 
Wisconsin in 1903. By 1916, all but three states had adopted the direct primary. Closely 
related was a movement to strip state legislatures of their power to choose U.S. senators. 
State after state enacted legislation that permitted voters to choose Senate candidates in 
primary elections. In 1912, a reluctant U.S. Senate was obliged to approve the 17th 
Amendment to the Constitution, mandating the direct election of senators. The state leg- 
islatures ratified this amendment in 1913. 
Populists had first proposed direct election of U.S. senators in the 1890s; they also pro- 
posed the initiativeand the referendum, both of which were adopted first by Oregon in 
1902 and then by 18 other states between 1902 and 1915. The initiative allowed reform- 
ers to put legislative proposals before voters in general elections without having to wait for 
state legislatures to act. The referendum gave voters the right in general elections to repeal 
an unpopular act that a state legislature had passed. Less widely adopted but important 
nevertheless was the recall, a device that allowed voters to remove from office any public 
servant who had betrayed his trust. As a further control over the behavior of elected offi- 
cials, numerous states enacted laws that regulated corporate campaign contributions and 
restricted lobbying activities in state legislatures. These laws neither eliminated corporate 
privilege nor destroyed the power of machine politicians. Nevertheless, they made politics 
more honest and strengthened the influence of ordinary voters. 
Creating a Virtuous Electorate 
Progressive reformers focused as well on creating a responsible electorate that understood 
the importance of the vote and that resisted efforts to manipulate elections. To create this 
ideal electorate, reformers had to see to it that all of those citizens who were deemed vir- 
tuous could cast their votes free of coercion and intimidation. At the same time, reformers 
sought to disenfranchise citizens who were considered irresponsible and corruptible. In 
pursuing these goals, progressives substantially altered the composition of the electorate 
and strengthened government regulation of voting. The results were contradictory. On the 
one hand, progressives enlarged the electorate by extending the right to vote to women; 
on the other hand, they either initiated or tolerated laws that barred large numbers of 
minority and poor voters from the polls. 
The Australian Ballot 
Government regulation of voting had begun in the 1890s, when virtually every state 
adopted the Australian, or secret, ballot. This reform required voters to vote in private 
rather than in public. It also required the government, rather than political parties, to print 
the ballots and supervise the voting. Before this time, each political party had printed its 
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own ballot with only its candidates listed. At election time, each party mobilized its loyal 
supporters. Party workers offered liquor, free meals, and other bribes to entice voters to 
the polls and to  persuade  them to cast the party ballot. Because the ballots were cast in 
public, few voters who had accepted gifts of liquor and food dared to cross watchful party 
officials. Critics argued that the system corrupted the electoral process. They also pointed 
out that it made  ticketsplitting  dividing one s vote between candidates of two or more 
parties virtually impossible. 
The Australian ballot solved these problems. Although it predated progressivism, it embod- 
ied the progressives  determination to use government power to encourage citizens to casttheir 
votes responsibly and wisely. 
Personal Registration Laws 
That same determination was apparent in the progressives  support for the personal regis- 
tration laws that virtually every state passed between 1890 and 1920. These laws allowed 
prospective voters to register to vote only if they appeared at a designated government 
office with proper identification. Frequently, these laws also mandated a certain period of 
residence in the state before registration and a certain interval between registration and 
actual voting. 
Personal registration laws were meant to disenfranchise citizens who showed no inter- 
est in voting until election day, when a party worker arrived with a few dollars and offered 
a free ride to the polls. However, they also excluded many hardworking, responsible, poor 
people who wanted to vote but had failed to register, either because their work schedules 
made it impossible or because they were intimidated by the complex regulations. The laws 
were particularly frustrating for immigrants with limited knowledge of American govern- 
ment and of the English language. 
Disenfranchisement 
Progressives also promoted election laws expressly designed to keep noncitizen immi- 
grants from voting. In the 1880s, 18 states had passed laws allowing immigrants to vote 
without first becoming citizens. Progressives reversed this trend. At the same time, the 
newly formed Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization (1906) made it more difficult to 
become a citizen. Applicants for citizenship now had to appear before a judge, who inter- 
rogated them, in the English language, on American history and civics. In addition, immi- 
grants were required to provide two witnesses to vouch for their  moral character  and 
their  attachment to the principles of the Constitution.  Finally, immigrants had to swear 
(and, if necessary, prove) that they were not anarchists or polygamists and that they had 
resided continuously in the United States for five years. 
Most progressives defended the new rigor of the process. U.S. citizenship, they believed, 
carried responsibilities; it was not to be bestowed lightly. This position was understandable, 
given the electoral abuses progressives had exposed. Nevertheless, the reforms also denied 
the vote to a large proportion of the population. In cities and towns where immigrants 
786  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
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dominated the workforce, the numbers of registered voters fell steeply. Nowhere was 
exclusion more startling than in the South, where between 1890 and 1904, every ex- 
Confederatestate passed laws designed to strip blacks of their right to vote. Because laws 
explicitly barring blacks from voting would have violated the 15th Amendment, this exclu- 
sion had to be accomplished indirectly through literacy tests, property qualifications, 
and poll taxes mandated by the legislatures of the ex-Confederate states. Any citizen who 
failed a reading test, or who could not sign his name, or who did not own a minimum 
amount of property, or who could not pay a poll tax, lost his right to vote. The citizens 
who failed these tests most frequently were blacks who formed the poorest and least 
educated segment of the southern population but a large portion of the region s poor 
whites also failed the tests. The effects of disenfranchisementwere stark. In 1900, only 
1,300 blacks voted in Mississippi elections, down from 130,000 in the 1870s. Virginia s 
voter turnout dropped from 60 percent of adult men (white and black) in 1900 to 28 percent 
in 1904. 
Many progressives in the North, such as Governor Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, 
criticized southern disenfranchisement. Some, including Jane Addams and John 
Dewey, joined in 1910 with W. E. B. Du Bois and other black reformers to found the 
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an interracial 
political organization that made black equality its primary goal. In the South, however, 
white progressives rarely challenged disenfranchisement, and most had little difficulty 
Political Reform in the States  " 787 
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Source: Data from Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International, 1989). 
11019_21_ch21_p0771-0808.qxd  6/4/07  11:50 AM  Page 787
justifying it with progressive ideology. Because progressives everywhere considered the 
right to vote a precious gift granted only to those who could handle its responsibilities, 
they equally believed that it must be withheld from people who were deemed racially 
or culturally unfit. Progressives in the North excluded many immigrants on just those 
grounds. Progressives in the South saw the disenfranchisement of African Americans in 
the same light. 
Disillusionment with the Electorate 
In the process of identifying those groups  unfit  to hold the franchise, some progres- 
sives soured on the electoral process altogether. The more they looked for rational and 
virtuous voters, the fewer they found. In Drift and Mastery (1914), Walter Lippmann 
argued that ordinary people had been overwhelmed by industrial and social changes. 
Because these changes seemed beyond their comprehension or control, they  drifted,  
unable to  master  the circumstances of modern life or take charge of their own des- 
tiny. Lippmann did not suggest that such ordinary people should be barred from vot- 
ing, but he did argue that more political responsibility should rest with appointed offi- 
cials who possessed the training and knowledge necessary to make government 
effective and just. The growing disillusionment with the electorate, in combination 
with intensifying restrictions on the franchise, created an environment in which 
fewer and fewer Americans actually went to the polls. Voting participation rates fell 
from79 percent in 1896 to only 49 percent in 1920. 
Woman Suffrage 
The major exception to this trend was the enfranchisement of women. This momentous 
reform was adopted by several states during the 1890s and the first two decades of the 
20th century and became federal law with the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the 
Constitution in 1920. 
Launched in 1848 at the famous Seneca Falls convention (see chapter 12), the women s 
rights movement floundered in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1890, suffragists came together in 
a new organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association(NAWSA), led 
by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Thousands of young, college-educated 
women campaigned door-to-door, held impromptu rallies, and pressured state legislators. 
Wyoming, which attained statehood in 1890, became the first state to grant women the 
right to vote, followed in 1893 by Colorado and in 1896 by Idaho and Utah. The main 
reason for success in these sparsely populated western states was not egalitarianism but 
rather the conviction that women s supposedly gentler and more nurturing nature would 
tame and civilize the men who had populated the frontier. 
This notion reflected a subtle but important change in the suffrage movement. Earlier 
generations had insisted that women were fundamentally equal to men, but the new suf- 
fragists argued that women were different from men. Women, they stressed, possessed a 
moral sense and a nurturing quality that men lacked. Consequently, they understood the 
civic obligations implied by the franchise and could be trusted to vote virtuously. Their 
788  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
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Economic and Social Reform in the States  " 789 
votes would hasten to completion the progressive task of cleansing the political process of 
corruption. Their experience as mothers and household managers, moreover, would enable 
them to guide local and state governments in efforts to improve education, sanitation, fam- 
ily wholesomeness, and the condition of women and children in the workforce. In other 
words, the enfranchisement of women would enhance the quality of both public and private 
life without insisting they were the equals of men in all respects. 
Suffragists were slow to ally themselves with blacks, Asians, and other disenfranchised 
groups. In fact, many suffragists, especially those in the South and West, opposed the fran- 
chise for Americans of color. They, like their male counterparts, believed that members of 
these groups lacked moral strength and thus did not deserve the right to vote. Unlike the 
suffrage pioneers of the 1840s and 1850s, many progressive-era suffragists were little trou- 
bled by racial discrimination and injustice. (See Map 21.1, Woman Suffrage Before 
1920, in the color insert following page 816.) 
Washington, California, Kansas, Oregon, and Arizona followed the lead of the other 
western states by enfranchising women in the years from 1910 to 1912. After a series of 
setbacks in eastern and midwestern states, the movement regained momentum under the 
leadership of the strategically astute Carrie Chapman Catt, who became president of 
NAWSA in 1915 and successfully coordinated myriad grassroots campaigns. Equally 
important was Alice Paul, a radical who founded the Congressional Union in 1913 and 
later renamed it the National Woman s Party. Paul and her supporters focused their atten- 
tion on the White House, picketing President Wilson s home 24 hours a day, brandish- 
ing large posters that chastised him for abandoning his democratic principles, and daring 
the police to arrest them. Several suffrage demonstrators were jailed, where they contin- 
ued their protests by going on hunger strikes (refusing to eat). Aided by a heightened 
enthusiasm for democracy generated by America s participation in the First World War 
(see chapter 23), which generated a more positive popular response to Paul s tactics than 
might otherwise have been the case, the suffragists achieved their goal of universal 
woman suffrage in 1920. 
Predictions that suffrage for women would radically alter politics turned out to be false. 
The political system was neither cleansed of corruption, nor did the government rush 
headlong to address the private needs of women and their families. Although the numbers 
of voters increased after 1920, voter participation rates continued to decline. Still, the 
extension of the vote to women, 144 years after the founding of the nation, was a major 
political achievement. 
Economic and Social Reform in the States 
In some states, progressive reform extended well beyond political parties and the electorate. 
Progressives also wanted to limit corporate power, strengthen organized labor, and offer social 
welfare protection to the weak. State governments were pressured into passing such legisla- 
tion by progressive alliances of middle-class and working-class reformers and by dynamic 
state governors. 
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Robert La Follette and Wisconsin Progressivism 
Nowhere did the progressives  campaign for social reform flourish as it did in Wisconsin. 
The movement arose first in the 1890s, in hundreds of Wisconsin cities and towns, as cit- 
izens began to mobilize against the state s corrupt Republican Party and the special privi- 
leges the party had granted to private utilities and railroads. These reform-minded citizens 
came from varied backgrounds. They were middle class and working class, urban and 
rural, male and female, intellectual and evangelical, Scandinavian Protestant and German 
Catholic. Wisconsin progressivism had already gained considerable momentum by 1897, 
when Robert La Follette assumed its leadership. 
La Follette was born into a prosperous farming family in 1855. He entered politics as a 
Republican in the 1880s and embraced reform in the late 1890s. Elected governor in 1900, 
he secured for Wisconsin both a direct primary and a tax law that stripped the railroad 
corporations of tax exemptions they had long enjoyed. In 1905, he pushed through a civil 
service law mandating that every state employee meet a certain level of competence. 
790  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
Robert La Follette, Wisconsin Progressive This photograph of La Follette campaigning in Wisconsin in 1897 captures the 
intensity and combativeness that  Fighting Bob  brought to progressivism. 
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A tireless campaigner and a spellbinding speaker,  Fighting Bob  won election to the 
U.S. Senate in 1906. Meanwhile, Wisconsin s advancing labor and socialist movements 
impelled progressive reformers to focus their legislative efforts on issues of corporate greed 
and social welfare. By 1910, reformers had passed state laws that regulated railroad and 
utility rates, instituted the nation s first state income tax, and provided workers with com- 
pensation for injuries, limitations on work hours, restrictions on child labor, and minimum 
wages for women. 
Many of these laws were written by social scientists at the University of Wisconsin, with 
whom reformers had close ties. In the first decade of the 20th century, John R. Commons, 
University of Wisconsin economist, drafted Wisconsin s civil service and public utilities 
laws. In 1911, Commons designed and won legislative approval for the Wisconsin Indus- 
trial Commission, which brought together employers, trade unionists, and professionals 
and gave them broad powers to investigate and regulate relations between industry and 
labor throughout the state. Never before had a state government so plainly committed itself 
to the cause of industrial justice. For the first time, the rights of labor would be treated with 
the same respect as the rights of industry. Equally important was the responsibility the com- 
mission delegated to nonelected professionals: social scientists, lawyers, engineers, and oth- 
ers. These professionals, Wisconsin reformers believed, would succeed where political parties 
had failed namely, in providing the public with expert and honestgovernment. 
The  Wisconsin idea  found quick adoption in Ohio, Indiana, New York, and Colorado; 
and in 1913, the federal government established its own Industrial Relations Commission 
and hired Commons to direct its investigative staff. In other areas, too, reformers began 
urging state and federal governments to shift the policy-making initiative away from polit- 
ical parties and toward administrative agencies staffed by professionals. 
Progressive Reform in New York 
New York was second only to Wisconsin in the vigor and breadth of its progressive move- 
ment. As in Wisconsin, New York progressives focused first on fighting political corrup- 
tion. Revelations of close ties between leading Republican politicians and life insurance 
companies vaulted reform lawyer Charles Evans Hughes into the governor s mansion in 
1907. Hughes immediately established several public service commissions to regulate rail- 
roads and utility companies. Also, as in Wisconsin, the labor movement exercised its influ- 
ence. New York City garment workers struck and forced state legislators to regulate work- 
ing conditions. With the establishment of the Factory Investigating Committee, New York, 
like Wisconsin, became a pioneer in labor and social welfare policy. 
New York state legislators also faced pressure from middle-class reformers settlement 
house workers such as Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement and lawyers such as 
Louis Brandeis who had become convinced of the need for new laws to protect the dis- 
advantaged. This combined pressure from working-class and middle-class constituencies 
persuaded some state Democrats, including Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith and Senator 
Robert F. Wagner, to convert from machine to reform politics. Their appearance in the 
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progressive ranks represented the arrival of a new reform sensibility. Wagner and Smith 
were both ethnic Catholics (Wagner was born in Germany, and Smith was the grandchild 
of Irish immigrants). They opposed prohibition, city commissions, voter registration laws, 
and other reforms whose intent seemed anti-immigrant or anti-Catholic. Meanwhile, they 
supported reforms meant to improve the working and living conditions of New York s 
urban poor. They agitated for a minimum wage, factory safety, workmen s compensation, 
the right of workers to join unions, and the regulation of excessively powerful corpora- 
tions. Their participation in progressivism accelerated the movement s shift, first in New 
York and then elsewhere, away from a preoccupation with political parties and electorates 
and toward questions of economic justice and social welfare. 
A Renewed Campaign for Civil Rights 
792  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
Focus Question 
How did W. E. B. Du Bois s approach to African American reform differ from that of 
Booker T. Washington? 
At the same time that politicians such as Smith and Wagner introduced an ethnic sensi- 
bility into progressivism, a new generation of African American activists began insisting 
that the issue of racial equality also be placed on the reform agenda. 
The Failure of Accommodationism 
Booker T. Washington s message that blacks should accept segregation and disenfran- 
chisement as unavoidable and focus their energies instead on self-help and self-improvement  
faced increasing criticism from black activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, 
Monroe Trotter, and others. Washington s accommodationist leadership (see chapter 18), in 
their eyes, brought southern blacks no reprieve from racism. More than 100 blacks had been 
lynched in 1900 alone; between 1901 and 1914, at least 1,000 others would be hanged. 
Increasingly, unsubstantiated rumors of black assaults on whites became occasions for 
white mobs to rampage through black neighborhoods and indiscriminately destroy life and 
property. In 1908, a mob in Springfield, Illinois, attacked black businesses and individuals; 
a force of 5,000 state militia was required to restore order. The troops were too late, however, 
to stop the lynching of two innocent black men, one a successful barber and the other an 84-year- 
old man who had been married to a white woman for more than 30 years.There was a sad irony 
in the deaths of these African Americans. Murdered in Abraham Lincoln shometown and 
within walking distance of his grave, they died just as black and white Americans everywhere 
were preparing to celebrate the centennial of the Great Emancipator s birth. 
Booker T. Washington had long believed that blacks who educated themselves or who 
succeeded in business would be accepted as equals by whites. As Du Bois and other black 
militants observed, however, white rioters made no distinction between rich blacks and 
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poor, or between solid citizens and petty criminals. All that had seemed to matter was the 
color of one s skin. Similarly, many black militants knew from personal experience that 
individual accomplishment was not enough to overcome racial prejudice. Du Bois was a 
brilliant scholar who became, in 1899, the first African American to receive a doctorate 
from Harvard University. Had he been white, Du Bois would have been asked to teach at 
Harvard or another elite academic institution, but no prestigious white university, in the 
South or North, made him an offer. 
From the Niagara Movement to the NAACP 
Seeing no future in accommodation, Du Bois and other young black activists came 
together at Niagara Falls in 1905 to fashion a new political agenda. They demanded that 
African Americans regain the right to vote in states that had taken it away, that segregation 
be abolished, and that the many discriminatory barriers to black advancement be 
removed. They declared their commitment to freedom of speech, the brotherhood of all 
men, and respect for the working man. Although their numbers were small, the mem- 
bers of the so-called Niagara movement were inspired by the example of the antebellum 
A Renewed Campaign for Civil Rights  " 793 
Antiblack Violence In 1913, a white mob destroyed a large part of the black section of Omaha, Nebraska. Race riots of this 
scale and devastation in early 20th-century America convinced many blacks that Booker T. Washington s message of accommodation 
was not working 
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794  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
abolitionists. Meeting in Boston, Oberlin, and Harpers Ferry all places of special signifi- 
cance to the abolitionist cause they hoped to rekindle the militant, uncompromising 
spirit of that earlier crusade (see chapters 12 and 14). 
The 1908 Springfield riot had shaken many whites. Some, especially those already work- 
ing for social and economic reform, now joined in common cause with the Niagara move- 
ment. Together, black and white activists planned a conference for Lincoln s birthday in 
1909 to revive, in the words of author William English Walling,  the spirit of the abolitionists  
and to  treat the Negro on a plane of absolute political and social equality.  Oswald Garrison 
Villard, the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, called on  all believers in democracy to join 
in a National conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the 
renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.  The conference brought together dis- 
tinguished progressives, white and black, including Mary White Ovington, Jane Addams, 
John Dewey, William Dean Howells, Ida B. Wells, and Du Bois. They drew up plans to estab- 
lish an organization dedicated to fighting racial discrimination and prejudice. In May 1910, 
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP) was officially 
launched, with Moorfield Storey of Boston as president, Walling as chairman of the execu- 
tive committee, and Du Bois as the director of publicity and research. 
The formation of the NAACP marked the beginning of the modern civil-rights move- 
ment. The organization launched a magazine, TheCrisis, edited by Du Bois, to publicize 
and protest the lynchings, riots, and other abuses directed against black citizens. Equally 
important was the Legal Redress Committee, which initiated lawsuits against city and state 
governments for violating the constitutional rights of African Americans. The committee 
scored its first major success in 1915, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the so- 
called grandfather clauses of the Oklahoma and Maryland constitutions violated the 15th 
Amendment. (These clauses allowed poor, uneducated whites but not poor, uneducated 
blacks to vote, even if they failed to pay their state s poll tax or to pass its literacy test, 
by exempting the descendants of men who had voted before 1867.) NAACP lawyers won 
again in 1917 when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a Louisville, Kentucky, 
law that required all blacks to reside in predetermined parts of the city. 
By 1914, the NAACP had enrolled thousands of members in scores of branches 
throughout the United States. The organization s success generated other civil-rights 
groups. The National Urban League, founded in 1911, worked to improve the economic 
and social conditions of blacks in cities. It pressured employers to hire blacks, distributed 
lists of available jobs and housing in African American communities, and developed social 
programs to ease the adjustment of rural black migrants to city life. 
Progress toward racial equality was sluggish. Attacking segregation and discrimination 
through lawsuits was, by its nature, a slow strategy that would take decades to complete. 
The growing membership of the NAACP, although impressive, was not large enough to 
qualify it as a mass movement, and its interracial character made the organization seem dan- 
gerously radical to millions of whites. White NAACP leaders responded to this hostility by 
limiting the number and power of African Americans who worked for the organization. 
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National Reform " 795 
This policy, in turn, outraged black militants who argued that no civil-rights organization 
should be in the business of appeasing white racists. 
Despite its limitations, the NAACP made significant strides. It gave Du Bois the secu- 
rity and visibility he needed to carry on his fight against Booker T. Washington s accom- 
modationist philosophy. Even before his death in 1915, Washington s influence in black 
and white communities had  receded. The NAACP, more than any other organization, helped 
resurrect the issue of racial equality at a time when many white Americans had accepted 
as normal the practices of racial segregation and discrimination. 
National Reform 
Focus Question 
What were the key similarities and differences in the progressive politics of 
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson? 
The more progressives focused on economic and social matters, the more they sought to 
increase their influence in national politics. Certain problems demanded national solu- 
tions. No patchwork of state regulations, for example, could adequately curtail the power 
of the trusts, protect workers, or monitor the quality of consumer goods. Moreover, state 
and federal courts often were hostile toward progressive goals: They repeatedly struck 
down as unconstitutional reform laws regulating working hours or setting minimum 
wages, on the grounds that they impinged on the freedom of contract and trade. A national 
progressive movement could force passage of laws that were less vulnerable to judicial 
veto or elect a president who could overhaul the federal judiciary with progressive-minded 
judges. 
National leadership would not emerge from Congress. The Democratic Party had been 
scarred by the Populist challenge of the 1890s. Divided between the radical Bryanites and 
the conservative followers of Grover Cleveland, and consequently unable to speak with 
one voice on questions of social and economic policy, after 1896 the Democrats seemed 
incapable of winning a national election. The Republican Party was more unified and pop- 
ular, but it was controlled by a conservative Old Guard. Led by Senator Nelson Aldrich of 
Rhode Island and House Speaker Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois, the Republican Old Guard 
was pro-business and devoted to a 19th-century style of backroom patronage. When 
Robert La Follette arrived in the Senate from Wisconsin in 1907, the Old Guard ostracized 
him as a dangerous radical. 
National progressive leadership came from the executive rather than the legislative branch, 
and from two presidents in particular, Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat 
Woodrow Wilson. These two presidents sponsored reforms that profoundly affected the lives 
of Americans and altered the nature of the American presidency. 
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796  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
The Roosevelt Presidency 
When the Republican bosses chose Theodore Roosevelt as William McKinley s running 
mate in 1900, their purpose was more to remove this headstrong, unpredictable character 
from New York state politics than to groom him for national leadership. As governor of 
New York, Roosevelt had been a moderate reformer, but even his modest efforts to rid the 
state s Republican Party of corruption and to institute civil service reform were too much 
for the state party machine, led by Thomas C. Platt. Consigning Roosevelt to the vice pres- 
idency seemed a safe solution. McKinley was a young, vigorous politician, fully in control 
of his party and his presidency. Less than a year into his second term, in September 1901, 
McKinley was shot by an anarchist assassin. The president clung to life for nine days, and 
then died. Upon succeeding McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, age 42, became the youngest 
chief executive in the nation s history. 
Born to an aristocratic New York City family, Roosevelt nevertheless developed an uncom- 
mon affection for  the people.  Asthmatic, sickly, and nearsighted as a boy, he remade him- 
self into a vigorous adult. With an insatiable appetite for high-risk adventure everything 
from  dude ranching  in the Dakota Territory, to big-game hunting in Africa, to wartime 
combat he was also a voracious reader and an accomplished writer. Aggressive and swagger- 
ing in his public rhetoric, he was in private a skilled, patient negotiator. A believer in the supe- 
riority of the English-speaking peoples, he nevertheless appointed members of  inferior  races 
to important posts in his administration. Rarely has a president s personality so enthralled the 
American public. He is the only 20th-century president immortalized on Mount Rushmore. 
Regulating the Trusts 
Roosevelt quickly revealed his flair for the dramatic. In 1902, he ordered the Justice 
Department to prosecute the Northern Securities Company, a $400 million monopoly that 
controlled all railroad lines and traffic in the Northwest from Chicago to Washington state. 
Never before had an American president sought to use the Sherman Antitrust Act to break 
up a business monopoly. The news shocked J. P. Morgan, the banker who had brokered 
the deal that had created Northern Securities. Morgan rushed to the White House, where 
he is said to have told Roosevelt,  If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my 
man and they can fix it up.  Roosevelt would have none of this  fixing.  In 1903, a federal 
court ordered Northern Securities dissolved, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the deci- 
sion the next year. Roosevelt was hailed as the nation s  trust-buster.  
Roosevelt, however, did not believe in breaking up all, or even most, large corpora- 
tions. Industrial concentration, he believed, brought the United States wealth, produc- 
tivity, and a rising standard of living. Rather than bust them up, Roosevelt argued, gov- 
ernment should regulate the industrial giants and punish those that used their power 
improperly. This new role would require the federal government to expand its powers. A 
newlyfortified government the centerpiece of a political program that Roosevelt would 
later call the New Nationalism was to be led by a forceful president, who was willing to 
use all of the powers at his disposal to achieve prosperity and justice. 
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Toward a  Square Deal  
Roosevelt displayed his willingness to use government power to protect the economically weak 
in a 1902 coal miners  strike. Miners in the anthracite fields of eastern Pennsylvania wanted 
recognition for their union, the United Mine Workers (UMW). They also wanted a 10 percent 
to 20 percent increase in wages and an eight-hour day. When their employers, led by George 
F. Baer of the Reading Railroad, refused to negotiate, they went on strike. In October, the fifth 
month of the strike, Roosevelt summoned the mine owners and John Mitchell, the UMW pres- 
ident, to the White House. Baer expected Roosevelt to threaten the striking workers with arrest 
by federal troops if they failed to return to work. Instead, Roosevelt supported Mitchell s 
request for arbitration and warned the mine owners that if they refused to go along, 10,000 
federal troops would seize their property. Stunned, the mine owners agreed to submit the dis- 
pute to arbitrators, who awarded the unionists a 10 percent wage increase and a nine-hour day. 
The mere fact that the federal government had ordered employers to compromise with 
their workers carried great symbolic weight. Roosevelt enjoyed a surge of support from 
Americans convinced that he shared their dislike for ill-gotten wealth and privilege. He 
also raised the hopes of African Americans when, only a month into his presidency, he 
dined with Booker T. Washington at the White House and then shrugged off the protests 
of white southerners, who accused him of undermining segregation. 
In his 1904 election campaign, Roosevelt promised that, if reelected, he would offer every 
American a  square deal.  The slogan resonated with voters and helped carry Rooseveltto a 
victory (57 percent of the popular vote) over the conservative Democrat Alton B. Parker. 
To the surprise of many observers, Roosevelt had aligned the Republican Party with the 
cause of reform. 
Expanding Government Power: The Economy 
Emboldened by his victory, the president intensified his efforts to extend government reg- 
ulation of economic affairs. His most important proposal was to give the government power 
to set railroad shipping rates and thereby to eliminate the industry s discriminatory mar- 
keting practices. The government, in theory, already possessed this power through the 
Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), a regulatory body established by Congress in 
1887, but the courts had so weakened the ICC s oversight and regulatory functions as to 
render it virtually powerless. Roosevelt achieved his goal in 1906, when Congress passed 
the Hepburn Act, which significantly increased the ICC s powers of rate review and enforce- 
ment. Roosevelt supported the Pure Food and Drug Act, passed by Congress that same year, 
which protected the public from fraudulently marketed and dangerous foods and medica- 
tions. He also campaigned for the Meat Inspection Act (1906), which committed the gov- 
ernment to monitoring the quality and safety of meat being sold to American consumers. 
Expanding Government Power: The Environment 
Roosevelt also did more than any previous president to extend federal control over the nation s 
physical environment. Roosevelt was not a  preservationist  in the manner of John Muir, 
National Reform " 797 
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founder of the Sierra Club, who insisted that the beauty of the land and the well-being of 
its wildlife should be protected from all human interference. Instead, Roosevelt viewed the 
wilderness as a place to live strenuously, to test oneself against the rough outdoors, and to 
match wits against strong and clever game. Roosevelt further believed that in the West  
that land of ancient forests, lofty mountain peaks, and magnificent canyons Americans 
could learn something important about their nation s roots and destiny. To preserve this 
West, Roosevelt oversaw the creation of 5 new national parks, 16 national monuments, and 
53 wildlife reserves. The work of his administration led directly to the formation of the 
National Park Service in 1916. 
Roosevelt also emerged a strong supporter of the  conservationist movement. Con- 
servationists cared little for national parks or grand canyons. They wanted to manage the 
environment, so as to ensure that the nation s resources were put to the most efficient eco- 
nomic use. Roosevelt shared the conservationists  belief that the plundering of western 
timberlands, grazing areas, water resources, and minerals had reached crisis proportions. 
Only broad regulatory controls would restore the West s economic potential. 
To that end, Roosevelt appointed a Public Lands Commission in 1903 to survey pub- 
lic lands, inventory them, and establish permit systems to regulate the kinds and numbers 
of users. Soon after, the Departments of Interior and Agriculture placed certain western 
lands rich in natural resources and waterpower off-limits to agricultural users. Govern- 
ment officials also limited waterpower development by requiring companies to acquire 
permits and pay fees for the right to generate electricity on public  land. When political 
favoritism and corruption within the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture threat- 
ened these efforts at regulation, Roosevelt authorized the hiring of university-trained 
experts to replace state and local politicians. Scientific expertise, rather than political con- 
nections, would now determine the distribution and use of western territory. 
Gifford Pinchot, a specialist in forestry management and Roosevelt s close friend, led the 
drive for scientific management of natural resources. In 1905, he persuaded Roosevelt to 
relocate jurisdiction for the national forests from the Department of the Interior to the 
Department of Agriculture, which, Pinchot argued, was the most appropriate department to 
oversee the efficient  harvest  of the nation s forest crop. The newly created National Forest 
Service, under Pinchot s control, quickly instituted a system of competitive bidding for the 
right to harvest timber on national forest lands. Pinchot and his expanding staff of college- 
educated foresters also implemented a new policy that exacted user fees from livestock 
ranchers who had previously used national forest grazing lands for free. Armed with new leg- 
islation and authority, Pinchot and fellow conservationists in the Roosevelt administration 
declared vast stretches of federal land in the West off-limits to mining and dam construction. 
The Republican Old Guard disliked these initiatives. When Roosevelt recommended 
prosecution of cattlemen and lumbermen who were illegally using federal land for private 
gain, congressional conservatives struck back with legislation (in 1907) that curtailed the 
president s power to create new government land reserves. Roosevelt responded by seizing 
another 17 million acres for national forest reserves before the new law went into effect. To 
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National Reform " 799 
his conservative opponents, excluding commercial activity from public land a program 
they regarded as socialistic was bad enough, but flouting the will of Congress with a 
17-million-acre land grab violated constitutional principles governing the separation of 
powers. Yet, to millions of American voters, Roosevelt s willingness to defy western cattle 
barons, mining tycoons, and other  malefactors of great wealth  increased his popularity. 
Progressivism: A Movement for the People? 
Historians have long debated how much Roosevelt s economic and environmental reforms 
altered the balance of power between the  interests  and the people. Some have demon- 
strated that many corporations were eager for federal government regulation that rail- 
road corporations wanted relief from the rate wars that were driving them into bank- 
ruptcy, for example, and that the larger meatpackers believed that the costs of government 
food inspections would drive smaller meatpackers out of business. So, too, historians have 
shown that agribusinesses, timber companies, and mining corporations in the West 
believed that government regulation would aid them and hurt smaller competitors. 
According to this view, government regulation benefited the corporations more than it 
benefited workers, consumers, and small businessmen. 
This view has some validity. These early reforms often curtailed corporate power only to 
a limited extent. Corporations fought with some success to turn the final versions of the 
reform laws to their advantage. But in 1907, the progressive program was still evolving. Pop- 
ular anger over corporate power and political corruption remained a driving force of pro- 
gressivism. The presence in the Senate of La Follette, Albert Beveridge of Indiana, and other 
anticorporate Republicans gave that anger an influential national voice. Whether the corpo- 
rations or the people would benefit most from progressive reforms had yet to be determined. 
The Republicans: A Divided Party 
The financial panic of 1907 further strained relations between Roosevelt reformers and Old 
Guard conservatives in the Republican Party. When several New York banks failed in a spec- 
ulative effort to corner the copper market, they triggered a run on banks, a short but severe 
dip in industrial production, and widespread layoffs. Everywhere, people worried that a major 
depression, like that of the 1890s, was in the offing. Only the timely decision of J. P. Morgan 
and his fellow bankers to pour private cash into the collapsing banks saved the nation from 
an economic crisis. Prosperity quickly returned, but the panic jitters lingered. Conservatives 
blamed Roosevelt s  radical  economic policies for the fiasco. To Roosevelt and his fellow 
progressives, however, the panic merely pointed out how little impact their reforms had 
actually made on the reign of  speculation, corruption, and fraud.  
Roosevelt, as a result, began calling for an overhaul of the banking system and regula- 
tion of the stock market. The Republican Old Guard, meanwhile, was more determined 
than ever to run the  radical  Roosevelt out of the White House. Sensing that he might fail 
to win his party s nomination, and mindful of a rash promise he had made in 1904 not to 
run again in 1908, Roosevelt decided not to seek reelection. It was a decision he would 
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soon regret. Barely 50 years old, he was too young and energetic to end his political career, 
and much of his reform program had yet to win Congressional approval. 
The Taft Presidency 
Roosevelt thought he had found in William Howard Taft,his secretary of war, an ideal suc- 
cessor. Taft had worked closely with Roosevelt on foreign and domestic policies. He had sup- 
ported Roosevelt s progressive reforms and offered him shrewd advice. Roosevelt believed 
Taft possessed both the ideas and the skills to complete the reform Republican program. 
To reach that conclusion, however, Roosevelt had to ignore some obvious differences 
between Taft and himself. Taft neither liked nor was particularly adept at politics. With 
the exception of a judgeship in an Ohio superior court, he had never held elective office. 
He was by nature a cautious and conservative man. As Roosevelt s handpicked succes- 
sor, Taft easily won the election of 1908, defeating Democrat William Jennings Bryan 
with 52 percent of the vote. His conservatism soon revealed itself in his choice of corpo- 
ration lawyers, rather than reformers, for cabinet positions. 
Battling Congress 
Taft s troubles began when he appeared to side against progressives in an acrimonious con- 
gressional battle over tariff legislation. Progressives had long desired tariff reduction, believ- 
ing that competition from foreign manufacturers would benefit American consumers and 
check the economic power of American manufacturers. Taft had raised expectations for tar- 
iff reduction when he called Congress into special session to consider a reform bill that called 
for a modest reduction of tariffs and an inheritance tax. The bill passed the House but was 
gutted in the Senate. When congressional progressives pleaded with Taft to use his power to 
whip conservative senators into line, he pressured the Old Guard into including a 2 percent 
corporate income tax in their version of the bill, but he did not insist on tariff reductions. As 
a result, the Payne-Aldrich Tariff he signed into law on August 5, 1909, did nothing to 
encourage imports. Progressive Republicans, bitterly disappointed, held Taft responsible. 
They were further angered when Taft withdrew his support of their efforts to strip 
Speaker Joe Cannon of his legislative powers. By 1910, Republican insurgents had entered 
into an alliance with reform-minded congressional Democrats. Then a bruising fight over 
Taft s conservation policies brought relations between Taft and the insurgent Republicans 
to the breaking point. 
The Ballinger-Pinchot Controversy 
Richard A. Ballinger, secretary of the interior, had aroused progressives  suspicions by reopen- 
ing for private commercial use 1 million acres of land that the Roosevelt administration had 
previously brought under federal protection. Gifford Pinchot, still head of the National 
Forest Service, obtained information implicating Ballinger in the sale of Alaskan coal 
deposits to a private syndicate. Pinchot showed the information, including an allegation 
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that Ballinger had personally profited from the sale, to Taft. Taft defended Ballinger, Pinchot 
went public with his charges, and a contentious congressional investigation ensued. What- 
ever hope Taft may have had of escaping political damage disappeared when Roosevelt, 
returning from an African hunting trip by way of Europe in spring 1910, staged a publi- 
cized rendezvous with Pinchot in England. In so doing, Roosevelt signaled his continuing 
support for his old friend Pinchot and his displeasure with Taft. 
Roosevelt s Return 
When Roosevelt arrived in the United States later that summer, he quickly returned to pol- 
itics. In September, Roosevelt embarked on a speaking tour, the high point of which was 
his elaboration at Osawatomie, Kansas, of his New Nationalism, an ambitious reform pro- 
gram that called for the federal government to stabilize the economy, protect the weak, 
and restore social harmony. 
The 1910 congressional elections confirmed the popularity of Roosevelt s positions. 
Insurgent Republicans trounced conservative Republicans in primary after primary, and the 
Democrats  embrace of reform brought them a majority in the House of Representatives for 
Roosevelt s Return " 801 
Theodore Roosevelt Launches His New Nationalism Campaign, 1910 This photograph of Roosevelt at Osawatomie, 
Kansas, captures some of the strength and exuberance of Roosevelt s public style. Roosevelt s appearance at Osawatomie 
marked his formal return to politics. For the occasion, he unveiled his New Nationalism, a far-reaching program of reform 
that called on the government to control the powerful corporations in the interests of the commonweal. 
B 
ro 
w 
n 
 B 
ro 
th 
e 
rs 
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the first time since 1894. When Robert La Follette, who was challenging Taft for the Repub- 
lican presidential nomination, seemed to suffer a nervous breakdown in February 1912, 
Roosevelt announced his own candidacy. In the 13 states sponsoring preferential primaries, 
Roosevelt won nearly 75 percent of the delegates, but the party s national leadership remained 
in the hands of the Old Guard, and they were determined to deny Roosevelt the Republican 
nomination. At the Republican convention in Chicago, Taft won renomination onthe first 
ballot. 
The Bull Moose Campaign 
Roosevelt had expected this outcome. The night before the convention opened, he had 
told an assembly of 5,000 supporters that the party leaders would not succeed in derail- 
ing their movement.  We stand at Armageddon,  he declared, and  we battle for the Lord.  
The next day, Roosevelt and his supporters withdrew from the convention and from the 
Republican Party. In August, the reformers reassembled as the new Progressive Party, 
nominated Roosevelt for president and California governor Hiram W. Johnson for vice 
president, and hammered out the reform platform they had long envisioned: sweeping 
regulation of the corporations, extensive protections for workers, a sharply graduated 
income tax, and woman suffrage.  I am as strong as a bull moose,  Roosevelt roared as he 
readied for combat; his proud followers took to calling themselves  Bull Moosers.  
Some of them, however, probably including Roosevelt, knew that their mission was 
futile. They had failed to enroll many Republican insurgents who had supported Roosevelt 
in the primaries but who now refused to abandon the GOP. Consequently, the Republi- 
can vote would be split between Roosevelt and Taft, making them both vulnerable to the 
Democrats  candidate, Woodrow Wilson. 
The Rise of Woodrow Wilson 
Few would have predicted in 1908 that the distinguished president of Princeton Univer- 
sity, Woodrow Wilson, would be the 1912 Democratic nominee for president of the 
United States. Before 1910, Wilson had never run for elective office, nor had he ever held 
an appointed post in a local, state, or federal administration. The son of a Presbyterian 
minister from Virginia, Wilson had practiced law for a short time after graduating from 
Princeton (then still the College of New Jersey) in 1879 before settling on an academic 
career. Earning his doctorate in political science from Johns Hopkins in 1886, he taught 
history and political science at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan (Connecticut) before returning 
to Princeton in 1890. He became president of Princeton in 1902, a post he held until he 
successfully ran for the governorship of New Jersey in 1910. 
Identifying himself with the anti-Bryan wing of the Democratic Party, Wilson attracted 
the attention of wealthy conservatives, who saw him as a potential presidential candidate. 
They convinced the bosses of the New Jersey Democratic machine to nominate Wilson 
for governor in 1910. Wilson accepted the nomination and won the governorship handily. 
He then shocked his conservative backers by declaring his independence from the state s 
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Democratic machine and moving New Jersey into the forefront of reform. Wilson s Pres- 
byterian upbringing had instilled in him a strong sense that society should be governed 
by God s moral law. As a young man in the 1880s, he had come to believe that the social 
consequences of unregulated industrialization were repugnant to Christian ethical prin- 
ciples. Although these beliefs had receded from view somewhat during his tenure as 
Princeton University president, they had not disappeared. Their presence in his con- 
sciousness helps to explain his emergence in 1911 and 1912 as one of the nation s lead- 
ing progressives. 
The Election of 1912 
At the Democratic convention of 1912, Wilson was something of a dark horse, running a 
distant second to House Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri. When the New York delega- 
tion gaveClark a simple majority of delegates, virtually everyone assumed that Clark would 
soon command the two-thirds majority needed to win the nomination. But Wilson smanagers 
held onto Wilson s delegates and began chipping away at Clark s lead. On the fourth day, 
on the 46th ballot, Wilson won the nomination. The exhausted Democrats closed ranks 
behind their candidate. 
Given the split in Republican ranks, Democrats had their best chance in 20 years of 
regaining the White House. A Wilson victory, moreover, would give the country its first 
southern-bornpresident in almost 
50 years. Finally, whatever its out- 
come, the election promised to 
deliver a hefty vote for reform. Both 
Roosevelt and Wilson were running 
on reform platforms, and the Social- 
ist Party candidate, Eugene V. Debs, 
was attracting larger crowds and gen- 
erating greater enthusiasm than had 
been expected. Taft was so certain of 
defeat that he barely campaigned. 
Debate among the candidates 
focused on the trusts. All three reform 
candidates Roosevelt, Wilson, and 
Debs agreed that corporations had 
acquired too much economic power. 
Debs argued that the only way to 
ensure popular control of that power 
was for the federal government to 
assume ownership of the trusts. 
Rooseveltcalled for the establishment 
of a powerful government that 
The Election of 1912 " 803 
WA 
7 
OR 
5 
CA 
R-11 
W-2 
NV 
3 
MT 
4 ND 
5 
SD 
5 
WY 
3 
ID 
4 
UT 
4 CO 
6 
AZ 
3 NM 
3 
TX 
20 
OK 
10 
KS 
10 
NE 
8 
MN 
12 
IA 
13 
LA 
10 
AR 
9 
MO 
18 
FL 
6 
MS 
10 AL 
12 GA 
14 
SC 
9 
TN 
12 
NC 
12 
KY 
13 
WS 
13 MI 
15 
IL 
29 IN 
15 
OH 
24 
VA 
12 
WV 
8 
PA 
38 
N.Y. 
48 
ME 
6 
NH 
4 
VT 
4 
MD 
8 
DE 
3 
NJ 
14 
MA 
 18 
CT 
7 
RI 
5 
Wilson  
(Democrat) 
Roosevelt    
(Progressive) 
Taft 
(Republican) 
Debs  
(Socialist) 
435 
8 
88 
---- 
number % number % 
82.0 
  1.5 
16.5 
---- 
6,296,547 
3,486,720 
4,118,571 
900,672 
42 
23 
27 
6.0 
Popular Vote 
Electoral Vote 
Map 21.2 Presidential Election, 1912 Taft and Roosevelt split 
the Republican vote, allowing Wilson to win with a plurality of the 
popular vote (42 percent) and a big majority (82 percent) of the 
electoral vote. 
11019_21_ch21_p0771-0808.qxd  9/4/07  1:58 PM  Page 803
would regulate and, if necessary, curb the power of the trusts. This was the essence of his 
New Nationalism, the program he had been advocating since 1910. 
Rather than regulate the trusts, Wilson declared his intention to break them up. He 
wanted to reverse the tendency toward economic concentration and thus restore opportu- 
nity to the people. This philosophy, which Wilson labeled the New Freedom, called for a 
temporary concentration of governmental power in order to dismantle the trusts. But once 
that was accomplished, Wilson promised, the government would relinquish its power. 
Wilson won the November election with 42 percent of the popular vote to Roosevelt s 
27 percent and Taft s 23 percent; Debs made a strong showing with 6 percent, the largest 
in his party s history. The three candidates who had pledged themselves to reform pro- 
grams Wilson, Roosevelt, and Debs together won a remarkable 75 percent of the vote. 
The Wilson Presidency 
Wilson quickly assembled a cabinet of talented men who could be counted on for wise 
counsel, loyalty, and influence over vital Democratic constituencies. He cultivated a public 
image of himself as a president firmly in charge of his party and as a faithful tribune of the 
people. 
Tariff Reform and a Progressive Income Tax 
Like his predecessor, Wilson first turned his attention to tariff reform. The House passed 
a tariff-reduction bill within a month, and Wilson used his leadership skills to push the 
bill through a reluctant Senate. The resulting Underwood-Simmons Tariff of 1913 reduced 
tariff barriers from approximately 40 percent to 25 percent. To make up for revenue lost 
to tariff reductions, Congress then passed an income tax law. The 16th Amendment to the 
Constitution, ratified by the states in 1913, had already given the government the right to 
impose an income tax. The law passed by Congress made good on the progressive pledge 
to reduce the power and privileges of wealthy Americans by requiring them to pay taxes 
on a greater percentage of their income than the poor. 
The Federal Reserve Act 
Wilson then asked Congress to overhaul the nation s financial system. Virtually everyone 
in both parties agreed on the need for greater regulation of banks and currency, but they 
differed sharply over how to proceed. The banking interests and their congressional sup- 
porters wanted the government to give the authority to regulate credit and currency flows 
either to a single bank or to several regional banks. Progressives opposed the vesting of so 
much financial power in private hands and insisted that any reformed financial system 
must be publicly controlled. Wilson worked out a compromise plan that included both 
private and public controls, and he marshaled the votes to push it through both the House 
and the Senate. By the end of 1913, Wilson had signed the Federal Reserve Act,the most 
important law passed in his first administration. 
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The Federal Reserve Act established 12 regional banks, each controlled by the private 
banks in its region. Every private bank in the country was required to deposit an average 
of 6 percent of its assets in its regional Federal Reserve bank. The reserve would be used 
to make loans to member banks and to issue paper currency (Federal Reserve notes) to 
facilitate financial transactions. The regional banks were also instructed to use their funds 
to shore up member banks in distress and to respond to sudden changes in credit 
demands by easing or tightening the flow of credit. A Federal Reserve Board appointed by 
the president and responsible to the public rather than to private bankers would set pol- 
icy and oversee activities within the 12 reserve banks. 
The Federal Reserve system strengthened the nation s financial structure and was in most 
respects an impressive political achievement for Wilson. In its final form, however, it revealed 
that Wilson was retreating from his New Freedom pledge. The Federal Reserve Board was a 
less powerful and less centralized federal authority than a national bank would have been, 
but it nevertheless represented a substantial increase in government control of banking. 
Moreover, the bill authorizing the system made no attempt to break up private financial insti- 
tutions that had grown too powerful or to prohibit the interlocking directorates that large 
banks used to augment their power. Because it sought to work with large banks rather than 
to break them up, the Federal Reserve system seemed more consonant with the principles of 
Roosevelt s New Nationalism than with those of Wilson s New Freedom. 
From the New Freedom to the New Nationalism 
Wilson s failure to mount a vigorous antitrust campaign confirmed his drift toward the New 
Nationalism. For example, in 1914, Wilson supported the Federal Trade Commission Act, 
which created a government agency by that name to regulate business practices. The Federal 
Trade Commission (FTC) had wide powers to collect information on corporate pricing poli- 
cies and on cooperation and competition among businesses. The FTC might have attacked 
trusts for  unfair trade practices,  but the Senate stripped the FTC Act s companion legisla- 
tion, the Clayton Antitrust Act, of virtually all provisions that would have allowed the gov- 
ernment to prosecute the trusts. Wilson supported this weakening of the Clayton Act, hav- 
ing decided that the breakup of large-scale industry was no longer practical or preferable. 
The FTC, in Wilson s eyes, would help businesses, large and small, to regulate themselves in 
ways that contributed to national well-being. In accepting giant industry as an inescapable 
feature of modern life and in seeking to regulate industrial behavior by means of government 
agencies such as the FTC, Wilson had become, in effect, a New Nationalist. 
At first, Wilson s drift to New Nationalist policies led him to support business interests. His 
nominations to the Federal Reserve Board, for example, were generally men who had worked 
for Wall Street firms and large industrial corporations. At the same time, he usually refused to 
use government powers to aid organized groups of workers and farmers. Court rulings had 
made worker and farmer organizations vulnerable to prosecution under the terms of the 
ShermanAntitrust Act of 1890. AFL president Samuel Gompers and other labor leaders tried 
but failed to convince Wilson to insert into the Clayton Antitrust Act a clause that would unam- 
biguously grant labor and farmer organizations immunity from further antitrust prosecutions. 
The Wilson Presidency  " 805 
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Nor did Wilson, at this time, view with any greater sympathy the campaign for African 
American political equality. He supported efforts by white southerners in his cabinet, such 
as Postmaster General Albert Burleson and Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, to segre- 
gate their government departments, and he largely ignored pleas from the NAACP to 
involve the federal government in a campaign against lynching. 
In late 1915, however, Wilson moved to the left, in part because he feared losing his 
reelection in 1916. The Bull Moosers of 1912 were retreating back to the Republican Party. 
Wilson remembered how much his 1912 victory, based on only 42 percent of the popular 
vote, had depended on the Republican split. To halt the progressives  rapprochement with 
the GOP, he made a bid for their support. In January 1916, he nominated Louis Brandeis 
to the Supreme Court. Not only was Brandeis one of the country s most respected pro- 
gressives, but he was also the first Jew nominated to serve on the country s highest court. 
Congressional conservatives did everything they could to block the confirmation of a man 
they regarded as dangerously radical, but Wilson, as usual, was better organized, and by 
June his forces in the Senate had emerged victorious. 
Wilson followed up this victory by pushing through Congress the first federal work- 
men s compensation law (the Kern-McGillicuddy Act, which covered federal employees), 
the first federal law outlawing child labor (the Keating-Owen Act), and the first federal law 
guaranteeing workers an eight-hour day (the Adamson Act, which covered the nation s 
400,000 railway workers). The number of Americans affected by these acts was rather 
small. Nevertheless, Wilson had reoriented the Democratic Party to a New Nationalism 
that cared as much about the interests of the powerless as the interests of the powerful. 
Trade unionists flocked to Wilson, as did most of the prominent progressives who had 
followed the Bull Moose in 1912. Meanwhile, Wilson had appealed to the supporters of 
William Jennings Bryan by supporting legislation that made federal credit available to farm- 
ers in need. He had put together a reform coalition capable of winning a majority at the polls. 
In the process, he had transformed the Democratic Party. From 1916 on, the Democrats, 
rather than the Republicans, became the chief guardians of the American reform tradition. 
That Wilson did so is a sign of the strength of the reform and radical forces in American 
society. By 1916, the ranks of middle-class progressives had grown broad and deep. Working- 
class protest had also accelerated in scope and intensity. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 
1912, and in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913, for example, the IWW organized strikes of 
textile workers that drew national attention, as did the 1914 strike by Colorado mine 
workers that ended with the infamous Ludlow massacre (see chapter 20). These protests 
reflected the mobilization of those working-class constituencies immigrants, women, the 
unskilled long considered inconsequential both by mainstream labor leaders and party 
politicians. Assisted by radicals, these groups had begun to fashion a more inclusive and polit- 
ically ambitious labor movement. Wilson and other Democrats understood the potential 
strength of this new labor movement, and the president s pro-labor legislative agenda in 
1916 can be understood, in part, as an effort to channel labor s new constituents into the 
Democratic Party. It was a successful strategy that contributed to Wilson s reelection in 1916. 
806  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
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Conclusion 
By 1916, the progressives had accomplished a great deal. They demonstrated that traditional 
American concerns with democracy and liberty could be adapted to an industrial age. They 
exposed and curbed some of the worst abuses of the American political system. They enfran- 
chised women and took steps to protect the environment. They broke the hold of laissez-faire 
economic policies on national politics and replaced it with the idea of a strong federal gov- 
ernment committed to economic regulation and social justice. They transformed the presi- 
dency into a post of legislative and popular leadership. They enlarged the executive branch by 
establishing new commissions and agencies charged with administering government policies. 
The progressives, in short, had presided over the emergence of a new national government, 
one in which power increasingly flowed away from municipalities and states and toward 
Washington. This reorientation followed a compelling logic: A national government stood a 
better chance of solving the problems of growing economic inequality, mismanagement of 
natural resources, and consumer fraud than did local and state governments. This emphasis 
on involving the federal government in economic and social affairs became progressivism s 
most enduring legacy. It made the movement a forerunner of the liberalism and  New Deal  
that emerged under Franklin Roosevelt s leadership in the 1930s (see chapter 25). 
The promise of effective federal government intervention, however, also brought a new 
danger: the possibility that government administrators might use their power to fashion 
themselves into a new bureaucratic elite impervious to popular control. Some progressives, 
such as Walter Lippmann, were already arguing that their knowledge, objectivity, and ded- 
ication equipped them to make critical decisions on behalf of the people without consult- 
ing them. Other progressives in government claimed to be responsive to the people while 
they cultivated close ties with corporations that they  were expected to regulate on the peo- 
ple s behalf. In some instances, in other words, progressive reformers were doing as much 
to advance their own bureaucratic interests or those of their corporate allies as they were 
helping to improve the welfare of ordinary Americans. 
These elitist tendencies did not go unchallenged. The democratic movements of the pro- 
gressive era those involving workers, women, minorities, consumers, and environmentalists  
were determined to hold both elected and appointed government officials accountable to 
the popular will. Their success in moving Wilson to the left in 1916 demonstrated that the 
forces of democracy could win. But the struggle between the contrasting progressive 
impulses toward democracy and elitism would go on, manifesting itself not simply in 
domestic politics but also in foreign affairs, where the United States was  seeking to balance 
its interest in spreading liberty with the protection of its international economic interests. 
S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS 
No topic in 20th-century American history has generated as large and rapidly changing a scholar- 
ship as has progressivism. Today, few scholars treat this political movement in the terms set forth 
by the progressives themselves: as a movement of  the people  against the  special interests.  In 
Conclusion " 807 
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The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR(1955), Richard Hofstadterargues that progressivism 
was the expression of a declining Protestant middle class at odds with the new industrial order. 
In TheSearch for Order, 1877 1920(1967), Robert Wiebefinds the movement s core in a rising 
middle class, closely allied to the corporations and bureaucratic imperatives that were defining 
this new order. Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American 
History(1963), and James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900 1918 
(1969), both argue that progressivism was the work of businessmen, who were eager to ensure 
corporate stability and profitability in a dangerously unstable capitalist economy. 
Without denying the importance of this corporate search for order,Nell Irvin Painter,Standing 
at Armageddon: The United States, 1877 1919(1987), and Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: 
Social Responsibility and the Liberal State(1991), insist on the role of the working class, men and 
women, whites and blacks, in shaping the progressive agenda. James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain 
Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870 1920 
(1986), andThomas J. Knock,To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World 
Order(1992), emphasize the influence of socialism on progressive thought, while Martin J. Sklar, 
The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1900 1916: The Market, the Law and Poli- 
tics(1988), stresses the role of progressivism in  containing  or taming socialism. 
Daniel T. Rodgersreconstructs the international networks of reform that nourished progres- 
sivism in Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age(1998). Nick Salvatoresuperbly 
captures the charisma and enigma of Debs in his Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist(1982). 
Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820 1920(1978), treats progressivism 
as a cultural movement to enforce middle-class norms on unruly urban and immigrant popula- 
tions. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in 
the United States(1992), and Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 
1890 1935(1991), reconstruct the central role of middle-class Protestant women in shaping pro- 
gressive social policy, while Robert M. Crunden,Ministers of Reform: The Progressives  Achieve- 
ment in American Civilization, 1889 1920(1982), stresses the religious roots of progressive 
reform. Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: the Life of William Jennings Bryan(2006), is indispens- 
able not just on Bryan but also on the religious dimensions of progressivism, while Alexander 
Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States(2000) is 
an essential guide to political reform during this period. An impressive recent attempt to syn- 
thesize the literature on progressivism is Michael McGerr,A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall 
of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870 1920(2003). 
808  "CHAPTER 21  "Progressivism 
Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to 
this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin 
Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is 
an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and 
efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want-NOW! 
www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 
11019_21_ch21_p0771-0808.qxd  6/4/07  11:50 AM  Page 808
Becoming a World Power,1898 1917 
F 
or much of the 19th century, most Americans were preoccupied by continental 
expansion. They treasured their distance from European societies, monarchs, and 
wars. Elections rarely turned on international events, and presidents rarely made their 
reputations as statesmen in the world arena. The diplomatic corps, like most agencies 
of the federal government, was small and inexperienced. The government projected its 
limited military power westward and possessed virtually no capacity or desire for 
involvement overseas. 
The nation s rapid industrial growth in the late 19th century forced a turn away from 
such continentalism. Technological advances, especially the laying of transoceanic 
cables and the introduction of steamship travel, diminished America s physical isola- 
tion. The babel of languages one could hear in American cities testified to how much 
the Old World had penetrated the New. Then, too, Americans watched anxiously as 
England, Germany, Russia, Japan, and other industrial powers intensified their compe- 
tition for overseas markets and colonies, and some believed America too needed to 
enter this contest. The voices making this argument grew more insistent and persuasive 
as the economic depression of the 1890s stripped the United States of its prosperity and 
pride. 
A war with Spain in 1898 gave the United States an opportunity to upgrade its military 
and acquire colonies and influence in the Western Hemisphere and Asia. Under Presidents 
William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, the United States pursued these initiatives and 
established a small but strategically important empire. Not all Americans supported this 
imperial project, and many protested the subjugation of the peoples of Cuba, Puerto Rico, 
and the Philippines that imperial expansion seemed to entail. In the eyes of anti-imperialists, 
the United States seemed to be becoming the kind of nation that many Americans had long 
despised one that valued power more than liberty. 
Roosevelt brushed aside these objections and set about creating an international system 
in which a handful of industrial nations pursued their global economic interests, domi- 
nated world trade, and kept the world at peace. Woodrow Wilson, however, was more 
troubled by America s imperial turn. His doubts became apparent in his efforts to devise a 
policy toward postrevolutionary Mexico that restrained American might and respected 
Mexican desires for liberty. It was a worthy ambition but one that proved exceedingly 
difficultto achieve. 
22 
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The United States Looks Abroad 
By the late 19th century, sizable numbers of Americans had become interested in extend- 
ing their country s influence abroad. The most important groups were Protestant mission- 
aries, businessmen, and imperialists. 
Protestant Missionaries 
Protestant missionaries were among the most active promoters of American interests 
abroad. Overseas missionary activity grew quickly between 1870 and 1900, most of it 
directed toward China. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of women s missionary soci- 
eties doubled, from 20 to 40; by 1915, these societies enrolled 3 million women. Con- 
vinced of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, Protestant missionaries considered it 
their Christian duty to teach the Gospel to the  ignorant  Asian masses and save their 
souls. Missionaries also believed that their efforts would free those masses from their racial 
810  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
1893 Frederick Jackson Turner publishes an essay announcing the end of the frontier 
1898 Spanish-American War (April 14 August 12)  " Treaty of Paris signed (December 10), giving U.S. control of 
Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico  " U.S. annexes Hawaii 
1899 1902 American-Filipino War 
1899 1900 U.S. pursues Open Door policy toward China 
1900 U.S. annexes Puerto Rico  " U.S. and other imperial powers put down Chinese Boxer Rebellion 
1901 U.S. forces Cuba to adopt constitution favorable to U.S. interests 
1903 Hay Bunau-Varilla Treaty signed, giving U.S. control of Panama Canal Zone 
1904  Roosevelt corollary  to Monroe Doctrine proclaimed 
1905 Roosevelt negotiates end to Russo-Japanese War 
1906 17 U.S. intervenes in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Mexico 
1907 Roosevelt and Japanese government reach a  gentlemen s agreement  restricting Japanese immigration 
to U.S. and ending the segregation of Japanese schoolchildren in California 
1907 09 Great White Fleet circles the world 
1909 13 William Howard Taft conducts  dollar diplomacy  
1910 Mexican Revolution 
1914 Panama Canal opens 
1914 17 Wilson struggles to develop a policy toward Mexico 
1917 U.S. purchases Virgin Islands from Denmark 
C HR O NO L O G Y 
11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 810
destiny, enabling them to become  civilized.  In this  civilizing  effort, missionaries 
resembled progressive reformers who sought to uplift America s immigrant masses at 
home. 
Businessmen 
For different reasons, industrialists, traders, and investors also began to look overseas, sens- 
ing that they could make fortunes in foreign lands. Exports of American manufactured 
goods rose substantially after 1880. By 1914, American foreign investment already equaled 
a sizable 7 percent of the nation s gross national product. Companies such as Eastman 
Kodak (film and cameras), Singer Sewing Machine Company, Standard Oil, American 
Tobacco, and International Harvester had become multinational corporations with overseas 
branch offices. 
Some industrialists became entranced by the prospect of clothing, feeding, housing, and 
transporting the 400 million people of China. James B. Duke, who headed American 
Tobacco, was selling 1 billion cigarettes per year in East Asian markets. Looking for ways 
to fill empty boxcars heading west from Minnesota to Tacoma, Washington, the railroad 
tycoon James J. Hill imagined stuffing them with wheat and steel destined for China and 
Japan. He actually published and distributed wheat cookbooks throughout East Asia to 
convince Asians to shift from a rice-based to a bread-based diet (so that there would be a 
market there for U.S. flour exports). Although export trade with East Asia during this period 
never fulfilled the expectations of Hill and other industrialists, their talk about the  wealth 
of the Orient  impressed on politicians its importance to American economic health. 
Events of the 1890s only intensified the appeal of foreign markets. First, the 1890 U.S. 
census announced that the frontier had disappeared and that America had completed the 
task of westward expansion. Then, in 1893, a young historian named Frederick Jackson 
Turner published an essay,  The Significance of the Frontier in American History,  that 
articulated what many Americans feared: that the frontier had been essential to the growth 
of the economy and to the cultivation of democracy. 
Living in the wilderness, Turner argued, had transformed the Europeans who settled 
the New World into Americans. They shed their European clothing styles, social customs, 
and political beliefs, and acquired distinctively American characteristics rugged individ- 
ualism, egalitarianism, and a democratic faith. How, Turner wondered, could the nation 
continue to prosper now that the frontier had gone? 
In recent years, historians of the American West have criticized Turner s  frontier thesis.  
They have argued that the very idea of the frontier as uninhabited wilderness overlooked 
the tens of thousands of Indians who occupied the region and that much else of what 
Americans believed about the West was based more on myth than on reality. They have 
also pointed out that it makes little sense to view the 1890s as a decade in which oppor- 
tunities for economic gain disappeared in the West. 
Even though these points are valid, they would have meant little to Americans living 
in Turner s time. For them, as for Turner, concern about the disappearing frontier 
The United States Looks Abroad " 811 
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expressed a fear that the increasingly urbanized and industrialized nation had lost its way. 
Turner s essay appeared just as the country was entering the deepest, longest, and most 
conflict-ridden depression in its history (see chapter 19). What could the republic do to 
regain its economic prosperity and political stability? Where would it find its new frontiers? 
One answer to these questions focused on the pursuit of overseas expansion. As Senator 
Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana declared in 1899:  We are raising more than we can con- 
sume. . . . We are making more than we can use. Therefore, we must find new markets for 
our produce, new occupation for our capital, new work for our labor.  
Imperialists 
Eager to assist in the drive for overseas expansion was a group of politicians, intellectuals, 
and military strategists who viewed such expansion as a key ingredient in the pursuit of 
world power. They wanted the United States to take its place alongside Britain, France, Ger- 
many, and Russia as a great imperial nation. They believed that the United States should 
build a strong navy, solidify a sphere of influence in the Caribbean, and extend markets into 
Asia. Their desire to control ports and territories beyond the continental borders of their 
own country made them imperialists.Many of them were also Social Darwinists (see chap- 
ter 19) who believed that America s destiny required that it prove itself the military equal 
of the strongest European nations and the master of the  lesser  peoples of the world. 
One of the best-known imperialists of the period was Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan.In 
an influential book,The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660 1783 (1890), Mahan argued 
that past empires, beginning with Rome, had relied on their capacity to control the seas. 
Mahan called for the construction of a U.S. navy with enough ships and firepower to make its 
presence felt everywhere in the world. To be effective, that global fleet would require a canal 
across Central America through which U.S. warships could pass swiftly from the Atlantic to 
the Pacific oceans. It would also require a string of far-flung service bases from the Caribbean 
to the southwestern Pacific. Mahan recommended that the U.S. government take possession 
of Hawaii and other strategically located Pacific islands with superior harbor facilities. 
Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt would eventually make almost 
the whole of Mahan s vision a reality, but in the early 1890s, Mahan doubted that Ameri- 
cans would accept the responsibility and costs of empire. Although the imperialists 
counted in their ranks such prominent figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry 
Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, many Americans still insisted that the United States should 
not aspire to world power by acquiring overseas bases and colonizing foreign peoples. 
Mahan underestimated, however, the government s alarm over the scramble of Europeans 
to extend their imperial control. Every U.S. administration from the 1880s on committed 
itself to a  big navy  policy. By 1898, the U.S. Navy ranked fifth in the world, and by 1900, 
it ranked third. Already in 1878, the United States had secured rights to Pago Pago, a 
superb deep-water harbor in Samoa (a collection of islands in the southwest Pacific inhab- 
ited by Polynesians), and in 1885, it had leased Pearl Harbor from the Hawaiians. Both 
harbors were expected to serve as fueling stations for the growing U.S. fleet. 
812  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
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These attempts to project U.S. power overseas had already deepened the government s 
involvement in the affairs of distant lands. In 1889, the United States established a pro- 
tectorate over part of Samoa, a move meant to forestall German and British efforts to 
weaken American influence on the islands. In the early 1890s, President Grover Cleve- 
land s administration was increasingly drawn into Hawaiian affairs, as tensions between 
American sugar plantation owners and native Hawaiians upset the islands  economic and 
political stability. In 1891, U.S. plantation owners succeeded in deposing the Hawaiian 
king and putting into power Queen Liliuokalani. But when Liliuokalani strove to establish 
her independence from American interests, the planters, assisted by U.S. sailors, overthrew 
her regime, too. Cleveland declared Hawaii a protectorate in 1893, but he resisted the 
imperialists in Congress who wanted to annex the islands. 
Still, imperialist sentiment in Congress and across the nation continued to gain 
strength, fueled by  jingoism.  Jingoists were nationalists who thought that a swaggering 
foreign policy and a willingness to go to war would enhance their nation s glory. They were 
constantly on the alert for insults to their country s honor and swift to call for military 
The United States Looks Abroad " 813 
Cotton and cotton 
manufactures 
Tobacco 
Wheat and 
wheat flour 
Meat products 
Automobiles, auto 
parts, and engines 
Iron and 
steel mill products 
Machinery 
Copper and 
manufactures 
1875 
1915 
0 50 100 150 200 450 
400 
350 
300 
250 
Animal fats 
and oils 
Petroleum 
and products 
(millions of dollars) 
Leading U.S. Exports, 1875 and 1915 
Source: Data from Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International, 1989). 
11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 813
retaliation. This predatory brand of nationalism emerged in each of the world s big powers 
in the late 19th century. In the United States, it manifested itself in terms of an eagerness for 
war. The anti-imperialist editor of the Nation, E. L. Godkin, exclaimed in 1894:  The num- 
ber of men and officials of this country who are now mad to fight somebody is appalling.  
Recent feminist scholarship has emphasized the degree to which men of the 1890s saw war 
as an opportunity to revive frontier-like notions of masculinity of men as warriors and con- 
querors that were proving difficult to sustain in  industrializing and bureaucratizing Amer- 
ica. Spain s behavior in Cuba in the 1890s gave those men the war they sought. 
The Spanish-American War 
814  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
The U.S. Navy, 1890 1914: Expenditures and Battleship Size 
Naval Expenditures as 
Total Federal Naval Percentage of Total Size of Battleships 
Fiscal year Expenditures Expenditures Federal Expenditures (average tons displaced) 
1890 $318,040,711 $ 22,006,206 6.9% 11,000 
1900 520,860,847 55,953,078 10.7 12,000 
1901 524,616,925 60,506,978 11.5 16,000 
1905 657,278,914 117,550,308 20.7 16,000 
1909 693,743,885 115,546,011 16.7 27,000 (1910) 
1914 735,081,431 139,682,186 19.0 32,000 
Sources: (for expenditures) E. B. Potter, Sea Power: A Naval History(Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1982), p. 187; (for size of ships) Harold 
Sprout, Toward a New Order of Sea Power(New York: Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 52. 
Focus Question 
In going to war against Spain in 1898, was the United States impelled more by impe- 
rialist or anti-imperialist motives? 
By the 1890s, the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico were virtually all that remained of the vast 
Spanish empire in the Americas. Relations between the Cubans and their Spanish rulers had 
long been deteriorating. The Spanish had taken 10 years to subdue a revolt begun in 1868. 
In 1895, the Cubans staged another revolt, sparked by their continuing resentment of Span- 
ish control and by a depressed economy caused in part by an 1894 U.S. tariff law that made 
Cuban sugar too expensive for the U.S. market. The fighting was brutal. Cuban forces 
destroyed large areas of the island to make it uninhabitable by the Spanish. The Spanish 
army, led by General Valeriano Weyler, responded in kind, forcing large numbers of Cubans 
into concentration camps. Denied adequate food, shelter, and sanitation, an estimated 
200,000 Cubans one-eighth of the island s population died of starvation and disease. 
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The Spanish-American War  " 815 
Uncle Sam Gives Spain More Than It Can Handle By going to war in 1898, this poster suggests, the United 
States had toppled  brutal Spain  and the remnants of its empire. 
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11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 815
Such tactics, especially those ascribed to  Butcher  Weyler (as he was known in much 
of the U.S. press), inflamed American opinion. Many Americans sympathized with the 
Cubans, who seemed to be fighting the kind of anticolonial war Americans had waged 
more than 100 years earlier. Americans stayed well informed about the atrocities by 
reading the New York Journal, owned by William Randolph Hearst, and the New York 
World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer. Hearst and Pulitzer were transforming newspaper 
publishing in much the same way Sam McClure and others had revolutionized the mag- 
azine business (see chapter 21). To boost circulation, they sought out sensational and 
shocking stories and described them in lurid detail. They were accused of engaging in 
 yellow journalism  embellishing stories with titillating details when the true reports 
did not seem dramatic enough. 
The sensationalism of the yellow press and its frequently jingoistic accounts failed to 
bring about American intervention in Cuba, however. In the final days of his adminis- 
tration, President Cleveland resisted mounting pressure to intervene. William McKinley, 
who succeeded him in 1897, denounced the Spanish even more harshly, with the aim 
of forcing Spain into concessions that would satisfy the Cuban rebels and end the con- 
flict. Initially, this strategy seemed to be working: Spain relieved  Butcher  Weyler of his 
command, began releasing incarcerated Cubans from concentration camps, and granted 
Cuba limited autonomy. Still, Spaniards living on the island refused to be ruled by a 
Cuban government, and the Cuban rebels continued to demand full independence. Late 
in 1897, when riots broke out in Havana, McKinley ordered the battleshipMaineinto 
Havana harbor to protect U.S. citizens and their property. Two unexpected events then 
set off a war. 
The first was the February 9, 1898, publication in Hearst s New York Journal of a letter 
stolen from Depuy de Lôme, the Spanish minister to Washington, in which he described 
McKinley as  a cheap politician  and a  bidder for the admiration of the crowd.  The de 
Lôme letter also implied that the Spanish cared little about resolving the Cuban crisis 
through negotiation and reform. The news embarrassed Spanish officials and outraged 
U.S. public opinion. Then, only six days later, the Maine exploded in Havana harbor, 
killing 260 American sailors. Although subsequent investigations revealed that the most 
probable cause of the explosion was a malfunctioning boiler, Americans were certain that 
it had been the work of Spanish agents.  Remember the Maine!  screamed the headlines 
in the yellow press. On March 8, Congress responded to the clamor for war by authoriz- 
ing $50 million to mobilize U.S. forces. In the meantime, McKinley notified Spain of his 
conditions for avoiding war: Spain would pay an indemnity for the Maine, abandon its 
concentration camps, end the fighting with the rebels, and commit itself to Cuban inde- 
pendence. On April 9, Spain accepted all the demands but the last. Nevertheless, on April 11, 
McKinley asked Congress for authority to go to war. Three days later, Congress approved a 
war resolution, which included a declaration (spelled out in the Teller Amendment) that the 
United States would not use the war as an opportunity to acquire territory in Cuba. On 
April 24, Spain responded with a formal declaration of war against the United States. 
816  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
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CI-17 
PACIFIC 
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Sutter's Fort 
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Map 18.1 Mining and Cattle Frontiers, 1870s Most of the mines shown on this map produced gold and silver. 
The next generation would begin to exploit the copper to be found in Montana and Arizona, and later generations would extract 
oil from Texas and Oklahoma and coal and oil from Wyoming. 
11019_CI-17_CI-20.qxd  9/4/07  11:19 AM  Page CI-17
CI-18 
Chivington 
Massacre 
1864 
"Battle" of 
Wounded Knee 
1890 
Red River War 
1869 1874 
Fetterman 
Massacre 
1866 
Little Big Horn 
1876 
Chief Joseph's 
Rebellion 
1877 
Hopi 
Zuni 
Pueblo 
Apache 
Mohave 
Ute 
Ute 
Navajo 
Comanche 
Paiute 
Sioux 
Sioux 
Blackfeet 
Cheyenne 
Crow 
Crow 
Nez Percé 
Bannock Arapaho 
Kiowa 
Chippewa 
Teton-Dakota 
Snake 
Reservations in 1875 
Reservations in 1900 
Present state boundaries 
Battle site 
Map 18.2 Indian Reservations, 1875 and 1900 Before the Civil War, Indians had hunted and trapped over most of this 
vast region. The shrinking areas on which they were confined by the reservation policy vividly illustrates that for the first 
Americans, the story was not  the expansion of America  but  the contraction of America.  
11019_CI-17_CI-20.qxd  9/4/07  11:19 AM  Page CI-18
CI-19 
CANADA 
MEXICO 
Pittsburgh Baltimore 
Philadelphia 
New York 
Providence 
Boston 
Worcester Haverhill 
Fall River 
Newark 
Patterson 
Elizabeth 
Rochester 
Buffalo 
Detroit 
Milwaukee 
Louisville 
New Orleans 
Winston-Salem 
Chicago 
Kansas City 
Toledo 
Flint 
St. Louis 
Omaha 
Los Angeles 
San Francisco 
Portland 
Seattle 
Columbus 
Cincinnati 
Indianapolis 
Cleveland 
WASH. 
OREGON 
UTAH 
ARIZONA NEW 
MEXICO 
OKLAHOMA 
KANSAS 
NEBRASKA 
S. DAKOTA 
N. DAKOTA 
MINN. 
IOWA 
MO. 
WISC. 
ILL. 
ARK. 
LA. 
MISS. ALA. GA. 
TENN. 
KY. 
FLA. 
S.C. 
N.C. 
VA. 
IN. 
MICH. 
OHIO 
PA. 
MD. 
DEL. 
N.J. 
N. Y. 
VT. 
N.H. 
CONN. 
MA. 
R.I. 
ME. 
W. V. 
TEXAS 
COLORADO 
IDAHO 
MONTANA 
WYOMING 
NEVADA 
CALIF. 
Over $3,000,000 
Distribution of Factory Output, 1919 
in thousands 
$1,000,000 to $2,999,000 
$500,000 to $999,000 
$100,000 to $499,000 
Less than $99,000 
Value of product over $1 billion 
Value of product over $200 million 
Cities 
Cotton Goods 
Copper Refining 
Lumber Products 
Meatpacking 
Brass and Copper Products 
Leather Goods 
Iron and Steel 
Flour Mill Products 
Sugar Refining 
Paper 
Shipbuilding 
Automobiles 
Butter 
Clothing 
Products for Railroads 
Tobacco Products 
Leading Industries 
Marble and Stone Products 
Woolen Goods 
Diversified 
Rubber Products 
Petroleum Refining 
Lead Smelting 
Map 20.1 Industrial America, 1900 1920 This map shows that the Northeast, Midwest, and California dominated factory 
production in the United States from 1900 to 1920. It also reveals the state-by-state distribution of various industries clothing in 
New York, automobiles in Michigan, petroleum refining in Texas and Oklahoma, and lumber in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. 
View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin. 
11019_CI-17_CI-20.qxd  9/4/07  11:19 AM  Page CI-19
CI-20 
WA 
OR 
CA 
NV 
ID 
MT 
WY 
UT 
AZ 
NM 
CO 
OK 
TX 
LA 
AR 
MO 
KS 
NE 
SD 
ND 
MN 
IA 
WS 
PA 
MD 
NJ 
DE 
NY 
ME 
CT 
RI 
MA 
NH 
VT 
IL IN 
MS AL GA 
FL 
SC 
TN 
KY 
NC 
VA 
WV 
OH 
MI 
No voting by women 
Women voting in 
presidential election Complete voting rights 
for women 
Women voting in primaries 
Map 21.1 Woman Suffrage Before 1920 This map illustrates how woman suffrage prior to 1920 had advanced furthest 
in the West. 
11019_CI-17_CI-20.qxd  9/4/07  11:19 AM  Page CI-20
 A Splendid Little War  
Secretary of State John Hay called the fight with Spain  a splendid little war.  Begun in 
April, it ended in August. More than 1 million men volunteered to fight, and fewer than 
500 were killed or wounded in combat. The American victory over Spain was complete, 
not just in Cuba but in the neighboring island of Puerto Rico and in the Philippines, 
Spain s strategic possession in the Pacific. 
Actually, the war was more complicated than it seemed. The main reason for the easy 
victory was U.S. naval superiority. In the war s first major battle, a naval engagement in 
Manila harbor in the Philippines on May 1, a U.S. fleet commanded by Commodore 
George Dewey destroyed an entire Spanish fleet and lost only one sailor (to heat stroke). 
On land, the story was different. On the eve of war, the U.S. Army consisted of only 
26,000 troops. These soldiers were skilled at skirmishing with Indians but ill-prepared 
and ill-equipped for all-out war. A force of 80,000 Spanish regulars awaited them in Cuba, 
with another 50,000 in reserve in Spain. Congress immediately increased the army to 
62,000 and called for an additional 125,000 volunteers. The response to this call was 
astounding, but outfitting, training, and transporting the new recruits overwhelmed the 
army s capacities. Its standard-issue, blue flannel uniforms proved too heavy for fighting 
in tropical Cuba. Rations were so poor that soldiers referred to one common item as 
 embalmed beef.  Most of the volunteers had to make do with ancient Civil War rifles that 
still used black, rather than smokeless, powder. The initial invasion force of 16,000 men 
took more than five days to sail the short distance from Tampa, Florida, to Daiquiri, Cuba. 
Moreover, the army was unprepared for the effects of malaria and other tropical diseases. 
That the Cuban revolutionaries were predominantly black also came as a shock to the 
U.S. forces. In their attempts to arouse support for the Cuban cause, U.S. newspapers had 
portrayed Cuban rebels as fundamentally similar to white Americans. They were described 
as intelligent, civilized, and democratic, possessing an  Anglo-Saxon tenacity of purpose.  
And, they were  fully nine-tenths  white, according to one report. The Spanish oppressors, 
by contrast, were depicted as dark-complexioned   dark cruel eyes, dark swaggering 
men  wrote author Sherwood Anderson and as possessing the characteristics of their 
 dark race : barbarism, cruelty, and indolence. The U.S. troops  first encounters with 
Cuban and Spanish forces challenged these stereotypes. Their Cuban allies appeared poorly 
outfitted, rough in their manners, and primarily black-skinned. The Spanish soldiers 
appeared well disciplined, tough in battle, and light complexioned. 
The Cuban rebels were actually skilled guerrilla fighters, but racial prejudice prevented 
most U.S. soldiers and reporters from crediting their military expertise. Instead, they judged 
the Cubans harshly as primitive, savage, and incapable of self-control or self-government. 
White U.S. troops preferred not to fight alongside the Cubans; increasingly, they refused 
to coordinate strategy with them. 
At first, the U.S. Army s logistical unpreparedness and its racial misconceptions did lit- 
tle to diminish the soldiers  hunger for a good fight. No one was more eager for battle than 
Theodore Roosevelt, who, along with Colonel Leonard Wood, led a volunteer cavalry unit 
The Spanish-American War  " 817 
11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 817
composed of Ivy League gentlemen, western cowboys, sheriffs, prospectors, Indians, and 
small numbers of Hispanics and ethnic European Americans. Roosevelt s Rough Riders, 
as the unit came to be known, landed with the invasion force and played an active role in 
the three battles fought in the hills surrounding Santiago. Their most famous action, the 
one on which Roosevelt would build his lifelong reputation as a military hero, was a furi- 
ous charge up Kettle Hill into the teeth of Spanish defenses. Roosevelt s bravery was stun- 
ning, although his judgment was faulty. Nearly 100 men were killed or wounded in the 
charge. Reports of Roosevelt s bravery overshadowed the equally brave performance of 
other troops, notably the 9th and 10th Negro Cavalries, which played a pivotal role in 
clearing away Spanish fortifications on Kettle Hill and allowing Roosevelt s Rough Riders 
to make their charge. One Rough Rider commented:  If it had not been for the Negro cav- 
alry, the Rough Riders would have been exterminated.  Another added:  I am a Southerner 
by birth, and I never thought much of the colored man. But . . . I never saw such fighting 
as those Tenth Cavalry men did. They didn t seem to know what fear was, and their bat- 
tle hymn was  There ll be a hot time in the old town tonight.   The 24th and 25th Negro 
Infantry Regiments performed equally vital tasks in the U.S. Army s conquest of the adja- 
cent San Juan Hill. 
818  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
U.S 
. 
Na 
val 
Blo 
ck 
ad 
e 
San Juan 
Ponce 
Santo 
Domingo 
Tampa 
Port-au- 
Prince 
Kingston 
Havana 
Santiago 
Key West 
Miami 
PUERTO 
RICO 
HAITI DOMINICAN 
REPUBLIC 
JAMAICA 
(U.K.) 
CUBA 
FLORIDA 
See inset 
0 
100 200 Kilometers 
0 
100 200 Miles 
Spanish fleet 
destroyed, 
July 3, 1898 
San Juan Hill 
July 1, 1898 
Kettle Hill 
July 1, 1898 Las Guasimas 
June 24, 1898 
El Caney 
July 1, 1898 
Santiago 
Daiquiri 
0 
4 Kilometers 
0 
4 Miles 
KEY BATTLES 
Gulf of 
Mexico 
CARIBBEAN  SEA 
ATLANTIC 
OCEAN 
Ba 
ha 
ma 
Is 
l 
a 
n 
ds 
( 
U. 
K. 
) 
Santiago 
Bay 
CARIBBEAN SEA 
Spanish possession 
U.S. forces 
Spanish forces 
U.S. victory 
U.S. naval blockade 
Map 22.1 Spanish-American War in Cuba, 1898 This map shows the following: the routes taken by U.S. ships 
transporting troops from Florida to Cuba; the concentration of troop landings and battles around Santiago, Cuba; and a U.S. naval 
blockade, stretching hundreds of miles from Puerto Rico to Cuba, that attempted to keep the Spanish troops in Cuba and Puerto 
Rico from being reinforced. 
View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin. 
11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 818
Theodore Roosevelt saw the Rough Rider regiment that he commanded in the Spanish- 
American War as a melting pot of different groups of white Americans. Combat, he fur- 
ther believed, would forge these many groups into one, as war had always done in the 
American past. African Americans were the group most conspicuously absent from the 
Rough Rider mix. Yet the fury of the fighting on Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill so scram- 
bled the white and black regiments that by the time the troops reached the San Juan sum- 
mit, they were racially intermixed. Combat had brought blacks into the great American 
melting pot, a phenomenon that Roosevelt celebrated at the time. The black troops, he 
declared, were  an excellent breed of Yankee,  and no  Rough Rider will ever forget,  he 
added,  the tie that binds us to the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry.  
But Roosevelt did not truly believe that blacks were the equals of whites or that they 
could be absorbed into the American nation. So, a few months after returning home, he 
began downplaying the role of black troops and questioned their ability to fight. The 
heroic role of black soldiers disappeared not only from Roosevelt s own memory but also 
from accounts and illustrations of the great charge. The attack on black fighting abilities 
would become so widespread that by the start of the First World War, the U.S. military 
had largely excluded black troops from combat roles.  Thus, an episode that had demon- 
strated the possibility of interracial cooperation in America ended in the hardening of 
racial boundaries. 
The taking of Kettle Hill, San Juan Hill, and other high ground surrounding Santiago gave 
the U.S. forces a substantial advantage over the Spanish defenders in Santiago. Nevertheless, 
logistical and medical problems nearly did them in. The troops were short of food, ammu- 
nition, and medical facilities. Their ranks were devastated by malaria, typhoid, and dysen- 
tery, and more than 5,000 soldiers died from disease. Even the normally ebullient Roo- 
sevelt was close to despair:  We are within measurable distance of a terrible military 
disaster,  he wrote his friend Henry Cabot Lodge on July 3. 
Fortunately, the Spanish had lost the will to fight. On the very day Roosevelt wrote to 
Lodge, Spain s Atlantic fleet tried to retreat from Santiago harbor and was promptly 
destroyed by a U.S. fleet. The Spanish army in Santiago surrendered on July 16; on July 
18, the Spanish government asked for peace. While negotiations for an armistice pro- 
ceeded, U.S. forces overran the neighboring island of Puerto Rico. On August 12, the U.S. 
and Spanish governments agreed to an armistice, but before the news could reach the 
Philippines, the United States had captured Manila and had taken prisoner 13,000 Spanish 
soldiers. 
The armistice required Spain to relinquish its claim to Cuba, cede Puerto Rico and the 
Pacific island of Guam to the United States, and tolerate the American occupation of 
Manila until a peace conference could be convened in Paris on October 1, 1898. At that 
conference, American diplomats startled their Spanish counterparts by demanding that 
Spain also cede the Philippines to the United States. After two months of stalling, the Span- 
ish government agreed to relinquish their coveted Pacific colony for $20 million. The 
transaction was sealed by the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. 
The Spanish-American War  " 819 
11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 819
820  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
Rough Riders and 10th Cavalry Roosevelt poses with his Rough Riders (above) while members of the 10th 
Cavalry appear below. Both groups played pivotal roles in the battles of San Juan and Kettle Hills, but America 
would celebrate only the Rough Riders, not the black cavalrymen. 
© 
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11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 820
The United States Becomes a World Power 
The United States Becomes a World Power  " 821 
Focus Question 
What different mechanisms of control did the United States use to achieve its aims 
in Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and China? 
America s initial war aim had been to oust the Spanish from Cuba an aim that both impe- 
rialists and anti-imperialists supported, but for different reasons. Imperialists hoped to incor- 
porate Cuba into a new American empire; anti-imperialists hoped to see the Cubans gain 
their independence. But only the imperialists condoned the U.S. acquisition of Puerto Rico, 
Guam, and particularly the Philippines, which they viewed as integral to the extension of 
U.S. interests into Asia. Soon after the war began, President McKinley had cast his lot with 
the imperialists. First, he annexed Hawaii, giving the United States permanent control of 
Pearl Harbor. Next, he set his sights on setting up a U.S. naval base at Manila. Never before 
had the United States sought such a large military presence outside the Western Hemisphere. 
In a departure of equal importance, McKinley announced his intent to administer much 
of this newly acquired territory as U.S. colonies. Virtually all territory the United States had 
obtained in the 19th century had been part of the North American continent. These lands 
had been settled by Americans, who had eventually petitioned for statehood. By 1900, 
most of these territories had been admitted to the Union with the same rights as existing 
states; others, such as New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma, would soon acquire state- 
hood status. In the case of the new overseas territories, however, only Hawaii would be 
allowed to follow this traditional path toward statehood. There, the powerful U.S. sugar 
plantation owners prevailed on Congress to pass an act in 1900 extending U.S. citizenship 
to all Hawaiian citizens and putting Hawaii on the road to statehood. No such influential 
group of Americans resided in the Philippines. The country was made a U.S. colony and 
placed under a U.S. administration that took its orders from Washington rather than from 
the Filipino people. Such colonization was necessary, in the eyes of American imperialists, 
to prevent other powers, such as Japan and Germany, from gaining a foothold somewhere 
in the 400-island archipelago and launching attacks on the U.S. naval base in Manila. 
The McKinley administration might have taken a different course. The United States 
might have negotiated an arrangement with Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of an anticolo- 
nial movement in the Philippines, that would have given the Philippines independence in 
exchange for a U.S. naval base at Manila. An American fleet stationed there would have 
been able to protect both American interests and the fledgling Philippine nation from 
predatory assaults by Japan, Germany, or Britain. Alternatively, the United States might 
have annexed the Philippines outright and offered Filipinos U.S. citizenship as the first 
step toward statehood. McKinley and his supporters, however, believed that the  inferior  
Filipino people lacked the capacity for self-government. The United States would undertake 
a solemn mission to  civilize  the Filipinos and thereby prepare them for independence, 
11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 821
but until that mission was complete, the Philippines would submit to rule by presiden- 
tiallyappointed U.S. governors. 
The Debate over the Treaty of Paris 
The proposed acquisition of the Philippines aroused opposition both in the United States 
and in the Philippines. The Anti-Imperialist League, strong in the Northeast, enlisted 
the support of several elder statesmen in McKinley s own party, as well as the former 
Democratic President Grover Cleveland, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and the labor 
leader Samuel Gompers. William Jennings Bryan, meanwhile, marshaled a vigorous anti- 
imperialist protest among Democrats in the South and West, while Mark Twain, William 
James, William Dean Howells, and other men of letters lent the cause their prestige. Some 
anti-imperialists believed that subjugating the Filipinos would violate the nation s most 
precious principle: the right of all people to independence and self-government. Moreover, 
they feared that the military and diplomatic establishment needed to administer the colony 
would threaten political liberties at home. 
Other anti-imperialists were motivated more by self-interest than by democratic ideals. 
U.S. sugar producers, for example, feared competition from Filipino producers. Trade 
unionists worried that poor Filipino workers would flood the U.S. labor market and 
822  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
Pearl Harbor 
PACIFIC 
OCEAN 
Kauai 
Niihau 
Oahu 
Molokai 
Maui 
Lanai 
Kahoolawe 
Hawaii 
HAWAIIAN 
ISLANDS 
(Annexed 1898) 
0 
0 100 Kilometers 
100 Miles 
CHINA 
KOREA 
JAPAN 
FRENCH 
INDOCHINA 
BR. NORTH 
BORNEO 
BRUNEI 
SARAWAK 
Philippine 
Islands 
1898 
Hawaiian 
Islands 
annexed 1898 
(see inset) 
Midway Islands 
annexed 1867 
Wake Island 
annexed 1899 
Guam 
1898 
Kaiser 
Wilhelmsland 
Papua possessions 
Pago Pago U.S. 
Naval Base 
American 
Samoa 1899 
DU 
TC 
HE 
ASTIN 
DIES 
Borneo 
Celebes 
New Guinea 
Java 
Timor 
Formosa 
Hainan 
Tokyo 
Shanghai 
Manila 
Hong Kong (U.K.) 
AUSTRALIA 0 
0 
750 
1500 Kilometers 
750 
1500 Miles 
PACIFIC 
OCEAN 
PACIFIC 
OCEAN CORAL 
SEA 
Equator 
U.S. possession 
U.S. naval base 
Map 22.2 American South Pacific Empire, 1900 By 1900, the American South Pacific empire consisted of a series of 
strategically located islands with superior harbor facilities, stretching from the Hawaiian Islands and Samoa in the middle of the 
Pacific to the Philippines on the ocean s western edge. 
11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 822
depress wage rates. Some businessmen warned that the costs of maintaining an imperial 
outpost would exceed any economic benefits that the colony might produce. Many 
Democrats, meanwhile, simply wanted to gain partisan advantage by opposing the Repub- 
lican administration s foreign policy. Still other anti-imperialists feared the contaminating 
effects of contact with  inferior  Asian races. 
The contrasting motivations of the anti-imperialists weakened their opposition. Even 
so, they almost dealt McKinley and his fellow imperialists a defeat in the U.S. Senate. On 
February 6, 1899, the Senate voted 57 to 27 in favor of the Treaty of Paris, only one vote 
beyond the minimum two-thirds majority required for ratification. Two last-minute devel- 
opments may have brought victory. First, William Jennings Bryan, in the days before the 
vote, abandoned his opposition and announced his support for the treaty. (He would later 
explain that he had decided for ratification in order to end the war with Spain, intending 
to continue his work for Filipino independence through diplomatic means.) Second, on 
the eve of the vote, Filipinos rose in revolt against the U.S. army of occupation. With 
another war looming and the lives of American soldiers imperiled, a few senators who had 
been reluctant to vote for the treaty may have felt obligated to support the president. 
The American-Filipino War 
The acquisition of the Philippines immediately embroiled the United States in a long, brutal 
war to subdue the Filipino rebels. In four years of fighting, more than 120,000 American sol- 
diers served in the Philippines and more than 4,200 of them died. The war cost $160 million, 
or eight times what the United States had paid Spain to acquire the archipelago. The war brought 
Americans face-to-face with an unpleasant truth: that American actions in the Philippineswere 
virtually indistinguishable from Spain s actions in Cuba. Like Spain, the United States refused 
to acknowledge a people s aspiration for self-rule. Like  Butcher  Weyler, American generals 
permitted their soldiers to use savage tactics. Whole communities suspected of harboring 
guerrillas were driven into concentration camps, and their houses, farms, and livestock were 
destroyed. American soldiers killed so many Filipino rebels (whom they called  goo-goos ) 
that the ratio of Filipino dead to wounded reached 15 to 1, a statistic that made the American 
Civil War, in which one soldier had died for every five wounded, seem relatively humane. 
One New York infantryman wrote home that his unit had killed 1,000 Filipinos men, 
women, and children in retaliation for the murder of a single American soldier:  I am in 
my glory when I can sight my gun on some dark skin and pull the trigger,  he exclaimed. A 
total of 15,000 Filipino soldiers died in the fighting. Estimates of total Filipino deaths from 
gunfire, starvation, and disease range from 50,000 to 200,000. 
The United States finally gained the upper hand in the war after General Arthur 
MacArthur (father of Douglas) was appointed commander of the islands in 1900. 
MacArthur did not lessen the war s ferocity, but he understood that it could not be won 
by guns alone. He offered amnesty to Filipino guerrillas who agreed to surrender, and he 
cultivated close relations with the islands  economic elites. McKinley supported this effort 
to build a Filipino constituency sympathetic to the U.S. presence. To that end, he sent 
The United States Becomes a World Power  " 823 
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William Howard Taft to the islands in 1900 to establish a civilian government. In 1901, 
Taft became the colony s first  governor-general  and declared that he intended to prepare 
the Filipinos for independence. He transferred many governmental functions to Filipino 
control and launched a program of public works (roads, bridges, schools) that would give 
the Philippines the infrastructure necessary for economic development and political inde- 
pendence. By 1902, this dual strategy of ruthless war against those who had taken up arms 
and concessions to those who were willing to live under benevolent American rule had 
crushed the revolt. Though sporadic fighting continued until 1913, Americans had secured 
control of the Philippines. The explicit commitment of the United States to Philippineinde- 
pendence (a promise that was deferred until 1946), together with an extensive program of 
internal improvements, eased the nation s conscience. 
Controlling Cuba and Puerto Rico 
Helping the Cubans achieve independence had been a major rationalization for the war 
against Spain. Even so, in 1900, when General Leonard Wood, now commander of U.S. 
forces in Cuba, authorized a constitutional convention to write the laws for a Cuban repub- 
lic, the McKinley administration made clear it would not easily relinquish control of the 
island. At McKinley s urging, the U.S. Congress attached to a 1901 army appropriations bill 
the Platt Amendment(Orville Platt was the Republican senator from Connecticut), delin- 
eating three conditions for Cuban independence: (1) Cuba would not be permitted to make 
treaties with foreign powers; (2) the United States would have broad authority to intervene 
in Cuban political and economic affairs; and (3) Cuba would sell or lease land to the 
United States for naval stations. The delegates to Cuba s constitutional convention were so 
outraged by these conditions that they refused even to vote on them. But the dependence of 
Cuba s vital sugar industry on the U.S. market and the continuing presence of a U.S. army 
on Cuban soil rendered resistance futile. In 1901, by a vote of 15 to 11, the delegates reluc- 
tantly wrote the Platt conditions into their constitution.  There is, of course, little or no inde- 
pendence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment,  Wood candidly admitted to his friend 
Theodore Roosevelt, who had recently succeeded the assassinated McKinley as president. 
Cuba s status, in truth, differed little from that of the Philippines. Both were colonies of 
the United States. In the case of Cuba, economic dependence closely followed political 
subjugation. Between 1898 and 1914, U.S. trade with Cuba increased more than tenfold 
(from $27 million to $300 million), while investments more than quadrupled (from $50 
million to $220 million). In 1903, the United States compelled Cuba to lease it 45 square 
miles of land and water on the island nation s southeast coast.  There the United States 
built the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, a facility that it maintains to this day. The 
United States also intervened in Cuban political affairs five times between 1906 and 1921 
to protect its economic interests and those of the indigenous ruling class with whom it had 
become closely allied. The economic, political, and military control that the United States 
imposed on Cuba would fuel anti-American sentiment there for years to come. 
Puerto Rico received somewhat different treatment. The United States did not think 
independence appropriate, even though under Spanish rule the island had enjoyed a large 
824  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
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measure of political autonomy and a parliamentary form of government. Nor did the 
United States follow its Cuban strategy by granting Puerto Rico nominal independence 
under informal economic and political controls. Instead, it annexed the island outright 
with the Foraker Act (1900). Unlike every previous annexation authorized by Congress 
since 1788, this act contained no provision for making the inhabitants of Puerto Rico cit- 
izens of the United States. Instead, Puerto Rico was designated an  unincorporated  terri- 
tory, which meant that Congress would dictate the island s government and specify the 
rights of its inhabitants. Puerto Ricans were allowed no role in designing their government, 
nor was their consent to its establishment sought. With the Foraker Act, Congress had, in 
effect, invented a new, imperial mechanism for ensuring sovereignty over lands deemed 
vital to U.S. economic and military security. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the consti- 
tutionality of this mechanism in a series of historic decisions, known as the Insular Cases, 
in the years from 1901 to 1904. 
In some respects, Puerto Rico fared better than  independent  Cuba. Puerto Ricans 
were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917 and won the right to elect their own governor in 
1947. Still, Puerto Ricans enjoyed fewer political rights than Americans in the 48 states. 
Moreover, throughout the 20th century, they endured a poverty rate far exceeding that of 
The United States Becomes a World Power  " 825 
The  Water Cure  in the Philippines This extraordinary photograph shows U.S. soldiers forcing water into the mouth 
of a Filipino guerrilla to the point where it would overflow his esophagus and pour into his breathing channels, creating the 
sensation of drowning. It reveals U.S. forces using brutal tactics to break down the resistance of their Filipino opponents. 
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the mainland. As late as 1948, for example, three-fourths of Puerto Rican households sub- 
sisted on $1,000 or less annually, a figure below the U.S. poverty line. In its skewed dis- 
tribution of wealth and its lack of industrial development, Puerto Rico resembled the 
poorly developed nations of Central and South America more than it did the affluent coun- 
try that took over its government in 1900. 
The subjugation of Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico troubled Americans far less 
than the U.S. takeover in the Philippines. Since the first articulation of the Monroe Doc- 
trine in 1823, the United States had, in effect, claimed the Western Hemisphere as its 
sphere of influence. Within that sphere, many Americans believed, the United States pos- 
sessed the right to act unilaterally to protect its interests. Before 1900, most of its actions 
(with the exception of the Mexican War) had been designed to limit the influence of Euro- 
pean powers Britain, France, Russia, and Spain on the countries of the hemisphere. 
After 1900, however, the United States assumed a more aggressive role, seizing land, over- 
turning governments it did not like, and forcing its economic and political policies on 
weaker neighbors in order to turn the Caribbean Sea into what policy makers called (with 
the example of ancient Rome in mind) an American Mediterranean. 
China and the  Open Door  
Except for the Philippines and Guam, the United States made no effort to take control of 
Asian lands. Such a policy might well have triggered war with other world powers that 
were already well established in the area. Nor were Americans prepared to tolerate the 
financial and political costs Asian conquest would have entailed. The United States opted 
for a diplomatic rather than a military strategy to achieve its foreign policy objectives. For 
China, in 1899 and 1900, it proposed the policy of the  open door.  
The United States was concerned that the actions of the other world powers in China 
would block its own efforts to open up China s markets to American goods. Britain, Germany, 
Japan, Russia, and France each coveted their own chunk of China, where they could 
monopolize trade, exploit cheap labor, and establish military bases. By the 1890s, each of 
these powers was building a sphere of influence, either by wringing economic and terri- 
torial concessions from the weak Chinese government or by seizing outright the land and 
trading privileges they desired. 
To prevent China s breakup and to preserve U.S. economic access to the whole of 
China, McKinley s secretary of state, John Hay, sent  open door notesto the major world 
powers. The notes asked each power to open its Chinese sphere of influence to the mer- 
chants of other nations and to grant them reasonable harbor fees and railroad rates. Hay 
also asked each power to respect China s sovereignty by enforcing Chinese tariff duties in 
the territory it controlled. 
None of the world powers embraced either of Hay s requests, although Britain and 
Japan gave provisional assent. France, Germany, Russia, and Italy responded evasively, 
indicating their support for the Open Door policy in theory but insisting that they could 
not implement it until all of the other powers had done so. Hay put the best face on their 
826  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
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responses by declaring that all of the powers had agreed to observe his Open Door prin- 
ciples and that he regarded their assent as  final and definitive.  Americans took Hay s bluff 
as evidence that the United States had triumphed diplomatically over its rivals. The rivals 
may have been impressed by Hay s diplomacy, but whether they intended to uphold the 
United States  Open Door policy was not at all clear. 
The first challenge to Hay s policy came from the Chinese. In May 1900, a Chinese orga- 
nization, colloquially known as the  Boxers, sparked an uprising to rid China of all  foreign 
devils  and foreign influences. Hundreds of Europeans were killed, as were many Chinese 
men and women who had converted to Christianity. When the Boxers laid siege to the for- 
eign legations in Beijing and cut off communication between that city and the outside world, 
the imperial powers raised an expeditionary force to rescue the diplomats and punish the Chi- 
nese rebels. The force, which included 5,000 U.S. soldiers, rushed over from the Philippines, 
broke the Beijing siege in August, and ended the Boxer Rebellion soon thereafter. 
Hay feared that other major powers would use the rebellion as a reason to demand 
greater control over Chinese territory. He sent out a second round of Open Door notes, 
now asking each power to respect China s political independence and territorial integrity, 
in addition to guaranteeing unrestricted access to its markets. Impressed by America s 
show of military strength and worried that the Chinese rebels might strike again, the 
imperialist rivals responded more favorably to this second round of notes. Britain, France, 
The United States Becomes a World Power  " 827 
Challenges to America s Open Door China Policy Although imperial powers had defeated the Chinese Boxers, here 
depicted as a slain Chinese dragon, this cartoon suggests that they would soon be fighting each other for the spoils of victory. 
Appearing in the British magazine, Puck,the cartoon presents Russia (the bear) and Britain (the lion) as the two principal 
antagonists, with menacing France (the fox) and Japan (mountain cat) snarling in the foreground, and various birds of prey 
(the United States, Germany, Austria, and Italy) hovering over the kill. 
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and Germany endorsed Hay s policy outright. With that support, Hay was able to check 
Russian and Japanese designs on Chinese territory. Significantly, when the powers 
decided that the Chinese government should pay them reparations for their property and 
personnel losses during the Boxer Rebellion, Hay convinced them to accept payment in 
cash rather than in territory. By keeping China intact and open to free trade, the United 
States had achieved a major foreign policy victory. Americans began to see themselves as 
China s savioras well. 
Theodore Roosevelt,Geopolitician  
828  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
Focus Question 
What were the similarities and differences in the foreign policies of Theodore 
Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson? 
Roosevelt had been a driving force in the transformation of U.S. foreign policy during the 
McKinley Administration. As assistant secretary of the navy, as a military hero, as a speaker 
and writer, and then as vice president, Roosevelt worked tirelessly to remake the country 
into one of the world s great powers. He believed that the Americans were a racially supe- 
rior people destined for supremacy in economic and political affairs. He did not assume, 
however, that international supremacy would automatically accrue to the United States. A 
nation, like an individual, had to strive for greatness and cultivate physical and mental fit- 
ness; it had to build a military force that could convincingly project power overseas; and 
it had to be prepared to fight. All great nations, Roosevelt declared, ultimately depended 
on the skill and dedication of their warriors. 
Roosevelt s appetite for a good fight caused many people to rue the ascension of this 
 cowboy  to the White House after McKinley s assassination in 1901. But behind his blus- 
tery exterior lay a shrewd analyst of international relations. As much as he craved power 
for himself and the nation, he understood that the United States could not rule every por- 
tion of the globe through military or economic means. Consequently, he sought a balance 
of power among the industrial nations through negotiation rather than war. Such a bal- 
ance would enable each imperial power to safeguard its key interests and contribute to 
world peace and progress. (See Map 22.3, Colonial Possessions, 1900, in the color 
insert following page 912.) 
Absent from Roosevelt s geopolitical thinking was concern for the interests of less pow- 
erful nations. Roosevelt had little patience with the claims to sovereignty of small coun- 
tries or the human rights of weak peoples. In his eyes, the peoples of Latin America, Asia 
(with the exception of Japan), and Africa were racially inferior and thus incapable of self- 
government or industrial progress. They were better suited to subservience and subsis- 
tence than to independence and affluence. 
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The Roosevelt Corollary 
Ensuring U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere ranked high on Roosevelt s list of foreign 
policy objectives. In 1904, he issued a  corollary  to the Monroe Doctrine, which had asserted 
the right of the United States to keep European powers from meddling in hemispheric affairs. 
In his corollary, Roosevelt declared that the United States possessed a further right: the right to 
intervene in the domestic affairs of nations in the Western Hemisphereto quell disorder and 
forestall European intervention. The Roosevelt corollary formalized a policy that the 
United States had already deployed against Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1900 and 1901. Sub- 
sequent events in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic had further convinced Roosevelt 
of the need to expand the scope of U.S. intervention in hemispheric affairs. 
Both Venezuela and the Dominican Republic were controlled by dictators who had 
defaulted on debts owed to European banks. Their delinquency prompted a German-led Euro- 
pean naval blockade and bombardment of Venezuela in 1902 and a threatened invasion of the 
Dominican Republic by Italy and France in 1903. The United States forced the German navy 
to retreat from the Venezuelan coast in 1903. In the Dominican Republic, after a revolution had 
chased the dictator from power, the United States assumed control of the nation s customs col- 
lections in 1905 and refinanced the Dominican national debt through U.S. bankers. 
The willingness of European bankers to loan money to Latin America s corrupt regimes 
had created the possibility that the countries ruled by these regimes would suffer bankruptcy, 
social turmoil, and foreign intervention. The United States, under Roosevelt, did not hesitate 
to intervene to make sure that loans were repaid and social stability was restored. But rarely 
in Roosevelt s tenure did the United States show a willingness to help the people who had suf- 
fered under these regimes establish democratic institutions or achieve social justice. When 
Cubans seeking true national independence rebelled against their puppet government in 
1906, the United States sent in the Marines to silence them. (See Map 22.4, United States 
Presence in Latin America, 1895 1934, in the color insert following page 912.) 
The Panama Canal 
Roosevelt s varied interests in Latin America embraced the building of a canal across Central 
America. The president had long believed, along with Admiral Mahan, that the nation 
needed a way of moving its ships swiftly from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, and 
back again. Central America s narrow width, especially in its southern half, made it the 
logical place to build a canal. In fact, a French company had obtained land rights and had 
begun construction of a canal across the Colombian province of Panama in the 1880s. But 
even though a  mere  40 miles of land separated the two oceans, the French were stymied 
by technological difficulties and by the financial costs of literally moving mountains. 
Moreover, French doctors found they were unable to check the spread of malaria and yel- 
low fever among their workers. By the time Roosevelt entered the White House in 1901, 
the French Panama Company had gone bankrupt. 
Roosevelt was not deterred by the French failure. He first presided over the signing of 
the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty with Great Britain in 1901, releasing the United States from an 
Theodore Roosevelt, Geopolitician " 829 
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1850 agreement that prohibited either country from building a Central American canal 
without the other s participation. He then instructed his advisers to develop plans for a 
canal across Nicaragua. The Panamanian route chosen by the French was shorter than the 
proposed Nicaraguan route, and the canal begun by the French was 40 percent complete, 
but the French company wanted $109 million for it, more than the United States was will- 
ing to pay. In 1902, however, the company reduced the price to $40 million, a sum that 
Congress deemed appropriate. Secretary of State Hay quickly negotiated an agreement 
with Tomas Herran, the Colombian chargé d affaires in Washington. The agreement, for- 
malized in the Hay-Herran Treaty, accorded the United States a six-mile-wide strip across 
Panamaon which to build the canal.Colombia was to receive a onetime $10 million pay- 
ment and annual rent of $250,000. 
The Colombian legislature, however, rejected the proposed payment as insufficient and 
sent a new ambassador to the United States with instructions to ask for a onetime payment 
of $20 million and a share of the $40 million being paid to the French company. Actually, 
the Colombians (not unreasonably) were hoping to stall negotiations until 1904, when 
they would regain the rights to the canal zone and consequently to the $40 million sale 
price promised to the French company. 
As negotiations failed to deliver the result he desired, Roosevelt encouraged the Pana- 
manians to revolt against Colombian rule. Panamanians had staged several rebellions in 
the previous 25 years, all of which had failed, but the 1903 rebellion succeeded, mainly 
because a U.S. naval force prevented the Colombian government from landing troops in 
its Panama province. Meanwhile, the U.S.S. Nashville put U.S. troops ashore to help the 
new nation secure its independence. The United States formally recognized Panama as a 
sovereign state only two days after the rebellion against Colombia began. 
Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a director of the French company from which the United States 
had bought the rights to the canal, declared himself Panama s diplomatic representative, 
even though he was a French citizen operating out of a Wall Street law firm and hadn t set 
foot in Panama in 15 years. Before the true Panamanian delegation (appointed by the new 
Panamanian government) even reached the United States for negotiations over the canal, 
Bunau-Varilla had gone to Washington, where he and Secretary of State Hay signed the 
Hay Bunau-Varilla Treaty (1903). The treaty granted the United States a 10-mile-wide 
canal zone in Panama in return for the package Colombia had rejected $10 million down 
and $250,000 annually. Thus the United States secured its canal, not by dealing with the 
newly installed Panamanian government, but with Bunau-Varilla s French company. 
When the Panamanian delegation arrived in Washington and read the treaty, one of them 
became so enraged that he knocked Bunau-Varilla cold. Under the circumstances, how- 
ever, the Panamanian delegation s hands were tied. If it objected to the counterfeit treaty, 
the United States might withdraw its troops from Panama, leaving the new country at the 
mercy of Colombia. The instrument through which the United States secured the Canal 
Zone is known in Panamanian history as  the treaty which no Panamanian signed,  and it 
bedeviled relations between the two countries for much of the 20th century. 
830  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
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Roosevelt s severing of Panama from Colombia prompted angry protests in Congress. 
The Hearst newspapers decried the Panama foray as  nefarious  and  a quite unexampled 
instance of foul play in American politics.  Roosevelt was not perturbed. Elihu Root (sec- 
retary of state in Roosevelt s second administration), after hearing Roosevelt defend his 
action before a meeting of his cabinet, jokingly told the president,  You have shown that 
you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of 
rape.  Roosevelt later gloated,  I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate!  
Roosevelt turned the building of the canal into a test of American ingenuity and 
willpower. Engineers overcame every obstacle; doctors developed drugs to combat malaria 
and yellow fever; armies of construction workers  made the dirt fly.  The canal remains a 
testament to the labor of some 30,000 workers, imported mainly from the West Indies, 
who, over a 10-year period, labored 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, for 10 cents an hour. 
Roosevelt visited the canal site in 1906, the first American president to travel overseas 
while in office. When the canal was triumphantly opened to shipping in 1914, the British 
ambassador James Bryce described it as  the greatest liberty Man has ever taken with 
Nature.  The canal shortened the voyage from San Francisco to New York by more than 
8,000 miles and significantly enhanced the international prestige of the United States. The 
Theodore Roosevelt, Geopolitician " 831 
PANAMA 
PANAMA 
PANAMA 
CANAL 
ZONE 
Colón 
Cristobal 
Balboa 
Panamá 
Gatun 
Locks 
Pedro Miguel Locks 
Miraflores Locks 
0 5 10 Miles 
0 5 10 Kilometers 
CARIBBEAN 
SEA 
PACIFIC 
OCEAN 
RíoC 
hagres 
Channel 
Ga 
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ke 
PANAMA 
CANAL 
ZONE 
COLOMBIA 
HONDURAS 
COSTA RICA 
NICARAGUA 
PACIFIC 
            OCEAN 
CARIBBEAN 
SEA 
Panama Canal 
Locks 
Railroad 
Map 22.5 Panama Canal Zone, 1914 This map shows the route of the 
completed canal through Panama and the 10-mile-wide zone surrounding it 
that the United States controlled. The inset map locates the Canal Zone in the 
context of Central and South America. 
11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 831
strategic importance of the canal, in turn, made the United States even more determined 
to preserve political order in Central America and the Caribbean. 
In 1921, the United States paid the Colombian government $25 million as compensa- 
tion for its loss of Panama. Panama waited more than 70 years, however, to regain control 
of the 10-mile-wide strip of land that Bunau-Varilla, in connivance with the U.S. govern- 
ment, had bargained away in 1903. President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty in 1977 pro- 
viding for the reintegration of the Canal Zone into Panama, and the canal was transferred 
to Panama in 2000. 
Keeping the Peace in East Asia 
In East Asia, Roosevelt strove to preserve the Open Door policy in China and the balance 
of power throughout the region. The chief threats came from Russia and Japan, both of 
whom wanted to seize large chunks of China. At first, Russian expansion into Manchuria 
and Korea prompted Roosevelt to support Japan s 1904 attack on the Russian Pacific fleet 
anchored at Port Arthur, China. Once the ruinous effects of the war on Russia became 
clear, however, Roosevelt entered into secret negotiations to arrange a peace. He invited 
representatives of Japan and Russia to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and prevailed on 
them to negotiate a compromise. The settlement favored Japan by perpetuating its control 
over most of the territories it had won during the brief Russo-Japanese War.Its chief prize 
was Korea, which became a protectorate of Japan, but Japan also acquired the southernpart of 
Sakhalin Island, Port Arthur, and the South Manchurian Railroad. Russia avoided paying 
Japan a huge indemnity and it retained Siberia, thus preserving its role as an East Asian power. 
Finally, Roosevelt protected China s territorial integrity by inducing the armies of both Russia 
and Japan to leave Manchuria. Roosevelt s success in ending the Russo-Japanese War won him 
the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1906; he was the first American to earn that award. 
Although Roosevelt succeeded in negotiating a peace between these two world powers, 
he subsequently ignored, and sometimes encouraged, challenges to the sovereignty of 
weaker Asian nations. In a secret agreement with Japan (the Taft-Katsura Agreement of 
1905), for example, the United States agreed that Japan could dominate Korea in return 
for a Japanese promise not to attack the Philippines. And in the Root-Takahira Agreement 
of 1908, the United States tacitly reversed its earlier stand on the inviolability of Chinese 
borders by recognizing Japanese expansion into southern Manchuria. 
In Roosevelt s eyes, the overriding need to maintain peace with Japan justified ignoring the 
claims of Korea and, increasingly, of China. Roosevelt admired Japan s industrial and military 
might and regarded Japanese expansion into East Asia as a natural expression of its imperial 
ambition. The task of American diplomacy, he believed, was first to allow the Japanese to 
build a secure sphere of influence in East Asia (much as the United States had done in Cen- 
tral America and the Caribbean), and second to encourage them to join the United States in 
pursuing peace rather than war. This was a delicate diplomatic task that required both sensi- 
tivity and strength, especially when anti-Japanese agitation broke out in California in 1906. 
832  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
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White Californians had long feared the presence of East Asian immigrants (see chapter 
20). They had pressured Congress into passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which 
ended most Chinese immigration to the United States. They next turned their racism on 
Japanese immigrants, whose numbers in California had reached 24,000. In 1906, the San 
Francisco school board ordered the segregation of Asian schoolchildren, so that they 
would not  contaminate  white children. In 1907, the California legislature debated a law 
to end Japanese immigration to the state. Anti-Asian riots erupted in San Francisco and 
Los Angeles, encouraged in part by hysterical stories in the press about the  Yellow Peril.  
Outraged militarists in Japan began talking of a possible war with the United States. 
Roosevelt assured the Japanese government that he too was appalled by the Californians  
behavior. In 1907, he reached a  gentlemen s agreement with the Japanese, by which 
the Tokyo government promised to halt the immigration of Japanese adult male laborers 
to the United States in return for Roosevelt s pledge to end anti-Japanese discrimination in 
California. Roosevelt did his part by persuading the San Francisco school board to rescind 
its segregation ordinance. 
At the same time, Roosevelt worried that the Tokyo government would interpret his sen- 
sitivity to Japanese honor as weakness. So he ordered the main part of the U.S. fleet, con- 
sisting of 16 battleships, to embark on a 45,000-mile world tour, including a splashy stop 
Theodore Roosevelt, Geopolitician " 833 
Anti-Asian Hysteria in San Francisco In 1906, in the midst of a wave of anti-Asian prejudice in California, the San Francisco 
school board ordered the segregation of all Asian schoolchildren. Here, a nine-year-old Japanese student submits an application 
for admission to a public primary school and is refused by the principal, Miss M. E. Dean. 
N 
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in Tokyo Bay. Many Americans deplored the cost of the tour and feared that the appear- 
ance of the U.S. Navy in a Japanese port would provoke military retaliation. Roosevelt 
brushed his critics aside, and, true to his prediction, the Japanese were impressed by the 
Great White Fleet sshow of strength. Their response seemed to lend validity to the 
African proverb Roosevelt often invoked:  Speak softly and carry a big stick.  
In fact, Roosevelt s handling of Japan was arguably the most impressive aspect of his 
foreign policy. Unlike many other Americans, he refused to let racist attitudes cloud his 
thinking. He knew when to make concessions and when to stand firm. His policies less- 
ened the prospect of a war with Japan while preserving a strong U.S. presence in East Asia. 
William Howard Taft,Dollar Diplomat 
William Howard Taft brought impressive foreign policy credentials to the job of president. 
He had gained valuable experience in colonial administration as the first governor-general 
of the Philippines. As Roosevelt s secretary of war and chief negotiator for the Taft-Katsura 
agreement of 1905, he had learned a great deal about conducting diplomacy with imperial- 
ist rivals. Yet Taft lacked Roosevelt s grasp of balance-of-power politics and capacity for lead- 
ership in foreign affairs. Furthermore, Taft s secretary of state, Philander C. Knox, a corpo- 
ration lawyer from Pittsburgh, lacked diplomatic expertise. Knox s conduct of foreign policy 
seemed directed almost entirely toward expanding opportunities for corporate investment 
overseas, a disposition that prompted critics to deride his policies as  dollar diplomacy.  
Taft and Knox believed that U.S. investments would effectively substitute  dollars for 
bullets,  and thus offer a more peaceful and less coercive way of maintaining stability and 
order. Taking a swipe at Roosevelt s  big stick  policy, Taft announced that  modern diplo- 
macy is commercial.  
The inability of Taft and Knox to grasp the complexities of power politics, however, led 
to a diplomatic reversal in East Asia. Prodded by banker associates, Knox sought to expand 
American economic activities in China even in Manchuria, where they encroached on 
the Japanese sphere of influence. In 1911, Knox proposed that a syndicate of European 
and American bankers buy the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railroad to open up 
North China to international trade. Japan reacted by signing a friendship treaty with Rus- 
sia, its former enemy, which signaled their joint determination to exclude American, 
British, and French goods from Manchurian markets. Knox s plan to purchase the railroad 
collapsed, and the United States  Open Door policy suffered a serious blow. Knox s further 
efforts to increase American trade with Central and South China triggered further hostile 
responses from the Japanese and the Russians and contributed to the collapse of the Chi- 
nese government and the onset of the Chinese Revolution in 1911. 
Dollar diplomacy worked better in the Caribbean, where no major power contested 
U.S. policy. Knox encouraged U.S. investment. Companies such as United Fruit of 
Boston, which established extensive banana plantations in Costa Rica and Honduras, 
grew powerful enough to influence both the economies and the governments of Central 
834  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
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American countries. When political turmoil threatened their investments, the United 
States simply sent in its troops. Thus, when Nicaraguan dictator José Santos Zelaya 
reportedly began negotiating with a European country to build a second trans-Isthmian 
canal in 1910, a force of U.S. Marines toppled his regime. Marines landed again in 1912 
when Zelaya s successor, Adolfo Diaz, angered Nicaraguans with his pro-American policies. 
This time the Marines were instructed to keep the Diaz regime in power. Except for a brief 
period in 1925, U.S. troops would remain in Nicaragua continuously from 1912 until 
1933. Under Taft, the United States continued to do whatever American policy makers 
deemed necessary to bolster friendly governments and maintain order in Latin America. 
Woodrow Wilson,Struggling Idealist 
Woodrow Wilson s foreign policy in the Caribbean initially appeared no different from 
that of his Republican predecessors. In 1915, the United States sent troops to Haiti to 
put down a revolution; they remained as an army of occupation for 21 years. In 1916, 
when the people of the Dominican Republic (who shared the island of Hispaniola with 
the Haitians) refused to accept a treaty making them more or less a protectorate of the 
United States, Wilson forced them to accept the rule of a U.S. military government. 
When German influence in the Danish West Indies began to expand, Wilson purchased 
the islands from Denmark, renamed them the Virgin Islands, and added them to the U.S. 
Caribbean empire. By the time Wilson left office in 1921, he had intervened militarily 
in the Caribbean more often than any American president before him. 
Wilson s relationship with Mexico in the wake of its revolution, however, reveals that he 
was troubled by a foreign policy that ignored a less powerful nation s right to determine its 
own future. He deemed the Mexicans capable of making democracy work and, in general, 
showed a concern for morality and justice in foreign affairs matters to which Roosevelt 
and Taft had paid scant attention. Wilson wanted U.S. foreign policy to advance demo- 
cratic ideals and institutions in Mexico. 
Wilson s Mexican dealings were motivated by more than his fondness for democracy. He 
also feared that political unrest in Mexico could lead to violence, social disorder, and a rev- 
olutionary government hostile to U.S. economic interests. With a U.S.-style democratic gov- 
ernment in Mexico, Wilson believed, property rights would be respected and U.S. invest- 
ments would remain secure. Wilson s desire both to encourage democracy and to limit the 
extent of social change made it difficult to devise a consistent foreign policy toward Mexico. 
The Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910 when dictator Porfirio Diaz, who had ruled 
for 34 years, was overthrown by democratic forces led by Francisco Madero. Madero s talk 
of democratic reform frightened many foreign investors, especially those in the United States 
and Great Britain, who owned more than half of all Mexican real estate, 90 percent of its 
oil reserves, and practically all of its railroads. Thus, when Madero was overthrown early 
in 1913 by Victoriano Huerta, a conservative general who promised to protect foreign 
investments, the dollar diplomatists in the Taft administration and in Great Britain 
Woodrow Wilson, Struggling Idealist  " 835 
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breathed a sigh of relief. Henry Lane Wilson, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, had helped 
engineer Huerta s coup. Before close relations between the United States and Huerta could 
be worked out, however, Huerta s men murdered Madero. 
Woodrow Wilson, who became president shortly after Madero s assassination in 1913, 
might have overlooked it (as did the European powers) and entered into close ties with 
Huerta on condition that he protect U.S. property. Instead, Wilson refused to recognize 
Huerta s  government of butchers  and demanded that Mexico hold democratic elections. 
Wilson favored Venustiano Carranza and Francisco ( Pancho ) Villa, two enemies of 
Huerta who commanded rebel armies and who claimed to be democrats. In April 1914, 
Wilson used the arrest of several U.S. sailors by Huerta s troops as a reason to send a fleet 
into Mexican waters. He ordered the U.S. Marines to occupy the Mexican port city of Ver- 
acruz and to prevent a German ship there from unloading munitions meant for Huerta s 
army. In the resulting battle between U.S. and Mexican forces, 19 Americans and 126 
Mexicans were killed. The battle brought the two countries dangerously close to war. 
Eventually, however, American control over Veracruz weakened and embarrassed Huerta s 
regime to the point where Carranza was able to take power. 
Carranza did not behave as Wilson had expected. Rejecting Wilson s efforts to shape a new 
Mexican government, he announced a bold land reform program. That program called for the 
distribution of some of Mexico s agricultural land to impoverished peasants and the transfer 
of developmental rights on oil lands from foreign corporations to the Mexican government. 
If the program went into effect, U.S. petroleum companies would lose control of their 
Mexican properties, a loss that Wilson deemed unacceptable. Wilson now threw his sup- 
port to Pancho Villa, who seemed more willing than Carranza to protect U.S. oil interests. 
When Carranza s forces defeated Villa s forces in 1915, Wilson reluctantly withdrew his 
support of Villa and prepared to recognize the Carranza government. 
Furious that Wilson had abandoned him, Villa and his soldiers pulled 18 U.S. citizens from 
a train in northern Mexico and murdered them, along with another 17 in an attack on Colum- 
bus, New Mexico. Determined to punish Villa, Wilson received permission from Carranza to 
send a U.S. expeditionary force under General John J. Pershing into Mexico to hunt down 
Villa s  bandits.  Pershing s troops pursued Villa s forces 300 miles into Mexico but failed to 
catch them. The U.S. troops did, however, clash twice with Mexican troops under Carranza s 
command, once again bringing the countries to the brink of war. The United States, about to 
enter the First World War, could not afford a fight with Mexico; in 1917, Wilson quietly 
ordered Pershing s troops home and grudgingly recognized theCarranza government. 
Wilson s policies toward Mexico in 1913 17 seemed to have produced few concrete 
results, except to reinforce an already deep antagonism among Mexicans toward the 
United States. His repeated changes in strategy, moreover, seemed to indicate a lack of skill 
and decisiveness in foreign affairs. Actually, however, Wilson recognized something that 
Roosevelt and Taft had not: that more and more peoples of the world were determined to 
control their own destinies. The United States, under Wilson, was looking for a way to 
support these peoples  democratic aspirations while also safeguarding its own economic 
836  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
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interests. The First World War would make this quest for a balance between democratic 
principles and national self-interest all the more urgent. 
Conclusion 
We can assess the dramatic turn in U.S. foreign policy after 1898 either in relation to the 
foreign policies of rival world powers or against America s own democratic ideals. By the 
first standard, U.S. foreign policy looks impressive. The United States achieved its major 
objectives in world affairs: It tightened its control over the Western Hemisphere and pro- 
jected its military and economic power into Asia. It did so while sacrificing relatively few 
American lives and while constraining the jingoistic appetite for truly extensive military 
adventure and conquest. The United States added only 125,000 square miles to its empire 
in the years from 1870 to 1900, while Great Britain, France, and Germany enlarged their 
empires by 4.7, 3.5, and 1.0 million square miles, respectively. Relatively few foreigners 
were subjected to U.S. colonial rule. By contrast, in 1900, the British Empire extended 
more than 12 million square miles and embraced one-fourth of the world s population. At 
times, American rule could be brutal, as it was to Filipino soldiers and civilians alike, but on 
the whole it was no more severe than British or French rule and significantly less severe than 
that of German, Belgian, or Japanese imperialists. McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilsonall 
placed limits on American expansion and avoided, until 1917, extensive foreign entangle- 
ments and wars. 
If measured against the standard of America s own democratic ideals, however, U.S. for- 
eign policy after 1898 must be judged more harshly. It demeaned the peoples of the 
Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and Colombia as inferior and primitive and denied 
them the right to govern themselves. In choosing to behave like the imperialist powers of 
Europe, the United States abandoned its longstanding claim to being a different kind of 
nation one that valued liberty more than power. 
Many Americans of the time judged their nation by both standards and thus faced a 
dilemma that would extend throughout the 20th century. On the one hand, they believed 
with Roosevelt that the size, economic strength, and honor of the United States required 
it to accept the role of world power and policeman. On the other hand, they continued to 
believe with Wilson that they had a mission to spread the democratic values of 1776 to 
the farthest reaches of the earth. The Mexico example demonstrates how hard it was for 
the United States to reconcile these two very different approaches to world affairs. 
S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS 
General works on America s imperialist turn in the 1890s and early years of the 20th century 
include John Dobson, America s Ascent: The United States Becomes a Great Power, 1880 1914 
(1978);Walter LaFeber,The Cambridge History of Foreign Relations: The Search for Opportunity, 
1865 1913(1993); and Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: AmericanEconomic 
Conclusion " 837 
11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 837
and Cultural Expansion, 1890 1945(1982).David F. Trask,The War with Spain in 1898 (1981) 
is a comprehensive study of the Spanish-American War, but it should be supplemented with 
Philip S. Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, 
2 vols. (1972). Gerald F. Linderman, The Mirror of War: American Society and the Spanish- 
American War(1974) brilliantly recaptures the shock that overtook Americans who discovered 
that their Cuban allies were black and the Spanish enemies were white. The role of gender in the 
Spanish-American War is explored inKristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: 
How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars(1998). 
Stuart Creighton Miller,  Benevolent Assimilation : The American Conquest of the Philippines, 
1899 1903(1982) examines the Filipino-American war, while Paul A. Kramer,The Blood of Gov- 
ernment: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines(2006) analyzes the effects of U.S. 
colonialism on the Philippines and America. Louis A. Perez, Cuba under the Platt Amendment, 
1902 1934(1986), explores the extension of U.S. control over Cuba, whileMarilyn B. Young, 
The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895 1901(1968) examines the unfolding Open 
Door policy. The acquisition of Guam and Samoa is the subject of Paul M. Kennedy,The Samoan 
Tangle(1974), and the history of Puerto Rico following its annexation by the United States is 
explored in Raymond Carr, Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment (1984). The anti-imperialist 
movement is analyzed in E. Berkeley Tompkins, Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 
1890 1920: The Great Debate(1970). 
Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power(1956), is still a 
crucial work on Roosevelt s foreign policy, but it should be supplemented with Richard H. Collin, 
Theodore Roosevelt s Caribbean: The Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine and the Latin American 
Context (1990). Consult Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and 
Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900 1930(1999), on the  dollar diplomacy  that emerged during the 
Taft Administration. On Wilson s foreign policy, see Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow 
Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order(1992); Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: 
The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913 1923(1984); John S. D. Eisenhower, Inter- 
vention: The United States and the Mexican Revolution, 1913 1917(1993); and Mary A. Renda, 
Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915 1940(2001). 
838  "CHAPTER 22  "Becoming a World Power, 1898 1917 
Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to 
this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin 
Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is 
an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and 
efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want-NOW! 
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11019_22_ch22_p0809-0838.qxd  6/4/07  11:52 AM  Page 838
War and Society, 
1914 1920 
T 
he First World War broke out in Europe in August 1914. The Triple Allianceof 
Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire squared off against the Triple 
Entente of Great Britain, France, and Russia. The United States entered the war on the side 
of the Entente (the Allies, or Allied Powers, as they came to be called) in 1917. Over the 
next year and a half, the United States converted its large, sprawling economy into a dis- 
ciplined war production machine, raised a 5-million-man army, and provided both the 
war matériel and troops that helped propel the Allies to victory. The United States emerged 
from the war as the world s mightiest country. In these and other respects, the war was a 
great triumph. 
But the war also convulsed American society more deeply than any event since the Civil 
War. This was the first  total  war,meaning that combatants devoted virtually all of their 
resources to the fight. Thus the U.S. government had no choice but to pursue a degree of 
industrial control and social regimentation that was unprecedented in American history. 
Needless to say, this degree of government control was a controversial measure in a soci- 
ety that had long distrusted state power. Moreover, significant numbers of Americans from 
a variety of constituencies opposed the war. To overcome this opposition, Wilson couched 
American war aims in disinterested and idealistic terms: The United States, he claimed, 
wanted a  peace without victory,  a  war for democracy,  and liberty for the world s 
oppressed peoples. Because these words drew deeply on American political traditions, 
Wilson believed that Americans would find them inspiring, put aside their suspicions, and 
support him. 
Although many people in the United States and abroad responded enthusiastically to 
Wilson s ideals, Wilson needed England and France s support to deliver peace without vic- 
tory, and this support never came. At home, disadvantaged groups stirred up trouble by 
declaring that American society had failed to live up to its democratic and egalitarian 
ideals. Wilson supported repressive policies to silence these rebels and to enforce unity 
and conformity on the American people. In the process, he tarnished the ideals for which 
America had been fighting. Only a year after the war ended, Wilson s hopes for peace with- 
out victory abroad had been destroyed, and America was being torn apart by violent labor 
disputes and race riots at home. 
23 
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Europe s Descent into War 
Europe began its descent into war on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, when a Bosnian 
nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian 
throne. This act was meant to protest the Austro-Hungarian imperial presence in the 
Balkans and to encourage the Bosnians, Croatians, and other Balkan peoples to join the 
Serbs in establishing independent nations. Austria-Hungary responded to this provoca- 
tion on July 28 by declaring war on Serbia, holding it responsible for the archduke s 
murder. 
The conflict might have remained local if an intricate series of treaties had not 
divided Europe into two hostile camps. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, the so- 
called Triple Alliance, had promised to come to each other s aid if attacked. Italy would 
soon opt out of this alliance, to be replaced by the Ottoman Empire.Arrayed against the 
nations of the Triple Alliance were Britain, France, and Russia in the Triple Entente.Russia 
was obligated by another treaty to defend Serbia against Austria-Hungary, and conse- 
quently on July 30, it mobilized its armed forces to go to Serbia s aid. That brought 
840  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
1914 First World War breaks out (July August) 
1915 German submarine sinks the Lusitania(May 7) 
1916 Woodrow Wilson unveils peace initiative  " Wilson reelected as  peace president  
1917 Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare (February)  " Tsar Nicholas II overthrown in Russia 
(March)  " U.S. enters the war (April 6)  " Committee on Public Information established  " Congress passes 
Selective Service Act, Espionage Act, Immigration Restriction Act  " War Industries Board established  " 
Lenin s Bolsheviks come to power in Russia (November) 
1918 Lenin signs treaty with Germany, pulls Russia out of war (March)  " Germany launches offensive on 
western front (March April)  " Congress passes Sabotage Act and Sedition Act  " French, British, and 
U.S. troops repel Germans, advance toward Germany (April October)  " Eugene V. Debs jailed for making 
antiwar speech  " Germany signs armistice (November 11) 
1919 Treaty of Versailles signed (June 28)  " Chicago race riot (July)  " Wilson suffers stroke (October 2)  " Police 
strike in Boston  " 18th Amendment (Prohibition) ratified 
1919 20 Steelworkers strike in Midwest  " Red Scare prompts  Palmer raids   " Senate refuses to ratify Treaty of 
Versailles  " Universal Negro Improvement Association grows under Marcus Garvey s leadership 
1920 Anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti convicted of murder 
1923 Marcus Garvey convicted of mail fraud 
1924 Woodrow Wilson dies 
1927 Sacco and Vanzetti executed 
C HR O NO L O G Y 
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Germany into the conflict to protect Austria-Hungary from Russian attack. On August 3, 
German troops struck not at Russia but at France, Russia s western ally. To reach 
France, Germantroops had marched through neutral Belgium. On August 4, Britain 
reacted by declaring war on Germany. Within the space of only a few weeks, Europe was 
engulfed in war. 
Complicated alliances and defense treaties of the European nations undoubtedly 
hastened the rush toward war. But equally important was the competition among the 
Europeanpowers to build the strongest economies, the largest armies and navies, and the 
grandest colonial empires. Britain and Germany, in particular, were engaged in a bitter strug- 
gle for European and world supremacy. Few Europeans had any idea that these military 
buildups might lead to a terrible war that would kill nearly an entire generation of 
young men and expose the barbarity lurking in their civilization. Historians now 
believe that several advisers close to the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, were 
actually eager to engage Russia and France in a fight for supremacy on the European con- 
tinent. They expected that a European war would be swift and decisive in Germany s 
favor. England and France also believed in their own superiority. Millions of young 
men, rich and poor, rushed to join the armies on both sides and share in the expected 
glory. 
Victory was not swift. The two camps were evenly matched. Moreover, the first 
wartime use of machine guns and barbed wire made defense against attack easier than 
staging an offensive. (Both tanks and airplanes had been invented by this time, but mili- 
tary strategists on both sides were slow to put them to offensive use.) On the western 
front, after the initial German attack narrowly failed to take Paris in 1914, the two oppos- 
ing armies confronted each other along a battle line stretching from Belgium in the north 
to the Swiss border in the south. Troops dug trenches to protect themselves from artillery 
bombardment and poison gas attacks. Commanders on both sides mounted suicidal 
ground assaults on the enemy by sending tens of thousands of infantry, armed only with 
rifles, bayonets, and grenades, out of the trenches and directly into enemy fire. Barbed 
wire further retarded forward progress, enabling enemy artillery and machine guns to cut 
down appalling numbers of men. In 1916, during one 10-month German offensive at 
Verdun (France), 600,000 German troops died; 20,000 British troops were killed during 
only the first day of an Entente assault on the Somme River (also in France). Many of 
those who were not killed in combat succumbed to disease that spread rapidly in the 
cold, wet, and rat-infested trenches. In Eastern Europe, the armies of Germany and Austria- 
Hungary squared off against those of Russia and Serbia. Although that front did not 
employ trench warfare, the combat was no less lethal. By the time the First World War 
ended, an estimated 8.5 million soldiers had died and more than twice that number had 
been wounded. Total casualties, both military and civilian, had reached 37 million. 
Europe had lost a generation of young men, as well as its confidence, stability, and global 
supremacy. 
Europe s Descent into War  " 841 
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American Neutrality 
842  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
"Æ 
"Æ 
"Æ 
"Æ 
"Æ 
"Æ 
"Æ 
AUSTRIA- 
HUNGARY 
FRANCE 
ITALY 
MONTENEGRO 
SPAIN 
ALGERIA 
 (Fr.) TUNISIA 
 (Fr.) 
LIBYA 
(Fr.) 
EGYPT 
 (Br.) 
ARABIA 
SPANISH 
MOROCCO 
(Sp.) 
MOROCCO 
(Fr.) 
PORTUGAL 
GREAT 
BRITAIN 
NORWAY 
ICELAND 
SWEDEN 
RUSSIA 
OTTOMAN EMPIRE 
BULGARIA 
ROMANIA 
SERBIA 
GREECE 
NETH. 
BELG. 
LUX. 
GERMANY 
SWITZ. 
ALBANIA 
DENMARK 
Paris 
Sarajevo 
Mecca 
Rome 
Vienna 
Berlin 
Petrograd 
(St.Petersburg) 
Constantinople 
London 
BOSNIA and 
HERZEGOVINA 
Central powers, 1916 
Neutral countries 
Trench line, Western front, 1915 
British naval blockade 
Allied powers and 
possessions, 1916 
Eastern front, 1915 
3 
July 30 
Russia begins mobilization 
4 
August 1 
Germany declares war 
on Russia 
5 
August 3 
Germany declares war 
on France 
6 
August 4 
Great Britain declares war 
on Germany 
7 
August 6 
Russia and 
Austria-Hungary at war 
8 
August 12 
Great Britain declares war 
on Austria-Hungary 
2 
July 28 
Austria-Hungary declares 
war on Serbia 
June 28 
Assassination at Sarajevo 
1 
THE ROAD TO WAR, 
SUMMER 1914 
0 
200 400 Kilometers 
0 
200 400 Miles 
MEDITERRANEAN SEA 
English Channel 
AEGEAN 
SEA 
BLACK SEA 
NORTH 
SEA 
A 
D 
R 
I 
A 
TI 
C 
SE 
A 
ATLANTIC 
OCEAN 
Bay of 
Biscay 
BALT 
IC 
SEA 
Map 23.1 Europe Goes to War In the First World War, Great Britain, France, and Russia squared off against 
Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. Most of the fighting occurred in Europe along the western front in 
France (solid line) or the eastern front in Russia (dashed line). This map also shows Britain s blockade of German ports. 
British armies based in Egypt (then a British colony) clashed with Ottoman armies in Arabia and other parts of the Ottoman 
Empire. View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin. 
Focus Question 
Why did the U.S. policy of neutrality fail, and why did the United States get drawn 
into war? 
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Soon after the fighting began, Woodrow Wilson told Americans that this was a European 
war; neither side was threatening a vital American interest. The United States would there- 
fore proclaim its neutralityand maintain normal relations with both sides while seeking 
to secure peace. Normal relations meant that the United States would continue trading 
with both camps. Wilson s neutrality policy met with lively opposition, especially from 
Theodore Roosevelt, who was convinced that the United States should join the Entente to 
check German power and expansionism. Most Americans, however, applauded Wilson s 
determination to keep the country out of war. 
Neutrality was easier to proclaim than to achieve, however. Many Americans, especially 
those with economic and political power, identified culturally more with Britain than with 
Germany. They shared with the English a language, a common ancestry, and a commitment 
to liberty. Wilson revered the British parliamentary system of government. His closest for- 
eign policy adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, was pro-British, as was Robert Lansing, a 
trusted counselor in the State Department. William Jennings Bryan, Wilson s secretary of 
state, objected to this pro-British tilt, but he was a lone voice in Wilson s Cabinet. Germany 
had no such attraction for U.S. policy makers. On the contrary, Germany s acceptance of 
monarchical rule, the prominence of militarists in German politics, and its lack of demo- 
cratic traditions inclined U.S. officials to judge Germany harshly. 
The United States had strong economic ties to Great Britain as well. In 1914, the United 
States exported more than $800 million in goods to Britain and its allies, compared with 
$170 million to Germany and Austria-Hungary (which came to be known as the Central 
Powers). As soon as the war began, the British and then the French turned to the United 
States for food, clothing, munitions, and other war supplies. The U.S. economy, which had 
been languishing in 1914, enjoyed a boom as a result. Bankers began to issue loans to the 
Allied Powers, further knitting together the American and British economies and giving 
American investors a direct stake in an Allied victory. Moreover, the British navy had 
blockaded German ports, which damaged the United States  already limited trade with 
Germany. By 1916, U.S. exports to the Central Powers had plummeted to barely $1 million, 
a fall of more than 99 percent in two years. 
The British blockade of German ports clearly violated American neutrality. The Wilson 
administration protested the British navy s search and occasional seizure of American mer- 
chant ships, but it never retaliated by suspending loans or exports to Great Britain. To do 
so would have plunged the U.S. economy into a  recession. In failing to protect its right to 
trade with Germany, however, the United States compromised its neutrality and allowed 
itself to be drawn into war. 
Submarine Warfare 
To combat British control of the seas and to check the flow of U.S. goods to the Allies, 
Germanyunveiled a terrifying new weapon, the Unterseeboot, or U-boat, the first militarily 
effective submarine. Early in 1915, Germany announced its intent to use its U-boats to 
sink on sight enemy ships en route to the British Isles. On May 7, 1915, without warning, 
American Neutrality  " 843 
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a German U-boat torpedoed the British passenger liner Lusitania,en route from New York 
to London. The ship sank in 22 minutes, killing 1,198 men, women, and children, 128 of 
them U.S. citizens. Americans were shocked by the sinking. Innocent civilians who had 
been given no warning of attack and no chance to surrender had been murdered in cold 
blood. The attack appeared to confirm what anti-German agitators were saying: that the 
Germans were by nature barbaric and uncivilized. The circumstances surrounding the 
sinking of the Lusitania, however, were more complicated than most Americans realized. 
Before its sailing, the Germans had alleged that the Lusitaniawas secretly carrying a 
large store of munitions to Great Britain (a charge later proved true), and that it therefore 
was subject to U-boat attack. Germany had warned American passengers not to travel on 
British passenger ships that carried munitions. Moreover, Germany claimed, with some 
justification, that the purpose of the U-boat attacks the disruption of Allied supply 
lines was no different from Britain s purpose in blockading German ports. Because its 
surface ships were outnumbered by the British navy, Germany claimed it had no alterna- 
tive but to choose the underwater strategy. If a submarine attack seemed more reprehen- 
sible than a conventional sea battle, the Germans argued, it was no more so than the British 
attempt to starve the German people into submission with a blockade. 
American political leaders might have used the Lusitaniaincident to denounce both 
Germany s U-boat strategy and Britain s blockade as actions that violated the rights of cit- 
izens of neutral nations. Only Secretary of State Bryan had the courage to say so, however, 
and his stand proved so unpopular in Washington that he resigned from office; Wilson 
chose the pro-British Lansing to take his place. Wilson denounced the sinking of the Lusitania 
and demanded that Germany pledge never to launch another attack on the citizens of neu- 
tral nations, even when they were traveling in British or French ships. Germany acquiesced 
to Wilson s demand. 
The resulting lull in submarine warfare was short-lived, however. In early 1916, the 
Allies began to arm their merchant vessels with guns and depth charges capable of destroy- 
ing German U-boats. Considering this a provocation, Germany renewed its campaign of 
surprise submarine attacks. In March 1916, a German submarine torpedoed the French 
passenger liner Sussex, causing a heavy loss of life and injuring several Americans. Again 
Wilson demanded that Germany spare civilians from attack. In the so-called Sussex pledge, 
Germany once again relented but warned that it might resume unrestricted submarine 
warfare if the United States did not prevail on Great Britain to permit neutral ships to pass 
through the naval blockade. 
The German submarine attacks strengthened the hand of Theodore Roosevelt and oth- 
ers who had been arguing that war with Germany was inevitable and that the United States 
must prepare to fight. By 1916, Wilson could no longer ignore these critics. Between January 
and September of that year, he sought and won congressional approval for bills to increase 
the size of the army and navy, tighten federal control over National Guard forces, and 
authorize the building of a merchant fleet. Although Wilson had conceded ground to the 
pro-war agitators, he did not share their belief that war with Germany was either 
inevitable or desirable. To the contrary, he accelerated his diplomatic initiatives to secure 
844  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
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peace, and he dispatched Colonel House to London in January 1916 to draw up a peace 
plan with the British foreign secretary, Lord Grey. This initiative resulted in the House- 
Grey memorandum of February 22, 1916, in which Britain agreed to ask the United States 
to negotiate a settlement between the Allies and the Central Powers. The British believed 
that the terms of such a peace settlement would favor the Allies. They were furious when 
Wilson revealed that he wanted an impartial, honestly negotiated peace in which the 
claims of the Allies and Central Powers would be treated with equal respect and consider- 
ation. Britain now rejected U.S. peace overtures, and relations between the two countries 
grew unexpectedly tense. 
The Peace Movement 
Underlying Wilson s 1916 peace initiative was a vision of a new world order in which rela- 
tions between nations would be governed by negotiation rather than war and in which jus- 
tice would replace power as the fundamental principle of diplomacy. In a major foreign 
policy address on May 27, 1916, Wilson formally declared his support for what he would 
later call the League of Nations, an international parliament dedicated to the pursuit of 
peace, security, and justice for all the world s peoples. 
Many Americans supported Wilson s efforts to commit national prestige to the cause of 
international peace rather than conquest and to keep the United States out of war. Carrie 
Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and Jane 
Addams, founder of the Women s Peace Party, actively opposed the war. In 1915, an inter- 
national women s peace conference at The Hague (in the Netherlands) had drawn many 
participants from the United States. A substantial pacifist group emerged among the nation s 
Protestant clergy. Midwestern progressives such as Robert La Follette, William Jennings 
Bryan, and George Norris urged that the United States steer clear of this Europeanconflict, 
as did leading socialists such as Eugene V. Debs. In April 1916, many of the country smost 
prominent progressives and socialists joined hands in the American Union Against 
Militarismand pressured Wilson to continue pursuing the path of peace. 
Wilson s peace campaign also attracted support from the country s sizable Irish and 
German ethnic populations, who wanted to block a formal military alliance with Great 
Britain. That many German ethnics, who continued to feel affection for their native land 
and culture, would oppose U.S. entry into the war is hardly surprising. And the Irish 
viewed England as an arrogant imperial power that kept Ireland subjugated. That view was 
confirmed when England crushed the Easter Rebellion that Irish nationalists had launched 
on Easter Monday 1916 to win their country s independence. The Irish in America, like 
those in Ireland, wanted to see Britain s strength sapped (and Ireland s prospects for freedom 
enhanced) by a long war. 
Wilson s Vision: Peace without Victory  
The 1916 presidential election revealed the breadth of peace sentiment. At the Democratic 
convention, Governor Martin Glynn of New York, the Irish American speaker who renom- 
inated Wilson for a second term, praised the president for keeping the United States out 
American Neutrality  " 845 
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846  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
The Horror of War This cover of the United Mine Workers Journal(1916) presents the Great War in the bleakest possible 
terms: as giving the Grim Reaper license to claim the bodies and souls of Europe s young men. Progressive labor unions were 
part of the broad coalition in the United States opposed to America s entry into war. 
W 
is 
co 
n 
s 
in 
 H 
is 
to 
r 
ic 
a 
l 
 S 
o 
c 
ie 
ty 
 
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of war. His portrayal of Wilson as the  peace president  electrified the convention and 
made  He kept us out of war  a campaign slogan. The slogan proved particularly effective 
against Wilson s Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, whose close ties to 
Theodore Roosevelt seemed to place him in the pro-war camp. Combining the promise of 
peace with a pledge to push ahead with progressive reform, Wilson won a narrow victory. 
Emboldened by his electoral triumph, Wilson intensified his quest for peace. On 
December 16, 1916, he sent a peace note to the belligerent governments, entreating them 
to consider ending the conflict and, to that end, to state their terms for peace. Although 
Germany refused to specify its terms and Britain and France announced a set of conditions 
too extreme for Germany ever to accept, Wilson pressed ahead, initiating secret peace 
negotiations with both sides. To prepare the American people for what he hoped would 
be a new era of international relations, Wilson appeared before the Senate on January 22, 
1917, to outline his plans for peace. In his speech, he reaffirmed his commitment to the 
League of Nations, but for such a league to succeed, Wilson argued, it would have to be 
handed a sturdy peace settlement. This entailed a  peace without victory. Only a peace 
settlement that refused to crown a victor or humiliate a loser would ensure the equality of 
the combatants, and  only a peace between equals can last.  
Wilson listed the crucial principles of a lasting peace: freedom of the seas; disarmament; 
and the right of every people to self-determination, democratic self-government, and secu- 
rity against aggression. He was proposing a revolutionary change in world order, one that 
would allow all of the world s peoples, regardless of their size or strength, to achieve politi- 
cal independence and to participate as equals in world affairs. These views, rarely expressed 
by the leader of a world power, stirred the despairing masses of Europe and elsewhere 
caught in deadly conflict. 
German Escalation 
Wilson s oratory came too late to serve the cause of peace. Sensing the imminent collapse 
of Russian forces on the eastern front, Germany had decided, in early 1917, to throw its full 
military might at France and Britain. On land it planned to launch a massive assault on the 
trenches, and at sea it prepared to unleash its submarines to attack all vessels heading for 
British ports. Germany knew that this last action would compel the United States to enter 
the war, but it was gambling on being able to strangle the British economy and leave France 
isolated before significant numbers of American troops could reach European shores. 
On February 1, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. Wilson 
continued to hope for a negotiated settlement, however, until February 25, when the British 
intercepted and passed on to the president a telegram from Germany s foreign secretary, 
Arthur Zimmermann, to the German minister in Mexico. The infamous  Zimmermann 
telegram instructed the minister to ask the Mexican government to attack the United States 
in the event of war between Germany and the United States. In return, Germany would pay 
the Mexicans a large fee and regain for them the  lost provinces  of Texas, New Mexico, and 
Arizona. Wilson, Congress, and the American public were outraged by the story. 
American Neutrality  " 847 
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In March, news arrived that Tsar Nicholas II s autocratic regime in Russia had collapsed 
and had been replaced by a liberal-democratic government under the leadership of 
Alexander Kerensky. As long as the tsar ruled Russia and stood to benefit from the Central 
Powers  defeat, Wilson could not honestly claim that America s going to war against Germany 
would bring democracy to Europe. The fall of the tsar and the need of Russia s fledgling 
democratic government for support gave Wilson the rationale he needed to justify American 
intervention. 
Appearing before a joint session of Congress on April 2, Wilson declared that the 
United States must enter the war because  the world must be made safe for democracy.  
He continued: 
We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts for democracy, 
for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, 
for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a 
concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world 
itself at last free. To such a task we dedicate our lives and our fortunes. 
Inspired by his words, Congress broke into thunderous applause. On April 6, Congress 
voted to declare war by a vote of 373 to 50 in the House and 82 to 6 in the Senate. 
The United States thus embarked on a grand experiment to reshape the world. Wilson 
had given millions of people around the world reason to hope, both that the terrible war 
would end soon and that their strivings for freedom and social justice would be realized. 
Although he was taking America to war on the side of the Allies, he stressed that America 
would fight as an  associated power,  a phrase meant to underscore America s determina- 
tion to keep its war aims separate from and more idealistic than those of the Allies. 
Still, Wilson understood all too well the risks of his undertaking. A few days before his 
speech to Congress, he had confided to a journalist his worry that the American people, once 
at war, will  forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and 
ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fibre of our national life, 
infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.  
American Intervention 
The entry of the United States into the war gave the Allies the muscle they needed to defeat 
the Central Powers, but it almost came too late. Germany s resumption of unrestricted sub- 
marine warfare took a frightful toll on Allied shipping. From February through July 1917, 
German subs sank almost 4 million tons of shipping, more than one-third of Britain s 
entire merchant fleet. One of every four large freighters departing Britain in those months 
never returned; at one point, the British Isles were down to a mere four weeks of provi- 
sions. American intervention ended Britain s vulnerability in dramatic fashion. U.S. and 
British naval commanders now grouped merchant ships into convoys and provided them 
with warship escorts through the most dangerous stretches of the North Atlantic. Destroyers 
848  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
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armed with depth charges were particularly effective as escorts. Their shallow draft made 
them invulnerable to torpedoes, and their great acceleration and speed allowed them to 
pursue slow-moving U-boats. The U.S. and British navies had begun to use sound waves 
(later called  sonar ) to pinpoint the location of underwater craft, and this new technology 
increased the effectiveness of destroyer attacks. By the end of 1917, the tonnage of Allied 
shipping lost each month to U-boat attacks had declined by two-thirds, from almost 1 million 
tons in April to 350,000 tons in December. The increased flow of supplies stiffened the 
resolve of the exhausted British and French troops. 
The French and British armies had bled themselves white by taking the offensive in 
1916 and 1917 and had scarcely budged the trench lines. The Germans had been content 
in those years simply to hold their trench position in the West because they were 
engaged in a huge offensive against the Russians in the East. The Germans intended first 
to defeat Russia and then to shift their eastern armies to the West for a final assault on 
the weakened British and French lines. Their opportunity came in the winter and spring 
of 1918. 
A second Russian revolution in November 1917 had overthrown Kerensky s liberal- 
democratic government and had brought to power a revolutionary socialist government 
under Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik Party. Lenin pulled Russia out of the war on the 
grounds that the war did not serve the best interests of the working classes, that it was a 
conflict between rival capitalist elites interested only in wealth and power (and indifferent 
to the slaughter of soldiers in the trenches). In March 1918, Lenin signed a treaty at Brest- 
Litovsk that added to Germany s territory and resources and enabled Germany to shift its 
eastern forces to the western front. 
Russia s exit from the war hurt the Allies. Not only did it expose French and British 
troops to a much larger German force, but it also challenged the Allied claim that they 
were fighting a just war against German aggression. Lenin had published the texts of secret 
Allied treaties showing that Britain and France, like Germany, had plotted to enlarge their 
nations and empires through war. The revelation that the Allies were fighting for land and 
riches rather than democratic principles outraged large numbers of people in France and 
Great Britain, demoralized Allied troops, and threw the French and British governments 
into disarray. 
The treaties also embarrassed Wilson, who had brought America into the war to fight for 
democracy, not territory. Wilson quickly moved to restore the Allies  credibility by unveiling, 
in January 1918, a concrete program for peace. His Fourteen Pointsreaffirmed America s 
commitment to an international system governed by laws rather than by might and 
renounced territorial aggrandizement as a legitimate war aim. This document provided the 
ideological cement that held the Allies together at a critical moment. (The Fourteen Points 
are discussed more fully in the section  The Failure of the International Peace. ) 
In March and April 1918, Germany launched its huge offensive against British and 
French positions, sending Allied troops reeling. A ferocious assault against French lines on 
May 27 met with little resistance; German troops advanced 10 miles a day a faster pace 
American Intervention " 849 
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than any on the western front since the earliest days of the war until they reached the 
Marne River, within striking distance of Paris. The French government prepared to evac- 
uate the city. At this perilous moment, a large American army fresh, well-equipped, and 
oblivious to the horrors of trench warfare arrived to reinforce what remained of the 
French lines. 
In fact, these American troops, part of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) com- 
manded by General John J. Pershing, had begun landing in France almost a year earlier. 
During the intervening months, the United States had had to create a modern army from 
scratch, because its existing force was so small, ranking only 17th in the world. Men had 
to be drafted, trained, and supplied with food and equipment; ships for transporting them 
to Europe had to be found or built. In France, Pershing put his troops through additional 
training before committing them to battle. He was determined that the American soldiers  
or  doughboys,  as they were called should acquit themselves well on the battlefield. The 
army he ordered into battle to counter the German spring offensive of 1918 fought well. 
Many American soldiers fell, but the German offensive ground to a halt. Paris was saved, 
and Germany s best chance for victory slipped from its grasp. 
Buttressed by this show of AEF strength, the Allied troops staged a major offensive of 
their own in late September. Millions of Allied troops (including more than a million from 
the AEF) advanced across the 200-mile-wide Argonne forest in France, cutting German 
supply lines. By late October, they had reached the German border. Faced with an invasion 
of their homeland and with rapidly mounting popular dissatisfaction with the war, German 
leaders asked for an armistice, to be followed by peace negotiations based on Wilson sFour- 
teen Points. Having forced the Germans to agree to numerous concessions, the Allies 
ended the war on November 11, 1918. The carnage was finally over. 
Mobilizing for  Total War 
850  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
Compared to Europe, the United States suffered little from the war. The deaths of 
112,000 American soldiers paled in comparison to European losses: 900,000 by Great 
Britain, 1.2 millionby Austria-Hungary, 1.4 million by France, 1.7 million by Russia, and 
2 million by Germany. The U.S. civilian population was spared most of the war s ravages  
the destruction of homes and industries, the shortages of food and medicine, the spread 
of disease that afflicted millions of Europeans. Only with the flu epidemic that swept 
across the Atlantic from Europe in 1919 to claim approximately 500,000  lives did Americans 
briefly experience wholesale suffering and death. 
Focus Question 
What problems did the United States encounter in mobilizing for total war, and how 
successfully were those problems overcome? 
11019_23_ch23_p0839-0874.qxd  6/4/07  11:54 AM  Page 850
Still, the war had a profound effect on American society. Every military engagement the 
United States had fought since the Civil War the Indian wars, the Spanish-American 
War, the American-Filipino War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Latin American interventions  
had been limited in scope. Even the troop mobilizations that seemed large at the time  
the more than 100,000 needed to fight the Spanish and then the Filipinos failed to tax 
severely American resources. 
The First World War was different. It was a  total  war to which every combatant had 
committed virtually all of its resources. The scale of the effort in the United States became 
apparent early in 1917 when Wilson asked Congress for a conscription law that would 
permit the federal government to raise a multimillion-man army. The United States would 
also have to devote much of its agricultural, transportation, industrial, and population 
resources to the war effort if it wished to end the European stalemate. Who would orga- 
nize this massive effort? Who would pay for it? Would Americans accept the sacrifice and 
regimentation it would demand? These were vexing questions for a nation long commit- 
ted to individual liberty, small government, and a weak military. 
Organizing Industry 
At first, Wilson pursued a decentralized approach to mobilization, delegating tasks to local 
defense councils throughout the country. When that effort failed, however, Wilson created 
several centralized federal agencies, each charged with supervising nationwide activity in 
its assigned economic sector. 
The success of these agencies varied. The Food Administration, headed by mining 
engineer and executive Herbert Hoover, substantially increased production of basic 
foodstuffs and put in place an efficient distribution system that delivered food to millions 
of troops and European civilians. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, as head of the 
U.S. Railroad Administration, also performed well in shifting the rail system from pri- 
vate to public control, coordinating dense train traffic, and making capital improvements 
that allowed goods to move rapidly to eastern ports, where they were loaded onto ships 
and sent to Europe. At the other extreme, the Aircraft Production Board and Emergency 
Fleet Corporation did a poor job of supplying the Allies with combat aircraft and mer- 
chant vessels. On balance, the U.S. economy performed wonders in supplying troops 
with uniforms, food, rifles, munitions, and other basic items; it failed badly, however, 
in producing more sophisticated weapons and machines such as artillery, aircraft, and 
ships. 
At the time, many believed that the new government war agencies possessed awesome 
power over the nation s economy and thus represented a near revolution in government. 
Most such agencies, however, were more powerful on paper than in fact. Consider, for 
example, the War Industries Board(WIB), an administrative body established by Wilson 
in July 1917 to harness manufacturing might to military needs. The WIB floundered for 
its first nine months, lacking the statutory authority to force manufacturers and the mili- 
tary to adopt its plans. Only the appointment of Wall Street investment banker Bernard 
Mobilizing for  Total  War  " 851 
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Baruch as WIB chairman in March 1918 turned the agency around. Rather than attempt- 
ing to force manufacturers to do the government s bidding, Baruch permitted industrial- 
ists to charge high prices for their products. He won exemptions from antitrust laws for 
corporations that complied with his requests. In general, he made war production too 
lucrative an activity to resist; however, he did not hesitate to unleash his wrath on corpo- 
rations that resisted WIB enticements. 
Baruch s forceful leadership worked reasonably well throughout his nine months in 
office. War production increased, and manufacturers discovered the financial benefits of 
cooperation between the public and private sectors. But Baruch s approach created prob- 
lems, too. His favoritism toward large corporations hurt smaller competitors. Moreover, 
the cozy relationship between government and corporation that he encouraged violated 
the progressive pledge to protect the people against the  interests.  Achieving cooperation 
by boosting corporate profits, finally, was a costly way for the government to do business. 
The costs of the war soared to $33 billion, a figure more than three times expectations. 
Securing Workers, Keeping Labor Peace 
The government worried as much about labor s cooperation as about industry s compli- 
ance, for the best-laid production plans could be disrupted by a labor shortage or an 
extended strike. War increased the demand for industrial labor while cutting the supply. 
European immigrants had long been the most important source of new labor for American 
industry, and during the war they stopped coming. Meanwhile, millions of workers 
already in America were conscripted into the military and thus lost to industry. 
Manufacturers responded to the labor shortage by recruiting new sources of labor from 
the rural South; a half million African Americans migrated to northern cities between 1916 
and 1920. Another half million white southerners followed the same path during that 
period. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans fled their revolution-ridden homeland for jobs 
in the Southwest and Midwest. Approximately 40,000 northern women found work as 
streetcar conductors, railroad workers, metalworkers, munitions makers, and in other jobs 
customarily reserved for men. The number of female clerical workers doubled between 
1910 and 1920, with many of these women finding work in the government war bureau- 
cracies. Altogether, a million women toiled in war-related industries. 
These workers alleviated but did not eliminate the nation s labor shortage. Unemploy- 
ment, which had hovered around 8.5 percent in 1915, plunged to 1.2 percent in 1918. 
Workers were quick to recognize the benefits of the tight labor market. They quit jobs they 
did not like and took part in strikes and other collective actions in unprecedented num- 
bers. From 1916 to 1920, more than 1 million workers went on strike every year. Union 
membership almost doubled, from 2.6 million in 1915 to 5.1 million in 1920. Workers 
commonly sought higher wages and shorter hours through strikes and unionization. 
Wages rose an average of 137 percent from 1915 to 1920, although inflation largely 
negated these gains. The average workweek declined in that same period from 55 to 51 hours. 
Workers also struck in response to managerial attempts to speed up production and 
852  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
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tighten discipline. As time passed, increasing numbers of workers began to wonder why 
the war for democracy in Europe had no counterpart in their factories at home.  Industrial 
democracy  became the battle cry of an awakened labor movement. 
Wilson s willingness to include labor in his 1916 progressive coalition reflected his 
awareness of labor s potential power (see chapter 21). In 1918, he bestowed prestige on 
the newly formed National War Labor Board(NWLB) by appointing former president 
William Howard Taft to be co-chair alongside Samuel Gompers, president of the American 
Federation of Labor. The NWLB brought together representatives of labor, industry, and 
the public to resolve labor disputes. 
Raising an Army 
To raise an army, the Wilson administration committed itself to conscription the draft- 
ing of most men of a certain age, irrespective of their family s wealth, ethnic background, 
or social standing. The Selective Service Act of May 1917 empowered the administration 
to do just that. By war s end, local Selective Service boards had registered 24 million young 
men age 18 and older and had drafted nearly 3 million of them into the military; another 
2 million volunteered for service. 
Relatively few men resisted the draft, even among recently arrived immigrants. Foreign- 
born men constituted 18 percent of the armed forces a percentage greater than their 
share of the total population. Almost 400,000 African Americans served, representing 
Mobilizing for  Total  War  " 853 
Clerks 
(except in stores) 
Teachers 
Nurses 
Telephone operators 
Semiskilled operatives 
(manufacturing) 
1910 
1920 
(in thousands) 
1,300 
1,200 
1,100 
1,000 
900 
800 
700 
600 
500 
400 
300 
200 
100 
0 
Stenographers 
and typists 
Bookkeepers, cashiers, 
and accountants 
Saleswomen and 
clerks in stores 
Waitresses 
Laborers (manufacturing) 
Occupations with Largest Increase in Women, 1910 20 
Source:Joseph A. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870 1920, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Monograph no. 9 (Washington, DC: Government 
Printing Office, 1929), p. 33. 
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approximately 10 percent of armed forces, the same as the percentage of African Americans 
in the total population. 
The U.S. Army, under the command of Chief of Staff Peyton March and General 
John J. Pershing, faced the difficult task of fashioning these ethnically and racially 
diverse millions into a professional fighting force. Teaching raw recruits to fight was 
hard enough, Pershing and March observed; the generals refused the task of teaching 
them to put aside their prejudices. Rather than integrate the armed forces, they segre- 
gated black soldiers from white. Virtually all African Americans were assigned to all- 
black units and barred from combat. Being stripped of a combat role was particularly 
galling to blacks, who, in previous wars, had proven themselves to be among the best 
American fighters. Pershing was fully aware of the African American contribution. He had 
commanded African Americantroops in the 10th Cavalry, the all-black regiment that had 
distinguished itself in the Spanish-American War (chapter 22). Pershing s military repu- 
tation had depended so heavily on the black troops who fought for him that he had 
acquired the nickname Black Jack. 
For a time, the military justified its intensified discrimination against blacks by refer- 
ring to the results of rudimentary IQ (intelligence quotient) tests administered by psy- 
chologists to 2 million AEF soldiers. These tests allegedly  proved  that native-born Americans 
and immigrants from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia were well endowed with 
intelligence, whereas African Americans and immigrants from Southern and Eastern 
854  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
Women Doing  Men s Work  Labor shortages during the war allowed thousands of women to take 
industrial jobs customarily reserved for men. Here women operate pneumatic hammers at the Midvale Steel 
and Ordnance Company, Nicetown, Pennsylvania, 1918. 
N 
a 
t 
io 
n 
a 
l 
 A 
rc 
h 
iv 
e 
s 
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Europe were poorly endowed. The tests were scientifically so ill-conceived, however, that 
their findings revealed nothing about the true distribution of intelligence in the soldier 
population. Their most sensational revelation was that more than half of the soldiers in the 
AEF white and black were  morons,  men who had failed to reach the mental age of 
13. After trying to absorb the apparent news that most U.S. soldiers were feeble-minded, 
the military sensibly rejected the pseudo-science on which these intelligence findings were 
based. In 1919, it discontinued the IQ testing program. 
Given the racial and ethnic differences among American troops and the short time Per- 
shing and his staff had to train recruits, the AEF s performance was impressive. The United 
States increased the army from a mere 100,000 to 5 million in little more than a year. The 
Germans sank no troop ships, nor were any soldiers killed during the dangerous Atlantic 
crossing. In combat, U.S. troops became known for their sharpshooting skills. The most 
decorated soldier in the AEF was Sergeant Alvin C. York of Tennessee, who captured 
35 machineguns, took 132 prisoners, and killed 17 German soldiers with 17 bullets. York 
had learned his marksmanship hunting wild turkeys in the Tennessee hills.  Of course, it 
weren t no trouble no how for me to hit them big [German] army targets,  he later commented. 
 They were so much bigger than turkeys  heads.  One of the most decorated AEF units was 
New York s 369th Regiment,a black unit recruited in Harlem. Bowing to pressure from civil 
Mobilizing for  Total  War  " 855 
The 369th Returns to New York Denied the opportunity to fight in the U.S. Army, this unit fought for 
the French. For the length and distinction of its service in the front lines, this entire unit was awarded the 
Croix de Guerre (War Cross) by the French government. 
N 
a 
t 
io 
n 
a 
l 
 A 
rc 
h 
iv 
e 
s 
 
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rights groups to allow some black troops to fight, Pershing had offered the 369th to the 
French army. The 369th entered the French front line, served in the forward Allied 
trenches for 191 days (longer than any other U.S. regiment), and scored several major suc- 
cesses. In gratitude for its service, the French government decorated the entire unit with 
one of its highest honors the Croix de Guerre (War Cross). 
Paying the Bills 
The government incurred huge debts buying food, uniforms, munitions, weapons, vehi- 
cles, and sundry other items for the U.S. military. To help pay its bills, it sharply increased 
tax rates. The new taxes hit the wealthiest Americans the hardest: The richest were slapped 
with a 67 percent income tax and a 25 percent inheritance tax. Corporations were ordered 
to pay an  excess profits  tax. Proposed by the Wilson administration and backed by 
Robert La Follette and other congressional progressives who feared that the  interests  would 
use the war to enrich themselves, these taxes were meant to ensure that all Americanswould 
sacrifice something for the war. 
Tax revenues, however, provided only about one-third of the $33 billion that the gov- 
ernment ultimately spent on the war. The rest came from the sale of Liberty Bonds.These 
30-year government bonds offered individual purchasers a return of 3.5 percent in annual 
interest. The government offered five bond issues between 1917 and 1920, and all quickly sold 
out, thanks, in no small measure, to a high-powered sales pitch, orchestrated by Treasury 
SecretaryWilliam G. McAdoo, that equated bond purchases with patriotic duty. McAdoo s 
agents blanketed the country with posters, sent bond  salesmen  into virtually every American 
community, enlisted Boy Scouts to go door-to-door, and staged rallies at which movie stars 
such as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin stumped for the war. 
Arousing Patriotic Ardor 
The Treasury s bond campaign was only one aspect of an extraordinary government effort 
to arouse public support for the war. In 1917, Wilson set up a new agency, the Committee 
on Public Information(CPI), to popularize the war. Under the chairmanship of George 
Creel, a midwestern progressive and a muckraker, the CPI distributed 75 million copies 
of pamphlets explaining U.S. war aims in several languages. It trained a force of 75,000 
 Four-Minute Men  to deliver succinct, uplifting war speeches to numerous groups in their 
home cities and towns. It papered the walls of virtually every public institution (and many 
private ones) with posters, placed advertisements in mass-circulation magazines, spon- 
sored exhibitions, and peppered newspaper editors with thousands of press releases on the 
progress of the war. 
Faithful to his muckraking past (see chapter 21), Creel wanted to give the people the 
facts of the war, believing that well-informed citizens would see the wisdom of Wilson s 
policies. He also saw his work as an opportunity to achieve the progressive goal of uniting 
all Americans into a single moral community. Americans everywhere learned that the 
United States had entered the war  to make the world safe for democracy,  to help the 
856  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
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world s weaker peoples achieve self-determination, and to bring a measure of justice into 
the conduct of international affairs. Americans were asked to affirm those ideals by doing 
everything they could to support the war. 
This uplifting message affected the American people, although not necessarily in ways 
anticipated by CPI propagandists. It imparted to many a deep love of country and a sense 
of participation in a grand democratic experiment. Among others, particularly those expe- 
riencing poverty and discrimination, it sparked a new spirit of protest. Workers, women, 
European ethnics, and African Americans began demanding that America live up to its 
democratic ideals at home as well as abroad. Workers rallied to the cry of  industrial 
democracy.  Women seized on the democratic fervor to bring their fight for suffrage to a 
successful conclusion (see chapter 21). African Americans began to dream that the war 
might deliver them from second-class citizenship. European ethnics believed that Wilson s 
support of their countrymen s rights abroad would improve their own chances for success 
in the United States. 
Although the CPI had helped to unleash it, this new democratic enthusiasm troubled 
Creel and others in the Wilson administration. The United States, after all, was still deeply 
divided along class, ethnic, and racial lines. Workers and industrialists regarded each other 
with suspicion. Cultural differences compounded this class division, for the working class 
was overwhelmingly ethnic in composition, and the industrial and political elites consisted 
mainly of the native-born whose families had been Americans for generations. Progressives 
had fought hard to overcome these divisions. They had tamed the power of capitalists, 
improved the condition of workers, encouraged the Americanization of immigrants, and 
articulated a new, more inclusive idea of who could belong to the American nation. 
But their work was far from complete when the war broke out, and the war opened up 
new social and cultural divisions. German immigrants still formed the largest foreign-born 
population group at 2.3 million. Another 2.3 million immigrants came from some part of 
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and more than 1 million Americans native-born and 
immigrants supported the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, both 
of which had opposed the war. The decision to authorize the CPI s massive unity campaign 
indicates that the progressives understood how widespread the discord was. Still, they had 
not anticipated that the promotion of democratic ideals at home would exacerbate, rather 
than lessen, the nation s social and cultural divisions. 
Wartime Repression 
By early 1918, the CPI s campaign had developed a darker, more coercive side. Inflam- 
matory advertisements called on patriots to report on neighbors, coworkers, and ethnics 
whom they suspected of subverting the war effort. Propagandists called on all immigrants, 
especially those from Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe, to pledge themselves to 
 100 percent Americanism  and to repudiate all ties to their homeland, native language, 
and ethnic customs. The CPI aroused hostility toward Germans by spreading lurid tales of 
German atrocities and encouraging the public to see movies such as The Prussian Cur and 
Mobilizing for  Total  War  " 857 
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The Beast of Berlin. The Justice Department arrested thousands of German and Austrian 
immigrants whom it suspected of subversive activities. Congress passed the Trading with 
the Enemy Act, which required foreign-language publications to submit all war-related 
stories to post office censors for approval. 
German Americans became the objects of popular hatred. American patriots sought to 
expunge every trace of German influence from American culture. In Boston, performances 
of Beethoven s symphonies were banned, and the German-born conductor of the Boston 
Symphony Orchestra was forced to resign. Although Americans would not give up the 
German foods they had grown to love, they would no longer call them by their German 
names. Sauerkraut was rechristened  liberty cabbage,  and hamburgers became  liberty 
sandwiches.  Libraries removed works of German literature from their shelves, and 
Theodore Roosevelt and others urged school districts to prohibit the teaching of the German 
language. Patriotic school boards in Lima, Ohio, and elsewhere burned the German books 
in their districts. 
German Americans risked being fired from work, losing their businesses, and being 
assaulted on the street. A St. Louis mob lynched an innocent German immigrant whom 
they suspected of subversion. After only 25 minutes of deliberation, a St. Louis jury acquit- 
ted the mob leaders, who had brazenly defended their crime as an act of patriotism. German 
Americans began hiding their ethnic identity, changing their names, speaking German 
only in the privacy of their homes, and celebrating their holidays only with trusted friends. 
This experience devastated the once-proud German American community; many would 
never recover from the shame and vulnerability they experienced in those years. 
858  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
Renamed German American Words 
Original German Name Renamed  Patriotic  Name 
hamburger salisbury steak, liberty steak, liberty sandwich 
sauerkraut liberty cabbage 
Hamburg Avenue, Brooklyn, New York Wilson Avenue, Brooklyn, New York 
Germantown, Nebraska Garland, Nebraska 
East Germantown, Indiana Pershing, Indiana 
Berlin, Iowa Lincoln, Iowa 
pinochle liberty 
German shepherd Alsatian shepherd 
Deutsches Hans of Indianapolis Athenaeum of Indiana 
Germania Maennerchor of Chicago Lincoln Club 
Kaiser Street Maine Way 
Sources: From La Vern J. Rippley, The German Americans(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976), p. 186; and Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and 
World War I, 1917 1921(New York: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 205 206. 
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The anti-German campaign esca- 
lated into a general anti-immigrant 
crusade. Congress passed the 
Immigration Restriction Act of 
1917, over Wilson s veto, which 
declared that all adult immigrants 
who failed a reading test would be 
denied admission to the United 
States. The act also banned the 
immigration of laborers from 
India, Indochina, Afghanistan, 
Arabia, the East Indies, and 
several other countries within 
an Asiatic Barred Zone. This 
legislation marked the beginning 
of a movement in Congress that, 
four years later, would close the 
immigration door to virtually all 
transoceanic peoples. 
Congress also passed the 18th 
Amendment to the Constitution, 
which prohibited the manufac- 
ture and distribution of alcoholic 
beverages (see chapter 21). The 
crusade for prohibition was not 
new, but anti-immigrant feelings 
generated by the war gave it 
added impetus. Prohibitionists 
pictured the nation s urban eth- 
nic ghettos as scenes of drunken- 
ness, immorality, and disloyalty. 
They also accused German American brewers of operating a  liquor trust  to sap people s 
will to fight. The states quickly ratified the 18th Amendment, and in 1919, Prohibition 
became the law of the land. 
More and more, the Wilson administration relied on repression to achieve domestic 
unity. In the Espionage, Sabotage, and Sedition Actspassed in 1917 and 1918, Con- 
gress gave the administration sweeping powers to silence and  imprison dissenters. These 
acts went far beyond outlawing behavior that no nation at war could be expected to toler- 
ate, such as spying for the enemy, sabotaging war production, and calling for the enemy s 
victory. Now citizens could be prosecuted for writing or uttering any statement that could 
be construed as profaning the flag, the Constitution, or the military. These acts constituted 
Mobilizing for  Total  War  " 859 
The Campaign of Fear By 1918, the government s appeal to Americans  
best aspirations to spread liberty and democracy had been replaced by a 
determination to arouse fear of subversion and conquest. Here the German 
enemy is depicted as a terrifying brute who violates Lady Liberty and uses his 
kulturclub to destroy civilization. 
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the most drastic restrictions of free speech at the national level since the Alien and Sedition 
Acts of 1798 (see chapter 8). 
Government repression fell most heavily on the IWW and the Socialist Party. Both 
groups had opposed intervention before 1917. Although they subsequently muted their 
opposition, they continued to insist that the true enemies of American workers were to be 
found in the ranks of American employers, not in Germany or Austria-Hungary. The gov- 
ernment responded by banning many socialist materials from the mails and by disrupting 
socialist and IWW meetings. By spring 1918, government agents had raided countless 
IWW offices and had arrested 2,000 IWW members, including its entire executive board. 
Many of those arrested would be sentenced to long jail terms. William Haywood, the IWW 
president, fled to Europe and then to the Soviet Union rather than go to jail. Eugene V. Debs, 
the head of the Socialist Party, received a 10-year jail term for making an antiwar speech 
in Canton, Ohio, in summer 1918. 
This federal repression, carried out in an atmosphere of supercharged patriotism, 
encouraged local governments and private citizens to initiate their own antiradical cru- 
sades. In the mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, a sheriff with an eager force of 2,000 depu- 
tized citizens kidnapped 1,200 IWW members, herded them into cattle cars, and dumped 
them onto the New Mexico desert with little food or water. Vigilantes in Butte, Montana, 
chained an IWW organizer to a car and let his body scrape the pavement as they drove the 
vehicle through city streets. Next, they strung him up to a railroad trestle, castrated him, 
and left him to die. The 250,000 members of the American Protective League, most of 
them businessmen and professionals, routinely spied on fellow workers and neighbors. 
They opened mail and tapped phones and otherwise harassed those suspected of disloy- 
alty. Attorney General Thomas Gregory publicly endorsed the group and sought federal 
funds to support its  police  work. 
The spirit of coercion even infected institutions that had long prided themselves on tol- 
erance. In July 1917, Columbia University fired two professors for speaking out against 
U.S. intervention in the war. The National Americanization Committee, which before 
1917 had pioneered a humane approach to the problem of integrating immigrants into 
American life, now supported surveillance, internment, and deportation of aliens suspected 
of anti-American sentiments. 
Wilson bore responsibility for this climate of repression. He did attempt to block certain 
pieces of repressive legislation; for example, he vetoed both the Immigration Restriction Act and 
the Volstead Act (the act passed to enforce Prohibition), only to be overridden by Congress.But 
Wilson did little to halt Attorney General Gregory s prosecution of radicals or Postmaster 
General Burleson s campaign to exclude Socialist Party publications from the mail. He ignored 
pleas from progressives that he intervene in the Debs case to prevent the ailing 62-year-old 
from going to jail. His acquiescence in these matters cost him dearly among progressives 
and socialists. Wilson believed, however, that once the Allies, with U.S. support, won the war 
and arranged a just peace in accordance with the Fourteen Points, his administration s 
wartime actions would be forgiven and the progressive coalition would be restored. 
860  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
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The Failure of the International Peace 
The Failure of the International Peace  " 861 
In the month following Germany s surrender on November 11, 1918, Wilson was confi- 
dent about the prospects of achieving a just peace. Both Germany and the Allies had pub- 
licly accepted the Fourteen Points as the basis for negotiations. Wilson s international pres- 
tige was enormous. People throughout the world were inspired by his dream of a 
democratic, just, and harmonious world order free of poverty, ignorance, and war. Poles, 
Lithuanians, and other Eastern Europeans whose pursuit of nationhood had been frus- 
trated for 100 years or more now believed that independence might be within their reach. 
Zionist Jews in Europe and the United States dared to dream of a Jewish homeland within 
their lifetimes. Countless African and Asian peoples imagined achieving their freedom 
from colonial domination. 
To capitalize on his fame and to maximize the chances for a peace settlement based on 
his Fourteen Points, Wilson broke with diplomatic precedent and decided to head the 
American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919. Enormous crowds of 
enthusiastic Europeans turned out to hail Wilson s arrival on the Continent in December. 
Some 2 million French citizens the largest throng ever assembled on French soil lined 
the parade route in Paris to catch a glimpse of  Wilson,le juste [the just].  In Rome, Milan, 
and La Scala, Italians acclaimed him  The Savior of Humanity  and  The Moses from 
Across the Atlantic.  
In the Fourteen Points, Wilson had translated his principles for a new world order 
into specific proposals for international peace and justice. The first group of points 
called for all nations to abide by a code of conduct that embraced free trade, freedom of 
the seas, open diplomacy, disarmament, and the resolution of disputes through media- 
tion. A second group, based on the principle of self-determination, proposed redrawing 
the map of Europe to give the subjugated peoples of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, 
and Russian empires national sovereignty. The last point called for establishing the 
League of Nations, an assembly in which all nations would be represented and in which 
all international disputes would be given a fair hearing and an opportunity for peaceful 
solutions. 
The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles 
Although representatives of 27 nations began meeting in Paris on January 12, 1919, to dis- 
cuss Wilson s Fourteen Points, negotiations were controlled by the  Big Four : Wilson, 
Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Premier Georges Clemenceau of 
France, and Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy. When Orlando quit the conference 
after a dispute with Wilson, the Big Four became the Big Three. Wilson quickly learned 
Focus Question 
What were Woodrow Wilson s peace proposals, and how did they fare? 
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that his negotiating partners  support for the Fourteen Points was much weaker than he 
had believed. The cagey Clemenceau mused:  God gave us the Ten Commandments, and 
we broke them. Wilson gives us Fourteen Points. We shall see.  Clemenceau and Lloyd 
George refused to include most of Wilson s points in the peace treaty. The points having 
to do with freedom of the seas and free trade were omitted, as were the proposals for open 
diplomacy and Allied disarmament. Wilson won partial endorsement of the principle of 
self-determination: Belgian sovereignty was restored, Poland s status as a nation was 
affirmed, and the new nations of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and 
Estonia were created. In addition, some lands of the former Ottoman Empire Armenia, 
Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Syria were to be placed under League of Nations  trustee- 
ships with the understanding that they would someday gain their independence. Wilson 
failed in his efforts to block a British plan to transfer former German colonies in Asia to 
Japanese control, an Italian plan to annex territory inhabited by 200,000 Austrians, and a 
French plan to take from Germany its valuable Saar coal mines. (See Map 23.2, Europe 
and the Near East After the First World War, in the color insert following page 912.) 
Nor could Wilson blunt the drive to punish Germany for its wartime aggression. In addi- 
tion to awarding the Saar basin to France, the Allies gave portions of northern Germany to 
Denmark and portions of eastern Germany to Poland and Czechoslovakia. Germanywas 
stripped of virtually its entire navy and air force, and forbidden to place soldiers or forti- 
fications in western Germany along the Rhine. It was allowed to keep an army of only 
100,000 men. In addition, Germany was forced to admit its responsibility for the war. In 
accepting this  war guilt,  Germany was, in effect, agreeing to compensate the victors in 
cash (reparations) for the pain and suffering it had inflicted on them. 
Lloyd George and Clemenceau brushed off the protests of those who viewed this desire 
to prostrate Germany as a cruel and vengeful act. That the German people, after their 
nation s 1918 defeat, had overthrown the monarch (Kaiser Wilhelm II) who had taken 
them to war, and had reconstituted their nation as a democratic republic the first in their 
country s history won them no leniency. On June 28, 1919, Great Britain, France, the 
United States, Germany, and other European nations signed the Treaty of Versailles. 
In 1921, an Allied commission notified the Germans that they were to pay the victors 
$33 billion, a sum well beyond the resources of a defeated and economically ruined Germany. 
The League of Nations 
The Allies  single-minded pursuit of self-interest disillusioned many liberals and socialists 
in the United States, but Wilson seemed undismayed. He had won approval of the most 
important of his Fourteen Points that which called for the creation of the League of 
Nations. The League, whose structure and responsibilities were set forth in the Covenant 
attached to the peace treaty, would usher in Wilson s new world order. Drawing its mem- 
bership from the signatories to the Treaty of Versailles (except, for the time being, Germany), 
the League would function as an international parliament and judiciary, establishing rules 
of international behavior and resolving disputes between nations through rational and 
862  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
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The Failure of the International Peace  " 863 
Wilson in Paris, 1919 This photograph shows President Wilson (on right), recently arrived in Paris to negotiate the Treaty of 
Versailles, striding confidently and comfortably alongside his two allies, British Prime Minister Lloyd George (on left) and French 
Premier Clemenceau (in center). In the negotiations themselves, Lloyd George and Clemenceau would prove to be as much 
adversaries as allies to Wilson. 
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peaceful means. A nine-member executive council the United States, Britain, France, 
Italy, and Japan would have permanent seats on the council, while the other four seats 
would rotate among the smaller powers was charged with administering decisions. 
Wilson believed that the League would redeem the failures of the Paris Peace Confer- 
ence. Under its auspices, free trade and freedom of the seas would be achieved, reparations 
against Germany would be reduced or eliminated, disarmament of the Allies would pro- 
ceed, and the principle of self-determination would be extended to peoples outside 
Europe. Moreover, the Covenant (Article X)would endow the League with the power to 
punish aggressor nations through economic isolation and military retaliation. 
Wilson versus Lodge: The Fight over Ratification 
The League s success, however, depended on Wilson s ability to convince the U.S. Senate 
to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson knew that this would not be easy. The Republi- 
cans had gained a majority in the Senate in 1918, and two groups within their ranks were 
determined to frustrate Wilson s ambitions. One group was a caucus of 14 midwesterners 
and westerners known as the  irreconcilables. Most of them were conservative isola- 
tionists who wanted the United States to preserve its separation from Europe, but a few 
were prominent progressives Robert La Follette, William Borah, and Hiram Johnson  
who had voted against the declaration of war in 1917. The self-interest displayed by England 
and France at the peace conference convinced this group that the Europeans were incapable 
of decent behavior in international matters. 
Senator Henry Cabot Lodgeof Massachusetts led the second opposition group. Its 
members rejected Wilson s belief that every group of people on earth had a right to form 
their own nation; that every state, regardless of its size, its economic condition, and the 
vigor and intelligence of its people, should have a voice in world affairs; and that disputes 
between nations could be settled in open, democratic forums. They subscribed instead to 
Theodore Roosevelt s vision of a world controlled by a few great nations, each militarily 
strong, secure in its own sphere of influence, and determined to avoid war through a carefully 
negotiated balance of power. These Republicans preferred to let Europe return to the 
power politics that had prevailed before the war rather than experiment with a new world 
order that might constrain and compromise U.S. power and autonomy. 
This Republican critique was a cogent one that merited extended discussion. Particularly 
important were questions that Republicans raised about Article X, which gave the League the 
right to undertake military actions against aggressor nations. Did Americans want to autho- 
rize an international organization to decide when the United States would go to war? Was this 
not a violation of the Constitution, which vested war-making power solely in the Congress? 
Even if the constitutional problem could be solved, how could the United States ensure that 
it would not be forced into a military action that might damage its national interest? 
It soon became clear, however, that several Republicans, including Lodge, were as inter- 
ested in humiliating Wilson as in developing an alternative approach to foreignpolicy. They 
accused Wilson of promoting socialism through his wartime expansion of government 
864  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
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power. They were angry that he had failed to include any distinguished Republicans, such as 
Lodge, Elihu Root, or William Howard Taft, in the Paris peace delegation. And they were still 
bitter about the 1918 congressional elections, when Wilson had argued that a Republican vic- 
tory would embarrass the nation abroad. Although Wilson s electioneering had failed to sway 
the voters (the Republicans won a majority in both Houses), his suggestion that a Republican 
victory would injure national honor had infuriated Theodore Roosevelt and his supporters. 
Roosevelt died in 1919, but his close friend Lodge kept his rage alive:  I never thought I could 
hate a man as much as I hate Wilson,  Lodge conceded in a moment of candor. 
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged with considering the 
treaty before reporting it to the Senate floor, Lodge did everything possible to obstruct rat- 
ification. He packed the committee with senators who were likely to oppose the treaty. He 
delayed action by reading every one of the treaty s 300 pages aloud and by subjecting it to 
endless criticism in six long weeks of public hearings. When his committee finally 
reported the treaty to the full Senate, it came encumbered with nearly 50 amendments 
whose adoption Lodge made a precondition of his support. Some of the amendments 
expressed reasonable concerns namely, that participation in the League not diminish the 
role of Congress in determining foreign policy, compromise American sovereignty, or 
involve the United States in an unjust or ill-advised war but many were meant only to 
complicate the task of ratification. 
Despite Lodge s obstructionism, the treaty s chances for ratification by the required 
two-thirds majority of the Senate remained good. Many Republicans were prepared to vote 
for ratification if Wilson indicated his willingness to accept some of the proposed amend- 
ments. Wilson could have salvaged the treaty and, along with it, U.S. participation in the 
League of Nations, but he refused to compromise with the Republicans and announced 
that he would carry his case directly to the American people instead. In September 1919, 
Wilson undertook a whirlwind cross-country tour that covered more than 8,000 miles 
with 37 stops. He addressed as many crowds as he could reach, sometimes speaking for 
an hour at a time, four times a day. 
On September 25, after giving a speech at Pueblo, Colorado, Wilson suffered excruci- 
ating headaches throughout the night. His physician ordered him back to Washington, 
where on October 2 he suffered a near-fatal stroke. Wilson hovered near death for two 
weeks and remained seriously disabled for another six. His condition improved somewhat 
in November, but his left side remained paralyzed, his speech was slurred, his energy level 
low, and his emotions unstable. Wilson s wife, Edith Bolling Wilson, and his doctor iso- 
lated him from Congress and the press, withholding news they thought might upset him 
and preventing the public from learning how much his body and mind had deteriorated. 
Many historians believe that the stroke impaired Wilson s political judgment. He 
refused to consider any of the Republican amendments to the treaty, even after it had 
become clear that compromise offered the only chance of winning U.S. participation in the 
League of Nations. When Lodge presented an amended treaty for a ratification vote on 
November 19, Wilson ordered Senate Democrats to vote against it; 42 (of 47) Democratic 
The Failure of the International Peace  " 865 
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senators complied, and with the aid of 13 Republican irreconcilables, the Lodge version was 
defeated. Only moments later, the unamended version of the treaty Wilson s version  
received only 38 votes. 
The Treaty s Final Defeat 
As the magnitude of the calamity became apparent, supporters of the League in Congress, the 
nation, and the world urged the Senate and the president to reconsider. Wilson would not 
budge. A bipartisan group of senators desperately tried to work out a compromise without 
consulting him. When that effort failed, the Senate put to a vote, one more time, the Lodge 
version of the treaty. Because 23 Democrats, most of them southerners, still refused to break 
with Wilson, this last-ditch effort at ratification failed on March 8, 1920, by a margin of seven 
votes. Wilson s dream of a new world order died that day. The crumpled figure in the White 
House seemed to bear little resemblance to the hero who, barely 15 months before, had been 
greeted in Europe as the world s savior. Wilson filled out his remaining 12 months in office 
as an invalid, presiding over the interment of progressivism. He died in 1924. 
The judgment of history lies heavily on these events, for many believe that the flawed 
treaty and the failure of the League contributed to Adolf Hitler s rise in Germany and the 
outbreak of a second world war more devastating than the first. It is necessary to ask, then, 
866  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
Woodrow Wilson s Fourteen Points, 1918: Record of Implementation 
1. Open covenants of peace openly arrived at Not fulfilled 
2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas in peace and war Not fulfilled 
3. Removal of all economic barriers to the equality of trade among nations Not fulfilled 
4. Reduction of armaments to the level needed only for domestic safety Not fulfilled 
5. Impartial adjustments of colonial claims Not fulfilled 
6. Evacuation of all Russian territory; Russia to be welcomed into the society of free nations Not fulfilled 
7. Evacuation and restoration of Belgium Fulfilled 
8. Evacuation and restoration of all French lands; return of Alsace-Lorraine to France Fulfilled 
9. Readjustment of Italy s frontiers along lines of Italian nationality Compromised 
10. Self-determination for the former subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire Compromised 
11. Evacuation of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro; free access to the sea for Serbia Compromised 
12. Self-determination for the former subjects of the Ottoman Empire; secure sovereignty Compromised 
for Turkish portion 
13. Establishment of an independent Poland with free and secure access to the sea Fulfilled 
14. Establishment of a League of Nations affording mutual guarantees of independence Compromised 
and territorial integrity 
Sources: From G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, The Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles,Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs, no. 6 (1939), pp. 8 34; 
and Thomas G. Paterson etal., American Foreign Policy: A History,2nd ed. (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 282 93. 
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whether American participation in the League would have significantly altered the course 
of world history. 
The mere fact of U.S. membership in the League would not have magically solved Europe s 
postwar problems. The U.S. government was inexperienced in diplomacy and prone to mis- 
takes. Its freedom to negotiate solutions to international disputes would have been limited by 
the large number of American voters who remained strongly opposed to U.S. entanglement 
in European affairs. Even if such opposition could have been overcome, the United States 
would still have confronted European countries determined to go their own way. 
Nevertheless, one thing is clear: No stable international order could have arisen after 
the First World War without the full involvement of the United States. The League of 
Nations required American authority and prestige in order to operate effectively as an 
international parliament. We cannot know whether the League, with American involve- 
ment, would have offered the Germans a less humiliating peace, allowing them to reha- 
bilitate their economy and salvage their national pride; nor whether an American-led 
League would have stopped Hitler s expansionism before it escalated into full-scale war in 
1939. Still, it seems fair to suggest that American participation would have strengthened 
the League and improved its ability to bring a lasting peace to Europe. 
The Postwar Period:A Society in Convulsion 
The end of the war brought no respite from the forces convulsing American society. Workers 
were determined to regain the purchasing power they had lost to inflation. Employers were 
determined to halt or reverse the wartime gains labor had made. Radicals saw in this conflict 
between capital and labor the possibility of a socialist revolution. Conservatives were certain 
that the revolution had already begun. Returning white servicemen were nervous about regain- 
ing their civilian jobs and looked with hostility on the black, Hispanic, and female workers who 
had been recruited to take their places. Black veterans were in no mood to return to segrega- 
tion and subordination. The federal government, meanwhile, uneasy over the centralization of 
power during the war, quickly dismantled such agencies as the War Industries Board and the 
National War Labor Board. By so doing, it deprived itself of mechanisms that might have 
enabled it to intervene in social conflicts and keep them from erupting into rage and violence. 
Labor-Capital Conflict 
Nowhere was the escalation of conflict more evident than in the workplace. In 1919, 
4 millionworkers one-fifth of the nation s manufacturing workforce went on strike. In 
January 1919, a general strike paralyzed the city of Seattle when 60,000 workers walked 
The Postwar Period: A Society in Convulsion " 867 
Focus Question 
What issues convulsed American society in the immediate aftermath of war, and 
how were they resolved? 
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off their jobs. By August, walkouts had been staged by 400,000 eastern and midwestern 
coal miners, 120,000 New England textile workers, and 50,000 New York City garment work- 
ers. Then came two strikes that turned public opinion sharply against labor. In September, 
Boston policemen walked off their jobs after the police commissioner refused to negotiate 
with their newly formed union. Rioting and looting soon broke out. MassachusettsGover- 
nor Calvin Coolidge, outraged by the policemen s betrayal of their sworn public duty, 
refused to negotiate with them, called out the National Guard to restore order, and fired 
the entire police force. His tough stand would bring him national fame and the Republi- 
can vice presidential nomination in 1920. 
Hard on the heels of the policemen s strike came a strike by more than 300,000 steel- 
workers in the Midwest. No union had established a footing in the steel industry since the 
1890s, when Andrew Carnegie had ousted the ironworkers  union from his Homestead, 
Pennsylvania, mills. Most steelworkers labored long hours (the 12-hour shift was still stan- 
dard) for low wages in dangerous workplaces. The organizers of the 1919 steel strikehad 
somehow managed to persuade steelworkers with varied skill levels and ethnic back- 
grounds to put aside their differences and demand an eight-hour day and union recogni- 
tion. When the employers rejected those demands, the workers walked off their jobs. The 
employers responded by procuring armed guards to beat up the strikers and by hiring 
nonunion labor to keep the plants running. In many areas, local and state police prohib- 
ited union meetings, ran strikers out of town, and opened fire on those who disobeyed 
orders. In Gary, Indiana, a confrontation between unionists and armed guards left 18 strikers 
dead. To arouse public support for their antiunion campaign, industry leaders portrayed the 
strike leaders as dangerous and violent radicals bent on the destruction of political liberty 
and economic freedom. They succeeded in arousing public opinion against the steelworkers, 
and the strike collapsed in January 1920. 
Radicals and the Red Scare 
The steel companies succeeded in putting down the strike by fanning the public s fear that 
revolutionary sentiment was spreading among workers. Radical sentiment was indeed on 
the rise. Mine workers and railroad workers had begun calling for the permanent nation- 
alization of coal mines and railroads. Longshoremen in San Francisco and Seattle refused 
to load ships carrying supplies to the White Russians who had taken up arms against 
Lenin s Bolshevik government. Socialist trade unionists mounted the most serious chal- 
lenge to Gompers s control of the AFL in 25 years. In 1920, nearly a million Americans 
voted for the Socialist presidential candidate Debs, who ran his campaign from the Atlanta 
Federal Penitentiary. Small groups of anarchists contemplated, and occasionally carried 
out, bomb attacks on businessmen and public officials. 
This radical surge did not mean, however, that leftists had fashioned themselves into a 
single movement or political party. On the contrary, the Russian Revolution had split the 
AmericanSocialist Party. One faction, which would keep the name Socialist and wouldcon- 
tinue under Debs s leadership, insisted that radicals follow a democratic path to socialism. 
868  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
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The other group, which would take the name Communist, wanted to establish a Lenin-style 
 dictatorship of the proletariat.  Small groups of anarchists, some of whom advocated cam- 
paigns of terror to speed the revolution, represented yet a third radical tendency. 
Few Americans noticed the disarray in the radical camp. Most assumed that radicalism 
was a single, coordinated movement bent on establishing a communist government on 
American soil. They saw the nation s immigrant communities as breeding grounds for 
Bolshevism. Beginning in 1919, this perceived  red scare prompted government officials 
and private citizens to embark on yet another campaign of repression. 
The postwar repression of radicalism closely resembled the wartime repression of dis- 
sent. Thirty states passed sedition laws to punish those who advocated revolution. Numer- 
ous public and private groups intensified Americanization campaigns designed to strip for- 
eigners of their subversive ways and remake them into loyal citizens. Universities fired 
radical professors, and vigilante groups wrecked the offices of socialists and assaulted 
IWW agitators. A newly formed veterans  organization, the American Legion, took on the 
American Protective League s role of identifying seditious individuals and organizations 
and ensuring the public s devotion to  100 percent Americanism.  
The Red Scare reached its climax on New Year s Day 1920, when federal agents broke 
into the homes and meeting places of thousands of suspected revolutionaries in 33 cities. 
Directed by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, these widely publicized  Palmer raids  
were meant to expose the extent of revolutionary activity. Palmer s agents uncovered three 
pistols, no rifles, and no explosives. Nevertheless, they arrested more than 4,000 people and 
kept many of them in jail for weeks without formally charging them with a crime. Finally, 
those who were not citizens (approximately 600) were deported and the rest were released. 
Palmer s failure to expose a revolutionary plot blunted support for him in official cir- 
cles, but, undeterred, Palmer now alleged that revolutionaries were planning a series of 
assaults on government officials and government buildings for May 1, 1920. When nothing 
happened on that date, his credibility suffered another blow. 
As Palmer s exaggerations of the Red threat became known, many Americans began to 
reconsider their near-hysterical fear of dissent and subversion. Even so, the political 
atmosphere remained hostile to radicals, as the Sacco and Vanzetti caserevealed. In May 
1920, two Italian-born anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested in 
Brockton, Massachusetts, and charged with armed robbery and murder. Both men pro- 
claimed their innocence and insisted that they were being punished for their political 
beliefs. Their foreign accents and their defiant espousal of anarchist doctrines in the court- 
room inclined many Americans, including the judge who presided at their trial, to view 
them harshly. Despite the weak case against them, they were convicted of first-degree mur- 
der and sentenced to death. Their lawyers attempted numerous appeals, all of which 
failed. Anger over the verdicts began to build among Italian Americans, radicals, and lib- 
eral intellectuals. Protests compelled the governor of Massachusetts to appoint a commis- 
sion to review the case, but no new trial was ordered. On August 23, 1927, Sacco and 
Vanzetti were executed, still insisting they were innocent. 
The Postwar Period: A Society in Convulsion " 869 
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I 
n this epic film, Warren Beatty, producer, director, and 
screenplay cowriter, attempts to integrate the history of 
the American Left in the early 20th century with a love 
story about two radicals of that era, John  Jack  Reed and 
Louise Bryant. Reed was a well-known radical journalist 
whose dispatches from Russia during its 1917 revolution 
were published as a book, Ten Days That Shook the World, 
that brought him fame and notoriety. Bryant never devel- 
oped the public reputation that Reed enjoyed, but she was 
an integral member of the radical circles that gathered in 
apartments and cafés in New York s Bohemian Greenwich 
Village before and during the First World War. 
At times, the love principals in this movie seem to resem- 
ble Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton more than they do the 
historical figures they are meant to represent. In general, 
however, the movie keeps love and politics in balance and 
thus successfully conveys an important and historically accu- 
rate message about the American Left, especially before the 
First World War: namely, that its participants wanted to rev- 
olutionize the personal as well as the political. Thus equality 
between men and women, women s right to enjoy the same 
sexual freedom as men, and marriage s impact on personal 
growth and adventure were issues debated with the same 
fervor as building a radical political party and accelerating the 
transition to socialism. (See the section entitled, The New 
Sexuality and the Rise of Feminism,  in chapter 20.) 
Redsis also an exceptionally serious film about political 
parties and ideologies. The film follows the arc of John Reed s 
and Louise Bryant s lives from their prewar days as discon- 
tented members of the Portland, Oregon, social elite, through 
their flight to the freedom and radicalism of Greenwich Vil- 
lage, to the hardening of their radicalism as a result of repres- 
sion during the First World War at home and the Bolshevik tri- 
umph in November 1917. In this movie, Beatty has recreated 
detailed and complex stories about internal fights within the 
Left both in the United States and Russia, through which he 
seeks to show how hopes for social transformation went awry. 
To give this film added historical weight, Beatty introduces 
 witnesses,  individuals who actually knew the real Reed and 
Bryant and who appear on screen periodically to share their 
memories, both serious and whimsical, about the storied cou- 
ple and the times in which they lived. 
Reds (1981) 
Directed by Warren Beatty.Starring Warren Beatty (John Reed),Diane Keaton (Louise Bryant),Edward 
Herrmann (Max Eastman),Jerzy Kosinski (Grigory Zinoviev),Jack Nicholson (Eugene O'Neill),and Maureen 
Stapleton (Emma Goldman). 
Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant and Warren Beatty as John Reed, together in Russia in the 
midst of that country s socialist revolution. 
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Racial Conflict and the Rise of Black Nationalism 
The more than 400,000 blacks who served in the armed forces believed that a victory for 
democracy abroad would help them achieve democracy for their people at home. At first, 
despite the discrimination they encountered in the military, they maintained their conviction 
that they would be treated as full-fledged citizens upon their return. Many began to talk about 
the birth of a New Negro independent and proud. Thousands joined the National Associa- 
tion for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization at the forefront of the 
fight for racial equality. By 1918, 100,000 African Americans subscribed to the NAACP s mag- 
azine, The Crisis, whose editor, W. E. B. Du Bois, had urged them to support the war. 
This wartime optimism made the postwar discrimination and hatred African Americans 
encountered difficult to endure. Many black workers who had found jobs in the North 
were fired to make way for returning white veterans. Returning black servicemen, mean- 
while, had to scrounge for poorly paid jobs as unskilled laborers. In the South, lynch mobs 
targeted black veterans who refused to tolerate the usual insults and indignities; 10 of the 
70 blacks lynched in the South in 1919 were veterans. 
The worst anti-black violence that year occurred in the North, however. Crowded con- 
ditions during the war had forced black and white ethnic city dwellers into uncomfortably 
close proximity. Many white ethnics regarded blacks with a mixture of fear and prejudice. 
They resented having to share neighborhoods, trolleys, parks, streets, and workplaces with 
blacks. Many also wanted African Americans barred from unions, seeing them as threats 
to their job security. 
Racial tensions escalated into race riots. The deadliest explosion occurred in Chicago in 
July 1919, when a black teenager who had been swimming in Lake Michigan was killed 
by whites after coming too close to a whites-only beach. Rioting soon broke out, with 
white mobs invading black neighborhoods, torching homes and stores, and attacking 
innocent residents. Led by war veterans, some of whom were armed, blacks fought back, 
turning the border areas between white and black neighborhoods into battle zones. Fight- 
ing raged for five days, leaving 38 dead (23 black, 15 white) and more than 500 injured. 
Race rioting in other cities pushed the death toll to 120 before summer s end. 
The riots made it clear to blacks that the North was not the Promised Land. Confined 
to unskilled jobs and to segregated neighborhoods with substandard housing and exorbi- 
tant rents, black migrants in Chicago, New York, and other northern cities suffered eco- 
nomic hardship throughout the 1920s. The NAACP carried on its campaign for civil rights 
and racial equality, but many blacks no longer shared its belief that they would one day 
be accepted as first-class citizens. They turned instead to a leader from Jamaica, Marcus 
Garvey,who gave voice to their bitterness:  The first dying that is to be done by the black 
man in the future,  Garvey declared in 1918,  will be done to make himself free. And then 
when we are finished, if we have any charity to bestow, we may die for the white man. But 
as for me, I think I have stopped dying for him.  
Garvey called on blacks to give up their hopes for integration and to set about forging 
a separate black nation. He reminded blacks that they possessed a rich culture stretching 
The Postwar Period: A Society in Convulsion " 871 
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back over the centuries that would enable them to achieve greatness as a nation. Garvey s 
ambition was to build a black nation in Africa that would bring together all of the world s 
people of African descent. In the short term, he wanted to help American and Caribbean 
blacks to achieve economic and cultural independence. 
Garvey s call for black separatism and self-sufficiency or black nationalism, as it came 
to be known elicited a favorable response among African Americans. In the early 1920s, 
the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which Garvey had founded, 
enrolled millions of members in 700 branches in 38 states. His newspaper, the Negro 
World, reached a circulation of 200,000. The New York chapter of UNIA undertook an 
economic development program that included the establishment of grocery stores, restau- 
rants, and factories. Garvey s most visible economic venture was the Black Star Line, a 
shipping company with three ships flying the UNIA flag from their masts. 
This black nationalist movement did not endure for long. Garvey entered into bitter dis- 
putes with other black leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois, who regarded him as a flam- 
boyant, self-serving demagogue. Garvey sometimes showed poor judgment, as when he 
expressed support for the Ku Klux Klan on the grounds that it shared his pessimism about 
the possibility of racial integration. Inexperienced in economic matters, Garveysquandered 
872  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
Marcus Garvey, Black Nationalist This portrait was taken in 1924, after Garvey s conviction 
on mail fraud charges. 
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UNIA money on abortive business ventures. The U.S. government regarded his rhetoric as 
inflammatory and sought to silence him. In 1923, he was convicted of mail fraud involv- 
ing the sale of Black Star stocks and was sentenced to five years in jail. In 1927, he was 
deported to Jamaica, and the UNIA folded. Nevertheless, Garvey s philosophy of black 
nationalism endured. 
Conclusion 
The resurgence of racism in 1919 and the consequent turn to black nationalism among 
African Americans were signs that the high hopes of the war years had been dashed. Indus- 
trial workers, immigrants, and radicals also found their pursuit of liberty and equality 
interrupted by the fear, intolerance, and repression unleashed by the war. They came to 
understand as well that Wilson s commitment to these ideals counted for less than did his 
administration s and Congress s determination to discipline a people whom they regarded 
as dangerously heterogeneous and unstable. Of the reform groups, only woman suffragists 
made enduring gains especially the right to vote but, for the feminists in their ranks, 
these steps forward failed to compensate for the collapse of the progressive movement and, 
with it, their program of achieving equal rights for women across the board. 
A similar disappointment engulfed those who had embraced and fought for Wilson s 
dream of creating a new and democratic world order. The world in 1919 appeared as 
volatile as it had been in 1914. More and more Americans perhaps even a majority  
were coming to believe that U.S. intervention had been a mistake. 
In other ways, the United States benefited a great deal from the war. By 1919, the 
Americaneconomy was by far the world s strongest. Many of the nation s leading corpo- 
rations had improved productivity and management during the war. U.S. banks were 
poised to supplant those of London as the most influential in international finance. The 
nation s economic strength triggered an extraordinary burst of growth in the 1920s, and 
millions of Americans rushed to take advantage of the prosperity that this  people s capi- 
talism  had put within their grasp. But even affluence failed to dissolve the class, ethnic, 
and racial tensions that the war had exposed. And the failure of the peace process added 
to Europe s problems, delayed the emergence of the United States as a leader in world 
affairs, and created the preconditions for another world war. 
S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS 
On America s neutrality and road to war, consult Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, 
War and Peace(1979), and John Milton Cooper Jr., The Vanity of Power: American Isolationism 
and the First World War, 1914 1917(1969). Roland C. Marchand,The American Peace Movement 
and Social Reform, 1898 1918(1972), reconstructs the large and influential antiwar movement, 
while John W. Chambers, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America(1987), ana- 
lyzes American efforts to prepare for war by raising a multimillion-man fighting machine. David 
Kennedy,Over Here: The First World War and American Society(1980), is a superb account of the 
Conclusion " 873 
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effects of war on American society. For details on industrial mobilization, consult Robert D. Cuff, 
The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations during World War I (1973). David 
Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor 
Activism, 1865 1925(1987), expertly reconstructs the escalation of labor-management tensions 
during the war, but it should be read alongside Joseph A. McCartin, Labor s Great War: The 
Strugglefor Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern Labor Relations, 1912 1921(1997). 
For a pioneering effort to situate U.S. domestic politics during the war in an international con- 
text, see Alan Dawley,Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution(2003). 
On the migration of African Americans to northern industrial centers and the movement of women 
into war production, see Joe William Trotter Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspec- 
tive: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender(1991), and Maurine W. Greenwald, Women, 
War and Work(1980). Stephen Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, 
and the Committee on Public Information(1980), is an important account of the CPI, the govern- 
ment s central propaganda agency. Harry N. Scheiber,The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties, 
1917 1921 (1960) and Geoffrey R. Stone,Perilous Times: Free Speech in War Time from the Sedi- 
tion Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (2004), analyze the repression of dissent. 
On Wilson, Versailles, and the League of Nations, consult Thomas J. Knock,To End All Wars: 
Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order(1992); Arno Mayer, The Politics and 
Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918 1919 
(1967); Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 
1913 1923(1984); John Milton Cooper, Jr.,Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson 
and the Fight for the League of Nations(2001); and Katherine A. S. Siegel,Loans and Legitimacy: 
The Evolution of Soviet-American Relations, 1919 1933 (1996). On Republican opposition to the 
League of Nations, see William C. Widenor,Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American 
Foreign Policy(1980). 
Nell Irvin Painter,Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877 1919(1987), offers a good 
overview of the class and racial divisions that convulsed American society in 1919. On the Red Scare, 
consult Robert K. Murray,Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria(1955). William Tuttle, Jr.,Race 
Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919(1970), examines race conflict after the First World War, 
while Judith Stein,The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society(1986), explores 
the emergence of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. 
874  "CHAPTER 23  "War and Society, 1914 1920 
Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to 
this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin 
Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is 
an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and 
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11019_23_ch23_p0839-0874.qxd  6/4/07  11:54 AM  Page 874
The 1920s 
I 
n 1920, Americans elected as president, Warren G. Harding, a man who could not have 
been more different from his predecessor Woodrow Wilson. A Republican, Harding pre- 
sented himself as a common man with common desires. In his 1920 campaign, he called 
for a  return to normalcy.  Although he died in office in 1923, his carefree spirit is thought 
to characterize the 1920s. 
To many Americans, the decade was one of fun rather than reform, of good times rather 
than high ideals. It was, in the words of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, the  Jazz Age,  a time 
when the search for personal gratification seemed to replace the quest for public welfare. 
Despite Harding s call for a return to a familiar past, America seemed to be rushing 
headlong into the future. The word modernbegan appearing everywhere: modern times, 
modern women, modern technology, the modern home, modern marriage. Although the 
word was rarely defined, it connoted certain beliefs: that science was a better guide to life 
than religion; that people should be free to choose their own lifestyles; that sex should be 
a source of pleasure for women as well as men; that women and minorities should be equal 
to white men and enjoy the same rights. 
Many other Americans, however, reaffirmed their belief that God s word transcended 
science; that people should obey the moral code set forth in the Bible; that women were 
not equal to men; and that blacks, Mexicans, and Eastern European immigrants were infe- 
rior to Anglo-Saxon whites. They made their voices heard in a resurgent Ku Klux Klan 
and the fundamentalist movement, and on issues such as evolution and immigration. In 
seeking to restore an older America, some in their ranks were prepared to deny individual 
Americans the liberty to choose their own ways of living and to insist that all people were 
not fundamentally equal. 
Modernists and traditionalists confronted each other in party politics, in legislatures, in 
courtrooms, and in the press. Their battles belie the vision of the 1920s merely as a time 
for the pursuit of leisure. 
Prosperity 
24 
Focus Question 
What were the achievements and limitations of  people s capitalism  in the 1920s? 
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On balance, the First World War had been good for the American economy. American 
industries had emerged intact, even strengthened, from the war. The war needs of the 
Allies had created an insatiable demand for American goods and capital. Manufacturers 
and bankers had exported so many goods and extended so many loans to the Allies that 
by war s end, the United States was the world s leading creditor nation. New York City 
challenged London as the hub of world finance. At home, the government had helped large 
corporations and banks to consolidate their power. Corporate America had responded by 
raising productivity and efficiency to new heights through advances in technology and 
management. 
Postwar economic turmoil and depression hampered these advances for a time. From 
1919 to 1921, the country struggled to redirect industry from wartime to civilian produc- 
tion, a process slowed by the government s hasty withdrawal from its wartime role as eco- 
nomic regulator and stabilizer. Workers went on strike to protest wage reductions or 
876  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
1920 Prohibition goes into effect  " Warren G. Harding defeats James M. Cox for presidency  " Census reveals that 
a majority of Americans live in urban areas  " 8 million cars on road 
1921 Sheppard-Towner Act passed 
1922 United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy sign Five-Power Treaty, agreeing to reduce size of their navies 
1923 Teapot Dome scandal lands Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall in jail  " Harding dies in office; 
Calvin Coolidge becomes president 
1924 Dawes Plan to restructure Germany s war debt put in effect  " Coolidge defeats John W. Davis for 
presidency  " Ku Klux Klan membership approaches 4 million  " Johnson-Reed Act cuts immigration 
by 80 percent and discriminates against East and South Asians and Southern and Eastern Europeans 
1925 Scopes trial upholds right of Tennessee to bar teachingof evolution in public schools  " Survey Graphic 
publishes a special issue announcing the Harlem Renaissance  " F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes 
The Great Gatsby  " U.S. withdraws Marines from Nicaragua 
1926 Revenue Act cuts income and estate taxes  " U.S. sends Marines back to Nicaragua to end civil war and 
protect U.S. property 
1927 Coolidge vetoes McNary-Haugen bill, legislation meant to relieve agricultural distress " Babe Ruth hits 
60 home runs  " Charles Lindbergh flies across the Atlantic 
1928 15 nations sign Kellogg-Briand pact, pledging to avoid war  " Coolidge vetoes McNary-Haugen bill again  " 
Herbert Hoover defeats Alfred E. Smith for presidency 
1929 Union membership drops to 3 million  " 27millioncars on roads  " William Faulkner publishes 
The Soundand the Fury " Josh Gibson joins the National Negro League 
1930 Los Angeles s Mexican population reaches 100,000 
C HR O NO L O G Y 
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increases in the workweek. Farmers were hit by a depression as the overseas demand for 
American foodstuffs fell from its 1918 19 peak. Disgruntled workers and farmers even 
joined forces to form statewide farmer-labor parties, which for a time threatened to dis- 
rupt the country s two-party system in the upper Midwest. In 1924, the two groups 
formed a national Farmer-Labor Party. Robert La Follette, their presidential candidate, 
received an impressive 16 percent of the vote that year, but then the third-party movement 
fell apart. 
Its collapse reflected a rising public awareness of how vigorous and productive the econ- 
omy had become. Beginning in 1922, the nation embarked on a period of remarkable growth. 
From 1922 to 1929, the gross national product grew at an annual rate of 5.5 percent, rising 
from $149 billion to $227 billion. The unemployment rate never exceeded 5 percent, and 
real wages rose about 15 percent. 
A Consumer Society 
The variety of products being produced matched the rate of economic growth. In the 19th 
century, economic growth had rested primarily on the production of capital goods, such as 
factory machinery and railroad tracks. In the 1920s, however, growth rested more on con- 
sumer goods. Some products, such as cars and telephones, had been available since the early 
1900s, but in the 1920s their sales reached new levels. In 1920, just 12 years after Ford 
introduced the Model T, 8 million cars were on the road. By 1929, there were 27 million  
one for every five Americans. Other consumer goods became available for the first time: 
tractors, washing machines, refrigerators, electric irons, radios, and vacuum cleaners. The 
term  consumer durable was coined to describe such goods, which, unlike food, cloth- 
ing, and other perishables, were meant to last. Even perishables took on new allure. Sci- 
entists had discovered the importance of vitamins in the diet and began urging Americans 
to consume more fresh fruits and vegetables. The agricultural economy of southern Cali- 
fornia grew rapidly as urban demand for the region s fresh fruits and vegetables skyrock- 
eted. Improvements in refrigeration and in packaging, meanwhile, allowed fresh produce 
to travel long distances and extended its shelf life in grocery stores. And more stores were 
being operated by large grocery chains that could afford the latest refrigeration and pack- 
aging technology. 
The public responded to these innovations with excitement. American industry had 
made fresh food and stylish clothes available to the masses. Refrigerators, vacuum clean- 
ers, and washing machines would spare women the drudgery of housework. Radios would 
expand the public s cultural horizons. Cars, asphalt roads, service stations, hot dog stands, 
 tourist cabins  (the forerunners of motels), and traffic lights seemed to herald a wholly 
new automobile civilization. By the middle of the decade, the country possessed a network 
of paved roads. City dwellers now had easy access to rural areas and made a ritual of day- 
long excursions. Camping trips and long-distance vacations became routine. Farmers and 
their families could now hop into their cars and head for the nearest town with its stores, 
movies, amusement parks, and sporting events. Suburbs proliferated, billed as the perfect 
Prosperity  " 877 
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mix of urban and rural life. Young men and women everywhere discovered that cars were 
a place where they could  make out,  and even make love, without fear of reproach by 
prudish parents or prying neighbors. 
In the 1920s, some Americans also discovered the benefits of owning stocks. The num- 
ber of stockholders in AT&T, the nation s largest corporation, rose from 140,000 to 
568,000. U.S. Steel stockholder numbers increased from 96,000 to 146,000. By 1929, as 
many as 7 million Americans owned stock, most of them people of middle-class or upper- 
class means. This spread of stock ownership reflected the need for working capital among 
the nation s corporations. Because privately held wealth could not satisfy that need, cor- 
porations sought to sell their stocks and bonds to the general public. The New York Stock 
Exchange, first organized in 1792, assisted in processing complicated transactions. 
A People s Capitalism 
Capitalists boasted that they had created a  people s capitalism in which virtually all 
Americans could participate. Now, everyone could own a piece of corporate America. 
Now, everyone could have a share of luxuries and amenities. Poverty, capitalists claimed, 
was banished, and the gap between rich and poor all but closed. If every American could 
own a car and house, buy quality clothes, own stock, take vacations, and go to the movies, 
then economic inequality would cease to matter as a political issue. 
Actually, although wages were rising, millions of Americans still earned too little to par- 
take fully of the marketplace. The percentage of Americans owning stocks remained small. 
Social scientists Robert and Helen Lynd discovered, in their celebrated 1929 study of 
Muncie, Indiana, that working-class families who bought a car often lacked money for 
other goods. One housewife admitted,  We don t have no fancy clothes when we have the 
car to pay for. . . . The car is the only pleasure we have.  Another declared,  I ll go with- 
out food before I ll see us give up the car.  Many industrialists resisted pressure to increase 
wages, and workers lacked the organizational strength to force them to pay more. 
One solution came with the introduction of consumer credit. Car dealers, home appli- 
ance salesmen, and other merchants began to offer installment plans that enabled con- 
sumers to purchase a product by making a down payment and promising to pay the rest 
in installments. By 1930, 15 percent of all purchases including 60 percent of all cars and 
75 percent of all radios were made on the installment plan. 
Even so, many poor Americans benefited little from the consumer revolution. Middle- 
class Americans acquired a disproportionate share of consumer durables. They also could 
afford to purchase far more fresh fruits and vegetables and stocks than most working-class 
Americans. 
The Rise of Advertising and Mass Marketing 
But even middle-class consumers had to be wooed. How could they be persuaded to buy 
another car only a few years after they had bought their first one? General Motors had the 
answer. In 1926, it introduced the concept of the annual model change. GM cars took on 
878  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
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a different look every year as GM engineers changed headlights and chassis colors, stream- 
lined bodies, and added new features. The strategy worked. GM leaped past Ford and 
became the world s largest car manufacturer. 
Henry Ford reluctantly introduced his Model A in 1927 to provide customers with a 
colorful alternative to the drab Model T. Having spent his lifetime selling a product 
renowned for its utility and reliability, Ford rejected the idea that sales could be increased 
by appealing to the intangible hopes and fears of consumers. He was wrong. The desire to 
be beautiful, handsome, or sexually attractive; to exercise power and control; to demon- 
strate competence and success; to escape anonymity, loneliness, and boredom; to experi- 
ence pleasure all such desires, once activated, could motivate a consumer to buy a new 
car even when the old one was still serviceable, or to spend money on goods that might 
have once seemed frivolous. 
Arousing such desires required more than bright colors, sleek lines, and attractive pack- 
aging. It called for advertising campaigns intended to make a product seem to be the answer 
to the consumer s desires. To create those campaigns, corporations turned to a new kind of 
company: professional advertising firms. The new advertising entrepreneurs, people such 
as Edward Bernays, Doris Fleischmann, and Bruce Barton, tended to be well-educated, sen- 
sitive to public taste, and knowledgeable about human psychology. In their campaigns, 
these advertisers played on the emotions and vulnerabilities of their target audiences. One 
cosmetics ad decreed:  Unless you are one woman in a thousand, you must use powder 
and rouge. Modern living has robbed women of much of their natural color.  A perfume 
manufacturer s ad pronounced:  The first duty of woman is to attract. . . . It does not mat- 
ter how clever or independent you may be, if you fail to influence the men you meet, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, you are not fulfilling your fundamental duty as a woman.  A 
mouthwash ad warned about one unsuspecting gentleman s bad breath  the truth that 
his friends had been too delicate to mention,  while a tobacco ad matter-of-factly declared: 
 Men at the top are apt to be pipe-smokers. . . . It s no coincidence pipe-smoking is a 
calm and deliberate habit restful, stimulating. His pipe helps a man think straight. A pipe 
is back of most big ideas.  
Advertising professionals believed they were helping people to manage their lives in 
ways that would increase their satisfaction and pleasure. American consumers responded 
enthusiastically. Their interest in fashion, their eagerness to fill their homes with the lat- 
est products, their alacrity to take up the craze of the moment (the mah-jongg card game, 
crossword puzzles, miniature golf) all evidenced Americans  preoccupation with self- 
improvement and personal pleasure. The most enthusiastic of all were middle-class 
Americans, who could afford to buy what the advertisers were selling. Many of them were 
newcomers to middle-class ranks, searching for ways to affirm or even create their 
new identity. The aforementioned ad for pipe tobacco, for example, was targeted at the 
new middle-class man, imagined by advertisers to be someone holding a salaried position 
in a corporate office or bank, or working as a commission salesman, or owning a small 
business. 
Prosperity  " 879 
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As male wage earners moved into the new middle class, their wives were freed from the 
necessity of working outside the home. Advertisers appealed to the new middle-class 
woman, too, as she refocused her attention toward dressing in the latest fashion, manag- 
ing the household, and raising children. Vacuum cleaners and other consumer durables 
would make her more efficient, and books on child-rearing, many imbued with a popu- 
larized Freudianism, would enable her to mold her children for future success in work and 
marriage. Cosmetics would aid women in their  first duty  to be beautiful and sexual for 
their husbands and boyfriends. 
880  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
Selling Beauty and Health This advertisement hints at the negative health 
effects of smoking, but touts  Luckies  as a healthful cigarette more appropriate for 
the delicate bodies of beautiful women. 
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Changing Attitudes toward Marriage and Sexuality 
That husbands and wives were encouraged to pursue sexual satisfaction together was one 
sign of how prescriptions for married life had changed since the 19th century, when 
women were thought to lack sexual passion and men were tacitly expected to satisfy their 
drives through extramarital liaisons.  Modern husbands and wives were expected to share 
other leisure activities as well dining out, playing cards with friends, going to the movies, 
attending concerts, and discussing the latest selection from the newly formed Book-of-the- 
Month Club. Husbands and wives now aspired to a new ideal to be best friends, full 
partners in the pursuit of happiness. 
The public pursuit of pleasure was also noticeable among young and single middle- 
class women. The so-called flappersof the 1920s set out to break the informal rules gov- 
erning young women s lives: they donned short dresses, rolled their stockings down, wore 
red lipstick, and smoked in public. They took their inspiration from depictions of saucy, 
working-class women of the previous decade that moviemakers had popularized and 
refined. Flappers were signaling their desire for independence and equality, but they had 
little thought of achieving those goals through politics, as had their middle-class prede- 
cessors in the woman suffrage movement. Rather, they aimed to create a new female per- 
sonality endowed with self-reliance, outspokenness, and a new appreciation for the plea- 
sures of life. 
An Age of Celebrity 
Prosperity  " 881 
Focus Question 
What was the age of celebrity and what caused it to arise? 
The pursuit of pleasure became both an individual and a group endeavor. Mass mar- 
keters began to understand that big sums of money could be made by staging mega- 
events, mostly connected to sports, that tens of thousands would attend and that radio 
announcers would broadcast to a virtual audience of millions. Newspapers and word- 
of-mouth would ensure that enthusiasts would discuss these events for days, even 
weeks and months. Baseball and boxing became the two sports where mass marketing 
had advanced the furthest. When Yankee Stadium opened in 1923, it set a new stan- 
dard for the scale and magnificence of sports amphitheaters. Boxing matches began 
drawing audiences that would have been unimaginable 20 years earlier. To succeed on 
this scale, these sports required not just stirring athletic competitions but also individ- 
ual athletes who seemed larger than life and whose exploits and character could be 
endlessly promoted. 
No sports figure achieved greater fame than did George Herman  Babe  Ruth, who 
overcame the hardships of a poor and orphaned youth in Baltimore to become the slug- 
ging star, the  Sultan of Swat,  of the New York Yankees. In the 1920s, Ruth hit more 
home runs than baseball experts had thought humanly possible, culminating in 1927, 
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when he hit a magical 60, a record that would last for 34 years and that would be sur- 
passed only three times in the 20th century. A close second in popularity to Ruth was 
heavyweight prizefighter Jack Dempsey, whose combination of ruthlessness and efficiency 
in the ring with gentleness outside it enthralled millions. 
Americans also drew their celebrities from the movies, where stars such as comedian 
Charles Chaplin and the exotically handsome Rudolph Valentino stirred laughter and sex- 
ual longings, respectively, in audiences. These and other figures became so familiar on the 
silver screen that they created an insatiable appetite among movie fans for news about their 
private lives as well, an interest that the movie industry was only too eager to exploit. 
The popular figures of the 1920s did not earn their status through their accomplishments 
in politics or war, but through their prowess at a game or their skill at acting in front of a 
camera. Historians have tended to criticize such celebrity worship, especially when the lion- 
ized individual seemed to possess no quality greater than the ability to hit a ball 400 feetor 
to smash an opponent s face. But such scholarly criticism perhaps has been too quick to 
overlook the human longing to experience the intensity of emotions associated with com- 
petition and triumph or to draw close to someone who demonstrates that the impossible  
whether in the form of a physical feat, or a love relationship, or an escape from a confin- 
ing life could be accomplished. 
Some of these sentiments can be discerned in the adulation bestowed on Charles A. 
Lindbergh, the young pilot who, in 1927, became the first individual to cross the Atlantic 
in a solo flight. Piloting his single-engine white monoplane,The Spirit of St. Louis,Lindbergh 
flew nonstop (and without sleep) for 34 hours from the time he took off from Long Island 
until he landed at Le Bourget Airport in Paris. Thousands of Parisians were waiting for him 
at the airfield and began charging his plane as soon as it landed. When he returned to New 
York, an estimated 4 million fans lined the parade route. This shy young man from Min- 
nesota instantly became the most famous and adored man in America, mobbed by crowds 
everywhere he went. None of this fame could have happened without the new machinery of 
celebrity culture aggressive journalists and radio commentators, promoters, and others 
who understood how fame could yield a profit. It mattered, too, that Lindbergh performed 
his feat in an airplane, one of the era s newest and most exciting innovations. ButLindbergh s 
celebrity involved more than hype and technology: He accomplished what others said 
could not be done, and he did it on his own in a time when corporations and other private 
institutions of power seemed to be shrinking the realm for individual initiative. Some of 
Lindbergh s popularity no doubt rested on his ability to demonstrate that an individual of 
conviction and skill could still make a difference in an increasingly industrialized and 
bureaucratized world. 
Celebrating Business Civilization 
Industrialists, advertisers, and merchandisers in the 1920s began to claim that their accom- 
plishments lay at the heart of American civilization. Business, they argued, made America 
great, and businessmen provided the nation with its wisest, most vigorous leadership. In 
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1924, President Calvin Coolidge declared that  the business of America is business.  Even 
religion became a business. Bruce Barton, in his best seller The Man Nobody Knows (1925), 
depicted Jesus as a business executive  who picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks 
of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.  Elsewhere, 
Barton hailed Jesus as an early  national advertiser,  and proclaimed that Peter and Paul 
were really not so different from Americans who sold vacuum cleaners. 
Some corporate leaders adopted benevolent attitudes toward their employees. They set 
up workplace cafeterias, hired doctors and nurses to staff on-site medical clinics, and 
engaged psychologists to counsel troubled workers. They built ball fields and encouraged 
employees to join industry-sponsored leagues. They published employee newsletters and 
gave awards to employees who did their jobs well and with good spirit. Some employers 
set up profit-sharing plans and offered stock options to reward employees for their efforts, 
and some even gave employees a voice in determining working conditions. 
The real purpose of these measures collectively known as welfare capitalism was to 
encourage employees to be loyal to their firm and to convince them (contrary to what 
labor union critics had been arguing) that industry did have the best interests of its 
employees at heart. Management had an understandable fear of union power, arising from 
the paralyzing strikes of 1919. As the decade proceeded and as prosperity rolled on, wel- 
fare capitalism reflected the confidence that capitalism had become more responsive to 
employee concerns and thus more humane. 
Industrial Workers 
Many industrial workers benefited from the nation s prosperity. Most of them enjoyed rising 
wages and a reasonably steady income. Skilled craftsmen in the older industries of con- 
struction, railroad transportation, and printing fared especially well. Their real wages rose by 
30 percent to 50 percent over the decade. The several million workers employed in the large 
mass-production industries (such as automobile and electrical equipment manufacture) also 
did well. Their wages were relatively high, and some of them enjoyed good benefits paid 
sick leave, paid vacations, life insurance, stock options, and retirement pensions. Although 
all workers in companies with these programs were eligible for such benefits, skilled work- 
ers were in the best position to claim them. 
Semiskilled and unskilled industrial workers had to contend with a labor surplus 
throughout the decade. As employers replaced workers with machines, the aggregate 
demand for industrial labor increased at a lower rate than it had in the preceding 20 years. 
Despite a weakening demand for labor, rural whites, rural blacks, and Mexicans contin- 
ued their migration to the cities, stiffening the competition for factory jobs. Employers 
could hire and fire as they saw fit and could therefore keep wage increases lagging behind 
increases in productivity. 
This softening demand for labor helps explain why many working-class families benefited 
little from the decade s prosperity or from its consumer revolution. An estimated40 percent 
of workers remained mired in poverty, unable to afford a healthy diet or adequatehousing, 
Prosperity  " 883 
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much less any of the more costly consumer goods. In 1930, for instance, only 25 percent 
to 40 percent of American households owned a washing machine, a vacuum cleaner, and 
a radio, and only 50 percent had a car. 
The million or more workers who labored in the nation s two largest industries, coal 
and textiles, suffered the most during the 1920s. Throughout the decade, both industries 
experienced severe overcapacity. By 1926, only half of the coal mined each year was being 
sold. Many New England textile cities experienced levels of unemployment that sometimes 
approached 50 percent. One reason was that many textile industrialists had shifted their 
operations to the South, where taxes and wages were lower. But the southern textile indus- 
try also suffered from excess capacity, exerting a downward pressure on prices and wages 
there as well. Plant managers pressured their workers to speed up production. Workers 
loathed the frequent  speed-ups  of machines and the  stretch-outs  in the number of 
spinning or weaving machines each worker was expected to tend. By the late 1920s, labor 
strife and calls for unionization were rising among disgruntled workers in both the South 
and the North. 
Unionization of textiles and coal, and of more prosperous industries as well, would 
have brought workers a larger share of the decade s prosperity. Some labor leaders, such 
as Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, argued that unionization would 
actually increase corporate profits by compelling employers to observe uniform wage and 
hour schedules that would restrain ruinous competition. Hillman pointed out as Henry 
Ford had in the preceding decade that rising wages would enable workers to purchase 
884  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
1880 
1890 
1900 
1910 
1920 
1930 
Y 
e 
a 
r 
Value (millions of dollars) 
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 
0 
North 
South 
Value of Regional Cotton Textile Output, 1880 1930 
Source: Data from Nancy F. Kane, Textiles in Transition: Technology, Wages, and Industry 
Relocation in the U.S. Textile Industry, 1880 1939(New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), p.29. 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  11:59 AM  Page 884
more consumer goods and thus increase corporate sales and revenues, but Hillman s views 
were ignored outside the garment industry. 
Elsewhere, unions lost ground as business and government, backed by middle-class opin- 
ion, remained hostile to labor organization. Employers attacked unions as un-American. A 
conservative Supreme Court whittled away at labor s legal protections. In 1921, it ruled 
that lower courts could issue injunctions against union members, prohibiting them from 
striking or picketing an employer. State courts also enforced what union members called 
 yellow dog  contracts, written pledges by which employees promised not to join a 
union while they were employed. Any employee who violated that pledge was subject to 
immediate dismissal. 
These measures crippled efforts to organize trade unions. Membership fell from a high 
of 5 million in 1920 to less than 3 million in 1929, a mere 10 percent of the nation s indus- 
trial workforce. Other forces contributed to the decline, too. Many workers, especially 
those benefiting from welfare capitalist programs, decided they no longer needed trade 
unions. And the labor movement hurt itself by moving too slowly to open its ranks to 
semiskilled and unskilled factory workers. 
Women and Work 
Women workers experienced the same hardships as men in the industrial workforce and 
fewer of the benefits. They were largely excluded from the ranks of the skilled craftsmen 
and thus missed out on the substantial wage increases that the men in those positions 
enjoyed. Women also had trouble finding work in the automobile industry, the highest 
paying of the mass-production industries. They had better access to the electrical equip- 
ment and meat-packing industries, although they were often segregated in departments 
given over to  women s work.  Where women were allowed to compete for the same jobs 
as men, they usually earned less. Thus, a female trimmer in a meat-packing plant typically 
made 37 cents per hour, only two-thirds of what a male trimmer earned. The textile indus- 
try had long been a major source of employment for women, but, in the 1920s, women 
and men alike in this ailing manufacturing sector suffered high rates of unemployment and 
declining wages. 
White-collar work established itself, in the 1920s, as a magnet for women. This sector 
grew rapidly in a decade in which corporations expanded and refined their managerial and 
accounting practices. Discrimination prevented women from becoming managers, accoun- 
tants, or supervisors, but they did dominate the lower-level ranks of secretaries, typists, fil- 
ing clerks, bank tellers, and department store clerks. By the 1930s, 2 million women, or 
20 percent of the female workforce, labored in these and related occupations. Initially, 
these positions had a glamour that factory work lacked. Work environments were cleaner 
and brighter, and women had the opportunity indeed were expected to dress well and 
fashionably. But wages were low and managerial authority was absolute. Unions had vir- 
tually no presence in white-collar places of employment, and workers had difficulty find- 
ing alternative ways of protesting unfair managers or difficult working conditiosns. 
Prosperity  " 885 
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Women with ambitious work aspirations most often  pursued the  female  professions, 
such as teaching, nursing, social work, and librarianship. Opportunities in several of these 
fields, especially teaching and social work, were growing, and women responded by 
enrolling in college in large numbers. The number of female college students increased by 
50 percent during the 1920s. Some of these college graduates used their new skills in new 
fields, such as writing for women s magazines. A few, drawing strength from their feminist 
forebears during the progressive era, managed to crack such male bastions of work as 
mainstream journalism and university research and teaching. In every field of endeavor, 
even such new and exotic ones as airplane flying, at least one woman arose to demonstrate 
that her sex had the necessary talent and drive to match or exceed what men had done. 
Thus in 1932, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo, matching 
Lindbergh s feat and inspiring women everywhere. Even so, Earhart s feat failed to improve 
substantially opportunities for women who wanted to work as pilots in the airline industry. 
In this industry, as in most lines of work, gender prejudices remained too entrenched, and 
the women who had broken the gender line remained, by and large, solitary figures. 
886  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
Amelia Earhart, Aviation Pioneer Earhart strikes a flapper pose in front of the biplane that she was preparing to fly across 
the Atlantic. 
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The Women s Movement Adrift 
Many supporters of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which, in 1920, gave 
women the right to vote, expected it to transform American politics. Women voters would 
reverse the decline in voter participation, cleanse politics of corruption, and launch a vari- 
ety of reform initiatives that would improve the quality of life for women and men alike. 
This female-inspired transformation, however, failed to materialize. Voter participation 
rates did not increase, nor did American politics become imbued with female-inspired 
virtue and honesty. The women s movement, instead, seemed to succumb to the same 
exhaustion and frustration as had the more general progressive movement from which it 
had emerged 20 years earlier. Younger women searching for independence and equality 
(such as the flappers discussed earlier in this chapter) often turned away from reform alto- 
gether, preferring a lifestyle that emphasized private achievement and personal freedom to 
a political career devoted to improving the collective status of America s women. Those 
who continued to agitate for reform found progress more difficult to achieve once the con- 
servative Republican administrations of Harding and Coolidge took office. 
Despite the difficult political environment in which they had to work, some female 
reformers made significant strides in the 1920s. In 1921, one group succeeded in getting 
Congress to pass the Sheppard-Towner Act,a major social welfare program that provided 
federal funds for prenatal and child health care centers throughout the United States. It 
remained in effect until 1929. In 1923, Alice Paul, still head of the National Woman s 
Party (NWP, see chapter 20), and her allies prevailed on Congress to consider an Equal 
Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, phrased as follows:  Men and women shall 
have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.  
And the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the major force behind the 
struggle for suffrage, transformed itself in 1920 into the League of Women Voters 
(LWV). During the next decade, the LWV launched numerous initiatives to encourage 
women to run for elective office, to educate voters about the issues before them, and to 
improve the condition of those Americans the poor, female and child laborers, the men- 
tally ill who needed assistance. 
Sometimes the women s movement was stymied not just by external opposition but 
also by internal division  as it was over the ERA. The NWP and other supporters of the 
ERA insisted that there could be no compromise with the proposition that women were 
the equals of men in every respect. But, the LWV countered, child-rearing and mothering 
duties did render women different from men in key respects and thus, in some instances, 
in need of special treatment by Congress and other lawmaking bodies. 
The question of female difference crystallized around the issue of protective labor leg- 
islation for women. Over the years, a series of state and federal laws had given women pro- 
tections at the workplace limitations on the hours of labor, prohibitions on overnight 
work, and other such measures that men did not have. Many women reformers sup- 
ported these measures, believing they were vital to protecting the masses of women work- 
ers from the worst forms of exploitation and thus enabling them to have enough time and 
Prosperity  " 887 
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energy to perform their vital roles as mothers and wives. Fearing that a successful ERA 
would render this protective legislation unconstitutional, the LWV and its allies opposed 
the ERA. Alice Paul and her allies countered by arguing that female protective laws did not 
really benefit women. Instead, employers used these laws as an excuse to segregate women 
in stereotyped jobs that were mostly low status and low paying and thus to deny women 
the opportunities for advancement and fulfillment open to men. 
This issue of whether women should be treated like men in all respects or offered some 
protections that no men enjoyed was a genuinely complicated one, and women activists 
would continue to argue about it with each other for decades. In the 1920s, however, their 
inability to speak with a single voice on this matter weakened their cause in the eyes of 
their adversaries. 
The Politics of Business 
888  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
Focus Question 
What were the similarities and differences in the politics of Harding, Coolidge, and 
Hoover? 
Republican presidents governed the country from 1921 to 1933. In the beginning, this 
transition engulfed national politics in scandal, as Warren Harding, the first of the decade s 
three Republican presidents, allowed high-ranking members of his administration to 
indulge in spectacular forms of corruption. But his successor, Calvin Coolidge, restored 
virtue and honor to the presidency while carrying out his 1924 campaign pledge to over- 
turn the legacy of progressivism and reduce the role of the government in economic affairs. 
The most significant challenge to Coolidge s small government program came from his 
own secretary of commerce and then his successor as president, Herbert Hoover, who 
sought to sustain the spirit of activist government that Theodore Roosevelt had introduced 
to Republican politics, albeit in somewhat altered form. 
Harding and the Politics of Personal Gain 
Warren Gamaliel Harding defeated Democrat James M. Cox for the presidency in 1920. 
From modest origins as a newspaper editor in the small town of Marion, Ohio, Harding 
had risen to the U.S. Senate chiefly because the powerful Ohio Republican machine knew 
it could count on him to do its bidding. He gained the presidency for the same reason. 
The Republican Party bosses believed that almost anyone they nominated in 1920 could 
defeat the Democratic opponent. They chose Harding because they could control him. 
Harding s good looks and geniality made him a favorite with voters, and he swept into 
office with 61percent of the popular vote, the greatest landslide since 1820. 
To his credit, Harding released the aging Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs from jail 
and took other measures to cool the passions unleashed by the Red Scare. He also included 
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talented men in his cabinet. His choices of Herbert Hoover as secretary of commerce, 
Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of state, and Andrew Mellon as secretary of the treasury 
were particularly impressive appointments. Still, Harding lacked the will to alter his 
ingrained political habits. He had built his political career on a willingness to please the 
lobbyists who came to his Senate office asking for favors and deals. He had long followed 
Ohio boss Harry M. Daugherty s advice and would continue to do so with Daugherty as 
his attorney general. Harding apparently did not consider men such as Daugherty self- 
serving or corrupt. They were his friends; they had been with him since the beginning of 
his political career. He made sure the  boys  had jobs in his administration, and he con- 
tinued to socialize with them. Many a night he could be found drinking (despite Prohibi- 
tion), gambling, and womanizing with the  Ohio Gang  at its K Street hangout. Sometimes 
the gang even convened in the White House. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roo- 
sevelt s daughter, once came into the White House study and found the air  heavy with 
tobacco smoke,  its tables cluttered with  bottles containing every imaginable brand of 
whiskey, . . . [and] cards and poker chips at hand.  
The Politics of Business  " 889 
Warren G. Harding with Friends and Attendants This photograph was shot in St. Augustine, Florida. Harding is third 
from the right. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, boss of the Ohio Republican machine, stands to the left of the President, 
dressed in black and supporting himself with a cane. 
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The K Street house was more than a place to carouse. It was a place of business where 
the Ohio Gang became rich selling government appointments, judicial pardons, and police 
protection to bootleggers. By 1923, the corruption could no longer be concealed. Journal- 
ists and senators began to focus public attention on the actions of Secretary of the Interior 
Albert Fall, who had persuaded Harding to transfer control of large government oil reserves 
at Teapot Dome,Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, from the navy to the Department of 
the Interior. Fall had immediately leased the deposits to two oil tycoons, Harry F. Sinclair 
and Edward L. Doheny, who pumped oil from the wells in exchange for providing the navy 
with a system of fuel tank reserves. Fall had issued the leases secretly, without allowing 
other oil corporations to compete for them, and he had accepted almost $400,000 from Sin- 
clair and Doheny. 
Fall would pay for this shady deal with a year in jail. He was not the only Harding 
appointee to do so. Charles R. Forbes, head of the Veterans  Bureau, would go to Leaven- 
worth Prison for swindling the government out of $200 million in hospital supplies. The 
exposure of Forbes s theft prompted his lawyer, Charles Cramer, to commit suicide; Jesse 
Smith, Attorney General Daugherty s close friend and housemate, also killed himself, 
apparently to avoid being indicted and brought to trial. Daugherty managed to escape con- 
viction and incarceration for bribery by burning incriminating documents held by his 
brother s Ohio bank. Still, Daugherty left government service in disgrace. 
Harding initially kept himself blind to this widespread use of public office for private 
gain but grew depressed when he finally realized what had been going on. In summer 
1923, in poor spirits, he left Washington for a West Coast tour. He fell ill in Seattle and 
died from a heart attack in San Francisco. The train returning his body to Washington 
attracted crowds of grief-stricken mourners who little suspected the web of corruption and 
bribery in which Harding had been caught. Even as the revelations poured forth in 1924 
and 1925, few Americans seemed bothered. Some of this insouciance reflected the care- 
free atmosphere of the 1920s, but much of it had to do with the character of the man who 
succeeded Harding. 
Coolidge and Laissez-Faire Politics 
Calvin Coolidge rarely smiled. At the many dinners he attended as vice president, he said 
hardly a word. Silence was his public creed, much to the chagrin of Washington s 
socialites. He was never enticed into carousing with the  boys,  nor did he ever stand by 
as liquor was being served. He believed that the best government was the government that 
governed least, and that the welfare of the country hinged not on politicians but on the 
people their willingness to work hard, to be honest, and to live within their means. 
Born in Vermont and raised in Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge gained national visibil- 
ity in September 1919, when as governor of Massachusetts he took a firm stand against 
Boston s striking policemen (see chapter 23). His reputation as a man who battled labor 
radicals earned him a place on the 1920 national Republican ticket. His image as an ordi- 
nary man helped convince voters in 1920 that the Republican Party would return the 
890  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
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country to its commonsensical ways after eight years of reckless reforms. Coolidge won his 
party s presidential nomination handily in 1924 and easily defeated his Democratic oppo- 
nent, John W. Davis. Coolidge s popularity remained strong throughout his first full term, 
and he probably would have been re-nominated and reelected in 1928, but he chose not 
to run. 
Coolidge took greatest pride in those measures that reduced the government s control 
over the economy. The Revenue Act of 1926 slashed the high income and estate taxes that 
progressives had pushed through Congress during the First World War. Coolidge cur- 
tailed the power of the Federal Trade Commission to regulate business affairs and 
endorsed Supreme Court decisions invalidating progressive era laws that had strengthened 
organized labor and protected children and women from employer exploitation. 
Hoover and the Politics of Associationalism 
Republicans inthe 1920s did more than simply remove government restraints and reg- 
ulations from the economy. Some, led by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, con- 
ceived of government as a dynamic, even progressive, economic force. Hoover did not 
want government to control industry, but he did want government to persuade private 
corporations to abandon their wasteful, selfish ways and turn to cooperation and pub- 
lic service. Hoover envisioned an economy built on the principle of association. Indus- 
trialists, wholesalers, retailers, operators of railroad and shipping lines, small business- 
men, farmers, workers, doctors each of these groups would form a trade association 
whose members would share economic information, discuss problems of production 
and distribution, and seek ways of achieving greater efficiency and profit. Hoover 
believed that the very act of associating in this way an approach that historian Ellis 
Hawley has called  associationalism  would convince participants of the superiority 
of cooperation over competition, of negotiation over conflict, of public service over 
selfishness. 
A graduate of Stanford University, Hoover had worked first as a mining engineer and 
then as an executive in multinational mining corporations. During the war, he had 
directed the government s Food Administration (see chapter 23). From that experience, he 
had come to appreciate the role that government could play in coordinating the activities 
of thousands of producers and distributors scattered across the country. 
Hoover s ambition as secretary of commerce was to make the department the grand 
orchestrator of economic cooperation. During his eight years in that post (1921 29), he 
organized more than 250 conferences and repeatedly brought together government offi- 
cials, representatives of business, policy makers, and others who had a stake in strength- 
ening the economy. 
Hoover achieved some notable successes. He persuaded farmers to join together in mar- 
keting cooperatives, steel executives to abandon the 12-hour day for their employees, and 
some groups of bankers in the South to organize their institutions into regional associa- 
tions with adequate resources and expertise. Hoover s dynamic conception of government 
The Politics of Business  " 891 
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did not endear him to Coolidge, who declared in 1927:  That man has offered me unso- 
licited advice for six years, all of it bad.  
The Politics of Business Abroad 
Republican domestic policy disagreements over whether to pursue laissez-faire or associa- 
tionalism spilled over into foreign policy as well. As secretary of commerce, Hoover intended 
to apply associationalism to international relations. He wanted the world s leading nations to 
meet regularly in conferences, to limit military buildups, and to foster an international envi- 
ronment in which capitalism could flourish. Aware that the United States must help create 
such an environment, Hoover hoped to persuade American bankers to adopt investment and 
loan policies that would aid European recovery. If they refused to do so, he was prepared to 
urge the government to take an activist, supervisory role in foreign investment. 
In 1921 and 1922, Hoover helped design the Washington Conference on the Limita- 
tion of Armaments. Although he did not serve as a negotiator at the conference Secretary 
of State Charles Evans Hughes reserved that role for himself and his subordinates  
Hoover did supply Hughes s team with a wealth of economic information, and he helped 
Hughes to use that information to design forceful, detailed proposals for disarmament. 
Those proposals gave U.S. negotiators a decided advantage over their European and Asian 
counterparts and helped them win a stunning accord, the Five-Power Treaty, by which 
the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy agreed to scrap more than 2 million tons 
of warships. Hughes also obtained pledges from all of the signatories that they would 
respect the  Open Door  in China, long a U.S. foreign policy objective (see chapter 22). 
These triumphs redounded to Hughes s credit but not to Hoover s, and Hughes used it 
to consolidate his control over foreign policy. He rebuffed Hoover s efforts to put interna- 
tional economic affairs under the direction of the Commerce Department and rejected 
Hoover s suggestion to intervene in the international activities of U.S. banks. 
Hughes was not entirely laissez faire in approach, as he demonstrated in his 1923 reac- 
tion to a crisis in Franco-German relations. The victorious Allies had imposed on Germany 
an obligation to pay $33 billion in war reparations (see chapter 23). In 1923, when the 
impoverished German government suspended its payments, France sent troops to occupy 
the Ruhr valley, whose industry was vital to the German economy. German workers retal- 
iated by going on strike, and the crisis threatened to undermine Europe s precarious eco- 
nomic recovery. Hughes did not stand on the sidelines. He intensified American financial 
pressure on the French and compelled them to attend a U.S.-sponsored conference in 
1924 to restructure Germany s debt obligation. 
The conference produced the Dawes Plan(after the Chicago banker and chief negotia- 
tor, Charles G. Dawes), which reduced German reparations from $542 million to $250 mil- 
lion annually and called on U.S. and foreign banks to stimulate the German economy with 
a quick infusion of $200 million in loans. Within a matter of days, banker J. P. Morgan,Jr., 
raised more than $1 billion from American investors. Money poured into German finan- 
cial markets, and the German economy appeared to stabilize. 
892  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
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The Dawes Plan won applause on both sides of the Atlantic, but soon the U.S. money 
flooding into Germany created its own problems. American investors were so eager to lend 
to Germany that their investments became speculative and unsound. At this point, a 
stronger U.S. government effort to direct loans to sound investments, a strategy that 
Hoover supported, might have helped. But neither Hughes nor his successor as secretary 
of state, Frank Kellogg, was interested in such initiatives, and neither was Secretary of the 
Treasury Mellon. The laissez-faire approach had reasserted itself, and Hoover s plan to 
involve the U.S. government directly in international economic matters had been rebuffed. 
The Republicans  continued pursuit of disarmament and world peace seemed to 
diverge from their general reluctance to involve the U.S. government in foreign affairs. 
To follow up the success of the 1922 Five-Power treaty, Secretary of State Kellogg 
drew up a treaty with Aristide Briand, the French foreign minister, outlawing war as a 
tool of national policy. In 1928, representatives of the United States, France, and 13 
other nations met in Paris to sign the Kellogg-Briand pact, an agreement that soon 
attracted the support of 48 other nations. Coolidge viewed Kellogg-Briand, however, 
not as a way of extending U.S. government power abroad but as a way of reducing fur- 
ther the size of the U.S. government at home. With the threat of war removed, the 
United States could scale back its military forces and eliminate much of the bureau- 
cracy needed to support a large standing army and navy. Unfortunately, the pact con- 
tained no enforcement mechanism, thus rendering itself ineffective as a foreign policy 
tool. 
The Republican administrations flexed U.S. power more effectively in Latin American 
affairs. U.S. investments in the region more than doubled from 1917 to 1929, and the U.S. 
government continued its policy of intervening in the internal affairs of Latin America to 
protect U.S. interests. Republican administrations did attempt initially to curtail American 
military involvement in the Caribbean. The Coolidge administration pulled American 
troops out of the Dominican Republic in 1924 and Nicaragua in 1925. In the case of 
Nicaragua, however, U.S. Marines returned in 1926 to end a war between liberal and con- 
servative Nicaraguans and to protect American property; this time they stayed until 1934. 
U.S. troops, meanwhile, occupied Haiti continuously between 1919 and 1934, keeping in 
power governments friendly to U.S. interests. Opposition to such heavy-handed tactics 
continued to build in the United States, but it  would not yield a significant change in U.S. 
policy until the 1930s (see chapter 25). 
Farmers,Small-Town Protestants,and Moral Traditionalists 
Farmers, Small-Town Protestants, and Moral Traditionalists  " 893 
Focus Question 
What did farmers and conservative Protestants fear in the 1920s, and what policies 
did they support? 
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Although many Americans benefited from the prosperity of the 1920s, others did not. 
Overproduction was impoverishing substantial numbers of farmers. Beyond these eco- 
nomic hardships, many moral-traditionalist white Protestants, especially those in rural 
areas and small towns, believed that the country was being overrun by racially inferior and 
morally suspect foreigners. 
Agricultural Depression 
The 1920s brought hard times to the nation s farmers after the boom period of the war 
years. During the war, domestic demand for farm products had risen steadily and foreign 
demand had exploded as the war disrupted agricultural production in France, Ukraine, 
894  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
P 
r 
ic 
e 
 ( 
do 
ll 
a 
r 
s 
 p 
e 
r 
 b 
u 
sh 
e 
l) 
Year 
1914 1918 1922 1926 1929 
1916 1920 1924 
$2.20 
2.10 
2.00 
1.90 
1.80 
1.70 
1.60 
1.50 
1.40 
1.30 
1.20 
1.10 
1.00 
.90 
.80 
.70 
.60 
.50 
.40 
.30 
.20 
.10 
0 
Wheat 
Corn 
Barley 
Oats 
Price of Major Crops, 1914 1929 
Source: Data from Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (White 
Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International, 1989), pp. 511 12. 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  11:59 AM  Page 894
and other European food-producing regions. Soon after the war, however, Europe s farm- 
ers quickly resumed their customary levels of production. Foreign demand for American 
foodstuffs fell precipitously, leaving U.S. farmers with an oversupply and depressed prices. 
A rise in agricultural productivity made possible by the tractor also worsened the plight of 
many farmers. The number of tractors in use almost quadrupled in the 1920s, and35 million 
new acres came under cultivation. Produce flooded the market. Prices fell even further, as 
did farm incomes. By 1929, the annual per capita income of rural Americans was only 
$223, one-quarter that of the non-farm population. Hundreds of thousands had to sell 
their farms and either scrape together a living as tenants or abandon farming altogether. 
Many chose to abandon farm life, packed their belongings into jalopies or loaded them 
onto trains, and headed for the city. 
Those who stayed on the land grew increasingly assertive in their demands. Early in the 
decade, radical farmers working through such organizations as the Nonpartisan League of 
North Dakota and farmer-labor parties in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and other midwestern 
states led the movement. By the second half of the decade, however, leadership had passed 
from farming radicals to farming moderates, and from small farmers in danger of dispos- 
session to larger farmers and agribusinesses seeking to extend their holdings. By lobbying 
through such organizations as the Farm Bureau Federation, the more powerful agricultural 
interests pressured Congress to set up economic controls that would protect them from 
failure. Their proposals, embodied in the McNary-Haugen Bill, called on the government 
to erect high tariffs on foreign produce and to purchase surplus U.S. crops. The govern- 
ment would then sell the surplus crops on the world market for whatever prices they 
fetched. Any money lost in international sales would be absorbed by the government 
rather than by the farmers. The McNary-Haugen Bill passed Congress in 1927 and in 
1928, only to be vetoed by President Coolidge both times. 
Cultural Dislocation 
Added to the economic plight of the farmers was a sense of cultural dislocation among the 
majority who were white, Protestant, and of northwest European descent. These farmers 
had long perceived themselves as the backbone of the nation hardworking, honest, God- 
fearing yeomen, guardians of independence and liberty. 
The 1920 census challenged the validity of that view. For the first time, a slight major- 
ity of Americans now lived in urban areas. That finding in itself signified little because the 
census classified as  urban  those towns with a population as small as 2,500. But the cen- 
sus figures did reinforce the widespread perception that both the economic and cultural 
vitality of the nation had shifted from the countryside to the metropolis. Industry, the chief 
engine of prosperity, was an urban phenomenon. Commercialized leisure the world of 
amusement parks, department stores, professional sports, movies, cabarets, and theaters  
was to be enjoyed in cities; so too were flashy fashions and open sexuality. Catholics, Jews, 
and African Americans, who together outnumbered white Protestants in many cities, 
seemed to be the principal creators of this new world. They were also thought to be the 
Farmers, Small-Town Protestants, and Moral Traditionalists  " 895 
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purveyors of Bolshevism and other modes of radicalism. Cities, finally, were the home of 
secular intellectuals who had scrapped their belief in Scripture and in God and had 
embraced science as their new, unimpeachable authority. 
Throughout the progressive era, rural white Americans had believed that the cities could 
be redeemed, that city dwellers could be reformed, that the Protestant values of rural Amer- 
ica would triumph. War had crushed that confidence and had replaced it with the fear that 
urban culture and urban people would undermine all that  true  Americans held dear. 
These fears grew even more intense with the changes brought by prosperity. Urban- 
industrial America increased in power and affluence and spread its consumer culture and 
its commodities to the countryside as never before. Even small towns now sported movie 
theaters and automobile dealerships. Radio waves carried news of city life into isolated 
farmhouses. The growth in the circulation of national magazines also broke down the wall 
separating country from city. Mail-order catalogs Sears, Roebuck, and Company and 
others invited farmers to fantasize that they too could fill their homes with refrigerators, 
RCA Victrolas, and Hoover vacuum cleaners. (See Map 24.1, Urbanization, 1920, in the 
color insert following page 912.) 
Rural white Americans showed ambivalence toward this cultural invasion. On the one 
hand, most country dwellers were eager to participate in the consumer marketplace. On 
the other hand, many worried that doing so would expose the countryside to atheism, 
immorality, and radicalism. They expressed their determination to protect their imperiled 
way of life in their support for Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, immigration restriction, and 
religious fundamentalism. 
896  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
Consumer Culture Penetrates the Countryside By the 1920s, cars, Coca-Cola, 
radios, and other commodities had found their way to the country s smallest towns. 
Here a farmer tunes his radio as he milks his cow. 
B 
ro 
w 
n 
 B 
ro 
th 
e 
rs 
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Prohibition 
The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited the manufacture and sale of alco- 
hol, went into effect in January 1920. Initially it drew support from a large and varied con- 
stituency that included farmers, middle-class city dwellers, feminists, and progressive reform- 
ers who loathed the powerful  liquor trust  and who saw firsthand the deleterious effects of 
drink on the urban poor. It soon became apparent, however, that Prohibition was doing as 
much to encourage law-breaking as abstinence. With only 1,500 federal agents to enforce the 
law, the government could not possibly police the drinking habits of 110 million people. 
With little fear of punishment, those who wanted to drink did so, either brewing liquor at 
home or buying it from speakeasies and bootleggers. 
Because the law prevented legitimate businesses from manufacturing liquor, orga- 
nized crime added alcohol to its portfolio. Mobsters procured much of their liquor from 
Canadian manufacturers, smuggled it across the border, protected it in warehouses, and 
distributed it to speakeasies. Al Capone s Chicago-based mob alone employed 1,000 
men to protect its liquor trafficking, which was so lucrative that Capone became the 
richest (and most feared) gangster in America. Blood flowed in the streets of Chicago 
and other northern cities as rival mobs fought one another to enlarge their share of the 
market. 
These unexpected consequences caused many early advocates of Prohibition, especially 
in the cities, to withdraw their support. Not so for Prohibition s rural, white Protestant 
supporters, however. The violence spawned by liquor trafficking confirmed their view of 
alcohol as evil. The high-profile participation of Italian, Irish, and Jewish gangsters in the 
bootleg trade reinforced their belief that Catholics and Jews were threats to law and moral- 
ity. Many rural white Protestants became more, not less, determined to rid the country of 
liquor once and for all; some among them resolved to rid the country of Jews and Catholics 
as well. 
The Ku Klux Klan 
The original Ku Klux Klan, formed in the South in the late 1860s, had died out with 
the defeat of Reconstruction and the reestablishment of white supremacy (see chapter 
17). The new Klan was created in 1915 by William Simmons, a white southerner who 
had been inspired by D. W. Griffith s racist film, Birth of a Nation, in which the early 
Klan was depicted as having saved the nation from predatory blacks. By the 1920s, 
control of the Klan had passed from Simmons to a Texas dentist, Hiram Evans, and its 
ideological focus had expanded from a loathing of blacks to a hatred of Jews and 
Catholics as well. Evans s Klan propagated a nativist message that the country should 
contain or better yet, eliminate the influence of Jews and Catholics and restore 
 Anglo-Saxon  racial purity, Protestant supremacy, and traditional morality to national 
life. This message swelled Klan ranks and expanded its visibility and influence in the 
North and South alike. 
Farmers, Small-Town Protestants, and Moral Traditionalists  " 897 
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By 1924, as many as 4 million Americans are thought to have belonged to the Klan, 
including the half-million members of its female auxiliary, Women of the Ku Klux Klan. Not 
only was the Klan strong in states of the Old Confederacy such as Louisiana and Texas and 
in border states such as Oklahoma and Kansas, but it thrived, too, in such northern states as 
Indiana, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Oregon. It even drew significant membership from 
the cities of those states. Indiana, for example, was home to 500,000 Klansmenand women, 
many of them in the Indianapolis area. In 1924, Indiana voters elected a Klansman to the 
governorship and sent several other Klan members to the statehouse. 
In some respects, the Klan resembled other fraternal organizations. It offered its mem- 
bers friendship networks, social services, and conviviality. Its rituals, regalia, and mock- 
medieval language (the Imperial Wizard, Exalted Cyclops, Grand Dragons, and such) gave 
initiates a sense of superiority, valor, and mystery similar to what other fraternal societies, 
from the Masons to the Knights of Columbus, imparted to their members. 
But the Klan also thrived on hate. It spread lurid tales of financial extortion by Jewish 
bankers and sexual exploitation by Catholic priests. The accusations were sometimes gen- 
eral, as in the claim that an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers had caused the agri- 
cultural depression, or allegations that the pope had sent agents to the United States with 
instructions to destroy liberty and democracy. More common, and more incendiary, how- 
ever, were the seemingly plausible, yet totally manufactured, tales of Jewish or Catholic 
depravity. Stories circulated of Jewish businessmen who had opened amusement parks 
and dance halls to which they lured innocent adolescents, tempting them with sexual 
transgression and profiting handsomely from their moral debasement. Likewise, Catholic 
priests and nuns were said to prey on Protestant girls and boys who had been forced into 
convents and Catholic orphanages. These outrageous stories sometimes provoked attacks 
on individual Jews and Catholics. More commonly, they prompted campaigns to boycott 
Jewish businesses and Catholic institutions, and to ruin reputations. 
The emphasis on sexual exploitation in these stories reveals the anxiety Klan members 
felt about society s growing acceptance of sexual openness and sexual gratification. Many 
Klan supporters lived in towns suffused with these modern attitudes. That such attitudes 
might reflect the yearnings of Protestant children rather than the manipulation of deceit- 
ful Jews and Catholics was a truth some Protestant parents found difficult to accept. 
Immigration Restriction 
Although most white Protestants never joined the Klan, many of them did respond to the 
Klan s nativist argument that the country and its values would best be served by limiting 
the entry of outsiders. That was the purpose of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Restric- 
tion Act of 1924. 
By the early 1920s, most Americans believed that the country could no longer accom- 
modate the million immigrants who had been arriving each year before the war and the more 
than 800,000 who arrived in 1921. Industrialists no longer needed unskilled European 
laborers to operate their factories, their places having been taken either by machines or by 
898  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
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African American and Mexican workers. Most labor movement leaders were convinced 
that the influx of workers unfamiliar with English and with trade unions had weakened 
labor solidarity. Progressive reformers no longer believed that immigrants could be easily 
Americanized or that harmony between the native-born and the foreign-born could be 
readily achieved. Congress responded to constituents  concerns by passing an immigration 
restriction act in 1921. In 1924, the more comprehensive Johnson-Reed Act imposed a 
yearly quota of 165,000 immigrants from countries outside the Western Hemisphere, 
effectively reducing total immigration to only 20 percent of the prewar annual average. 
The sponsors of the 1924 act believed that certain groups British, Germans, and Scan- 
dinavians, in particular were racially superior and that, consequently, these groups 
should be allowed to enter the United States in greater numbers; however, because the 
Constitution prohibited the enactment of explicitly racist laws, Congress had to achieve 
this racist aim through subterfuge. Lawmakers established a formula to determine the 
annual immigrant quota for each foreign country, which was to be computed at 2 percent 
of the total number of immigrants from that country already resident in the United States 
in the year 1890. In 1890, immigrant ranks had been dominated by the British, Germans, 
and Scandinavians, so the new quotas would thus allow for a relatively larger cohort of 
immigrants from those countries. Immigrant groups that were poorly represented in the 
1890 population Italians, Greeks, Poles, Slavs, and Eastern European Jews were effec- 
tively locked out. 
The Johnson-Reed Act also reaffirmed the long-standing policy of excluding Chinese 
immigrants, and it added Japanese and other groups of East and South Asians to the list of 
groups that were altogether barred from entry. The act did not officially limit immigration 
from nations in the Western Hemisphere, chiefly because agribusiness interests in Texas 
and California had convinced Congress that cheap Mexican labor was indispensable to their 
industry s prosperity. Still, the establishment of a Border Patrol along the U.S. Mexican 
border and the imposition of a $10 head tax on all prospective Mexican immigrants made 
entry into the United States more difficult than it had been. 
The Johnson-Reed Act accomplished Congress s underlying goal. Annual immigration 
from transoceanic nations fell by 80 percent. The large number of available slots for Eng- 
lish and German immigrants regularly went unfilled, while the smaller number of avail- 
able slots for Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, and others prevented hundreds of thousands of 
them from entering the country. A  national origins  system put in place in 1927 further 
reduced the total annual quota to 150,000 and reserved more than 120,000 of these slots 
for immigrants from northwestern Europe. Except for minor modifications in 1952, the 
Johnson-Reed Act would govern U.S. immigration policy until 1965. 
Remarkably few Americans, outside of the ethnic groups being discriminated against, 
objected to these laws at the time they were passed an indication of how broadly accept- 
able racism and nativism had become. In fact, racism and religious bigotry enjoyed a resur- 
gence during the Jazz Age. The pseudoscience of eugenics, based on the idea that nations 
could improve the racial quality of their population by expanding its stronger racial strains 
Farmers, Small-Town Protestants, and Moral Traditionalists  " 899 
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and shrinking its weaker ones, found supporters not only in Congress but among the 
ranks of prestigious scientists as well. Universities such as Harvard and Columbia set quo- 
tas similar to those of the Johnson-Reed Act to reduce the proportion of Jews among their 
undergraduates. 
Fundamentalism versus Liberal Protestantism 
Of all the movements protesting against the modern elements of urban life in the 1920s, 
Protestant fundamentalism was perhaps the most enduring. Fundamentalistsregarded the 
Bible as God s word and thus the source of all  fundamental  truth. They believed that every 
event depicted in the Bible, from the creation of the world in six days to theresurrection of 
900  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
Annual Immigrant Quotas under the Johnson-Reed Act, 1925 1927 
Northwest Europe Eastern and 
and Scandinavia Southern Europe Other Countries 
Country Quota Country Quota Country Quota 
Germany 51,227 
Great Britain and 
Northern Ireland 34,007 
Irish Free State 
(Ireland) 28,567 
Sweden 9,561 
Norway 6,453 
France 3,954 
Denmark 2,789 
Switzerland 2,081 
Netherlands 1,648 
Austria 785 
Belgium 512 
Finland 471 
Free City of Danzig 228 
Iceland 100 
Luxembourg 100 
Total (number) 142,483 
Total (%) 86.5% 
Poland 5,982 
Italy 3,845 
Czechoslovakia 3,073 
Russia 2,248 
Yugoslavia 671 
Romania 603 
Portugal 503 
Hungary 473 
Lithuania 344 
Latvia 142 
Spain 131 
Estonia 124 
Albania 100 
Bulgaria 100 
Greece 100 
Total (number) 18,439 
Total (%) 11.2% 
Africa 
(other than Egypt) 1,100 
Armenia 124 
Australia 121 
Palestine 100 
Syria 100 
Turkey 100 
New Zealand 
and Pacific Islands 100 
All others 1,900 
Total (number) 3,745 
Total (%) 2.3% 
Note: Total annual immigrant quota was 164,667. 
Source: From Statistical Abstract of the United States(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1929), p. 100. 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  11:59 AM  Page 900
Christ, happened exactly as the Bible described it. For fundamentalists, God was a deity 
who intervened directly in the lives of individuals and communities and who made known 
both his pleasure and his wrath to those who acknowledged his divinity. Sin had to be 
actively purged, and salvation actively sought. 
The rise of the fundamentalist movement from the 1870s through the 1920s roughly 
paralleled the rise of urban-industrial society. Fundamentalists recoiled from the  evils  of 
the city from what they perceived as its poverty, its moral degeneracy, its irreligion, and 
its crass materialism. Fundamentalism took shape in reaction against two additional 
aspects of urban society: the growth of liberal Protestantism and the revelations of science. 
Liberal Protestantsbelieved that religion had to be adapted to the skeptical and sci- 
entific temper of the modern age. No biblical story in which a sea opens up, the sun stands 
still, or a woman springs forth from a man s rib could possibly be true. The Bible was to 
be mined for its ethical values rather than for its literal truth. Liberal Protestants removed 
God from his active role in history and refashioned him into a distant and benign deity 
who watched over the world but did not intervene to punish or to redeem. They turned 
religion away from the quest for salvation and toward the pursuit of good deeds, social 
conscience, and love for one s neighbor. Although those with a liberal bent constituted 
only a minority of Protestants, they were articulate, visible, and influential in social reform 
movements. Fundamentalism arose in part to counter the  heretical  claims of the liberal 
Protestants. 
Liberal Protestants and fundamentalists both understood that science was the source of 
most challenges to Christianity. Scientists believed that rational inquiry was a better guide 
to the past and to the future than prayer and revelation. Scientists even challenged the 
ideas that God had created the world and had fashioned humankind in his own image. 
These were assertions that many religious peoples, particularly fundamentalists, simply 
could not accept. Conflict was inevitable. It came in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee. 
The Scopes Trial 
No aspect of science aroused more anger among fundamentalists than Charles Darwin s 
theory of evolution. There was no greater blasphemy than to suggest that man emerged 
from lower forms of life instead of being created by God. In Tennessee in 1925, funda- 
mentalists succeeded in passing a law that forbade teaching  any theory that denies the 
story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible.  
For Americans who accepted the authority of science, denying the truth of evolution was 
as ludicrous as insisting that the sun revolved around the earth. They ridiculed the funda- 
mentalists, but they worried that the passage of the Tennessee law might signal the onset of 
a campaign to undermine First Amendment guarantees of free speech. The American Civil 
Liberties Union (ACLU), founded by liberals during the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920, began 
searching for a teacher who would be willing to challenge the constitutionality of the Ten- 
nessee law. They found their man in John T. Scopes, a 24-year-old biology teacher in Day- 
ton, Tennessee. After confessing that he had taught evolution to his students, Scopes was 
Farmers, Small-Town Protestants, and Moral Traditionalists  " 901 
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I 
nherit the Windis a fictionalized drama about the 1925 
Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee (see p. 891 for a dis- 
cussion of the actual trial). It begins with the arrest of 
Bertram T. Cates (the name given by the moviemakers to 
the John T. Scopes character) and ends with Cates s con- 
viction on the charge of breaking a state law prohibiting 
the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools. The cli- 
mactic moment in the movie, as in the real Scopes story, 
is the courtroom clash between Matthew Harrison Brady 
(a thinly fictionalized version of William Jennings Bryan) 
and Henry Drummond (the Clarence Darrow character) 
over the Bible, truth, and scientific inquiry. That the two 
actors who played Brady and Drummond, Fredric March 
and Spencer Tracy, were as prominent in American cin- 
ema as Bryan and Darrow had been in American politics 
enhanced the movie s appeal. A popular film, Inherit the 
Windshaped how a generation that came of age in the 
1960s interpreted the meaning of the Scopes trial. The 
film s broad influence makes it a particularly important 
and interesting historical document to explore. 
The director of Inherit the Wind, Stanley Kramer, liked 
to engage important political issues in his movies: Home 
of the Brave(1949) explored racism in the U.S. army; On 
the Beach(1959) examined the social consequences of 
nuclear war; and Judgment at Nuremberg(1961) investi- 
gated the nature of Nazi criminality.  Some movie critics 
have expressed frustration with these  message movies,  
charging that Kramer often sacrificed historical and per- 
sonal nuance in order to drive his political point home. He 
does this in Inherit the Windby portraying the Scopes 
camp in the most positive possible light. To help us iden- 
tify with E. K. Hornbeck  (meant to represent the irascible 
Baltimore-based journalist, H. L. Mencken),  for example, 
he casts the amiable Gene Kelly in the role. Kramer cele- 
brates Drummond (representing Darrow) not just for his 
commitment to defending science and reason but for 
having more integrity than anyone else in the courtroom. 
Kramer does try to endow Brady with some positive 
qualities and to honor him for his past achievements in 
politics. Ultimately, however, Kramer cannot resist 
depicting Brady as pompous, calculating, and, by the 
trial s end, dangerously out of control. 
This caricature of Brady/Bryan reveals the roots of 
Inherit the Windin a 1955 play by the same name.  The 
creators of that play were not especially concerned 
about making their Brady character resemble Bryan. 
Instead, they wanted Brady to represent an entirely dif- 
ferent figure in American politics, Senator Joseph 
McCarthy, who led a campaign in the 1950s to oust 
communists and their supporters from their jobs in the 
U.S. government. McCarthy s anticommunist operation 
was terrifying not just to the radicals he sought to 
expose but also to liberals and others who believed 
that McCarthy s unscrupulous methods were threaten- 
ing the core political values of the American republic 
(see chapter 27). In identifying Brady with McCarthy, 
the playwrights sought to discredit both men. 
The play and movie also criticize McCarthyism by 
introducing to the 1920s evolution battle an entirely fic- 
titious fire and brimstone preacher, Reverend Jeremiah 
Brown, who, in the manner of a 1950s McCarthyite anti- 
communist, viciously and publicly condemns those, 
including his own daughter, Rachel, who dare to chal- 
lenge the authority of those in power. Both Brown and 
Brady are portrayed in the play and movie as successful 
manipulators of public opinion, much as McCarthy was 
thought to have distorted the minds of Americans 
everywhere with his messages of fear and hate. 
INHERIT THE WIND (1960) 
Directed by Stanley Kramer. 
Starring Fredric March (Matthew Harrison Brady),Spencer Tracy (Henry Drummond),Gene Kelly 
(E.K.Hornbeck),Dick York (Bertram T.Cates),Claude Akins (Rev.Jeremiah Brown),and Donna Anderson 
(Rachel Brown). 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 902
we still need to acknowledge the power of the final 
courtroom scene in the movie, in which Drummond 
and Brady battle each other about the meaning of sci- 
ence and religion. Their confrontation allows us to 
glimpse what was at stake in 1925 when a trial in the 
small town of Dayton, Tennessee, transfixed the 
nation. 
That Kramer allowed his movie about a trial in the 
1920s to be influenced by events that he lived through 
in the 1950s is itself an interesting subject to discuss. It 
causes us to ask how much historians  views of the past 
are themselves shaped by the times in which these his- 
torians lived. But however much we come to see Inherit 
the Windas a commentary on politics in 1950s America, 
Spencer Tracy playing Henry Drummond (the fictional Clarence Darrow) on left and Fredric March playing 
Matthew Harrison Brady (the fictional William Jennings Bryant) on right. 
© 
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arrested. The case quickly attracted national attention. William Jennings Bryan, the former 
Populist, progressive, and secretary of state, announced that he would help prosecute 
Scopes, and the famous liberal trial lawyer Clarence Darrow rushed to Dayton to lead 
Scopes s defense. That Bryan and Darrow had once been allies in the progressive move- 
ment only heightened the drama. A small army of journalists descended on Dayton, led by 
H. L. Mencken, a Baltimore-based journalist famous for his savage critiques of the alleged 
stupidity and prudishness of small-town Americans. 
The trial dragged on, and most of the observers expected Scopes to be convicted. He 
was, but the hearing took an unexpected turn when Darrow persuaded the judge to let 
Bryan testify as an  expert on the Bible.  Darrow knew that Bryan s testimony would have 
no bearing on the question of Scopes s innocence or guilt. The jury was not even allowed 
to hear it. His aim was to expose Bryan as a fool for believing that the Bible was a source 
of literal truth and thus to embarrass the fundamentalists. In a riveting confrontation, Dar- 
row made Bryan s defense of the Bible look problematic and led Bryan to admit that the 
 truth  of the Bible was not always easy to determine. But Darrow could not shake Bryan s 
belief that the Bible was God s word and thus the source of all truth. 
In his account of the trial, Mencken portrayed Bryan as a pathetic figure devastated by 
his humiliating experience on the witness stand, a view popularized in the 1960 movie 
Inherit the Wind.When Bryan died only a week after the trial ended, Mencken claimed that 
the trial had broken Bryan s heart. Bryan deserved a better epitaph than the one Mencken 
had given him. Diabetes caused his death, not a broken heart. Nor was Bryan the innocent 
fool that Mencken made him out to be. He remembered when social conservatives had 
used Darwin s phrase  survival of the fittest  to prove that the wealthy and politically pow- 
erful were racially superior to the poor and powerless. His rejection of Darwinism evi- 
denced his democratic faith that all human beings were creatures of God and thus capa- 
ble of striving for perfection and equality. 
The public ridicule attendant on the Scopes trial took its toll on fundamentalists. Many 
of them retreated from politics and refocused their attention on purging sin from their own 
hearts rather than from the hearts of others. In the end, the fundamentalists prevailed on 
three more states to prohibit the teaching of evolution, but the controversy had even more 
far-reaching effects. Worried about losing sales, publishers quietly removed references to 
Darwin from their science textbooks, a policy that would remain in force until the 1960s. 
In this respect, the fundamentalists had scored a significant victory. 
Ethnic and Racial Communities 
904  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
Focus Question 
How were the experiences of ethnic and racial groups in 1920s America similar and 
how were they different? 
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The 1920s were a decade of change for ethnic and racial minorities. Government policy 
simultaneously discouraged the continued immigration of  new immigrants  from Southern 
and Eastern Europe and encouraged the migration of African Americans from the South to 
the North and of Mexicans across the Rio Grande and into the American Southwest. Some 
minorities benefited from the prosperity of the decade; others created and sustained 
vibrant subcultures. All, however, experienced a surge in religious and racial discrimina- 
tion that made them uneasy in Jazz Age America. 
European American Ethnics 
European American ethnics and especially the Southern and Eastern European majority 
among them were concentrated in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Many were 
semiskilled and unskilled industrial laborers who suffered economic insecurity. In addi- 
tion, they faced cultural discrimination. Catholics and Jews were targets of the Klan and 
its politics of hate. Catholics generally opposed Prohibition, viewing it as a crude attempt 
by Protestants to control their behavior. Southern and Eastern Europeans, particularly 
Jews and Italians, resented immigration restriction and the implication that they were infe- 
rior to Anglo-Saxon whites. Many Italians were outraged by the execution of Nicola Sacco 
and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927 (chapter 23). If the two men had been native-born white 
Protestants, Italians argued, their lives would have been spared. 
Southern and Eastern Europeans everywhere endured intensive Americanization cam- 
paigns. State after state passed laws requiring public schools to instruct children in the 
essentials of citizenship. Several states, including Rhode Island, extended these laws to pri- 
vate schools as well, convinced that the children of immigrants who were attending 
Catholic parochial schools were spending too much time learning about their native reli- 
gion, language, and country. An Oregon law tried to eliminate Catholic schools altogether 
by ordering all children aged 8 to 16 to enroll in public schools. But attending a public 
school was no guarantee of acceptance, either a lesson learned by Jewish children who 
had excelled in their studies only to be barred from Harvard, Columbia, and other elite 
universities. 
Southern and Eastern Europeans responded to these insults and attacks by strengthen- 
ing the very institutions and customs Americanizers sought to undermine. Ethnic associa- 
tions flourished in the 1920s Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues, fraternal and 
mutual benefit societies, banks and charitable organizations, athletic leagues and youth 
groups. Children learned their native languages and customs at home and at church if not 
at school, and they joined with their parents to celebrate their ethnic heritage. Among Ital- 
ians and French Canadians, saints  days were occasions for parades, speeches, band con- 
certs, games, and feasts, all serving to solidify ethnic bonds and affirm ethnic identity. 
Many of these immigrants and their children, however, also embraced the new con- 
sumer culture. They flocked to movies and amusement parks, to baseball games and box- 
ing matches. Children usually entered more enthusiastically into the world of American 
mass culture than did their immigrant parents, a behavior that often set off family conflicts. 
Ethnic and Racial Communities  " 905 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 905
The famed New York Yankee, Lou Gehrig, had to fight to convince his German-born mother 
that playing baseball was honorable work. But many ethnics found it possible to reconcile 
their own culture with American culture. Youngsters who went to the movies did so with 
friends from within their community. Ethnics also played baseball in leagues organized 
around churches or ethnic associations. In these early days of radio, ethnics living in large 
cities could always find programs in their native language and music from their native lands. 
European American ethnics also resolved to develop sufficient political muscle to defeat 
the forces of nativism and to turn government policy in a more favorable direction. One 
sign of this determination was a sharp rise in the number of immigrants who became U.S. 
citizens. The percentage of immigrant Poles, Slavs, Italians, Lithuanians, and Hungarians 
who became naturalized citizens nearly doubled during the decade; the percentage of nat- 
uralized Greeks almost tripled. Armed with the vote, ethnics turned out on election day to 
defeat unsympathetic city councilmen, mayors, state representatives, and even an occa- 
sional governor. Their growing national strength first became apparent at the Democratic 
national convention of 1924, when urban-ethnic delegates almost won approval of planks 
calling for the repeal of Prohibition and condemnation of the Klan. After denying the pres- 
idential nomination to William G. McAdoo Woodrow Wilson s treasury secretary, son- 
in-law, and heir apparent they nearly secured it for their candidate, Alfred E. Smith,the 
Irish American governor of New York. McAdoo represented the rural and southern con- 
stituencies of the Democratic Party. His forces ended up battling Smith s urban-ethnic 
forces for 103 ballots, until both men gave up and supporters from each camp switched 
their votes to a compromise candidate, the corporate lawyer John W. Davis. 
The nomination fight damaged the Democratic Party in the short term, and popular 
Calvin Coolidge easily defeated the little-known Davis. This split between the party s rural 
906  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
Democratic Presidential Voting in Chicago 
by Ethnic Groups, 1924 and 1928 
Percent Democratic 
1924 1928 
Czechoslovaks 40% 73% 
Poles 35 71 
Lithuanians 48 77 
Yugoslavs 20 54 
Italians 31 63 
Germans 14 58 
Jews 19 60 
Source: From John M. Allswang, A House for All Peoples: Ethnic Politics in 
Chicago, 1890 1936(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), p. 42. 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 906
Protestant and urban-ethnic constituencies would keep the Democrats from the White 
House for nearly a decade, but the convention upheaval of 1924 also marked an impor- 
tant milestone in the bid by European American ethnics for political power. They would 
achieve a second milestone at the Democratic national convention of 1928 when, after 
another bitter nomination struggle, they secured the presidential nomination for Al Smith. 
Never before had a major political party nominated a Catholic for president. Herbert 
Hoover crushed Smith in the general election, as nativists stirred up anti-Catholic preju- 
dice yet again and as large numbers of southern Democrats either stayed home or voted 
Republican. Even so, the campaign offered encouraging signs, none more so than Smith s 
beating Hoover in the nation s 12 largest cities. European American ethnics would yet have 
their day. 
African Americans 
Despite the urban race riots of 1919 (see chapter 23), African Americans continued to 
leave their rural homes for the industrial centers of the South and the North. In the 1920s 
alone, nearly a million blacks traveled North. In New York City and Chicago, their num- 
bers grew so large 300,000 in New York and 234,000 in Chicago that they formed 
cities unto themselves. When word of New York City s urban black enclave reached the 
Caribbean, thousands of West Indian blacks set off for Harlem. Within these black 
metropolises emerged complex societies consisting of workers, businessmen, professionals, 
Ethnic and Racial Communities  " 907 
FL 
6 
MD 
 8 
VT 
4 
NH 
4 
IA 
13 
CA 
13 
MA 
18 
NJ 
14 
OR 
5 
NV 
3 
NE 
8 
CO 
6 
MN 
12 
WI 
13 
KS 
10 
TX 
20 LA 
10 
AR 
9 
MO 
18 
IL 
29 
IN 
15 
MI 
15 
MS 
10 
AL 
12 GA 
14 
TN 
12 
KY 
13 
OH 
24 
SC 
9 
NC 
12 
VA 
12 
WV 
8 
PA 
38 
NY 
45 
ME 
6 
RI 
5 
CT 
 7 
DE 
 3 
WA 
7 
ID 
4 
UT 
4 
WY 
3 
MT 
4 ND 
5 
SD 
5 
AZ 
3 NM 
3 
OK 
10 
Electoral Vote    
Number     %    
 Popular Vote 
  Number            %    
87 16.4 15,016,169 40.9 
Smith 
(Democrat) 
Hoover 
(Republican) 444 83.6 21,391,993 58.2 
Map 24.2 Presidential Election, 1928 This map shows Hoover s 
landslide victory in 1928, as he carried all but eight states and won almost 
84percent of the electoral vote. 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 907
intellectuals, artists, and entertainers. Social differentiation intensified as various groups  
long-resident northerners and newly arrived southerners, religious conservatives and cul- 
tural radicals, African Americans and African Caribbeans found reason to disapprove of 
one another s ways. Still, the diversity and complexity of urban black America were 
thrilling, nowhere more so than in Harlem, the  Negro capital.  Black writer James Weldon 
Johnson described Harlem in the 1920s: 
Throughout colored America Harlem is the recognized Negro capital. Indeed, it is Mecca 
for the sightseer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous, the enterprising, the 
ambitious, and the talented of the entire Negro world. . . . Not merely a colony or a com- 
munity or a settlement not at all a  quarter  or a slum or a fringe [Harlem is] . . . a black 
city, located in the heart of white Manhattan, and containing more Negroes to the square 
mile than any other spot on earth. It strikes the uninformed observer as a phenomenon, a 
miracle straight out of the skies. 
Not even the glamour of Harlem could erase the reality of racial discrimination, how- 
ever. Most African Americans could find work only in New York City s least-desired and 
lowest-paying jobs. Because they could rent apartments only in areas that real estate agents 
and banks had designated as  colored,  African Americans suffered the highest rate of res- 
idential segregation of any minority group. Although Harlem had its fashionable districts 
where affluent blacks lived, much of the area s housing stock was poor and rents were 
high. Harlem became a black ghetto, an area set apart from the rest of the city by the skin 
color of its inhabitants, by its higher population density and poverty rate, by its higher 
incidence of infectious diseases, and by the lower life expectancy of its people. 
Blacks did enjoy some important economic breakthroughs in the 1920s. Henry Ford, 
for example, hired large numbers of African Americans to work in his Detroit auto facto- 
ries. Even here, however, a racist logic was operating, for Ford believed that black and 
908  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
Death Rates from Selected Causes for New York City Residents, 1925 
Cause of Death Total Population African American Population 
General death rate (per 1,000 population) 11.4 16.5 
Pneumonia 132.8 282.4 
Pulmonary tuberculosis 75.5 258.4 
Infant mortality (per 1,000 live births) 64.6 118.4 
Maternal mortality (per 1,000 total births) 5.3 10.2 
Stillbirths (per 1,000 births) 47.6 82.7 
Homicide 5.3 19.5 
Suicide 14.8 9.7 
Note: Rate is per 100,000 population, unless noted. 
Source: Cheryl Lynn Greenberg,  Or Does It Explode?  Black Harlem in the Great Depression(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 32. 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 908
white workers, divided along racial lines, would not challenge his authority. Until the 
1940s, in fact, unions made less headway at Ford plants than at the plants of other major 
automobile manufacturers. 
Racial divisions carried over from work to play. African Americans loved baseball as 
much as white Americans did, and Babe Ruth enjoyed a large black following, but black 
baseball players were barred from playing in the lily-white major leagues. In response, they 
formed their own Negro Leagues in the United States and also played professional ball in 
Mexico and the Caribbean, where they earned extra income and escaped some of the prej- 
udice that met them everywhere in the United States. Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and other 
countries in which African Americans played did not organize baseball along racial lines. 
The greatest black baseball player was probably Josh Gibson, who joined the Home- 
stead Grays of the National Negro League in 1929 at the age of 18. In his 17-year career, 
he compiled statistics that surpassed those of any professional ballplayer of his era, white 
or black, including those of the legendary Babe Ruth. Gibson slugged 962 career home 
runs, hit 84 home runs in a single season, and compiled a .373 lifetime batting average. 
Because he died in 1947, at the age of 35, just months before the integration of major 
league baseball, Gibson never got the opportunity to test his skills against the best white 
ballplayers, and they never got a chance to play against him. 
African Americans grew pessimistic about achieving racial equality. After Marcus Gar- 
vey s black nationalist movement collapsed in the mid-1920s (see chapter 23), no compa- 
rable organization arose to take its place. The NAACP continued to fight racial discrimi- 
nation, and the Urban League carried on quiet negotiations with industrial elites to secure 
jobs for African Americans. Black socialists led by A. Philip Randolph built a strong all- 
black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, but the victories were small and 
white allies were scarce. The political initiatives emerging among European American eth- 
nics had few counterparts in the African American community. 
In terms of black culture, however, the 1920s were vigorous and productive. Black 
musicians coming north to Chicago and New York brought with them their distinctive 
musical styles, most notably the blues and ragtime. Influenced by the harmonies and tech- 
niques of European classical music, which black musicians learned from their European 
American ethnic counterparts, these southern styles metamorphosed into jazz. Urban 
audiences, first black and then white, found this new music alluring. They responded to 
its melodies, its sensuality, its creativity, its savvy. In Chicago, Detroit, New York, New 
Orleans, and elsewhere, jazz musicians came together in cramped apartments, cabarets, 
and nightclubs to jam, compete, and entertain. Willie Smith, Charles P. Johnson, Count 
Basie, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong were among the most famous 
musicians of the day. By the late 1920s, they were being hailed in Europe as well. 
Jazz seemed to express something quintessentially modern. Jazz musicians broke free 
of convention, improvised, and produced new sounds that created new sensations. Both 
blacks and whites found in jazz an escape from the routine, the predictability, and the con- 
ventions of their everyday lives. 
Ethnic and Racial Communities  " 909 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 909
The Harlem Renaissance 
Paralleling the emergence of jazz was a black literary and artistic awakening known as the 
Harlem Renaissance. Black novelists, poets, painters, sculptors, and playwrights set 
about creating works rooted in their own culture instead of imitating the styles of white 
Europeans and Americans. The movement had begun during the war, when blacks sensed 
that they might at last be advancing to full equality. It was symbolized by the image of the 
 New Negro,  a black man or woman who would no longer be deferential to whites but 
who would display his or her independence through talent and determination. The  New 
Negro  would be assertive in every field at work, in politics, in the military, and in arts 
and letters. As racial discrimination intensified after the war, cultural activities took on 
special significance. The world of culture was one place where blacks could express their 
racial pride and demonstrate their talent. 
Langston Hughes, a young black poet, said of the Harlem Renaissance:  We younger 
Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves with- 
out fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn t mat- 
ter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.  Writers Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and 
Zora Neale Hurston; poet Countee Cullen; and painter Aaron Douglas were other promi- 
nent Renaissance participants. In 1925,Survey Graphic, a white liberal magazine, devoted 
910  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
Josh Gibson, Negro Leagues Star This photograph captures Gibson in 1944, near the end of his career, being 
tagged out at home plate by Ted Radcliffe in the 10th annual East-West All Star Game at Comiskey Park, Chicago. 
© 
 B 
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tm 
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11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 910
an entire issue to  Harlem the Mecca of the New Negro.  Alain Locke, an art and liter- 
ary critic and professor of philosophy at Howard University in Washington, D.C., edited 
both the issue and the book The New Negro, published later that year. Locke became the 
movement s leading visionary and philosopher. 
But even these cultural advances failed to escape white prejudice. The most popular 
jazz nightclubs in Harlem, most of which were owned and operated by whites, often 
refused to admit black customers. The only African Americans permitted inside were the 
jazz musicians, singers and dancers, prostitutes, and kitchen help. Moreover, the musi- 
cians often had to perform what the white patrons wanted to hear. Duke Ellington, for 
example, was called on to play  jungle music,  which for whites revealed the  true  African 
soul sensual, innocent, primitive. Such pressures curtailed the artistic freedom of black 
musicians and reinforced racist stereotypes of African Americans as inferior people who 
were closer to nature than the  more civilized  white audiences who came to hear their 
music. 
Black artists and writers experienced similar pressures. Many of them depended for 
their sustenance on the support of wealthy white patrons. Those patrons were generous, 
but they wanted a return on their investment. Charlotte Mason, the New York City matron 
who supported Hughes and Hurston, for example, expected them to entertain her friends 
by demonstrating  authentic Negritude  in their work. Hurston accepted this role, but for 
Hughes it became intolerable. Both Hughes and Hurston paid a price for their patron s 
support, including the collapse of their once-close friendship with each other. 
Mexican Americans 
After the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, Mexicans became the country s chief source of immi- 
grant labor. A total of 500,000 Mexicans came to the United States in the 1920s. Some 
headed for the steel, auto, and meatpacking plants of the Midwest, but most settled in the 
Southwest, where they worked on the railroads and in construction, agriculture, and man- 
ufacturing. In Texas, three of every four construction workers and eight of every ten 
migrant farm workers were Mexicans. An official of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce 
declared:  Mexican farm labor is rapidly proving the making of this State. In California, 
Mexican immigrants made up 75 percent of the state s agricultural workforce. 
Mexican farm laborers in Texas worked long hours for little money. As a rule, they 
earned 50 cents to a dollar less per day than Anglo workers. They were usually barred from 
becoming machine operators or assuming other skilled positions. Forced to follow the 
crops, they had little opportunity to develop settled homes and communities. Mexican 
farm workers depended for shelter on whatever facilities farm owners offered. Because 
farm owners rarely required the services of Mexican workers for more than several days or 
weeks, few were willing to spend the money required to provide decent homes and 
schools. Houses typically lacked even wooden floors or indoor plumbing. Mexican labor- 
ers found it difficult to protest these conditions because their knowledge of English was 
limited. Few owned cars or trucks that would have allowed them to escape a bad employer 
Ethnic and Racial Communities  " 911 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 911
and search for a good one. Many were in debt to employers who had advanced them 
money and who threatened them with jail if they failed to fulfill the terms of their contract. 
Others feared deportation; they lacked visas, having slipped into the United States illegally 
rather than pay the immigrant tax or endure harassment from the Border Patrol. 
Increasing numbers of Mexican immigrants, however, found their way to California, 
where, on the whole, wages exceeded those in Texas. Some escaped agricultural labor alto- 
gether for construction and manufacturing jobs. Many Mexican men in Los Angeles, for 
example, worked in the city s large railroad yards, at the city s numerous construction 
sites, and as unskilled workers in local factories. Mexican women labored in the city s gar- 
ment shops, fish canneries, and food processing plants. By 1930, Los Angeles had become 
the largest area of settlement for Mexicans in the United States. 
The Los Angeles Mexican American community increased in complexity as it grew in 
size. By the mid-1920s, it included a growing professional class, a proud group of cali- 
fornios (Spanish-speakers who had been resident in California for generations), many 
musicians and entertainers, a small but energetic band of entrepreneurs and businessmen, 
912  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
San Diego 
(9,266) Dallas 
(5,901) 
Los Angeles 
(97,116) 
San Francisco 
(7,922) 
El Paso 
(58, 291) 
Houston 
(14,149) 
Denver 
(6,837) 
Detroit 
(6,515) 
Chicago 
(19,362) 
San Antonio 
(82,373) 
CANADA 
MEXICO 
WASH. 
OREGON 
CALIF. 
NEVADA 
IDAHO 
MONTANA 
WYOMING 
UTAH 
COLORADO 
KANSAS 
OKLAHOMA 
TEXAS 
NEBRASKA 
ARIZONA NEW 
MEXICO 
NORTH 
DAKOTA MINN. 
WIS. 
IOWA 
MISSOURI 
ARK. 
LA. 
MISS. ALA. 
GA. 
S.C. 
TENN. 
N.C. 
KY. 
ILL. IND. 
MICH. 
OHIO 
W. 
VA. 
PENN. 
NEW 
YORK 
N.H. 
MAINE 
MASS. 
R. I. 
CONN. 
VT. 
MD. 
Washington, D.C. 
DEL. 
FLA. 
SOUTH 
DAKOTA 
N.J. 
VIRGINIA 
0 
250 500 Kilometers 
0 
250 500 Miles 
Gulf of 
Mexico 
PACIFIC 
OCEAN 
ATLANTIC 
OCEAN 
Below 1,000 
1,001 10,000 
10,001 50,000 
50,001 100,000 
100,001 500,000 
Over 500,000 
Major cities (100,000 
or more) with significant 
Mexican populations* 
Areas of Mexican Settlement (by states), 1930  
*Population totals include those Mexicans born in Mexico and those born in the United States. 
Map 24.3 Mexican Population in the United States, 1930 By 1930, Mexican immigrants had established their pattern 
of settling primarily in the U.S. Southwest. Texas had the largest concentration of Mexican immigrants, followed by California and 
Arizona, and then by New Mexico and Colorado. Though Texas had a larger overall population, Los Angeles had surpassed San 
Antonio as the city with the largest single Mexican community in the United States. 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 912
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11019_CI-21_CI-24.qxd  9/4/07  11:23 AM  Page CI-21
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U.S. troops 
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11019_CI-21_CI-24.qxd  9/4/07  11:23 AM  Page CI-22
CI-23 
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11019_CI-21_CI-24.qxd  9/4/07  11:23 AM  Page CI-23
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conservative clerics and intellectuals who had fled or been expelled from revolutionary 
Mexico, and Mexican government officials who had been sent to counter the influence of 
the conservative exiles and to strengthen the ties of the immigrants to their homeland. This 
diverse mix created much internal conflict, but it also generated considerable cultural 
vitality. Los Angeles became the same kind of magnet for Mexican Americans that Harlem 
had become for African Americans. 
Mexican musicians flocked to Los Angeles, as did Mexican playwrights. The city sup- 
ported a vigorous Spanish-language theater. Mexican musicians performed on street cor- 
ners, at ethnic festivals and weddings, at cabarets, and on the radio. Especially popular were 
folk ballads, called corridos,that spoke to the experiences of Mexican immigrants. Although 
different in form and melody from the African American blues,corridos resembled the blues 
in their emphasis on the suffering, hope, and frustrations of ordinary people. 
This flowering of Mexican American culture in Los Angeles could not erase the low 
wages, high rates of infant mortality, racial discrimination, and other hardships Mexicans 
faced; nor did it encourage Mexicans, in Los Angeles or elsewhere, to mobilize themselves 
Ethnic and Racial Communities  " 913 
Mexican American Women Workers, 1920s These women were employed at 
a tortilla factory in Los Angeles. 
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11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 913
as a political force. Unlike European immigrants, Mexican immigrants showed little inter- 
est in becoming American citizens and acquiring the vote. Yet the cultural vibrancy of the 
Mexican immigrant community did sustain many individuals who were struggling to sur- 
vive in a strange, and often hostile, environment. 
The  Lost Generation and Disillusioned Intellectuals 
914  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
Focus Question 
To whom did the phrase  Lost Generation  refer and what caused these individuals 
to become disillusioned? 
Many native-born white artists and intellectuals also felt uneasy in America in the 1920s. 
Their unease arose not from poverty or discrimination but from alienation. They despaired 
of American culture and regarded the average American as anti-intellectual, small-minded, 
materialistic, and puritanical. The novelist Sinclair Lewis, for example, ridiculed small- 
town Americans in Main Street (1920),  sophisticated  city dwellers in Babbitt (1922), 
physicians inArrowsmith(1925), and evangelicals in Elmer Gantry (1927). 
Before the First World War, intellectuals and artists had been deeply engaged with  the 
people.  Although they were critical of many aspects of American society, they believed 
they could help bring about a new politics and improve social conditions. Some of them 
joined the war effort on the side of the Allies before the United States had officially inter- 
vened. Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and e. e. cummings, among others, sailed to 
Europe and volunteered their services, usually as ambulance drivers carrying wounded 
Allied soldiers from the front. 
America s intellectuals were shaken by the war s effect on American society. The wartime 
push for consensus created intolerance of radicals, immigrants, and blacks. Intellectuals had 
been further dismayed by Prohibition, the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, the rise of funda- 
mentalism, and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Not only had many Americans 
embraced conformity for themselves, but they seemed determined to force conformity on 
others. The young critic Harold Stearns wrote in 1921 that  the most moving and pathetic 
fact in the social life of America today is emotional and aesthetic starvation.  Before these 
words were published, Stearns had sailed for France. So many alienated young men like 
Stearns showed up in Paris that Gertrude Stein, an American writer whose Paris apartment 
became a gathering place for them, took to calling them the  Lost Generation.  
Their indictment of America was often too harsh. Most of these writers possessed little 
knowledge of how most Americans lived. Few expressed sympathy for the plight of farm- 
ers or the working-class poor. Few knew much about the rich cultural heritage of immi- 
grant communities. Still, they managed to convert their disillusionment into a rich literary 
sensibility. The finest works of the decade focused on the psychological toll of living in 
what the poet T. S. Eliot referred to as The Waste Land (1922). 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 914
F. Scott Fitzgerald s novel The Great Gatsby (1925) told of a man destroyed by his desire 
to be accepted into a world of wealth, fancy cars, and fast women. In the novel A Farewell 
to Arms (1929), Ernest Hemingway wrote of an American soldier overwhelmed by the 
senselessness and brutality of war who deserts the army for the company of a woman he 
loves. Playwright Eugene O Neill created characters haunted by despair, loneliness, and 
unfulfilled longing. Writers created innovations in style as well as in content. Sherwood 
Anderson, in his novel Winesburg, Ohio (1919), blended fiction and autobiography. John 
Dos Passos, in Manhattan Transfer (1925), mixed journalism with more traditional literary 
methods. Hemingway wrote in an understated, laconic prose that somehow drew atten- 
tion to his characters  rage and vulnerability. 
White Southern writers found a tragic sensibility surviving from the South s defeat in the 
Civil War that spoke to their own loss of hope. One group of such writers, calling them- 
selves the Agrarians, argued that the enduring agricultural character of their region offered 
a more hopeful path to the future than did the mass-production and mass-consumption 
regime that had overtaken the North. In 1929, William Faulkner published The Sound and 
the Fury, the first in a series of novels set in northern Mississippi s fictional Yoknapataw- 
pha County. Faulkner explored the violence and terror that marked relationships among 
family members and townspeople, while maintaining compassion and understanding. 
Faulkner, Lewis, Hemingway, O Neill, and Eliot would each receive the Nobel Prize for 
Literature. 
Democracy on the Defensive 
Disdain for the masses led many intellectuals to question democracy. If ordinary people 
were as stupid, prejudiced, and easily manipulated as they seemed, how could they be 
entrusted with the fate of the nation? Although few intellectuals were as frank as Mencken, 
who dismissed democracy as  the worship of jackals by jackasses,  their distrust of demo- 
cracy ran deep. Walter Lippmann, a former radical and progressive, declared that modern 
society had rendered democracy obsolete. In his view, average citizens, buffeted by pro- 
paganda emanating from powerful opinion makers, could no longer make the kind of 
informed, rational judgments needed to make democracy work. They were vulnerable to 
demagogues who played on their emotions and fears. Lippmann s solution, and that of 
many other political commentators, was to shift government power from the people to 
educated elites. Those elites, who would be appointed rather than elected, would conduct 
foreign and domestic policy in an informed, intelligent way. Only then, in Lippmann s 
view, could government be effective and just. 
Mencken and Lippmann enjoyed especially strong influence and prestige among university 
students, whose ranks and political significance were growing. But their antidemocratic views 
did not go uncontested. The philosopher John Dewey, who taught at ColumbiaUniversity 
but whose reputation and influence extended well beyond academia, was the most artic- 
ulate spokesman for the  pro-democracy  position. He acknowledged that the concentra- 
tion of power in giant organizations had eroded the authority of Congress, the presidency, 
The  Lost Generation  and Disillusioned Intellectuals  " 915 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 915
and other democratic institutions, but democracy, he insisted, was not doomed. The peo- 
ple could reclaim their freedom by making big business subject to government control. 
Government could use its power to democratize corporations and to regulate the commu- 
nications industry to ensure that every citizen had access to the facts needed to make rea- 
sonable, informed political decisions. 
Dewey s views attracted the support of a wide range of liberal intellectuals and reformers, 
including Robert and Helen Lynd; Rexford Tugwell, professor of economics at Columbia; 
and Felix Frankfurter, a rising star at Harvard s law school. Some of these activists had ties 
to labor leaders and to New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. They formed the van- 
guard of a new liberal movement committed to taking up the work the progressives had 
left unfinished. 
But these reformers were utterly without power, except in a few states. The Republican 
Party had driven reformers from its ranks. The Democratic Party was a fallen giant, crip- 
pled by a split between its principal constituencies rural Protestants and urban ethnics  
over Prohibition, immigration restriction, and the Ku Klux Klan. The labor movement was 
moribund. The Socialist Party had never recovered from the trauma of war and Bolshe- 
vism. La Follette s Farmer-Labor Party had stalled after a promising debut. John Dewey 
and his friends tried to launch yet another third party, but they failed to raise money or 
arouse mass support. 
Reformers took little comfort in the presidential election of 1928. Hoover s smashing 
victory suggested that the trends of the 1920s the dominance of the Republicans, the 
centrality of Prohibition to political debate, the paralysis of the Democrats, the growing 
economic might of capitalism, and the pervasive influence of the consumer culture  
would continue unabated. 
Conclusion 
Signs abounded in the 1920s that Americans were creating a new and bountiful society. 
The increased accessibility of cars, radios, vacuum cleaners, and other consumer durables; 
rising real wages, low unemployment, and installment buying; the widening circle of stock 
owners; the spread of welfare capitalism all these pointed to an economy that had 
become more prosperous, more consumer-oriented, even somewhat more egalitarian. 
Moves to greater equality within marriage and to enhanced liberty for single women sug- 
gested that economic change was propelling social change as well. 
Even so, many working-class and rural Americans benefited little from the decade s 
prosperity. Moreover, the decade s social changes aroused resistance, especially from white 
farmers and small-town Americans, who feared that the rapid growth of cities and the large 
urban settlements of European and Mexican Catholics, Jews, and African Americans were 
rendering their white Protestant America unrecognizable. 
In the Democratic Party, farmers, small-town Americans, and moral traditionalists 
fought bitterly against the growing power of urban, ethnic constituencies. Elsewhere, the 
916  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 916
traditionalists battled hard to protect religion s authority against the inroads of science and 
to purge the nation of  inferior  population streams. In the process they arrayed them- 
selves against American traditions of liberty and equality, even as they posed as the defend- 
ers of the best that America had to offer. 
Their resistance to change caused many of the nation s most talented artists and writ- 
ers to turn away from their fellow Americans in disgust. Meanwhile, although ethnic and 
racial minorities experienced high levels of discrimination, they nevertheless found 
enough freedom to create vibrant ethnic and racial communities and to launch projects  
as in the case of African Americans in Harlem and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles of 
cultural renaissance. 
The Republican Party, having largely shed its reputation for reform, took credit for 
engineering the new economy of consumer plenty. It looked forward to years of political 
dominance. A steep and unexpected economic depression, however, would soon dash that 
expectation, revive the Democratic Party, and destroy Republican political power for a 
generation. 
S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS 
William Leuchtenberg,The Perils of Prosperity, 1914 1932(1958), andEllis Hawley,The Great 
War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 
1917 1933(1979), offer useful overviews of the 1920s. Important works on the consumer revo- 
lution include Warren I. Susman,Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in 
the Twentieth Century(1984);Roland Marchand,Advertising the American Dream: Making Way 
for Modernity, 1920 1940(1985); andKathy Lee Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America s 
Beauty Culture(1998). John D. Hicks,Republican Ascendancy, 1921 1933(1960) still serves as 
a good introduction to national politics, but consult, too, Thomas B. Silver, Coolidge and the 
Historians(1982); Ellis Hawley, ed., Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New 
Era Thought and Practice(1974); and John W. Dean, Warren G. Harding(2004). For a pene- 
trating look at U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean in the 1920s, seeMary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: 
Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism(2001). 
On agricultural distress and protest, seeTheodore SaloutosandJohn D. Hicks, Twentieth 
Century Populism: Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900 1939(1951). For an exam- 
ination of the economic and social effects of Prohibition, seeNorman Clark, Deliver Us From 
Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition(1976). The best treatment of the Scopes trial can 
be found inMichael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan(2006). On the 
1920s resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, consult Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: 
The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan(1994). Frederic Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of 
Protestant America, 1880 1930(1982), expertly analyzes the split in Protestant ranks between 
liberals and fundamentalists. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American 
Nativism, 1865 1925(1955), remains an excellent work on the spirit of intolerance that gripped 
America in the 1920s. On hostility toward immigrants and ethnics, see, also, Mae Ngai, Impos- 
sible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America(2004) and Jerome Karabel, The 
Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton(2005). 
Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920 1933(1960), 
remains the most thorough examination of 1920s workers. 
Conclusion " 917 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 917
On ethnic communities, Americanization, and political mobilization in the 1920s, seeGary 
Gerstle,Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914 1960(1989); 
George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los 
Angeles, 1900 1945(1993); andKristi Andersen, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 
1928 1936(1979). On the Harlem Renaissance, see Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance 
(1971). Malcolm Cowley,Exiles Return(1934), is a marvelous account of the writers and artists 
who comprised the  Lost Generation.  For a provocative interpretation of the intertwined char- 
acter of white and black literary cultures in 1920s New York, seeAnn Douglas,Terrible Honesty: 
Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s(1995). 
918  "CHAPTER 24  "The 1920s 
Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to 
this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin 
Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW 
is an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use 
and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want NOW! 
www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 
11019_24_ch24_p0875-0918.qxd  6/4/07  12:00 PM  Page 918
The Great Depression and the New Deal, 
1929 1939 
T 
he Great Depressionbegan on October 29, 1929 (Black Tuesday) with a spectacular 
stock market crash. On that one day, stock values plummeted $14 billion. By the end of 
that year, stock prices had fallen 50 percent from their September highs. By 1932, the worst 
year of the depression, they had fallen another 30 percent. In three years, $74 billion of 
wealth had simply vanished. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate had soared to 25 percent. 
Many Americans who lived through the Great Depression could never forget the scenes 
of misery they saw everywhere. In cities, the poor meekly awaited their turn for a piece of 
stale bread and thin gruel at ill-funded soup kitchens. Scavengers poked through garbage 
cans for food, scoured railroad tracks for coal that had fallen from trains, and sometimes 
ripped up railroad ties for fuel. Hundreds of thousands of Americans built makeshift shel- 
ters out of cardboard, scrap metal, and whatever else they could find in the city dump. 
They called their towns  Hoovervilles,  after the president whom they despised for his 
apparent refusal to help them. 
The Great Depression brought cultural crisis as well as economic crisis. In the 1920s, 
American business leaders had successfully redefined the national culture in business terms, 
as Americans  values became synonymous with the values of business: economic growth, free- 
dom of enterprise, and acquisitiveness. But the swagger and bluster of Americanbusinessmen 
during the 1920s made them vulnerable to attack in the 1930s, as jobs, incomes, and 
growth all disappeared. With the prestige of business and business values in decline, how 
could Americans regain their hope and recover their confidence in the future? The first 
years of the 1930s held no convincing answers. 
The gloom broke in early 1933 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president 
and unleashed the power of government to regulate capitalist enterprises, to restore the 
economy to health, and to guarantee the social welfare of Americans who were unable 
to help themselves. Roosevelt called his pro-government program a  new deal for the 
American people,  and it would dominate national politics for the next40years. Hailed 
as a hero, Roosevelt became (and remains) the only president to serve more than two 
terms. In the short term, the New Deal failed to restore prosperity to America, but the 
 liberalism  it championed found acceptance among millions, who agreed with Roosevelt 
that only a large and powerful government could guarantee Americans their 
liberty. 
25 
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Causes of the Great Depression 
920  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
1929 Herbert Hoover assumes the presidency  " Stock market crashes on  Black Tuesday  
1930 Tariff Act (Hawley-Smoot) raises tariffs 
1931 More than 2,000 U.S. banks fail 
1932 Unemployment rate reaches 25 percent  " Reconstruction Finance Corporation established  " Bonus Army 
marches on Washington  " Roosevelt defeats Hoover for presidency 
1933 Roosevelt assumes presidency  " Hundred Days legislation defines First New Deal (March June)  " 
Roosevelt administration recognizes the Soviet Union  " Good Neighbor Policy toward Latin America 
launched 
1934 Father Charles Coughlin and Huey Long challenge conservatism of First New Deal  " 2,000 strikes staged 
across country  " Democrats overwhelm Republicans in off-year election  " Radical political movements 
emerge in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington, and California  " Indian Reorganization Act restores tribal 
land, provides funds, and grants limited right of self-government to American Indians  " Reciprocal Trade 
Agreement lowers tariffs 
1935 Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) formed  " Supreme Court declares NRA unconstitutional  " 
Roosevelt unveils his Second New Deal  " Congress passes Social Security Act  " National Labor Relations 
Act (Wagner Act) guarantees workers  right to join unions  " Holding Company Act breaks up utilities  
near-monopoly  " Congress passes Wealth Tax Act  " Emergency Relief Administration Act passed; funds 
Works Progress Administration and other projects  " Rural Electrification Administration established  " 
Number of Mexican immigrants returning to Mexico reaches 500,000 
1936 Roosevelt defeats Alf Landon for second term  " Supreme Court declares AAA unconstitutional  " Congress 
passes Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act to replace AAA  " Farm Security Administration 
established 
1937 United Auto Workers defeat General Motors in sit-down strike  " Roosevelt attempts to  pack  the 
Supreme Court  " Supreme Court upholds constitutionality of Social Security and National Labor Relations 
acts  " Severe recession hits 
1938 Conservative opposition to New Deal does well in off-year election  " Supermancomic debuts 
1939 75,000 gather to hear Marian Anderson sing at Lincoln Memorial. 
C HR O NO L O G Y 
Focus Question 
What caused the crash of 1929, and why did the ensuing Depression last so long? 
America had experienced other depressions, or  panics,  and no one would have been sur- 
prised if the boom of the 1920s had been followed by a one- or two-year economic down- 
turn. No one was prepared, however, for the economic catastrophe of the 1930s. 
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Stock Market Speculation 
In 1928 and 1929, the New York Stock Exchange had undergone a remarkable run-up in 
prices. In less than two years, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had doubled. Money had 
poured into the market, but many investors were buying on 10 percent  margin,  putting 
up only 10 percent of the price of a stock and borrowing the rest from brokers or banks. 
Few thought they would ever have to repay these loans with money out of their own pock- 
ets. Instead, investors expected to resell their shares within a few months at dramatically 
higher prices, pay back their loans from the proceeds, and still clear a handsome profit. 
And, for a while, that is exactly what they did. In 1928 alone, for example, RCA stock 
value increased 400 percent. 
The possibility of making a fortune by investing a mere a few thousand dollars only 
intensified investors  greed. As speculation became rampant, money flowed indiscrimi- 
nately into all kinds of risky enterprises. The stock market spiraled upward, out of control. 
When, in October 1929, confidence in future earnings finally faltered, creditors began 
demanding that investors who had bought stocks on margin repay their loans. The market 
crashed from its dizzying heights. 
Still, the crash, by itself, fails to explain why the Great Depression lasted as long as it 
did. Poor decision making by the Federal Reserve Board, an ill-advised tariff that took 
effect soon after the depression hit, and a lopsided concentration of wealth in the hands of 
the rich deepened the economic collapse and made recovery more difficult. 
Mistakes by the Federal Reserve Board 
In 1930 and 1931, the Federal Reserve curtailed the amount of money in circulation and 
raised interest rates, thereby making credit more difficult for the public to secure. Although 
employing a tight money policy during the boom years of 1928 or 1929 might have 
restrained the stock market and strengthened the economy, it was disastrous once the mar- 
ket had crashed. What the economy needed in 1930 and 1931 was an expanded money 
supply, lower interest rates, and easier credit. Such a course would have made it easier for 
debtors to pay their creditors. Instead, by choosing the opposite course, the FederalReserve 
plunged an economy starved for credit deeper into depression. Higher interest rates also 
triggered an international crisis, as the banks of Germany and Austria, heavily dependent 
on U.S. loans, went bankrupt. The German-Austrian collapse, in turn, spread financial 
panic through Europe and ruined U.S. manufacturers and banks specializing in European 
trade and investment. 
An Ill-Advised Tariff 
The Tariff Act of 1930, also known as the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, accelerated economic 
decline abroad and at home. Throughout the 1920s, agricultural interests had sought 
higher tariffs to protect American farmers against foreign competition. But Hawley-Smoot 
not only raised tariffs on 75 agricultural goods from 32 percent to 40 percent (the highest 
Causes of the Great Depression " 921 
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rate in American history), it also raised tariffs by a similar percentage on 925 manufactured 
products. Industrialists had convinced their supporters in the Republican-controlled Congress 
that such protection would give American industry much-needed assistance. The legisla- 
tion was a disaster. Angry foreign governments retaliated by raising their own tariff rates 
to keep out American goods. International trade, already weakened by the tight credit poli- 
cies of the Federal Reserve, took another blow at the very moment when it desperately 
needed a boost. 
A Maldistribution of Wealth 
A maldistribution in the nation s wealth that had developed in the 1920s also stymied eco- 
nomic recovery. Although average income rose in the 1920s, the incomes of the wealthiest 
families rose higher than the rest. Between 1918 and 1929, the share of the national income 
that went to the wealthiest 20 percent of the population rose by more than 10 percent,while 
the share that went to the poorest 60 percent fell by almost 13 percent. The Coolidge 
administration contributed to this maldistribution by lowering taxes on the wealthy, 
922  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
Unemployed Men in New York City, 1931 The thousands of men waiting to register at the Emergency Unemployment 
Relief office became so frustrated that they rioted.  Police reserves arrived to restore order. 
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thereby increasing the propor- 
tion of the national wealth con- 
centrated in their hands. The 
deepening inequality of income 
distribution slowed consump- 
tion and held back the growth 
of consumer-oriented industries 
(cars, household appliances, 
processed and packaged foods, 
recreation), the most dynamic 
elements of the U.S. economy. 
Even when the rich spent their 
money lavishly building huge 
mansions, buying expensive 
cars, vacationing on the French 
Riviera they still spent a 
smallerproportion of their total 
incomes on consumption than 
wage earners did. The average 
1920s wage earner, for example, 
might spend one-quarterto one- 
half of his annual earnings to buy 
a car. 
Putting more of the total increase in national income into the pockets of average 
Americansduring the 1920s would have steadied the demand for consumer goods and 
kept the newer consumer industries correspondingly stronger. Such an economy might 
have recovered relatively quickly from the stock market crash of 1929. Instead, recovery 
from the Great Depression lagged until 1941, more than a decade later. 
Hoover:The Fall of a Self-Made Man 
In 1928, Herbert Hoover seemed to embody the American dream. From modest begin- 
nings, Hoover had parlayed his intelligence and drive into gaining admission to Stanford 
University, becoming a mining engineer, and then rising rapidly to top management posi- 
tions in the corporate world. A talented and tireless administrator, Hoover won an inter- 
national reputation in the First World War for his success, as head of the U.S. Food 
Administration, in feeding millions of European soldiers and civilians. Then, in the 1920s, 
he became an active and influential secretary of commerce (see chapters 23 and 24). As 
the decade wound down, no American seemed better qualified to become president of the 
United States, an office that Hoover assumed in March 1929. Hoover was certain he could 
make prosperity a permanent feature of American life.  We in America today are nearer to 
Hoover: The Fall of a Self-Made Man " 923 
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n 
a 
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io 
n 
a 
l 
in 
co 
m 
e 
 b 
e 
fo 
re 
 t 
ax 
e 
s70 
65 
60 
55 
50 
45 
40 
35 
30 
25 
20 
15 
10 
5 
0 
1918 1921 1929 
Wealthiest fifth 
Second wealthiest fifth 
Middle fifth 
Second poorest fifth 
Poorest fifth 
47.4 51.0 
52.3 
18.3 
14.9 
12.6 
6.8 
19.4 
13.9 
10.5 
5.2 
18.8 
14.4 
10.1 
5.4 
Income Distribution Before the Great Depression 
Source: From Gabriel Kolko, Wealth and Power in America: An Analysis of Social Class 
and Income Distribution(New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 14. 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 923
the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land,  he declared in 
August 1928. A little more than a year later, the Great Depression struck. 
Hoover s Program 
To cope with the crisis, Hoover first turned to the associational principles he had followed 
as secretary of commerce (see chapter 24). He encouraged organizations of farmers, indus- 
trialists, and bankers to share information, bolster one another s spirits, and devise poli- 
cies to aid economic recovery. He urged farmers to restrict output, industrialists to hold 
wages at pre-depression levels, and bankers to help each other remain solvent. The federal 
government would provide them with information, strategies of mutual aid, occasional 
loans, and morale-boosting speeches. 
Hoover turned to other aggressive policies once he realized that associationalism was 
failing. To ease the European crisis, Hoover secured a one-year moratorium on loan pay- 
ments that European governments owed American banks. He steered through Congress 
the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, which was intended to help American banks meet the 
demands of European depositors who wished to convert their dollars to gold. And to ease 
the crisis at home, he began to expand the government s economic role. The Reconstruc- 
tion Finance Corporation (RFC), created in 1932, made $2 billion available in loans to ail- 
ing banks and to corporations willing to build low-cost housing, bridges, and other pub- 
lic works. The RFC was the biggest federal peacetime intervention in the economy up to 
that point in American history. The Home Loan Bank Board, set up that same year, offered 
funds to savings and loans, mortgage companies, and other financial institutions that lent 
money for home construction and mortgages. 
Despite this new government activism, Hoover was uncomfortable with the idea that 
the government should be responsible for restoring the nation s economic welfare. When 
RFC expenditures, in 1932, created the largest peacetime deficit in U.S. history, Hoover 
tried to balance the federal budget. He supported the Revenue Act of 1932, which aimed 
to erase the deficit by raising taxes. He also insisted that the RFC issue loans only to rela- 
tively healthy institutions that were capable of repaying them and that it favor public 
works, such as toll bridges, that were likely to become self-financing. As a result of these 
constraints, the RFC spent considerably less than Congress had authorized. Hoover was 
especially reluctant to engage the government in providing relief to unemployed and 
homeless Americans. To give money to the poor, he insisted, would destroy their desire to 
work, undermine their sense of self-worth, and erode their capacity for citizenship. 
Hoover saw no similar peril in extending government assistance to ailing banks and 
businesses. Critics pointed to the seeming hypocrisy of Hoover s policies. For example, in 
1930, Hoover refused a request of $25 million to help feed Arkansas farmers and their 
families but approved $45 million to feed the same farmers  livestock. In 1932, shortly 
after rejecting an urgent request from the city of Chicago for aid to help pay its teachers 
and municipal workers, Hoover approved a $90 million loan to rescue that city s Central 
Republic Bank. 
924  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
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The Bonus Army 
In spring 1932, a group of army veterans mounted a particularly emotional challenge to 
Hoover s policies. In 1924, Congress had authorized a $1,000 bonus for First World War 
veterans in the form of compensation certificates that would mature in 1945. Now the vet- 
erans were demanding that the government pay the bonus immediately. A group of Portland, 
Oregon, veterans, calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, hopped onto empty 
boxcars of freight trains heading east, determined to stage a march on Washington. As the 
impoverished  army  moved eastward, its ranks multiplied, so that by the time it reached 
Washington its numbers had swelled to 20,000, including wives and children. The so- 
called Bonus Armyset up camp in the Anacostia Flats, southeast of the Capitol, and peti- 
tioned Congress for early payment of the promised bonus. The House of Representatives 
agreed, but the Senate turned them down. Hoover refused to meet with the veterans. In July, 
federal troops led by Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur and 3rd CavalryCommander 
George Patton entered the veterans  Anacostia encampment, set the tents and shacks 
ablaze, and dispersed the protestors. In the process, more than 100 veterans were 
wounded and one infant died. 
News that veterans and their families had been attacked in the nation s capital served 
only to harden anti-Hoover opinion. In the 1932 elections, the discredited Republicans 
were voted out of office after having dominated national politics (excepting Woodrow 
Wilson s two terms) for 36 years. Hoover received only 39.6 percent of the popular vote 
Hoover: The Fall of a Self-Made Man " 925 
The Bonus Army s Encampment Set Ablaze U.S. troops under the command 
of General Douglas MacArthur torched the tents and shacks that housed thousands 
of First World War veterans who had come to Washington to demand financial 
assistance from the government. 
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and just 59 (of 531) electoral 
votes. Hoover left the presidency 
in 1933 a bewildered man, reviled 
by Americans for his seeming 
indifference to suffering and his 
ineptitude in dealing with the 
economy s collapse. 
A Culture in Crisis 
The economic crisis of the early 
1930s expressed itself not just in 
politics but also in culture, espe- 
cially in the literature and cinema 
of the time. Many writers who, in 
the 1920s, had castigated ordinary 
Americas for their small-mindedness 
and crass materialism now felt 
compelled to travel among them, 
learn about their condition, and 
seek signs of social renewal. But 
writers found mostly economic 
misery and a deep spiritual depres- 
sion. EdmundWilson, a literary critic, traveled the country in 1930 and 1931 and wrote 
numerous essays about how Americans had lost their way and knew not where to turn. When 
he reached San Diego, he got hold of the city s coroner reports on the numerous individuals 
who, in desperation, had taken their own lives. Wilson had believed that San Diego, that 
lovely outpost of the American frontier sitting astride the great and beckoning Pacific, would 
be a place where the American dream still thrived. But here, too, Wilson claimed, failure and 
death suffused life and snuffed out hope. He reported on the city s suicides in this fashion: 
They drive their cars into dark alleys, get into the back seat and shoot themselves; they 
hang themselves in hotel bedrooms, take overdoses of suphonal or barbital; they slip off 
to the municipal golf-links and there stab themselves with carving-knives; or they throw 
themselves into the bay, blue and placid, where gray battleships and cruisers guard the 
limits of their broad-belting nation. 
A sense of aimlessness and hopelessness characterized one of the major literary works of 
the early 1930s, the Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932 35) written by the Chicago-born writer 
James T. Farrell. In another decade, one easily imagines that Farrell might have cast his 
scrappy Irish-American protagonist, Studs, as an American hero whose pluck and guile 
enable him to achieve wealth, success, and influence. But Studs lacks the necessary focus 
and is too easily overcome by the harshness of his environment. He dies poor and alone, 
926  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
Map 25.1 Presidential Election, 1932 The trauma of the Great 
Depression can be gauged by the shifting fortunes of President Herbert 
Hoover. In 1928, he had won 444 electoral votes and carried all but eight 
states (see Map 24.2, p. 897). In 1932, by contrast, he won only 59 electoral 
votes and carried only seven states. His Democratic opponent, Franklin D. 
Roosevelt, was the big winner. 
FL 
7 
MD 
8 
VT 
3 
NH 
4 
IA 
11 
CA 
22 
MA 
17 
NJ 
16 
OR 
5 
NV 
3 
NE 
7 
CO 
6 
MN 
11 
WI 
12 
KS 
9 
TX 
23 LA 
10 
AR 
9 
MO 
15 
IL 
29 
IN 
14 
MI 
19 
MS 
9 
AL 
11 
GA 
12 
TN 
11 
KY 
11 
OH 
26 
SC 
8 
NC 
13 
VA 
11 
WV 
8 
PA 
36 
NY 
47 
ME 
5 
RI 
 4 
CT 
8 
DE 
 3 
WA 
8 
ID 
4 
UT 
4 
WY 
3 
MT 
4 ND 
4 
SD 
4 
AZ 
3 NM 
3 OK 
11 
Roosevelt 
(Democrat) 472 89 22,829,501 57 
59 11 15,760,864 40 
Hoover 
(Republican) 
Electoral Vote    
Number     %    
 Popular Vote 
  Number            %    
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 926
not even having reached the age of 30. The popular writer Nathaniel West, meanwhile, 
was publishing Miss Lonelyhearts(1933) and A Cool Million(1934), novels similarly orga- 
nized around central characters succumbing to failure, drift, and even insanity. 
One can detect parallel themes of despair in the period s cinema, especially in such 
movies as Fugitive from a Chain Gang(1932), in which an industrious and honorable man, 
James Allen, returns from Europe a war hero, only to sink into vagabondage. Caught 
by the police when he becomes an innocent accessory to a crime, Allen is sentenced to 
10 years on a Georgia chain gang. Unable to tolerate the hardship and injustice of his pun- 
ishment, Allen escapes from jail and uses his intelligence and character to start a new life 
for himself under an alias. He finds himself a woman and satisfying work as an engineer, 
but must abandon both once his true identity is revealed. His desire to stay out of prison 
condemns him to being a man always on the run, unable to prove his innocence or to earn 
a decent living or build enduring relationships. It is a powerful and bleak film that was, nev- 
ertheless, popular with moviegoers and given an Academy Award for Best Picture. 
Less grim but still sobering were the gangster movies of the early 1930s, especially Little 
Caesar(1930) and The Public Enemy(1931), which told stories of hard-nosed, crooked, and 
violent men who made themselves into figures of wealth and influence by living outside the 
law and bending the social environment in which they lived to their will. These gangsters usu- 
ally had to pay for their sins by dying or going to jail, but, before that happened, they were 
often portrayed sympathetically, as individuals who, against all odds, found a way to suc- 
ceed. Moviegoers liked the intensity, suspense, and violence of gangster police confronta- 
tions offered in these films but they were drawn, too, to the gangsters, modern-day out- 
laws who demonstrated how tough it was to succeed in America and how necessary it 
might be to break the rules. 
The lawlessness that was so integral to the gangster movies also surfaced in the wild 
comedy of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo Marx, entertainers who, in the 1920s and 
1930s, made the transition from vaudeville stage to silver screen. In their films, the Marx 
Brothers ridiculed figures of authority, broke every rule of etiquette, smacked around their 
antagonists (and each other), and deliberately and delightfully mangled the English language. 
Anarchy ruled their world. Many of the moviegoers who went to see the Marx Brothers on 
the big screen simply wanted to enjoy 90 minutes of side-splitting laughter, if only to 
escape the harshness of their daily lives. 
But some of the Marx Brothers movies carried a more serious political message, perhaps 
none more so than Duck Soup(1933), a withering political satire set in the fictional nation 
of Fredonia. Fredonia s dictatorial leaders are pompous and small-minded, its legal system 
is a fraud, and its citizens are clueless and easily misled; by the movie s end, the latter are 
called to arms through spectacularly ludicrous song and dance scenes, and then led off to 
fight a meaningless but deadly war. In one of the film s most famous and controversial 
lines, Rufus T. Firefly, leader of Fredonia (played by Groucho Marx), declares to his 
troops:  And remember while you re out there risking life and limb through shot and shell, 
we ll be in here thinking what a sucker you are.  
A Culture in Crisis  " 927 
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928  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
Duck Soupcontains some of the funniest scenes the Marx Brothers ever filmed, but it 
also delivers the dispiriting message that people could not hope to better themselves 
through politics, which had been emptied of meaning and honesty. This cinematic senti- 
ment paralleled the conviction held by many Americans in 1932 and early 1933 that their 
own politicians, especially Hoover and the Republicans, had failed them in a time of need. 
In such ways did the political pessimism of the early 1930s seep into the era s culture. 
The Democratic Roosevelt 
Between 1933 and 1935, the mood of the country shifted sharply, and politics would, 
once again, generate hope rather than despair. This change was largely attributable to the 
personality and policies of Hoover s successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and to the social 
movements that emerged during his presidency. 
An Early Life of Privilege 
Roosevelt was born in 1882 into a patrician family descended, on his father s side, from 
Dutch gentry who in the 17th century had built large estates on the fertile land along the 
Hudson River. By the 1880s, the Hyde Park manor where Roosevelt grew up had been in 
the family for more than 200 years. His mother s family the Delanos traced its ancestry 
back to the Mayflower. Roosevelt s education at Groton, Harvard College, and Columbia 
Law School was typical of the path followed by the sons of America s elite. 
The Roosevelt family was wealthy, although not spectacularly so by the standards of the 
late 19th century. His parents  net worth of more than $1 million was relatively small in 
comparison to the fortunes being amassed by industrialists and railroad tycoons, many of 
whom commanded fortunes of $50 million to $100 million or more. This widening gap 
in wealth concerned families like the Roosevelts, who worried that the new industrial elite 
would dislodge them from their social position. Moreover, they took offense at the new- 
comers  allegedly vulgar displays of wealth, lack of taste and etiquette, indifference to the 
natural environment, and hostility toward those less fortunate than themselves. Theodore 
Roosevelt, an older cousin of Franklin Roosevelt, had called on the men of his gentry class 
to set a better example by devoting themselves to public service and the public good. 
Though young Franklin wanted to follow in his famous cousin s footsteps, it took a 
long time for him to show Teddy s seriousness of purpose. He distinguished himself nei- 
ther at school nor at law. Prior to the 1920s, he could point to few significant political 
achievements, and he owed much of his political ascent in the Democratic Party to his 
famous name. He was charming, gregarious, and fun-loving, always eager to sail, party, 
and enjoy the company of women other than his wife, Eleanor. Then, in 1921, at the age 
of 39, Roosevelt was both stricken and transformed by a devastating illness, polio, which 
paralyzed him from the waist down for the rest of his life. 
During the two years that Roosevelt spent bedridden, he seemed to acquire a new deter- 
mination and focus. He developed a compassion for those suffering misfortune that would 
later enable him to reach out to the millions caught in the Great Depression. Roosevelt s 
physical debilitation also transformed his relationship with Eleanor, with whom he had 
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shared a testy and increasingly loveless marriage. Eleanor s dedication to nursing Franklin 
back to health forged a new bond between them. More conscious of his dependence on 
others, he now welcomed her as a partner in his career. Eleanor soon displayed a talent for 
political organization and public speaking that surprised those who knew her only as a 
shy, awkward woman. She was an indispensable player in the revival of Franklin s politi- 
cal fortunes, which began in 1928 with his election to the governorship of New York state. 
Eleanor would also become an active, eloquent First Lady, her husband s trusted ally, and 
an architect of American liberalism. 
Roosevelt Liberalism 
As governor of New York for four years (1929 33), Roosevelt had initiated various reform 
programs, and his success made him the front-runner for the 1932 Democratic presidential 
nomination. Even so, he had little assurance that he would be the party s choice. Since 
1924, the Democrats had been divided between southern and midwestern agrarians on 
the one hand and northeastern ethnics on the other. The agrarians favored government 
regulation both of the nation s economy and of the private affairs of its citizens. Their 
support of government intervention in the pursuit of social justice marked them as eco- 
nomic progressives, while their advocacy of Prohibition revealed a cultural conservatism 
as well as a nativistic strain. By contrast, urban ethnics opposed Prohibition and other 
forms of government interference in the private lives of its citizens. Urban ethnics were 
divided over whether the government should regulate the economy, with former New 
York governor Al Smith increasingly committed to a laissez-faire policy, and Senator 
Robert Wagner of New York and others supporting more federal control. 
Roosevelt understood the need to carve out a middle ground. As governor of New York, 
and then as a presidential candidate in 1932, he surrounded himself with men and women 
who embraced the new reform movement called liberalism. Frances Perkins,Harry Hopkins, 
Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, Adolph Berle, Samuel Rosenman all were interven- 
tionist in economic matters and libertarian on questions of personal behavior. They shared 
with the agrarians and Wagner s supporters a desire to regulate capitalism, but they agreed 
with Al Smith that the government had no business telling people how to live their lives. 
Although it seemed unlikely at first, Roosevelt did manage to unite the party behind him 
at the 1932 Democratic Party convention. In his convention acceptance speech, he 
declared:  Ours must be the party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened 
international outlook, and of the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens.  He 
promised  a new deal for the American people.  
The First New Deal,1933 1935 
The First New Deal, 1933 1935  " 929 
Focus Question 
What do you consider to be the three or four most important pieces of legislation in 
the First New Deal? Why? 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 929
By the time Roosevelt assumed office in March 1933, the economy lay in shambles. From 
1929 to 1932, industrial production had fallen by 50 percent, while new investment had 
declined from $16 billion to less than $1 billion. In those same years, more than 100,000 
businesses went bankrupt. In early 1933, with the nation s banking system on the verge of 
collapse, 34 states had ordered all the banks in their jurisdictions to close their doors. No 
one seemed to be able to bring the unemployment rate under control. Some Americans 
feared that the opportunity for reform had already passed. 
Not Roosevelt.  This nation asks for action, and action now,  Roosevelt declared in his 
inaugural address. Roosevelt was true to his word. In his first Hundred Days, from early 
March through early June 1933, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to pass 15 major pieces 
of legislation to help bankers, farmers, industrialists, workers, homeowners, the unem- 
ployed, and the hungry. He also prevailed on Congress to repeal Prohibition. Not all of 
the new laws helped relieve distress and promote recovery, but, in the short term, that 
seemed to matter little. Roosevelt had brought excitement and hope to the nation. He was 
confident, decisive, and defiantly cheery.  The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,  he 
declared. 
930  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
From Herbert Hoover to Franklin D. Roosevelt This 1933 photograph shows the outgoing and incoming presidents on 
the way to FDR s inauguration. By this time, the two men detested each other, a sentiment that, in this photograph, FDR 
concealed better than his predecessor. 
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Roosevelt used the radio to reach out to ordinary Americans. On the second Sunday 
after his inauguration, he launched a series of radio addresses known as  fireside chats,  
speaking in a plain, friendly, and direct voice to the forlorn and discouraged. In his first 
chat, he explained the banking crisis in simple terms but without condescension.  I want 
to take a few minutes to talk with the people of the United States about banking,  he 
began. An estimated 20 million Americans listened. 
To hear the president speaking warmly and conversationally as though he were 
actually there in the room was riveting. An estimated 500,000 Americans wrote let- 
ters to Roosevelt within days of his inaugural address. Millions more would write to 
him and to Eleanor Roosevelt over the next few years. Many of the letters were sim- 
ply addressed to  Mr. or Mrs. Roosevelt, Washington, D.C.  Democrats began to hang 
portraits of Franklin Roosevelt in their homes, often next to a picture of Jesus or the 
Madonna. 
Roosevelt was never the benign father figure he made himself out to be. He skillfully 
crafted his public image. Compliant news photographers agreed not to show him in a 
wheelchair or struggling with the leg braces and cane he used to take even small steps. 
The First New Deal, 1933 1935 " 931 
Legislation Enacted During the  Hundred Days,  March 9 June 16, 1933 
Date Legislation Purpose 
March 9 Emergency Banking Act Provide federal loans to private bankers 
March 20 Economy Act Balance the federal budget 
March 22 Beer-Wine Revenue Act Repeal Prohibition 
March 31 Unemployment Relief Act Create the Civilian Conservation Corps 
May 12 Agricultural Adjustment Act Establish a national agricultural policy 
May 12 Emergency Farm Mortgage Act Provide refinancing of farm mortgages 
May 12 Federal Emergency Relief Act Establish a national relief system, including the Civil Works Administration 
May 18 Tennessee Valley Authority Act Promote economic development of the Tennessee Valley 
May 27 Securities Act Regulate the purchase and sale of new securities 
June 5 Gold Repeal Joint Resolution Cancel the gold clause in public and private contracts 
June 13 Home Owners Loan Act Provide refinancing of home mortgages 
June 16 National Industrial Recovery Act Set up a national system of industrial self-government and establish the 
Public Works Administration 
June 16 Glass-Steagall Banking Act Create Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; separate commercial and 
investment banking 
June 16 Farm Credit Act Reorganize agricultural credit programs 
June 16 Railroad Coordination Act Appoint federal coordinator of transportation 
Source: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 20 21. 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 931
His political rhetoric sometimes promised more than he was prepared to deliver in actual 
legislation. This was not simply a strategy meant to confuse his opponents and to sustain 
his own appeal. Roosevelt was struggling to keep together a party that was divided over 
a variety of issues. At the same time, he was attempting to establish a strong federal gov- 
ernment in a polity that had long been hostile to that idea. Not only did Roosevelt have 
to overcome ideological opposition to a centralized state, but he had to find individuals 
able to run federal agencies in a nation in which that kind of administrative experience 
was in short supply. 
Saving the Banks 
Roosevelt s first order of business was to save the nation s financial system. With so many 
of the nation s banks already closed by inauguration day, Roosevelt s first act was to order 
the rest of the country s banks to cease all business a bold move he brazenly called a 
 bank holiday.  At his request, Congress rushed through the Emergency Banking Act 
(EBA), which made federal loans available to private bankers, and followed that with the 
Economy Act (EA), which committed the government to balancing the budget. 
Both the EBA and the EA were fiscally conservative programs that Hoover had pro- 
posed. The EBA made it possible for private bankers to retain financial control of their 
institutions, and the EA announced the government s intention of pursuing a fiscally pru- 
dent course. Only after the financial crisis had eased did Roosevelt turn to the structural 
reform of banking. A second Glass-Steagall Act (1933) separated commercial banking 
from investment banking. It also created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation 
(FDIC), which assured depositors that the government would protect up to $5,000 of 
their savings. The Securities Act (1933) and the Securities Exchange Act (1934) imposed 
long-overdue regulation on the New York Stock Exchange, both by reining in buying on 
the margin and by establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to enforce 
federal law. 
Economic Relief 
Roosevelt understood the need to temper financial prudence with compassion. Congress 
responded swiftly in 1933 to Roosevelt s request to establish the Federal Emergency Relief 
Administration (FERA), granting it $500 million for relief to the poor. To head FERA, Roosevelt 
appointed a brash young reformer, Harry Hopkins, who disbursed $2millionduring his 
first two hours on the job. Roosevelt next won congressional approval for the Civilian 
Conservation Corps (CCC), which put more than 2 million single young men to work 
planting trees, halting erosion, and otherwise improving the environment. The follow- 
ing winter, Roosevelt launched the Civil Works Administration (CWA), an ambitious 
work-relief program, also under Harry Hopkins s direction, which hired 4 million 
unemployed people at $15 per week and put them to work on 400,000 small-scale gov- 
ernment projects. For middle-class Americans threatened with the loss of their homes, 
Roosevelt won Congressional approval for the Homeowners  Loan Corporation (1933) 
932  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
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torefinancemortgages. These direct subsidies to millions of jobless and home-owning 
Americans lent credibility to Roosevelt s claim that the New Deal would set the country on 
a new course. 
Agricultural Reform 
In 1933, Roosevelt expected economic recovery to come not from relief, but through agri- 
cultural and industrial cooperation. He regarded the Agricultural Adjustment Act, passed 
in May, and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), passed in June, as the most 
important legislation of his Hundred Days. Both were based on the idea that curtailing 
production would trigger economic recovery. By shrinking the supply of agricultural and 
manufactured goods, Roosevelt s economists reasoned, they could restore the balance of 
normal market forces. As demand for scarce goods exceeded supply, prices would rise and 
revenues would climb. Farmers and industrialists, earning a profit once again, would 
increase their investment in new technology and hire more workers, and prosperity and 
full employment would be the final result. 
To curtail farm production, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), 
which was set up by the Agricultural Adjustment Act, began paying farmers to keep a por- 
tion of their land out of cultivation and to reduce the size of their herds. The program was 
controversial. Many farmers were skeptical of a government offer to pay more money for 
working less land and husbanding fewer livestock, but few refused to accept payments. As 
one young Kansas farmer reported: 
There were mouthy individuals who seized every opportunity to run down the entire 
program. . . condemning it as useless, crooked, revolutionary, or dictatorial; but . . . when 
the first AAA payments were made available, shortly before Christmas, these same wordy 
critics made a beeline for the courthouse. They jostled and fell over each other in their mad 
scramble to be the first in line to receive allotment money. 
The AAA had made no provision, however, for the countless tenant farmers and farm 
laborers who would be thrown out of work by the reduction in acreage. In the South, the 
victims were disproportionately black. A Georgia sharecropper wrote Harry Hopkins of his 
misery:  I have Bin farming all my life But the man I live with Has Turned me loose taking 
my mule [and] all my feed. . . . I can t get a Job so Some one said Rite you.  New Dealers 
within the Department of Agriculture, such as Rexford Tugwell and Jerome Frank, were 
sympathetic to the plight of sharecroppers, but they failed during the First New Deal to 
extend to them the government s helping hand. 
The programs of the AAA also proved inadequate to Great Plains farmers, whose eco- 
nomic problems had been compounded by ecological crisis. Just as the depression rolled in, 
the rain stopped falling on the plains. The land, stripped of its native grasses by decades of 
excessive plowing, dried up and turned to dust. And then the dust began to blow, sometimes 
traveling 1,000 miles across open prairie. Dust became a fixed feature of daily life on the 
plains (which soon became known as the Dust Bowl), covering furniture, floors, and stoves, 
and penetrating people s hair and lungs. The worst dust storm occurred on April 14, 1935, 
The First New Deal, 1933 1935 " 933 
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when a great mass of dust, mov- 
ing at speeds of 45 to 70 miles per 
hour, roared through Colorado, 
Kansas, and Oklahoma, blacken- 
ing the sky, suffocating cattle, and 
dumping thousands of tons of 
topsoil and red clay on homes 
and streets. 
The government responded to 
this calamity by establishing the 
Soil Conservation Service (SCS) 
in 1935. Recognizing that the soil 
problems of the Great Plains 
could not be solved simply by 
taking land out of production, 
SCS experts urged plains farmers 
to plant soil-conserving grasses 
and legumes in place of wheat. 
They taught farmers how to plow 
along contour lines and how to 
build terraces techniques that 
had been proven effective in slow- 
ing the runoff of rainwater and 
improving its absorption into the 
soil. Plains farmers were open to 
these suggestions, especially when the government offered to subsidize those willing to 
implement them. Bolstered by the new assistance, plains agriculture began to recover. 
Still, the government offered little assistance to the rural poor the tenant farmers and 
sharecroppers. Nearly 1 million had left their homes by 1935, and another 2.5 million 
would leave after 1935. Most headed west, piling their belongings onto their jalopies, 
snaking along Route 66 until they reached California. They became known as Okies, 
because many, although not all, had come from Oklahoma. Their dispossession and forced 
migration disturbed many Americans, for whom the plight of these once-sturdy yeomen 
became a symbol of how much had gone wrong with the American dream. 
In 1936, the Supreme Court ruled that AAA-mandated limits on farm production 
constituted an illegal restraint of trade. Congress responded by passing the Soil Conser- 
vation and Domestic Allotment Act, which justified the removal of land from cultivation 
for reasons of conservation rather than economics. This new act also called on landown- 
ers to share their government subsidies with sharecroppers and tenant farmers, although 
many landowners managed to evade this and subsequent laws that required them to 
share federal funds. 
934  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
NEBRASKA 
KANSAS 
IOWA 
MO. 
UT. 
ARK. 
OKLAHOMA 
TEXAS 
COLORADO 
NEW 
MEXICO 
0 
150 300 Kilometers 
0 
150 300 Miles 
Gulf of 
Mexico 
Area of severe wind erosion 
in 1935 1936 
Area of severe wind erosion 
in 1938 
Area of severe wind erosion 
in 1940 
Area of most severe wind 
erosion in 1935 1938 
Map 25.2 Dust Bowl, 1935 1940 This map shows the areas in six 
states Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, and a bit of 
Nebraska claimed by the Dust Bowl between 1935 and 1940. The light shading 
in the center shows the area where the winds caused the worstdamage. 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 934
The use of subsidies, begun by the AAA, did eventually bring stability and prosperity 
to agriculture, but at high cost. Agriculture became the most heavily subsidized sector of 
the U.S. economy, and the Department of Agriculture grew into one of the government s 
largest bureaucracies. The rural poor, black and white, never received a fair share of fed- 
eral benefits. Beginning in the 1930s, and continuing in the 1940s and 1950s, they would 
be forced off the land and into the cities of the North and West. 
Industrial Reform 
American industry was so vast that Roosevelt s administration never contemplated paying 
individual manufacturers direct subsidies to reduce, or even halt, production. Instead, the 
government decided to limit production through persuasion and association techniques 
that Hoover had also favored. To head the National Recovery Administration (NRA), 
authorized under the National Industrial Recovery Act, Roosevelt chose General Hugh 
Johnson, a participant in industrial planning experiments during the First World War. 
Johnson s first task was to persuade industrialists and businessmen to agree to raise 
The First New Deal, 1933 1935 " 935 
Searching for a Better Life Scenes like this one were common in the 1930s as farm 
families in Oklahoma and Texas who had lost their land began heading to California. Here a 
family s entire belongings are packed onto a truck, and the mother tends to her baby on an 
isolated road. The woman s fur collar suggests that this family had once known better times. 
FD 
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employee wages to a minimum of 30 to 40 cents per hour and to limit employee hours to 
a maximum of 30 to 40 hours per week. The limitation on hours was meant to reduce the 
quantity of goods that any factory or business could produce. 
Johnson launched a high-powered publicity campaign. He distributed NRA pamphlets 
and pins throughout the country. He used the radio to exhort all Americans to do their 
part. He staged an NRA celebration in Yankee Stadium and a parade down New York 
City s Fifth Avenue. He sent letters to millions of employers asking them to place a  blue 
eagle  the logo of the NRA on storefronts, at factory entrances, and on company sta- 
tionery to signal their participation in the campaign to limit production and restore pros- 
perity. Blue eagles soon sprouted everywhere, usually accompanied by the slogan  We Do 
Our Part.  
Johnson understood, however, that his propaganda campaign could not by itself guaran- 
tee recovery. So he brought together the largest producers in every sector of manufacturing 
and asked each group (or conference) to work out a code of fair competition that would 
specify prices, wages, and hours throughout the sector. He also asked each conferenceto 
restrict production. 
In summer and fall 1933, the NRA codes drawn up for steel, textiles, coal mining, rub- 
ber, garment manufacture, and other industries seemed to be working. The economy 
936  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
Selling the NRA Through Sex and Sunburn Americans were asked to display their support for the NRA by 
pasting eagles onto their factory entrances, storefronts, and even clothes. The young women in this photo 
dispensed with pasting, choosing instead to allow the sun to burn their bare backs around a stenciled blue eagle 
and NRA lettering, which were being applied by the woman in the white gown. 
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improved, and hard times seemed to be easing. But in winter and spring 1934, economic 
indicators plunged downward once again, and manufacturers began to evade the code 
provisions. Government committees set up to enforce the codes were powerless to punish 
violators. By fall 1934, it was clear that the NRA had failed. When the Supreme Court 
declared the NRA codes unconstitutional in May 1935, the Roosevelt administration 
allowed the agency to die. 
Rebuilding the Nation s Infrastructure 
In addition to establishing the NRA, the National Industrial Recovery Act launched the 
Public Works Administration (PWA). The PWA had a $3.3 billion budget to sponsor 
internal improvements that would strengthen the nation s infrastructure of roads, 
bridges, sewage systems, hospitals, airports, and schools. The labor needed for these 
construction projects would shrink relief rolls and reduce unemployment, but the 
projectscould be justified in terms that conservatives approved: economic investment 
rather than short-term relief. 
The PWA authorized the building of three major dams in the West Boulder, 
Grand Coulee, and Bonneville that opened up large stretches of Arizona, California, 
and Washington to industrial and agricultural development. It funded the construction 
of the Triborough Bridge in New York City and the 100-mile causeway linking Florida 
to Key West. It also appropriated money for the construction of thousands of new 
schools. 
The TVA Alternative 
One piece of legislation passed during Roosevelt s First New Deal specified a strategy 
for economic recovery significantly different from the one promoted by the NIRA. The 
Tennessee Valley Authority Act (1933) called for the government rather than private 
corporations to promote economic development throughout the Tennessee Valley, a 
vast river basin winding through parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, 
Georgia, and North Carolina. The act created the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 
to control flooding on the Tennessee River, harness its water power to generate elec- 
tricity, develop local industry (such as fertilizer production), improve river navigabil- 
ity, and ease the poverty and isolation of the area s inhabitants. In some respects, the 
TVA s mandate resembled that of the PWA, but the TVA enjoyed even greater authority. 
The extent of its control over economic development reflected the influence of Rexford 
Tugwell and other New Dealers who were committed to a government-planned and 
government-operated economy. Although they rarely said so, these reformers were 
drawn to socialism. 
The accomplishments of the TVA were many. It built, completed, or improved more 
than 20 dams, including the huge Wheeler Dam near Muscle Shoals in Alabama. At sev- 
eral of the dam sites, the TVA built hydroelectric generators and soon became the nation s 
largest producer of electricity. Its low electric rates compelled private utility companies to 
The First New Deal, 1933 1935 " 937 
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938  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
reduce their rates as well. The TVA also constructed waterways to bypass non-navigable 
stretches of the river, reduced the danger of flooding, and taught farmers how to prevent 
soil erosion and use fertilizers. (See Map 25.3, Tennessee Valley Authority, in the color 
insert following page 1056.) 
Although the TVA was one of the New Deal s most celebrated successes, it generated lit- 
tle support for more ambitious experiments in national planning. For the government to 
have assumed control of established industries and banks would have been quite a different 
matter from bringing prosperity to an impoverished region. Like Roosevelt, few members of 
Congress or the public favored the radical growth of governmental power that such pro- 
grams would have entailed. Thus, the thought of replacing the NRA with a nationwide 
TVA, for instance, made little headway. The New Deal never embraced the idea of the fed- 
eral government as a substitute for private enterprise. 
The New Deal and Western Development 
As the TVA showed, New Deal programs could make an enormous difference to a partic- 
ular region s welfare. Other regional beneficiaries of the New Deal included the New York 
City area, which prospered from the close links of local politicians to the Roosevelt 
administration. The region that benefited most from the New Deal, however, was the 
West. Between 1933 and 1939, per capita payments for public works projects, welfare, 
and federal loans in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Coast states outstripped those of 
any other region. 
Dam building was central to this western focus. Western real estate and agricultural 
interests wanted to dam the West s major rivers to provide water and electricity for urban 
and agricultural development, but the costs were prohibitive, even to the largest capital- 
ists, until the New Deal offered to defray the expenses with federal dollars. Western inter- 
ests found a government ally in the Bureau of Reclamation, a hitherto small federal agency 
(in existence since 1902) that became, under the New Deal, a prime dispenser of funds for 
dam construction, reservoir creation, and the provision of water to western cities and 
farms. Drawing on PWA monies, the bureau oversaw the building of the Boulder Dam 
(later renamed Hoover Dam), which provided drinking water for southern California, irri- 
gation water for California s Imperial Valley, and electricity for Los Angeles and southern 
Arizona. It also authorized the Central Valley Project and the All-American Canal, vast 
water-harnessing projects in central and southern California meant to provide irrigation, 
drinking water, and electricity to California farmers and towns. The greatest construction 
project of all was the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington, which 
created a lake 150 miles long. Together with the Bonneville Dam (also on the Columbia), 
the Grand Coulee gave the Pacific Northwest the cheapest electricity in the country and 
created a new potential for economic and population growth. Not surprisingly, these two 
dams also made Washington state the largest per capita recipient of New Deal aid. 
These developments attracted less attention in the 1930s than the TVA because their 
benefits did not fully materialize until after the Second World War. Also, dam building in 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 938
the West was not seen as a radical experiment in government planning and management. 
Unlike the TVA, the Bureau of Reclamation hired private contractors to do the work. 
Moreover, the benefits of these dams were intended to flow first to large agricultural and 
real estate interests, not to the poor; they were intended to aid private enterprise, rather 
than bypass it. In political terms, dam building in the West was more conservative than it 
was in the Tennessee Valley. Even so, this activity made the federal government a key 
architect of the modern American West. 
The First New Deal, 1933 1935 " 939 
Improving the Nation s Infrastructure The federal government built several major 
dams in the West to boost agricultural and industrial development. This is a 
photograph of the mammoth Boulder Dam (later renamed the Hoover Dam) on the 
Colorado River. 
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Political Mobilization,Political Unrest,1934 1935 
Although Roosevelt and the New Dealers quickly dismantled the NRA in 1935, they could 
not stop the political forces it had set in motion. Ordinary Americans now believed they 
could make a difference. If the New Dealers could not achieve economic recovery, then 
the people would find others who could. 
940  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
0 
50 100 Kilometers 
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50 100 Miles 
C 
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L. 
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Clear 
L. 
Lake 
Tahoe 
Eagle 
Lake 
Lake 
Almanor 
Oroville 
Res. 
New 
Melones 
Res. 
Honey L. 
Folsum 
Lake 
Shasta 
Lake 
Lake 
Mohave 
Lake 
Havasu 
Salton 
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Lake 
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Humboldt 
Res. 
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L. 
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L. 
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DAM 
(1935) 
FRIANT 
DAM 
(1942) 
TRACY 
MADERA 
CANAL 
(1944) 
DELTA CROSS 
CHANNEL 
(1950) 
FRIANT KERN 
CANAL 
(1949) 
COLORADO RIVER 
AQUEDUCT 
(1941) 
ALL 
AMERICAN 
CANAL 
(1942) 
DELTA MENDOTA 
CANAL 
(1951) 
CONTRA COSTA 
CANAL 
(1940) 
SHASTA DAM 
(1945) 
KESWICK DAM 
(1949) 
San 
Diego 
Los 
Angeles 
San Francisco 
Bakersfield 
Long Beach 
Fresno 
Sacramento 
Reno 
Las Vegas 
Yuma 
Carson 
City 
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Santa 
Barbara 
Dam 
Pumping station 
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Map 25.4 Federal Water Projects in California Built or Funded by the New Deal This map demonstrates how 
much California cities and agriculture benefited from water projects dams, canals, aqueducts, pumping stations, and power 
plants begun under the New Deal. The projects extended from the Shasta Dam in the northern part of the state to the All- 
American Canal that traversed the Imperial Valley south of San Diego, and included the Colorado River Aqueduct that would 
bring vital drinking water to Los Angeles. 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 940
Populist Critics of the New Deal 
Some critics were disturbed by what they perceived as the conservative character of New 
Deal programs. Banking reforms, the AAA, and the NRA, they alleged, all seemed to favor 
large economic interests. Ordinary people had been ignored. 
In the South and Midwest, millions listened regularly to the radio addresses of Louisiana 
Senator Huey Long,a former governor of that state and an accomplished orator. In attacks 
on New Deal programs, he alleged that  not a single thin dime of concentrated, bloated, 
pompous wealth, massed in the hands of a few people has been raked down to relieve the 
masses.  Long offered a simple alternative:  Break up the swollen fortunes of America and . . . 
spread the wealth among all our people.  He called for a redistribution of wealth that 
would guarantee each American family a $5,000 estate. 
Long s rhetoric inspired hundreds of thousands of Americans to join the Share the 
Wealth clubs his supporters organized. Most came from middle-class ranks or from the 
ranks of skilled workers. Long s supporters worried that the big business orientation of New 
Deal programs would undermine their economic and social status. By 1935, Roosevelt 
regarded Long as the man most likely to unseat him in the presidential election of 1936. 
Before that campaign began, however, Long was assassinated. 
Meanwhile, in the Midwest, Father Charles Coughlin, the  radio priest,  delivered his 
stinging critique of the New Deal to a weekly radio audience of between 30 and 40million 
listeners. Like Long, Coughlin appealed to anxious middle-class Americans and to privi- 
leged groups of workers who believed that middle-class status was slipping from their 
grasp. A devoted Roosevelt supporter at first he had once called the New Deal  Christ s 
Deal  Coughlin had become, by 1934, a harsh critic. He charged that the New Deal was 
run by bankers and the NRA aimed to resuscitate corporate profits without concern for 
the average working man. Coughlin called for a strong government to compel capital, 
labor, agriculture, professionals, and other interest groups to do its bidding. He founded 
the National Union of Social Justice (NUSJ) in 1934 as a precursor to a political party that 
would challenge the Democrats in 1936. Coughlin increasingly admired dictators such as 
Italy s Benito Mussolini, who built their power and programs through decree rather than 
through democratic consent. If necessary, he admitted in 1936, he would   dictate  to 
preservedemocracy.  
As Coughlin s disillusionment with the New Deal deepened, a strain of anti-Semitism 
became apparent in his radio talks, as in his accusation that Jewish bankers were mas- 
terminding a world conspiracy to dispossess the toiling masses. Although Coughlin 
was a compelling speaker, he failed to build the NUSJ into an effective political force. 
Its successor, the Union Party, attracted only a tiny percentage of voters in 1936. 
Embittered, Coughlin moved further to the political right. By 1939, his denunciations 
of democracy and Jews had become so extreme that some radio stations refused to carry 
his addresses. Still, millions of Americans continued to put their faith in the  radio 
priest.  
Political Mobilization, Political Unrest, 1934 1935 " 941 
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Another popular figure was Francis E. Townsend, a California doctor who claimed that the 
way to end the depression was to give every senior citizen $200 per month with the stipula- 
tion that seniors would spend those dollars, thus putting more money in circulation and reviv- 
ing economic demand. Townsend also pushed hard for a pension program to ease the plight 
of the nation s elderly. While the Townsend movement did not last long, it did prod a ner- 
vous Roosevelt administration to make relief for the elderly a program that Roosevelt would 
label Social Security an important component of the New Deal. 
Labor Protests 
The attacks by Long, Coughlin, and Townsend on the New Deal deepened popular dis- 
content and inspired other insurgent movements. The most important of them was the 
labor movement. Workers began joining unions in response to the National Industrial 
Recovery Act, and especially its Clause 7 (a), which granted workers the right to join labor 
unions of their own choosing, and obligated employers to recognize unions and bargain 
with them in good faith. Union members made quite modest demands at first: (1) they 
wanted employers to observe the provisions of the NRA codes; (2) they wanted to be 
treated fairly by their foremen; and (3) they wanted employers to recognize and negotiate 
with their unions. 
Few employers, however, were willing to grant their employees any say in working con- 
ditions. Many ignored the NRA s wage and hour guidelines altogether and used their influ- 
ence over NRA code authorities to thwart worker requests for wage increases and union 
recognition. Workers flooded Washington with letters addressed to President Roosevelt, 
Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and General Hugh Johnson, asking them to force 
employers to comply with the law. A Rhode Island textile worker who had been fired for 
joining a union asked why the NRA had neither responded to his complaint nor punished 
the company that had fired him.  If people can be arrested for violating certain laws,  he 
wondered,  why can t this company?  
When their pleas went unanswered, workers began to take matters into their own hands. 
In 1934, they staged 2,000 strikes, some of which escalated into armed confrontations 
between workers and police. In Toledo, Ohio, in May, 10,000 workers surrounded the 
Electric Auto-Lite plant, declaring that they would block all exits and entrances until the 
company agreed to shut down operations and negotiate a union contract. Two strikers were 
killed in an exchange of gunfire. In Minneapolis, unionized truck drivers and warehouse- 
men fought police, private security forces, and the National Guard in a series of street bat- 
tles from May through July that left four dead and hundreds wounded. In San Francisco in 
July, skirmishes between longshoremen and employers killed two and wounded scores of 
strikers. This violence provoked a general strike in San Francisco that shut down the city s 
transportation, construction, and service industries for two weeks. In September, 400,000 
textile workers at mills from Maine to Alabama walked off their jobs. Attempts by employ- 
ers to bring in replacement workers triggered violent confrontations that caused several 
deaths, hundreds of injuries, and millions of dollars in property damages. 
942  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
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Anger at the Polls 
By late September, textile union leaders had lost their nerve and called off the strike, 
but workers took their anger to the polls. In Rhode Island, they broke the Republican 
Party s 30-year domination of state politics. In the South Carolina gubernatorial race, 
working-class voters rejected a conservative Democrat, Coleman Blease, and chose 
instead Olin T. Johnston, a former mill worker and an ardent New Dealer. In the country as 
a whole, Democrats won 70 percent of the contested seats in the Senate and House. The 
Democrats increased their majority, from 310 to 319 (out of 432) in the House, and from 
60 to 69 (out of 96) in the Senate. No sitting president s party had ever done so well in 
an off-year election. 
The victory was not an unqualified one for Roosevelt and the First New Deal, however. 
The 74th Congress would include the largest contingent of radicals ever sent to Washington: 
Tom Amlie of Wisconsin, Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, Maury Maverick of Texas, Vito 
Marcantonio of New York, and some 30 others. Their support for the New Deal depended 
on whether Roosevelt delivered more relief, more income security, and more political 
power to farmers, workers, the unemployed, and the poor. 
Radical Third Parties 
Radical critics of the New Deal also made an impressive showing in state politics in 1934 
and 1936. They were particularly strong in states gripped by labor unrest. In Wisconsin, 
for example, Philip La Follette, the son of Robert La Follette (see chapter 21), was elected 
governor in 1934 and 1936 as the candidate of the radical Wisconsin ProgressiveParty. 
In Minnesota, discontented agrarians and urban workers organized the Minnesota Farmer- 
Labor (MFL) Party and elected their candidate to the governorship in 1930, 1932, 1934, 
and 1936. In Washington, yet another radical third party, the CommonwealthBuilders, 
elected both senators and almost half the state legislators in 1932 and 1934. And in 
California, the socialist and novelist Upton Sinclair and his organization, End Poverty 
in California (EPIC), came closer to winning the governorship than anyone had 
expected. 
A widespread movement to form local labor parties offered further evidence of voter 
volatility, as did the growing appeal of the Communist Party. The American Communist 
Party (CP) had emerged in the early 1920s with the support of radicals who wanted to 
adopt the Soviet Union s path to socialism (see chapter 23). The CP began to attract 
attention in the early 1930s, as its organizers spread out among the poorest and most 
vulnerable populations in America homeless urban blacks in the North, black and 
white sharecroppers in the South, Chicano and Filipino agricultural workers in the West  
and mobilized them into unions and unemployment leagues. CP members also played sig- 
nificant roles in strikes described earlier, and they were influential in the Minnesota 
Farmer-Labor Party and in Washington s Commonwealth Builders. Once they stopped 
preaching world revolution in 1935 and began calling instead for a  popular front  of 
democratic forces against fascism (a term used to describe the new kinds of dictatorships 
Political Mobilization, Political Unrest, 1934 1935 " 943 
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944  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
Focus Question 
What was  underconsumptionism,  and how did it inform the legislation of the Second 
New Deal? How was the Second New Deal different from the first? 
appearing in Hitler s Germany and Mussolini s Italy), their ranks grew even more. By 
1938, approximately 80,000 Americans were thought to have been members of the 
Communist Party. 
Although the Communist Party proclaimed its allegiance to democratic principles 
beginning in 1935, it nevertheless remained a dictatorial organization that took its orders 
from the Soviet Union. Many Americans feared the growing strength of the CP and began 
to call for its suppression. The CP, however, was never strong enough to gain power for 
itself. Its chief role in 1930s politics was to channel popular discontent into unions and 
political parties that would, in turn, force New Dealers to respond to the demands of the 
nation s poor. 
The Second New Deal,1935 1937 
The labor unrest of 1934 had taken Roosevelt by surprise. For a time, he kept his distance 
from the masses mobilizing in his name, but in spring 1935, with the 1936 presidential 
election looming, he decided to place himself at their head. He called for the  abolition of 
evil holding companies,  attacked the wealthy for their profligate ways, and called for new 
programs to aid the poor and downtrodden. Rather than becoming a socialist, as his crit- 
ics charged, Roosevelt sought to reinvigorate his appeal among poorer Americans and turn 
them away from radical solutions. 
Philosophical Underpinnings 
To point the New Deal in a more populist direction, Roosevelt turned increasingly to a rel- 
atively new economic theory, underconsumptionism. Advocates of this theory held that 
a chronic weakness in consumer demand had caused the Great Depression. The path to 
recovery lay, therefore, not in restricting production, as the architects of the First New 
Deal had tried to do, but in boosting consumer expenditures through government support 
for strong labor unions (to force up wages), higher social welfare expenditures (to put 
more money in the hands of the poor), and ambitious public works projects (to create 
hundreds of thousands of new jobs). 
Underconsumptionists did not worry that new welfare and public works programs 
might strain the federal budget. If the government found itself short of revenue, it could 
always borrow additional funds from private sources. These reformers, in fact, viewed gov- 
ernment borrowing as a useful antidepression tool. Those who lent the government money 
would receive a return on their investment; those who received government assistance 
would have additional income to spend on consumer goods; and manufacturers would 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 944
profit from increases in consumer spending. Government borrowing, in short, would 
stimulate the circulation of money through the economy, increase consumer demand, 
and end the depression. This fiscal policy, a reversal of the conventional wisdom that 
government should always balance its budget, would in the 1940s come to be known as 
Keynesianism, after John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who had been its most 
forceful advocate. 
Many politicians and economists rejected the notion that increased government spend- 
ing and the deliberate buildup of federal deficits would lead to prosperity. Roosevelt was 
not easily convinced that he should put aside his concern for fiscal restraint and balanced 
budgets, but in 1935, as the nation entered its sixth year of the depression, he was willing 
to give the new ideas a try. Reform-minded members of the 1934 Congress were eager for 
a new round of legislation directed more to the needs of ordinary Americans than to the 
needs of big business. 
Legislation 
Congress passed much of that legislation in January to June 1935 a period that came to be 
known as the Second New Deal. Two of the acts were of historic importance: the Social 
SecurityAct and the National Labor Relations Act. The Social Security Act, passed in May, 
required the states to set up welfare funds from which money would be disbursed to the 
elderly poor, the unemployed, unmarried mothers with dependent children, and the disabled. 
It also enrolled a majority of working Americans in a pension program that guaranteed them 
The Second New Deal, 1935 1937 " 945 
Selected WPA Projects in New York City, 1938 
Construction and Renovation Education, Health, and Art Research and Records 
East River Drive 
Henrik Hudson Parkway 
Bronx sewers 
Glendale and Queens public libraries 
King s County Hospital 
Williamsburg housing project 
School buildings, prisons, and firehouses 
Coney Island and Brighton Beach 
boardwalks 
Orchard Beach 
Swimming pools, playgrounds, parks, 
drinking fountains 
Source: John David Millet, The Works Progress Administration in New York City(Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1938), pp. 95 126. 
Adult education: homemaking, trade 
and technical skills, and art and culture 
Children s education: remedial reading, 
lip reading, and field trips 
Prisoners  vocational training, 
recreation, and nutrition 
Dental clinics 
Tuberculosis examination clinics 
Syphilis and gonorrhea treatment clinics 
City hospital kitchen help, orderlies, 
laboratory technicians, nurses, doctors 
Subsistence gardens 
Sewing rooms 
Central Park sculpture shop 
Sewage treatment, community 
health, labor relations, and 
employment trends surveys 
Museum and library catalogs and 
exhibits 
Municipal office clerical support 
Government forms standardization 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 945
a steady income upon retirement. A federal system of employer and employee taxation was 
set up to fund the pensions. Despite limitations on coverage and inadequate pension lev- 
els, the Social Security Act of 1935 provided a sturdy foundation on which future presi- 
dents and congresses would erect the American welfare state. 
Equally historic was the passage, in June, of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). 
This act delivered what the NRA had only promised: the right of every worker to join a 
union of his or her own choosing and the obligation of employers to bargain with that 
union in good faith. The NLRA, also called the Wagner Act after its Senate sponsor, 
Robert Wagner of New York, set up a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to supervise 
union elections and to investigate claims of unfair labor practices. The NLRB was to be 
staffed by federal appointees with power to impose fines on employers who violated the 
law. Union leaders hailed the act as their Magna Carta. 
Congress also passed the Holding Company Act to break up the 13 utility companies 
that controlled 75 percent of the nation s electric power. It passed the Wealth Tax Act, 
which increased tax rates on the wealthy from 59 percent to 75 percent, and on corpora- 
tions from 13.75 percent to 15 percent; and it passed the Banking Act, which strength- 
ened the power of the Federal Reserve Board over its member banks. It created the Rural 
Electrification Administration (REA) to bring electric power to rural households. Finally, 
it passed the huge $5 billion Emergency Relief Appropriation Act. Roosevelt funneled part 
of this sum to the PWA and the CCC and used another part to create the National Youth 
Administration (NYA), which provided work and guidance to the nation s youth. 
Roosevelt directed most of the new relief money, however, to the Works Progress 
Administration(WPA) under the direction of Harry Hopkins, now known as the New 
Deal s  minister of relief.  The WPA built or improved thousands of schools, playgrounds, 
airports, and hospitals. WPA crews raked leaves, cleaned streets, and landscaped cities. In 
the process, the WPA provided jobs to approximately 30 percent of the nation s jobless. 
By the time the decade ended, the WPA, in association with an expanded Reconstruc- 
tion Finance Corporation, the PWA, and other agencies, had built 500,000 miles of roads, 
100,000 bridges, 100,000 public buildings, and 600 airports. The New Deal had trans- 
formed America s urban and rural landscapes. The awe generated by these public works 
projects helped Roosevelt retain popular support at a time when the success of the New 
Deal s economic policies was uncertain. The WPA also funded a vast program of public 
art, supporting the work of thousands of painters, architects, writers, playwrights, actors, 
and intellectuals. Beyond extending relief to struggling artists, it fostered the creation of art 
that spoke to the concerns of ordinary Americans, adorned public buildings with colorful 
murals, and boosted public morale. 
Victory in 1936: The New Democratic Coalition 
Roosevelt described his Second New Deal as a program to limit the power and privi- 
lege of the wealthy few and to increase the security and welfare of ordinary citizens. In 
his 1936 reelection campaign, he excoriated the corporations as  economic royalists  
946  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 946
who had  concentrated into their 
own hands an almost complete 
control over other people s prop- 
erty, other people s money, other 
people s labor other people s 
lives.  He called on voters to strip 
the corporations of their power 
and  save a great and precious 
form of government for ourselves 
and the world.  American voters 
responded by handing Roosevelt 
the greatest victory in the history 
of American presidential politics. 
He received 61 percent of the 
popular vote; Alf Landon of 
Kansas, his Republican opponent, 
received only 37 percent. Only 
two states, Maine and Vermont, 
representing a mere eight elec- 
toral votes, went for Landon. 
The 1936 election won the Democratic Party its reputation as the party of reform 
and the party of the  forgotten American.  Of the 6 million Americans who went to the 
polls for the first time, many of them European ethnics, 5 million voted for Roosevelt. 
Among the poorest Americans, Roosevelt received 80 percent of the vote. Black voters 
in the North deserted the Republican Party the  Party of Lincoln  calculating that 
their interests would best be served by the  Party of the Common Man.  Roosevelt also 
did well among white middle-class voters, many of whom stood to benefit from the 
Social Security Act. These constituencies would constitute the  Roosevelt coalition  for 
most of the next 40 years, helping to solidify the Democratic Party as the new majority 
party in American politics. 
Rhetoric Versus Reality 
Roosevelt s 1935 36 anti-corporate rhetoric was more radical than the laws he supported. 
The Wealth Tax Act took considerably less out of wealthy incomes and estates than was 
advertised, and the utility companies that the Holding Company Act should have broken 
up remained largely intact. Moreover, Roosevelt promised more than he delivered to the 
nation s poor. Farm workers, for example, were not covered by the Social Security Act or 
by the National Labor Relations Act. Consequently, thousands of African American share- 
croppers in the South, along with substantial numbers of Mexican American farm work- 
ers in the Southwest, missed out on protections and benefits brought by these laws. The 
sharecroppers were shut out because southern Democrats would not have voted for an act 
The Second New Deal, 1935 1937 " 947 
FL 
7 
MD 
8 
VT 
3 
NH 
4 
IA 
11 
CA 
22 
MA 
17 
NJ 
16 
OR 
5 
NV 
3 
NE 
7 
CO 
6 
MN 
11 
WI 
12 
KS 
9 
TX 
23 LA 
10 
AR 
9 
MO 
15 
IL 
29 
IN 
14 
MI 
19 
MS 
9 
AL 
11 
GA 
12 
TN 
11 
KY 
11 
OH 
26 
SC 
8 
NC 
13 
VA 
11 
WV 
8 
PA 
36 
NY 
47 
ME 
5 
RI 
 4 
CT 
8 
DE 
 3 
WA 
8 
ID 
4 
UT 
4 
WY 
3 
MT 
4 ND 
4 
SD 
4 
AZ 
3 NM 
3 OK 
11 
Roosevelt 
(Democrat) 523 98 27,757,333 61 
8  2 16,684,231 37 
Landon 
(Republican) 
Electoral Vote    
Number     %    
 Popular Vote 
  Number            %    
Map 25.5 Presidential Election, 1936 In 1936, Franklin D. 
Roosevelt s reelection numbers were overwhelming: 98 percent of the 
electoral vote, and more than 60 percent of the popular vote. No previous 
election in American history had been so one-sided. 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 947
that was seen as improving the 
economic or social condition of 
southern blacks. For the same 
reason, the New Deal made little 
effort to restore voting rights to 
southern blacks or to protect 
their basic civil rights. White 
supremacy lived on in New Deal 
democracy. 
Roosevelt s 1935 36 populist 
stance also obscured the support 
that some capitalists were giving 
the Second New Deal. In the 
West, Henry J. Kaiser headed a 
consortium of six companies that 
built the Hoover, Bonneville, and 
Grand Coulee dams; and in Texas, 
building contractors Herman and 
George Brown were bankrolling a 
group of elected officials that 
included a young Democratic 
congressman named Lyndon 
Johnson. In the Midwest and the East, Roosevelt s corporate supporters included real estate 
developers, mass merchandisers (such as Bambergers and Sears, Roebuck), clothing manu- 
facturers, and the like. These firms, in turn, had financial connections with recently estab- 
lished investment banks such as Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, competitors of the 
House of Morgan and its allies in the Republican banking establishment, and with consumer- 
oriented banks such as the Bank of America and the Bowery Savings Bank. They tolerated 
strong labor unions, welfare programs, and high levels of government spending in the belief 
that these developments would strengthen consumer spending, but they had no intention of 
surrendering their own wealth or power. The Democratic Party had become, in effect, the 
party of the masses and one section of big business. The conflicting interests of these two con- 
stituencies would create tensions within the Democratic Party throughout the years of its 
political domination. 
Men,Women, and Reform 
The years 1936 and 1937 were exciting ones for academics, policy makers, and bureau- 
crats who designed and administered the rapidly growing roster of New Deal programs 
and agencies. Fueled by idealism and dedication, they were confident they could make the 
New Deal work. They planned and won congressional approval for the Farm Security 
Administration (FSA), an agency designed to improve the economic lot of tenant farmers, 
948  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
F 
ed 
e 
ra 
l 
c 
iv 
i 
li 
an 
 em 
p 
lo 
ym 
en 
t 
( 
in 
 t 
ho 
u 
sa 
n 
d 
s 
) 
1,100 
1,000 
900 
800 
700 
600 
500 
400 
300 
200 
100 
0 
1920 1930 1940 
Year 
Hoover 
Roosevelt 
Harding and 
Coolidge 
Wilson 
Growth in Federal Civilian Employment, 1920 1940 
Source: Data from Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (White 
Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International, 1989), p. 1102. 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 948
sharecroppers, and farm laborers. They drafted and passed laws that outlawed child labor, 
set minimum wages and maximum hours for adult workers, and committed the federal 
government to building low-cost housing. They investigated and tried to regulate concen- 
trations of corporate power. 
Although they worked on behalf of  the people,  the New Dealers constituted a new 
class of technocrats. The prospect of building a strong state committed to prosperity and 
justice fired their imaginations. They delighted in the intellectual challenge and the tech- 
nical complexity of social policy. They did not welcome interference from those they 
regarded as less intelligent or motivated by obsolete ideologies. 
This was particularly true of the men. Many had earned advanced degrees in law and 
economics at elite universities such as Harvard, Columbia, and Wisconsin. Not all had 
been raised among wealth and privilege, however, as was generally the case with ear- 
lier generations of reformers. To his credit, Franklin Roosevelt was the first president 
since his cousin Theodore Roosevelt to welcome Jews and Catholics into his adminis- 
tration. Some became members of Roosevelt s inner circle of advisers men such as 
Thomas  Tommy the Cork  Corcoran, Jim Farley, Ben Cohen, and Samuel Rosenman. 
These men had struggled to make their way, first on the streets and then in school and 
at work. They brought to the New Deal intellectual aggressiveness, quick minds, and 
mental toughness. 
The Second New Deal, 1935 1937 " 949 
Rates of Unemployment in Selected Male and Female Occupations, 1930 
Male Occupations Percentage Male Percentage Unemployed 
Iron and steel 96% 13% 
Forestry and fishing 99 10 
Mining 99 18 
Heavy manufacturing 86 13 
Carpentry 100 19 
Laborers (road and street) 100 13 
Female Occupations Percentage Female Percentage Unemployed 
Stenographers and typists 96% 5% 
Laundresses 99 3 
Trained nurses 98 4 
Housekeepers 92 3 
Telephone operators 95 3 
Dressmakers 100 4 
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Population(Washington, D.C.: 
Government Printing Office, 1931). 
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The profile of New Deal women was different. Although a few, notably Eleanor Roosevelt 
and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, were more visible than women in previous admin- 
istrations had been, many of the female New Dealers worked in relative obscurity, in agen- 
cies such as the Women s Bureau or the Children s Bureau (both in the Department of 
Labor). Women who worked on major legislation, as did Mary Van Kleeck on the Social 
Security Act, or who directed major programs, as did Jane Hoey, chief of the Social Security s 
Bureau of Public Assistance, received less credit than men in comparable positions. More- 
over, female New Dealers tended to be a generation older than their male colleagues and 
were more likely to be Protestant than Catholic or Jewish. Many of them had known each 
other since the days of progressive-era reform and woman suffrage (see chapter 21). 
The New Deal offered these female reformers little opportunity to advance the cause of 
women s equality. Demands for greater economic opportunity, sexual freedom, and full equal- 
ity for women and men were put forward less often in the 1930s than they had been in the 
preceding two decades. One reason was that the women s movement had lost momentum after 
achieving the vote in 1920 (see chapter 24). Another was that prominent New Deal women, 
rather than vigorously pursuing a campaign for equal rights, chose to concentrate instead on 
 protective legislation  laws that safeguarded female workers, whom they considered more 
fragile than men. Those who insisted that women needed special protections could not eas- 
ily argue that women were the equal of men in all respects. 
Even so, feminism was hemmed in on all sides by a male hostility that the depression 
had only intensified. Many American men had built their male identities on the value of 
hard work and the ability to provide economic security for their families. For them, the 
loss of work unleashed feelings of inadequacy. Male vulnerability increased as unemploy- 
ment rates of men most of whom labored in blue-collar industries rose higher than 
those of women, many of whom worked in white-collar occupations less affected by job 
cutbacks. Many fathers and husbands resented wives and daughters who had taken over 
their breadwinning roles. 
This male anxiety had political and social consequences. Several states passed laws out- 
lawing the hiring of married women. New Deal relief agencies were reluctant to authorize aid 
for unemployed women. The labor movement made protection of the male wage earner one 
of its principal goals. The Social Security pension system left out waitresses, domestic ser- 
vants, and other largely female occupations. Some commentators even proposed ludicrous 
gender remedies to the problem of unemployment. Norman Cousins of the Saturday Evening 
Post, for example, suggested that the depression could be ended simply by firing 10 million 
working women and giving their jobs to men.  Presto!  he declared.  No unemployment, no 
relief rolls. No Depression.  
Many artists introduced a strident masculinism into their painting and sculpture. 
Mighty Superman, the new comic-strip hero of 1938, reflected the spirit of the times. 
Superman was depicted as a working-class hero who, on several occasions, saved work- 
ers from coal mine explosions and other disasters caused by the greed and negligence of 
villainousemployers. 
950  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
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Superman s greatest vulnerability, however, other than kryptonite, was his attraction to 
the sexy and aggressive working woman, Lois Lane. He could never resolve his dilemma by 
marrying Lois and tucking her away in a safe domestic sphere, because the continuation of 
the comic strip demanded that Superman be repeatedly exposed to kryptonite and female 
danger. But the producers of male and female images in other mass media, such as the 
movies, faced no such technical obstacles. Anxious men could take comfort from the con- 
clusion of the movie Woman of the Year, in which Spencer Tracy persuades the ambitious 
Katharine Hepburn to exchange her successful newspaper career for the bliss of motherhood 
and homemaking. From a thousand different points, 1930s politics and culture made it clear 
that a woman s proper place was in the home. Faced with such obstacles, it is not surprising 
that women activists failed to make feminism a major part of New Deal reform. 
The Second New Deal, 1935 1937 " 951 
Man of Steel The comic book Supermandebuted in 1938, with the cover that 
appears in this reproduction. The character Superman partook of the New Deal s 
commitment to help ordinary Americans in need while offering men a fantasy about 
unconquerable male power. 
T 
h 
e 
 M 
ic 
h 
a 
e 
l 
 B 
a 
rs 
o 
n 
 C 
o 
l 
le 
c 
t 
io 
n 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 951
Labor in Politics and Culture 
In 1935, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated 
Clothing Workers, and the leaders of six other unions that had seceded from the American 
Federation of Labor (AFL) cobbled together a new labor organization. The Committee for 
Industrial Organization (CIO later renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations) 
aspired to organize millions of unskilled and semiskilled workers whom the AFL had 
largely ignored. In 1936, Lewis and Hillman created a second organization, Labor s 
Non-Partisan League (LNPL), to develop a labor strategy for the 1936 elections. 
Although professing the league s nonpartisanship, Lewis intended from the start that the 
LNPL s role would be to channel labor s money, energy, and talent into Roosevelt s 
reelection campaign. Roosevelt welcomed the league s help, and labor would become a 
key constituency of the new Democratic coalition. The passage of the Wagner Act and 
the creation of the NLRB in 1935 enhanced the labor movement s status and credibility. 
Membership in labor unions climbed steadily, and, in short order, union members 
began flexing their new muscles. 
In late 1936, the United Auto Workers (UAW) took on General Motors, widely 
regarded as the most powerful corporation in the world. Workers occupied key GM fac- 
tories in Flint, Michigan, declaring that their sit-down strikewould continue until GM 
agreed to recognize the UAW and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement. Frank 
Murphy, the pro-labor governor of Michigan, refused to use National Guard troops to 
evict the strikers, and Roosevelt declined to send federal troops. A 50-year-old practice of 
using soldiers to break strikes ended, and General Motors capitulated after a month of 
resistance. Soon, the U.S. Steel Corporation, which had defeated unionists in the bloody 
strike of 1919 (see chapter 23), announced that it was ready to negotiate a contract with 
the newly formed CIO steelworkers union. 
The labor movement s public stature grew along with its size. Many writers and artists, 
funded through the WPA, depicted the labor movement as the voice of the people and the 
embodiment of the nation s values. Murals sprang up in post offices and other public 
buildings featuring portraits of blue-collar Americans at work. Broadway s most celebrated 
play in 1935 was Clifford Odets s Waiting for Lefty, a raw drama about taxi drivers who 
confront their bosses and organize an honest union. Audiences were so moved by the play 
that they often spontaneously joined in the final chorus of  Strike, Strike, Strike,  the 
words that ended the play. Pins and Needles, a 1937 musical about the hopes and dreams 
of garment workers, performed by actual members of the International Ladies Garment 
Workers Union, became the longest-running play in Broadway history (until Oklahoma! 
broke its record of 1,108 performances in 1943). 
Similarly, many of the most popular novels and movies of the 1930s celebrated the 
decency, honesty, and patriotism of ordinary Americans. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 
(1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Frank Capradelighted movie audi- 
ences with fables of simple, small-town heroes vanquishing the evil forces of wealth 
and decadence. Likewise, in The Grapes of Wrath, the best-selling novel of 1939, John 
952  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
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Steinbeck told an epic tale of an Oklahoma family s fortitude in surviving eviction from 
their land, migrating westward, and suffering exploitation in the  promised land  of 
California. In 1940, John Ford turned Steinbeck s novel into one of that year s highest- 
grossing and most acclaimed movies. Moviegoers found special meaning in the decla- 
ration of one of the story s main characters, Ma Joad:  We ll go on forever . . .  cause 
we re the people.  In themselves and in one another, Americans seemed to discover the 
resolve they needed to rebuild a culture that had surrendered its identity to corpora- 
tions and business. 
John Steinbeck wrote about the Okie migrants to California as an outsider. But the Okies 
produced a writer and musician of their own who became, in the late 1930s, a popular folk 
singer. Born in 1913 in Okemah, Oklahoma, Woody Guthrie grew up in nearby Pampa, 
Texas. He wasn t born poor his father was a small businessman and a local politician  
but by the time he reached his twenties, Guthrie had known a great deal of hardship: his 
father s business failed, three family homes burned down, one sister died from burns, and 
then the drought and dust storms struck. In the 1930s, Guthrie joined the large migration 
of Okies to California. There, his musical gifts were discovered, chiefly because radio sta- 
tions, in particular, were keen to put  singing cowboys  on the air. Guthrie had emerged 
from a country music tradition in Texas and Oklahoma and found an audience among the 
many people from those states who had gone to California. 
But Guthrie quickly developed a broader appeal as he cast himself as the bard of ordi- 
nary Americans everywhere. He loved America for the beauty of its landscape and its peo- 
ple, sentiments he expressed in one of his most popular songs,  This Land Is Your Land,  
which he wrote in 1940 in response to Irving Berlin s  God Bless America  (a song 
Guthrie did not like because of the false sense of complacency he thought it induced). 
Guthrie did not possess a refined singing voice, but his  hillbilly  lyrics, melodies, and 
humor were inventive and often inspiring. He would become a powerful influence on 
subsequent generations of musicians, including such major figures as Bob Dylan and 
Bruce Springsteen. 
Guthrie traveled ceaselessly in the 1930s, from Los Angeles to New York and from 
Texas to Washington state. The more he learned about the hardships of individual 
Americans, the angrier and more politically active he became. He drew close to the 
labor movement and to the Communist Party, and increasingly, in his writings and 
songs, he criticized the industrialists, financiers, and their political agents who, he 
believed, had brought the calamity of the Depression on America. But Guthrie always 
associated his criticism with the hope that the working people of America, if united, 
could take back their land which is the message he meant to convey when he sang 
 This Land Is Your Land  and restore its greatness. The optimism of his message 
underscored how much the cultural mood had changed since the early 1930s. In his 
focus on ordinary working Americans, in his hope for the future, and in his fusion of 
dissent and patriotism, Guthrie was emblematic of the dominant stream of culture and 
politics in the late 1930s. 
The Second New Deal, 1935 1937 " 953 
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America s Minorities and the New Deal 
954  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
Focus Question 
Which minority groups in American society benefited the most from the New Deal 
and which benefited the least? 
Reformers in the 1930s generally believed that issues of capitalism s viability, economic recov- 
ery, and the inequality of wealth and power outweighed problems of racial and ethnicdis- 
crimination; only in the case of American Indians did New Dealers pass legislation specifi- 
cally designed to improve a minority s social and economic position. Because they were 
disproportionately poor, most minority groups did profit from the populist and pro-labor 
character of New Deal reforms, but the gains were distributed unevenly. Eastern and South- 
ern European ethnics benefited the most, and African Americans and Mexican Americans 
advanced the least. 
Eastern and Southern European Ethnics 
Eastern and Southern European immigrants and their children had begun mobilizing 
politically in the 1920s in response to religious and racial discrimination (see chapter 24). 
Roosevelt understood their political importance well, for he was a product of New York 
Democratic politics, where men such as Robert Wagner and Al Smith had begun to orga- 
nize the ethnic vote even before 1920 (see chapter 21). He made sure that a significant 
portion of New Deal monies for welfare, building and road construction, and unem- 
ployment relief reached the urban areas where most European ethnics lived. As a result, 
Jewish and Catholic Americans, especially those descended from Eastern and Southern 
European immigrants, voted for Roosevelt in overwhelming numbers. The New Deal did 
not eliminate anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism from American society, but it did allow 
millions of European ethnics to believe, for the first time, that they would overcome the 
second-class status they had long endured. 
Eastern and Southern European ethnics also benefited from their strong working-class 
presence. Forming one of the largest groups in the mass-production industries of the 
Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, they formed a large part of the labor movement s 
new membership. Roosevelt accommodated himself to their wishes because he understood 
and feared the power they wielded through their labor organizations. 
African Americans 
The New Deal did more to reproduce patterns of racial discrimination than to advance 
the cause of racial equality. African Americans who belonged to CIO unions or who lived 
in northern cities benefited from New Deal programs, but most blacks lived in the rural 
South, where they were barred from voting, largely excluded from AAA programs, and 
denied federal protection in their efforts to form agricultural unions. The CCC ran sepa- 
rate camps for black and white youth. The TVA hired few blacks. Those enrolled in the 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 954
CWA and other work-relief programs frequently received less pay than whites for doing 
the same jobs. Roosevelt consistently refused to support legislation to make lynching a 
federal crime. 
This failure to push a strong civil-rights agenda did not mean that New Dealers were 
racist. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke out frequently against racial injustice. In 1939, she 
resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when the organization refused to 
allow black opera singer Marian Andersonto perform in its concert hall. She then pres- 
sured the federal government into granting Anderson permission to sing from the steps of 
the Lincoln Memorial. On Easter Sunday, 75,000 people gathered to hear Anderson and 
to demonstrate their support for racial equality. The president did not attend. 
Roosevelt did eliminate segregationist practices in the federal government that had been 
in place since Woodrow Wilson s presidency. He appointed Mary McLeod Bethune, 
Robert Weaver, William Hastie, and other African Americans to important second-level 
posts in his administration. Working closely with each other in what came to be known as 
the Black Cabinet, these officials fought hard to end discrimination in New Deal programs. 
Roosevelt, however, refused to support the Black Cabinet if it meant alienating white 
southern senators who controlled key congressional committees. He believed that pushing for 
civil rights would cost him the support of the white South. Meanwhile, African Americansand 
their supporters were not yet strong enough as an electoral constituency or as a reform 
movement to force Roosevelt to accede to their wishes. 
Mexican Americans 
The Mexican American experience in the Great Depression was particularly harsh. In 
1931, Hoover s secretary of labor, William N. Doak, announced a plan for repatriating ille- 
gal aliens (returning them to their land of origin) and giving their jobs to American citi- 
zens. The federal campaign quickly focused on Mexican immigrants in California and the 
Southwest. The U.S. Immigration Service staged a series of highly publicized raids, 
rounded up large numbers of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and demanded that each 
detainee prove his or her legal status. Those who failed to produce the necessary docu- 
mentation were deported. Local and state governments pressured many more Mexicans 
into leaving. The combined efforts of federal, state, and local governments created a cli- 
mate of fear in Mexican communities that prompted 500,000 to return to Mexico by 1935. 
This total equaled the number of Mexicans who had come to the United States in the 
1920s. Los Angeles lost one-third of its Mexican population. Included in repatriate ranks 
were a significant number of legal immigrants who were unable to produce their immi- 
gration papers, the American-born children of illegals, and some Mexican Americans who 
had lived in the Southwest for generations. 
The advent of the New Deal in 1933 eased but did not eliminate pressure on Chicano com- 
munities. New Deal agencies made more money available for relief, thereby lightening the bur- 
den on state and local governments. But federal laws, more often than not, failed to dissuade 
local officials from continuing their campaign against Mexican immigrants. Where Mexicans 
America s Minorities and the New Deal  " 955 
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gained access to relief rolls, they received payments lower than those given to  Anglos  (whites) 
or were compelled to accept tough agricultural jobs that paid less than living wages. 
Life grew harder for immigrant Mexicans who stayed behind. The Mexican cultural 
renaissance that had emerged in 1920s Los Angeles (see chapter 24) stalled. Hounded by 
government officials, Mexicans everywhere sought to escape public attention and scrutiny. 
In Los Angeles, where their influence had been felt throughout the city in the 1920s, they 
retreated into the separate community of East Los Angeles. To many, they became the 
 invisible minority.  
Mexicans and Mexican Americans who lived in urban areas and worked in blue-collar 
industries, however, did benefit from New Deal programs. In Los Angeles, for example, 
Chicanos employed in canneries, in garment and furniture shops, and on the docks 
responded to the New Deal s pro-labor legislation by joining unions in large numbers and 
winning concessions from their employers. Most Chicanos, however, lived in rural areas 
and labored in agricultural jobs, and the New Deal offered them little help. The National 
Labor Relations Act did not protect their right to organize unions, and the Social Security 
Act excluded them from the new federal welfare system. 
American Indians 
From the 1880s until the early 1930s, federal policy had contributed to the elimination of 
AmericanIndians as a distinctive population. The Dawes Act of 1887 (see chapter 18) had called 
for tribal lands to be broken up and allotted to individual owners in the hope that Indianswould 
adopt the work habits of white farmers. But American Indians had proved stubbornly loyal 
to their languages, religions, and cultures. Few of them succeeded as farmers, and many lost 
land to white speculators. By 1933, nearly half the AmericanIndians living on reservations 
whose land had been allotted were landless, and many who retained allotments held land 
that was largely desert or semidesert. 
The shrinking land base in combination with a growing population deepened American 
Indian poverty. The assimilationist pressures on American Indians, meanwhile, reached a 
climax in the intolerant 1920s, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) outlawed Indian 
religious ceremonies, forced children from tribal communities into federal boarding 
schools, banned polygamy, and imposed limits on the length of men s hair. 
Government officials working in the Hoover administration began to question this 
draconian policy, but its reversal had to await the New Deal and Roosevelt s appointment 
of John Collieras the commissioner of the BIA. Collier pressured the CCC, AAA, and 
other New Deal agencies to employ Indians on projects that improved reservation land 
and trained Indians in land conservation methods. He prevailed on Congress to pass the 
Pueblo Relief Act of 1933, which compensated Pueblos for land taken from them in the 
1920s, and the Johnson-O Malley Act of 1934, which provided funds to the states for 
Indian health care, welfare, and education. As part of his campaign to make the BIA more 
responsive to American Indian needs, Collier increased the number of Indian BIA 
employeesfrom a paltry few hundred in 1933 to a respectable 4,600 in 1940. 
956  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
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Collier also took steps to abolish federal boarding schools, encourage enrollment in 
local public schools, and establish community day schools. He insisted that American 
Indians be allowed to practice their traditional religions, and he created the Indian Arts 
and Crafts Board in 1935 to nurture traditional Indian artists and to help them market 
their works. 
The centerpiece of Collier s reform strategy was the Indian Reorganization Act (also 
known as the Wheeler-Howard Act) of 1934, which revoked the allotment provisions of 
the Dawes Act. The IRA restored land to tribes, granted Indians the right to establish con- 
stitutions and bylaws for self-government, and provided support for new tribal corpora- 
tions that would regulate the use of communal lands. This landmark act signaled the gov- 
ernment s recognition that American Indian tribes possessed the right to chart their own 
political, cultural, and economic futures. It reflected Collier s commitment to  cultural 
pluralism,  a doctrine that celebrated the diversity of peoples and cultures in American 
society and sought to protect that diversity against the pressures of assimilation. Collier 
hoped that the IRA would invigorate traditional Indian cultures and tribal societies and 
sustain both for generations. Cultural pluralism was not a popular creed in America dur- 
ing the depression years, which makes its acceptance as the rationale for the IRA all the 
more remarkable. 
Collier encountered opposition everywhere: from Protestant missionaries and cul- 
tural conservatives who wanted to continue an assimilationist policy; from white farm- 
ers and businessmen who feared that the new legislation would restrict their access to 
Native American land; and even from a sizable number of Indian groups, some of 
which had embraced assimilation and others that viewed the IRA cynically, as one more 
attempt by the federal government to impose  the white man s will  on the Indian peo- 
ples. This opposition made the IRA a more modest bill than the one Collier had origi- 
nally championed. 
Avocal minority of Indians continued to oppose the act even after its passage. The 
Navajo, the nation s largest tribe, voted to reject its terms along with 76 other tribes. 
Still, 181 tribes, nearly 70 percent of the total, supported Collier s reform and began 
organizing new governments under the IRA. Although their quest for independence 
would suffer setbacks, these tribes gained significant measures of freedom and auton- 
omy during the New Deal. 
The New Deal Abroad 
When he first entered office, Roosevelt seemed to favor a nationalist approach to inter- 
national relations. The United States, he believed, should pursue foreign policies to ben- 
efit its domestic affairs, without regard for the effects of those policies on world trade and 
international stability. Thus, in June 1933, Roosevelt pulled the United States out of the 
World Economic Conference in London, a meeting called by leading nations to 
strengthen the gold standard and thereby stabilize the value of their currencies. Roosevelt 
The New Deal Abroad " 957 
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feared that the United States would be forced into an agreement designed to keep the gold 
content of the dollar high and U.S. commodity prices low, which would frustrate New 
Deal efforts to inflate the prices of agricultural and industrial goods. 
Soon after his withdrawal from the London conference, however, Roosevelt put the United 
States on a more internationalist course. In November 1933, he became the first president to 
recognize the Soviet Union and to establish diplomatic ties with its Communistrulers. In 
December 1933, he inaugurated a Good Neighbor Policytoward Latin America by formally 
renouncing U.S. rights to intervene in the affairs of Latin American nations. To back up 
his pledge, Roosevelt ordered home the Marines stationed in Haiti and Nicaragua, scuttled 
the Platt Amendment that had given the United States control over the Cuban government 
since 1901, and granted Panama more political autonomy and a greater administrative role 
in operating the Panama Canal (see chapter 22). 
None of this, however, meant that the United States had given up its influence over Latin 
America. When a 1934 revolution brought a radical government to power in Cuba, the U.S. 
ambassador there worked with conservative Cubans to replace the government with a 
regime more favorable to U.S. interests. The United States did refrain from sending troops 
to Cuba. It also kept its troops at home in 1936 when a radical government inMexico 
nationalized several U.S.-owned and British-owned petroleum companies. The United 
States merely demanded that the new Mexican government compensate the oil companies 
for their lost property, which Mexico eventually did. Although the United States was still 
the dominant power in hemispheric affairs, its newfound restraint inspired Latin American 
hopes that a new era had dawned. 
The Roosevelt administration s recognition of the Soviet Union and embrace of the Good 
Neighbor Policy can be seen as an international expression of the liberal principles that 
guided its domestic policies. These diplomatic initiatives, however, also reflected Roosevelt s 
interest in stimulating international trade. American businessmen wanted access to the 
Soviet Union s domestic market. Latin America was already a major market for the United 
States, but one in need of greater stability. To win the support of American traders and 
investors, Roosevelt stressed how the Good Neighbor Policy would improve the region s 
business climate. 
Roosevelt further expressed his interest in building international trade through his sup- 
port for the Reciprocal Trade Agreement, passed by Congress in 1934. This act allowed his 
administration to lower U.S. tariffs by as much as 50 percent in exchange for similar 
reductions by other nations. By the end of 1935, the United States had negotiated recip- 
rocal trade agreements with 14 countries. Roosevelt s emphasis on international trade a 
move consonant with the Second New Deal s program of increasing the circulation of 
goods and money through the economy further solidified support for the New Deal in 
parts of the business community, especially among those firms, such as United Fruit and 
Coca-Cola, with large overseas investments. 
Actually increasing the volume of international trade was more difficult than passing 
legislation to encourage it. In Germany and Italy, belligerent nationalists Adolf Hitler 
958  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 958
and Benito Mussolini told their people that the solution to their ills lay not in foreign 
trade but in military strength and conquest. Throughout the world, similar appeals to 
national pride proved more popular than calls for tariff reductions and international 
trade. In the face of this historical current, the New Deal s internationalist economic 
policies made little headway. 
Stalemate,1937 1940 
By 1937 and 1938, the New Deal had begun to lose momentum. One reason was an 
emerging split between working-class and middle-class Democrats. After the UAW s vic- 
tory over General Motors in 1937, other workers began to imitate the successful tactics of 
the Flint, Michigan, militants. Sit-down strikes spread to many industries and regions, a 
development that many middle-class Americans found disturbing. 
The Court-Packing Fiasco 
The president s proposal on February 5, 1937, to alter the makeup of the Supreme Court 
exacerbated middle-class fears. Roosevelt asked Congress to give him the power to appoint 
one new Supreme Court justice for every member of the court who was older than age 70 
and who had served for at least 10 years. His stated reason was that the current justices 
Stalemate, 1937 1940 " 959 
F.D.R. Elected President New Deal Recovery 
12,830,000 
7,700,000 
10,390,000 
Recession 
World War II 
U.S. Participation 
in World War II 
1,040,000 
670,000 
1945 
1940 
1935 
1930 
Stock Market Crash 
P 
e 
rc 
en 
ta 
g 
e 
 o 
f 
n 
on 
fa 
rm 
 w 
o 
rk 
e 
r 
s 
 u 
n 
em 
p 
lo 
ye 
d 
Unemployment, 1920 1945 
40 
30 
20 
10 
0 
Year 
1,550,000 
Unemployment in the Nonfarm Labor Force, 1929 1945 
Source: Data from Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970(White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus International, 1989), p. 126. 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 959
were too old and feeble to handle the large volume of cases coming before them, but his 
real purpose was to prevent the conservative justices on the court most of whom had 
been appointed by Republican presidents from dismantling his New Deal. His proposal, 
if accepted, would have given him the authority to appoint six additional justices, thereby 
securing a pro New Deal majority. 
The president seemed genuinely surprised by the storm of indignation that greeted his 
 court-packing proposal. Roosevelt s political acumen had apparently been dulled by 
his 1936victory. His inflated sense of power infuriated many who had previously been 
New Deal enthusiasts. Although working-class support for Roosevelt remained strong, 
many middle-class voters turned away from the New Deal. In 1937 and 1938, a conserv- 
ative opposition took shape, uniting Republicans, conservative Democrats (many of them 
southerners), and civil libertarians who were determined to protect private property and 
government integrity. 
Ironically, Roosevelt s court-packing scheme may have been unnecessary. In March 1937, 
just one month after he proposed his plan, Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts, a for- 
mer opponent of New Deal programs, decided to support them. In April and May, the 
Court upheld the constitutionality of the Wagner Act and Social Security Act, both by a 
5-to-4 margin. The principal reforms of the New Deal would endure. Roosevelt allowed 
his court-reform proposal to die in Congress that summer. Within three years, five of the 
aging justices had retired, giving Roosevelt the opportunity to fashion a court more to his 
liking. Nonetheless, Roosevelt s reputation had suffered. 
The Recession of 1937 1938 
Whatever hope Roosevelt may have had for a quick recovery from the court-packing fiasco 
was dashed by a sharp recession that struck the country in late 1937 and 1938. The New 
Deal programs of 1935 had stimulated the economy, prompting Roosevelt to scale back 
relief programs. Meanwhile, new payroll taxes took $2 billion from wage earners  salaries 
to finance the Social Security pension fund even though the government did not intend to 
begin paying benefits until 1941. Thus, the government substantially shrunk the volume 
of dollars it was putting into circulation. Starved for money, the economy and stock mar- 
ket crashed once again. Unemployment, which had fallen to 14 percent, shot back up to 
20 percent. In the 1938 elections, voters vented their frustration by electing many con- 
servative Democrats and Republicans who were opposed to the New Deal. These conser- 
vatives could not dismantle the New Deal reforms already in place, but they did block the 
passage of new programs. 
Conclusion 
Roosevelt first assumed the presidency in the same week that Adolf Hitler established a Nazi 
dictatorship in Germany. Some feared that Roosevelt, by accumulating more power into the 
hands of the federal government than had ever been held in peacetime, aspired to autocratic 
960  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 960
rule. Nothing of the sort happened. Roosevelt and the New Dealers not only strengthened 
democracy, they also inspired millions of Americans who had never before voted to go to 
the polls. Groups that had been marginalized  Eastern and Southern Europeanethnics, 
unskilled workers, American Indians now believed that their political activism could 
make a difference. 
Not everyone benefited to the same degree from the broadening of American democracy. 
Northern factory workers, farm owners, European American ethnics, and middle-class con- 
sumers (especially homeowners) were among the groups who benefited most. In contrast, 
the socialist and communist elements of the labor movement failed to achieve their radi- 
cal aims. Southern industrial workers, black and white, benefited little from New Deal 
reforms; so did farm laborers. Feminists made no headway. African Americans and Mexican 
Americans gained meager influence over public policy. 
New Deal reforms might not have mattered to any group if the Second World War had 
not rescued the New Deal economic program. With government war orders flooding fac- 
tories from 1941 on, the economy grew vigorously, unemployment vanished, and pros- 
perity finally returned. The architects of the Second New Deal, who had argued that large 
government expenditures would stimulate consumer demand and trigger economic 
recovery, were vindicated. 
The war also solidified the political reforms of the 1930s: an increased role for the gov- 
ernment in regulating the economy and in ensuring the social welfare of those unable to 
help themselves; strong state support of unionization, agricultural subsidies, and progres- 
sive tax policies; and the use of government power and money to develop the West and 
Southwest. In sharp contrast to progressivism, the reforms of the New Deal endured. Voters 
returned Roosevelt to office for unprecedented third and fourth terms, and these same voters 
remained wedded for the next 40 years to Roosevelt s central idea: that a powerful state 
would enhance the pursuit of liberty and equality. 
S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS 
T. H. Watkins, The Great Depression: America in the 1930s(1993), provides a broad overview 
of society and politics during the 1930s. No work better conveys the tumult and drama of that 
era thanArthur M. Schlesinger Jr. s three-volume The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old 
Order(1957), The Coming of the New Deal (1958), and The Politics of Upheaval (1960), but 
Schlesinger s work must now be supplemented with David M. Kennedy,Freedom from Fear: The 
American People in Depression and War, 1929 1945(1999). On Hoover s failure to restore pros- 
perity and popular morale, see David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life(1979). 
The most complete biography of FDR, and one that is remarkably good at balancingRoosevelt s 
life and times, is Kenneth S. Davis,FDR(1972 1993), in four volumes. For a vivid description of 
the political dangers confronting Roosevelt as he assumed office in 1933, see Jonathan Alter, The 
Defining Moment: FDR s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope(2006). On EleanorRoosevelt, 
see Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, vol. 1 (1992). On the New Deal, see William 
E. Leuchtenberg,Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932 1940(1963); Anthony J. Badger, 
The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933 1940(1989); and Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., 
Conclusion " 961 
11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 961
The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930 1980(1989). Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and 
the Problem of Monopoly(1966), is essential to understand the First New Deal s industrial pol- 
icy, while Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor 
(1991), examines the role of the labor movement in national politics. 
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth 
Century(1996), is essential reading on the centrality of labor and the  common man  to literary 
and popular culture in the 1930s, as is Lary May,The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics 
of the American Way(2000). For the economic and cultural ties between the New Deal and the 
rebirth of the labor movement, see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in 
Chicago, 1919 1939(1990). Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A 
Critical History, 1919 1957(1957), is still the best single-volume history of the Communist 
Party during the 1930s. 
Harvard Sitkoff,A New Deal for Blacks(1978), is a wide-ranging examination of the place of 
African Americans in New Deal reform. Abraham Hoffman,Unwanted Mexican Americans in the 
Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929 1939(1974), analyzes the repatriation campaign, 
while the problems of illegal alienage created by that campaign are expertly analyzed in Mae Ngai, 
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America(2004). The importance of 
John Collier and the Indian Reorganization Act are treated well in Lawrence C. Kelly,The Assault 
on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform(1983). James T. Patterson, 
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal(1967), expertly analyzes the growing opposition 
to the New Deal in the late 1930s, while Alan Brinkley,The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism 
in Recession and War(1995), provocatively examines the efforts of New Dealers to adjust their 
beliefs and programs as they lost support, momentum, and confidence in the late 1930s. 
962  "CHAPTER 25  "The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 1939 
Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to 
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11019_25_ch25_p0919-0962.qxd  6/4/07  11:57 AM  Page 962
America during the Second World War 
T 
he Second World War brought unprecedented destruction to much of the globe. The 
United States whose own towns, farms, and cities would escape the impact of combat 
operations lurched toward direct engagement in this conflict. Mobilization for war, already 
underway before formal U.S. entry in 1941, first lifted the nation out of the Great Depres- 
sion and, then, transformed its economy. At war s end, the military might and productive 
capacity of the victorious United States spurred by innovative technologies and new work- 
ing relationships among government, business, labor, and scientific researchers dwarfed 
that of all other nations. Franklin Roosevelt s wartime presidency, invoking military neces- 
sity as the justification, significantly expanded the power of the national government. 
As the war proceeded, Americans came to reconsider how to understand liberty and 
equality. Although a government-directed publicity campaign initially stressed how 
wartime sacrifices would protect and preserve an  American way of life,  the ongoing fight 
against fascist dictatorships overseas soon raised questions about what might and 
should change in the United States itself. Might the nation, while striving for military vic- 
tory, also reorder its economy, rework its politics, and refashion the cultural and social 
patterns that had shaped racial, ethnic, and gender relationships during the 1930s? Could 
the interrelated tasks of reconstructing a war-ravaged world and strengthening forces for 
peace require the creation of new institutions, both at home and abroad? 
The Road to War:Aggression and Response 
26 
Tensions growing out of the First World War, heightened by a worldwide economic 
depression, fostered international instability during the 1930s. In Japan, Italy, and Germany, 
economic stagnation nurtured ultranationalist political movements that championed aggres- 
sive foreign policies. Elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, economic problems 
inclined governing majorities to turn inward, concentrating on promoting recovery and 
avoiding foreign entanglements. 
Focus Question 
How did events in Asia and in Europe affect debate within the United States over 
whether or not to embrace more interventionist policies overseas? 
11019_26_ch26_p0963-1008.qxd  6/4/07  3:26 PM  Page 963
The Rise of Aggressor States 
The first signs of another world war appeared in Asia. On September 18, 1931, Japanese 
military forces seized Manchuria, and Japan renamed the puppet state it created 
Manchukuo. This aggression by Japan violated the charter of the League of Nations, the 
Washington naval treaties, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact (see chapter 24). Focused on 
domestic matters, nations such as the United States hesitated to oppose Japan s move with 
military force. Instead, the Hoover-Stimson Doctrine (1931) announced a U.S. policy of 
 nonrecognition  toward Manchukuo, and the League of Nations merely condemned 
Japan s move. Japan simply ignored these rhetorical rebukes. 
964  "CHAPTER 26  "America during the Second World War 
1931 Japanese forces seize Manchuria 
1933 Hitler takes power in Germany 
1936 Spanish Civil War begins  " Germany and Italy agree to cooperate as the Axis Powers 
1937 Neutrality Act broadens provisions of Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936  " Roosevelt makes  Quarantine  
speech  " Japan invades China 
1938 France and Britain appease Hitler at Munich 
1939 Hitler and Stalin sign Soviet German nonaggression pact  " Hitler invades Poland; war breaks out in 
Europe  " Congress amends Neutrality Act to assist Allies 
1940 Paris falls after German blitzkreig(June)  " Battle of Britain carried to U.S. by radio broadcasts  " Roosevelt 
makes  destroyers-for-bases  deal with Britain  " Selective Service Act passed  " Roosevelt wins third term 
1941 Lend-Lease established  " Roosevelt creates Fair Employment Practices Commission  " Roosevelt and 
Churchill proclaim the Atlantic Charter  " U.S. engages in undeclared naval war in North Atlantic  " Congress 
narrowly repeals Neutrality Act  " Japanese forces attack Pearl Harbor (December 7) 
1942 Rio de Janeiro Conference (January)  " President signs Executive Order 9066 for internment of Japanese 
Americans (February)  " General MacArthur driven from Philippines (May)  " U.S. victorious in Battle of 
Midway (June)  " German army defeated at Battle of Stalingrad (August)  " Operation TORCH begins 
(November) 
1943 Axis armies in North Africa surrender (May)  " Allies invade Sicily (July) and Italy (September)  "  Zoot suit  
incidents in Los Angeles; racial violence in Detroit  " Allies begin drive toward Japan through South Pacific 
islands 
1944 Allies land at Normandy (D-day, June 6)  " Allied armies reach Paris (August)  " Allies turn back Germans at 
Battle of the Bulge (September)  " Roosevelt reelected to fourth term  " Bretton Woods Conference creates 
IMF and World Bank  " Dumbarton Oaks Conference establishes plan for UN 
1945 U.S. firebombs Japan  " Yalta Conference (February)  " Roosevelt dies; Truman becomes president (April) 
 " Germany surrenders (May)  " Hiroshima and Nagasaki hit with atomic bombs (August)  " Japan 
surrenders (September)  " United Nations established (December) 
C HR O NO L O G Y 
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Two ultranationalist states in Europe also soon embarked on military aggression. Adolf 
Hitler sNational Socialist (Nazi) Party, which came to power in Germany during 1933, 
announced a bold approach to addressing economic ills and political instability. Hitler cre- 
ated a one-party dictatorial state; denounced the Versailles peace settlement of 1919 as unfair 
to Germany; further blamed its problems on a Jewish conspiracy; claimed a genetic superior- 
ity for the  Aryan race  of German-speaking peoples; and promised a new Germanic empire, 
the Third Reich.His fascist regime also withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933 and, 
in a blatant violation of the Versailles treaty, dramatically boosted Germany s military budget. 
Another, less powerful fascist government, headed by Benito Mussolini, had come to 
power in Italy during the 1920s. As Mussolini introduced authoritarian controls over 
Italy s domestic life, he launched his own military buildup and prepared for territorial 
expansion. Mussolini talked of making the Mediterranean an Italian-dominated sea. Build- 
ing on earlier moves against Albania and Libya, Mussolini sent his armies, in 1935, into 
Ethiopia. After a brief and bloody conflict, Mussolini converted this previously indepen- 
dent African kingdom into an Italian colony and, then, began forging close ties with 
Hitler s regime in Germany. 
U.S. Neutrality 
In the United States, memories of involvement in the First World War helped justify efforts 
to isolate the nation from the foreign troubles of the 1930s. Antiwar books and movies, 
such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1931), implicitly portrayed President Woodrow Wil- 
son s earlier call for making  the world safe for democracy  (see chapter 23) as part of a cyn- 
ical power game directed by business and governmental elites. Appeals to noble ideals 
merely allowed corrupt power brokers to turn young soldiers into cannon fodder. During 
the mid-1930s, a U.S. Senate committee headed by Republican Gerald P. Nye of North 
Dakota elaborated on this view of recent history. After well-publicized hearings, the Nye 
Committee charged that bankers and munitions makers, in search of profits, had conspired 
with their counterparts in Britain and France to maneuver the United States into the First 
World War. An influential group of historians, endorsing different variations of this cri- 
tique, charged Wilson with having ignored the U.S. national interest when plunging his 
nation into the war in 1915. Twenty years later, popular opinion polls suggested over- 
whelming opposition to a similar U.S. involvement in the foreign conflicts of the 1930s. 
The U.S. Congress backed this stance with a series of Neutrality Acts. These mea- 
sures aimed at keeping the United States free from the kind of entangling financial rela- 
tionships that had supposedly pulled it into the First World War. Neutrality lawspassed in 
1935and 1936 established an embargo on arms sales to belligerent nations, prohibited 
U.S. loansto any country at war, and curtailed travel by U.S. citizens on vessels belong- 
ing to any warring power. The  cash-and-carry provision in the Neutrality Act of 1937 
extended the earlier arms embargo to include any foreign trade with belligerents. It did 
allow nations at war to continue buying products in the United States if they paid in hard 
cash and transported goods away in their own ships, rather than on U.S. ships. 
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Critics of this neutrality legislation charged that foreswearing U.S. intervention actively 
aided expansionist powers such as Nazi Germany. In March 1936, Hitler s forces entered the 
Rhineland, an area of Germany from which the 1919 peace settlement had barred military 
installations. A few months later, Hitler and Mussolini began assisting General Francisco 
Franco, a fellow fascist seeking the overthrow of Spain s fragile Republic and the restora- 
tion of a monarchy closely tied to the Catholic Church and the Spanish military. Franco s 
opponents, including that nation s communist movement, appealed to nonfascist nations 
for assistance. Only the communist Soviet Union responded. 
Fearing conflict in Spain could flare into a wider war, the governments of Britain, 
France, and the United States refused to become involved. The U.S. Congress extended its 
arms embargo to include civil wars, a move that blocked the Spanish Republic from obtain- 
ing weaponry in the United States and implicitly benefited General Franco s already well- 
armed fascist forces. As with the other pieces of neutrality legislation, President Roosevelt, 
who was personally sympathetic to more interventionist policies, signed this measure. 
The Spanish Civil War, however, helped sharpen foreign policy debate in the United 
States. Conservative groups generally hailed General Franco as a staunch anticommunist 
who would promote social stability and religious values in Spain. In contrast, the political 
left saw the Spanish Republic being sacrificed to a fascist movement that threatened to 
spread repression all across Europe. Cadres of Americans, including members of an 
 AbrahamLincoln Brigade,  crossed the Atlantic to fight alongside the anti-Franco forces 
in Spain. U.S. peace groups, which had generally presented a united front during the 
1920s, differed over how best to avoid a wider war. Some advocated neutrality and isola- 
tion, but others argued that the threat of fascismnow demanded a turn toward interven- 
tionism, beginning in Spain. 
Roosevelt s administration did tilt in an interventionist direction, more overtly than 
before. Seeking to influence domestic debate, Roosevelt called for international coopera- 
tion against expansionist nations. In his controversial  Quarantine the Aggressors  Speech 
of October 1937, the president suggested the possibility of Congress modifying earlier 
neutrality measures. Still suspicious of foreign entanglements, a majority of legislators 
refused to budge, even if this meant a victory by Franco in Spain s civil war. 
The Mounting Crisis 
As Americans were weighing policies of maintaining strict neutrality against ones of oppos- 
ing aggression overseas, expansionist forces in Japan seized the initiative. During the sum- 
mer of 1937, after an exchange of gunfire between Japanese and Chinese troops at the 
Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, Japanese armies mounted a full scale invasion of China. 
Japan s forces captured Shanghai, Nanjing, Shandong, and Beijing. Japan demanded that 
China accept economic and political direction from Tokyo. As the Nationalist Chinese 
government of Jiang Jieshi (formally spelled Chiang Kai-sheck) struggled to survive, Japan 
unveiled ambitious plans for an East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, a self-sufficient eco- 
nomic zone under Japanese leadership. 
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This expansionist vision, which Japan promised would liberate Asian nations from 
Western colonialism, worried the Roosevelt administration and heightened tensions 
between the United States and Japan. In late 1937, Japanese planes sank the Panay, a U.S. 
gunboat, as it was evacuating Americans from Nanjing. Japan s quick apology and promise 
to pay for damages defused a potential crisis. Still, the Panay incident and Japan s brutal- 
ity in Nanjing, which took the lives of perhaps 300,000 Chinese civilians, further fueled 
interventionist efforts in the United States. President Roosevelt began consulting, secretly, 
with British leaders about how to respond to the threat of war in Asia, where Britain still 
held valuable colonies. In May 1938, FDR publicly announced a program of naval rear- 
mament that went beyond treaty limits that Japan had already violated. 
Meanwhile, in Europe, Germany continued on the march. In March 1938, Hitler used 
the threat of military action to engineer the annexation of Austria, a neighboring nation, 
into the Third Reich, and he soon suggested a similar plan for the Sudetenland, a portion 
of Czechoslovakia inhabited by 3.5 million people of German descent. French and British 
leaders, still hoping to avoid war, met with Hitler in Munich in September 1938. Without 
consulting the leaders of Czechoslovakia or those of the neighboring Soviet Union, they 
acquiesced to Germany s power play in the Sudetenland. In return, Hitler pledged to seek 
no more territory. Hailed by Britain s prime minister as a guarantee of  peace in our time,  
the arrangement soon became a symbol of what interventionists called the  appeasement  
of aggression. 
Any hope that the Munich Conference would guarantee peace faded quickly. In March 
1939, German troops marched into the Czechoslovakian capital of Prague; within a few 
months, Hitler announced the annexation of the rest of Czechoslovakia. Then, in an August 
1939 surprise, he protected his eastern flank by signing a nonaggression pact with the 
Soviet Union, supposedly his sworn enemy. In a secret protocol, Hitler and Soviet leader 
JosephStalinagreed on a plan to divide up Poland, Hitler s next target, and the Baltic 
States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), which were long coveted by the Soviet Union. 
The Outbreak of War in Europe 
When Hitler s armies stormed onto Polish soil on September 1, 1939, the Second World 
War officially began. Britain and France, the Allies, already pledged to defend the Polish 
government, declared war against Germany but could not mobilize in time to help Poland. 
Within weeks, Germany s war machine overran that nation. Then, as a brutal campaign of 
Nazi repression wracked Poland, an eerie calm which observers called a sitzkrieg, or  sit- 
ting war  settled over the rest of Europe during the winter of 1939 40. 
Suddenly, in April 1940, a full-scale Germanblitzkrieg, or  lightning war,  began. 
Employing massed tank formations, motorized infantry and artillery, and massive air sup- 
port, German military forces moved swiftly. They raced through Denmark, Norway, the 
Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and into France. The speed of the Nazi advance 
shocked Allied strategists in Paris and London. Britain dramatically evacuated its troops, 
but not their valuable equipment, from the French coastal town of Dunkirk, just before it 
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fell to a German onslaught. Early in June, Italy joined Germany and declared war on the 
Allies. Later in June, German troops marched into Paris. 
Hitler declared France s western and northern regions to be occupied German territory 
and installed a pro-Nazi French government at Vichy in southern France. In an act of pow- 
erful symbolism, he staged France s formal surrender in the same railway car in which Ger- 
many had capitulated to France at the end of the First World War. General Charles 
DeGaulle, seeking safety in London, countered by proclaiming France Libre (Free France), an 
anti-Nazi government pledged to end the German occupation and topple the Vichy regime. 
After only six weeks of combat, Hitler s military juggernaut gave Nazi Germany control 
of Europe s Atlantic coastline. Germany s sway extended from the North Sea south to 
Spain, where Franco s fascist government remained officially neutral but effectively in the 
camp of Germany and Italy, which after announcing their own formal alliance, became the 
Axis Powers. The Axis gained another member, in September 1940, when Japan joined 
them in signing the Tripartite Pact. Britain now loomed directly in Hitler s gun sights. 
The U.S. Response to War in Europe 
Meanwhile, alarmed at the Nazi surge, President Roosevelt pressured Congress to modify 
its neutrality legislation and called for other  measures short of war  to help Britain and 
France. Late in 1939, Congress lifted the ban on selling military armaments to belligerents 
and authorized arms sales to all buyers who could pay cash and use their own ships for 
transport. Because its naval forces dominated the Atlantic sea lanes, Britain primarily ben- 
efited from this revised cash-and-carry policy. 
The United States took other steps toward intervention. Congress granted the White 
House s request for new military funding and for enactment of the Selective Training and 
Service Act of 1940, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Worried about Britain s pre- 
carious military and financial position, Roosevelt facilitated the shipment of military sup- 
plies, sometimes claimed to be  surplus,  to Great Britain. He also added two distin- 
guished, pro-interventionist Republicans to what now seemed a war cabinet. Henry 
Stimson became secretary of war and Frank Knox secretary of the navy. These appoint- 
ments gave Roosevelt s foreign policy a bipartisan image, if not fully bipartisan support. 
Hitler focused his attention on the British Isles. From August through October 1940, 
Germany sair force, the Luftwaffe, conducted daily raids on Britain s air bases and nearly 
knocked out its Royal Air Force (RAF). On the verge of a kayo, however, Hitler suddenly 
changed strategy and ordered, instead, the bombing of London and other British cities first 
by day and, then, by night. In addition to allowing the RAF time to recover, Hitler s move 
steeled Britain s resolve and bolstered the interventionist argument in the United States. 
Use of German airpower against British civilians, in what became known as  the Battle of 
Britain,  aroused sympathy in the United States for their plight. U.S. radio correspondents 
began reporting, nightly, during Nazi bombing raids. The dramatic radio broadcasts of 
CBS s Edward R. Murrow, observed the writer Archibald MacLeish,  skillfully burned the 
city of London in our homes, and we felt the flames.  
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The Roosevelt administration, in turn, inched closer to intervention. In September 1940, 
it announced the transfer of 50 naval destroyers, from the era of World War I, to the British 
navy. In exchange, Britain granted the United States the right to build eight naval bases in its 
colonial territories in the Western Hemisphere. This  Destroyers-for-Bases  deal infuriated 
Roosevelt s opponents. Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana mailed out, at governmental 
expense, more than a million anti-interventionist postcards, a move that Secretary of War 
Stimson condemned as approaching  very near the line of subversion . . . if not treason.  
The Road to War: Aggression and Response  " 969 
Germany demands annexation of 
Sudetenland, September 1938 
Western Soviet Union and 
Eastern Europe occupied, 
1941 1942 
Germany effects Anschluss 
with Austria, March 1938 
Czechoslovakia seized, 
August 1939 
Poland invaded, 
September 1939. 
World War II begins 
Denmark and Norway 
occupied, April 1940 
Belgium, the Netherlands 
occupied, May 1940 
Allied evacuation from 
Dunkirk, May 1940 
German submarine attacks 
in North Atlantic 
Battle of Britain 
Fall, 1940 
France surrenders, June 1940, 
and Vichy government 
installed, June 1940 
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Neutral nations 
Axis Powers, Germany 
and Italy, 1938 
Axis satellites and areas 
brought under Axis control 
Areas controlled by Allies, 
as of November 1942 
German advance up to 
December 1941 
German advance up to 
November 1942 
Map 26.1 German Expansion at Its Height This map shows the expansion of German power from 1938 through 1942. 
Which countries fell to German control? Why might Americans have differed over whether these moves by Germany represented a 
strategic threat to the United States? 
11019_26_ch26_p0963-1008.qxd  6/4/07  3:26 PM  Page 969
After deciding to seek an unprecedented third term as president in 1940, however, 
Roosevelt seemed to shift course. He certainly began to speak more circumspectly, dis- 
honestly according to his critics, about intervention. With his New Deal domestic pro- 
grams fading from view and his foreign policy controversial, he appeared likely to face a 
strong Republican challenge. The GOP, turning away from candidates opposed to inter- 
ventionism, nominated Wendell Willkie, a lawyer and business executive with solidly pro- 
Allied and internationalist leanings, to oppose FDR. While generally supporting Roo- 
sevelt s policy toward the Allies, this former Democrat also charged that the president 
would soon carry the United States directly into battle. In response, Roosevelt courted 
anti-interventionist votes by assuring  American mothers  that  your boys are not going to 
be sent into any foreign wars.  Although the Republicans did better than they had done in 
1936, Roosevelt rather easily defeated Willkie, gaining nearly 55 percent of the popular 
vote, and FDR s Democratic Party retained control of Congress. Once safely reelected, 
Rooseveltunveiled an ambitious plan to support Britain s war effort. 
The president s moves continued to generate significant opposition. The America First 
Committee, organized by the head of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, intensified its cru- 
sade against intervention. The aviator-hero Charles A. Lindbergh, its most famous mem- 
ber, flew to mass rallies, all across the country, and joined anti-Roosevelt politicians, such 
as Senators Wheeler and Nye, in denouncing aid to the Allies. 
Interventionists came to label all of their opponents as  isolationists,  a single, deroga- 
tory term that obscures the diversity within the uneasy coalition opposed to U.S. engage- 
ment in the Second World War. Pacifists within this broad constituency opposed all wars, 
even those against fascist regimes, as immoral and mutually destructive. Some political pro- 
gressives such as Senator Wheeler condemned fascism but feared that U.S. entry into war 
would lead to centralization of governmental power at home. Other anti-interventionists, 
such as Lindbergh, praised the fascist states as bulwarks against communism, and some 
even covertly shared Hitler s anti-Semitism. Avowedly anti-Semitic and pro-fascist organi- 
zations, such as the German-American Bund, openly defended Hitler s racial policies and 
denounced the  Jew Deal,  a reference to the presence of Jewish advisers in President 
Roosevelt s inner circle. During the fall of 1941, a special subcommittee of the U.S. Senate 
began  Propaganda Hearings  into whether or not the Hollywood film industry, with its 
many Jewish producers, calculatedly made movies, such as Confessions of a Nazi Spy(1939), 
which promoted interventionism. 
The opposition to aiding the Allies, then, did tap anti-Semitic sentiment in the United 
States. In 1939, congressional leaders had quashed the Wagner-Rogers bill, which would 
have boosted immigration quotas to admit 20,000 Jewish children into the United States. 
Seemingly bowing to anti-Semitic prejudices, the United States adopted a restrictive 
refugee policy. The consequences of the U.S. stance became especially grave after June 1941, 
when Hitler established the death camps that would systematically exterminate millionsof 
Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and anyone else whom the Nazis deemed unfit for life in the 
Third Reich and its occupied territories. 
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Meanwhile, those who favored assisting the Allied cause mounted a popular campaign of 
their own. The most prominent group, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the 
Allies, headed by William Allen White, a well-known Republican journalist, organized more 
than 300 local chapters in just a few weeks during the spring of 1940. These organizations, 
much like their opponents, gathered a diverse constituency. Interventionists agreed, how- 
ever, that a fascist-dominated Europe would soon threaten the security and safety of the 
United States. Isolationists claimed to stand for  America First,  according to a pro-interven- 
tionist folk song, but ignored the likelihood that the fascists already saw  America next.  
The Road to War: Aggression and Response  " 971 
The Fight Against Interventionism The movement to keep the United States out of the Second World War mobilized 
powerful personalities, impassioned rhetoric, and colorful imagery. This emblem, for example, invokes nationalistic and 
patriotic imagery in the cause of avoiding, rather than engaging in, war. 
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An  Arsenal of Democracy  
Franklin Roosevelt now vigorously pressed the case for stronger anti-Axis measures. Rec- 
ognizing the sorry state of Britain s finances, the president proposed that the United States 
would now  lend-lease,  or loan rather than sell, munitions to the Allies. Making the 
United States a  great arsenal of democracy,  FDR claimed, would  keep war away from 
our country and our people.  Debate over a Lend-Lease Actbecame bitter, and a divided 
Congress narrowly passed this controversial measure, which carried the patriotic-sounding 
title of  House Resolution 1776,  on March 11, 1941. Several months later, when Germany 
turned its attention away from Britain and suddenly attacked the Soviet Union, its recent 
ally, in violation of the 1939 nonaggression pact, Roosevelt extended lend-lease assistance 
to Joseph Stalin s communist government. 
While proclaiming an official U.S. policy of nonbelligerence, Roosevelt next began 
coordinating his military strategy with that of Britain. He secretly pledged to follow a 
Europe-first approach if the United States ever found itself fighting a two-front war against 
Germany and Japan, its Axis partner in Asia. Publicly, Roosevelt deployed U.S. Marines to 
Greenland and Iceland, a move that freed up the British forces that had been protecting 
these strategic Danish possessions following Germany s 1940 conquest of Denmark. 
In August 1941, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Britain s Prime Minister, met on a 
ship off the coast of Canada. They worked toward formalizing a wartime alliance and con- 
cluded their meeting by issuing an  Atlantic Charter,  which disavowed territorial expan- 
sion, endorsed protection of human rights and self-determination, and pledged the post- 
war creation of a new world organization that would ensure  general security.  Roosevelt 
also agreed to Churchill s request that the U.S. Navy provide convoys, as far as Iceland, to 
the ships that were carrying lend-lease supplies to Britain. Soon, in an undeclared war in 
the North Atlantic, the U.S. Navy engaged Germany s formidable  wolf packs, groups of 
submarines that preyed on Allied shipping. 
The White House now firmly believed that defeating Hitler would require formal U.S. 
entry into the war, but it lacked domestic support for making this move. Privately, the 
president likely hoped Germany would commit some provocative act in the North Atlantic 
that would swing U.S. popular opinion decisively behind intervention. The October 1941 
sinking of a U.S. destroyer, the Reuben James, did convince a majority in Congress to back 
Roosevelt s calls for repealing the neutrality legislation of the 1930s. Still, the tone of 
debate became so bitter and the margin favoring repeal so slim that the White House 
acknowledged Congress would still not pass a formal declaration of war. 
Hitler s military strategy in Europe only complicated Roosevelt s course. While 
avoiding a repetition of the Reuben James episode in the North Atlantic, Germany 
focused its military energies on the Soviet Union, the communist-led nation for which 
most Americans felt far less empathy than they did for Great Britain. As it turned out, 
however, conflict with Japan, rather than with Germany, would bring the United States 
formally into the Second World War. 
972  "CHAPTER 26  "America during the Second World War 
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Pearl Harbor 
Relations between Japan and the United States had steadily worsened during the late 
1930s and early 1940s. In response to Japan s 1937 invasion of China, the United States 
extended economic credits to the beleaguered Nationalist Chinese government and cur- 
tailed sales of equipment to Japan. In 1939, the United States abrogated its Treaty of Com- 
merce and Navigation with Japan, an action that meant further restrictions on U.S. exports 
to that island nation. A 1940 ban on the sale of aviation fuel and high-grade scrap iron 
aimed at slowing military advances by Japan throughout much of Southeast Asia. 
Measures of this kind failed to halt Japanese expansion, now aided by the conflict then 
engulfing Europe. The European war prevented France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain 
from supporting their colonies in Asia, and militarists in Japan saw an opportunity to enlarge 
their own East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Japanese forces thus pushed deep into French 
Indochina, seeking the raw materials Japan could no longer buy from the United States. Mil- 
itary planners in Tokyo also secretly prepared plans for attacks against Singapore, the 
Netherlands East Indies (later Indonesia), and the Philippines, a U.S. colonial possession. 
Roosevelt continued to maneuver. He expanded the trade embargo against Japan, 
promised further assistance to Nationalist China, and accelerated an ongoing U.S. military 
buildup in the Pacific. In mid-1941, the president played his most potent diplomatic card: 
He froze all Japanese financial assets held in the United States. This move effectively gave 
the Roosevelt administration control over all commerce between the two countries, includ- 
ing trade in petroleum, the vital commodity that fueled Japan s economy and its dreams 
for expansionism. 
Japanese expansionists now squarely faced a fateful decision. Despite diminishing eco- 
nomic and military prospects, they refused to abandon their goal of creating an East Asian 
empire. Instead, they began planning a preemptive attack against the United States. In 
light of their nation s limited supplies of raw materials, especially oil, Japanese strategists 
saw little hope for winning a prolonged war but imagined that a crippling, surprise 
blow might limit U.S. military capabilities and even bring economic concessions from 
Washington. General Hideki Tojo, who became his nation s wartime prime minister, 
viewed Japanese strategy as something of a rash gamble:  Sometimes a man has to jump 
with his eyes closed,  Tojo remarked. 
On December 7, 1941, Japanese bombers swooped down on U.S. naval facilities at Pearl 
Harbor, in Hawaii. Specially modified to operate from aircraft carriers, the planes destroyed 
much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Altogether, Japan sank or severely damaged 19 ships; destroyed 
or disabled nearly 200 aircraft; and killed more than 2,200 Americans. The damage might 
have been worse. U.S. aircraft carriers, which were out to sea at the time of the attack, avoided 
the Japanese bombers, which also failed to take out Pearl Harbor s fuel storage tanks and 
repair facilities. 
Japan s assault against Pearl Harbor brought the United States into war rather than bring- 
ing it to terms. In a dramatic message to Congress, broadcast over radio, on December 8, 
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Roosevelt decried the attack. Coining the phrase that would serve as a U.S. battle cry 
throughout the war, he called December 7  a date which will live in infamy.  
Pearl Harbor would also live on in historical debates. Roosevelt s most implacable crit- 
ics quickly began asking, for example, why much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor 
lay vulnerable and unprepared, rather than on a state of full alert. Could Roosevelt and 
his advisers really have been unaware of an impending attack? U.S. intelligence, it would 
later be revealed, had broken Japan s secret diplomatic code calling the decrypted mes- 
sages  MAGIC  and enjoyed some insight into Japanese intentions. Other critics came 
to charge FDR with adopting a series of calculated policies that were designed to pro- 
voke Japan. Deliberately inciting a Japanese attack, in this view, provided Roosevelt with 
a way of opening a  back door  through which the United States could enter the Second 
World War. 
Most historians, however, view the Roosevelt administration as more unlucky and 
confused than duplicitous and devious. Its plan for deterring Japanese expansion by 
increasing U.S. naval forces in the Pacific and stationing bombers in the Philippines, 
within striking distance of Japan, simply failed to work. U.S. intelligence, based on inter- 
cepted messages and visual sightings, did expect a major military move from Japan in late 
1941, but one toward Singapore or other British or Dutch possessions in Asia rather than 
at Pearl Harbor. Moreover, strategists in Washington, including the president, doubted 
that Japan s military planners had the skill or daring that an attack on Pearl Harbor 
entailed. 
Pearl Harbor disarmed the noninterventionist movement and brought the United 
States, officially, into the Second World War. On December 8, 1941, Congress declared 
war against Japan. Representative Jeanette Rankin, a longtime peace activist from Mon- 
tana who had voted against entry into the First World War, now stood as a lone dissenter. 
Nothing in the Tripartite Pact specifically required Hitler, unaware of Japan s plans for 
Pearl Harbor, to support his Axis ally. Roosevelt s  date of infamy  speech never even 
mentioned Germany, but a presidential radio address, delivered a day later, bluntly 
accused all three Axis Powers of hatching a coordinated plan to attack the United States. 
Two days later, on December 11, Germany (soon joined by Italy) did declare war on the 
United States. Hitler mistakenly assumed that fighting Japan would keep the United States 
preoccupied in the Pacific and, therefore, out of any major combat operations across the 
Atlantic Ocean. Axis strategists drastically underestimated the United States s ability to 
mobilize swiftly and effectively. 
Fighting the War in Europe 
974  "CHAPTER 26  "America during the Second World War 
Focus Question 
What military strategies did the United States and the Allies ultimately adopt when 
fighting in both the European and Asian theaters of the Second World War? 
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Initially, the war went badly for the Allies. Even as Hitler tried to consolidate his grip over 
Western Europe, his forces were rolling across North Africa, and his submarines were 
slashing away at Allied supply lines in the Atlantic Ocean. During the months that fol- 
lowed Pearl Harbor, German U-boats, according to U.S. General George Marshall, came to 
 threaten our entire war effort.  U.S. officials concealed the actual toll, but German subs 
operating in Atlantic waters, sometimes within sight of the U.S. shoreline, sank nearly 400 
ships in less than six months. In the Pacific, Japan seemed unstoppable. Its forces overran 
Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines; then, Japan moved against the British 
in Burma and the Australians in New Guinea. 
New governmental bureaucracies quickly guided a crash program for U.S. mobiliza- 
tion. Establishing military priorities acquiring naval bases, securing landing rights for 
aircraft, ensuring points for radio transmission, and gaining access to raw materials for mil- 
itary production became the immediate order of business. Soon thereafter, a series of 
governmental agencies, often staffed by people from the business world, began to direct 
economic decision making. 
At the same time, a newly formed Joint Chiefs of Staff, consisting of representatives from 
each of the armed services, oversaw military matters. In January 1943, after 16 months of 
around-the-clock work, builders completed the War Department s Pentagon complex, a 
giant five-story, five-sided building that symbolized the nation s new military might and 
the new place of the military in American life. Technological breakthroughs assisted the U.S. 
military effort. In 1942, aircraft equipped with radar, a critical new technology developed in 
collaboration with Britain, proved effective against submarines. During 1943, Germany s U- 
boat threat faded  from menace to problem,  in the words of one U.S. naval strategist. 
A highly sophisticated Allied code-breaking operation also played a crucial role in chang- 
ing the course of battle. Realizing the importance of radio communication to his war plans, 
Hitler s scientists had integrated the complex ENIGMA encryption machine, first introduced 
during the 1920s, into Germany s war effort. Experts initially considered Germany s 
ENIGMA messages immune to code-breaking efforts. The cipher keys changed daily and 
offered 150 million million million ways of encoding any message. Then a group of Polish 
mathematicians, who had escaped just before German armies subdued their country, 
brought key ideas for decoding ENIGMA s secrets to Britain. Their insights contributed to 
a successful and super-secret Allied code-breaking program headquartered at Bletchley Park 
in England. At its height, the Bletchley Park endeavor, not officially acknowledged until 
1974, employed 4,000 people, including many from the United States. 
The Allied code-breakers gradually perfected their operation. Decrypted German mes- 
sages, called  ULTRA  for  ultra-secret,  gave the Allies a crucial military advantage, 
beginning with the Battle of Britain and Germany s campaigns in North Africa. Amazingly, 
Germancommanders never discovered how many of their intercepted and decoded radio 
communications reached Allied commanders sometimes even before making their way 
to their intended German recipients. In the postwar world, the code-breaking operation at 
Bletchley Park would contribute to the development of computer technology. 
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Campaigns in North Africa and Italy 
The Allied Powers continually clashed over military strategy. Although other nations, such 
as China, joined the Allied ranks, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union 
dominated. These three nations agreed on making Europe the primary focus of their efforts, 
and Roosevelt and his military strategists established a unified command with their British 
counterparts. The Soviet Union s Stalin, his armies facing the bulk of Germany s forces in 
Eastern Europe, called for a second front in Western Europe, created by an invasion across 
the English Channel into France, to relieve pressure on the USSR. Many of Roosevelt s 
advisers agreed: If German troops succeeded in knocking the Soviet Union out of the war, 
Hitler could turn his full attention toward Britain. Churchill, however, urged instead the 
invasion of North Africa, garrisoned by German forces and officially under the colonial con- 
trol of Vichy France, as a way of first nibbling away at the edges of Nazi power and at 
areas he considered vital to maintaining Britain s colonial interests in the Mediterranean. 
A North African campaign against German forces, code-named TORCH, began with 
Anglo-American landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942. Under the com- 
mand of U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the initial invasion force included 400 
ships, 1,000 planes, and more than 100,000 troops. To ease his way, Eisenhower signed 
an armistice agreement with Admiral Jean Darlan, a Nazi sympathizer and the person offi- 
cially in charge of Vichy France s colonies in North Africa. This arrangement, which 
allowed Darlan and his colleagues to retain their political positions, outraged Eisenhower s 
Free-French allies, notably General Charles De Gaulle, and many people in the United 
States. When Darlan s opponents assassinated him, shortly after the beginning of TORCH, 
one of Eisenhower s aides called it an  act of providence.  Even as TORCH, aided by the 
ULTRA intercepts, moved forward, Free French leaders, particularly De Gaulle, continued 
to nurture their resentments against their U.S. Allies. 
At a meeting in Casablanca, Morocco, in January 1943, Roosevelt sided with Churchill. 
Arguing that a cross-Channel invasion of France still seemed too risky, they succeeded in 
postponing it to some indefinite future. Roosevelt hoped clear-cut Allied victories, in 
advance of any Channel crossing, could bolster his own sagging political popularity in the 
United States. To assuage Stalin s fear that Britain and the United States might sign a sep- 
arate peace with Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill promised to remain at war until Germany 
agreed to an  unconditional surrender.  Continuing disagreement over the timing for 
opening the Second Front in France, however, still strained relations among the Allies. 
Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, Joseph Stalin s Red Army slowly turned the tide of bat- 
tle with a decisive victory after more than five months of bloody warfare in and around the 
Soviet city of Stalingrad. Abandoning a largely defensive response to Hitler s offensive dur- 
ing the late summer of 1942, Stalin s forces finally counterattacked in early 1943. They cut 
off and, then, ground down an entire German army, more than 1 million soldiers, at Stal- 
ingrad, and sent other German forces reeling backward for the first time during the war. 
Stalin s Allies could soon claim victories of their own. Although Hitler poured rein- 
forcements into North Africa, he failed to stop either TORCH or a drive westward from 
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Egypt by British forces. Caught in between, nearly 200,000 Axis troops in North Africa 
surrendered to the Allies during the spring of 1943. Later that summer, the Allies followed 
up the North African campaign by overrunning the island of Sicily and then fighting their 
way, slowly, northward through Italy s rugged mountains. Allied successes did boost civil- 
ian morale in the United States and Britain, but the Italian campaign also diverted badly 
needed resources away from the upcoming cross-Channel invasion, without loosening the 
Nazi stranglehold over Western Europe. 
Some U.S. officials increasingly worried about the postwar implications of the Roosevelt- 
Churchill strategy. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, for example, warned that the Allied cam- 
paigns through Africa and Italy might leave the Soviet Union as the dominant power in most 
of Europe. Unless the United States soon directly confronted German might, he colorfully 
argued, Germany could be left holding  the leg for Stalin to skin the deer,  making  danger- 
ous business for us at the end of the war.  Finally heeding such advice, Roosevelt agreed to 
establish a firm date for the cross-Channel invasion the Allies had so long promised Stalin. 
Operation OVERLORD 
Named Operation OVERLORD and directed by General Dwight Eisenhower, the invasion 
began on June 6, 1944, D-day. During the preceding months, Allied commanders assem- 
bled, in England, one of the largest invasion forces in world history. German officials obvi- 
ously knew about these preparations, but a disinformation campaign and diversionary tac- 
tics fooled them into expecting the Allied landing would come at the narrowest part of the 
English Channel rather than in the Normandy region of France. A new code-breaking 
machine, which dramatically increased the number of ULTRA intercepts, allowed Allied 
intelligence officers to confirm that their deceptions had worked. 
After several delays, because of inhospitable weather, Allied commanders executed 
their daring plan. As naval gunner crews pounded the Normandy shore, three divisions of 
paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines and disrupted German communications. 
Finally, at dawn on June 6, more than 4,000 Allied ships began landing troops and sup- 
plies. The first U.S. forces to come ashore at Omaha Beach met especially heavy German 
fire and took enormous casualties, but waves of invading troops continued to land. Only 
three weeks after D-day, more than a million Allied personnel controlled the French coast, 
clearing the way for the long-awaited second front. (See Map 26.2, Allied Advances and 
Collapse of German Power, in the color insert following page 1056.) 
Just as the 1943 Battle of Stalingrad had reversed the course of the war in the East, 
OVERLORD changed the momentum in the West. Within three months, U.S., British, and 
Free French troops entered Paris. After repulsing a desperate German counteroffensive in 
Belgium, at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and January 1945, forces under 
Eisenhower s command swept eastward, crossed the Rhine River, and prepared to head 
toward Berlin to meet up with westward-advancing Soviet troops. 
The Allies, not surprisingly, disagreed on how to orchestrate Germany s final defeat. 
British strategists urged a rapid advance, in hopes of meeting up with Stalin s troops in 
Fighting the War in Europe  " 977 
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Berlin or even farther to the east of that city. General Eisenhower dissented. He favored a 
strategy that would produce fewer casualties among his troops and might assuage the sus- 
picious Soviets about the postwar intentions of their western Allies. Doubtful that his 
troops could beat the Soviets into Berlin anyway, Eisenhower decided that any attempt to 
race to Berlin would undermine chances for postwar cooperation between the United 
States and the Soviet Union. 
Eisenhower s view prevailed. He moved his troops cautiously along a broad front and, 
then, halted them at the Elbe River, west of Berlin. This guaranteed that Soviet troops, who 
took staggering casualties while approaching Berlin, would enter the German capital first. 
Although Hitler took his own life in order to avoid capture, the majority of Germany s Nazi 
elite and its wartime leadership did fall into Allied hands. 
As the war in Europe drew to a close, the horrors perpetrated by the leaders of the 
Third Reich became fully visible. Hitler s murderous campaign of extermination, now 
called the Holocaust, took the lives of more than 5 million Jews, roughly half of Europe s 
prewar population of 10 million. The Nazis also murdered hundreds of thousands of other 
people, including gypsies, homosexuals, intellectuals, communists, the physically and 
mentally challenged, and people from various other identity groups. Only Germany s defeat 
closed down Hitler s death camps, but the Allies might have saved at least some people if 
they had helped them escape and emigrate. Allied leaders, however, worried about how to 
deal with large numbers of refugees and claimed they could not spare scarce ships to trans- 
port people to sanctuary. In 1943, after officials in Romania proposed the evacuation of 
70,000 endangered Jews from its territory, for instance, the Allies never seriously consid- 
ered accepting the offer. With few places to go, people who might have been spared went 
off to Nazi death camps. 
The attempt to respond to Nazi atrocities continued for years. In 1945 and 1946, the 
Allies first brought 24 of Germany s top officials to trial at Nuremberg for  crimes against 
humanity.  After a series of subsequent trials, more than 10,000 former German officials 
stood convicted of war crimes. Large quantities of money, gold, and jewelry that Nazi lead- 
ers had stolen from victims of the Holocaust and deposited in Swiss banks, however, 
remained concealed for more than 50 years. Not until 1997 did groups representing Holo- 
caust survivors and the U.S. government force an investigation of the Swiss banking indus- 
try s holdings of stolen  Nazi gold,  an inquiry that finally prompted some restitution for 
the families who had been victimized. 
Meanwhile, following Hitler s suicide in April and Germany s final surrender on May 8, 
1945, the military foundations for a postwar European settlement fell into place. Soviet 
armies controlled Eastern Europe; British and U.S. forces predominated in Italy and the 
rest of the Mediterranean; the four European Allies divided up zones of occupation in 
Germany and Austria. Allied leaders also turned to the task of transforming these military- 
produced arrangements into a comprehensive postwar political settlement in Europe, 
even as the war in the Pacific, which had officially begun at Pearl Harbor, remained far from 
over. 
978  "CHAPTER 26  "America during the Second World War 
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The Pacific Theater 
For six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan s forces steadily advanced. Singapore fell easily. 
Japan overwhelmed U.S. naval garrisons in the Philippines and on Guam and Wake 
islands. After taking heavy casualties, Filipino and U.S ground troops surrendered at 
Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines. After a much larger Japanese fleet ravaged a U.S 
naval contingent in the Java Sea, Japan s naval forces headed southward to menace Australia 
and New Zealand and eastward to threaten Hawaii. 
Seizing the Offensive in the Pacific 
As the United States rapidly built up its combat capabilities, military strategists adopted, 
of necessity, a largely defensive strategy. Then, in May 1942, the first U.S. naval victory, 
at the Battle of the Coral Sea, relieved some of the Japanese pressure on Australia. In 
response, Japanese naval commanders decided to hit back hard. They amassed 200 ships 
and 600 planesto destroy what remained of the U.S. Pacific fleet and to take Midway Island, 
perhaps in preparation for an assault against Hawaii. U.S. Naval Intelligence, however, broke 
enough of the Japanese code to warn Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Surprising the Japanese 
armada, U.S. planes sank four Japanese carriers and destroyed a total of 322 planes. The Bat- 
tle of Midway, in early June 1942, preserved the presence of the U.S. Navy in the mid-Pacific. 
Nimitz s forces did suffer substantial losses at Midway, but the far greater ones that they 
inflicted prevented Japanese commanders from continuing their offensive in the Pacific. 
Two months later, U.S. amphibious forces splashed ashore at Guadalcanal in the 
Solomon Islands and finally ended Japan s threat to Australia. Although bloody engage- 
ments in the Solomons continued for months, on both land and sea, they ultimately 
achieved their major objective: permanently seizing the military initiative in the Pacific. 
According to prewar plans, Europe was to have received the highest priority, but by 1943, 
the United States, now massively rearmed, could devote roughly equal resources to both 
theaters of the war. 
Combat in the Pacific Theater became, in the historian John Dower s phrase, a  war 
without mercy.  Battlefield conditions reinforced racial prejudices, and the brutality 
already evident during Japan s initial assault against China continued. Japanese militarists 
expected the war would confirm the superiority of the divine Yamato race. Japanese cap- 
tors, particularly on the Asian mainland, mistreated prisoners in almost unimaginable 
ways. The Japanese army s infamous  Unit 731  tested bacteriological weapons in China 
and conducted horrifying medical experiments on live subjects. Following the surrender 
of U.S. and Filipino troops in 1942, Japanese commanders, in what became known as the 
 Bataan Death March,  forced their captives to walk, on meager rations of food and water, 
more than 60 miles. 
The United States exhibited its own signs of racially based behavior. Wartime imagery, in 
both the U.S. government publications and in popular culture, often portrayed all Japanese 
people as animalistic subhumans. On the battlefield, U.S. troops could, on occasion, rival 
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their Japanese adversaries in disrespecting enemy dead and in killing opposing forces rather 
than taking prisoners. The longer the war in the Pacific lasted, the more brutal it became. 
China Policy 
U.S. policy makers continued to hope that China s Nationalist government might eventu- 
ally mount an effective military opposition against Japan and emerge, after the war, to lead 
a strong and united nation. Neither hope seemed realistic. 
The United States tried to bolster China s armed forces. General Joseph W. Stillwell, 
who had been advising Chinese commanders on military matters since the Japanese inva- 
sion of the late 1930s, continually clashed with Jiang Jieshi. Friction between the prickly 
 Vinegar Joe  and Jiang eventually prompted Roosevelt, who hoped the Nationalist leader 
could become an important U.S. ally, to withdraw Stillwell from China. Stillwell s depar- 
ture, however, brought no improvement in the performance of Jiang s military forces. 
China s political instability complicated matters. The U.S. officials most attuned to Chinese 
politics agreed with Stillwell: Incompetence and corruption riddled Jiang Jieshi s Nation- 
alist government. It could avoid engaging the Japanese invaders but still make extravagant 
demands for U.S. military assistance. China s ongoing civil war, which Jiang s forces 
seemed to be losing, further worried U.S. officials. A powerful communist movement, led 
by Mao Zedong, clearly fought more effectively than the Nationalist government against 
China s Japanese invaders, but the White House continued to envision Jiang as the future 
leader of a noncommunist China. On this crucial matter, the Nationalist leader s powerful 
backers in the United States, members of the  China Lobby,  successfully pressured FDR 
and other political leaders, particularly those in the Republican Party, to support the 
Nationalist cause. Roosevelt thus insisted that Nationalist China retain its status as a full 
member of the Allied Powers, and he convinced Stalin to support Jiang, rather than his fel- 
low communist Mao. All the while, Japan s advance into Chinese territory continued. 
U.S. Strategy in the Pacific 
In contrast to the European Theater, no unified command guided the war in the Pacific. 
Consequently, makeshift, compromise military decisions actions often emerged. General 
Douglas MacArthur, who commanded U.S. Army forces, insisted on an offensive launched 
from his headquarters in Australia through New Guinea and the Philippines and on to 
Japan. In May 1942, Japan had humbled the haughty and imperious MacArthur by forc- 
ing him out of the Philippines, and he had pledged he would, one day, return in victory. 
He now claimed that controlling the Philippines at war s end would advance U.S. strate- 
gic interests in the postwar world. Admiral Nimitz, the hero of Midway, saw strategic cal- 
culations somewhat differently. He favored a direct advance toward Japan, across the 
smaller islands of the central Pacific. Taking this route meant that the drive against Japan 
would bypass MacArthur s beloved Philippines. 
Unable to decide between the two strategies, the Joint Chiefs of Staff authorized both, 
which moved forward, amidst fierce fighting and heavy casualties. MacArthur s forces took 
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New Guinea, and those commanded by Nimitz liberated the Marshall Islands and the Marianas 
in 1943 and 1944. Supporting these efforts, a Marine platoon of Navajo Indians established a 
unique, highly effective radio communication system. Employing their own language in imag- 
inative coded variations, which Japanese intelligence officers never cracked, the members of 
this Navajo Signal Corpsensured that U.S. troops could securely exchange messages. 
By late 1944, U.S. military forces finally came within range of Japan. The fall of Saipan 
meant that U.S. bombers could easily reach Japanese targets. The capture of the islands of 
Iwo Jima and of Okinawa during spring 1945 further shortened the distance between U.S. 
bases and Japan s major population centers. The battle for Okinawa, however, also con- 
firmed the human costs of the island-hopping strategy: 120,000 Japanese and 48,000 
American soldiers died. After contemplating these numbers, U.S. military planners 
dreaded the prospect of invading Japan s home islands. 
Increasingly, reliance on airpower looked more and more enticing. Key members of the 
U.S. military had long attributed almost magical qualities to aerial bombardment. Some 
had even insisted that the mere threat of bombing could provide a means of deterring war 
as well as a way of conducting it. Careful analyses of strategic bombing during the Second 
World War, though, suggested less sanguine assessments. The Nazi bombardment during 
the Battle of Britain, for example, had inflicted heavy damage but only appeared to 
strengthen civilian morale, while never giving Hitler the quick victory he had expected. 
Subsequent Allied bombing against Germany, including controversial campaigns against 
The Pacific Theater  " 981 
Navajo Signal Corps Sending messages in their native language, which neither the Japanese nor the Germans could 
decipher, Navajo Indians in the Signal Corps made a unique contribution to preserving the secrecy of U.S. intelligence. 
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the civilian populations of Hamburg and Dresden, produced equally mixed results. Even 
as the Allies wreaked havoc on German cities, they endured losses in planes and pilots that 
seemed almost impossible to sustain over any length of time. 
Nonetheless, U.S. strategists continued to see strategic bombing providing the crucial 
U.S. advantage in the Pacific. In February 1944, General Henry Harley ( Hap ) Arnold 
devised a plan for firebombing major Japanese cities  not only because they are greatly 
congested but because they contain numerous war industries.  Bombers added to the hor- 
ror of war, Arnold conceded, but when used  with the proper degree of understanding  
could become  the most humane of all weapons.  President Roosevelt endorsed Arnold s 
air campaign, but it proved difficult to execute from bases in China. 
In time, U.S. military victories opened the way for a more effective and lethal operation, run 
by General Curtis LeMay from Saipan in the Marianas. The blunt-talking LeMay, whom 
Arnold dubbed  the Babe Ruth of bombers,  once summarized his strategy as  bomb and burn 
them until they quit.  According to the official U.S. position, incendiary raids against Japanese 
cities constituted  precision  rather than  area  bombing. In actuality, as LeMay admitted, the 
United States measured the success of a mission by square miles of Japanese territory left 
scorched. According to a later estimate, the number of Japan s civilians who perished as a result 
of these raids exceeded the total of its troops killed in battle. Air attacks on Tokyo during the 
night of March 9 10, 1945, inaugurated the new policy. They leveled nearly one-quarter of 
the city and incinerated more than 100,000 people. (See Map 26.3, Pacific Theater Offen- 
sive Strategy and Final Assault Against Japan, in the color insert following page 1056.) 
Meanwhile, as the war in the Pacific neared its end, a combined sea and air strategy 
emerged. The United States, under the agreement reached at the 1943 Casablanca Confer- 
ence, still sought Japan s  unconditional surrender  by blockading its seaports, bombarding 
its cities from the air, and, perhaps, invading its home islands with U.S. combat units. Crit- 
ics of the policy of unconditional surrender, which most Japanese assumed meant the death 
of their emperor, later suggested that it may have encouraged Japan s government to con- 
tinue fighting, even when defeat seemed inevitable. This same stance also possibly pre- 
vented U.S. negotiators from more vigorously pursuing the peace feelers sent by some 
Japanese leaders. Anything less than unconditional surrender, its proponents counter- 
claimed, would have encouraged continued Japanese resistance. Whatever the case, the 
United States adopted a strategy of achieving total victory through massive destruction. 
A New President, the Atomic Bomb, and Japan s Surrender 
On April 13, 1945, newspaper headlines across the country announced:  PRESIDENT 
ROOSEVELT DEAD.  After more than 13 years in office, an already frail FDR succumbed 
to a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Sorrow and shock spread through the armed forces, 
where many young servicemen and women could effectively remember no other president; 
through diplomatic conference halls, where Roosevelt s personal magnetism had often 
brought unity, if not always clarity; and among his many supporters, for whom Roosevelt 
had symbolized optimism during both economic depression and war. 
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Over the years, Roosevelt also accumulated a host of critics and enemies. His victory over 
Republican Thomas E. Dewey in 1944 rested on the smallest popular-vote margin in a pres- 
idential race since 1912. The GOP, extending gains it had made during the 1942 congres- 
sional elections, cut further into the once-overwhelming Democratic majorities in the Sen- 
ate and House. Politically and physically weakened, Roosevelt fought to retain his dominant 
place in the political spotlight. Unaware of Roosevelt s precarious health, both Republican 
and Democrats assumed FDR would lead the United States into the postwar world. 
Emerging from Roosevelt s shadow, the new president, Harry S Truman, initially 
seemed an unimposing presence. Born on a farm near Independence, Missouri, Truman 
had served in France during the First World War; become a U.S. Senator in 1934; and 
suddenly surfaced as Roosevelt s vice-presidential running mate in 1944. Roosevelt offered 
an upper-class image of well-practiced and worldly charm. The blunt-spoken Truman 
proudly presented himself as a  little man from Missouri.  He also knew little about inter- 
national affairs or about any informal understandings that Roosevelt may have made with 
Churchill and Stalin. During the period between Roosevelt s Fourth Inauguration in March 
1945 and his death in mid-April, Truman met with FDR only three times. 
Only after succeeding Roosevelt did Truman learn about events at Los Alamos, New 
Mexico. There, since the late 1930s, scientists from all across the world had been secretly 
working on a new weapon. Advances in theoretical physics suggested that the process of 
splitting atoms (fission) would release a tremendous amount of energy that could be pack- 
aged as a nuclear bomb. Fearful of Germany s outpacing the United States in this research, 
Albert Einstein, a Jewish refugee from Germany, had successfully implored Roosevelt to 
launch, on the basis of recent atomic knowledge, a crash bomb-building program. The 
government subsequently enlisted top researchers in the Manhattan Project, a huge, secret, 
military-directed operation. On July 16, 1945, the Project tested a workable atomic device 
at Trinity Site, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. 
Truman and his top policy makers, eager to end the war quickly, decided to put the 
new weapon to immediate use. Planners agreed that any ground invasion of Japan s home 
islands would cost far too much in U.S. casualties. In addition, the Soviet Union, in a joint 
decision confirmed at a meeting of the Allies at the Potsdam Conference during the sum- 
mer of 1945, would soon enter the Pacific Theater. Truman hoped to limit any advances 
that Soviet troops might make in the Far East as a way of curtailing Stalin s postwar influ- 
ence there. Winston Churchill called the atomic bomb a  miracle of deliverance and a 
peace giver,  and Truman, who always insisted it had been dropped on primarily military 
targets in Japan, later publicly claimed that he had never lost a night s sleep over its use. 
Privately, he and other U.S. officials admitted to having greater qualms. Certainly, dis- 
agreement marked discussions over where and how to employ the new device. A com- 
mission of atomic scientists recommended a  demonstration  that would impress Japan 
with the bomb s destructive power without producing civilian casualties. General George 
C. Marshall suggested using it on purely military installations or only on manufacturing 
sites, after first warning away Japanese workers. 
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984  "CHAPTER 26  "America during the Second World War 
Total War: Dresden and Hiroshima The effects of  total war  are graphically illustrated in these 
photographs of the devastation of Dresden, Germany (top), by the British Bomber Command and the U.S. 8th 
Air Force on February 13 and 14, 1945, and that of Hiroshima, Japan (bottom), by the U.S. 509th Composite Group 
on August 6, 1945. In the initial attack on Dresden, 786 aircraft dropped 5,824,000 pounds (2,600 long tons) of 
bombs on the city, killing an estimated 60,000 people and injuring another 30,000. An area of more than 2.5 square 
miles in the city center was demolished, and some 37,000 buildings were destroyed. To critics, the bombing of 
Dresden, a target that many argued was of little strategic value, exemplified the excessive use of airpower. 
In sobering comparison, Hiroshima was devastated by one bomb weighing only 10,000 pounds (4.4 long 
tons) an atomic bomb dropped from one aircraft. The single U-235 bomb killed 68,000 people outright, 
injured another 30,000, and left 10,000 missing. (These figures do not include those who later developed diseases 
from deadly gamma rays.) The bomb obliterated almost five square miles of the city s center and destroyed 
40,653 buildings. Truman reported the strike as  an overwhelming success.  Many hailed the atomic bomb as a 
necessary step toward military victory; others worried about the dawn of the  nuclear age.  
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The War at Home: The Economy  " 985 
Securing military victory overseas depended on reviving, and then rapidly expanding, 
the domestic economy of the United States. Prewar production brought the Great 
Depression of the 1930s closer to an end, and wartime conditions quickly completed the 
recovery process. Moreover, innovations in wartime production processes promised to 
transform the nation s economic structure, its corporate and financial institutions, its 
labor force, and, perhaps, even the relationship between the economy and the national 
government. 
Focus Question 
How did mobilizing for war produce political, economic, and social changes in the 
United States? 
Ultimately, the Truman administration discarded these options. The United States 
needed, according to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, to make  a profound psychological 
impression on as many inhabitants as possible.  In addition, LeMay s aerial bombardment 
of Japanese cities provided a powerful prologue to a nuclear attack. Many U.S. officials 
came to see the targeting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese cities previously 
untouched by U.S. fire bombing, as a small departure from existing policy.  Fat Man  and 
 Little Boy,  as the two atomic bombs dropped on August 6 and 9, 1945 were nicknamed, 
could seem merely larger and more lethal incendiary devices. 
Stimson and most other observers soon acknowledged, however, that atomic weaponry 
introduced a new level of violence to world affairs. Colonel Paul Tibbets, who piloted the 
U.S. plane that dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima, reported that  the shimmering city 
became an ugly smudge . . . a pot of bubbling hot tar.  Teams of U.S. observers who 
entered Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the aftermath of their bombing were stunned at the 
instantaneous incineration of both human beings and manmade structures, and shocked 
to contemplate the longer-lasting horror of radiation disease. Shortly after the atomic 
bombs fell on Japan, Stimson reconsidered his earlier view. He wrote Truman that atomic 
weaponry meant  a first step in a new control by man over the forces of nature too revo- 
lutionary and dangerous to fit into old concepts.  The destruction of Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki inaugurated the  atomic age,  one in which dreams of peace mingled with night- 
mares of destruction, potentially on a global scale. 
During the late summer days of 1945, however, Americans who knew someone 
involved in the worldwide military effort invariably sighed with relief. News reports of 
August 15 heralded Japan s defeat. Those of September 2 reported its formal surrender, on 
 VJ Day,  aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Spontaneously, all across the 
nation, people flooded into the streets to celebrate the end of the Second World War. 
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Government s Role in the Economy 
The federal bureaucracy grew, by one calculation, nearly 400 percent during the war. New 
governmental planning and regulatory agencies proliferated. The powerful War Produc- 
tion Board oversaw the conversion of factories to wartime production and, later, their 
expansion. It also planned resource usage and enforced production priorities and sched- 
ules. The War Labor Board adjudicated labor management disputes, and the War Man- 
power Commission allocated workers to various industries. The Office of Price Adminis- 
tration regulated prices to control inflation and rationed scarce commodities such as 
gasoline, rubber, steel, shoes, coffee, sugar, and meat. Some observers who wished to 
expand on the New Deal of the 1930s imagined how the wartime system of economic con- 
trols might be adapted to peacetime conditions, while most of the Republicans and con- 
servative Democrats in Congress looked forward to its postwar dismantlement. 
From 1940 to 1945, the U.S. economy expanded rapidly, and the gross national prod- 
uct (GNP) rose, year-by-year, by 15 percent or more! When Roosevelt called for the pro- 
duction of 60,000 planes shortly after Pearl Harbor, skeptics sneered. Within a few years, 
though, the nation produced nearly 300,000 planes in a number of different designs. The 
Maritime Commission oversaw the construction of millions of tons of new ships. A once 
stagnant economy spewed out prodigious quantities of other supplies, including 2.5 million 
trucks and 50 million pairs of shoes. A worldwide war became one of  massed machines,  
the military journalist Hanson Baldwin observed. 
In the cause of increasing production, most industries forged close relationships with 
governmental bureaucracies. Washington promoted, under the acronym of R&D, a coor- 
dinated plan for scientific and technological research and development. Greatly increased 
federal funding helped spawn new industries, such as electronics, and transform others, 
such as rubber and chemicals. Eventually, an Office of Scientific Research and Develop- 
ment contracted with universities and scientists for a variety of projects. Support from this 
governmental agency helped adapt radar and penicillin (initially British discoveries), rocket 
engines, and other new products for wartime use. The Manhattan Project provided the most 
dramatic example of the emergence of powerful new links between military-orientedR&D 
and the national government. In addition, this massive effort, which employed a number of 
people who had fled Nazi tyranny during the 1930s, demonstrated how much European- 
trained refuges might contribute to scientific and technological innovation. 
Business and Finance 
Washington pumped billions of dollars into the wartime economy. To finance the military 
effort, government spending rose from $9 billion in 1940 to $98 billion in 1944. In 1941, 
the national debt stood at $48 billion; at the end of the war, it would reach $280 billion. 
As production shifted from autos to tanks, from refrigerators to guns, the array of new con- 
sumer goods coming into the marketplace drastically shrank. In order to ensure that U.S. 
troops were adequately clothed, fed, and supplied, the government also set up an elaborate 
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system for rationing the amount of certain products including foods, fabrics, and fuel  
people could purchase. With fewer consumer products available, people invested in war 
bonds, turning their savings into tanks and planes. Sales of war bonds to ordinary people 
provided a relatively insignificant contribution to overall wartime spending, but bond dri- 
ves helped raise personal saving to record levels and gave bondholders a direct stake, psy- 
chologically as well as economically, in the Allied cause. 
Wartime conditions encouraged steps toward achieving greater economic equality. The 
rationing of items needed for the war effort overseas meant more equitable distribution of 
scarce goods at home. Increased taxes on wealthier Americans also helped redistribute 
income and narrow the gap in wealth between the very well-to-do and other people. 
Observers sympathetic to economic planning saw war bonds, rationing, and progressive 
The War at Home: The Economy  " 987 
Rita Hayworth Scraps Her Bumpers Movie stars aided the war effort by 
promoting the sale of war bonds and urging sacrifice. Here Hayworth urges 
Americans to scrap their unessential car parts. 
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taxation encouraging a sense of shared sacrifice and helping ease at least some of the 
domestic tensions evident during the 1930s. 
At the same time, however, the war s emphasis on harmony helped Republicans and 
conservative Democrats make the case for sidetracking some of the earlier New Deal 
efforts, including controversial ones aimed at directly assisting the less affluent. The 
remarkable Republican surge in the off-year elections of 1942 the GOP gained 44 seats 
in the House and seven in the Senate strengthened the anti New Deal coalition in Con- 
gress. In 1943, legislators abolished the job-creation programs of the Works Progress 
Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the National Youth 
Administration (NYA) (see chapter 25). They also shut down the Rural Electrification 
Administration (REA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA), agencies most active in 
economically depressed rural areas. Moreover, as business executives flocked into govern- 
ment, to run the new wartime agencies, administrators in Washington began adopting a 
relatively cooperative stance toward large corporations. 
Large businesses whose products seemed essential to wartime victory invariably flour- 
ished, often with governmental assistance. What seemed essential, of course, could become 
a matter of definition. Coca-Cola and the Wrigley chewing gum empire gained precious 
sugar allotments by arguing that GIs overseas needed to enjoy their products. The Kaiser 
Corporation, whose spectacular growth during the 1930s had been spurred by contracts 
for federal dam projects, now turned to building ships, aircraft, and military vehicles, 
including the famous  Jeep.  By 1943, Kaiser controlled nearly one-third of the nation s 
military construction business, much of it taking place in Southern California, along the 
coastal corridor that stretched from San Francisco to San Diego. Elsewhere, federal subsi- 
dies and tax breaks enabled factories to expand and retool and corporations to prosper. 
The  cost-plus  provision, built into military contracts, guaranteed that manufacturers 
doing business with wartime Washington would gain a profit. 
The Second World War also helped boost the economic power wielded by the largest 
corporations. After Roosevelt ordered his justice department to postpone enforcement of 
antitrust laws, government lawyers tucked away long-planned legal cases, such as one 
against America s great oil cartel. Congressional efforts to investigate possible collusion in 
the awarding of large government contracts and to increase assistance to small businesses 
made little headway. The top 100 companies, which had provided 30 percent of the 
nation s total manufacturing output in 1940, contributed 70 percent by 1943. Many 
smaller businesses, left to dealing in smaller niche markets only indirectly connected to 
war-related production, complained that Washington-based agencies short-changed them 
when allocating scare resources. 
The Workforce 
During the early years of the military buildup, people who had scrounged for jobs during 
the Great Depression began to find regular work. The primary job of governmental agen- 
cies, according to their leaders, involved obtaining employment for the people employers 
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seemed most likely to hire. Thus, positions in heavy industry invariably went to men, and 
most of the skilled jobs to men of European descent. Initially, government-financed train- 
ing centers also concentrated on white males and did much less for women and, particu- 
larly in the South, workers of color. As military service depleted the ranks of white males, 
however, other people became candidates for well-paid production jobs. In time, both pri- 
vate employers and public officials encouraged women to seek wartime work outside of 
their homes; African Americans from the rural South to move to industrial cities, includ- 
ing ones in the North and Far West; and Mexicans to enter the United States under the 
BraceroAgreement of 1942. In response to wartime necessities, then, the composition of 
the U.S. workforce changed significantly during the early 1940s. 
Filling positions never before open to them, women became welders, shipbuilders, 
lumberjacks, and miners. Women won places in prestigious symphony orchestras, and 
one Major League Baseball owner financed creation of a separate women s league to give 
new life to the national pastime. Many employers hired married women who, before the 
war, would have been lucky to obtain a position even in traditionally  female occupa- 
tions,  such as teaching. Women of color moved into clerical and sales jobs, positions in 
which they had not previously been welcomed. Although wartime workplaces did gener- 
ally remain segregated by sex women usually working with other women and men 
alongside other men the range of jobs open to women expanded. 
The scope of unpaid labor, primarily provided by women, also expanded. Volunteer 
activities outside the home such as Red Cross projects, civil defense work, and recycling 
drives claimed more of the time of women, children, and older people. Government 
publications exhorted women to expand their homemaker routines:  Work in a garden 
this summer.   Save waste fats for explosives.   Wear it out, use it up, make it do, or do 
without.  Both in the home and in the workplace, women s responsibilities and workloads 
increased. 
The new labor market improved economic prospects for workers of color, especially 
African Americans. Many moved to labor-scarce cities in the North and West and into 
jobs previously closed to them. Despite the beginning of the northward migration ear- 
lier in the twentieth century, the prewar African American population had remained 
largely southern, rural, and agricultural; by the late 1940s, a substantial percentage of 
African Americans lived and worked outside of the South, in urban-industrial areas of 
the country. Although the war hardly eliminated discriminatory employment practices, 
twice as many African Americans held skilled jobs at the end of the conflict as at its 
beginning. 
Washington did take some steps to address workplace discrimination. In June 1942, 
under pressure from African American union leaders led by A. Philip Randolph of the Broth- 
erhood of Railway Porters, President Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the Fair 
Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). FDR charged this new governmental agency 
with attacking racial discrimination in hiring decisions. In 1943, the national government 
announced that it would not recognize as a collective bargaining agent any labor union that 
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discriminated on the basis of race. In addition, the War Labor Board moved to outlaw the 
practice of paying different wages to whites and nonwhites for doing the same job. 
For most of the people who found jobs, the war brought significantly higher wages and 
longer work hours. Although the government tried to limit wage increases during the war, 
the need to ensure rising production totals and the availability of overtime invariably 
meant larger paychecks. During the war, average weekly earnings for industrial workers 
rose nearly 70 percent. Farmers, who had suffered through many years of low prices and 
overproduction, doubled their incomes and then doubled them again. 
The Labor Front 
The labor union movement seemingly stood to benefit from the scarcity of home front 
workers during the war years. Membership rolls rose by 50 percent. Although women 
and workers of color joined unions in unprecedented numbers, white males, who still 
comprised the bulk of unionized workers, became the main beneficiaries of organized 
labor s new clout. 
The commitment of most labor unions to their new female workers remained suspect. 
Not a single woman served on the executive boards of either the American Federation of 
Labor (AFL) or the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The International Broth- 
erhood of Teamsters required its female members to accept revocation of their member- 
ship when the war ended. Unions did seek contracts stipulating equal pay for men and 
women who worked in the same position, but these helped only those women who could 
find a  male job.  In addition, unions typically justified their stance on women employees 
as a way of ensuring employers would pay a  family wage,  one on which a single male 
breadwinner could support a spouse and children. Union leaders seemed most interested 
in pressing for equal-pay provisions in order to maintain wage levels in jobs that they 
expected men to reclaim at war s end. It was also generally expected, when peace returned 
and employers trimmed workforces, that returning veterans, primarily men of European 
descent, would enjoy special preferences for the available job slots. 
Some union leaders even resisted efforts to hire women and workers of color. Incorpo- 
rating job-seekers from these groups, who were traditionally paid less than white males, 
into the wartime workforce might, they feared, jeopardize the gains unions had won dur- 
ing the hard-fought struggles of the 1930s. Early in the war, then, many union locals in 
the well-paying aircraft and shipbuilding industries flatly refused to enroll African Americans 
as members. After creation of the FEPC, some union leaders condemned governmental 
efforts to address racial discrimination as communist inspired. After greater numbers of 
African Americans managed to find jobs, racial tensions in the workplace sometimes led 
to direct confrontations. In various parts of the country at a defense plant in Lockland, 
Ohio, at a transit company in Philadelphia, at a shipbuilding company in Mobile, for 
instance white workers walked off the job to protest the hiring of African Americans. 
Management intended to use the war, protestors generally charged, as an excuse to erode 
union power by changing the composition of the workforce. 
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Other forms of grassroots labor militancy, although muted by a wartime no-strike 
pledge, persisted into the 1940s. Wildcat strikes erupted among bus drivers in St. Louis, 
assembly-line workers in Detroit, and streetcar conductors in Philadelphia. In the Motor 
City, a disgruntled group of aircraft workers, angry at increasing regimentation of the pro- 
duction process, fanned out across a factory floor and cut off the neck ties worn by super- 
visory personnel. Despite the no-strike assurance, the United Mine Workers called a walk- 
out in the bituminous coal fields in 1943. A hard line by the War Labor Board against the 
union s demands only appeared to prolong the strike. Roosevelt s secretary of interior 
blasted both sides in the dispute and called the walkout  a black and stupid chapter in the 
history of the home front.  A Congress increasingly hostile to union interests weighed in 
as well. In 1943, it passed the Smith-Connally Act, which empowered the president to 
seize plants or mines if strikes interrupted war production. The Second World War, then, 
may have quieted but never halted labor management conflict. 
Assessing Economic Change 
Overall, the war had a substantial effect on the nation s political economy. During the con- 
flict, most workplaces became more inclusive, in terms of gender and race, than ever 
before. So did labor unions. More people entered the paid labor force, and many earned 
more than rationing restrictions on consumer goods allowed them to spend. In a remark- 
able reversal of conditions during the Great Depression, savings piled up. Wartime pro- 
duction demands helped strengthen organized labor s place in the U.S. economy. By the 
end of the Second World War, union membership stood at an all-time high. 
Perhaps most significantly, the Second World War helped accelerate long-term changes 
in the institutional scale of economic life. Big government, big business, and big labor all 
grew even larger. Scientific and technological innovations forged new links of mutual 
interest between governmental agencies and large corporations, particularly those directly 
involved in military-related production. An older United States one marked by family 
farms, family-run businesses, and small towns did not disappear, but urban-based, 
bureaucratized institutions were increasingly coming to dominate daily life, especially in 
most areas of the nation s burgeoning economy. 
A New Role for Government? 
The growth of governmental power during war years prompted new debate over the role 
of government in a postwar world. During the heyday of the New Deal during the 1930s, 
a relatively broad view of governmentally guaranteed  security  had enabled creation of 
programs such as the Social Security System and of federal agencies to secure home mort- 
gages and personal savings accounts. At the same time, grassroots community-based 
groups, often working with labor unions, had begun building a set of cooperative social 
welfare and health institutions they hoped would create a vast, nonprofit security-safety net. 
Although the New Deal had begun running out of political cards even before U.S. entry 
into the war, President Roosevelt and some of his advisers began to suggest new initiatives 
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as military victory seemed increasingly likely. They talked of reharnessing the national 
government s power behind expanded efforts to enhance security in everyday life. Some 
dreamed, for example, of extending the government s wartime health care and day care 
programs into a more comprehensive social welfare system. 
In 1944, FDR introduced his most ambitious domestic agenda in years: a  Second Bill 
of Rights.  He called for measures to ensure that Americans could enjoy the right to a wide 
range of substantive liberties. These were to include regular employment, adequate food 
and shelter, appropriate educational opportunities, and guaranteed health care. Whenever 
people could not otherwise obtain these material conditions, the national government 
should use its power to ensure their availability. Translating this vision into reality, its pro- 
ponents generally assumed, would require the national government to continue the kind 
of economic and social planning it was doing in wartime. The Second Bill of Rights, then, 
proposed that postwar politics and governance focus on guaranteeing individuals and fam- 
ilies security in their everyday lives. 
The vision of providing greater security appealed to more than hardcore New Dealers. 
Large insurance companies and some private businesses, recognizing the popularity of 
security-focused proposals, came forward with new private alternatives to governmental 
programs. Insurers expanded earlier efforts to market their own array of programs, 
directed toward individual policy holders, for providing security against sickness, disabil- 
ity, and unexpected death. At the same time, insurance companies worked with some large 
corporations to develop group insurance plans as substitutes and also as supplements to 
the kind of governmental programs already provided by the New Deal and imagined in the 
Second Bill of Rights. 
The War at Home:Social Issues and Social Movements 
The wartime years, along with the search for military victory overseas, highlighted a wide 
range of domestic social issues. Many people, ordered by their military superiors or 
attracted by new employment possibilities, moved away from the communities in which 
they had grown up. Mobilizing for military victory seemed to demand a willingness to 
change. At the same time, the wartime emphasis on preserving traditional ideals, includ- 
ing liberty and equality, helped spotlight how often social conditions in everyday life 
departed from idealized depictions. 
Selling the War 
The effort to sell a war overseas brought new attention to social issues at home. During the 
First World War, government propagandists had portrayed a struggle to end war and 
bring about a more democratic and peaceful world. Fighting for such idealistic goals, how- 
ever, carried far less appeal during the 1940s. Only 20 years after Woodrow Wilson s  war 
to end all wars,  after all, the United States found itself fighting a Second, and far wider, 
World War. Attuned to popular attitudes, the Roosevelt administration called on citizens 
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to fight more for the preservation of a vague concept called the  American Way of Life  at 
home than for the transformation to a more democratic, peaceful world. 
The work of the illustrator Norman Rockwell and of the movie director Frank Capra, 
masters of nostalgia, exemplified wartime image-making. Rockwell produced a set of 
iconic paintings that visualized President Roosevelt s  Four Freedoms : Freedom of 
Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. Using his 
neighbors in Arlington, Vermont, as models, Rockwell depicted these values as already 
comfortably rooted in small-town America. Originally published in the Saturday Evening 
Post magazine, Rockwell s  Four Freedoms  eventually adorned millions of posters dis- 
tributed by the government. 
Hollywood studios and directors eagerly answered the wartime call.  The American film 
is our most important weapon,  proclaimed one Hollywood executive. The film factory pro- 
duced both commercial movies with military themes, such as Destination Tokyo(1943), and 
documentaries, such as the Why We Fight series, directed by Frank Capra. During the 1930s, 
Capra s films had championed the decency and good sense of ordinary people (portrayed 
by stars such as Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck) in movies such as Mr. Deeds Comes 
to Town(1936). Commissioned by Washington to dramatize why citizens should fight 
against the Axis, Capra put Rockwell-like characters in motion and contrasted the freedom 
of their daily routines with the tightly regimented lifestyles in the military-dominated dic- 
tatorships of Germany, Italy, and Japan. 
Much of Hollywood followed Capra to war. Many of its shining stars and lesser players 
served in combat units, while most other Hollywood personalities sold war bonds, enter- 
tained the troops, and worked on documentaries for the Army s Pictorial Division. Darryl 
F. Zanuck of Twentieth Century Fox filmed Allied troops in North Africa and the Aleutian 
Islands, and the director-producer John Ford crafted powerful documentaries about Pearl 
Harbor and the Battle of Midway. Walt Disney s studio devoted most of its animation 
resources to the production of war-related cartoons and short features. 
The advertising industry also contributed. The Roosevelt administration encouraged it 
to sell his  Four Freedoms,  and most advertising professionals obliged. In their vision, 
freedom generally appeared in the form of new washing machines, improved kitchen 
appliances, streamlined automobiles, a wider range of lipstick hues, and other consumer 
products. Although wartime rationing prevented people from immediately acquiring these 
kinds of products, wartime ads promised that, once the fighting ended, technological 
know-how would transform the United States into a consumer s paradise. People could 
soon enjoy living in a bigger and better version of the prosperity-soaked world still asso- 
ciated, in popular memory and culture, with the 1920s (see chapter 24). 
After initially resisting the idea of establishing a specific propaganda agency, Roosevelt 
finally did authorize, during the spring of 1942, creation of the Office of War Information 
(OWI). The OWI replaced an earlier, less aggressive effort, located in an Office of Facts and 
Figures. The President charged the OWI with coordinating a full range of informational ini- 
tiatives. Many New Deal Democrats saw the OWI catering to advertisers who preferred 
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C 
asablanca, perhaps the most popular movie ever 
produced by the old Hollywood studio system, 
began as a rather modest wartime collaboration 
between Warner Brothers and the OWI. The studio pro- 
vided the stars, the script, and the crew. The OWI 
offered guidance on how best to portray the Allied 
cause. It successfully urged, for example, that the role 
of  Sam,  an African American piano player and singer, 
be related, more specifically than in earlier drafts of the 
script, to contemporary civil-rights issues. 
Released in New York City at the same time, 
November 1942, that Allied forces were pursuing their 
TORCH campaign in North Africa, Casablancacontains 
numerous references to wartime themes and events. 
Most powerfully and pointedly, the film s own place- 
ment in cinematic time, December 1941, creates 
numerous opportunities to disparage isolationism. On 
several occasions, dialogue in the movie cleverly 
alludes to a real-life incident, the Japanese attack on 
Pearl Harbor, which will not happen until after 
Casablanca s own narrative time frame ends. This tech- 
nique, used in virtually every Hollywood film about 
familiar historical events, encourages viewers to take 
pride in their ability to spot historical references. Most 
important to Casablanca s political agenda, these allu- 
sions to past events underscore its support for the 
necessity of U.S. involvement in the Second World War. 
More often than not, though, Casablancaworks to 
conceal its political messages by entangling them in a set 
of personal dilemmas faced by its male lead,  Rick Blaine,  
memorably played by Humphrey Bogart. Once an antifas- 
cist activist, who had  run guns to Ethiopia  and had 
fought fascism in Spain during the 1930s, Rick now only 
wants to isolate himself from larger causes and to preside 
over his gambling saloon in Casablanca. Remaining aloof 
from global politics, he watches refugees from fascism 
stream through this North African city on their way, hope- 
fully, to freedom in the United States. For mysterious 
reasons, however, Blaine cannot or will not return home 
but, instead, runs  Rick s American Café,  located at the 
edge of the North African frontier. 
There seems little mystery, however, about the root 
cause of Rick s personal isolationism: a beautiful woman 
named  Ilsa Lund,  portrayed by Ingrid Bergman. Before 
the Nazis stormed into Paris in 1939, Rick and Ilsa had 
planned to flee the city together, but she had left him 
waiting at the train station. Only when Ilsa unexpect- 
edly resurfaces, two years later in Casablanca, does Rick 
learn why she had abandoned him. As she was prepar- 
ing to leave Paris, news arrived that her husband, an 
antifascist crusader named  Victor Lazlo,  had not per- 
ished, as she had thought, at the hands of the Nazis. 
Respecting her marriage vows, Ilsa had rushed to the 
injured Victor and nursed him back to health. 
Trapped in Casablanca with a now-recovered Lazlo, 
Ilsa presents Rick with a series of personal and political 
dilemmas. She pleads with him, after her own husband s 
entreaties go unheeded, to help Victor escape to the 
United States, from where he can resume his antifas- 
cist activism. As long as Lazlo stays in Casablanca  
nominally under the legal control of Vichy France but 
effectively under the thumb of a murderous Nazi officer, 
 Major Strasser  his political reputation presumably 
protects him from immediate danger. At the same time, 
though, Lazlo s continued presence in North Africa makes 
him of little immediate value to the Allied cause, the one 
that the brooding Rick refuses to assist. Although Rick 
claims his noninterventionist policy stems from a com- 
mitment to political neutrality, the movie makes clear 
that personal considerations dominate his politics. Lazlo 
will only leave Casablanca with Ilsa, whom Rick suspects 
remains as romantically attracted to him as he still is to 
her. 
Casablanca s scriptconveniently provides Rick with 
the means to help Ilsa and Lazlo or Ilsa and himself  
flee together: two blank  letters of transit,  which have 
CASABLANCA (1942) 
Directed by Michael Curtiz.Starring Humphrey Bogart (Rick Blaine),Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa Lund),Paul 
Henreid (Victor Lazlo),Conrad Veidt (Major Strasser),Claude Rains (Captain Renault),Dooley Wilson (Sam) 
11019_26_ch26_p0963-1008.qxd  6/4/07  3:26 PM  Page 994
sign the letters of transit over to Victor and Ilsa. Then, 
Rick turns his persuasive charms on Ilsa, who has mis- 
takenly come to believe he will allow her to abandon 
Lazlo and leave Casablanca with him. These two lovers 
must set aside personal feelings, Rick implores her, and 
help her husband return to his antifascist work. When 
Major Strasser makes a last-ditch effort to stop Victor 
and Ilsa from boarding an outbound plane, Blaine sim- 
ply guns him down. As the movie ends, Rick plans to 
light out, with Captain Renault rather than Ilsa as his 
traveling companion, for the North African frontier and 
join a Free French brigade and the Allied cause. 
Casablancathus frames the fictional Rick Blaine s 
personal and political problems as symbolically parallel 
to those that the United States and its like-minded cit- 
izens faced before their own real-life entry into the 
Second World War. Seeing Humphrey Bogart make all 
the  correct  decisions, presumably, will help convince 
Casablanca s wartime viewers that their political lead- 
ers, and they, are now working through the conse- 
quences of having made similarly appropriate ones. 
Watching Casablancatoday, perhaps, helps convince 
viewers that people such as the fictional Rick Blaine 
really did make up America s  greatest generation.  
One of Classical Hollywood s most powerful motion pictures, Casablanca(1943) 
highlighted the personal and political dilemmas raised by U.S. entry into the Second 
World War. Here, Rick (Humphrey Bogart), Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and Sam (Dooley 
Wilson) uneasily recall their past in pre-war Paris and ponder their wartime futures. 
been hidden in Rick s Café. These documents, accord- 
ing to the movie s shaky legal logic, permit anyone, 
even Lazlo, to depart from Casablanca on the next 
plane flight. If Rick were to give the letters to Lazlo, he 
stands, once again, to lose Ilsa and to compromise his 
noninterventionist political principles. If he uses the 
documents to flee Casablanca with Ilsa, he will harm 
the Allied cause by preventing Lazlo from actively 
rejoining it. Will Rick, once a heroic activist, continue to 
remain uninvolved? Is there any way he can reconcile 
the conflicting demands he now confronts? 
As Casablancaconstructs Rick Blaine, Bogart s char- 
acter can cut through all of these problems simply by 
embracing the role of a lone outlaw-hero, the iconic 
protagonist of so many of Hollywood s western movies. 
Blaine thus abandons his earlier reluctance to take a 
stance along with the married woman he still 
loves and takes the kind of decisive, if technically ille- 
gal, action that marks him as both manly and principled. 
Symbolically structured as what film scholars call a 
 disguised western,  Casablanca ends with Rick 
becoming a modern, North African version of an Old 
West gunfighter. At the point of a pistol, Blaine forces a 
duplicitous Vichy police officer,  Captain Renault,  to 
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imagery extolling the future joys of consumerism rather than those promoting broader 
visions of liberty and equality. Interpreting OWI-sponsored images very differently, 
Republicans blasted the agency for cranking out crass political appeals for causes favored 
by Roosevelt s New Dealers. While fending off its critics, the OWI set up branch offices 
throughout the world, published a widely distributed magazine called Victory, and pro- 
duced hundreds of films, posters, and radio broadcasts. 
Gender Issues 
Popular portrayals of why the nation was fighting the Second World War increasingly 
clashed with how wartime mobilization was changing everyday life. The gap between 
Rockwell-type imagery and daily demands became readily apparent in the range of social 
issues affecting women. 
The wartime United States called on women to serve their country as more than wives 
and mothers. Some 350,000 women volunteered for military duty during the war, and 
more than a thousand became pilots for the Women s Air force Service Pilots (WASPs). 
Not everyone approved of the changes. One member of Congress asked,  What has 
become of the manhood of America?  Most of his colleagues, however, supported creation 
of a woman s corps in each branch of the military, an innovation proposed but never 
adopted during the First World War. 
996  "CHAPTER 26  "America during the Second World War 
Pin-up Girls Male GIs often surrounded themselves with pin-up girls, images very different from that of the 
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Military service by women, together with their expanding roles in the wartime labor 
market, prompted debate over the possibility of enacting new legal-constitutional mea- 
sures. Congress debated, without ever passing, a national equal-pay law and an Equal 
Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. Women s organizations disagreed 
among themselves over how to proceed. Groups claiming to speak for middle-class 
women, for example, strongly backed the ERA, but ones representing women who worked 
outside their homes, often for low wages, opposed its passage. They saw the ERA as a 
potential threat to the constitutionality of the array of special protective legislation, regu- 
lating hours and hazardous conditions, which reformers of the Progressive Era had strug- 
gled to obtain for women workers. Wartime conditions, then, helped refocus an earlier 
debate: Should working women continue to be accorded a protected status, in view of 
their vulnerability to exploitation in male-directed work environments, or would they ulti- 
mately benefit from gaining completely equal legal and constitutional status with men? 
Even as wartime necessity helped alter older gender patterns in employment, wide- 
spread imagery frequently worked to frame the changes as temporary. Works of popular 
culture, for example, often portrayed the wartime participation of women in the work- 
place as a short-term anomaly and as a temporary sacrifice intended, ultimately, to pre- 
serve and protect their  natural  sphere in the home. Moreover, most wartime imagery 
tended to reinforce familiar ideals of femininity. A typical ad suggesting that women take 
on farm work declared:  A woman can do anything if she knows she looks beautiful 
doing it.  
In some ways, the war may have even widened the symbolic gap between notions of 
femininity and masculinity. Male-dominated military culture seemed to foster the glamour- 
girl ideal. Service publications regularly featured pin-up sections and encouraged service- 
men to decorate their wartime world their sleeping quarters, their airplanes, even their 
tanks with overt images of female sexuality. The home front entertainment industry, led 
by Hollywood, promoted its glamorous female stars as anxious to  please their boys  in the 
military. Some of the wartime popular culture came to associate masculinity with misogyny. 
Coming out of the war, the tough-guy genre, on prominent display in Hollywood s thrillers 
and in the author Mickey Spillane s series of  Mike Hammer  detective novels, portrayed 
female sexuality as both alluring and threatening to men. 
Public policy making sometimes worked to reinforce gender divisions. The military 
assigned most of the women who joined the armed services to clerical and supply jobs, 
usually within the United States. The government and some private employers did pro- 
vide, with differing degrees of enthusiasm and financial support, day care programs for 
mothers working outside of their homes. Although the thousands of centers set up during 
the conflict provided a precedent for future policy makers, the actual number of facilities 
met only a fraction of the child care need. Many centers, moreover, quickly shut their doors 
after the war s end. Meanwhile, social scientists often blamed mothers who worked outside 
of their homes during the war years for an apparent spike in rates of juvenile delinquency 
and divorce, and they pondered how new public policies might reverse these trends. 
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Racial Issues 
The Second World War affected issues related to race as well as gender. The United States 
entered the global conflict as a nation in which many areas of daily life, particularly in the 
South and Southwest, featured highly visible signposts of racial and ethnic separatism. Cit- 
izens of African descent constantly negotiated an elaborate system of legalized segregation 
throughout southern states. Effectively disenfranchised politically in the South, African 
Americans in the rest of the country continued to experiment with how best to use the polit- 
ical power they had gained during the 1930s. In California and throughout the Southwest, 
residents who traced their ancestry back to Mexico, including many who had long resided 
in the United States, continued to work on addressing a wide range of issues involving 
employment, education, and housing. 
After the United States formally entered the war, President Roosevelt refused to aban- 
don the settled policy of racial segregation in the U.S. armed forces. Although the Army 
integrated Latino and American Indian soldiers, along with those from various European 
ethnic groups, into its combat units, military leaders refused to do the same for people of 
African and Japanese ancestry. Groups such as the NAACP pressed for integration, but 
Roosevelt s top advisers claimed that eliminating Jim Crow in the military could interfere 
with the nation s combat capabilities. The Red Cross and the U.S. Army even adopted the 
scientifically absurd practice of segregating donated blood into separate stores of  white  
and  black  plasma. 
Military officials often placed African Americans in inferior or highly dangerous support 
positions and initially excluded most of the segregated fighting units from combat duty. The 
White House deferred to these decisions, supported by white Democrats from the South 
who feared that permitting African Americans to join the fight for freedom abroad on an 
equal basis with other Americans might encourage attempts at desegregation at home. 
Toward the end of the war, when troop shortages forced the government to put segregated 
African American units into combat, these units invariably performed with distinction. 
Wartime social tensions sometimes flared into open conflict. Within the military, for 
example, a 1944 explosion at an ammunition depot at Port Chicago, near San Francisco, 
killed 300 U.S. Navy dockworkers, all of them inadequately trained and most of African 
descent. When naval officers ordered other black sailors to similar duty, some refused, cit- 
ing dangerous working conditions. The resulting court martial of 50 African Americans 
became the largest mass trial in naval history. A military court found all of them guilty of 
disobeying orders and imposed lengthy prison terms. After the war, the navy reduced the 
sentences and released the prisoners but refused requests to overturn their convictions. 
The Port Chicago incident remained a vivid memory among African Americans, and civil- 
rights groups continually pressed for redress. Finally, in 1999, one of the convicted sailors, 
Freddie Meeks, received a presidential pardon. 
Meanwhile, on the wartime home front, a variety of volatile racial issues continued to 
simmer. As the wartime production system created more jobs, vast numbers of people 
from the rural South, including several hundred thousand African Americans, continued 
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to move northward to cities such as Los Angeles and Detroit. The people already living in 
these areas often chafed at the influx of newcomers, who competed with them for jobs and 
housing and who placed greater demands on public services such as transportation, edu- 
cation, and recreational facilities. 
Urban housing projects sometimes became sites of conflict. White residents of these 
facilities generally charged governmental agencies, when they attempted to challenge racial 
discrimination, with acting heavy-handedly, while persons of color criticized public offi- 
cials for failing to move aggressively enough. In Buffalo, New York, threats of violence 
caused officials to cancel the construction of one housing project. In Detroit, in early 1942, 
that city s mayor deployed police officers in order to prevent clashes at the racially inte- 
grated Sojourner Truth site from escalating into something more serious. 
The type of social strains evident early on in Detroit began to flare into violence. This 
escalation most often occurred in overcrowded urban spaces, where diverse populations 
and cultures already competed and clashed with one another. In Detroit, in June 1943, 
conflict between white and black youth at an amusement park rapidly spiraled into a mul- 
tiple-day riot. Nearly 40 people, most of them African American, lost their lives before fed- 
eral troops, dispatched by FDR at the request of the mayor of Detroit and the governor of 
Michigan, arrived in the Motor City. Critics of Detroit s police force charged it with not 
responding forcefully enough to the first disturbances, while the NAACP charged it with 
overreacting and with targeting black people, 17 of whom died as a result of deadly force 
used by officers. The violence in Detroit left hundreds injured and inflicted millions of dol- 
lars worth of damage to property. Federal troops remained in the city for six months after 
their initial deployment in June. The following month, Roosevelt sent another military 
force into New York City s Harlem to quell disturbances there. 
Clashes extended beyond those between people of European and African descent. In 
Los Angeles, the  Zoot Suit Riots  of 1943 grew out of a complex set of social issues that 
had been roiling that fast-growing metropolis over the past several years. These included 
competition for control over contested public spaces, such as dance halls and jazz clubs; 
cultural-ethnic differences in dress and entertainment styles; and ethnic bitterness, espe- 
cially growing out of the contentious 1942  Sleepy Lagoon  murder case, which had pro- 
duced controversial guilty verdicts (later reversed) against a group of Mexican American 
defendants. When social tensions finally produced violence, in late May and early June of 
1943, the worst incidents initially pitted servicemen of European descent against young 
Mexican American men who were sporting zoot suits. This flamboyant outfit, which fea- 
tured oversized coats and trousers, had come to exemplify ethnic pride and protest against 
wartime restrictions that seemed to fall hardest on communities of color. 
For several days, increasingly larger groups of soldiers and sailors from nearby military 
bases entered the fray and stormed through parts of Los Angeles. Critics claimed that the 
city s police force did little to stop roving bands of servicemen, sometimes augmented by 
white residents of LA, who broadened their targets to include both African and Mexican 
Americans, whether zoot-suited or not. Police, the same critics charged, seldom hesitated 
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to crack the heads of the young men who fought back. Largely ignoring the greater dimen- 
sions of what was going on in their city, members of the LA city council passed a resolu- 
tion that made wearing a zoot suit a criminal offense. Finally, military authorities barred 
servicemen from coming into LA, a move that helped restore order. 
Even when wartime tensions did not produce the kind of violence seen in Detroit and 
Los Angeles, the Second World War highlighted long-standing social issues. For many 
American Indians, for instance, the wartime years increased the pressures associated with 
longer-term patterns of migration and assimilation. Approximately 25,000 Indian men and 
several hundred Indian women served in the armed forces. Tens of thousands of other 
Indian men and women, many leaving their reservations for the first time, found wartime 
1000  "CHAPTER 26  "America during the Second World War 
Zoot Suit Directed by Luis Valdez and based on his earlier stage play, the motion picture Zoot 
Suit(1981) recalled ethnic tensions in Los Angles during the Second World War. Starring Edward 
J. Olmos and Daniel Valdez, this innovative musical drama highlighted the struggles waged by 
Mexican Americans over space, identity, and legally protected rights. Zoot Suitexplores, for 
example, how styles of masculine dress could become matters over which people would fight. 
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work in urban areas. Rapid City, South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Reservation, attracted 
more than 2,000 Indians, most of whom settled in informal camps around city. Other cities 
with nearby reservations such as Gallup, New Mexico; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Billings, 
Montana became magnets for those seeking wartime work. Many people moved back and 
forth between city and reservation, where economic opportunities remained limited, and 
tried to juggle the problems produced by living in two significantly different worlds. 
People of Japanese descent faced a unique set of social issues during the war. Shortly 
after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a powerful anti-Japanese political movement claimed to 
see signs of an impending sabotage campaign along the nation s West Coast, where most 
people of Japanese descent then lived. One military report claimed that a  large, unassim- 
ilated, tightly knit racial group, bound to an enemy nation by strong ties of race, culture, 
custom, and religion . . . constituted a menace  that justified extraordinary action. 
Lacking evidence of any significant pockets of disloyalty, President Roosevelt nonethe- 
less overrode objections from within his own administration and caved into political pres- 
sures. In February 1942, he issued Executive Order 9066, which directed the forced relo- 
cation of first- and second-generation Japanese Americans (called Issei and Nisei, 
respectively) and their internment in hastily constructed detainment camps located far 
away from West Coast areas. Significantly, in Hawaii, where the presumed danger of sub- 
version should have been much greater, no similar mass internment took place. There, 
people of Japanese ancestry constituted nearly 40 percent of the population, and U.S. offi- 
cials conceded their centrality to the local wartime economy. 
The Roosevelt administration ultimately uprooted nearly 130,000 people of Japanese 
descent from their West Coast homes. Native-born U.S. citizens, including many young chil- 
dren, comprised two-thirds of the detainees. The relocation forced Japanese Americans to 
abandon their possessions and businesses or to sell them for a pittance before being trans- 
ported to flimsy barracks surrounded by barbed wire and under armed guard. Many left 
behind thriving agricultural enterprises that were vital to wartime production. Civil libertar- 
ians generally condemned the internment program as militarily unnecessary and as uncon- 
stitutional, but a divided U.S. Supreme Court upheld its validity in Korematsu v. U.S.(1944). 
The Roosevelt administration closed the camps even before Japan s surrender, and in 1988, 
the U.S. Congress finally officially apologized for the internment. It also authorized payment 
of a cash indemnity to anyone who had been confined in the internment facilities. 
Social Movements 
The global fight against fascism proved helpful to the movements that were working for 
social change in America. German Nazism, with its doctrines of Aryan supremacy and 
racial inequality, helped expose the ugly underpinnings of older social science research. 
 The Huns have wrecked the theory of the master race with which we were so contented 
so long,  lamented one pro-segregationist politician from Alabama. At the same time, the 
antifascist climate of the war years gave greater visibility to an expanding body of alterna- 
tive research that saw racial difference as embedded in culture, rather than biology, and 
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buttressed a growing conviction that a democracy could eliminate discrimination and bridge 
racial and ethnic gulfs. 
The northward migration of African Americans contributed to efforts for social change. The 
nearly 750,000 African Americans who relocated to northern cities began to taste, for the first 
time in their lives, the real possibility of exerting political power. They found an outspoken 
advocate of civil rights within the White House. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt repeatedly antag- 
onized southern Democrats and members of her husband s administration by her advocacy of 
civil rights and her well-publicized participation in integrated social and political functions. 
The Amsterdam News, a newspaper aimed at African Americans, called for a  Double V  
campaign victory at home as well as abroad. The labor leader A. Philip Randolph 
promised to lead tens of thousands of black workers in a march on Washington to demand 
more defense jobs and integration of the military forces. President Roosevelt feared the 
event would embarrass his administration and urged that it be canceled. Randolph s per- 
sistence ultimately forced Roosevelt to create the Fair Employment Practices Commission 
(FEPC). If this new agency gained little effective power over day-to-day events, its exis- 
tence helped advance the ideal of nondiscrimination. 
Particularly in urban areas such as Detroit and New York City, civil-rights groups, old 
and new, used the wartime years to construct a wider base from which to fight for jobs 
and political power. Founded in 1942, the inter-racial Committee (later, Congress) on 
Racial Equality (CORE) promised to find new, nonviolent ways of opposing discrimina- 
tion. Testing a variety of strategies during the war, activists from CORE, led by Bayard 
Rustin, staged well-organized, well-publicized sit-ins. They called for integrating restau- 
rants, theaters, and other public facilities, especially in wartime Washington, D.C. 
The global dimension of the war effort proved of particular help to social movements 
addressing issues of importance to Mexican American communities. In California and 
throughout the Southwest during the war years, Latino organizations highlighted the irony 
of fighting overseas on behalf of a nation that denied equality at home and challenged the 
United States to live up to its democratic rhetoric. Approximately 500,000 Mexican 
Americansserved, often with great distinction, in the military. Not wishing to anger this 
constituency, the Roosevelt administration, which also feared harm to its Good Neighbor 
Policy in Latin America, saw the 1943 zoot-suit incidents in LA as requiring a response 
from Washington. Consequently, the president s coordinator of Inter-American affairs, 
Nelson Rockefeller, allocated federal money to train Spanish-speaking workers for wartime 
employment, to improve education for Mexican Americans, and to provide high school 
graduates with new opportunities to enter college. 
Organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) contin- 
ually pressed for change. Although legal precedents in California and in Southwestern 
states formally classified Latinos as  white,  actual practices usually discriminated against 
citizens and immigrants of Mexican descent. In Texas, Mexican American activists, work- 
ing closely with the Mexican government, mounted several drives against discrimination. In 
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California, as the war was about to end in 1945, attorneys for LULAC backed an ambitious 
effort by several families to mount a legal challenge, grounded in the latest social science 
research, against cities in Orange County that segregated Mexican American children into 
separate and obviously unequal schools. 
People of Japanese descent, despite the internment, also laid the basis for postwar cam- 
paigns to achieve greater equality for Asian Americans. The courage and sacrifice of Japanese 
American combat units, composed of volunteers from the stateside internment camps and 
from Hawaii, became legendary. Members of the 100th Battalion and the 442nd Regi- 
mental Combat Team, segregated units, suffered stunning causalities, often while under- 
taking extremely dangerous combat missions in Europe. In the Pacific Theater, 6,000 
members of the Military Intelligence Service provided invaluable service against the same 
enemy their detractors once claimed they covertly supported. 
Leaders of many social movements, then, came to see fighting for the American Way of 
Life as representing a commitment not to the past but to the future, one to be marked by 
new struggles on behalf of liberty and equality. After researching his influential study of 
racial relations, An American Dilemma(1944), the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal 
declared the need for  fundamental change.  The African American novelist Richard Wright 
expressed a similar sentiment more tersely: The United States needed to address its  white 
problem.  
In the face of divisive issues and new social movements, the OWI mounted informational 
campaigns that stressed national unity and contrasted America s  melting pot  ethos with the 
obsession in Germany and Japan about racial  purity.  Many wartime motion pictures, plays, 
radio dramas, and musical pieces tried to foster a sense of national community by expressing 
pride in cultural diversity. As members of each of the nation s racial and ethnic groups dis- 
tinguished themselves in the military, the claim to greater equality of condition   Americans 
All,  in the words of a wartime slogan took on greater force. Governmental imagery extolling 
social solidarity and freedom provided another way in which the wartime years assisted the 
work of social activists. 
Shaping the Peace 
Shaping the Peace  " 1003 
Focus Question 
What major institutions and policies did the United States and the Allies adopt in 
their effort to shape the reconstruction of the postwar world? 
Even before the war ended, U.S. policy makers began considering postwar peace arrange- 
ments. The Truman administration claimed to be building on Roosevelt s wartime confer- 
ences and agreements as it tried to shape a postwar framework for international relations. 
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Under Truman s leadership, the United States worked to establish the United Nations (UN), 
new international economic institutions, and other dispute-settling arrangements. 
International Organizations 
In the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and at a conference in Moscow in October 1943, the Allied 
powers pledged to create a replacement for the defunct League of Nations. Internationalist- 
minded Americans saw the new UN offering a more realistic version of Woodrow Wilson s 
earlier vision, one in which the United States would lead a world body that could deter 
aggressor nations and promote peaceful political change. 
At the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington in August 1944 and at a subse- 
quent meeting in San Francisco in April 1945, the Allies worked out the UN s organiza- 
tional structure. It included a General Assembly, in which each member nation would be 
represented and cast one vote. A smaller body, the Security Council, would include five 
permanent members from the Allied Coalition the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet 
Union, France, and Nationalist China and six rotating members. The Security Council 
would assume primary responsibility for taking action to maintain peace, but each of 
the permanent members could veto any council decision. A UN Secretariat, headed by a 
Secretary General, would handle day-to-day business, and an Economic and Social Coun- 
cil would sponsor measures to improve living conditions throughout the world. 
The U.S. Senate, with only two dissenting votes, approved joining the UN in July 1945. 
This victory for internationalism contrasted sharply with the Senate s 1919 rejection of U.S. 
membership in the League of Nations. Opponents of Wilson s dream had then worried that 
the League would press internationalist policies that might limit the ability of the United States 
to pursue its own national interest. Following the Second World War, however, a newly pow- 
erful United States appeared able to dominate international organizations such as the UN. It 
seemed unlikely that decisions by it or other international bodies could seriously hamstring 
U.S. foreign policy. In addition, most U.S. leaders now saw the lack of a coordinated, inter- 
national response to aggression during the 1930s as a major factor in the outbreak of the Sec- 
ond World War and wished to avoid reliving the  appeasement  policies of that era. 
Eleanor Roosevelt, the former first lady and still a committed social activist, played a 
prominent role in promoting an internationalist agenda in the postwar period. A delegate 
to the first meeting of the UN s General Assembly, she chaired its Commission on Human 
Rights and guided the drafting of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the 
UN in 1948. The document set forth  inalienable  human rights and freedoms as corner- 
stones of international law. 
A series of postwar economic agreements also illustrated a growing acceptance by U.S. 
leaders of the value of international organizations. At the Bretton Woods (New Hampshire) 
Conference of 1944, representatives from 45 nations created the International Monetary 
Fund (IMF), which they hoped could maintain a stable system of international exchange 
by ensuring the conversion of each nation s currency into that of every other at fixed and 
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stable rates. The U.S. dollar, pegged at a value of $32 dollars for an ounce of gold, would 
provide the linchpin. Exchange rates could be altered only with the agreement of the IMF. 
This financial system, according to its architects, would facilitate smoothly flowing trade 
relationships and create the economic basis for preventing the kind of political instability 
that had paved the road to war during the 1930s. 
Postwar U.S. planners participated in setting up other international economic organi- 
zations. At the Bretton Woods conference, they established the International Bank for 
Reconstruction and Development, later renamed the World Bank. Its creators envisioned 
it providing loans to war-battered countries and facilitating the resumption of world trade. 
In 1948, the United States also spearheaded implementation of the General Agreement on 
Tariffs and Trade (GATT). GATT established the institutional groundwork for subsequent 
meetings at which nations could come together and negotiate nondiscriminatory trade 
arrangements that would, in theory, operate freely and fairly throughout the world. Rather 
than confronting one another by raising protective tariffs or threatening military action 
over economic disputes, GATT would supposedly encourage nations to resolve their dif- 
ferences through cooperation, by engaging in a good-faith, internationally supervised bar- 
gaining process. 
Spheres of Interest and Postwar Settlements 
During their wartime negotiations, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt had apparently 
assumed that the most powerful nations their own would enjoy special  spheres of 
influence  in the postwar world. As early as January 1942, the Soviet ambassador to the 
United States reported to Stalin that Roosevelt had tacitly assented to the Soviets exercis- 
ing effective postwar control over the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. In 
1944, Stalin and Churchill agreed, informally and secretly, that Britain would continue to 
dominate Greece and that the Soviets could oversee Romania and Bulgaria. U.S. leaders, 
meanwhile, assumed that Latin America would remain within their sphere of influence. 
Roosevelt sometimes seemed to imply that he accepted Stalin s goal of having states 
friendly to the USSR on its vulnerable western border. At the Tehran Conference of 
November 1943, however, FDR also told Stalin that U.S. voters of Eastern European 
descent expected their homelands to be independent of Soviet control after the war. 
Historians continue to differ on precisely how Roosevelt might have intended to recon- 
cile his contradictory hints about the postwar Soviet sphere of influence. As long as the Soviet 
military remained essential to Germany s defeat and Roosevelt also wanted the USSR to 
join the war against Japan the ailing U.S. president struck a conciliatory tone with Stalin. 
After Roosevelt s death, however, the powerful position gained by the Soviets in Eastern 
Europe quickly became a focus of tensions between the United States and the USSR. 
Early in the war, both nations did favor some plan for the dismemberment and dein- 
dustrialization of a defeated Nazi Germany. At a conference held at Yalta, Ukraine, in 
February1945, the three major Allied powers agreed to divide Germany into four zones 
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of occupation (with France s postwar government as the other occupying force). Later, as 
relations among the victors worsened, this temporary division of Germany hardened into 
a Soviet-dominated zone in the East and the other three zones to its west. The victors also 
divided Berlin, the German capital, into separate zones, even though the city lay uneasily 
within the Soviet-controlled portion of Germany. 
Postwar differences also involved Poland. At the Yalta Conference, the Soviets agreed to 
hold elections in postwar Poland and to oversee creation of a government  responsible to 
the will of the people.  Stalin also claimed, apart from these formalities, that the other 
Allied leaders tacitly acknowledged that the USSR would effectively dominate postwar 
Poland. Stalin apparently left Yalta expecting Poland would be in the USSR s sphere of 
influence, but many in the United States soon charged him with bad faith for failing to 
hold free elections and for not relinquishing Soviet control over Poland. Other critics, par- 
ticularly powerful within Republican ranks, blamed Roosevelt and some of his key advis- 
ers for not bargaining harder or, even, for selling out to Stalin at Yalta. Observers more 
sympathetic to Roosevelt s problems with his allies, however, viewed the agreements 
reached at Yalta as inevitably ambiguous. With tough battles against Germany and Japan 
still looming on the horizon, British and U.S. leaders seemingly chose to sacrifice clarity in 
hopes of gaining further cooperation, especially on military matters, from Stalin. 
In Asia, military projections likewise influenced postwar settlements. At a November 
1943 conference in Tehran, and again at Yalta, Stalin pledged to send Soviet troops to Asia 
as soon as Germany surrendered. The first U.S. atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, however, 
just one day before the Soviets were to enter the Pacific Theater of the war, and the United 
States assumed total charge of the occupation and postwar reorganization of Japan. After 
Soviet armies drove into the Korean Peninsula, the United States and the USSR divided 
Korea, which had been controlled by Japan, into separate zones of occupation. Here, as in 
Germany, these zones would later emerge as two antagonistic states, one beholden to the 
United States and the other to the Soviet Union (see chapter 27). 
The fate of the European colonies seized by Japan in Southeast Asia provided another 
contentious issue. Most U.S. officials preferred to see the former British and French 
colonies become independent nations, but they also worried about the left-leaning politics 
of many anticolonial nationalist movements. As the Truman administration became more 
suspicious of the expansionist intentions of Stalin s Soviet regime, it became increasingly 
tempting to support British and French efforts to reassemble their colonial empires. 
The United States maintained its own sphere of influence in the Pacific. In the Philippines, 
the Truman administration honored a long-standing pledge to grant independence. A gov- 
ernment friendly to the United States, which agreed to respect American economic inter- 
ests and accept U.S. military bases, took power in 1946. U.S. advisers from these bases 
soon began assisting the Philippine government in its campaign against leftist rebels, the 
Hukbalahaps, or Huks. In 1947, the United Nations designated the Mariana, Caroline, and 
Marshall Islands as the  Trust Territories of the Pacific  and authorized the United States 
to administer their affairs. 
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Although the nations of Latin America had been only indirectly involved in military 
conflict and peace negotiations, the Second World War encouraged Roosevelt to build on 
his Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s (see chapter 25). Following the German invasion 
of Poland in 1939, Latin American leaders stood nearly united behind the Allies. After 
formal U.S. entry into the war, at a conference in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942, every 
Latin American country except Chile and Argentina broke diplomatic ties with the Axis 
governments. When naval warfare in the Atlantic severed commercial connections 
between Latin America and Europe, Latin American countries became critical suppliers 
of raw materials to the United States. 
Wartime conferences avoided making many clear-cut decisions about the Middle East, 
especially about the founding of a Jewish state. The Second World War prompted sur- 
vivors of the Holocaust and Jews from around the world to take direct action. Zionism, 
the international movement to found a Jewish state in Palestine, the ancient homeland 
of Jewish people, attracted thousands of Jews to the Middle East. They began efforts to 
carve out, against the wishes of Palestinians and other Arab people, a new Jewish state, 
Israel. 
Conclusion 
The world landscape changed dramatically during the Second World War. For the United 
States, wartime mobilization finally ended the Great Depression and focused most of the 
national government s attention on international concerns. The war brought not only victory 
over dictatorial, expansionist regimes but also left the United States as the world s preeminent 
economic and military power. 
At home, the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt concerned with success- 
fully prosecuting a global war against fascism embraced economic planning and assigned 
broad executive powers to governmental bureaucracies. Cooperative ties among govern- 
ment, business, and scientific researchers gradually took shape. These sectors worked 
together to provide the seemingly miraculous growth in the economic productivity that 
ultimately propelled the U.S. military effort. 
Even as the war overseas went on, domestic debates over liberty and equality contin- 
ued at home. Many Americans saw the Second World War as a struggle to protect and pre- 
serve the liberties they already enjoyed. Others, inspired by a struggle against racism and 
injustice abroad, insisted that a war for freedom should include efforts to advance social 
justice at home. 
News of Japan s 1945 surrender prompted joyous celebrations throughout the United 
States. Still, most people seemed uncertain about postwar prospects. Internationally, could 
the United States maintain a cooperate relationship with its wartime Allies, especially the 
Soviet Union? Domestically, how would the wrenching dislocations of war affect both 
individuals and institutions? The nation, moreover, now faced the future without the 
charismatic leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt. 
Conclusion " 1007 
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S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS  
On the United States and the coming of World War II, see Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt 
and American Foreign Policy, 1932 1945(1979), and Waldo H. Heinrichs, Threshold of War: 
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II(1988). On the isolationist coali- 
tion, see Justus Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 
1939 1941(2003). For the war s military aspects, consult John Keegan, The Second World War 
(2005); Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II(1994); and 
Gerald F. Linderman, The World within War: America s Combat Experience in World War II 
(1997). Few narrative histories can match the dramatic sweep of Stephen Ambrose s many 
works, such as D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (1994). Michael 
Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler s Germany, 
1941 1945(2002) is also highly readable. The decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan is 
adroitly analyzed in J. Samuel Walker,Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the 
Atomic Bombs against Japan (2005). 
David Kennedy sThe American People in World War II: Freedom from Fear, Part II(2003) 
is a recent overview of the wartime years. See also, William L. O Neill, A Democracy at War: 
American s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II(1993), and Michael C. C. Adams, The 
Best War Ever: America and World War II(1994). The superb synthesis by John Morton Blum, 
V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II(1976) may be supple- 
mented by the essays in Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, eds.,The War in American Cul- 
ture: Society and Consciousness during World War II(1996), and Thomas Patrick Doherty,Pro- 
jections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (1993). Richard W. Steele, 
Free Speech and the Good War (1999) examines governmental efforts to regulate dissent. Karen 
Anderson,Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World 
War II(1981) surveys women s roles during the war. Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multi- 
cultural History of America in World War II(2000) is a good synthesis of issues related to race 
and ethnicity. 
1008  "CHAPTER 26  "America during the Second World War 
Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to 
this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin 
Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is 
an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and 
efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want NOW! 
www.thomsonedu.com/login/ 
11019_26_ch26_p0963-1008.qxd  6/4/07  3:27 PM  Page 1008
The Age of Containment, 
1946 1953 
T 
he Second World War, popularly portrayed as a struggle to preserve the  American 
Way of Life,  ended up transforming much of it. The fight against fascism had propelled 
foreign-policy issues to the center of domestic politics, and postwar international tensions 
kept them there. As combat operations against the Axis powers gave way to conflict 
between the United States and the Soviet Union, U.S. leaders overhauled military strategy. 
They claimed a broad authority for the nation s commander in chief and, hence, the 
office of the president and the need for a global stand against communism. An aggres- 
sive campaign to shore up  national security,  in addition, came to affect many areas of 
domestic life. 
The early postwar years, between 1946 and 1953, raised questions about the reach of 
governmental power. What role should Washington, whose bureaucracies had undertaken 
extensive economic planning during the Second World War, play in the postwar economy? 
Could a more powerful national government help people enjoy greater security in their 
own daily lives? How might such a government affect liberty and equality? Debate over 
issues such as these marked the presidency of Democrat Harry Truman (1945 53), who 
struggled to implement his anticommunist agenda and to build upon social welfare measures 
from the New Deal era of the 1930s. 
Creating a National Security State,1945 1949 
27 
Focus Question 
What major conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union shaped 
the Cold War, and what were the principal elements of the foreign policy called 
containment? 
The wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union proved little more 
than a marriage of convenience. The shared goal of defeating the Axis had forced these two 
nations, capitalist and communist, to cooperate, but collaboration scarcely lasted beyond 
victory. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union produced a Cold War 
marked by mutual suspicion and growing tension. 
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Onset of the Cold War 
Historians have dissected the beginning of the Cold War from many different perspectives. 
The traditional interpretation focuses on Soviet expansionism. It sees a historical Russian 
appetite for new territory, an ideological zeal to spread international communism, or some 
interplay between these two desires. According to this view, the United States needed to 
check the expansionist designs of a malevolent USSR. Other historians generally called 
revisionists argue that the Soviet Union s obsession with securing its borders, an under- 
standable response to the invasion of its territory during both world wars, dominated its 
foreign policy. The United States, in this view, might have tried harder to reassure the 
USSR, pursuing conciliatory policies instead of ones that intensified Soviet fears. Still other 
scholars maintain that assigning blame to one side or the other obscures how clashing 
interests and differing political cultures produced potentially dangerous confrontations, 
but never direct military conflict, between the two superpowers. 
In every account, Harry Truman s administration plays a central role. The new U.S. 
president initially hoped that he could somehow deal with the Soviets but quickly came 
to distrust Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. As differences between the former allies emerged, 
Truman turned to a group of hard-line, anti-Soviet advisers. 
The atomic bomb provided an immediate source of U.S.-Soviet friction. At the Potsdam 
Conference of July 1945, Truman had casually told Stalin, without mentioning the atomic 
bomb, about a new U.S. weapon of  unusual destructive force.  Well-informed by Soviet 
intelligence operations about the Manhattan Project, Stalin casually replied that Truman 
1010  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
1946 Baruch plan for atomic energy proposed  " Employment Act passed  " Republicans gain control of Congress 
in November elections 
1947 Truman Doctrine announced  " HUAC begins hearings on communist infiltration of Hollywood  " George 
Kennan s  Mr. X  article published  " National Security Act passed (CIA and NSC established)  " Marshall 
Plan adopted  " Truman s loyalty order announced  " Taft-Hartley Act passed over Truman s veto  " Jackie 
Robinson and Larry Doby break major league baseball s color line 
1948 Berlin Airlift begins  " Truman wins reelection  " The Kinsey Reportand Dr. Benjamin Spock s Baby and Child 
Carepublished 
1949 NATO established  " China  falls  to communism  " NSC-68 drafted  " Soviet Union explodes atomic device  " 
Truman unveils his Fair Deal 
1950 Korean War begins  " Senator Joseph McCarthy charges communist infiltration of State Department  " 
McCarran Internal Security Act passed 
1951 Truman removes General MacArthur as commander in Korea 
1952 GI Bill of Rights passed  " Dwight Eisenhower elected president 
C HR O NO L O G Y 
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should make  good use  of this weapon. Less calmly, Stalin ordered his scientists to inten- 
sify the Soviet Union s own nuclear weapons program. Truman likely hoped that the bomb 
would scare the Soviets, and it did. Historians still debate whether it frightened the Soviets 
into more cautious behavior or made them more fearful and aggressive. 
As atomic warfare against Japan gave way to atomic diplomacy with the Soviet Union, U.S. 
leaders clashed among themselves over how to proceed. A group that included Secretaryof 
War Henry Stimson, predicting the Soviets would soon possess their own atomic weapons, 
urged Truman to share nuclear technology with the USSR, in hopes of forestalling a 
nuclear arms race. The president s more hard-line confidants, fearing Soviet intentions and 
doubting their nuclear knowledge, rejected this approach. 
In 1946, Truman authorized Bernard Baruch, a special presidential representative at the 
United Nations, to explore ways of controlling the spread of atomic weapons. The Baruch 
Plan proposed that the United States would abandon its nuclear weapons, but only after 
the Soviets met certain conditions. Soviet leaders would have to agree to a process for 
outside monitoring and verification of their atomic energy program and would have to 
Creating a National Security State, 1945 1949 " 1011 
Testing the Atomic Bomb at Bikini Atoll This atomic test, one of 23 detonations at Bikini Atoll in the 
Marshall Islands during the late 1940s, raised a column of water 5,000 feet high. Although Bikini islanders were 
evacuated from the blast sites, the radiation still affected nearby people, including U.S. service personnel, and the 
area s ecology for years to come. As nuclear-related imagery spread through Cold War culture, new  bikini  
swimsuits for  bombshell  women became a fashion rage. 
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11019_27_ch27_p1009-1050.qxd  6/4/07  3:33 PM  Page 1011
surrenderveto power in the UN in cases regarding nuclear issues. Unwilling to submit to 
these conditions, Soviet leaders  rejected the Baruch Plan. They counterproposed that the 
United States unilaterally destroy its atomic weapons as the initial step toward any final 
agreement. The United States opposed this idea, and both nations used the deadlock to 
justify seeking to outpace the other in developing nuclear weapons. 
Additional sources of friction involved U.S. loan policies and Soviet domination of Eastern 
Europe. Under pressure from Republicans in Congress, Truman ended lend-lease assistance 
to the Soviet Union at the end of the war and, on advice from his own camp, linked exten- 
sion of future reconstruction loans to signs of Soviet cooperation with the United Statesover 
the future of Europe. This linkage strategy never worked. The Soviet Union s need for cap- 
ital and its suspicions about Western intentions provided excuses for an aggressive, hard- 
line stance. A repressive sphere of Soviet influence over Eastern Europe, which the USSR 
called defensive and the United States labeled expansionist, fell into place. By 1946, the two 
nations, once uneasy allies, seemed ready to become bitter adversaries. 
Harry Truman increasingly placed his personal stamp on the presidency by pledging to 
stop the campaign of communist expansionism he claimed Moscow directed. Truman s 
anticommunist initiatives, in both foreign and domestic affairs, relied on new measures for 
extending the reach and power of the executive branch of the national government. 
Containment Abroad: The Truman Doctrine 
In March 1947, the president announced what became known as the Truman Doctrine. 
This pronouncement came during a speech to Congress about the civil war in Greece, a 
conflict in which communist-led insurgents appeared ready to topple a corrupt but pro- 
Western government. A war-weakened Britain had long considered Greece within its 
sphere of influence, but it could no longer maintain its formerly strong presence there or 
in other parts of the Middle East. Truman s advisers claimed that a leftist victory in Greece 
would expose nearby Turkey, a nation considered critical to the U.S. strategic position in 
the Mediterranean, to Soviet expansionism. 
Seeking to justify U.S. aid to Greece and Turkey, Truman made his case to Congress in 
especially dramatic terms. Both the threat of communism and U.S. security interests, he 
said, now spanned the globe. The future of  free peoples  everywhere hung in the balance. 
Unless the United States aided those who were  resisting attempted subversion by armed 
minorities or by outside pressures,  totalitarian communism would spread and, ultimately, 
threaten the United States. 
The global vision of U.S. national security outlined in the Truman Doctrine encountered 
some skepticism. Henry Wallace, who had become Truman s most visible Democratic 
critic, chided the president for exaggerating the Soviet threat and urged a more concilia- 
tory approach toward Moscow. Conservative Republicans, though firmly anti-Soviet, 
looked suspiciously at the increase of executive power and the vast expenditures the Truman 
Doctrine seemed to imply. If the president wanted to win support for his position, Republican 
Senator Arthur Vandenberg had already advised, Truman should  scare hell  out ofpeople. 
1012  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
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The rhetoric the president used when announcing the Truman Doctrine seemed to have fol- 
lowed this advice. Gaining backing from both Republicans and Democrats, Congress did 
approve Truman s request for $400 million in assistance to Greece and Turkey, most of it for 
military aid, in the spring of 1947. This vote signaled broad, if not unanimous, bipartisan sup- 
port for a national security policy that came to be called containment. 
The term containment first appeared in a 1947 article in the influential journal Foreign 
Affairs by George Kennan, the U.S. State Department s premier Soviet expert. Writing 
under the pseudonym  X,  Kennan argued that the  main element  in any U.S. policy 
 must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive 
tendencies.  This article and the word containment quickly became associated, to Kennan s 
subsequent displeasure, with the urgent tone of the Truman Doctrine and with a military- 
dominated approach to world affairs. 
Containment eventually came to provide a convenient catchphrase for the Truman 
administration s global, anticommunist national security policy. Although Kennan had envi- 
sioned containment primarily as a careful political strategy that tried to limit Soviet gains in 
Europe, the White House s rearticulation lacked Kennan s nuances and, instead, turned con- 
tainment in militarized and globalized directions. Truman s version came to link all leftist 
insurgencies, wherever they occurred, to a totalitarianmovementdirected from Moscow. 
Soviet communism threatened the security of the United States by dangerous ideas as well 
as by military might. Even a relatively small gain by the Soviets in one part of the globe 
would, in this view, encourage them to extend, perhaps even accelerate, their aggressive ini- 
tiatives. Although postwar debates over foreign policy did include sharp disagreements over 
precisely how and where to pursue containment, few U.S. leaders questioned the need for a 
global and activist foreign policy aimed against the spread of communism. 
Truman s Loyalty Program 
Only nine days after proclaiming the Truman Doctrine, the president issued Executive 
Order 9835. It declared there should be  a loyalty investigation  of every civilian employee 
 of any department or agency of the executive branch of the Federal Government.  Newly 
established loyalty boards would determine whether or not there were  reasonable 
grounds  for concluding that a person working for the U.S. government belonged to an 
organization or held political ideas that might pose a  security risk.  Any employees found 
to pose such a danger would lose their government jobs. The Truman loyalty program also 
authorized the attorney general s office to identify organizations it deemed subversive, 
and to place them on a special Attorney General s List. 
The Truman Loyalty Program rested on a controversial assessment of Soviet espionage 
activity in the United States. Although knowledgeable observers consistently recognized 
that the Soviets had conducted spy operations inside the U.S. government during the 
1940s, there has been sharp disagreement over their scope and success. Were the Soviets 
operating only at the fringes of government or had they penetrated its top levels? Were 
they simply collecting readily obtainable information or stealing vital national secrets? 
Creating a National Security State, 1945 1949 " 1013 
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Debate over questions such as these now takes place in light of evidence unavailable 
before the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union. Previously closed Soviet archives and declas- 
sified files of U.S. surveillance agencies suggest both nations engaged in a wide range of 
spying activities. The wartime alliance had made it easier than ever before for the Soviet 
Union to obtain intelligence in the United States. By 1943, for instance, a super-secret U.S. 
Army counterintelligence unit had begun intercepting transmissions between Moscow and 
the United States. Called the  VENONA files  and not publicly revealed until 1995, these 
intercepted messages showed that the USSR helped finance America s Communist Party; 
placed informants in important U.S. governmental agencies; and began obtaining secret 
information about U.S. atomic work as early as 1944. U.S. officials, in short, justifiably saw 
Soviet espionage as a legitimate concern. Historians still differ, however, over the significance 
and reliability of specific pieces of evidence in the VENONA files and even over how much 
members of the Truman administration actually knew about information in these intercepts. 
There can be little doubt, though, that the case Truman made on behalf of his loyalty pol- 
icy failed to satisfy a diverse group of critics. The president claimed, in effect, that the United 
States faced relatively few security risks but that their potential for doing grave harm 
demanded a response unprecedented in peacetime. Many Republicans charged the Truman 
administration with underestimating the threat and warned that hundreds, perhaps thou- 
sands, of communists now worked in the federal bureaucracy. The Democrats, these Repub- 
licans argued, lacked the will to create the kind of aggressive loyalty program that could 
root them out. From a very different perspective, civil liberties groups saw a more limited 
threat and argued for a carefully calibrated response. Truman s approach, they insisted, 
failed to distinguish between, for example, an atomic scientist with ties to the Soviet Union 
and a politically outspoken clerical worker in the Interior Department. Truman s loyalty 
plan, therefore, angered both fervent anticommunists, who accused the president of doing 
too little to fight subversion at home, and civil libertarians, who charged him with whip- 
ping up fears that far exaggerated the menace and exceeded constitutional limitations on 
governmental power. 
The National Security Act, the Marshall Plan, and the Berlin Crisis 
Shaking off criticism from all sides, the Truman administration continued to pursue its 
anticommunist initiatives. It secured congressional passage of the National Security Act of 
1947, which created several new governmental bureaucracies. The law began the process 
that transformed the old Navy and War Departments into a unified Department of 
Defense, finally established in 1949. It instituted another new arm of the executive branch, 
the National Security Council (NSC), and gave it broad authority over the planning and 
execution of foreign policy. It established the Air Force as a separate service alongside the 
Army and Navy, and it created, as a successor to the wartime Office of Strategic Services 
(OSS), a new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). 
The CIA, charged with gathering sensitive political information and conducting covert 
activities, proved to be the most flexible of the new national security bureaucracies. 
1014  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
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Shrouded from public scrutiny and even close oversight by Congress, its secretly funded 
operations crisscrossed the globe. The CIA reached out, for example, to anti-Stalinist 
groups in Eastern Europe and even to some within the Soviet Union. It helped finance, in 
hopes of preventing the rise of communist-led organizations, pro-U.S. labor unions in 
Western Europe. It covertly intervened in overseas political campaigns, bolstering anti- 
communist parties in France and Japan. The CIA secretly claimed credit for preventing 
the Italian Communist Party from winning a nationwide electoral victory in 1948. The 
Trumanadministration came to see CIA operations as integral to its anticommunist 
foreign policy. 
Truman s White House also considered its economic policies in Western Europe an 
important part of the containment effort. Concerned that Western Europe s severe eco- 
nomic problems might benefit communist-dominated movements, Secretary of State 
George C. Marshall hoped U.S. aid would quickly rejuvenate the region s economy. Under 
his 1947 Marshall Plan, the United States would extend funds designed to allow postwar 
Western European governments to coordinate a broad program of economic reconstruc- 
tion. Between 1946 and 1951, the United States provided nearly $13 billion in assistance 
to 17 Western European nations. 
The Truman administration consistently hailed the Marshall Plan, which Congress 
approved in early 1948, for complementing other national security initiatives. It credited 
aid from the United States for helping brighten the economic scene in Western Europe, 
where industrial production quickly rebounded. Improving standards of living, the White 
House claimed, enhanced political stability in Western Europe and undermined the appeal 
of communist-led movements. In response to conservative critics who complained of a 
 giveaway  program, supporters of the Marshall Plan insisted that U.S. economic aid 
expanded both markets and investment opportunities for U.S. firms wanting to do busi- 
ness in Western Europe. 
The Truman administration also moved to beef up U.S. military resources, depleted as 
a result of an earlier postwar demobilization effort. After the USSR facilitated the installa- 
tion of a pro-Soviet government in Czechoslovakia, during the spring of 1948, the presi- 
dent s key military advisers claimed Stalin likely intended a military strike against Western 
Europe. A brief war scare gripped Washington. Planners urged an immediate increase in 
across-the-board military spending and reinstitution of the military draft. Truman, addressing 
a joint session of Congress, declared that  moral God-fearing peoples . . . must save theworld 
from Atheism  and from Soviet  totalitarianism.  
U.S. policy makers viewed the future of postwar Germany, initially divided into four zones 
of occupation (see chapter 26), as crucial to the security of Western Europe. In June 1948,the 
United States, Great Britain, and France announced a currency-reform program as the first 
step toward integrating their separate sectors into the Federal Republic of Germany,popu- 
larly known as West Germany. Soviet leaders expressed alarm. Having twice been invaded 
by German armies during the preceding 35 years, they wanted, as a hedge against a third 
attack, any post-occupation Germany to remain economically enfeebled. Hoping tosidetrack 
Creating a National Security State, 1945 1949 " 1015 
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Western plans, in June 1948, the Soviets cut off all highways, railroads, and water routes 
linking Berlin, which was located within their own domain, to the western zones of 
occupation. 
This Soviet attempt to seal off Berlin provided an opportunity for the newly created U.S. 
Air Force to display its capabilities. Under the direction of General Curtis LeMay, U.S. and 
British pilots began  Operation Vittles  or  the Berlin Airlift.  Specially outfitted planes, fly- 
ing around the clock, soared over the Soviet blockade and delivered virtually all of the 
items Berliners needed to continue their daily routines. The United States, hinting at a mil- 
itary response, also began negotiating for U.S. air bases in Western Europe and immedi- 
ately stationed in Britain two squadrons of B-29s, reputably able to deliver atomic bombs 
to Soviet targets. Although these planes actually lacked nuclear capability, officials in the 
Pentagon began planning for an atomic attack, during some future confrontation, against 
the USSR. Once Stalin recognized the Berlin Airlift would continue, he abandoned his 
blockade, in May 1949, and moved to convert the Soviet-occupied sector of East Germany 
into the German Democratic Republic. The western portion of a divided Berlin, an anti- 
communist enclave inside East Germany, quickly became a prominent focus of Cold War 
tensions. 
The Election of 1948 
National security issues helped Harry Truman win the 1948 election. His victory capped 
a remarkable political story, one that featured a feisty incumbent president and a trio of 
challengers. 
Truman faced significant political opposition that had been building since 1946. Dissident 
Democrats, who thought his containment policies too militant and his domestic ones too 
tame, began looking to an old Truman rival, former Vice-President (1941 45) Henry 
A. Wallace. After Wallace, whom Truman inherited from Roosevelt as his secretary of com- 
merce, criticized U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union, the president ousted him from the 
cabinet in September 1946. This move angered those Democrats who saw Wallace, not 
Truman,as FDR s rightful successor. Later, the off-year national elections of November 1946 
gave the Republicans control of Congress for the first time since 1928. GOP leaders saw this 
victory portending an end to their 20-year losing streak in presidential races. Although 
Truman s political fortunes did seem somewhat improved by late 1947, few political 
handicappersliked his chances in 1948. 
Truman faced three prominent opponents. To his political left, a new Progressive Party, 
which nominated Henry Wallace for president, hoped to attract the disaffected Democrats 
who charged Truman with abandoning FDR s legacy. In addition, South Carolina s J. Strom 
Thurmond became the pro-segregationist candidate of a new States  Rights (or  Dixiecrat ) 
party, and Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican who had run well during a losing race 
against Franklin Roosevelt in 1944, returned as the GOP nominee. Targeting Dewey, his 
most serious challenger, Truman called the GOP-controlled Congress into a special ses- 
sion and presented it with a list of domestic policy proposals that were abhorrent to most 
1016  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
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Republicans. After GOP legislators predictably ignored Truman s wish list, the president 
targeted  that do-nothing, good-for-nothing, worst Congress.  
Dewey helped Truman s cause by running an exceedingly cautious campaign. A pro- 
Democratic newspaper caricatured Dewey s standard speech as four  historic sentences: 
Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. 
The future lies ahead.  Ignoring critics, he remained confident of a November victory. 
When his campaign train, the  Victory Special,  arrived in Truman s old political base of 
Kansas City, Dewey pointedly booked the same hotel suite the president used whenever 
he came to town. 
Meanwhile, Truman mounted an energetic, tub-thumping effort. It featured blunt and 
caustic attacks on his opponents, most famously delivered from the back of his own cam- 
paign train. Dewey was plotting  a real hatchet job on the New Deal,  the president charged, 
and the GOP, controlled by a cabal of  cunning men,  was preparing for  a return of the Wall 
Street economic dictatorship.   Give  em hell, Harry!  shouted his Democratic supporters. In 
November, Truman won slightly less than 50 percent of the popular vote but secured a solid 
majority in the Electoral College. The Democratic Party also regained control of Congress. 
Truman s victory now seems less surprising to historians than it did to political analysts 
in 1948. Despite Republican victories in the 1946 congressional elections, the Democratic 
Party retained the core of its old New Deal base. In fact, Democratic congressional candi- 
dates who identified with Franklin Roosevelt rather than with his successor generally 
polled a higher percentage of the 
November vote in their districts 
than did Truman. Voter loyalty to 
the memory of Roosevelt and his 
New Deal coalition helped bring 
the Democrats their victory. 
After accepting his party s call for 
new civil-rights measures, Truman 
survived the revolt of the Dixiecrats, 
disaffected white Southern Demo- 
crats, in 1948. Strom Thurmond 
had denounced Truman for 
backinga  civil wrongs  program 
and charged that  radicals, subver- 
sives, and reds  now controlled the 
national Democratic Party. He 
claimed that Dixiecrats did not 
oppose all civil-rights legislation but 
insisted that the U.S. Constitution 
required that state governments,not 
the federal government,possessed 
Creating a National Security State, 1945 1949 " 1017 
WA 
8 
OR 
6 
CA 
25 
NV 
3 
MT 
4 
ND 
4 
SD 
4 
WY 
3 
ID 
4 
UT 
4 CO 
6 
AZ 
4 NM 
4 
TX 
23 
OK 
10 
KS 
8 
NE 
6 
MN 
11 
IA 
10 
LA 
10 
AR 
9 
MO 
15 
FL 
8 
MS 
9 AL 
11 
GA 
12 
SC 
8 
TN 
 Th-1 Tr-11 
NC 
14 
KY 
11 
WI 
12 MI 
19 
IL 
28 
IN 
13 
OH 
25 
VA 
11 
WV 
8 
PA 
35 
NY 
47 
ME 
5 
NH 
4 
VT 
3 
MD 
8 
DE 
3 
NJ 
16 
MA 
16 
CT 
8 
RI 
4 
Truman    303       57       24,105,812      49.9 
(Democrat) 
Dewey                        189       36       21,970,065      45.3 
(Republican) 
Thurmond                          39         7         1,169,021        2.4 
(States  Rights) 
Wallace                         ----       ----        1,157,172        2.4 
(Progressive) 
Electoral Vote    
Number     %    
 Popular Vote 
  Number            %    
Map 27.1 Presidential Election, 1948 This electoral map helps 
show how, in this close election, Truman won the presidency with less than 
50 percent of the popular vote. 
11019_27_ch27_p1009-1050.qxd  6/4/07  3:33 PM  Page 1017
the power to enact antidiscrimination measures. The Dixiecrat movement did portend 
longer-term political changes among southern whites, people who had loyally voted Demo- 
cratic since Reconstruction. As a presidential candidate in 1948, however, Thurmond 
secured only the electoral votes of four Deep South states, while Truman carried all of the 
other states of the old Confederacy. 
Truman s hard-line anticommunist rhetoric proved crucial to sidetracking Henry Wallace s 
once-promising campaign. Wallace and his supporters had never expected to win the pres- 
idency but hoped to do well enough to rekindle support for their vision of the New Deal 
and to build pressure for a less militantly anti-Soviet foreign policy. Eventually, though, 
many Democrats abandoned the Progressives because of their refusal to reject support 
from the U.S. Communist Party a point that Truman contrasted with his own anticom- 
munist stance. Henry Wallace received less than 3 percent of the popular tally and no elec- 
toral votes. The 1948 election left the Progressive Party in shambles and suggested a les- 
son for elections to come: Successful presidential candidates could never appear  soft  on 
national security issues if they hoped to gain the White House. 
The Era of the Korean War,1949 1952 
Meanwhile, to carry out his containment policy, Truman continued to marshal the nation s 
economic and military resources. After a series of Cold War crises during 1949 and the 
outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula in 1950, he reaffirmed his administration s 
anticommuniststance. 
NATO, China, and the Bomb 
In April 1949, the United States, Canada, and 10 European nations formed the North 
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Under this  mutual defense  pact, each nation 
pledged that an attack against one would automatically be treated as a strike against all. 
Prominent critics, such as Republican Senator Robert Taft, called NATO a provocation to 
the Soviet Union, an  entangling alliance  that violated the traditional U.S. foreign policy, 
and a threat to the constitutionally guaranteed power of Congress to declare war. Because 
of NATO s mutual defense feature, Taft argued, the policies of other countries, rather than 
those of the United States, could bring the nation into a foreign conflict. The NATO con- 
cept prevailed, however, and the idea of pursuing containment through similar arrange- 
ments would expand during the 1950s. (See Map 27.2, Divided Germany and the 
NATO Alliance, in the color insert following page 1056.) 
Meanwhile, events in China heightened Cold War tensions. Although the United States 
had extended billions of dollars in military aid and economic assistance to Jiang Jieshi s 
struggling Nationalist government, Jiang had steadily lost ground to the forces of Mao 
Zedong, who promised that a communist China would soon gain an important role in 
world affairs and that Chinese peasants would enjoy the fruits of a sweeping program of 
land reform. Experienced U.S. diplomats privately predicted Jiang s inevitable downfall. 
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Publicly, however, the Truman administration continued to portray Jiang as the capa- 
ble and respected leader of a  free China.  Then, in 1949, Mao s armies finally forced Jiang 
and his supporters to retreat from the Chinese mainland to the nearby island of Formosa 
(Taiwan). Mao s communist movement established the People s Republic of China, while 
Jiang s National Chinese government took root on Formosa. The two Chinas, like the two 
Germanys, became evocative symbols of a global Cold War. 
Many people in the United States wondered how Mao s communist forces could have tri- 
umphed. Financed by conservative business leaders, the powerful  China lobby  excoriated 
Truman and his new secretary of state, Dean Acheson, for having  lost  China to the com- 
munists. Critics of Acheson s state department forced the removal of several analysts who 
had warned of Jiang s impending collapse or had merely emphasized his shortcomings. 
Although Acheson had once made some tentative, highly secret moves toward negotiating 
with the People s Republic, new international tensions and domestic political pressures 
ultimately convinced the Truman administration to embrace Jiang s regime on Taiwan and 
refuse to recognize or officially deal with Mao s  Red China.  Nonrecognition remained 
U.S. policy for more than 20 years, even after the friction between communist China and 
the Soviet Union, which experienced  China hands  in the U.S. State Department had 
predicted, became evident. 
In September 1949, Truman announced another event that reinforced his adminis- 
tration s anticommunist resolve. The Soviet Union, years earlier than many of the pres- 
ident s aides had expected, had conducted a successful  nuclear explosion.  The USSR s 
crude atomic device, which ended the U.S. nuclear monopoly, increased concern about 
the threat posed by Soviet communism. Already besieged by domestic critics who saw 
recent history filled with Soviet gains and U.S. losses, Truman secretly pondered 
whether U.S. scientists should take the next step in nuclear weaponry: development of 
a hydrogen bomb. Acheson, who had once shared Henry Stimson s fears about a 
nuclear arms race, now threw the State Department s influence behind the H-bomb 
project. 
NSC-68 
In responding to events of 1949, the Truman administration began formally reviewing its 
foreign-policy assumptions. George Kennan, increasingly concerned about the emergence 
of a global, largely militarized redesign of his containment concept, resigned from the State 
Department s policy staff. As a result, the task of overseeing this review fell to Paul Nitze, 
a hard-liner who insisted on confronting the USSR throughout the world, lest small gains 
in one corner encourage more aggressive Soviet moves elsewhere. Nitze effectively dom- 
inated production of a policy paper identified as NSC-68(National Security Council 
Document 68), which provided a blueprint for both the rhetoric and the substance of 
future Cold War foreign policy. In the words of one of NSC-68 s architects, the United 
States should  find every weak spot in the enemy s armor . . . and hit him with anything 
that comes to hand. Anything we do short of an all-out effort is inexcusable.  
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NSC-68 opened with an alarming account of a global ideological clash between  freedom,  
spread by U.S. power, and  slavery,  promoted by the Soviet Union, the center of an 
international communist movement. Despairing of fruitful negotiations with the Soviets, 
NSC-68urged a full-scale effort to expand U.S. influence. It endorsed covert action, eco- 
nomic pressure, propaganda campaigns, and a massive military buildup. Because some 
Americans might oppose larger military spending and budget deficits, the report cau- 
tioned, U.S. leaders should portray their actions as defensive and present greater military 
spending as a stimulus to the economy rather than as a potential drain on national 
resources. Although the details of NSC-68 remained classified for more than two decades, 
people in the United States certainly learned about its major assumptions. Led by Secretary 
of State Acheson, officials from the Truman administration stumped the country, preaching 
the key tenets of NSC-68 and popularizing its view of the Cold War as a global showdown 
between good and evil. 
The Korean War 
Supporters of NSC-68 could claim vindication in June 1950, when communist North Korea 
invaded South Korea. Truman characterized the attack as a simple case of Soviet-inspired 
aggression. According to a spokesperson for the State Department, the relationship 
between the USSR and North Korea resembled  that between Walt Disney and Donald 
Duck.  President Truman invoked the rhetoric of containment and the domino-like vision 
of NSC-68:  If aggression is successful in Korea, we can expect it to spread through Asia 
and Europe to this hemisphere.  
The situation on the Korean Peninsula, however, was more complicated. Japanese mil- 
itary forces had occupied all of Korea between 1905 and 1945, and Japan s defeat in the 
Second World War had encouraged most Koreans to hope they might reestablish their 
own independent nation. Instead, separate zones of occupation, resulting from separate 
wartime military operations by the United States and the Soviet Union, became two dis- 
tinct states, with the 38th parallel providing the boundary between them. The Soviet 
Union supported North Korea s communist government, headed by the dictatorial Kim Il-sung. 
The United States backed the aging, American-educated Syngman Rhee to head up an 
unsteady, sometimes autocratic, government in South Korea. Separated by an arbitrary and 
militarized border, many Koreans saw themselves divided as much by internal politicaland 
religious differences as by Cold War considerations. Nonetheless, both Kim and Rhee rec- 
ognized that patronage from the rival superpowers could help bolster their regimes and 
advance their conflicting plans for Korea. 
As Rhee s policies, especially those favoring large landholders, generated internal oppo- 
sition, Kim decided on unifying Korea under his control. He gambled that the United 
States would not, or could not, effectively intervene in Korea. At one point, after all, 
even the militantly anticommunist Dean Acheson had suggested the Korean peninsula fell 
outsidethe U.S.  defense perimeter.  On June 25, 1950, Kim s communist troops moved 
across the 38th parallel into South Korea. Earlier, he had consulted Soviet and Chinese 
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leaders and, after arguing for the likelihood of a quick North Korean victory, received their 
approval. His South Korean nation under attack, Syngman Rhee appealed to the Truman 
administration for military assistance. Over the strong opposition of General Omar 
Bradley, Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, supporters of U.S. intervention, led by Nitze and 
Acheson, prevailed. 
The situation quickly escalated into a wider Cold War conflict, the Korean War. The 
Soviets, unaware of the details of Kim s plans, were boycotting the UN on the day North 
Korealaunched its invasion and could not veto a U.S. proposal to send a UN military force, 
under U.S. command, to Korea. Under UN auspices, the United States rushed assistance 
to Rhee, who moved to quell dissent in the South as well as to repel the armies of the 
North. 
U.S. leaders soon began debating their goal in Korea. Should they seek only to contain 
communism by driving North Korea s forces back over the 38th parallel? Or should they 
try to  roll back  communist power and reunify Korea under Rhee s leadership? Rollback 
initially seemed fanciful, as North Korean forces pushed rapidly southward. Within three 
months of their incursion, they took Seoul, the capital of South Korea, and probed into 
the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. UN troops, most of them from the United States 
and under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, initially seemed unprepared. 
Soon, however, U.S.-supplied firepower took its toll on North Korea s elite troops and, 
later, on the untrained recruits Kim sent to replace them. 
MacArthur then devised a plan that most other military commanders considered crazy: 
an amphibious landing behind enemy lines. Those stunned by his audacious proposal 
became even more astounded by its results. On September 15, 1950, a sizeable contingent 
of U.S. Marines landed at Inchon, suffered minimal casualties, and recaptured nearby 
Seoul in less than two weeks. 
The shifting tide of battle devastated Korea. Many observers would call the Korean con- 
flict a  limited  war, largely because it never spread off the Korean Peninsula or involved 
nuclear weapons. Intense bombing, however, preceded every U.S military move, and nei- 
ther side seemed concerned about civilian casualties. Estimates of Koreans left dead and 
wounded reached perhaps one-tenth of the total population of both Koreas. While battling 
for control of Seoul, for example, rival forces reduced the city to rubble, with only the 
capitol building and a train station left standing. 
As MacArthur s troops drove northward, Truman faced a crucial decision. Emboldened 
by success, the general urged moving beyond containment to an all-out war of  liberation  
and the reunification of Korea. MacArthur s supporters in Washington saw an oppor- 
tunity to demonstrate the feasibility of junking the policy of merely containing com- 
munism in favor of rolling it back. Other advisers warned, however, that Mao s China 
would likely retaliate if U.S. forces approached its border. After a joint meeting on 
Wake Island, far closer to MacArthur s home turf than to Truman s, the president did 
allow MacArthur to carry the war into North Korea but cautioned against provoking 
China. 
The Era of the Korean War, 1949 1952 " 1021 
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Unimpressed by the threat of Chinese intervention, MacArthur advanced his forces to 
near the Yalu River on the Chinese-Korean border. China responded by sending at least 
400,000 troops into North Korea, which forced retreating UN forces back across the 38th 
parallel.  We face an entirely new war,  MacArthur admitted. Alarmists in Washington 
considered several possibilities: evacuating UN forces from Korea; employing atomic 
weaponry against China; or, perhaps, even mounting a preemptive nuclear strike against 
the USSR. 
Truman pondered his options. After apparently wavering briefly, he made a crucial 
decision: It was not the time to employ atomic weapons, in Korea or anywhere else. Then, 
after MacArthur s troops stopped the Chinese advance and even regained the initiative, 
Truman also rejected any idea of further escalating the war in favor of settling for a mili- 
tary stalemate at the point where the 38th parallel bisected the Korean Peninsula. General 
MacArthur, directly challenging the president, argued publicly for an all-out offensive into 
North Korea and, possibly, even into China as well. Invoking the principle that the U.S. 
Constitution made military officers subordinant to the president, the nation s comman- 
der-in-chief, a now-angry Harry Truman, summarily relieved MacArthur from his post in 
April 1951. 
MacArthur returned home as a war hero and as a potential Republican presidential can- 
didate. Opinion polls reported overwhelming opposition to Truman s decision to dump 
the popular general, now a hero of both the Korean and the Second World War. During 
U.S. Senate hearings on MacArthur s dismissal, however, equally distinguished military 
strategists dismissed his scenario for Korea as the  wrong war in the wrong place.  
MacArthur s once luminous image, along with his political ambitions, soon faded away. 
Truman mobilized his remaining political resources behind an unsuccessful search for 
translating a temporary truce into a more permanent peace settlement for Korea. As nego- 
tiations stalled, another military hero, Dwight Eisenhower, whom Republicans tapped as 
their 1952 candidate for president, promised he would personally go to Korea, if elected, 
and accelerate the peace process. Harry Truman would leave office, in 1953, without 
securing a formal end to the Korean War. 
Korea and Containment 
Meanwhile, this conflict brought NSC-68 s recommendations to life and spurred the Truman 
administration to expand its containment initiatives. It announced plans to rearm West 
Germany, scarcely five years after Nazi Germany s defeat, and to increase NATO s military 
forces. A proposal for direct U.S. military aid to Latin American governments, which leg- 
islators had voted down in the past, slid through Congress. In the Philippines, the United States 
stepped up military assistance to suppress the leftist Huk rebels. In 1951, the United States 
finally signed a formal peace treaty with Japan and inked a security pact that gave the 
United States the power to establish military bases on the Japanese island of Okinawa. The 
Truman administration acquired similar bases in the Middle East, bolsteringthe U.S. strategic 
position in that oil-rich area. The ANZUS mutual defense pact of 1952 linked theUnited States 
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strategically to Australia and New Zealand. And in French Indochina, Truman began assisting 
France s effort to prevent a communist-led independence movement from ousting its 
colonial regime. 
Throughout the world, U.S. policy makers continued to oppose any movement whose 
political orientation seemed left-leaning and to give support to pro-United States parties 
and people. The U.S. occupation government in Japan, for example, increasingly restricted 
the activities of labor unions, suspended an antitrust program that American officials had 
earlier implemented, and barred communists from posts in the government and in the uni- 
versities. As in Germany, the United States tried to convert a formerly fascist foe into an 
anticommunist ally by strengthening pro-U.S. elites and by promoting a U.S. model of 
economic growth. 
The Era of the Korean War, 1949 1952 " 1023 
"Æ 
"Æ 
Cheju-du 
Tsushima 
Kyushu 
Honshu 
Shikoku 
Pusan 
Fukuoka 
Inchon 
Seoul 
Panmunjom 
Kaesong 
Pyongyang 
Kosong 
Hungnam 
Sinuiju 
Sinanju 
Chosan 
Hyesanjin 
Chongjin 
Hiroshima 
PEOPLE S REPUBLIC 
OF CHINA 
SOVIET UNION 
NORTH 
KOREA 
SOUTH 
KOREA 
JAPAN 
Farthest North Korean advance, 
September 1950 
Farthest Chinese advance, 
January 1951 
Farthest U.N. advance 
November 1950 
Armistice line, 
July 27, 1953 
International 
boundary, 1950 
Landing at Inchon, 
September 15, 1950 
38th Parallel 
SEA 
OF 
JAPAN 
YELLOW 
SEA 
Tsush 
ima  
         
     Str 
ait 
Korea 
Bay 
Yalu 
R. 
0 
75 150 Kilometers 
0 
75 150 Miles 
Battle lines 
N. Korean offensive 
U.N. offensive 
Chinese offensive 
Map 27.3 Korean War This map shows the lines of battle and the armistice line that still divides the two Koreas. Note the 
advances made first by North Korea and then by UN (United States-led) troops. 
View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin 
11019_27_ch27_p1009-1050.qxd  6/4/07  3:33 PM  Page 1023
In Africa, anticommunism prompted the United States to ally with South Africa. In 
1949, that nation s all-white (and militantly anticommunist) Nationalist Party had insti- 
tuted a legal-social system, calledapartheid, based on elaborate rules of racial separation 
and subordination of blacks. Some officials in the State Department warned that any pact 
with South Africa, by implying support for apartheid, hardly presented the United States 
as an apostle of freedom, but the Truman administration nonetheless concluded an 
alliance with South Africa s white supremacist regime. 
The Truman administration s anticommunism, again in line with NSC-68, included 
more than military moves. Truman s global  Campaign of Truth,  an intensive informa- 
tional and psychological offensive, used mass-media imagery and cultural exchanges to 
counter the Soviet s anticapitalist propaganda. A rhetoric that framed U.S. policy in terms 
of defending fundamental values took hold. As the Defense Department replaced the old 
War Department, U.S. policy makers increasingly talked about defending  national security  
rather than advancing the  national interest.  
Beginning with the Truman Doctrine of 1947, in short, the United States reinvented 
itself as a superpower with a global reach. In response to the specter of Soviet-led com- 
munism, the United States solidified its position within Iran, Greece, and Turkey, all once 
inside Britain s sphere of influence; initiated the Marshall Plan and NATO; transformed 
former enemies Italy, Germany, and Japan into anti-Soviet bulwarks; assumed control 
of hundreds of islands in the Pacific Ocean; launched research to develop an H-bomb; 
winked at apartheid to win an anticommunist ally in South Africa; solidified its sphere of 
influence in Latin America; acquired military bases around the world; and devised a mas- 
ter plan, NSC-68, for using military, economic, and covert action to advance far-flung 
national security goals. 
As the Truman administration moved to fortify the U.S. strategic position overseas, 
its policies also produced what the historian Michael Sherry has called  the militariza- 
tion of American life.  With strong bipartisan support in Congress, the White House 
accelerated what would become a massive military buildup and, as a result, an increas- 
ing merger between military and economic policy making. The fight against communism 
and for greater security, at home and abroad, continually justified the expansion of the 
power of the governmental bureaucracies charged with protecting national security. 
Congress granted a new Atomic Energy Commission, for example, broad powers to 
oversee development of a U.S. nuclear power industry. To develop both the weaponry 
and the policies implied by a global security strategy, Congress created a think tank  
RAND, an acronym for Research and Development. The Pentagon joined with aircraft 
manufacturers in an ultimately successful effort to develop surface-to-surface missiles. 
The Pentagon s soaring budget and its expensive contracts did worry cost-conscious 
members of Congress, but the prospect of governmental spending creating new jobs in 
their home districts helped mute opposition to a foreign policy that emphasized military 
initiatives. 
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Pursuing National Security at Home 
Pursuing National Security at Home  " 1025 
Although bipartisan support for Truman s national security measures overseas generally pre- 
vailed, the president s programs for containing subversive influences at home encountered bit- 
ter, sustained opposition. Militant anticommunists, sometimes taking their cue from Truman s 
own rhetoric, leveled increasingly alarming allegations about internal communist subversion 
and about his administration s unwillingness to respond appropriately. Civil libertarians, on 
the other hand, continued to complain about  witch-hunts  against people whose only 
apparent sin seemed dissent from prevailing policy choices. As the political climate became 
increasingly volatile, even some dedicated anticommunists began to worry that wild goose 
chases after unlikely subversives could discredit the government s effort to identify authen- 
tic Soviet agents. The widespread search for signs of subversion, which took place outside 
the control of the Truman White House, eventually touched many areas of postwar life. 
Anticommunism and the U.S. Labor Movement 
The issue of anticommunism, for example, helped unsettle the U.S. labor movement. After 
the end of the Second World War, militant workers had struck for increased wages and 
for a greater voice in workplace routines and production decisions. Labor strikes had 
brought both the auto and the electronics industries to a standstill. In Stamford, Con- 
necticut, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, general strikes had led to massive work stoppages 
that later spread to other U.S. large cities. After the president threatened to seize mines and 
railroads shut down by work stoppages and to order strikers back to work, labor militancy 
slowly began to subside. 
Unimpressed, the Republican-controlled Congress effectively tapped anticommunist 
sentiment to pass the Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947. Opponents of the law, 
popularly known as the Taft-Hartley Act, charged that it seemed to have more to do with 
countering gains made by organized labor during the 1930s than with combating com- 
munism. It limited a union s power to conduct boycotts, to compel employers to accept 
 closed shops  in which only union members could be hired, and to conduct any strike 
that the president judged harmful to national security. In addition, the measure required 
that union officials sign affidavits stating that they did not belong to the Communist Party 
or to any other  subversive  organization. If a union refused to comply, it could lose some 
of the legal protections otherwise available under national labor laws. Truman vetoed 
Taft-Hartley, but Congress swiftly overrode him. By the end of the Truman era, some type 
of loyalty-security check had been conducted on about 20 percent of the U.S. workforce, 
more than 13 million people. 
Focus Question 
How did the foreign policy of containment affect domestic policy and American life? 
11019_27_ch27_p1009-1050.qxd  6/4/07  3:33 PM  Page 1025
Anticommunism also affected both internal union politics and labor-management rela- 
tions. Some workers had long charged communist organizers with displaying greater loy- 
alty to the Communist Party than to their own unions or to the nation. Differences over 
whether to support the Democratic Party or Henry Wallace s Progressive effort in 1948 
had embittered relations within the organized labor movement. During the years following 
Truman s victory, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled 13 unions a 
full third of its membership for their political ties. In addition, outspoken labor activists 
discovered that their ideas about politics and economics, if they seemed to resemble com- 
munist tenets, could put their own jobs at risk. The anticommunist issue, forcefully 
invoked by businesspeople and conservative labor leaders, increasingly found its way into 
labor-management relations during the 1940s. 
HUAC and the Search for Subversives 
The entertainment industry attracted special attention. In 1947, only three days after Truman 
unveiled his famous Doctrine, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 
opened hearings into subversive influences in Hollywood. Basking in the gaze of newsreel 
1026  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
Instructors on Strike Employees of an Arthur Murray Dance Studio in New York City demonstrate both the conga, a 
popular Latin American dance style in 1947, and their determination to form a union affiliated with Local 16 of the United 
Office and Professional Workers of America. During the immediate postwar period, workers in a wide range of occupations 
mounted strikes to secure higher wages, better conditions, and greater job security through unionization campaigns. 
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cameras, committee members seized on the refusal of a group of screenwriters, producers, 
and directors all current or former members of the American Communist Party to tes- 
tify about their own politics and that of others in the film community. Known as  the 
HollywoodTen,  this group claimed that the First Amendment barred HUAC from 
scrutinizing political convictions. The federal courts upheld HUAC s investigative 
powers, however, and the Hollywood Ten eventually went to prison for contempt of 
Congress. 
Studio heads also drew up a secret blacklist, a directory of alleged subversives whom 
they agreed not to hire. Movie moguls denied the existence of such a list, but their dis- 
avowals sounded unconvincing. As the staunchly anticommunist actor and producer John 
Wayne later conceded,  The only thing our side did that was anywhere near blacklisting 
was just running a lot of people out of the business.  Leaders in other sectors of the enter- 
tainment industry, particularly television, adopted a similar policy. Although prominent 
celebrities such as the Hollywood Ten dominated media accounts of blacklisting activities, 
many anonymous labor union members, who worked behind the scenes in technical and 
support positions, also lost their source of livelihood in the entertainment business. 
In time, hundreds of people charged with being subversives found their employment 
prospects resting on their willingness to appear as  friendly witnesses  before HUAC or 
some similar investigative committee. There, investigators would require witnesses to pro- 
vide the names of other people who supposedly had attended a pro-communist meeting 
or event, usually at some point during an increasingly distant past. Some of those called 
to testify, such as the writer Lillian Hellman, refused to answer any questions. Others, such 
as the director Elia Kazan, cooperated and agreed to  name names.  Individual decisions 
over whether to participate in the ritualistic process of naming names created personal 
anguish and political rancor that would divide members of the entertainment business and 
labor union movement for decades. 
The search for subversives also created new political celebrities. Ronald Reagan, who 
served as president of the Screen Actors Guild and as a secret informant for the FBI (iden- 
tified as  T-10 ), eagerly testified before HUAC about communist influences within the 
movie industry. Richard Nixon, once an obscure member of Congress from California, 
began his rapid political ascent when he backed Whittaker Chambers, a journalist formally 
active in communist circles. Chambers, newly repentant and staunchly anticommunist, 
came before HUAC in 1948. He charged Alger Hiss,a prominent Democrat with a lengthy 
career in public service, with having been a party member who had slipped classified 
information to Soviet agents during the late 1930s. 
The Hiss-Chambers-Nixon affair instantly sparked controversy. Hiss charged anticommu- 
nist zealots, expecially in the FBI, with framing him with bogus evidence, including docu- 
ments Chambers had retrieved from a pumpkin patch on his farm. The federal government, 
legally barred from indicting Hiss on espionage charges, successfully prosecuted him for com- 
mitting perjury while testifying before Congress. To Nixon and his supporters, the case of Alger 
Hiss, who had advised FDR during the Yalta Conference (see chapter 26), demonstrated the 
Pursuing National Security at Home  " 1027 
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need for greater vigor in hunting down subversively inclined Democrats in Washington. Hiss 
and his supporters, however, would continue to stick to their frame-up story. 
During the mid-1990s, the availability of long-classified documents prompted an 
extensive, extra-legal review of the Hiss controversy. A small group of scholars contended 
that the evidentiary trail left unsettled the key questions of what precise information Hiss 
might have revealed and under what circumstances. Most observers, however, con- 
cluded that substantial evidence suggested that Hiss and several other high-ranking gov- 
ernmental officials had likely passed some information to the Soviets during the 1930s and 
1940s and subsequently lied about their actions. Armed with an enhanced documentary 
record, then, historians continue to debate the details of individual causes, including that 
of Alger Hiss, into a new century. 
Elaborating its own anti-subversive efforts, the Truman administration implemented its 
loyalty program and dismissed hundreds of federal employees. In addition, Truman s 
1028  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
It s Okay We re Hunting Communists This 1947  Herblock  (Herbert Block) 
cartoon presents a critical view of the impact of HUAC s communist-hunting. 
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11019_27_ch27_p1009-1050.qxd  6/4/07  3:33 PM  Page 1028
attorney general, Tom Clark (whom the president later appointed to the U.S. Supreme 
Court), authorized J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, to compile a secret FBI file of alleged 
subversives whom the government could then detain, without any legal hearing, during a 
time of national emergency. 
Fears that subversives from overseas might immigrate to the United States prompted 
Congress to pass the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. It empowered U.S. immigration offi- 
cials to deny entry to persons they determined could endanger national security by bring- 
ing dangerous ideas into the country. The law also authorized the deportation of immi- 
grants, even those who had gained U.S. citizenship, if they belonged to organizations on 
the Attorney General s List. 
At the same time, Hoover s FBI compiled its own confidential dossiers on a wide range of 
people.It often targeted artists and intellectuals, including some, such as Ernest Hemingway 
and John Steinbeck, with no ties to the Communist Party. The FBI and other federal agencies 
paid special attention to prominent African Americans. The FBI kept close tabs, for 
instance, on a wide range of civil-rights activists, including Bayard Rustin, a founder of 
CORE (see chapter 26). The U.S. State Department and immigration officials singled out 
Richard Wright (author of the acclaimed novel Native Son), W. E. B. Du Bois (the nation s 
most celebrated African American historian), and Paul Robeson (a well-known entertainer- 
activist) because of their links to the U.S. Communist Party and their identification with 
anti-imperialist and antiracist organizations throughout the world. In addition, suspicions 
of homosexuality could make people, including the only nominally closeted Rustin, into 
targets for governmental surveillance and discriminatory treatment. 
Targeting Difference 
Public signs of homosexual behavior, as the stance adopted by Bayard Rustin suggested, 
increased during the postwar era. Continuing a trend begun during the Second World 
War, more visible and assertive gay and lesbian subcultures emerged, particularly in larger 
cities such as New York and San Francisco. Dr. Alfred Kinsey s controversial research on 
sexual behavior his first volume, on male sexuality, appeared in 1948 suggested that 
U.S. life included far more same-sex relationships than previous studies had ever imag- 
ined. Kinsey s volumes, which attracted considerable popular attention, claimed to find peo- 
ple pursuing a wide range of sexual behaviors, ranging from exclusively heterosexual to exclu- 
sively homosexual. In late 1952, the issue of transsexuality hit the headlines when the press 
revealed that, after a series of  sex-change  operations in Europe, George W. Jorgensen, Jr. 
had become a  blonde beauty,  Christine Jorgensen. 
By this time, in response to aggressive policing practices and to laws that criminalized 
homosexual behavior, a small  homophile  movement, aimed at combating legal discrim- 
ination, had emerged. Gays formed the Mattachine Society (in 1950), and lesbians later 
founded the Daughters of Bilitis, organizations that advocated equal rights for homosexuals. 
Why should the law of the land only protect sexual acts and social relationships generally 
viewed as  normal,  these activists cautiously asked? 
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Meanwhile, an aggressive effort to contain these signs of homosexuality gained ground. 
The Kinsey Report s implicit claim that homosexuality might be seen as simply another form 
of sexuality, alongside the discreet militancy of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of 
Bilitis, helped fuel this campaign. The fact that several founders of the Mattachine Society 
had also been members of the Communist Party, coupled with the claim that Soviet agents 
could more easily blackmail homosexuals than heterosexuals, helped identify homosexu- 
ality as a threat to national security.  One homosexual can pollute a Government office,  
in much the same way as could a person with communist ideas, claimed a report from the 
U.S. Senate. 
Now, historians of sexuality see a  Lavender Scare  about homosexuality accompany- 
ing the  Red Scare  about communism. Popular imagery, for example, portrayed both 
homosexuality and communism as subversive  diseases  that inwardly  sick  people, who 
seemed outwardly little different than other Americans, could spread throughout the body 
politic. It would take, according to this logic, sustained inquiries by knowledgeable experts 
to uncover all of the subversive communists and homosexuals working in sensitive posi- 
tions in the U.S. government. Suspicion of  sexual deviance  became an acceptable basis 
for subjecting government employees to loyalty board hearings and, ultimately, denying 
them the same legal-constitutional protections enjoyed by heterosexuals. 
The  Great Fear  
Some cultural historians view the search for subversives during the late 1940s and early 
1950s unfolding against a backdrop of a widespread anxiety they call the  Great Fear.  The 
very real events that energized the Truman administration, such as atomic tests by the 
Soviets, also heightened the emotional impact of stories about communist agents having 
stolen U.S. nuclear secrets or about gay subversives shaping U.S. foreign policy. A grow- 
ing sense of insecurity, in turn, spurred even greater efforts to safeguard national security. 
As this feeling of anxiety began to settle over U.S. politics, the U.S. Justice Department 
arrested, in 1950, several members of an alleged spy ring. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, both 
members of the American Communist Party, became the central characters in this contro- 
versial episode. 
The Rosenberg case, as with that of Hiss, became a Cold War melodrama. Their trial, 
the verdicts of guilty, the sentences of death, the numerous legal appeals, the worldwide 
protests, and their 1953 executions at Sing Sing Prison all provoked intense controversy. 
Could the Rosenbergs, the parents of two young children, have been involved in the theft 
of nuclear secrets? And if so, were their death sentences, on the charge of espionage, the 
constitutionally appropriate punishment? To their supporters, the Rosenbergs (who died 
maintaining their innocence) became symbols of how easily anticommunist hysteria could 
override rational analysis and legal-constitutional safeguards. Federal officials seemed pri- 
marily interested in calming the Great Fear by locating and then sacrificing convenient 
scapegoats. To others, however, the evidence presented at the couple s trial clearly showed 
that they had channeled nuclear information to the Soviets. 
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New cartloads of documents, including those that became available in the 1990s, 
have helped to focus, without quite ending, controversy over the Rosenberg case. The 
evidentiary record, as most historians now view it, demonstrates Julius Rosenberg s 
involvement in some kind of spying and Ethel Rosenberg s knowledge about his activ- 
ities. Studies of other Cold War spy cases, however, also suggest that the U.S. govern- 
ment declined even to indict people who almost certainly had passed on important 
atomic-related information to the Soviets. In some instances, officials apparently feared 
a court trial would have revealed ongoing counter-espionage operations by the United 
States. Among all the people actually prosecuted for involvement with the Soviets, 
moreover, only Julius and Ethel Rosenberg faced a charge that carried the death 
penalty. Questions about precisely what information Julius Rosenberg helped convey 
to the USSR and how useful it actually proved to Soviet nuclear scientists also remain 
at issue. 
The performance of the U.S. justice system during the Great Fear became another mat- 
ter for sustained debate. How well did U.S. courts balance legitimate concerns about safe- 
guarding national security with the protection of civil liberties? During the 1949 prosecu- 
tion of leaders of the American Communist Party, for instance, the trial judge accepted 
Truman s Justice Department s claim that merely holding a leadership position in this 
political party helped further an international conspiracy against the United States and the 
larger  free world.  The Marxist ideology of the American Communist Party and its theo- 
retical publications, even in the absence of any proof of subversive actsby individual defen- 
dants, justified convicting the party s leaders of having committed the crime of sedition 
against the U.S. government. 
This case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court and produced the landmark deci- 
sion ofDennis v. U.S. (1951). Civil libertarians insisted that the government failed to pre- 
sent any evidence that Communist Party publications and speeches, by themselves, posed 
a  clear and present danger  to national security. In this view, the beliefs of the members 
of any political group, even an avowedly communist one, enjoyed the protection of the 
First Amendment. The government, in short, could only put actions, not ideas or political 
preferences, on trial. Although two dissenting Supreme Court justices adopted versions of 
this position, the majority modified the High Court s own  clear and present danger  doc- 
trine and upheld the broader view of sedition-by-expression earlier advanced by the Truman 
administration and lower federal courts. 
Even before the Denniscase reached the Supreme Court, however, the anticommunist 
credentials of Truman administration were drawing increased scrutiny from more zealous 
red-hunters. In Congress, most Republicans and many Democrats, denouncing Truman s 
initiatives as too limited, joined to pass the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950. It 
authorized the detention, during any national emergency, of alleged subversives in special 
camps. It also created the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) to investigate orga- 
nizations suspected of links to the Communist Party and to oversee registration of groups 
allegedly controlled by communists. 
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The Truman administration responded ambiguously. Although the president vetoed the 
McCarran Internal Security Act a symbolic response that Congress quickly overrode his 
administration authorized the FBI s J. Edgar Hoover to devise a secret detention program, 
which contained even fewer procedural safeguards than the one created by Congress,and 
continued to enforce its own loyalty program. Still, Truman could never defuse doubts 
about his anticommunist credentials and those of key members of his administration. 
McCarthyism 
Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin eventually emerged as the Truman 
administration s primary accuser. An intelligence officer during the Second World War, 
McCarthy had entered national politics in the guise of a battle-hardened combat vet, 
 TailgunnerJoe.  Enjoying a meteoric rise, which took him to the U.S. Senate in 1946, the 
rough-hewn McCarthy apparently preferred to be known as a brawler and boozer than as 
a legislator. The Great Fear, however, helped McCarthy refashion himself as a hard- 
driving, two-fisted anticommunist investigator, one who seemingly leaped out from the 
pages of a hard-boiled detective thriller. 
In a famous 1950 speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy charged Truman s 
State Department with employing hundreds of known communists. People rightly 
feared the future, according to McCarthy,  not because our only powerful potential 
enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of 
those who have been treated so well by this Nation.  The people in this camp, accord- 
ing to McCarthy, included Secretary of State Acheson and his predecessor, General 
George C. Marshall. 
A master of political imagery and sexual innuendo, McCarthy subtly linked together 
the Lavender and Red Scares. He portrayed anticommunists in Truman s administra- 
tion as both overly privileged and insufficiently manly. Dean Acheson and his aides 
might pose as hard-headed realists who understood the dangers of communism, but 
McCarthy dismissed their claims. Lacking the all-around toughness of authentic anti- 
communists (such as the Wisconsin senator himself), people such as Acheson, who had 
been  born with silver spoons in their mouths,  had degenerated into effete  enemies 
from within.  To accentuate the secretary of state s supposed lack of manliness, 
McCarthy derided Acheson as the  Red Dean of fashion  and as the leader of the  lace 
handkerchief crowd.  
By the final years of Truman s presidency, McCarthy seemed an unstoppable political 
force. Although McCarthy failed to substantiate most of his charges or to identify specific 
violations of the law, he lacked neither imagination nor potential targets. During the sum- 
mer of 1950, a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate, after examining government files, con- 
cluded that McCarthy s charges against the State Department amounted to  the most nefar- 
ious campaign of half-truths and untruths in the history of this republic.  McCarthy simply 
charged that the files had been  raped,  and he went after Millard Tydings, the courtly 
Democratic senator who had chaired the subcommittee. The defeat of Tydings, whose 
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opponents circulated a fabricated photograph linking him to pro-communist activities, in the 
November 1950 election seemed to confirm McCarthy s political clout and lack of scruples. 
McCarthy s tactics produced considerable controversy. Despite his apparent reckless- 
ness, some influential people tolerated and even encouraged him. Conservative, staunchly 
anticommunist leaders within the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, embraced 
McCarthy, who was a Catholic. Leading Republicans welcomed McCarthy s assaults on 
their Democratic rivals. In contrast, the historically minded among the senator s oppo- 
nents saw him as the latest personification of a form of populist-style demagoguery, which 
became labelled  McCarthyism.  
The National Security Constitution 
Too much attention to the theatrics of McCarthyism, however, can obscure long-term 
political-constitutional shifts during the era of the Great Fear. Widespread concern about 
national security helped U.S. leaders refashion the nation s structure of governance. The 
sovereign people ratified only one addition to the formal, written Constitution during this 
era: The 22nd Amendment, adopted in 1951, responded to Roosevelt s election to third 
and fourth terms in the White House by limiting future presidents to two terms. But con- 
gressional legislation, especially the National Security Act of 1947 and the assumption of 
new powers by executive branch agencies particularly the CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon  
effectively changed the nation s constitutional structure and its approach to governance. 
The view that the presidency possessed only limited powers gave way to an opposing 
vision, which had been voiced during earlier times of perceived crisis such as the Second 
World War. Cold War conditions provided renewed justification for greatly extending the 
power of the national government, especially of the executive branch. 
When Truman took the United States into a congressionally undeclared war in Korea, 
he encountered few constitutional obstacles. The idea of constitutional limitations only 
came into play after he asserted his presidential authority in 1952 and ordered his com- 
merce secretary to seize control of the domestic steel industry in order to prevent a threat- 
ened strike. Truman could have invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to obtain a 60-day  cooling 
off  period, but he resisted using a measure he had earlier (and unsuccessfully) vetoed. 
Truman claimed, in effect, that the Cold War had dramatically changed constitutional 
practice. The president, the nation s commander-in-chief, possessed virtually unlimited 
power whenever safeguarding national security required emergency action. 
The  steel seizure case  (officially known as Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. 
Sawyer) quickly reached the U.S. Supreme Court. There, three justices, all Truman 
appointees, agreed with the president s claims of emergency executive powers. Six other 
justices, for differing reasons, rejected Truman s position as too broadly framed, but all 
expressed significant support, whenever national security issues came into play, for some- 
what less expansive views of presidential authority. Most constitutional scholars would 
come to see this 1952 case as a short-term defeat for Truman but hardly a long-term setback 
for national-security powers. 
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Truman s Fair Deal 
1034  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
Focus Question 
What were the guiding assumptions of the Fair Deal, and which of its major initiatives 
seemed likely to pass through Congress? Which proposals seemed likely to stall 
there, and why? 
Meanwhile, Harry Truman needed to operate within relatively narrow political boundaries 
when his administration left the national security arena and entered that of social welfare 
policy making. Truman s policy initiatives, which culminated in what the White House 
would call the Fair Deal, grew out of the Democratic Party s effort to frame a domestic 
agenda for the post-New Deal era. 
Truman claimed to share much of Franklin Roosevelt s earlier vision. Many Democrats 
thus pressed him to embrace an expansive view, such as that set forth in FDR s Second Bill 
of Rights (1944) (see chapter 26), of how the national government might enhance the 
everyday security of ordinary citizens. Following the Second World War, after all, most 
Western European nations were creating or expanding their own  welfare states.  These 
systems of governance, based on the principle and practice of using economic and social 
planning to guarantee all citizens certain substantive rights, such as access to adequate 
housing and medical care, featured an aggressive use of state power. 
In the United States, however, proposals for governmental planning and new social 
welfare measures generally stalled. Critics had already assailed wartime Washington s 
extensive use of governmental power to regulate economic relationships as unnecessary 
and in conflict with the U.S. Constitution. During Truman s presidency, opposition to the 
kind of expansive social agenda suggested in FDR s Second Bill of Rights grew stronger. 
Any attempt to update the New Deal agenda for a postwar world, insisted most Republi- 
cans and some Democrats, could provide dangerous precedents for unconstitutionally 
trampling on private rights and erode traditional ideas about individual initiative and 
responsibility. Dixiecrat Democrats, for example, often joined with conservative Republi- 
cans to block any congressional legislation that might give Washington additional economic 
powers on the theory that such a move might imply analogous authority to begin disman- 
tling white supremacy in the South. Weighing in on behalf of powerful business interests, 
the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) consistently denounced the Truman 
administration as a menace to the nation s private, free-enterprise economic system. 
The Employment Act of 1946 and the Promise of Economic Growth 
The Truman administration, faced with this kind of opposition to economic planning and 
European-style welfare policies, sought an alternative vision of domestic social policy mak- 
ing. The 1946 debate over a  Full Employment Bill  provided it. This measure, as initially 
conceived, would have empowered Washington to ensure employment for all citizens 
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seeking work. To the bill s opponents, the phrase  full employment  implied a step toward 
the European model of a welfare state, perhaps even toward socialism. 
As the Democratic effort to enact this measure lost momentum, a scaled-back version 
moved forward. The law that Congress finally passed, renamed the Employment Act of 
1946, called for  maximum  (rather than full) employment and specifically declared that 
private enterprise, not government, bore primary responsibility for economic decision 
making. The act nonetheless created a new executive branch body, the Council of Eco- 
nomic Advisers, to formulate long-range policy recommendations, and it thus signaled that 
the national government would assume some still undefined responsibility for the health 
and performance of the U.S. economy. 
Moreover, the Employment Act of 1946 suggested that economic expertise now pro- 
vided a vital national resource. The idea that advice from economic experts, as an alterna- 
tive to government planning, could guarantee a constantly expanding economy helped 
muster crucial support for creating the Council of Economic Advisers. An influential group 
of economists, many of them disciples of Britain s John Maynard Keynes, pressed for this 
move. Their economic know-how, they claimed, could help government eliminate the 
boom-and-bust cycles that had long afflicted the nation s economy. Instead of abandoning 
the economy to the largely uncoordinated decisions of private individuals and corpora- 
tions, economic expertise could help governmental and business leaders identify the poli- 
cies most likely to produce growth. 
The promise of economic expansion quickly came to dazzle postwar leaders. Using the 
relatively new measure of gross national product (GNP), economists claimed they could 
objectively calculate the nation s growing economic bounty. Developed in 1939, GNP  
defined as the total dollar value of all goods and services produced in the nation during a 
given year became the standard gauge of economic health. Corporate executives, who 
had generally feared that the end of the war would bring long-term labor unrest and trig- 
ger a deep recession, came to view a rising GNP as an important predictor of social stabil- 
ity. The Truman administration s domestic policy makers also welcomed the prospect of 
an expanding economy, which would automatically increase federal tax revenues and, thus, 
help remove some of the political obstacles blocking the financial path for the administra- 
tion s domestic agenda.  With economic expansion, every problem is capable of solution,  
insisted one celebrant of economic growth. Another likened the promise of ongoing 
growth to finding the proverbial rainbow andthe pot of gold at its end. 
Truman and his advisers enthusiastically spread the gospel of governmentally stimulated 
economic growth. This new faith nicely dovetailed with the spending levels their national 
security plans required. The Cold War could serve as  an automatic pump primer  for the 
U.S. economy. At the same time, security-related assistance programs such as the Marshall 
Plan could create overseas markets and investment opportunities for U.S. businesses. The 
goal of sustained economic growth at home, in short, became linked to development in the 
world at large and to the all-pervasive concern about protecting U.S. national security. 
Sharp increases in governmental spending for the Pentagon thus signaled a generaleconomic 
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policy that critical observers eventually began to call  military Keynesianism  the 
practice of stimulating and regulating the economy through governmental spending in 
the military sector. U.S. News and World Report, a conservative weekly, suggested that 
government officials seemed to  have found the magic formula for almost endless good 
times.  
Shaping the Fair Deal 
In 1949, Truman unveiled a set of social welfare proposals he called the Fair Deal. He pro- 
posed extending popular New Deal programs, particularly Social Security and minimum 
wage laws; enacting legislation dealing with civil rights, national health care, and federal 
aid for education; and repealing the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. The president also urged 
substantial spending on public housing projects, and his secretary of agriculture called for 
new governmental subsidies to support farm prices. The core assumption on which Truman 
built his entire Fair Deal that sustained economic growth could finance enlarged 
government programs for specifically targeted groups came to dominate policy plan- 
ning. Changes to two prominent programs, both of which predated Truman s administra- 
tion, illustrate the approach to domestic social policy that became standard procedure dur- 
ing the Fair Deal years. 
The first, the so-called GI Bill (officially titled the Serviceman s Readjustment Act of 
1944), provided a comprehensive social benefit package but only for those people who 
had served in the armed forces. Far more inclusive and clearly defined than programs for 
veterans of previous wars, the GI Bill gained crucial support from the conservative leadership 
of the American Legion. The law provided vets with financial assistance for college andjob- 
training programs. Slightly more than 50 percent of veterans sought such funds, and dur- 
ing 1947, the year of peak enrollment, roughly half of the nation s entire college and uni- 
versity population received aid under the GI Bill. In addition, it gave veterans preferential 
treatment when applying for government jobs; favorable financial terms when borrowing 
money to purchase homes or businesses; and, eventually, comprehensive medical care in 
hospitals run by the Veterans Administration (VA). The Veterans Readjustment Assistance 
Act of 1952, popularly known as the GI Bill of Rights, extended these benefits to those 
who had served in the Korean War. The Truman administration never revived FDR s pro- 
posal for a Second Bill of Rights, but the Fair Deal did ensure that veterans would enjoy 
some of its key provisions. 
The Social Security program also expanded during Truman s Fair Deal. Rebutting 
attacks against this New Deal measure by conservatives who denounced it as a poorly 
designed and unwarranted extension of federal power, advocates of Social Security 
stressed its carefully targeted provisions. Certainly, people who were disabled and blind 
deserved assistance, and older people had surely earned the  income security  provided by 
Social Security through their years of work and the monetary contributions withheld from 
their own paychecks. Under the Social Security Act of 1950, the level of benefits increased 
significantly; the retirement-related portions of the program became more flexible; and 
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more than 10 million additional people, including agricultural workers, came into the 
Social Security system. 
The Fair Deal s more expansive (and more expensive) proposals, however, either failed 
to gain congressional approval or passed in scaled-back form. Truman s plan for a com- 
prehensive national health insurance program faced opposition from several different 
quarters. Consumer groups and labor unions, intent on creating nonprofit, community- 
run health plans, generally saw Truman s proposal for a centralized health system as a 
blueprint for unnecessarily bureaucratizing medical care. From a different perspective, the 
American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Hospital Association (AHA) 
opposed any direct governmental intervention in the traditional fee-for-service medical 
system and steered Congress toward a less intrusive alternative expanding the federal 
financing of new hospitals under the previously enacted Hill-Burton Act (1946). In addi- 
tion, large insurance companies, which were continuing to push their own private plans 
in cooperation with businesses (see chapter 26), also weighed in against the Truman plan. 
Opinion polls suggested that many voters, especially those who could enroll in affordable 
private health insurance plans such as the popular Blue Cross and Blue Shield systems, 
found themselves confused by or simply uninterested in Truman s initiative. 
Truman s Fair Deal  " 1037 
The Postwar College Scene This picture by the famed photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White shows veterans of the 
Second World War dominating available space in a classroom at the University of Iowa. Tapping financial support offered under 
the GI Bill (1944), more than 600 vets enrolled in 1946 at Iowa. Returning servicemen, who comprised more than 60 percent of 
this University s total enrollment, often taxed existing facilities here and at other universities throughout the country. 
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The Fair Deal s housing proposals met a similarly mixed reception. The severe postwar 
shortage of affordable housing in urban areas did stir some support for Washington s par- 
ticipation in home-building programs. Even some conservative Republicans, notably Senator 
Robert Taft of Ohio, supported the Housing Act of 1949 as a necessary response to a post- 
war housing pinch. Part of Truman s Fair Deal package, this measure authorized con- 
struction of 810,000 public housing units and provided federal funds for  urban renewal  
zones, areas to be cleared of rundown dwellings and then rebuilt with new construction. 
The Housing Act of 1949 proclaimed ambitious goals but provided relatively modest fund- 
ing, especially for its public-housing component. Private construction firms and realtors 
welcomed funding for urban renewal and for federal home loan guarantee programs such 
as those established under the GI Bill and those directed by the Federal Housing Admin- 
istration (FHA). At the same time, they continually lobbied effectively against a more 
extensive program of publicly financed housing projects. 
The Fair Deal, in short, proved most successful in advancing narrowly targeted social 
welfare measures. This meant the Truman administration provided significant assistance 
to veterans and to older Americans but failed to achieve its more ambitious goals of 
national health care and public housing construction. With opponents of the broader Fair 
Deal proposals dismissing them as  welfare schemes,  the White House found it easier to 
advance the narrower initiatives that it could defend as fiscally sound  security  measures 
for specifically delineated groups of deserving recipients. 
Civil Rights 
The Truman administration also struggled to place at least some of the national government s 
power behind a growing civil-rights movement. A global struggle against the fascism of the 
Axis Powers had earlier assisted domestic campaigns against discrimination (see chapter 26), 
and subsequent efforts benefited from the postwar battle against communism. After 
returning to the home front, few service personnel of African, Latino, and Native American 
descent wished to remain passive bystanders when public laws and policing practices 
sometimes reduced them to second-class citizens. Moreover, people of color who had 
moved to larger cities, seeking to escape discrimination and find wartime employment, not 
only wanted to secure but to build on the social and economic gains they and their families 
had made during the earlier 1940s. Drives to translate the vision of liberty and equality on 
prominent display in FDR s Second Bill of Rights into reality also continued to animate 
some lawyers and grassroots activists during the immediate postwar period. The national 
government, from their perspectives, needed to mobilize its powerful resources to fight 
discrimination and injustice in the Cold War United States. 
During his 1948 presidential campaign, Truman strongly endorsed the proposals of a 
civil-rights committee he had established in 1946. Its controversial report, entitled  To 
Secure These Rights,  called for federal legislation against lynching; creation of a special 
civil-rights division within the Department of Justice; adoption of new initiatives against 
discrimination in employment, housing, and public facilities; and a plan for desegregating 
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the U.S. military. These proposals had helped prompt the Dixiecrat revolt of 1948, but 
they also gained Truman significant support from African Americans and Latinos. 
Truman continued to support the civil-rights cause. When successive congresses failed 
to enact legislation against lynching and poll taxes, which prevented most southern blacks 
from voting, leaders of the civil-rights movement turned to the White House and to the 
federal courts. The threat by A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car 
Porters, to work with activists such as Bayard Rustin in organizing a protest campaign, 
pushed Truman to issue an executive order, in 1948, which set in motion a gradual phas- 
ing out of the military s system of racial segregation. 
Much as the antifascist environment of the Second World War had forced the Roosevelt 
administration to address some civil-rights issues, the Cold War climate helped energize 
Truman s Fair Dealers. Truman spoke candidly about how much legalized segregation tar- 
nished the image of the United States in a Cold War world  which is 90 percent colored.  
Although the Cold War could help justify action against African American leaders whom 
governmental officials considered linked to subversive causes, it also made the federal gov- 
ernment s tacit support of Jim Crow a foreign policy liability. Continuing efforts to pre- 
serve racialized segregation, spearheaded by Dixiecrats from the South, seemed in direct 
conflict with Washington s claim to represent liberty and equality in a world threatened by 
Soviet totalitarianism. The symbol of U.S. constitutional law still upholding racial sepa- 
ratism worked to the advantage of attorneys for the NAACP and for Latino groups such as 
LULAC, when they mounted court challenges against discriminatory measures, especially 
in the field of public education. 
Lawyers from Truman s Justice Department appeared in court to support suits brought by 
civil-rights organizations. Working in concert, attorneys made the case against government- 
backed public school segregation and against  restrictive covenants  (legal agreements that 
prevented racial or religious minorities from acquiring real estate). In 1946, the Supreme 
Court declared restrictive covenants unconstitutional and began chipping away at the 
 separate-but-equal  principle, used since Plessy v.Ferguson (1896) to justify the legality of 
racially segregated public schools. A federal court in California, ruling on the case brought 
the previous year in Orange County by LULAC and the NAACP, held that segregating 
students of Mexican descent in separate, and unequal, schools violated their constitu- 
tional rights. According to one of the federal courts that heard this case as Mendez v. 
Westminster School District in 1946 a separate school system could never pass con- 
stitutional muster, especially in a nation that had only recently emerged victorious 
over Nazi racism. The practice of  co-mingling  a diverse student body within the 
same educational institution  instills and develops a common cultural attitude,  which 
would be  imperative for the perpetuation of American institutions and ideals,  the 
court argued. 
Subsequent court rulings cast further doubt on the future of the Plessyprecedent. In 
1948, a second federal court with the case now entitled Westminster School District v. 
Mendez agreed with the first: segregating Mexican-descended students violated their 
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constitutional rights. Two years later, in cases involving students of African descent, the 
U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional, under the 14th Amendment, racial segrega- 
tion in state-financed graduate and law schools. The familiar arguments used to legitimate 
racial segregation in other areas of public education now seemed ripe for successful con- 
stitutional challenges. 
The years immediately after the Second World War, in sum, marked a turning point in 
domestic policy making. The New Deal s vision of comprehensive socioeconomic planning 
gave way to the Fair Deal s view: The nation could expect that uninterrupted economic 
growth would enable Washington to finance, through rising tax revenues, programs 
designed to assist specific groups. As one supporter of this approach argued, postwar pol- 
icy makers were sophisticated enough to embrace  partial remedies,  such as the GI Bill, 
rather than to wait for fanciful  cure-alls,  such as FDR s Second Bill of Rights. Partisans of 
the Fair Deal hoped that at least some of these limited programs could be expanded in the 
years to come. 
Signs of a Changing Culture 
1040  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
Focus Question 
How did a resurgent civil-rights movement and a new suburban culture help signal 
changes in American life during the immediate postwar era? 
The postwar years also accelerated the pace of cultural change. Encouraged by the adver- 
tising industry, most people seemed, at one level, to view most things new and novel as 
signs of progress. Yet, at another level, the speed and scope of cultural change generated 
widespread feelings of uneasiness and anxiety, which likely contributed to the Great Fear 
about subversion. 
The Baseball  Color Line  
The complex interplay between celebrating and fearing change can be seen in the effort, 
during the 1940s and early 1950s, to desegregate the sport-entertainment business 
known as Organized Baseball. In 1947, the national pastime finally abandoned its policy 
of racial segregation when Jack Roosevelt (Jackie) Robinson, a multi-sport star at UCLA 
who had later played baseball in the Negro National League, took over first base for the 
Brooklyn Dodgers. Some ballplayers of European descent, including several in Robinson s 
own club, considered a boycott. Baseball s leadership, seeking new sources of on-field tal- 
ent and seeing a steady stream of African American fans coming through the turnstiles, 
quickly displayed the power it could wield over its labor force. It squelched dissent by 
threatening to suspend any player who refused to play with or against Robinson. 
11019_27_ch27_p1009-1050.qxd  6/4/07  3:33 PM  Page 1040
Officially, Organized Baseball 
desegregated. Shortly after 
Robinson s debut, the Cleveland 
Indians acquired center fielder 
Larry Doby and, somewhat later, 
the already legendary hurler, 
Leroy (Satchel) Paige. Other top- 
flight players abandoned the 
Negro leagues for clubs in the 
American and National circuits. 
The skills of Robinson, named 
Rookie of the Year in 1947 and the 
National League s Most Valuable 
Player in 1949, and other players 
of African descent quickly carried 
the day. Although talented light- 
skinned Latinos had long passed 
through the racial barrier, Orestes 
( Minnie ) Minoso, a Cuban-born 
veteran of the Negro Leagues, 
became the first Afro-Latino to 
break into the Big Leagues in 1949. 
Close students of the game soon 
credited players such as Robinson 
and Minoso, fleet-footed and dar- 
ing base runners, with reintroduc- 
ing an aggressive style of play to a 
sport that had come to emphasize 
home runs and a base-to-base 
approach to scoring runs. 
Major League teams began fielding greater numbers of African American and Latino 
players, and some mounted extensive recruiting operations in Mexico and throughout the 
Caribbean. Years later, during the 50th anniversary of Robinson s debut, Major League 
Baseball would stage elaborate memorial ceremonies for Robinson, who had died in 
1972, and would congratulate itself for having been at the forefront of the fight against 
racial prejudice during the Cold War years. 
As historians generally note, however, baseball s Cold War leadership had unofficially 
limited its own desegregation effort. It allowed several teams which claimed, improbably, 
that they could find no talented African American or Latino prospects to wait years before 
integrating their rosters. More commonly, clubs restricted the number of African American 
Signs of a Changing Culture  " 1041 
Jackie Robinson In 1947, Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers 
and became the first African American since the 19th century to play major 
league baseball. He had served as a lieutenant in the Army during the Second 
World War. Racial integration of the national pastime of baseball became a 
powerful symbol of progress in race relations. 
T 
h 
e 
 M 
ic 
h 
a 
e 
l 
 B 
a 
rs 
o 
n 
 C 
o 
l 
le 
c 
t 
io 
n 
11019_27_ch27_p1009-1050.qxd  6/4/07  3:33 PM  Page 1041
and Latino players they would take on and adopted a Jim Crow policy for hiring managers, 
coaches, and front-office personnel. When age forced Jackie Robinson s retirement as a 
player, for instance, he found himself effectively shut out of the game he had earlier helped 
integrate. 
Even many of the players who followed in Robinson s on-field footsteps confronted 
continuing obstacles. African American and Latino players, who faced subtle barriers 
while competing for a spot on a Major League roster, often encountered overt, off-the- 
field discrimination during the annual spring training period in the South and South- 
west. Young prospects endured similar problems while playing for minor league teams, 
generally located in relatively small towns with few services or businesses that catered 
to people of color. Spanish-speaking players faced special difficulties that extended 
beyond language. Even stars such as Minoso, accustomed to playing top-quality base- 
ball in the Negro Leagues and Caribbean winter leagues, struggled to convince man- 
agers, sportswriters, and teammates (African Americans as well as Caucasians) that they 
could  understand  the subtleties of either the  national pastime  or of the larger North 
American culture. 
New Suburban Developments 
The culture of postwar suburbia also showed how the celebration of cultural change and 
a resistance to its impact could coexist in an uneasy tension. Suburbs had long been part 
of the national landscape. During the late 1940s, however, suburban living came within 
the means of millions of families. The new Long Island town of Levittown, New York, which 
welcomed its first residents in October 1947, quickly became the preeminent symbol of 
postwar suburban culture. 
Nearly everything about Levittown seemed unprecedented. Levitt & Sons, a construc- 
tion company that had mass-produced military barracks during the Second World War, 
claimed to be completing a five-room bungalow every 15 minutes. Architectural critics 
might sneer at these  little boxes,  but potential buyers would brave long lines for a chance 
to purchase one. By 1950, New York s Levittown contained more than 10,000 homes and 
40,000 residents, and bulldozers and construction crews were sweeping through similarly 
planned developments across the country. 
To assist potential buyers, the national government continued to offer an extensive set 
of programs. The FHA, established during the New Deal, helped underwrite an elaborate 
lending system. Typically, people who bought FHA-financed homes needed only 5 percent 
of the purchase price as a down payment; they could borrow the rest and guarantee their 
loan with a long-term, government-insured mortgage. Military veterans enjoyed even more 
favorable terms under the GI loan program. This kind of public assistance to middle- 
income families made it cheaper for them to purchase a suburban house than to rent a sig- 
nificantly smaller apartment in most cities. Moreover, homeowners enjoyed another valu- 
able governmental subsidy. They could deduct the interest payments on their mortgages 
from their federal income tax. 
1042  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
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The postwar suburb gained a reputation for being an ideal place in which to raise 
children, which U.S. families were having in unprecedented numbers. Toward the end 
of the Second World War, a number of demographic forces, including earlier marriages 
and rising incomes, had begun to fuel a  baby boom that would last until the end of 
the 1950s. The baby boom generation, a key segment of the U.S. population for decades 
to come, made an immediate imprint on suburban culture. With houses generally occu- 
pying only about 15 percent of suburban lots, baby boomers could, with the help of 
their parents, convert the large lawns into lush, green private playgrounds. In addition, 
suburban children could claim credit for generating and consuming growing segments 
of the nation s GNP, especially those connected to entertainment, leisure, and public edu- 
cation. Suburban schools were as new as the homes, and school boards used their well- 
appointed facilities to attract both skilled, enthusiastic teachers and the children of other 
middle-income families. 
In many respects, postwar suburbanculture exuded a sense of optimism. Suburbia often 
symbolized new possibilities, confidence in the future, and acceptance of change. It also 
encouraged the vision of continued economic growth. Because the output of developers 
never caught up with the demand of 
buyers during the early Cold War era, 
suburbanites discovered they could 
often sell their existing home at a sub- 
stantial profit and move up to a more 
spacious, more expensive dwelling in 
an even newer suburb. A suburban 
home, in short, became both a symbol 
of success and an important, highly 
liquid financial asset. 
At the same time, some of the most 
noticeable markers of postwar subur- 
ban culture seemed to symbolize resis- 
tance to certain kinds of changes. As 
many contemporary observers noted, 
the new suburbs appeared to offer 
many of its residents a material and 
psychological refuge. Most obviously, 
buying a suburban home could pro- 
vide many families of European 
descent a way of cushioning the impact 
of social and demographic change. As 
African American families continued to 
migrate to northern and western cities in 
search of jobs and greateropportunity, 
Signs of a Changing Culture  " 1043 
27 
26 
25 
24 
23 
22 
21 
20 
19 
18 
17 
T 
ho 
u 
sa 
n 
d 
s 
1940 1950 1960 1970 
1945 1955 1965 
*Based on estimated total live births per 1,000 population. 
Birth Rate, 1940 1970* 
The Baby Boom 
11019_27_ch27_p1009-1050.qxd  6/4/07  3:33 PM  Page 1043
white families began to see movingto the new suburbs as a way to avoid living in racially 
integrated communities. Governmental policies generally contributed to this trend through 
the financial incentives provided to homebuyers. Moreover, after the U.S. Supreme Court 
declared restrictive covenants unconstitutional, local officials rarely enforced the decision. 
Various informal and extralegal arrangements prevented, until well into the 1960s, any 
African American from buying a home in Long Island s Levittown. 
Other policies and practices also helped segregate the new postwar suburbs. 
Although land and building costs would have been cheaper in these areas than in urban 
locales, most suburbanites jealously guarded their community s legal power to veto the 
building of public housing projects, whose units were likely to become racially and eth- 
nically integrated. As a result, the federal government clustered housing projects on 
relatively expensive, high-density urban sites, a practice that helped make suburban living 
seem all that more desirable. At the same time, the lending industry generally chan- 
neled government-guaranteed loans for single-family homes toward the new suburbs, 
and private lenders routinely denied African Americans and Latinos the credit they 
needed to buy a newly built home. Their individual decisions, bankers insisted, rested 
purely on economic calculations. African American and Latino buyers invariably lacked 
the financial resources, lenders claimed, to qualify for a loan on a new suburban home. 
They needed to readjust their sights and seek housing within urban areas or in older 
suburbs. Any discrimination produced by this system, the housing-lending industry 
contended, flowed from the unintentional consequences of entirely race-blind, mar- 
ketplace calculations. 
The people who dominated the new suburban housing industry thus denied they were 
intentionally contributing to the spatial patterning of racial discrimination. William Levitt 
could proudly identify his private housing projects with the public crusade against com- 
munism.  No man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist,  he remarked in 
1948.  He has too much to do.  Even as Levitt was claiming he could help solve the prob- 
lem of housing and perhaps even that of communist subversion he was also resisting 
any suggestion that his firm s business-related choices bore any direct relationship to racial 
discrimination. 
Similarly, developers saw the new suburbia s gender politics as the  natural  byproduct 
of larger marketplace forces. The financial industry, adopting a policy that resembled its 
approach to racial matters, extended the vast majority of its loan guarantees to men of 
European descent. Only rarely could single women, from any ethnic background, obtain 
loans. The FHA, a governmental agency, justified the gender tilt in its policies by insisting 
that men were the primary family breadwinners and that single women seldom made 
enough money to qualify as good credit risks. 
Postwar Hollywood 
Postwar Hollywood turned out powerful symbols of the Cold War era s fascination with  
and fear of cultural change. When the postwar era began, Hollywood stilldominatedthe 
1044  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
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entertainment business. Enjoying the reopening of overseas markets and welcoming 
the return of their male stars from military service, the major studios expected to pros- 
per during the postwar era. According to marketing studies, most people simply 
 went to the movies,  giving little thought to what picture they might see. In 1946, 
Hollywood s attendance figures and profits reached all-time highs. As one historian 
later estimated, the average number of moviegoers in a single week, 90 million, 
amounted to nearly three-quarters of the people realistically able to reach a motion 
picture theater! 
Hollywood, still congratulating itself for having cheered the nation through the Depres- 
sion and the Second World War, expected to perform much the same service during the 
onset of the Cold War. Perhaps no movie genre seemed better designed to cheerlead than 
the Hollywood musical. Filled with lively stars, upbeat tunes, and flashy dance sequences, 
musicals invariably expressed optimism about the future. MGM s On the Town(1949), 
based on a 1944 Broadway smash and updated to the Cold War period, epitomized the 
early postwar musical. It saturated movie screens with hopeful imagery. During 24 hours 
of shore leave, three U.S. sailors sing and dance their way through New York City, sample 
the fruits of both elite and popular culture, and fall in love with three equally vibrant 
young women. Moving at a breakneck pace, On the Townsuggested just how much three 
virile servicemen might accomplish in one day. Ending with a title card proudly pro- 
claiming it had been filmed in  Hollywood, USA,  this musical also seemed to herald the 
U.S. film industry s own bright future. 
Even as On the Townarrived in movie theaters, however, Hollywood s fortunes were 
starting to change. By 1949, attendance figures along with profits began to plummet. 
During the next decade, Hollywood would lose fully half of its 1946 audience, and many 
studios would face bankruptcy. 
Cultural historians once blamed television for keeping potential moviegoers at 
home, but Hollywood s difficulties set in even before TV became a serious rival. The 
same year MGM shot On the Town, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that 
antitrust laws required the major studios to give up their highly profitable ownership 
of local movie theaters. This decision, the Paramount Case(1948), rocked Hollywood 
just as it faced labor strife, internal conflict over blacklisting, and soaring production 
costs. TV simply delivered another, albeit substantial, blow to an industry already 
reeling backward. 
Meanwhile, as Hollywood struggled to adapt to changing times, images of fear and hope- 
lessness began to pervade some of its own productions. An important cycle of 1940s motion 
pictures, first noticed by critics in France, came to be called films noirsor  dark cinema.  
The images of crime and of social behavior in many of these movies challenged established 
censorship limits, which the Hollywood studios had been enforcing under their Production 
Code since the mid-1930s. The industry, in fact, had refused to allow production of ear- 
lier versions of some of the noirish film scripts brought to the screen during the Cold War 
era. Nearly always filmed in black and white and often set at night in large cities, films noirs 
Signs of a Changing Culture  " 1045 
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purported to peek into the dark corners of the American Way of Life. Noir characters con- 
tinued to pursue dreams and hopes but with little chance of ever succeeding. Failure and 
loss, in films noirs, seemed to be the rule rather than the exception. 
Most of Hollywood s films noirsconspicuously featured alluring femmes fatales, beautiful 
and dangerous women who challenge the prevailing order, particularly its gender hierarchies. 
Portrayed as in revolt against the popular injunction to support her man, the femme fatale 
character represented an image very different from that of the always faithful, and eternally 
nurturing, wife and mother. Usually unmarried or childless, amoral femmes fatalesthreaten 
both men, who were generally portrayed as weak and ineffectual, and other, less assertive 
women. Ultimately, however, Hollywood s femmes fatalesfail to overcome the male-dominated 
forces they seek to challenge. 
In The File on Thelma Jordan (1949), an archetypal noir, Barbara Stanwyck s title 
character cynically infiltrates the marriage of a weak-willed district attorney. Neither 
love nor even lust drives her illicit affair with him. Instead, she calculatedly seduces 
him as part of a cleverly ambitious, but ultimately unsuccessful, scheme to manipulate 
the criminal justice system. The postwar era s most prominent female stars including 
Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, and Lana Turner achieved both popular 
and critical acclaim playing femmes fatales, women whose desire for radical change ulti- 
mately ends in failure. 
In sum, developments in the national pastime of baseball, in the new suburbia, and in 
the Hollywood film industry provide three vivid examples of a more general cultural pattern: 
an ambivalent response to changes ushered in during the Cold War era. Alterations in sup- 
posedly settled cultural patterns could signal both the promise of living in the postwar 
United States and the potentially disastrous consequences of confronting changes that 
threatened to overwhelm both the daily lives of individuals and the cultural cohesion of 
the nation. 
By the early 1950s, according to many contemporary observers, Cold War U.S. cul- 
ture seemed in need, at the very least, of new symbols of stability. Particularly in the 
realms of politics and governance, there appeared a deeply felt desire for signs of reas- 
surance. With a positive approval rating hovering under 30 percent, Harry Truman 
seemed to symbolize disarray, even despair. The  Little Man from Missouri  now seemed 
far too small a figure to lead the United States out of a time marked by ambiguous, even 
dire, signposts. Most people, including Truman, appeared to look forward to the end of 
his tenure in the White House. 
From Truman to Eisenhower 
Harry Truman refused even to consider running for another term in 1952. Still, his 
tumultuous years in the public spotlight put his Democratic Party on the defensive, and 
denunciations of communism and of Truman fueled an energetic Republican campaign. 
1046  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
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The Election of 1952 
Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952, tried to take a 
hard line on national security. He warned that  Soviet secret agents and their dupes  had 
 burrowed like moles  into governments throughout the world.  We cannot let our guard 
drop for even a moment,  he claimed. Stevenson approved of the conviction of the American 
Communist Party s leaders and the dismissal of schoolteachers who were party members. 
A solidly anticommunist stance, however, could not save Stevenson or the Democratic 
Party. The GOP s formula for electoral victory could be reduced to a simple equation, 
 K1C2 :  Korea, corruption, and communism.  
The Republicans first linked Stevenson s candidacy to the unpopular Truman presi- 
dency. They criticized Truman for mishandling the Korean War and highlighted revela- 
tions about some members of Truman s administration having solicited kickbacks in 
exchange for the granting of governmental contracts. The GOP s staunchly anticommunist 
vice-presidential candidate, Senator Richard Nixon of California, called Stevenson  Adlai 
the appeaser  and charged him with holding a Ph.D. from  Dean Acheson s Cowardly College 
of Communist Containment.  Some Republicans even questioned the manliness of the 
Democratic contender, a soft-spoken lawyer-politician who remained unmarried following 
his 1949 divorce. 
A Soldier-Politician 
For their presidential candidate, Republicans looked to a hero of the Second World War, 
General Dwight David Eisenhower, popularly known as  Ike.  Eisenhower had grown 
up in Kansas, graduated from West Point, ascended through Army ranks, and directed 
the Normandy invasion of 1944 as Supreme Allied Commander. He had served as Army 
Chief of Staff from 1945 to 1948 and, after an interim period as president of Columbia 
University, had become the commander of NATO, a post he held until May 1952. Eisen- 
hower had never sought elective office, but a half-century of public service, most of it in 
the military, had taught him skills he found useful during his sudden plunge into parti- 
san politics. Initially uncomfortable in the spotlight, Eisenhower fought through early 
difficulties and, with help from a bevy of consultants, developed an appealing media 
persona. 
Eisenhower s personal appeal generally dazzled political insiders and commentators. 
Although Ike s partisan affiliations had long remained vague hazy enough for some 
Democrats to have courted him as their own presidential nomineein 1948 he eventu- 
ally emerged as the GOP s savior. Key Republicans, in turn, convinced Eisenhower that 
Senator Robert Taft, the likely GOP nominee if Ike declined to run, leaned too far to the 
right on domestic issues and lacked a firm commitment to containment policies overseas. 
Eisenhower, claiming to take a middle-of-the-road stance on controversial issues, appeared 
ready to direct the nation through the Cold War as skillfully as he had led it through a hot 
one. A generally adoring Washington press corps, grumbled Adlai Stevenson, embraced 
From Truman to Eisenhower  " 1047 
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the former war hero before learn- 
ing  what his party platform would 
be  or  what would be the issues of 
the campaign.  The Republican 
effort in 1952, the first to experi- 
ment with the possibilities of tele- 
vised appeals, effectively tapped its 
presidential candidate s charisma. A 
popular GOP campaign simply 
announced:  I Like IKE!  
The first military leader to gain 
the presidency since Ulysses S. Grant 
(1869 77), Eisenhower achieved a 
great personal victory in 1952. The 
Eisenhower-Nixon ticket rolled up 
almost 7 million more popular 
votes than its Democratic oppo- 
nents and dominated the Electoral 
College tally by a margin of 442 to 
89. Despite Ike s trouncing of 
Stevenson, however, the Republican Party made relatively modest gains. It managed a sin- 
gle-vote majority in the U.S. Senate and an eight-vote edge over the Democrats in the 
House of Representatives. The Democratic coalition Franklin Roosevelt had forged during 
the 1930s thus survived. It did, however, show some signs of fraying, especially in the 
South. There, the votes of white southerners, many of which had gone to the Dixiecrats in 
1948, began moving toward the Republicans. Eisenhower carried four states in the Demo- 
cratic Party s once solid South. 
Conclusion 
An emphasis on aggressively safeguarding national security helped reshape national life 
during the years immediately following the Second World War. As worsening relations 
between the United States and the Soviet Union developed into a Cold War, the Truman 
administration pursued policies that expanded the power of the national government, par- 
ticularly those of the executive branch. The militarization of foreign policy, presaged in the 
Truman Doctrine and solidified in NSC-68, intensified after the United States went to war 
in Korea in 1950. 
The Cold War climate also affected the home front. People debated how best to protect 
national security, combat subversion, and calm cultural anxieties. The New Deal s vision, 
outlined in FDR s Economic Bill of Rights, faded, but Truman s Fair Deal offered a new 
view of social policy making. Fair Dealers promised that the wisdom of economic experts 
1048  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
WA 
9 
OR 
6 
CA 
32 
NV 
3 
MT 
4 
ND 
4 
SD 
4 
WY 
3 
ID 
4 
UT 
4 CO 
6 
AZ 
4 NM 
4 
TX 
24 
OK 
8 
KS 
8 
NE 
6 
MN 
11 
IA 
10 
LA 
10 
AR 
8 
MO 
13 
FL 
10 
MS 
8 AL 
11 
GA 
12 
SC 
8 
TN 
11 
NC 
14 
KY 
10 
WI 
12 MI 
20 
IL 
27 
IN 
13 
OH 
25 
VA 
12 
WV 
8 
PA 
32 
NY 
45 
ME 
5 
NH 
4 
VT 
3 
MD 
9 
DE 
3 
NJ 
16 
MA 
16 
CT 
8 
RI 
4 
Electoral Vote     
Number      %          
 Popular Vote 
  Number            %    
Stevenson  89        17       27,314,992      44.4 
(Democrat) 
Eisenhower                    442        83       33,936,234      55.1 
(Republican) 
Map 27.4 Presidential Election, 1952 In this overwhelming 
victory for Eisenhower, Stevenson carried only a few states. Note that the 
so-called solid South remained largely Democratic. This trend would shift 
substantially over the next two decades. 
11019_27_ch27_p1009-1050.qxd  6/4/07  3:33 PM  Page 1048
could guarantee economic growth and thereby provide the tax revenues to finance a set of 
effectively targeted social welfare programs. The Truman administration also pressed for 
national measures against racial discrimination. 
The 1952 election of Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the Republicans the presidency for 
the first time in 20 years. Eisenhower s personal appeal, however, did not signal an immi- 
nent end to the power of the Democratic coalition that had held electoral sway since the 
1930s. How would its vision of liberty and equality, as modified during the Fair Deal 
years, fare during the rest of the 1950s? 
S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS  
David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History since 1945(2001) provides an interna- 
tional context for the emerging Cold War; Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 
1945 2002(9th rev. ed., 2002) offers an expert interpretive synthesis of U.S. policies; and 
Melvyn P. Leffler and David Painter, eds., The Origins of the Cold War: Rewriting Histories 
(2005) presents accessible essays on Cold War controversies. Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of 
Communism (1994) is a brief, critical account of the onset of the Cold War. Leffler sA Prepon- 
derance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992) 
offers more detail, as do Michael J. Hogan,A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of 
the National Security State, 1945 1954(1998), and Arnold A. Offner, Another Such Victory: 
President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953 (2002). John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A 
New History (2005)and his many other books present a less critical view. Alonso L. Hamby, 
Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman(1995) provides an overview of Truman and his 
presidency. 
On the Korean War, William Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and 
Strategic History (2004) and The Korean War: An International History (1995) provide 
overviews, while Bruce Cumings s many books, including Korea: The Unknown War (coau- 
thored with Jon Halliday) (1988), provide a more critical view. Postwar reconstruction of former 
enemies is expertly treated in John Dower,Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II 
(2000), and Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 
1945 1963 (1999). 
On communism and anticommunism in America during this period, Allen Weinstein and 
Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America, the Stalin Era (1999) 
examines Soviet espionage. Stanley I. Kutler, American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the 
Cold War(1982) and Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism(2001) stress the excesses of 
anticommunist crusading. 
The effect of the Cold War and containment on American culture is the subject of many 
excellent studies. Michael S. Sherry,In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s 
(1995), a broad synthesis, and Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (rev. ed., 
1996) are good places to begin. Tom Englehardt, The End of Victory Culture and the Disillu- 
sioning of a Generation(1995) provides an influential interpretation. Paul Boyer, By the 
Bomb s Early Light (1985) andAlan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narrative, Post- 
modernism, and the Nuclear Age(1995) examine diverse cultural effects of the atomic age.Lary 
May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywoodand the Politics of the American Way(2000) examines 
Hollywood film culture. Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, 
Anticommunism, and the Cold War(1999) stresses FBI pressure on scientists to support the 
Conclusion " 1049 
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Cold War. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer sRepublic: Mass Consumption in Postwar America 
(2003) critically highlights the convergence of a number of important Cold War-era social 
and political forces. 
1050  "CHAPTER 27  "The Age of Containment, 1946 1953 
Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to 
this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin 
Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. Thomson- 
NOW is an integratedonline suite of services and resources with proven ease of 
use and efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want NOW! 
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11019_27_ch27_p1009-1050.qxd  6/4/07  3:33 PM  Page 1050
Affluence and Its Discontents, 
1953 1963 
W 
ith the end of the fighting in Korea in 1953, Cold War tensions somewhat abated. A 
new U.S. president, Dwight David Eisenhower (1953 61), modulated the pitch of 
the anticommunist rhetoric coming from the White House. Yet he and his successor, John 
F. Kennedy (1961 63), pledged not only to continue a global anticommunist foreign pol- 
icy but to take it in new directions. 
At home, Ike and JFK supported, with differing degrees of enthusiasm, efforts to extend 
some of the domestic programs initiated during the 1930s and 1940s. Sustained economic 
growth during the late 1950s and early 1960s encouraged talk about an age of  affluence.  
It also generated concern about the spread of social conformity, the behavior and cultural 
tastes of young people, and the impact of commercial mass culture. At the same time, dis- 
cussions about the distribution of the nation s economic bounty and movements to end 
racial discrimination triggered new debates over the ways in which the use of governmental 
power might affect how people understood and enjoyed liberty and equality. 
Foreign Policy,1953 1960 
28 
Focus Question 
In what ways did the  New Look  reorient the foreign policy of containment? 
The U.S. strategy for containing communism began shifting focus and direction during the 
1950s. Bipolar confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union over European 
issues continued alongside greater attention to building up nuclear arsenals and directing 
often-subtle power plays in the Third World: the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and 
Africa. 
Eisenhower Takes Command 
Eisenhower honored a campaign pledge by personally traveling to Korea, in hope of 
speeding the end of U.S. military involvement there. Negotiations to conclude the Korean 
War temporarily broke down, however, over whether or not North Korean and Chinese 
prisoners of war (POWs) could choose to remain in South Korea. Anxious to conclude 
11019_28_ch28_p1051-1102.qxd  6/4/07  3:34 PM  Page 1051
matters, Eisenhower began to hint about using nuclear weapons if diplomacy failed. Talks 
soon resumed, and on July 27, 1953, both sides signed a truce that established a com- 
mission of neutral nations to handle the POW issue. (The POWs were subsequently 
allowed to determine whether they wished to be repatriated to their own countries.) A 
conflict during which more than 2 million Asians, mostly noncombatants, and 53,000 
Americans died finally ended. A formal peace treaty remained unsigned, however, and the 
38th parallel, which divided North and South Korea, became one of the most heavily for- 
tified borders in the world. 
At home, Ike gradually wrested control of the national security issue from more mil- 
itant anticommunists, including Senator Joseph McCarthy. A Republican-controlled 
Congress did exceed the wishes of the Eisenhower administration when it passed the 
Communist Control Act of 1954. This measure barred the American Communist Party 
from running candidates in elections and extended the registration provisions of the 1950 
McCarran Act. With a GOP president and a former general in the White House, however, 
1052  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
1953 Korean War ends  " Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed  " Playboymagazine debuts 
1954 Joseph McCarthy censured by U.S. Senate  " Communist Control Act passed  " Brownv. Board of Education 
of Topekadecision issued  " SEATO formed  " Arbenz government overthrown in Guatemala  " Elvis Presley 
releases first record on Sun label  " Geneva Peace Accords in Southeast Asia signed 
1955 Montgomery bus boycott begins  " National Review founded " Brown IIdecision issued  " U.S. deals with 
Suez Crisis  " Anti-Soviet uprisings occur in Poland and Hungary  " Federal Highway Act passed  " 
Eisenhower reelected 
1957 Eisenhower sends troops to Lebanon  " Eisenhower sends troops to Little Rock, Arkansas  " Congress passes 
Civil Rights Act, first civil-rights legislation in 80 years  " Soviets launch Sputnik " Gaither Report urges 
more defense spending 
1958 National Defense Education Act passed by Congress  " The Affluent Societypublished 
1959 Khrushchev visits United States 
1960 Civil Rights Act passed  " U-2 incident ends Paris summit  " Kennedy elected president  " Sit-in 
demonstrations begin 
1961 Bay of Pigs invasion fails  " Berlin Wall erected  " Freedom rides begin in the South  " Kennedy announces 
Alliance for Progress 
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis brings superpowers to brink of war  " Kennedy sends troops to University of 
Mississippi to enforce integration 
1963 Civil-rights activists undertake march on Washington  " Betty Friedan s The Feminine Mystique published 
 " Kennedy assassinated (November 22); Lyndon Johnson becomes president 
C HR O NO L O G Y 
11019_28_ch28_p1051-1102.qxd  6/4/07  3:34 PM  Page 1052
most Republicans began to inch away from aggressively confrontational styles of anticom- 
munist politics. 
Joe McCarthy finally careened out of control. While heading up a special Senate Sub- 
committee on Investigations, popularly known as the  McCarthy Committee,  the senator 
enjoyed broad subpoena powers and legal immunity from libel suits. He could charge reluc- 
tant witnesses with selling out their country and lead sympathetic ones through stories 
about a vast Red Menace. After differences with military officials prompted McCarthy to 
speculate about subversives in the U.S. Army, a Senate committee conducted a televised 
investigation into his charges. Under the glare of TV lights, McCarthy allowed himself to 
play the role of a crude bully, who carelessly hurled wild slanders in every direction. In 
March 1954, the veteran journalist Edward R. Murrow devoted one of his  See It Now  TV 
programs to a dissection of McCarthy. Borrowing a tactic from McCarthy s own political play- 
book, other critics even hinted that the senator and his aides seemed lacking in  manliness.  
Finally, in late 1954, McCarthy s U.S. Senate colleagues approved, by a margin of 65 to 22, 
a resolution censuring him for  unbecoming  conduct. McCarthyism began receding to the 
fringes of domestic political culture, and McCarthy faded from the limelight. He would die, 
in 1957, while still a seldom-noticed member of the senate. 
Meanwhile, the Eisenhower administration crafted its own national security agenda. 
Coming in the wake of the bombast of McCarthyism, its relatively low-key style of anti- 
communism could seem eminently reasonable and moderate. The apparent unreliability 
of legislators such as McCarthy strengthened the case for the White House when it asserted 
a constitutional privilege to withhold classified national security materials from Congress. 
Eisenhower generally refrained, however, from vigorously pressing claims about presi- 
dential power, as Truman had done in the  steel seizure case  of 1952, and avoided any 
serious legal-constitutional confrontations with the judiciary. 
Relatively free from congressional and judicial oversight, the Eisenhower administration 
extended earlier programs of domestic surveillance and of covert action overseas. It also 
backed a secret program to develop new aerial surveillance capabilities; by 1956, intel- 
ligencephotographs taken from the new U-2 spy planesprovided U.S. strategists with a 
clear view of the Soviet arsenal. 
Most historians have come to see Eisenhower, especially at the beginning of his presi- 
dency, as an adroit political strategist. He could aggressively press the power of his office 
while often seeming to be doing relatively little. In the words of one scholar, Eisenhower 
conducted a  hidden hand presidency.  Mindful of how the pugnacious style of his pre- 
decessor had often dragged Harry Truman into partisan disputes and political scandals, 
Ike carefully guarded his personal popularity and reputation. To do this, he preferred to 
remain in the background of public controversies and project an air of calm steadiness, 
which sometimes bordered on the aloof. In foreign policy, he usually allowed John Foster 
Dulles, his secretary of state from 1953 to 1959, to take center stage. Ike also encouraged 
the idea that George Humphrey, his secretary of the treasury, and Sherman Adams, his 
chief of staff, looked after domestic matters. 
Foreign Policy, 1953 1960 " 1053 
11019_28_ch28_p1051-1102.qxd  6/4/07  3:34 PM  Page 1053
The New Look, Global Alliances, and Summitry 
Generally working behind the scenes, Eisenhower oversaw a refashioning of the nation s 
anticommunist foreign policy. To begin, he allowed Secretary of State Dulles to warn, 
repeatedly, that Washington would consider adopting measures to  rollback,  rather than 
simply to contain, communism. This approach differed from one that international 
observers, such as Britain s Winston Churchill, suggested. In their view, the change of 
leadership in Moscow, following the 1953 death of Joseph Stalin, created opportunities for 
significantly reducing Cold War tensions. Nikita Khrushchev, who would eventually 
emerge as the new Soviet leader, did talk about  peaceful coexistence.  Seeking to free up 
resources to produce more consumer goods, Khrushchev also inaugurated reductions in 
the USSR s armed forces. 
Meanwhile, the Eisenhower administration undertook a review and a subsequent 
revision of U.S. military and strategic policies. The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged 
cutting back the U.S. military budget and emphasizing nuclear weaponry and air power. 
Dubbed the  New Look,  these changes dovetailed with Eisenhower s concern that spi- 
raling military expenditures might eventually strangle economic growth. The president, 
despite his background in the Army, came to rely on advanced nuclear capabilities, to 
deemphasize costly ground forces, and to listen attentively to the Air Force s  bomber 
generals,  such as Curtis LeMay, who headed the Strategic Air Command (SAC). In addi- 
tion, advocates of the New Look stressed the value of covert action, cultural outreach, 
and economic pressure. 
Under Eisenhower, the United States elevated psychological warfare and  informa- 
tional  programs into major Cold War weapons. The government-run Voice of America 
extended the reach of its radio broadcasts and increased the number of languages in which 
it programmed. Washington also secretly funded Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty 
(beamed to the Soviet Union), and Radio Asia, all ostensibly privately run ventures. In 
1953, Eisenhower persuaded Congress to create the United States Information Agency 
(USIA), an executive-branch office that coordinated anticommunist informational and 
propaganda campaigns. 
A key centerpiece of the New Look, the doctrine of  massive retaliation, gambled 
that the threat of unleashing U.S. nuclear weaponry would check Soviet expansion. The 
administration publicly hinted that it would not hesitate, in any future confrontation 
involving communist military moves and U.S national security, to launch a nuclear attack 
against the USSR. Secretly, it drew up plans for such an eventuality. To extend the U.S. 
nuclear umbrella, the Eisenhower administration placed additional weapons under the 
direct control of military commanders, particularly those in SAC. 
Eisenhower s administration also concluded a set of global military alliances. It 
expanded NATO to include West Germany in 1955 and added two other mutual defense 
pacts with noncommunist nations in Central and Southeast Asia. The Southeast Asia 
Treaty Organization (SEATO), formed in 1954, linked the United States to Australia, 
France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand. The Central 
1054  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
11019_28_ch28_p1051-1102.qxd  6/4/07  3:34 PM  Page 1054
Treaty Organization (CENTO), created in 1959, aligned the United States with Pakistan, 
Iran, Turkey, Iraq, and Great Britain. 
Simultaneously trying to soothe relations with the USSR, Eisenhower also stressed the 
importance of negotiations, including high-level  summit meetings,  with the Soviets. In 
May 1955, U.S. and Soviet leaders decided finally to end the postwar occupation of Austria 
and to transform it into an independent and neutral nation. Two months later, the 
United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France met in Geneva, Switzerland, and 
agreed to inaugurate cultural exchanges as one way of reducing Cold War suspicions. 
Some optimistic observers even began to talk about the reconciliatory  spirit of Geneva.  
During the fall of 1959, as a way of healing recent rifts over the future of a still-divided 
Berlin, Khrushchev toured the United States. His most publicized stops included a farm in 
Iowa, a Hollywood studio, and Disneyland. Although a 1960 Paris summit meeting fell 
apart, amidst a bitter war of words, after the Soviets shot down a U-2 spy plane over their 
territory, the tone of Cold War rhetoric seemed to grow somewhat less strident during 
Eisenhower s eight years in office. 
The two superpowers even began to consider how they might reduce their stockpiles 
of nuclear weaponry. Eisenhower s  Open Skies  initiative of 1955 proposed mutual 
reconnaissance flights over each other s territory to verify disarmament efforts. Always sus- 
picious and hyper-secretive, the Soviet leadership balked at this idea, but the rival nations 
did make some progress toward limiting atomic testing. Responding to the health hazards 
of radioactive fallout, both slowed the pace of aboveground testing and even discussed a 
broader test-ban agreement. 
For some Americans, however, these efforts came far too late. Government documents 
finally declassified in the 1980s confirmed suspicions that people who had lived  down- 
wind  from nuclear test sites during the 1940s and 1950s had contracted a dispropor- 
tionate number of atomic-related illnesses. Subsequent revelations also showed that the 
U.S. government had covertly conducted experiments with radioactive materials on 
unsuspecting citizens. 
Meanwhile, events in Eastern Europe tested the likelihood of the United States and the 
USSR actually squaring off, militarily, there. By the mid-1950s, many of the Soviet-dominated 
 satellite  countries in that region resented their badly managed communist economies 
and detested their police-state regimes, ultimately supported by Moscow s military might. 
Seizing on hints of what appeared to be a post-Stalin relaxation of the USSR s heavy hand, 
insurgents in Poland staged a brief rebellion in June 1956. They forced the Soviets to 
accept Wladyslaw Gomulka, an old foe of Stalin, as Poland s head of state. Hungarians 
then rallied in support of Imre Nagy, another anti-Stalinist communist, who pledged to 
create a multiparty political system. After failed attempts at finding some accommodation, 
which would have preserved Moscow s power over Hungary, Soviet military forces moved 
against the new Hungarian government. 
The Hungarian insurgents appealed to the United States for assistance. They appar- 
ently took seriously earlier U.S. calls, especially by Secretary of State Dulles, for  rolling 
Foreign Policy, 1953 1960 " 1055 
11019_28_ch28_p1051-1102.qxd  6/4/07  3:34 PM  Page 1055
back  Soviet power and  liberating  Eastern Europe. More cautious U.S. military strate- 
gists, however, recognized the danger of mounting a U.S. military operation in Eastern 
Europe, so close to Soviet territory. Soviet armies brutally crushed the Hungarian upris- 
ing, killing thousands of people, including Nagy. Anticommunist critics of rollback 
rhetoric suggested that the failed Hungarian Revolution showed how advocating a policy 
that moved beyond containment might secure political advantage at home but produce 
tragedy abroad. 
Covert Action and Economic Leverage 
Meanwhile, the U.S. campaign to contain communism shifted toward the Third World. As 
it did, covert action and economic pressure, less visible and less expensive than military 
deployments, became major policy tools. Using secretive operations and economic diplo- 
macy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Eisenhower administration reasoned, seemed 
less likely to provoke domestic political controversies or showdowns with the Soviets. 
The CIA, headed by Allen Dulles, brother of the secretary of state, played a key role in 
U.S. policy in the Third World during the 1950s. In 1953, the CIA helped engineer the 
election of the strongly anticommunist Ramón Magsaysay as president of thePhilippines. 
That same year, the CIA facilitated a coup in Iran, which overthrew Mohammed 
Mossadegh s constitutional government, after it threatened to nationalize Iran s oil 
industry, and restored Shah Reza Pahlavi to power. Increasingly dictatorial in his 
domestic policies, the Shah assured Eisenhower that Iran would remain a firm ally of 
Washington and a close friend to oil interests in the United States and Europe. (The 
Shah remained in power until ousted in 1979 in another coup, this time led by Islamic 
fundamentalists.) 
The CIA continually expanded its global reach and its influence within the Eisenhower 
administration. In 1954, CIA operatives secretly helped topple President Jacobo Arbenz 
Guzmán s elected government in Guatemala. Officials in Washington and executives of the 
United Fruit Company desired the ouster of Arbenz, whose broad support included that 
of Guatemala s Communist Party. Using up-to-date informational strategies, including 
phony newscasts created by the U.S. advertising industry, the CIA undermined domestic 
support for Arbenz, who had promised a program to nationalize and redistribute large 
tracts of Guatemalan land owned by United Fruit. 
Impressed by what the Iranian and Guatemalan operations appeared to suggest about 
the potential of covert action, the National Security Council secretly widened the CIA s 
mandate. By 1960, the CIA deployed approximately 15,000 agents around the world, 
compared to only 6,000 when Eisenhower took office. 
Eisenhower also employed new economic strategies trade and aid to fight commu- 
nism and win Third World converts to the U.S cause. Governmental economic initiatives 
sought to open new opportunities for U.S. enterprises overseas, discourage other countries 
from adopting state-directed economic systems, and encourage expanded trade ties. Those 
who supported these efforts credited U.S. policy with encouraging greater stability in 
1056  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
11019_28_ch28_p1051-1102.qxd  6/4/07  3:34 PM  Page 1056
CI-25 
THE TENNESSEE 
VALLEY AUTHORITY 
KENTUCKY 
PICKWICK 
LANDING 
WILSON WHEELER 
GUNTERSVILLE 
HALE'S 
BAR 
CHICKAMAUGA 
NORRIS 
WATT'S 
BAR 
CHEROKEE 
SOUTH 
HOLSTON 
WATAUGA 
FORT LOUDOUN 
DOUGLAS 
CHEOAH 
CENTER 
HILL 
DALE 
HOLLOW 
WOLF 
CREEK 
BLUE RIDGE 
CHATUGE 
HIWASSEE 
SANTEETLAH 
GLENVILLE 
FONTANA 
APALACHIA 
OCOEES 
CALDERWOOD 
NOTTELY 
T 
e 
n 
n 
e 
s 
s 
e 
e 
R 
. 
Ohio 
R 
. 
Cumberl 
andR. 
Nashville 
Knoxville 
Chattanooga 
Johnson 
City 
Asheville 
Huntsville 
Muscle 
Shoals 
Augusta 
Oak 
Ridge 
ILL. 
TENNESSEE 
KENTUCKY 
GEORGIA 
ALABAMA 
MISS. 
VIRGINIA 
W.V. 
NORTH 
CAROLINA 
SOUTH 
CAROLINA 
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0 
50 100 Kilometers 
0 
50 100 Miles 
Area of 
Enlargement 
Tennessee Valley 
basin 
TVA dam 
Power plant 
ÛÿÜ 
Map 25.3 Tennessee Valley Authority This map shows the vast scale of the TVA, and pinpoints the locations of 29 dams 
and 13 power plants that emerged from this project. 
11019_CI-25_CI-28.qxd  9/4/07  11:28 AM  Page CI-25
CI-26 
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Russian front, 
December 19411 
Battle of Stalingrad, 
August 1942 January 19433 
Surrender in Tunisia of 
Axis armies in northern Africa, 
May 13, 1943 
4 
Russian front, 
Spring 1944 6 
Russian front, 
February 194511 
Western front, 
February 1945 
10 
Battle of the Bulge, 
Dec. 1944   Jan. 1945 
9 
Western front, 
June 1944 
8 
Invasion of Normandy, 
June 6, 1944 7 
Berlin falls, 
May 2, 1945 
12 
German surrender, 
Reims, 
May  7, 1945 
13 
Russian front, 
November 19422 
Italian front, 
February 19455 
"Æ 
"Æ 
"Æ 
"Æ 
"Æ 
"Æ 
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"Æ 
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"Æ 
"Æ 
"Æ 
"Æ 
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ATLANTIC 
OCEAN 
NORTH 
SEA 
BAL 
TIC 
SE 
A 
A 
D 
R 
I 
A 
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I 
C 
S 
E 
A 
BLACK SEA 
AEGEAN 
SEA 
MEDITERRANEAN SEA 
R 
E 
D 
S 
E 
A 
Suez 
Canal 
Helsinki 
Paris 
Brussels 
Berlin 
Amsterdam 
Oslo 
Stockholm 
London 
Dublin 
Lisbon 
Madrid 
Rome 
Naples 
Salerno 
Marseilles 
Reims 
Nice 
Oran 
Port Lyautey 
Stalingrad 
Warsaw 
Kaunas 
Riga 
Tallinn 
Copenhagen 
Moscow 
Leningrad 
Minsk 
Smolensk 
Kiev 
Tula 
Yalta 
Jerusalem 
Damascus 
Amman 
Beirut 
Prague 
Dresden 
Pinsk 
Tirana 
Berne 
ICELAND 
UNITED 
KINGDOM 
IRELAND 
DENMARK 
NORWAY 
SWEDEN 
FINLAND 
FRANCE 
VICHY 
FRANCE 
GOV'T. GEN. 
OF 
POLAND 
SPAIN 
PO 
RTU 
GA 
L 
ITALY 
GERMANY 
NETH. 
LUX. 
BELGIUM 
SWITZ. HUNGARY 
ROMANIA 
BULGARIA 
GREECE 
TURKEY 
UNION OF SOVIET 
SOCIALIST REPUBLICS 
CROATIA 
Algiers 
Tunis 
Tripoli 
Cairo 
GIBRALTAR 
(U.K.) 
ALGERIA 
SP. MOROCCO 
TUNISIA 
FR. MOROCCO 
LIBYA 
(It.) 
EGYPT 
Athens 
Vienna 
Bucharest 
Ankara 
Sofia 
Budapest 
Sardinia 
Sicily 
Malta (U.K.) 
Corsica 
(Vichy Fr.) 
Crete 
(Gr.) 
Rhodes 
(It.) Cyprus 
(U.K.) 
A 
L 
B 
A 
N 
I 
A 
PALESTINE 
(BR. MANDATE) 
TRANS- 
JORDAN 
(BR. MANDATE) 
SYRIA 
LEBANON 
SLOVAKIA 
SERBIA 
MONT. 
BO 
HE 
MIA 
 MO 
R. 
FRENCH NORTH AFRICA 
(Vichy France) 
Joined Allies November 1942 
See Inset 
GERMAN OCCUPATION 
 ZONES AT WAR'S END 
AMERICAN 
ZONE 
BRITISH 
ZONE 
FRENCH 
ZONE 
SOVIET 
ZONE 
Berlin 
"Æ 
Axis Powers and 
satellites 
Farthest extent of 
Axis control 
Allied and Allied- 
controlled nations Major battles 
Advancing Western 
fronts 
Neutral nations 
Advancing Eastern 
fronts 
Map 26.2 Allied Advances and Collapse of German Power This map depicts the final Allied advances and the end of 
the war in Germany. Through what countries did Soviet armies advance, and how might their advance have affected the postwar 
situation? How was Germany divided by occupying powers, and how might that division have affected postwar politics? 
View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin. 
11019_CI-25_CI-28.qxd  9/4/07  11:28 AM  Page CI-26
CI-27 
Tarawa, 
November 20, 19431 
Kwajalein, 
January 31, 19442 
Eniwetok, 
February 17, 19443 
Tinian, 
July 24, 19446 
Guam, 
July 24, 19445 
Palau, 
September 15, 19447 
American landings on Leyte, 
October 20, 1944 8 
Okinawa 
occupied, April 1  
June 21,1945 
12 
First atomic bomb, Hiroshima, 
August 6, 1945 
13 
Soviet Union 
declares war on Japan, 
August 8, 1945 
14 
Second atomic bomb, 
Nagasaki, August 9, 194515 
Agreement on 
surrender in Korea, 
August 16, 1945 
16 
Japan offers to 
surrender, 
August 10, 1945. 
Japan accepts 
Allied terms, 
August 14, 1945. 
U.S. occupation 
forces land, 
August 30, 1945. 
Japan formally 
surrenders, 
September 2, 1945. 
17 
Battle of Luzon, 
January 9 June 30, 1945 
10 
Iwo Jima occupied, 
February 19  
March 16, 1945 
11 
B-29s begin air strikes 
on Japanese mainland, 
November 1944 
9 
B-29 strikes against Japan 
from bases in China begin 
June 14, 1944 
4 
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Equator 0° 
Beijing 
Shanghai 
Seoul 
Chongqing 
Tokyo 
Nagasaki 
Hong 
Kong 
Rangoon 
Bangkok 
Saigon 
Manila 
Singapore 
Port Moresby 
Hollandia 
Vladivostok 
Hiroshima 
SOVIET 
UNION 
CHINA 
MONGOLIA 
INDIA 
BURMA 
THAILAND 
FRENCH 
INDOCHINA 
KOREA 
JAPAN 
PHILIPPINES 
MANCHURIA 
(MANCHUKUO) 
MALAYA 
DUTCH EAST INDIES 
SARAWAK 
BR. NORTH 
BORNEO 
BRUNEI Caroline Islands 
Marianas 
Islands 
Solomon 
Islands (U.K.) 
Marshall 
Is. 
Kuri 
lIsla 
nds 
New Guinea 
Guam (U.S.) 
Wake I. (U.S.) 
Sakhalin I. 
Karafuto 
Java 
Formosa 
Borneo 
Celebes 
S 
u 
m 
at 
r 
a 
Timor 
Luzon 
PACIFIC 
OCEAN 
INDIAN 
OCEAN 
American forces (Nimitz) 
American forces (MacArthur) 
British forces 
Soviet forces 
Other Allied forces 
Major Allied victories 
Japanese Empire, 1936 
Allied nations 
Farthest extent of Japanese 
control, August 1942 
Neutral nations 
0 
500 1,000 Kilometers 
0 
500 1,000 Miles 
Map 26.3 Pacific Theater Offensive Strategy and Final Assault Against Japan This map suggests the complicated 
nature of devising a war strategy in the vast Pacific region. What tactics did the United States use to advance upon and finally 
prevail over the island nation of Japan? 
11019_CI-25_CI-28.qxd  9/4/07  11:28 AM  Page CI-27
CI-28 
Berlin 
ATLANTIC 
OCEAN 
NORTH 
SEA 
BLACK 
SEA 
MEDITERRANEAN  SEA 
NORWEGIAN 
SEA 
BALT 
IC 
SEA 
ICELAND 
UNITED 
KINGDOM 
IRELAND DENMARK 
NORWAY 
SWEDEN 
FINLAND 
FRANCE 
SPAIN 
(joined in 1982) 
PORTUGAL 
ITALY 
POLAND 
EAST 
GERMANY 
WEST 
GERMANY 
NETH. 
BELG. 
LUX. 
SWITZ. 
AUSTRIAHUNGARY 
ROMANIA 
ALBANIA 
BULGARIA 
GREECE 
(joined in 1952) 
LIBYA 
ALGERIA 
MOROCCO 
EGYPT 
CYPRUS 
TURKEY 
(joined in 1952) 
YUGOSLAVIA 
UNION OF SOVIET 
SOCIALIST REPUBLICS 
CZ 
EC 
HO 
SL 
OVAKIA 
(joined in 1955) 
American Zone 
British Zone 
French Zone 
Soviet Zone 
(The American, British, 
and French zones were 
consolidated as West 
Berlin) 
East 
Berlin 
West 
Berlin 
B 
e 
r 
l 
i 
n 
W 
a 
ll 
( 
1 
9 
6 
1 
  
1 
9 
8 
9 
) 
THE DIVISION OF BERLIN 
The Cold War split Europe into two opposing alliances.  
Germany was divided into two countries: The Federal 
Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German 
Democratic Republic (East Germany).  Berlin, the former 
capital of Germany, was also divided.  In 1949 NATO was 
formed, and in 1955 the Warsaw Pact came into existence. 
0 200 
0 200 400 Kilometers 
400 Miles 
NATO Countries 
Warsaw Pact Countries 
Nonaligned Countries 
Map 27.2 Divided Germany and the NATO Alliance This map shows the geopolitics of the Cold War. Which countries 
aligned with the United States through NATO? Which aligned with the Soviet Union through the Warsaw Pact? Note how Berlin 
became a divided city, although it was located within East Germany. 
11019_CI-25_CI-28.qxd  9/4/07  11:28 AM  Page CI-28
recipient countries. Critics at home and abroad noted, however, that U.S. aid programs 
could seem heavy-handed and often alienated Third World leaders by equating  freedom  
only with free-market economic policies that U.S. investors favored. 
U.S. military aid to the Third World rose even more sharply than economic assistance. 
Under a Mutual Security and Military Assistance Program, the United States spent $3 billion 
annually, instructed Third World governments in anticommunist policies, trained their 
military forces, and advised their domestic police forces. The buildup of armaments in 
Third World nations did provide the United States with stronger anticommunist allies but 
also contributed to the development of military dictatorships. 
The United States and Third World Politics,1953 1960 
In pursuing its policies in Third World areas, the Eisenhower administration employed a 
broad definition of  communist.  In many nations emerging from colonialism, groups 
advocating labor rights and land redistribution sometimes did ally with local communist 
movements. Their domestic political opponents could thus hope to win U.S. support by 
mentioning the word communist, especially to people in Washington, D.C. 
Latin America 
In Latin America, the Eisenhower White House favored autocratic regimes that welcomed 
U.S. economic investment and opposed leftist political movements. Eisenhower publicly 
honored unpopular dictators in Peru and Venezuela and privately confessed admiration 
for the anticommunist politics of Paraguay s General Alfredo Stroessner, who sheltered Ger- 
man-Nazi fugitives and ran his country much as if it were a private fiefdom. Eisenhower s 
administration continued to cultivate close ties with Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. 
Batista also enjoyed strong support from U.S. crime syndicates, which controlled the 
Cuba s gambling industry, and from the CIA, which secretly trained his repressive 
securityforces. 
The backlash against U.S. policy boosted the appeal of  yankeephobia in much of 
Latin America. Two important events of the late 1950s dramatized the growing unpopu- 
larity that U.S. policy makers now faced throughout much of the southern part of the 
Western Hemisphere. 
When Vice-President Richard Nixon visited this region on a 1958 goodwill tour, he gen- 
erally encountered ill will. Constantly escalating protest demonstrations reached their cli- 
max during Nixon s last stop, in Caracas, Venezuela. At one point, protestors surrounded 
the vice-president s motorcade, laid siege to his Cadillac limousine, and forced Nixon, hus- 
tled to safety by armed Secret Service agents, to take refuge in the U.S. Embassy. 
Events in Havana, Cuba, the following year, added substance to the symbolism of 
Caracas. A relatively broad-based Cuban opposition movement, headed by a charismatic 
revolutionary named Fidel Castro, toppled Batista s pro-U.S. regime in December 1959. 
Once in control, Castro promised to reduce Cuba s dependence on the United States and 
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to create a state-directed economic system, one he claimed would improve living condi- 
tions for most Cubans. These policies, together with Castro s own increasingly autocratic 
rule, prompted many of Cuba s more affluent citizens to depart for Florida, and the 
Eisenhower administration to impose an economic boycott against Cuba. Castro turned 
to the Soviet Union, declared his allegiance to Marxist doctrine, moved against political 
dissent at home, and pledged support for Cuban-style insurgencies throughout Latin 
America. 
The Eisenhower administration began laying down a two-track response. First, it recon- 
sidered U.S. policies that seemed to have been generating animosity and sparking anti-U.S. 
political movements throughout Latin America. This review ultimately recommended that 
Washington start encouraging democratic political processes, protection for human rights, 
and policies of economic growth. At the same time, Allan Dulles and the CIA were work- 
ing on their own initiatives toward Cuba and Castro. Looking back at earlier operations 
and surveying current assets, including its contacts in organized crime, the CIA began 
planning how best to depose the Cuban leader, who was becoming an increasingly visible 
symbol of opposition to U.S. policies on the world stage. 
The Middle East, Asia, and Africa 
Meanwhile, a growing distrust of nationalism and neutralism shaped U.S. policy toward 
the Middle East. In 1954, after Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser led a successful military coup 
in Egypt, against a corrupt monarchy closely tied to Great Britain, he promised to help res- 
cue other Arab nations from European domination and guide them toward policies of 
 positive neutralism  in the Cold War. Nasser denounced Israel, boosted Egypt s economic 
and military power, extended diplomatic recognition to the People s Republic of China, 
and purchased advanced weapons from communist Czechoslovakia. 
The Eisenhower administration viewed these policies as neither positive nor neutral. It 
quickly cancelled the U.S. loans intended to finance construction of the Aswan Dam, 
which Egypt hoped to make the centerpiece of a project designed to improve agriculture 
along the Nile River and to provide power for new Egyptian industries. Nasser responded, 
in July 1956, by seizing the British-controlled Suez Canal, which connected the Red Sea 
to the Mediterranean, as a way of gaining new revenues and prestige for Egypt. The Suez 
also remained of both economic and symbolic importance to Britain, and its forces, joined 
by those of France and Israel, attacked Egypt in October and quickly seized back the canal. 
Observers of the international scene talked about  the Suez Crisis.  
Eisenhower distrusted Nasser, but he opposed Britain s blatant attempt to retain its 
imperial position in the Middle East. Denouncing the Anglo-French-Israeli action, which 
coincided with the Soviet Union s brutal campaign to shore up its communist empire by 
crushing Hungary, the U.S. president threatened to destabilize Britain s currency unless 
the invasion ended. Eventually, a plan supported by the United States and the UN gave 
Egypt control over the Suez Canal, but U.S. influence in the area still suffered, particularly 
after the Soviet Union took over the financing for the Aswan Dam. 
1058  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
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With Nasser-style nationalism now seeming to lean toward the USSR, the Eisenhower 
administration came to fear the spread of  Nasserism  throughout the energy-rich Middle 
East. In spring 1957, the president s  Eisenhower Doctrine pledged that the United 
States would defend Middle Eastern countries  against overt armed aggression from any 
nation controlled by international communism.  When ruling elites in Lebanon and Jordan 
faced potential revolts by domestic forces friendly to Nasser, Eisenhower dispatched U.S. 
Marines to Lebanon, and Britain helped Jordan s King Hussein retain his throne. 
The Eisenhower administration moved with similar determination elsewhere in the 
Third World. It remained steadfast in its policy of trying to squelch political movements 
it considered too closely tied to communism. In 1958, for example, the CIA furnished 
planes and pilots to rebels trying to overthrow Achmed Sukarno, leader of Indonesia, 
who drew support from that nation s large Communist Party. The rebellion failed, and 
Sukarno tightened his grip on power. CIA operatives also became involved in a plan to 
eliminate Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. Lumumba s opponents killed the popular 
black nationalist leader in January 1961, but scholars still debate the CIA s precise role in 
precipitating his death. 
Vietnam 
Eisenhower s effort to thwart communism and neutralism in the Third World set the 
stage for a more through commitment in Indochina. There, communist-nationalist forces 
led by Ho Chi Minh (born Nguyen Tat Thanh) continued to seek independence from 
France. Ho Chi Minh had studied in the Soviet Union and in France before returning to 
Indochina in 1941 to fight against the Japanese armies that had overrun this French 
colony. When Japan withdrew at war s end, Ho had appealed to the United States to back 
independence for Indochina. Despite wartime criticism of European colonialism, U.S. 
leaders supported the return of French rule. In 1946, Ho Chi Minh and his Vietminh 
forces went to war against France and its ally, Bao Dai, the Paris-educated Vietnamese 
emperor who had reigned since the 1920s. 
Despite U.S. willingness to finance its military operations, France could not retain its 
hold over Indochina. A stunning 1954 Vietminh victory, orchestrated by General Vo 
Nguyen Giap, at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, convinced France to begin pulling out of 
Indochina. The Geneva Peace Accords of 1954, which the United States ultimately 
refused to sign, ended France s colonial regime and divided the old Indochina into three 
sovereign nations: Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The accords further split Vietnam into 
twojurisdictions North Vietnam and South Vietnam until a future, nationwide elec- 
tion could create a government that would unify it as a single country. 
Eisenhower s advisers feared that events in Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh stood poised 
to win any electoral contest, could set off a geopolitical chain reaction. Using now-familiar 
Cold War language, the White House insisted that  the loss of any of the countries of 
Southeast Asia to Communist aggression  would ultimately  endanger the stability and 
security  of Europe and Japan, a formulation becoming known as the  domino theory.  As 
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Ho Chi Minh s communist government consolidated control over North Vietnam, Eisenhower 
supported creation of a noncommunist state in South Vietnam. 
Ike additionally ordered, in advance of the planned reunification election, covert oper- 
ations and economic programs throughout South Vietnam. In late 1954, Washington dis- 
patched to South Vietnam Colonel Edward Lansdale, who had directed the CIA s cam- 
paign against the leftist insurgency in the Philippines from 1950 to 1953. Lansdale helped 
oversee creation in Saigon, South Vietnam s capital city, of the pro-U.S. government 
headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, an anticommunist Catholic who had been educated in the 
United States. Lansdale also took charge of covert activities against anti-Diem factions, 
especially those loyal to Ho Chi Minh. 
At first, the U.S.-directed effort at nation-building seemed to make headway. With 
Washington s concurrence, Diem s regime renounced the Geneva Peace Accords and 
refused to participate in any national election intended to establish a unified Vietnamese 
government. Diem extended his own government s authority over South Vietnam, redis- 
tributed land formerly owned by the French, augmented his military forces, and even 
launched an industrialization program. 
Diem s authoritarian policies, together with opposition from North Vietnam, soon 
undermined the stability of his government. Diem alienated much of South Vietnam s 
predominantly Buddhist population, and his narrowing circle of political allies became 
best known for their notorious corruption. With encouragement and material support 
from North Vietnam, Vietminh loyalists in the South spearheaded opposition to Diem. 
As time passed, Diem grew increasingly isolated from key constituencies in his strug- 
gling nation and progressively more dependent on U.S. support. Early on, French offi- 
cials had warned their U.S. counterparts of Diem s liabilities, but the Eisenhower 
administration could see no alternative. It sent billions of U.S. dollars and military 
advisers to prop up his government. 
Eisenhower struggled to frame a coherent U.S. policy toward Vietnam. Ike had once 
claimed that U.S. military involvement there would be a  tragedy  and had rebuffed, in 
1954, advisers who urged direct U.S. military intervention, including even the possible use 
of atomic weapons, on behalf of France. Following French withdrawal from Indochina, 
however, Eisenhower committed economic and military aid, along with America s inter- 
national prestige, to Diem s shaky political fortunes. The decision of how far the United 
States might actually go in order to fulfill Eisenhower s commitment to South Vietnam 
would fall to his successors in the White House. 
Affluence:A  People of Plenty  
1060  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
Focus Question 
How could economic growth seem to be both an opportunity and a problem during 
the 1950s? 
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President Eisenhower s  farewell address  of 1961 famously criticized the increasingly cozy 
relationship between the groups that directed nation s foreign policy and its economic sys- 
tem. The former general warned that a  military-industrial complex  threatened to so 
accelerate the costs of Cold War containment that the burden of military expenditures 
would eventually harm the U.S. domestic economy. 
Eisenhower s warning contained several ironies. Most obviously, his administration, 
while trying to contain costs, had watched ever-larger sums of money flow to the national 
security establishment. Eisenhower s selection of Charles Wilson of General Motors in 
1953 and Neil McElroy of Procter & Gamble in 1957 to head the Department of 
Defense, moreover, seemingly dramatized the same linkage Ike decried in his final address. 
Government spending on national security what critics called  military Keynesianism  (see 
chapter 27) pumped money into the general economy and stimulated key industries. 
In addition, Eisenhower s warnings about possible dangers came after eight years dur- 
ing which his White House had praised the nation s continued economic growth. In 1945, 
the United States had still teetered on the brink of economic depression. By 1960, it could 
claim a GNP more than five times that of Great Britain and at least ten times that of Japan. 
The output of major U.S. corporations, such as General Motors, surpassed the GNP of 
many sovereign nations. 
Economic Growth 
The 1950s marked the midpoint of a period of generally steady economic growth that 
began during the Second World War and continued until the early 1970s. Writing in the 
mid-1950s, the historian David Potter called Americans a  people of plenty.  Corporations 
turned out vast quantities of consumer goods and enjoyed rising profits. Investments and 
business ventures overseas boosted corporate profits at home. The domestic economy 
intersected with an international marketplace dominated by U.S.-based firms. The label 
 Made in America  announced both the quality of particular products and the economic 
power of the nation at large. A global national-security policy, in addition to making the 
Pentagon one of the nation s largest consumers, helped keep raw materials and energy 
flowing from the Third World. Abundant supplies of inexpensive oil and natural gas, in 
particular, lowered production costs and allowed U.S. industries to substitute less costly, 
and less polluting, foreign energy sources for domestically mined coal. 
Newer U.S. industries, such as chemicals and electronics, quickly came to dominate the 
world marketplace. The Corning Glass Company reported that most of its sales during the 
mid-1950s came from products that had not even been on the market in 1940. General 
Electric proudly proclaimed that  progress is our most important product.  
The newest suburbs and the products their residents consumed remained promi- 
nent emblems of this particular view of progress. Because these outlying areas lacked, at 
best, adequate mass transit, life revolved around the automobile. Initially, if the male 
breadwinner required the family car to commute to work, his spouse needed to spend her 
day near home. As the opportunities for buying automobiles on credit expanded during 
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the mid-1950s, however, the two-car 
family and the new suburban shopping 
malls, surrounded by acres of free park- 
ing, became tangible symbols of eco- 
nomic growth. Widespread ownership 
of kitchen appliances, television sets, 
and automobiles marked those living in 
the United States, especially in the eyes 
of most of those in the rest of the world, 
as people of plenty. 
Complaints about the limits of cap- 
italism, widely expressed during the 
1930s, all but disappeared from 
domestic political discourse. Capital- 
ism seemed to work and spectacu- 
larly well. Only a new vocabulary of 
superlatives, it seemed, could describe 
its wonders. In 1955, Fortune maga- 
zine hailed  The Changing American 
Market  and highlighted  The Rich 
Middle-Income Class  and  The Won- 
derful Ordinary Luxury Market.  Har- 
vard s celebrated economist John Ken- 
neth Galbraith, who had simply 
entitled his 1952 study American Capi- 
talism, gave his follow-up book a more 
grandiose-sounding title, The Affluent 
Society (1958). (This best seller actu- 
ally took a far more critical look at the 
U.S. economy than Galbraith s first 
book; see following discussion.) 
Words such as plenty, abundance, 
and affluencefit nicely with the dom- 
inant economic vision. The rate of 
growth and the burgeoning supply of 
consumer goods overshadowed all 
other economic indicators. Mainstream 
political discourse increasingly slid by what people actually owned their accumulated 
wealth to focus on their affluence what they could, with the aid of generous credit terms, 
consume. From this perspective, observers could easily see the entire American Way of Life 
constantly improving. Some even predicted a leveling out of living standards between the 
1062  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
The Typical Housewife This photograph depicts a different view 
of the  typical housewife  in her kitchen. 
The  Mrs. America  Gas Kitchen In 1959, the American National 
Exhibition in Moscow featured a  typical housewife  working in this 
RCA/Whirlpool  Mrs. America  gas kitchen, a symbol of the 
streamlined material progress of the postwar United States. 
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11019_28_ch28_p1051-1102.qxd  6/4/07  3:34 PM  Page 1062
top and the bottom levels of this 
growth-enabled consumer society. Any 
remaining gulf seemed not between 
people with cars and those without 
them, they announced, but between 
ones who drove Cadillacs and Lincolns 
and those who piloted Chevrolets and 
Fords.  Luxury has reached the 
masses,  proclaimed Fortune. 
Many economists claimed that 
greater government expenditures would 
generate even faster growth, but the 
Eisenhower administration demurred. 
Fearing that increased spending might 
fuel an inflationary spiral of rising 
prices and destabilize the economy, it 
kept expenditures for nonmilitary pro- 
grams under tight control and 
remained committed, at least rhetori- 
cally, to restraining even the Pentagon s 
spending habits. As a result, by the late 
1950s, the federal government began 
running balanced budgets. 
Highways and Waterways 
The Eisenhower administration, after due deliberation, did endorse several costly new 
domestic programs. For one of these, the construction of an interstate highway system, it 
could invoke national-security considerations. Supposedly, during any militaryemer- 
gency, the government could rush supplies and personnel along federally financed 
superhighways. Creating a national tax on gasoline and other transportation-related 
products, the Highway Act of 1956authorized a national system of limited-access 
expressways. Touted as the largest public works project in world history, this program 
delighted the oil, concrete, and tire industries; provided steady work for construction 
firms and labor unions; and boosted the interstate trucking business. It also confirmed the 
victory of the automobile over competing modes of surface travel, including passenger 
trains, trolleys, and buses. 
The White House also supported expensive water-diversion projects in the West. The 
Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation federal agencies with powerful 
supporters in business and Congress  spent billions of dollars on dams, irrigation canals, 
and reservoirs. Irrigation turned desert into crop land, and elaborate pumping systems 
even allowed rivers to flow uphill. No society in the history of the world had ever devoted 
Affluence: A  People of Plenty   " 1063 
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Auto Sales, 1940 1970 
11019_28_ch28_p1051-1102.qxd  6/4/07  3:34 PM  Page 1063
a similar portion of its resources to water 
projects. By 1960, much of the arid West 
enjoyed reliable access to trillions of gallons 
of water. Governmental expenditures laid 
the basis for new economic growth in states 
such as Texas, California, and Arizona. 
These water projects came at a price. 
Technologically complicated and costly, 
they apparently needed similarly complex 
and expensive bureaucracies to sustain 
them. As a consequence, local communi- 
ties lost power to governmental agencies 
and to the large-scale private entrepre- 
neurs who pushed aside smaller farmers 
and ranchers. In addition, several Ameri- 
can Indian tribes found significant por- 
tions of their land being flooded for large 
water reservoirs or being purchased by 
agribusinesses or large ranching interests. 
Moreover, these vast projects which 
diverted surface waters, tapped into 
ground-water tables, and dotted the West 
with dams and reservoirs also produced 
ecological problems. They disrupted and 
degraded critical habitats and contributed 
to the buildup of salt by-products in the 
water and the soil. Some scientists also began to warn about the consequences to animal 
and plant life from the overuse, especially by larger farming operations, of pesticides 
such as DDT. 
Labor Management Accord 
Most corporate leaders, supportive of the kind of government involvement required to 
build the Interstate Highway System highways and water projects, were learning to live 
with labor unions as well. The auto industry, where management and labor leaders had 
negotiated a mutually acceptable contract in 1950, showcased what some economic 
observers saw as a tacit accord between the two sides. 
At the end of the Second World War, more than 14 million U.S. workers, roughly 35 percent 
of those who worked in nonagricultural jobs, held union cards. Hoping to consolidate this 
base and to move forward cautiously, most union leaders saw closer cooperation with cor- 
porate management, rather than aggressive new organizing drives, as the safest way to guar- 
antee employment stability and secure political influence for their unions. 
1064  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
Automobiles Symbolize a New Lifestyle This ad for a 
1958 pink convertible shows off not only the nation s new 
economic productivity and consumer lifestyle but also suggests 
the dominant ideal of family  togetherness.  
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The United Auto Workers (UAW), which had been one of the most militant Congress of 
Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions during the 1930s, helped lead the way. Unions such 
as the UAW dropped demands for greater involvement in  management prerogatives.  These 
included organization of the daily work routine, introduction of new technologies, investment 
priorities, and, most important, decisions on where to locate new facilities. Unionscontinued 
to bargain aggressively but on a relatively narrow range of issues that immediately affected 
worker paychecks and benefits. Union leaders also assured management that rank-and-file 
workers would abide by their union contracts and disavow the wildcat tactics that had been 
used during the 1930s and 1940s. In another sign of declining militancy within the labor 
movement, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the CIO, long at odds, merged in 
1955. Finally, to police this new labor management détente in an even-handed manner, 
both sides looked to the federal government s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The 
1950s thus seemed to signal an end to the kind of fierce labor capital conflicts that had 
marked the 1930s and had continued through the 1940s. 
Some union activists, however, expressed concern about the new direction of the labor 
movement. Although membership rolls stood at record highs, nearly two-thirds of all union- 
ized workers lived in only 10 states. Worse, there were already clear signs in some areas of 
union strength, such as the Northeastern United States, of companies beginning to move jobs 
elsewhere, beginning with states in the South. There, the union movement lacked strong 
roots, and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 allowed for state laws that frustrated new organizing 
drives, such as the ultimately underproductive effort known as  Operation Dixie.  
Most business leaders, on the other hand, judged the new direction in labor management 
relations as a substantial victory for their side. Fortune magazine noted that General 
Motors, while paying higher wages and shouldering costlier employee benefit packages, 
 got a bargain  on the larger issue of labor peace from its landmark 1950 contract with the 
UAW. To safeguard their control over decision making, corporations expanded their 
supervisory staffs, a practice that drove up consumer prices and curtailed worker partici- 
pation in planning the work process. The labor management accord also helped divide 
industrial workers from one another: Those employed in the most profitable sectors of the 
economy, such as the auto industry, could bargain far more effectively than those who 
worked in less lucrative sectors. 
To further consolidate management s power, many businesses expanded benefits for 
their workers. Companies such as Sears and Eastman Kodak encouraged a cooperative cor- 
porate culture, which included health and pension plans, profit-sharing arrangements, and 
social programs. Some even created private recreational parks for the exclusive use of their 
employees. Reaching out to workers, executives decided, would reduce the appeal of both 
aggressive unions and more extensive governmental welfare measures. 
Between the end of the Second World War and the early 1960s, a large percentage of 
U.S. wage-earners came to enjoy at least some of the fruits of affluence. Real wages (what 
workers make after adjusting their paychecks for inflation) rose steadily, while job open- 
ings remained plentiful. The frequency of industrial accidents dropped; fringe benefits 
Affluence: A  People of Plenty   " 1065 
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(what workers receive in the form of health insurance, paid vacation time, and retirement 
plans) invariably improved; and job security was generally high. 
Political Pluralism 
Economic growth also appeared to help sustain a stable political system. Observers of 
the domestic scene during the 1950s could not help but see their own times in terms of 
memories of the past and visions of the future. In contrast to the conflicts of the 1930s, 
the disruptions during the Second World War, and the Great Fear of the early Cold War 
period, the 1950s seemed an era of relative tranquility.  Moreover, domestic life in the 
United States seemed less troubled and chaotic than that in other parts of the Cold War 
world, as the increasingly prosperous nation worked, fairly effectively, to mute conflict 
and solve domestic problems. 
According to the dominant viewpoint, which political scientists called  pluralism  (or 
 interest-group pluralism ), U.S. politics featured a roughly equal bargaining process 
among well-organized interest groups. John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, coined the 
term  countervailing power  to describe the ability of labor unions, consumer lobbies, 
farm organizations, and other groups to check the appetites of giant corporations. No sin- 
gle group could hope to dictate to the others, celebrants of pluralism claimed, because so 
many interests felt securely empowered. Pluralists shrugged off signs of an apparent 
decline in political participation, clearly evident in how few citizens went to the polls on 
election days, by arguing that relatively low voter turnouts simply showed widespread sat- 
isfaction with how well existing processes worked. 
In addition to praising the process, pluralists invariably praised the results. Public leaders, 
it seemed, could find a realistic solution to virtually every political problem. Short-term con- 
flicts over specific issues might never disappear, but supporters of the pluralist vision pointed 
out how affluence could moderate political passions and point warring interests toward a 
viable long-term agreement on fundamental arrangements. As a professor at Harvard Law 
School put it, constant economic growth meant that  in any conflict of interest,  it was 
 always possible to work out a solution  because continuing affluence appeared to guar- 
antee that any settlement would leave all interests  better off than before.  
A Religious People 
The celebration of political pluralism accompanied the exaltation of the stabilizing role 
of religion. Signs of religious commitment seemed part of most people s weekly, some- 
times daily, routine. Formal church membership grew at more than double the rate of 
the U.S. population during the 1950s. Moreover, public life appeared solidly anchored 
in religious values. As part of the crusade against  atheistic communism,  Congress 
emphasized the role of religion by constructing a nondenominational prayer room on 
Capitol Hill, adding the phrase  under God  to the Pledge of Allegiance, and declaring 
the phrase  In God We Trust,  emblazoned on U.S. currency for nearly a century, to be 
the official national motto. 
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At the same time, observers claimed that intense religious allegiances no longer divided 
people as much as they had in the past. President Eisenhower urged people to practice 
their own religious creed, whatever it might be.  Our government makes no sense,  he 
declared,  unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith and I don t care what it is.  
Tommy Sands, a young pop singer, advised his teenage fans that  all religions are the 
greatest.  
Prominent religious leaders noted how a widespread  faith in faith  could bring people 
together. Rabbi Morris Kretzer, head of the Jewish Chaplain s Organization, reassured 
Protestants and Catholics that they and their Jewish neighbors shared  the same rich her- 
itage of the Old Testament . . . the sanctity of the Ten Commandments, the wisdom of the 
prophets, and the brotherhood of man.  A 1954 survey claimed that more than 95 percent 
of the population identified with one of the three major faiths, and religious commenta- 
tors talked about the unifying power of a  Judeo-Christian tradition.  The era s leading 
study of religion, Will Herberg s Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955), argued that these three 
major faiths were really  saying the same thing in affirming the  spiritual ideals  and  moral 
values  of the American Way of Life.  
The media elevated several religious leaders to celebrity status. Norman Vincent 
Peale, a Protestant minister who linked an embrace of religiosity to the achievement of 
individual peace of mind, sold millions of books containing the message that belief in a 
Higher Power could bring  health, happiness, and goodness  to daily life. Some close 
students of religion, such as Herberg, found Peale s most famous book, The Power of Positive 
Thinking (1952) to be a lightweight version of religious theology, but it remained a best seller 
throughout the 1950s. The Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen hosted an Emmy-winning, 
prime-time television program called Life Is Worth Living, which continues to play in 
reruns on cable TV. The Baptist evangelist Billy Graham, a friend of Sheen s and even- 
tually a confidant of President Eisenhower, achieved super-star status during the 1950s. 
The best-selling Peace with God(1953) offered the same message Graham preached to 
large crowds and over television: Only a spiritual rebirth, through a direct commitment 
to Jesus Christ, would bring salvation to individuals who lived in a world filled with so 
many signs of sin and corruption. 
Although observers generally identified Peale, Sheen, and Graham with relatively conserv- 
ative, anticommunist political causes, their differing approaches to religion shared a broadly 
pluralist stance. Billy Graham, for instance, scrupulously avoided the kind of anti-Semitic and 
anti-Catholic rhetoric that sometimes accompanied the sermons of other protestant evange- 
lists, and his own ministry abandoned all forms of racial segregation during the mid-1950s. 
Moreover, appeals to religious faith could be found all across the political spectrum. 
Dorothy Day, who had been involved in religiously based community activism since the 
early 1930s, continued to work with an interdenominational coalition of communitarians. 
Especially through the pages of her Catholic Workermagazine, she promoted programs 
for redistributing income and wealth in more equitable ways and for securing a more peace- 
ful world. Church leaders and laypeople from all three major denominations supported 
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efforts at addressing racial and religious discrimination, including the spiritually 
grounded efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders (see follow- 
ingdiscussion). 
Discontents of Affluence 
Celebrations of economic affluence, political pluralism, and religious commitment existed 
alongside a relatively vibrant body of social criticism. The widespread faith that the United 
States could deploy its abundant economic and political-social resources to solve virtually 
all of its remaining problems likely helped encourage this rich critical culture. The 1950s 
produced a sizeable and diverse body of literature that probed issues such as social con- 
formity, unruly youth, mass culture, discrimination, and economic inequality. 
1068  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
Split-Level Living This 1960 cartoon, by the Washington Post s Herblock  
(Herbert Block), illustrates the growing critique of Eisenhower-era social policy. 
While suburbanites enjoy new affluence in a split-level home, public services and 
distressed people remain underfunded. 
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Conformity in an Affluent Society 
The sociologist William H. Whyte, Jr., gained a wide academic audience for The Organi- 
zation Man (1956). This book indicted corporate culture for contributing to an unwanted 
by-productof affluence: social conformity. Criticizing the social, cultural, andpsychological 
(although not the economic) role of large corporations, TheOrganization Mansaw ordinary 
corporate employees deferring to the wishes and values of their bosses at the expense of 
their own individuality. Even among younger executives, Whyte s book claimed, the 
security of knowing what the corporate hierarchy desired and when it wanted it  
outweighedany concern about losing track of one s own sense of self. 
The Lonely Crowd (1950) by another sociologist, David Riesman, offered an even broader 
critique of social conformity. This influential book claimed to see a shift from an  inner- 
directed  culture, in which people looked to themselves and to their immediate families for 
their sense of identity and self-worth, to an  other-directed  one, in which people constantly 
gazed at others for approval and measured their own worth against mass-mediated images. 
An other-directed society, in short, emphasized  adjustment  to the expectations of others 
rather than commitment to individual  autonomy.  
Seeking to show how baby boomers would supposedly learn conformist values, The 
Lonely Crowdpointed to Tootle, the Engine, a popular children s book. After  Tootle  shows 
a preference for jumping the rails and frolicking in the nearby fields, people from his com- 
munity use peer pressure to nudge him  back on the tracks.  If he remains on the straight- 
and-narrow and follows lines laid down by others, Tootle learns, his future as a powerful 
and fast-moving streamliner will be assured. Riesman s book argued that this  modern 
cautionary tale,  which stressed the importance of adjusting one s own path through life 
to the expectations of others, contrasted vividly with the self-reliant values served up in 
Little Red Riding Hoodand other earlier conflict-filled fairy tales. 
The critique of social conformity reached perhaps its widest audience through the 
best-selling books of journalist Vance Packard.The Hidden Persuaders (1957) argued that the 
advertising industry especially through calculated appeals to the insecurities of 
consumers encouraged conformist behavior, particularly in buying habits and cultural 
tastes. His book, Packard claimed, could help its readers  achieve a creative life in these con- 
forming times,  when so many people  are left only with the roles of being consumers or 
spectators.  
If analysts looked hard enough, it seemed, evidence of conformity and loss of selfhood 
lurked nearly everywhere. Critics such as Whyte, Riesman, and Packard generally high- 
lighted signs supposedly evident among middle-class men, but writers such as Betty 
Friedanwarned about an analogous, although gendered, trend among many women, 
especially those with good educations and lively intellects who found themselves trapped 
in the new suburbia. Business corporations, for instance, expected that the wives of their 
male executives would help their husbands deal with the demands of corporate life, 
including the need for frequent dinner parties and occasional relocation moves. The orga- 
nization man, it was said, should recognize that his ascent up the economic ladder could 
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depend on how well an  organization woman,  his spouse, conformed to her unpaid work 
for the greater good of the corporate world. 
The affluent cultural climate of the 1950s, then, hardly discouraged social criticism, 
some of it occasionally quite pointed. Both the scholarly and more popular writings of the 
sociologist C. Wright Mills, for instance, denounced how corporate leaders and advertising 
executives operated as members of a  power elite.  A relatively small coalition of the 
already powerful could set the agenda for public policy discussions, especially those 
involving national security and domestic spending priorities. This ruling elite, which also 
included military leaders and anticommunist politicians, shaped the crucial decisions on 
important policy issues. Moreover, its emphasis on generating sustained economic growth 
produced social problems that went far beyond the other-directedness analyzed in The 
Lonely Crowd. The much-vaunted American Way of Life, in Mills  view, featured increas- 
ingly regimented work routines and meaningless leisure-time activities that could never 
produce a true sense of satisfaction. Standing against the tide of pluralist accounts, Mills 
watched his claims undergo constant sifting and resifting. The numerous academics and 
journalists who espoused the pluralist faith during the 1950s invariably concluded that 
Mills, for all his passion and commitment, offered only simplistic  conspiracy theories.  
During the 1960s, however, his ideas about a  power elite  and a widespread sense of 
social  alienation  would circulate within a much more receptive cultural environment. 
Restive Youth 
Meanwhile, concern about young people, especially their cultural tastes and social behav- 
ior, intensified. At one point, in the mid-1950s, many criminologists linked a rise in the 
sale of comic books to a spike in reported rates of juvenile delinquency. The Seduction of 
the Innocent (1954), a popular study by the psychologist Frederick Wertham, blamed 
comics, especially those featuring images of sex and violence, for  mass-conditioning  chil- 
dren and for stimulating social unrest. Responding to regulatory legislation by some U.S. 
cities and to calls for additional measures by Congress, the comic book industry quickly 
embraced self-censorship. Publishers who adhered to new, industry-developed guidelines 
for portraying violence and deviant behavior began to display a seal of approval on their 
publications. The  great comic book scare  proved a relatively momentary fright. 
Other worrisome signs, however, persisted. One of these, a former truck driver named 
Elvis Presley, rocked the pop music scene with several hits on the tiny Sun record label. 
Most of the major record distributors dismissed rock as a passing fad, but Sun s Sam Phillips 
detected something more substantial. As soon as Elvis began to make personal appearances, 
the overt sensuality that dominated his musical performance quickly validated Phillips  intu- 
itions. Presley and other youthful (invariably male) rock stars includingBuddy Holly from 
West Texas, Richard Valenzuela (Richie Valens) from East Los Angeles, Frankie Lymon 
from Spanish Harlem, and  Little Richard  Penniman from Georgia leaped over cultural 
and ethnic barriers. Rock derived new musical forms from older sources, especially African 
American rhythm and blues (R&B) and the  hillbilly  music of southern whites. 
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The first rock  n  rollersseemingly spoke to the hopes and fears of millions of their 
youthful fans. They sang about the joy of  having a ball tonight,  the pain of the  sum- 
mertime blues,  the torment of being  a teenager in love,  and the promise of deliverance, 
through the power of rock, from  the days of old.  Songs such as  Roll Over Beethoven  
by Chuck Berry became powerful teen anthems. 
Guardians of older, family-oriented forms of commercial culture found rock  n  roll 
far more frightening than comic books. They denounced rock s sparse lyrics, pulsating 
guitars, and screeching saxophones as an assault on the very idea of music. Even the 
name of this music, it seemed obvious, played to raging teenage hormones. Religious 
groups thus denounced rock as the  Devil s music ; anticommunists detected a clever 
strategy by the Red Menace to corrupt youth; and segregationists saw its indebtedness 
to black musical forms as part of a sinister plot to encourage  race-mixing.  Still a bell- 
wether of conservative tastes, the FBI s J. Edgar Hoover saw rock music as  repulsive to 
right-thinking people  and as a social force that would soon have  serious effects on our 
young people.  The danger of rock  n  roll seemed abundantly evident in The Blackboard 
Jungle (1955), a hit movie (which featured  Rock Around the Clock  on its soundtrack) 
about a racially mixed group of sexually active students who, for good measure, terror- 
ize teachers and mock any adult authority not  manly enough  to set limits on their 
excesses. 
Eventually attentive to new turns in the product-centered culture of youth, the com- 
mercial entertainment industry soon recognized the potential breadth of rock  n  roll s 
appeal. Its flexible cultural and musical vocabulary could attract its youthful audience 
with both critiques and celebrations of the consequences of material abundance.  Charlie 
Brown,  for example, satirically contrasted pieties about staying in school with the bleak 
educational opportunities open to many students, especially those of African descent. 
Chuck Berry sang of a terminally bored teenager, riding around in his automobile,  with 
no particular place to go.  The implied social criticism in songs such as these, which older 
listeners often failed to decode, anticipated the more overtly rebellious rock music of the 
1960s. 
At the same time, rock music and the larger youth culture of the 1950s could also 
merge seamlessly into that era s mass-consumption ethic. Sam Phillips, lacking the capital 
to distribute records to a rapidly expanding market, sold Presley s contract to RCA and 
watched the rest of his budding stars drift away from Sun to larger labels. The leading 
record companies and Top-40 radio stations saw middle-class teenagers, whose average 
weekly income/allowance reached $10 by 1958, as a market segment well worth targeting. 
In  Sweet Little Sixteen,  Berry sang about an affluent teenager chasing after the latest fash- 
ions, the next rock  n  roll show, and  about half-a million framed autographs.  Record 
companies and disc jockeys began promoting a second generation of rock performers, 
such as the Beach Boys, and songs that exalted the pursuit of  fun, fun, fun,  which appar- 
ently required the latest clothing fashions, late-model automobiles, and the top-selling 
rock  n  roll records. 
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The Mass Culture Debate 
Meanwhile, concern about social conformity and youth-oriented styles often joined a 
broader cultural debate over  mass culture.  Much of the anxiety about the decline of 
individualism and the rise of disruptive young people encompassed deeper fears, espe- 
cially among people who equated their own tastes with the future of civilization. From 
their perspective, the marketers who could apparently use standardized imagery to manip- 
ulate the cultural marketplace and sway the emotions of millions of people, those  hidden 
persuaders,  also threatened to debase the fragile core of cultural life. 
Cosmopolitan critics, connoisseurs of European-derived culture, decried the mass- 
marketedproducts flooding the newly affluent United States. They worried that the 
 bad  such as comics and rock music would soon purge anything  good  from the 
cultural marketplace and perhaps prevent future generations from even being able to 
distinguish between them. Moreover, they warned that a national mass media, by 
addressing millions of cultural consumers in the same manner, would obscure mean- 
ingful, and sometimes subtle, differences underneath a constant blur of pleasant, super- 
ficial imagery. After intensively studying a small town in upstate New York, for exam- 
ple, a team of sociologists claimed that mass-mediated images from outside this 
community seemed  so overwhelming that little scope is left for the expression of local 
cultural  forms. 
Television, dominated by three large corporations (NBC, CBS, and ABC) and ultimately 
financed by revenues from national advertising accounts, provided a prominent target in the 
mass culture debate. Picturing millions of seemingly passive viewers gathered around  the 
boob tube,  critics decried both the quality of television programming and its presumed 
impact on viewers. Network television, according to its critics, encouraged people to retreat 
into unreal, fabricated spaces, such as a mythical Old West or the fakecompetition on TV 
quiz shows. By the late 1950s, the television networks filled many of their prime-time 
hours with western-themed series (such as Gunsmoke) and quiz programs (such as the 
$64,000 Question), whose contestants had been supplied the answers they pretended to 
puzzle over. The head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would later 
speak for the 1950s generation of TV critics when he denounced the entire medium as a 
 vast wasteland.  
Social observers also noted how television even appeared to be recutting the fabric of 
everyday life. Architects rearranged living space within middle-class homes so that the TV 
set, serving as an electronic substitute for the traditional fireplace hearth, could become 
the focal point of family gatherings. New products such as the frozen TV dinner, the TV 
tray, the recliner chair, and the influential magazine TV Guide became extensions of a 
television-constructed culture. 
The mass-produced cultural products that critics decried, however, also seemed insep- 
arable from the pluralistic political system and the economic growth that these same 
observers generally celebrated. Was it possible to eliminate the curse of mass culture 
without sacrificing liberty and affluence? If, for example, Congress were to legislate against 
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 dangerous  cultural products, might not such regulations shrink the boundaries for all 
legally protected expression? If local communities were to step in, as some had done with 
comics, the results might be even worse. The prospect of southern segregationists confis- 
cating civil-rights literature or of local censorship boards rushing, unimpeded, to ban 
books by celebrated authors such as D. H. Lawrence hardly appealed to the cosmopolitan, 
well-educated critics of mass culture. Their critical diagnosis, in short, seemed short on 
viable remedies. Most important, the mass culture debate did nothing to halt the flood of 
products, especially TV programs, aimed at an ever-expanding audience. 
Changing Gender Politics 
Meanwhile, the 1950s saw the continuation of significant changes in how and where peo- 
ple lived and worked. This era particularly challenged ideas about the nature of gender 
relationships. 
The New Suburbs and Gender Ideals 
In middle-class homes, especially those located in the new suburbs, wives and mothers 
discovered just how  liberating  consumer technology might be. Colorful and chrome- 
plated appliances and  modern conveniences  such as automatic clothes washers, more 
powerful vacuum cleaners, and home freezers did ease old burdens but also created new 
ones. Clothes and floors now, according to advertisers, needed to be kept  spotlessly 
clean.  Elaborate meals could be prepared in  a jiffy.  Careful academic studies found that, 
contrary to what promoters of labor-saving devices promised, women could devote as 
much of their day to household tasks during the 1950s as had their grandmothers in the 
early 1900s. New household technologies did not so much reduce the time that women 
spent on domestic duties as shift it to different activities, ones requiring the household 
gadgets that accompanied the spread of affluence. 
At first glance, the changing demands of housework fit into a broader pattern of 
 separate spheres.  A set of clearly delineated and gendered barriers seemed to struc- 
ture daily life, particularly in the newer suburbs. At its most rigid, the suburban 
lifestyle included a public sphere of work and politics dominated by men and a private 
sphere of housework and child care reserved for women. Because few businesses 
located in the suburbs, men began spending a good portion of their days commuting 
from home to work. Women who wanted to hold a job outside their homes initially 
found nearby employment opportunities about as scarce as child-care facilities. Conse- 
quently, mothers spent a great deal of time taking care of their baby-boomer children. In 
contrast to the urban neighborhoods or the rural communities in which many suburban 
housewives had grown up, the new suburbs of the 1950s contained few older relatives 
or younger single women who could assist with household and child-care duties. 
Without mothers or grandmothers living close by, young suburban mothers turned else- 
where for child-rearing advice. Local Parents and Teachers Associations (PTAs), connected 
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to neighborhood schools, offered the chance for women to exchange information with 
their neighbors, as did women s organizations such as the La Leche League. Increasingly, 
though, younger parents turned to an easily expandable shelf of child-care manuals. Dr. 
Benjamin Spock sBaby and Child Care, first published in 1946 with successive editions 
selling in the tens of millions, stood out from its competitors. 
Following earlier advice books, Spock s book assigned virtually all child-care duties to 
women and underscored their nurturing role by stressing the need to constantly monitor 
a child s psychological growth. The future of the family and the nation itself, Spock 
implied depended on how well baby-boom-era mothers handled the daily responsibility 
of child-rearing. Other manuals picked up where Dr. Spock left off and counseled moth- 
ers on the care and feeding of teenagers. 
The alarmist tone of many of these advice books reflected and helped generate a grow- 
ing concern about teenage culture. A problem teen, according to one 1950s study, sprang 
from a  family atmosphere not conducive to development of emotionally well-integrated, 
happy youngsters, conditioned to obey legitimate authority.  The ideal mother, from this 
perspective, did not work outside her home and devoted herself to rearing her own par- 
ticular segment of the baby-boom generation. Women who desired careers outside of their 
home and marriage risked being labeled, in line with widespread psychological theories of 
the day, as maladjusted and deviant, real-life versions of the femmes fataleswho populated 
films noirs(see chapter 27). 
Slightly different versions of this message appeared nearly everywhere. Even the 
nation s most prestigious colleges for women assumed that their female students would 
pursue men and marriage instead of a career. In a 1955 commencement address at the 
prestigious, all-women Smith College, Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party s urbane 
presidential contender, reminded graduates that it was the duty of each to keep her 
husband  truly purposeful, to keep him whole.  Popular magazines, psychology literature, 
and pop-culture imagery suggested that understanding, supportive wives and mothers 
held the keys to social stability. Conversely, women who desired alternative arrangements, 
either in their work or their sexual preferences, needed to be pressured, much as  Tootle, 
the Engine,  to return to the straight and narrow path. 
Competing portraits, however, painted different and more complicated pictures of gen- 
der arrangements. Most men told researchers that they preferred an active partner to a 
 submissive, stay-at-home  wife. Popular TV shows, such as  Father Knows Best  and 
 Leave It to Beaver,  subtly suggested that middle-class fathers should become more 
engaged in family life than they normally seemed to be. Advice manuals still envisioned 
husbands earning their family s entire income but increasingly urged them to be  real 
fathers  at home. Parenting literature came to extol an ethic of  family togetherness,  and 
institutions such as the Young Men s Christian Association (YMCA) began to offer courses 
on how to achieve this ideal. 
The call for family togetherness seemed to be, in part at least, a response to what cul- 
tural historians have come to see as an incipient  male revolt  against  family values  and 
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the  male breadwinner role.  Hugh Hefner s Playboy magazine, which debuted in 1953, 
epitomized this rebellion. It ridiculed men who neglected their own happiness in order to 
support a wife and children as suckers rather than saints.Playboy s first issue defiantly pro- 
claimed:  We aren t a  family magazine.   Hefner advised women to pass Playboy along to 
the man in your life and get back to your Ladies Home Companion.  In this version of the 
good life, a man lived in his own  pad  rather than in the heavily mortgaged family home; 
drove a sports car rather than a four-door sedan or a station wagon; and courted the Play- 
mate of the Month rather than the Mother of the Year. 
Signs of Women s Changing Roles 
Despite media images of homebound wives and mothers, greater numbers of women than 
ever before now worked outside of their homes. The rate of female employment, including 
that among married women, had begun to rise during the 1940s, and this trend continued 
throughout the 1950s. Women who were married often entered the labor force as part- 
time workers in the expanding clerical and service sectors. In 1948, about 25 percent of 
married mothers held jobs outside of the home; at the end of the 1950s, nearly 40 per- 
cent did. With the introduction of a new method of oral contraception in 1960, the birth 
control pill, women gained an additional measure of control over family planning and 
career decisions and over decisions about their own sexual behavior. By 1964, one- 
quarter of the women who used contraception relied on  the pill.  At the same time, 
women s groups began to press for an end to antiabortion laws that restricted the ability 
of women, particularly those without the means to travel overseas or to states that offered 
relatively liberal access to medical abortions, to find legal and relatively safe ways to ter- 
minate pregnancies. 
Employment opportunities for women, especially when compared to those available to 
most men of European descent, still remained limited during the 1950s. Virtually all of the 
nation s nurses, telephone operators, secretaries, and elementary school teachers were 
women. Historically, pay scales in these areas lagged behind those for men in comparable 
fields; union jobs remained rare; and chances for rapid, or significant, advancement 
seemed elusive. As the number of low-paid jobs for women expanded during the 1950s, 
better-paid professional opportunities actually narrowed. Medical and law schools, along 
with most professional societies, admitted very few women. When Sandra Day (who 
would later become Justice Sandra Day O Connor serving on the U.S. Supreme Court) 
graduated, with honors, from a prestigious law school during the 1950s, not a single pri- 
vate firm offered her a job, and she worked, without pay, in the public sector. The num- 
ber of women on college and university faculties shrank during the 1950s, down from the 
already low levels of earlier decades. 
The  family wage,  as both ideal and practice, created a barrier to better-paying jobs for 
women. Employers still invoked the notion of a family wage to justify paying male work- 
ers higher wages and salaries than their female counterparts, even though significant num- 
bers of women now needed to support not just themselves but also a family on their own 
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paychecks. This was especially the case for women of color. By 1960, women headed 
slightly more than 20 percent of black families. Recognizing that idealized images of 
motherhoodhardly characterized the lives of the many African American women who 
worked outside of their homes, Ebony magazine regularly celebrated black women who 
combined success in parenting and at work. It featured articles about educators and 
prominent entertainers, as well as about blue-collar workers, such as the only African 
American woman who worked as a mechanic at American Airlines. 
Some of the mass-circulation magazines that targeted women of European descent also 
carried a relatively wide array of messages about gender roles. Although many social com- 
mentators continued to label a woman s desire to pursue activities outside of her home as 
 unnatural,  popular publications increasingly featured stories about women successfully 
pursuing careers in public life and in business. The 1950s, in short, saw growing diversity 
in both the social roles that women were assuming and the ways in which commercial 
mass culture represented aspirations for further change. 
The Fight against Discrimination,1953 1960 
1076  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
Focus Question 
How did the fight against discrimination raise new political issues and visions during 
the 1950s and early 1960s? How did the nation s political and social institutions 
respond to these issues? 
When Dwight Eisenhower assumed the presidency in 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court was 
preparing to rehear a full-scale constitutional challenge to racially segregated educational 
systems. The NAACP and its chief legal strategist, Thurgood Marshall, spearheaded the 
attack on Jim Crow school arrangements. Before the rehearing took place, a vacancy in the 
Chief Justiceship allowed Ike to tap Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, 
to head the High Court. The Supreme Court, with Warren as its  Chief,  entered the 
widening struggle against discrimination. 
TheBrownCases, 1954 1955 
The landmark Supreme Court case popularly known as  the Browndecision  actually 
included a series of constitutional challenges to school segregation. In 1954, Chief Justice 
Warren wrote a unanimous opinion (in Brownv. Board of Education of Topeka) striking 
down state-mandated segregation of public schools. This practice, according to Warren s 
relatively brief and broadly argued opinion, violated the constitutional right of African American 
students to equal protection of the law. A companion case, decided the same day (Bollingv. 
Sharpe), ruled against segregated schools in the District of Columbia. Although these decisions 
technically applied only to state-operated schools, they suggested that other segregated public 
facilities now lay open to constitutional challenge. In 1955, however, yet another Supreme 
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The Fight against Discrimination, 1953 1960 " 1077 
Court decision, known as Brown II, 
decreed that the process of public school 
desegregation should not go into effect 
immediately; it could, instead, move for- 
ward  with all deliberate speed.  
Carrying out the broader implica- 
tions of the Browncases challenged the 
nation s political, social, and cultural 
institutions. A crucial part of the crusade 
against racial discrimination had long 
focused on the 16 states that the Census 
Bureau officially called  the South,  but 
ongoing demographic changes ensured 
that the civil-rights struggle would not 
remain a regional matter. 
During the 1950s, life in the South 
continued to become more like that in 
the rest of the country. New cultural 
forces, such as network television, pen- 
etrated this once relatively insular 
region, opening parts of it to ideas and 
practices that challenged the prevailing 
racial patterns. Machine technologies continued to displace the South s predominantly 
black field workers, and the absence of strong labor unions and the presence of favor- 
able tax laws attracted more national chain stores and northern-based businesses. In 
addition, an improved generation of air-conditioning units, for businesses and homes, 
helped transform work, leisure, and demographic patterns throughout the southern 
United States. 
At the same time, the racial and ethnic composition of cities in the West, Midwest, and 
Northeast changed to look more like that in areas of the South. In 1940, more than three- 
quarters of the nation s African Americans lived in the South. Following earlier trends, African 
Americans continued to leave the rural South and become important political constituencies 
in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and other urban areas. In these locales, most 
Democrats and many Republicans generally supported efforts to end racial discrimination. As 
more African Americans came to cast Democratic ballots, however, the GOP sought to refo- 
cus its appeal, reaching out to white voters in what had long been theDemocratic Party s solid 
South and in the new suburban neighborhoods, especially in the Mid and Far West. At the 
same time, the nation s Spanish-speaking population continued to grow and to become an 
increasingly important political force, particularly in the West and Southwest. (See Map 
28.1, Shifts in African American Population Patterns, 1940 1960, in the color insert 
following page 1248.) 
Segregation Dressed in his Air Force uniform, a young man from 
New York City is faced with a  colored waiting room  in an Atlanta bus 
terminal in 1956. Before the  civil-rights revolution of the 1960s, 
southern states maintained legally enforced segregation in most public 
facilities, a practice popularly called Jim Crow (see chapter 18). 
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The most familiar stories about the civil-rights crusade during the 1950s have long con- 
centrated on the South, but recent histories help underscore its nationwide scope. By 1963, 
efforts to change the entire spectrum of racially based patterns and practices affected local, 
state, and national politics. Civil rights activists outside the South, where people of African 
and Latin American descent already exercised some measure of political leverage, worked 
for better jobs, improved housing, stronger neighborhood institutions, and greater influ- 
ence within the larger political system. Cultivating ties to sympathetic politicians and labor 
unions, a relatively broad movement to end segregation and racial discrimination emerged, 
especially among African Americans, in virtually every northern and western city. 
These urban-based movements employed a variety of tactics on behalf of several differ- 
ent goals. They pressed  shop where you can work  campaigns, which urged African 
American consumers to patronize only businesses that would employ them as workers. 
They tried to bring more blacks into the labor union movement and the fast-growing pub- 
lic service sector, so that they could find jobs in police and fire departments as well as in 
all of the various agencies of state and local government. Leading attorneys, while still sup- 
porting lawsuits such as Brown, joined with black lawyers to concentrate on the ordinary 
day-to-day legal problems of clients in their own communities. Increasingly, though, gain- 
ing additional political leverage seemed crucial to making gains in other areas, including 
economic ones. 
The search for political power became particularly contested and inexorably connected to 
the struggle to dismantle systems of officially sanctioned segregation throughout the South. 
Here, white segregationists pledged  massive resistance  to the Brown decisions. When the 
Supreme Court s  all deliberate speed  approach in Brown II seemed to give them time to 
maneuver, their lawyers went to court in pursuit of traditional and newly invented delaying 
tactics. In 1956, 100 members of the U.S. Congress signed a  Southern Manifesto,  which con- 
demned the Supreme Court s desegregation rulings as a  clear abuse of judicial power  and 
pledged support for any state that intended  to resist forced integration by any lawful means.  
Defiance did not always remain within legal bounds, especially in the South. There, white 
vigilantes unfurled the banners and donned the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, and new racist 
organizations, such as the White Citizens Council, appeared on the scene. As a result, peo- 
ple who joined the civil-rights cause constantly risked injury and death. Even those who 
were only indirectly connected to the struggle could fall victim to racist violence. In August 
1955, two white Mississippians brutally murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till, because they 
decided this black visitor from Chicago had acted  disrespectful  toward a married white 
woman. 
Mamie Till Bradley insisted that her son s death not remain a private incident. She 
demanded that his maimed corpse be displayed publicly for  the whole world to see  and 
insisted that his murderers be punished. To the surprise of many observers, Mississippi 
officials did indict two men for Till s murder. When they came to trial, though, an all- 
white Mississippi jury quickly found the pair who would subsequently confess their 
crime to a magazine reporter not guilty. 
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The Montgomery Bus Boycott and Martin Luther King, Jr. 
In response to the uncertainty of judicial remedies, the southern civil-rights movement 
began supplementing legal maneuvering with ever-more ambitious and larger campaigns 
of direct action. Following an earlier 1953 campaign that secured partial desegregation of 
the public transportation system in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, activists in Montgomery, 
Alabama, raised their own sights. After police arrested Rosa Parksfor defying a local seg- 
regation ordinance, Montgomery s black community quickly mobilized and demanded a 
complete end to segregated buses. They coupled their demand with an ambitious boycott 
of city buses, which required organizing a system of private carpools as an alternative 
mode of transit. Joining with Rosa Parks, a longtime bastion of the local NAACP chapter, 
many other black women in Montgomery helped coordinate the complicated, months- 
long boycott. Responding to events in Montgomery, the U.S. Supreme Court extended the 
premise of the Browndecisions on education and specifically declared segregation of pub- 
lic buses to be unconstitutional. 
After a campaign lasting more than a year, the effort succeeded. City officials, saddled with 
continued financial losses and legal defeat in court, agreed to end Montgomery sseparatist 
The Fight against Discrimination, 1953 1960 " 1079 
Montgomery Bus Boycott The drive to desegregate municipal buses in Montgomery, Alabama, required an elaborately 
organized and skillfully coordinated effort. It primarily relied on the talents and commitment of volunteers, particularly women. 
African American residents of Montgomery shared automobile transportation, coordinated by the boycott movement, while 
avoiding city buses, such as the one standing vacant across the street. 
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transit policy. Events in Montgomery suggested that other local black activists, even in the 
legally segregated South, could effectively mobilize and then organize community 
resources to fight against racial discrimination. 
The Montgomery boycott of 1955 56 also vaulted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,one of 
its leaders and its primary spokesperson, into the national spotlight. Born, raised, and edu- 
cated in Atlanta, Georgia, with a doctorate in theology from Boston University, King joined 
with other black ministers to follow up the victory in Montgomery by forming the Southern 
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Increasingly able to mobilize against segregated 
public facilities and racial discrimination, the SCLC turned to the more difficult task of 
organizing an ongoing sociopolitical movement that could work for permanent change in 
other areas of race relations. 
The relatively young male ministers in the SCLC tapped advice from across generational 
and gender divides. They turned, for example, to Bayard Rustin, who had been involved 
in civil-rights activism since the 1940s, and to Ella Baker, another veteran organizer with 
experience in CORE and the NAACP. Aided by Rustin s tactical advice and Baker s organi- 
zational skills, Dr. King thrived as the titular leader of the SCLC s ambitious effort to regis- 
terAfrican American voters throughout the South. 
King and his associates relied on nonviolent direct action. Following in the footsteps of 
Rustin and CORE (see chapter 27), they espoused a moral, religiously grounded ethic. The 
civil-rights crusade, in this sense, intended to be more than just another pluralist interest 
group that sought a place at the bargaining table. According to Dr. King s well-publicized 
sermons and writings, nonviolent direct action would dramatize, through both word and 
deed, the evil of racial discrimination. The civil-rights crusade promised to bring  redemption 
and reconciliation  to the entire nation. 
King s powerful presence and religiously rooted rhetoric, which attracted all national 
media, played especially well on television. The people who directed this commercial 
medium began to recognize how news coverage, especially when focused on easily dra- 
matized examples of conflict, could swell their audience and boost their journalistic 
stature. Media accounts of events in the South emphasized the roles played by King and 
his followers, helping to elevate their specific activities in the broader, constantly volatile 
drama of civil rights. The southern-based activists who looked to Dr. King, however, com- 
prised only one part of a much broader, highly diverse movement that reached through- 
out the nation and into the world. 
The Politics of Civil Rights: From the Local to the Global 
All across the country, civil-rights activists  pressed forward. Shortly after the conclusion of 
the Montgomery bus boycott,for example, New York City passed the nation s first  open 
housing  ordinance, a model for other local and state measures intended to end racial dis- 
crimination in the sale and rental of homes and apartments. In other cities and states out- 
side the South, civil-rights groups enjoyed considerable success in obtaining legislation to 
outlaw racial discrimination in hiring. The majority of people in a 1944 opinion poll had 
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agreed that workers of European descent  should have the first chance  at any job oppor- 
tunity, but subsequent surveys showed a steady erosion of this sentiment during the 1950s. 
Efforts to obtain laws aimed at ending discrimination in housing, however, faced 
tougher going than those focused on the workplace. Typically, white homeowners in those 
urban and older suburban neighborhoods where African Americans or Latinos might hope 
to buy or rent tried to adopt the same exclusionary strategies used so effectively by their 
counterparts in the new suburbs. 
In a number of instances, civil-rights groups continued to work, however, with sym- 
pathetic allies. In 1958, for example, a labor and civil-rights coalition in California, join- 
ing under slogans such as  Keep Mississippi Out of California  and  Fight Sharecropper 
Wages,  defeated an anti-union  right-to-work  proposal. Such a measure, its opponents 
claimed, threatened to drive down pay for workers, of both European and non-European 
descent, to levels found in the antiunion, pro-segregationist states of the Deep South. 
Buoyed by this success, the same coalition began aggressively lobbying members of the 
California legislature to enact a statewide opening housing measure. 
Political institutions in Washington, D.C., also felt pressure to act on civil-rights mat- 
ters. The Supreme Court lent its support at crucial times, such as the Montgomery bus 
boycott, but the Constitution did not grant the federal judiciary the power to provide the 
on-the-ground policing required to translate its definitions of liberty and equality into 
everyday practices. Congress, with the ability to enact enforcement legislation, remained 
deeply divided on racial issues. With southern segregationists, all members of the Demo- 
cratic Party s majority, holding key posts on Capitol Hill, antidiscrimination measures 
faced formidable congressional obstacles. 
Even so, Congress did pass its first civil-rights measure in more than 80 years. The 
Civil Rights Act of 1957established new procedures for expediting lawsuits by African 
Americans claiming illegal abridgement of their right, under the 15th Amendment, to 
vote. Generally credited to the tactical wizardry of Lyndon Johnson of Texas, the Demo- 
cratic leader in the Senate, this legislation also created a permanent Commission on Civil 
Rights, a largely advisory body empowered only to study alleged violations and recom- 
mend additional remedies. In 1960, again after crucial maneuvering by Johnson, a sec- 
ond civil-rights act expanded the legal remedies available to blacks who were being 
barred from voting in the South. These civil-rights measures, passed in the face of fierce 
opposition from southern Democrats, dramatized the difficulty of getting even relatively 
limited measures through Congress and clearing the obstacles segregationists could 
throw in the way of civil-rights legislation. 
The office of the president, which theoretically possessed the constitutional power to 
enforce legislation and court orders, appeared reluctant, under Dwight Eisenhower, to 
take action. Lobbied by Republicans from the Northeast and West, Ike did support the 
Civil Rights Act of 1957 but held back when these same Republicans urged a dramatic 
presidential step, perhaps issuing an executive order barring racial discrimination on con- 
struction projects financed by federal funds. A confirmed gradualist, Eisenhower saw the 
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fight against segregation as primarily a state and local matter, and he expressed doubts 
about political leaders in Washington being able to change the attitudes of people who 
were opposed to the integration of public facilities or job sites. 
During the fall of 1957, however, events in Little Rock, Arkansas, finally forced 
Eisenhower shand. In response to a federal court order, which demanded desegregation 
of the city s Central High, the state s governor, Orval Faubus, had promised fellow segre- 
gationists that black students would never enter the school building. Ike s initial tempo- 
rizing allowed Faubus time to play to the white supremacist galleries of Arkansas, and the 
governor eventually deployed his state s National Guard to prevent any move toward 
desegregation. Confronting this direct challenge to national authority, Eisenhower took 
command of the Arkansas National Guard and sent members of the U.S. Army to Little 
Rock. Black students, escorted by armed troops, finally entered Central High. The primary 
issue at stake, Eisenhower insisted, involved the defiance of the law of the land rather than 
the specific politics of school desegregation. 
The confrontation in Little Rock also underscored, as the Eisenhower administration con- 
ceded, the international dimension of civil-rights politics in the United States. Washington 
often found itself on the defensive when foreign critics pointed to the U.S. record on civil 
rights. The Soviet Union delighted in reminding people around the world, particularly 
those in the Third World, how racial discrimination showed  the façade of the so-called 
 American democracy.   Secretary of State Dulles warned that racial conflict at home was 
 not helpful to the influence of the United States abroad.  Events in Arkansas seemed to 
reaffirm the image, carried throughout the world by the Eisenhower administration s infor- 
mational campaign, of the United States as a powerful nation that supported liberty and 
equality. When the U.S. Supreme Court, inCooperv. Aaron(1958), unanimously invali- 
dated an Arkansas law intended to block further integrationist efforts, newspapers around 
the globe highlighted its action. 
American Indian Policy 
The Eisenhower administration also struggled with the politics of American Indian policy. 
It attempted to implement two programs,  termination  and  relocation,  that were already 
underway before it took office. The first called for Washington to terminate the status of 
Indians as  wards of the United States  and grant them all the  rights and privileges per- 
taining to American citizenship.  This policy, to be pursued on a tribe-by-tribe basis, 
aimed at abolishing Indian reservations, liquidating tribal assets, and curtailing the social 
services offered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In 1954, a year after Congress pro- 
posed this general approach, legislators enacted six specific bills of termination, which would 
change the legal status of more than 8,000 American Indians and affect the ownership of 
more than 1 million acres of tribal land. 
Under the relocation program, which had begun in 1951, the government financed 
incentive packages intended to entice Indians to leave rural reservations and seek jobs in 
urban areas. In 1954, the BIA intensified its relocation efforts, with Minneapolis, St. Louis, 
Dallas, and several other cities joining Denver, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles as relocation 
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sites. Both relocation and termination rested on the assumption widespread in the social-sci- 
ence literature of the day that governmental planners could re-chart the lives of American 
Indians and that the nation s social and cultural systems could quickly assimilate all Indian 
people into the mainstream of U.S. life. 
The initiatives, however, faced fierce criticism. After Congress enacted several more ter- 
mination bills during the 1950s, almost 12,000 people lost their status as tribal members, 
and land formally held by tribes continued to fall into the hands of commercial, non- 
Indian developers. Indians from terminated tribes stood to forfeit both their exemption 
from state taxation and the social services provided by the BIA. In return, they gained rel- 
atively little, especially in economic benefits. Relocation went no better than termination. 
Even as this process weakened the links between migrants and communal life on the reser- 
vations they left, most relocated Indians complained of finding only low-paying, dead-end 
jobs and racial discrimination away from their tribal homes. 
American Indian activists and their supporters mobilized against the termination and 
relocationpolicies. By 1957, their efforts forced the U.S. government to scale back the ini- 
tial congressional timetable, which had called for liquidating every tribe within five years. 
Continued protests led both Republicans and Democrats to repudiate termination in their 
party platforms of 1960. Two years later, Congress finally ended the program. Despite the 
criticism it produced, the relocation program continued until 1967. By then, almost half 
of the nation s Indians lived in relocation cities. This policy, critics constantly noted, nei- 
ther touched the deep-rooted problems that many Indians confronted, including a life 
expectancy only two-thirds that of whites, nor provided significantly better opportunities 
for employment or education. 
The Growth of Spanish-Speaking Populations 
Millions of Spanish-speaking people, many of whom had recently arrived in the United 
States, also began mobilizing in hopes of realizing the nation s commitments to liberty and 
equality. Despite the prospect of discriminatory practices in the U.S. job and housing mar- 
kets, large numbers of Puerto Ricans began moving from their island commonwealth to the 
mainland during the 1950s. By 1960, New York City s Puerto Rican population was nearly 
100 times greater than it had been before the Second World War. Large numbers of Puerto 
Ricans also settled in Chicago, Boston, and Hartford, Connecticut, during the 1950s. The 
commonwealth government of Puerto Rico promoted immigration as a way of easing pop- 
ulation pressures, but it also encouraged migrants to maintain cultural ties with the island. 
Officially U.S. citizens, most of the newcomers spoke only Spanish, and the formation of 
social and cultural clubs helped connect them with the Puerto Rican communities they had 
left behind. 
At the same time, Puerto Ricans also began to form organizations that could help 
address conditions in the United States. The Puerto Rican Hispanic Leadership Forum, 
organized in 1957, presaged the emergence of groups that looked more to social and eco- 
nomic conditions and, ultimately, greater political clout in the United States than to 
cultural affinities with Puerto Rico. 
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Meanwhile, large numbers of Spanish-speaking people from Mexico continued moving 
to California and the Southwest. There they settled, sometimes uncomfortably, into 
already established Mexican American communities. In 1940, Mexican Americans had 
been the most rural of all the major ethnic groups; by 1950, in contrast, more than 65 percent 
of Mexican Americans were living in urban areas, a figure that would climb to 85 percent 
by 1970. As a result of this fundamental demographic shift, Mexican Americans began to 
become an important political force in many western and southwestern cities. 
Controversy over continued immigration from Mexico intensified during the early 
1950s. Beginning in 1942 and continuing until 1967, the U.S. government sponsored the 
bracero (or farmhand) program, which brought nearly 5 million Mexicans across the 
U.S. Mexican border, theoretically on short-term contracts, to fill agricultural jobs. Many 
braceros and their families remained in the United States, however, after these agreements 
expired. Legal immigrants from Mexico, along with growing numbers of people who fil- 
tered across the border, joined them. 
 Operation Wetback,  an ongoing U.S. government dragnet of the early 1950s, targeted 
undocumented immigrants from Mexico. The choice of a term of ethnic derision, which 
implied that all people of Mexican ancestry had illegally swum across the Rio Grande River 
to reach the United States, hardly built support for this program in MexicanAmerican com- 
munities. During a five-year period, the U.S. government claimed to have rounded up and 
deported to Mexico nearly 4 million people, allegedly all undocumented immigrants. This 
operation, its critics charged, not only swept up some people who lacked ready docu- 
mentation but served to stigmatize longtime citizens of Mexican heritage and to justify dis- 
criminatory treatment by local and state governments and by employers. 
Groups representing Mexican Americans gradually broadened older struggles, which 
traced back to the 1930s (see chapter 25), against discrimination. Labor organizers, often 
defying efforts by employers and FBI personnel to label their efforts as  communist inspired,  
sought higher wages and better working conditions in the factories and fields. Unions with 
left-leaning political reputations and large Mexican American memberships, such as the 
United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), faced 
ongoing harassment from the FBI, other governmental agencies, and private businesses. A 
lengthy strike in New Mexico by Mexican American zinc miners, who were affiliated with 
a union that had been expelled from the CIO in 1950, became the subject of the motion 
picture Salt of the Earth(1954). Pressure from Washington, the film industry, and anti- 
communist labor unions prevented, throughout the 1950s, popular distribution of this 
independent production, a collaboration among blacklisted filmmakers, striking miners, 
and their families. 
At the same time, organizations representing Mexican American professionals, such 
as LULAC and the Unity League, parlayed their legal resources into lawsuits seeking the 
desegregation of schools and other public facilities in Southern California and through- 
out the Southwest. When preparing to go to court, however, lawyers for these groups 
immediately faced a strategic dilemma. Legal challenges brought on behalf of plaintiffs 
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of African descent, as in the Browncases, relied on the claim that state laws separating 
 whites  and  coloreds  violated guarantees of legal equality. Most states, though, clas- 
sified persons whose ancestors came from Mexico people who, theoretically, could be 
of  mixed  ancestry, including European, Indian, African, and even Asian as legally 
 white.  In the area of education, as earlier cases such as Westminsterhad shown (see 
chapter 27), school officials in states such as California and Texas segregated students of 
Mexican descent on the basis of real and alleged  language deficiencies,  rather than on 
that of  race.  The  other white  legal status of Mexican Americans, in other words, com- 
plicated the ability of organizations such as LULAC to frame court challenges. In prac- 
tice, it also prevented lawyers from automatically relying on precedents involving 
 white-against-black  discrimination. 
Urban-Suburban Issues 
The ongoing expansion of suburbia during the 1950s focused increasing attention on pub- 
lic policies related to cities. A variety of measures, adopted by both governmental and pri- 
vate institutions and organizations, for example, continued to shift resources away from 
cities, especially from neighborhoods with  significant numbers of Latinos and African 
Americans. Continuing the now-familiar policy of red-lining, many banks and loan insti- 
tutions denied funds for home-buyers and businesses in areas they considered  decaying  
or  marginal.  Using the same supposedly neutral criteria employed for suburban loans, 
the lending industry saw these blighted areas as  bad risks.  They contained aging build- 
ings, densely clustered homes, and growing numbers of low-income people, many of 
whom were of non-European descent. The FHA and other governmental agencies thus 
concentrated their activities in the newer suburbs. In 1960, for example, the FHA failed to 
put up a single dollar for home loan guarantees in Camden or Paterson, New Jersey, cities 
in which minority populations were growing, while it focused on the recently built, largely 
all-white suburbs that surrounded them. 
 Urban renewal  programs, authorized by the Housing Act of 1949 (see chapter 27), accord- 
ing to numerous social-science studies, too often seemed aimed at  urban removal.  Although 
the law called for  a feasible method for the temporary relocation  of persons displaced by 
urban renewal projects, lax enforcement meant that developers could generally ignore the 
needs of these people. Throughout the 1950s, Robert Moses, who dominated the planning 
and execution of New York City s vast construction projects, effectively concealed the 
number of people dislocated by his urban renewal and highway building programs. 
Although this unelected planner-bureaucrat always had his defenders, who insisted his 
vision ultimately encompassed the greater good of all residents, maps of New York City s 
always changing landscape showed office buildings, freeways, and relatively expensive 
housing complexes inexorably replacing the older living units that people with low- 
income jobs could afford. 
Roughly similar debates over goals and results along with the same general patterns 
in building marked the histories of other large cities during the 1950s. Plans for new, 
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federally built public housing, for example, quickly faltered in most areas of the United 
States. Newer suburban areas with their middle-income homeowners used their politi- 
cal clout and local zoning laws to freeze out government-sponsored housing projects. In 
addition, private housing interests lobbied to limit the number of public units actually 
constructed, invariably on relatively expensive and already densely populated urban 
sites, and to deny them amenities, such as closets or closets with doors, that could be 
found in most private apartments. Publicly built facilities, originally conceived as short- 
term alternatives for families who would soon move to their own homes, became stig- 
matized as  the projects.  They gained reputations for being housing of last resort, 
reserved for people with chronically low incomes and meager prospects for economic 
advancement. In addition to disrupting urban housing patterns, renewal-removal projects 
also helped disperse industries that had long provided entry-level jobs for semi- and 
unskilled workers. 
The urban-suburban policies of the 1950s, in short, seemed to be in need of major 
repair. In 1960, both the Democratic and Republican parties pledged to create a new cab- 
inet office for urban affairs and to reconsider Washington s role in addressing the cycle of 
continued suburban growth and onrushing urban decay. 
Debating the Role of Government,1955 1960 
Discussion of urban-suburban issues during the late 1950s accompanied a broader debate 
over how the national government in Washington might deal with a wide range of 
socioeconomic matters. Although Eisenhower sometimes hinted that he favored rolling 
back domestic programs established during the 1930s and 1940s, he possessed neither the 
political support nor the personal will to do so. Actually, his administration presided over 
a modest expansion of earlier initiatives: a larger Social Security system, a higher minimum 
wage, better unemployment benefits, and a new Department of Health, Education, and 
Welfare (HEW). Eisenhower denied that this record suggested the White House favored 
 big government,  and insisted his approach represented a  moderate Republicanism.  
The New Conservatives 
Eisenhower s self-professed moderation on domestic issues angered a growing group of 
people who soon became known as the  new conservatives.  Conservatives within the 
GOP s ranks conceded Eisenhower s popularity and the fact that he was the first Repub- 
lican president since Herbert Hoover but they also complained that his administration 
seldom represented the conservative principles for which the Republican Party supposedly 
stood. From their perspective, the Republicans who voted in support of domestic social 
programs looked as bad as the Northern Democrats with whom they often allied. 
The most popular conservative Republican of the 1950s, Arizona s Barry Goldwater, 
often voiced his doubts about the programmatic and regional shape of the national GOP. 
Ruggedly handsome and militantly anticommunist, Goldwater won election to the U.S. 
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Senate in 1952. Once in Washington, he quickly emerged as the spokesperson for those 
Republicans who viewed Eisenhower s policies as insufficiently conservative and too 
indebted to GOP constituencies on the East Coast. Goldwater once quipped that his 
party and the nation might be better off if someone could magically saw off the north- 
ern part of the eastern seaboard and let it drift out into the Atlantic, presumably toward a 
socialist-minded Europe. 
Still, Goldwater took care to distinguish his conservatism from that of the  radical right,  
whose attacks against Eisenhower sometimes veered into anti-Semitic diatribes and claims 
of Ike being a conscious agent of Moscow. Carefully framed and largely ghost-written, 
Goldwater s The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) helped popularize his conservative cri- 
tique. By refusing to seriously consider stronger military measures against the Soviet Union 
and by not making  victory the goal of U.S. policy,  he argued, Eisenhower had likely endan- 
gered national security with his version of containment. Goldwater also portrayed almost all 
domestic programs, including federal civil-rights legislation, as grave threats to individual 
liberty. The Eisenhower administration seemed largely content to follow the Democratic 
Party s  New Deal antics  in its own domestic policy making, the Arizona senator alleged. 
While Goldwater was pressing the GOP to reject Eisenhower s moderate Republican- 
ism, others, such as the publisher William F. Buckley, Jr., used the 1950s to frame a 
broadly conservative message for the 1960s. Buckley, who grew up in a wealthy, cos- 
mopolitan, and fervently conservative family, first gained national attention while still in 
his twenties. In God and Man at Yale (1952), the devoutly Roman Catholic Buckley 
attacked what he saw as a  collectivist  and antireligious tilt in higher education. Most Ivy 
League educators, he claimed, would defend neither capitalism nor Christianity. Known 
for wrapping his brickbats in humor, Buckley once claimed that he would rather be gov- 
erned by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. 
Buckley helped found theNational Reviewin 1955. This weekly magazine attracted a 
talented group of writers and avoided positions, particularly the anti-Semitism of some 
old-line conservatives and the hysterical anticommunism of groups such as the John Birch 
Society, which Democrats and members of the media could label as extremist. Buckley and 
his National Reviewcolleagues, recognizing they could not refashion conservatism quickly, 
adopted strategies for the long run. To this end, they established Young Americans for 
Freedom (YAF) in 1960, several years before similar college-based political organizations 
emerged from the New Left (see chapter 29). 
Adopting another long-term approach, called  fusionism,  to building a conservative 
movement, Buckley s group avoided any strict litmus test. As a result, the National 
Reviewinitially even provided a sounding board for Joe McCarthy s embattled followers 
and for some southern segregationists. Relatively quickly, however, the magazine and 
the larger movement it hoped to create came to feature creative tension coming from 
three broad, not-always-compatible constituencies. This threesome included  traditional- 
ist  conservatives, who insisted that social stability depended on jettisoning all notions of 
equality and allowing the educated-talented few, people such as themselves, todominate 
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the nation s institutions. The magazine also published pieces by  libertarians,  people who 
rejected the hierarchical, anti-egalitarian vision of more traditional conservatives but who 
favored reducing the power of government and enlarging the liberties of capitalist entrepre- 
neurs. Finally, the National Reviewconsistently featured staunch anticommunists, such as 
Barry Goldwater, who insisted that national power be used, far more aggressively than either 
Democratic or Republican administrations had done, to oppose Soviet-led communism. 
Meanwhile, a different style of conservative activism emerged, at the grassroots, 
especially within many new suburban areas. Barry Goldwater s brand of conservatism 
proved especially appealing to suburbanites in the  Sunbelt states  that stretched from 
California, across the Southwest, eastward through Texas, and over to Florida. Fiercely 
anticommunist, the  suburban warriors  from these areas, beginning with California, 
also framed a militantly conservative domestic agenda. It focused on keeping both state 
and national officials from using their power to infringe on what these conservative 
suburbanitesconsidered liberties constitutionally reserved to their own local communi- 
ties. They called for maintaining grassroots control of local school curricula, tough zoning 
laws, and the lowest possible rates of taxation, especially on real estate. 
Advocates of a More Active Government 
While the new conservative movement mobilized and, then, organized, in hopes of scal- 
ing back domestic social policies, an even more eclectic group tried to make the case for 
expanding governmental programs. Many of these commentators began by calling for 
greater activism from the office of the president. 
The initial indecision by the White House during the 1957 situation at Little Rock s 
Central High School suggested, at least to these critics, that Dwight Eisenhower held an 
unsteady grasp of domestic issues. The national election of 1956 had given him (and Vice 
President Nixon) another landslide victory over a Democratic ticket, headed again by Adlai 
Stevenson, but Eisenhower s continued personal popularity had done even less for the 
Republican Party, which had failed to regain control of Congress, than in the 1952 con- 
test. (The GOP would shed additional congressional seats as well as state legislatures and 
governors  mansions in the mid-term races of 1958. After this election, Democrats out- 
numbered Republicans by nearly 2-to-1 margins in both the U.S. Senate and the House of 
Representatives.) Meanwhile, Eisenhower, who had rebounded from a mild heart attack 
before the 1956 election, seemed progressively enfeebled, physically as well as politically. 
After the president suffered a second heart attack and a mild stroke during his second 
term, critics intensified calls for more vigorous leadership from the White House. Social 
activists criticized the reluctance to use Washington s power to attack racial discrimina- 
tion, and many economists, pointing to an economic downturn in 1958 59 when unem- 
ployment figures rose precipitously, ridiculed the Eisenhower administration s commitment 
to a balanced budget. Even after economic conditions improved, economists such as John 
Kenneth Galbraith urged significant deficit spending by Washington as a spur to further 
growth. Eisenhower s advisers stoutly resisted this advice. 
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Many of these critics, while avoiding the rhetoric of conservatives such as Goldwater, also 
found the Eisenhower administration s national security moves to be insufficient. The 1957 
Gaither Report, prepared by Paul Nitze and other people who had been associated with the 
NSC-68 document of 1950 (see chapter 27), savaged New Look policies. The Gaither Report 
claimed that the Soviet Union s GNP was growing even more quickly than that of the United 
States and that a rapidly expanding military sector accounted for much of this expansion. 
The Gaither Report urged an immediate increase of about 25 percent in the Pentagon s bud- 
get and a crash program for building fallout shelters. It also called for developing intercon- 
tinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and expanding conventional military forces. Another 
report, largely written by a young political scientist named Henry Kissinger and issued by the 
prestigious Rockefeller Foundation, argued that the New Look, by relying on massive 
nuclear retaliation and downplaying non-nuclear options, actuallyundermined national 
security. It joined the Gaither Report in seeking greater U.S. spending for a wide range of 
defense initiatives. 
Eisenhower, who remained far more attentive to foreign policy than domestic issues, 
reacted cautiously. Although the White House agreed to accelerate the development of 
ICBMs, it opposed any significant effort to build fallout shelters or to expand existing 
capabilities for fighting limited, non-nuclear wars. In fact, the Eisenhower administration 
reduced the size of several army and air force units and kept its defense budget well 
below the levels critics had proposed. Eisenhower felt confident in pursuing this course 
because super-secret U-2 surveillance flights over the USSR revealed that the Soviets were 
lagging behind, rather than racing ahead of, the United States in military capability. 
Concerns about national security and calls for greater government spending also affected 
U.S. educational policies. Throughout the 1950s, the more traditionalist educatorshad often 
complained about schools imparting  life adjustment  skills getting along with others and 
adapting to social change instead of teaching traditional academic subjects. Rudolf Flesch s 
best-selling Why Johnny Can t Read(1956) anticipated books that asked why Johnny and his 
classmates couldn t add or subtract very well either and why they lagged behind their coun- 
terparts in the Soviet Union in science. Washington s help in funding K 12 instruction 
seemed an obvious way to upgrade educational performance. Simultaneously, the nation s 
leading research universities sought greater federal aid. In summer 1957, a committee of 
prominent scientists implored the Defense Department to expand its support for basic sci- 
entific research.  Research is a requisite for survival  in the nuclear age, it declared. 
The case for increased federal spending suddenly became more compelling. On 
October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union orbited the world s first artificial satellite, a 22-inch 
sphere called Sputnik, and seemingly soared far beyond the United States in both space 
exploration and military capabilities. The USSR could use the same missile technology 
needed to launch Sputnik, argued Eisenhower s critics, to rain down nuclear weapons on 
U.S. cities. Effectively safeguarding U.S. national security, therefore, appeared to demand 
rebuilding, as rapidly as possible, the nation s military arsenal, its educational institutions, 
and its research capabilities. 
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The specter of the original Sputnik, along with that of a second and much larger Soviet 
satellite, improved chances that a wide range of institutions, and not simply the Pentagon, 
would now obtain federal funding. Phrases such as  national security  and  national defense  
seemed to clear the way for financial resources to flow more freely out of Washington. In 
1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which funneled aid to college- 
level programs in science, engineering, foreign languages, and the social sciences. This 
law marked a milestone in the long battle to overcome congressional opposition to federal 
funding of public education, especially from southern representatives who feared that 
aid from Washington could increase pressure for racial integration. Legislators also 
created another R&D effort, to be overseen by a new National Aeronautics and Space 
Administration (NASA). This governmental agency pledged to harness U.S. educa- 
tional and technological know-how so that the United States could counter the Soviet 
Union s successes with its Sputniks and preserve outer space for the benefit of  all 
mankind.  
Many people also hoped that domestic social welfare programs would become the 
beneficiaries of increased federal spending. Galbraith s The Affluent Society(1958) saw 
a dangerous tilt in the  social balance,  away from support for development of  pub- 
lic goods  and toward satisfaction of private desires. Already affluent families could 
afford to vacation in their own chrome-encrusted automobiles, but they would speed 
through shabby cities, motor along litter-filled roadsides, and gaze out at unsightly 
billboards. The researcher who developed a new carburetor is well rewarded, but any- 
one  who dreams up a new public service is [labeled] a wastrel,  Galbraith s book sar- 
donically noted. 
Galbraith s critique seemed mild when compared to that of Michael Harrington. His 
passionate essays about the persistence of poverty recalled his apprenticeship at Dorothy 
Day s Catholic Worker. In 1959, Commentary, one of several influential national magazines 
featuring social criticism, published an article, which was immediately noticed in policy- 
making circles. In this essay, Harrington insisted that the need to address economic 
inequality remained as urgent as it had been during the 1930s. At least one-third of the 
nation s people living in rural areas, small towns, and cities barely subsisted in a land 
of supposed abundance and affluence. Avoiding the usual trappings of economic analysis, 
Harrington crafted dramatic stories about how economic deprivation ravaged the bodies 
and spirits of people whose lives had been largely untouched by the economic growth of 
the 1940s and 1950s. 
During the 1960s, when addressing social and economic issues became a priority 
among policy makers drawn to Washington, pundits such as Galbraith and Harrington 
became political celebrities. These same people had honed their critiques, however, within 
the vibrant political culture of the late 1950s. The brief presidency of John F. Kennedy 
would, in fact, feature calls for more active foreign and domestic policies that had first 
emerged during the 1950s. 
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The Kennedy Years:Foreign Policy 
The Kennedy Years: Foreign Policy  " 1091 
Focus Question 
What foreign and domestic policies did the Kennedy administration champion? 
John Fitzgerald Kennedy s wealthy, politically ambitious father, Joseph P. Kennedy, 
claimed to have groomed his son for the White House. The young Kennedy graduated 
from Harvard in 1940, won military honors while serving in the Navy during the Second 
World War, won a 1946 election to represent his home district in Massachusetts in the 
lower house of Congress, and captured a Senate seat in 1952. Once in Washington, 
Kennedy became better known for his social life than for his command of legislative 
details, but he quickly parlayed his charm and youthful good lucks into political stardom. 
His 1953 marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier added yet another dash of glamour. A favorite of 
the media, Jackie won plaudits for her cultural tastes, choice in fashions, and fluency in 
several languages. After John Kennedy narrowly missed winning the Democratic vice pres- 
idential nomination in 1956, he immediately took aim at gaining the top spot on his 
party s 1960 ticket. 
The Election of 1960 
JFK, often accompanied by Jackie and by his brothers, Robert and Edward ( Ted ) 
Kennedy, barnstormed across the country. This early presidential campaigning, along with 
a talented staff and his family s vast wealth, helped Kennedy overwhelm his Democratic 
challengers, including Senators Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Lyndon Johnson of 
Texas. By pledging to separate his Roman Catholic faith from his politics and by con- 
fronting those who appealed to anti-Catholic prejudice, Kennedy tried to defuse the reli- 
gious issue that had doomed the candidacy of Al Smith in 1928 (see chapter 24). 
Richard Nixon, running as the Republican standard bearer, spent much of the 1960 
presidential campaign on the defensive. A widespread perception that the still-popular 
Eisenhower remained unenthusiastic about a Republican candidate who had served as his 
vice-president for eight years hardly cheered Nixon. Still, he tried to counter Kennedy s 
charisma with images of his own seasoned leadership, gained while at Ike s side. Nixon 
seemed notably off-balance during the first of several televised debates in which a cool, 
tanned Kennedy emerged, according to surveys of TV viewers, with a clear victory over a 
pale, nervous Nixon. (People who listened on radio assigned Nixon considerably higher 
marks.) Despite chronic and severe health problems, which Kennedy s entourage effec- 
tively concealed, JFK projected vigor and energy, if not experience. 
Kennedy s 1960 campaign highlighted issues from the 1950s that, taken together, morphed 
into an agenda JFK would call the  New Frontier.  Although Senator Kennedy s civil-rightsrecord 
had been mixed, candidate Kennedy declared his support for new congressional legislation. 
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In an important symbolic act, he dispatched aides to Georgia to assist MartinLuther 
King, Jr., who was facing jail time for a minor traffic violation. Kennedy also promised to 
use the president s executive authority, which Eisenhower had refused to do, to fight 
against job discrimination and to press for new social welfare programs to rebuild rural 
communities, increase educational opportunities, and improve urban conditions. 
Kennedy s New Frontier also recalled two other central issues of the late 1950s: pro- 
moting greater economic growth and conducting a more aggressive foreign policy. Dis- 
missing Eisenhower s economic policies as overly timid and largely ineffectual, Kennedy 
proposed using tax cuts and deficit spending to juice the economy. On foreign policy, he 
criticized Eisenhower for failing to rid Latin America, and Cuba, of Fidel Castro and for 
allowing a  missile gap  to develop between the United States and the Soviet Union. By 
spending more on defense, Kennedy claimed, the United States could respond, more flex- 
ibly, against communism, especially in the Third World. The  American people are tired of 
the drift in our national course . . . and they are ready to move again, Kennedy proclaimed. 
The closely contested 1960 presidential election defied easy analysis. Despite his early 
problems, Nixon ran a skilled campaign, and Kennedy outpolled him by only about 
100,000 popular votes. Kennedy s victory in the Electoral College, moreover, rested on 
1092  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
WA 
9 
OR 
6 
CA 
32 
NV 
3 
MT 
4 
ND 
4 
SD 
4 
WY 
3 
ID 
4 
UT 
4 CO 
6 
AZ 
4 
AK 
3 
HI 
3 
NM 
4 
TX 
24 
OK 
N-7 
B-1 
KS 
8 
NE 
6 
MN 
11 
IA 
10 
LA 
10 
AR 
8 
MO 
13 
FL 
10 
MS 
8 AL 
B-6 
K-5 
GA 
12 
SC 
8 
TN 
11 
NC 
14 
KY 
10 
WI 
12 MI 
20 
IL 
27 
IN 
13 
OH 
25 
VA 
12 
WV 
8 
PA 
32 
NY 
45 
ME 
5 
NH 
4 
VT 
3 
MD 
9 
DE 
3 
NJ 
16 
MA 
16 
CT 
8 
RI 
4 
Kennedy  303        56       34,226,731      49.7 
(Democrat) 
Nixon                      219        41       34,108,157      49.5 
(Republican) 
Byrd    15          3            501,643       ---- 
(Independent) 
Electoral Vote    
Number     %     
 Popular Vote 
  Number            %   
Map 28.2 Presidential Election, 1960 In one of the closest elections 
in American history in terms of the popular vote, Kennedy only narrowly 
outpolled Nixon. Kennedy s more commanding victory in the electoral vote 
produced some discussion about the consequences if the electoral college 
one day produced a president who had failed to carry the popular vote, a 
situation that occurred in the election of 2000. 
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razor-thin margins in several states, including Illinois. Many Republicans urged Nixon to 
challenge Kennedy s suspicious vote total there, but the vice president chose to accept the 
disputed result. JFK s triumph owed a great debt to his vice presidential running mate, 
Lyndon Baines Johnson. A tireless campaigner, LBJ gained credit for the Democratic ticket 
carrying the Deep South and his home state of Texas. Democrats remained the majority 
party in Congress and across the country, but this did not translate into a groundswell of 
support for Kennedy or his New Frontier. 
JFK and Jackie achieved their earliest success by riveting media attention on the White 
House. They hobnobbed with movie stars and hosted prominent intellectuals. Kennedy s debut 
as president featured designer clothing, a poignant appearance by the aged poet Robert Frost, 
and an oft-quoted inaugural speech in which JFK challenged people to  ask not what your coun- 
try can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.  The  best and the brightest,  the name 
a journalist later bestowed (tongue in cheek) on the hard-driving people who joined 
Kennedy s administration, promised to launch exciting anddifficult crusades, even one to 
the frontier of outer space. Implicitly recalling the Soviet s 1957 triumph with its Sputniks, 
JFK promised that the United States would beat the USSR in the ultimate event in the space 
race, landing a manned craft on the surface of the moon, before the end of the 1960s. 
Kennedy s Foreign Policy Goals 
Kennedy promised an aggressive national security stance, which would include new flexible- 
responsecapabilities. Although Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara quickly found that 
the alleged missile gap between the United States and the USSR had never existed, the 
Kennedy administration still boosted the defense budget. It strongly supported military assis- 
tance programs, informational initiatives, and covert-action planning. In one of his most 
popular innovations, the president created the Peace Corps, a volunteer program that would 
prepare Americans, especially young people, to assist struggling people in nations around the 
world. Once overseas, they would work on various projects aimed at improving living con- 
ditions and, additionally, undercutting the appeal of left-leaning, procommunist movements. 
The Kennedy administration also repackaged Eisenhower s effort to reorient U.S. Latin 
American policy. Kennedy s  Alliance for Progress  elaborated on Ike s earlier desire to 
move away from reliance on dictators and to support broadly conceived socioeconomic 
programs. Unveiled in spring 1961, in hopes of checking the spread of anti-Americanism 
and Castro-like insurgencies, the Alliance for Progress promised $20 billion in loans over 
a 10-year period to Latin American countries that would undertake land reform and eco- 
nomic development measures. Most Latin Americans judged Kennedy s Alliance, which 
underestimated obstacles to social and economic innovation, as more of a symbolic ges- 
ture than a substantive blueprint for change in their region. 
Cuba and Berlin 
The first serious setback for the Kennedy presidency, an ill-conceived 1961 CIA mission 
against Cuba, also had its roots in the Eisenhower administration. The CIA, looking toearlier 
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covert actions against anti-American governments in Iran and Guatemala as models, had 
worked out a secret, Eisenhower-endorsed invasion to oust Fidel Castro. Overriding dis- 
sent from some of his advisers, Kennedy reaffirmed White House support for this plan. On 
April 17, 1961, however, when U.S.-backed and-trained forces (mainly anticommunist 
Cuban exiles) landed at the Bahia de Cochinas (the Bay of Pigs) on the southern coast of 
Cuba, the popular uprising, which the CIA had predicted, failed to materialize. 
Instead, forces loyal to Castro quickly surrounded and captured the invaders. Con- 
fronting a badly planned and poorly executed operation, Kennedy rejected any additional 
steps, including last-minute U.S. air strikes that CIA operatives had apparently misled 
their Cuban allies into believing were part of the plan. The White House initially tried to 
deny any U.S. involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion, but the CIA s role quickly became 
public knowledge. A new wave of anti-Yankee sentiment swept across much of Latin 
America, and Castro used the invasion as justification for further tightening his grip over 
Cuban life and strengthening his ties to the Soviet Union. 
Kennedy responded to the Bay of Pigs by admitting error and by devising new anti-Castro 
strategies.  I have made a tragic mistake,  Kennedy told one adviser.  Not only were our 
facts in error, but our policy was wrong.  Stung by the failed invasion, the White House 
continued to target Castro with a covert program,  Operation Mongoose.  It included 
efforts to destabilize Cuba s economy and, in concert with organized crime figures, to 
assassinate the Cuban leader. 
Meanwhile, two other dramatic confrontations began unfolding, more slowly, in 
Berlin and in Cuba. In June 1961, Nikita Khrushchev and Kennedy met in Vienna, 
Austria, where the Soviets proposed ending the Western presence in Berlin and 
reuniting the city as part of East Germany. Khrushchev s initiative responded to the 
steady flow of immigrants from East Germany into West Berlin, a migration that was 
both politically embarrassing and economically draining to the German communist 
regime. Kennedy refused to abandon West Berlin, and in August 1961, with Soviet 
approval, East Germanybegan to erect first a barbed-wire fence and then a concrete 
barrier to separate East from West Berlin. This  Berlin Wall  became a symbol of 
communist repression. Kennedy s assertion,  Ich bin ein Berliner,  delivered in front 
of the wall to a cheering crowd of West Berliners, provided a memorable moment in 
his presidency. 
Superpower confrontation escalated to a potentially lethal, even catastrophic, level 
during the Cuban Missile Crisisof October 1962. Responding to pleas from Fidel 
Castro and seeing Kennedy, especially after their personal meeting in Vienna, as an 
inexperienced bungler, Khrushchev took a bold gamble: He began sending advanced 
Soviet armaments to Cuba. After a U-2 spy plane showed missile-launching sites in 
Cuba, the Kennedy administration announced it would not allow the Soviet Union to 
place nuclear warheads so close to U.S. soil. It demanded that the Soviets dismantle the 
missile silos and turn back its supply ships, presumably containing the warheads, then 
heading for Cuba. 
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The Cuban Missile Crisis began in earnest. After tense strategizing sessions with his 
top advisers, Kennedy rejected calls by some military leaders, notably General Curtis 
LeMay, for a strike against Cuba. JFK thus heeded warnings that any such rash action 
risked escalating into nuclear warfare between the United States and the Soviet Union. 
Instead, Kennedy ordered the U.S. Navy to  quarantine  Cuba. The president did 
authorize Strategic Air Command (SAC) to go on full alert, in preparation for a possi- 
ble nuclear conflict. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later recalled leaving a 
presidential conference during the 13-day crisis, looking up at the sky, and wondering 
if the world would still be there 24 hours later. Reflections of this kind encouraged 
both the United States and the USSR to engage in secret diplomatic maneuvers to fore- 
stall a military showdown. 
Delicate maneuvering by both governments (and several private go-betweens) finally 
ended the standoff. On October 28, 1962, Khrushchev ordered the Soviet missiles in Cuba 
to be dismantled and the supply ships to sail for home; Kennedy pledged not to invade 
Cuba and secretly promised to complete a previously ordered withdrawal of U.S. mis- 
siles from Turkey. When researchers finally gained access to Soviet archives during the 
mid-1990s, they discovered that the Missile Crisis had been even more dangerous than 
U.S. officials had ever imagined. Unknown to anyone in the Kennedy administration in 
1962, the Soviets had already placed in Cuba tactical nuclear weapons, which could have 
been launched against U.S. targets in retaliation for any air strike. 
The Missile Crisis underscored how easily the United States and the USSR could careen 
toward nuclear conflict, and the dangers of October 1962 encouraged the two nuclear 
superpowers to begin moving with greater caution. To prevent a similar confrontation or 
an accident involving nuclear weapons, they established a direct telephone hotline 
between Moscow and Washington, D.C. Later, during a spring 1963 commencement 
address at American University, Kennedy underscored the importance of the United States 
working to promote world peace. Some Kennedy watchers, then as well as now, have 
argued that this American University speech portended what a second JFK administration 
would have attempted to achieve in foreign policy. 
Southeast Asia and  Flexible Response  
Meanwhile, though, in Southeast Asia, Kennedy continued earlier U.S. attempts to pre- 
serve a noncommunist state in South Vietnam. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which the 
attempt to overthrow an already established communist government had failed, JFK 
seemed more determined than before to prevent any communist-led  war of national lib- 
eration  from ever succeeding. 
Even so, the odds against preserving a pro-U.S. government in South Vietnam seemed 
to grow ever longer as Kennedy s own presidency lengthened. Opposition to the regime of 
Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been in power since 1954, had now coalesced in the National 
Liberation Front (NLF). Formed in December 1960, the NLF included nationalist factions 
that resented Diem s dependence on the United States, communists who demanded more 
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extensive land reform, an array of political leaders who were fed up with Diem s corrup- 
tion and cronyism, and groups beholden to Ho Chi Minh s communist government in the 
North. North Vietnam began sending additional supplies and, then, thousands of its own 
troops to the South to support the NLF. 
The Kennedy administration saw Vietnam as a test case for its anticommunist strat- 
egy, especially the doctrine of flexible response. Although it accepted a 1962 deal that 
created a technically neutral but communist-influenced government in Laos, the White 
House appeared determined to hold the line in South Vietnam. Washington trained elite 
U.S. troops, the Green Berets, in counterinsurgency tactics; sent teams of social scientists, 
charged with nation building, to advise South Vietnam on socioeconomic policies; and 
dispatched other experts to train that nation s internal security forces. Finally, the 
Kennedy administration deployed, in ever larger increments, nearly 11,000 U.S. 
troops who would supposedly only advise, rather than actively fight alongside, South 
Vietnamese forces. 
These U.S. moves seemed to create only new opportunities for corruption and greater 
distrust between South Vietnam s government and its citizens. When U.S. officials became 
aware that disgruntled South Vietnamese military officers were planning to topple Diem s 
already tottering regime, they gave them a green light to continue orchestrating their plan. 
In November 1963, the conspirators routed Diem an act that could hardly have surprised 
the Kennedy administration from his presidential palace and in a genuine shock to 
U.S. officials summarily murdered him. This coup d état, which brought a military 
regime to power in Saigon, appeared to create even greater political instability in South 
Vietnam. The NLF and North Vietnam, in turn, ratcheted up their military pressure on the 
new government in Saigon. 
The Southeast Asian policy of Kennedy s administration seemed no more coherent than 
that of Eisenhower s. The overall goal, to be sure, remained consistent: prevent communist 
forces from toppling any anticommunist government in Saigon. The United States could not 
afford to  lose  South Vietnam. Although some in JFK s inner circle urged sending U.S. com- 
bat forces into battle, the president continued to reject this option. Onseveral occasions, the 
White House even talked about withdrawing some of its combat-ready advisers, perhaps 
as a substantive shift in policy or as a public relations move. As with his domestic agenda, 
Kennedy s presidency ended, unexpectedly, with its future direction in Vietnam in a state 
of flux or, perhaps, even disarray. 
The Kennedy Years:Domestic Policy 
Kennedy hesitated to follow up on his campaign proposal of increasing federal spending 
to speed economic growth. He feared that federal budget deficits might cost him support 
among fiscal conservatives and business leaders. Relations with corporate leaders, never- 
theless, did turn temporarily ugly in 1962, when Kennedy clashed with the president of 
U.S. Steel over that company s decision to raise its prices beyond the guidelines suggested 
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by the White House. Recoiling from this imbroglio, the Kennedy administration hoped to 
chart a steadier domestic course. Events did not always cooperate. 
Policy Making During the Early 1960s 
In 1962, the White House staff finally sat down with key members of Congress to discuss 
lowering tax rates as a means of promoting economic growth. The economy had nicely 
rebounded from its downturn of 1957 58, but proponents of a tax cut promised even more 
rapid growth. Lower tax rates for everyone and special deductions for businesses that 
invested in new plants and equipment, the tax-cutters argued, would spur investment in 
facilities and jobs. Despite opposition from those Democrats who thought these changes 
tilted toward corporations and the wealthy, the tax bill seemed headed for passage in the 
fall of 1963. 
Most of Kennedy s ideas about social welfare policy recalled earlier proposals. There 
was talk of raising the federal minimum wage rate and of new urban rebuilding programs. 
Under the programs begun during the 1940s, Kennedy-era bulldozers continued to raze 
large parts of urban America, still at the expense, critics charged, of people who desper- 
ately needed affordable housing. One new departure, the Area Redevelopment Bill of 
1961, called for directing federal grants and loans to areas, such as Appalachia, that the 
economic growth of the 1940s and 1950s had largely bypassed. 
The Civil-Rights Movement, 1960 1963 
Although JFK had talked about supporting new civil-rights legislation, he also tried to pla- 
cate the segregationist wing of his Democratic Party. Initially, the Kennedy administration 
assigned greater priority to the fight against organized crime than the one against racial 
discrimination. The president and his brother, Robert, whom he had appointed attorney 
general, listened sympathetically when J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, falsely warned 
of continuing links between Martin Luther King, Jr., and members of the American Com- 
munist Party. To monitor King s activities and gather information that Hoover would later 
use to smear the civil-rights leader, the FBI intensified surveillance, illegally tapped King s 
phone conversations, and placed  bugs  in his hotel rooms. 
Meanwhile, in early 1960, African American students at North Carolina A&T, a histor- 
ically black college in Greensboro, sat down at a drugstore lunch counter and politely 
asked to be served in the same manner as white customers. This  sit-in  marked an inten- 
sification of direct action. Young activists directly challenged local segregation laws by act- 
ing as if these measures simply did not exist. Targeting locations in both the South and the 
North, demonstrators staged nonviolent sit-ins at restaurants, bus and train stations, and 
other public facilities. 
The courage and commitment of these demonstrators brought new energy and 
media attention to the antidiscrimination movement. Singing anthems such as  We 
Shall Overcome  and  Oh, Freedom to promote solidarity, young people pledged their 
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talents, their resources indeed, their lives to the civil-rights struggle. In 1961, an inter- 
racial group of activists from CORE and a new group that had emerged from the sit-in 
movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), risked racist 
retaliation by conducting  freedom rides  across the South. The freedom riders were 
challenging the Kennedy administration to enforce the federal court decisions that had 
declared state laws requiring segregation on interstate buses (and in bus stations) to be 
unconstitutional. 
This grassroots activism forced the Kennedy administration into action of its own. It 
first dispatched U.S. marshals to protect the freedom riders from racist violence. In 1962 
(and again the following year), the White House called on National Guard troops and fed- 
eral marshals to prevent pro-segregationist mobs from halting court-ordered integration at 
several educational institutions in the Deep South, including the Universities of Mississippi 
and Alabama. In November 1962, Kennedy issued a long-promised executive order that 
banned racial discrimination in federally financed housing. The following February, he 
sent Congress a civil-rights bill that called for faster trials in lawsuits seeking to tear down 
barriers designed to prevent African Americans in the South from voting. Events of the 
early 1960s, especially in the South, however, always seemed to outpace the Kennedy 
administration s initiatives. 
The racist violence that convulsed Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 highlighted this 
dynamic. Birmingham s all-white police force unleashed dogs and high-pressure water hoses 
on African Americans, including young children, who were peacefully demonstrating on 
behalf of desegregating that city s public facilities. White supremacists later murdered four 
young girls and injured twenty other people when they bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist 
Church, a center of the civil-rights campaign in Birmingham. After thousands of angry 
African Americans rallied in protest and two more children were killed, this time by police 
officers the Kennedy administration finally moved to staunch the bloodletting. 
By this time, however, the determination and courage of civil-rights activists in defying the 
violence in Birmingham had produced another real-life, televised drama for the entire world 
to watch.  Kennedy finally entered the picture. During an emotion-filled national television 
address, the president pleaded for a national commitment to the battle against discrimina- 
tion. Recent events in Alabama, he declared, had raised  a moral issue . . . as old as Scrip- 
tures and . . . as clear as the Constitution.  The time for  patience  and  delay,  Kennedy 
announced, had passed. Racial strife was already  retarding our Nation s economic and social 
progress and weakening the respect with which the rest of the world regards us.   Against 
the backdrop of a televised battle line that seemed to stretch across the South, the issue of 
civil rights dominated national politics during the last six months of Kennedy s presidency. 
The White House still hoped it might influence the direction and moderate the pace of 
change. It crafted additional legislation designed to dampen the enthusiasm for civil-rights 
demonstrations, without further inflaming white segregationists. Its proposed bill called for a 
ban against racial discrimination in public facilities and housing and for new measures to pro- 
tect the voting rights of African Americans in the South. When the administration recognized 
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that its legislative proposals would not derail a  March on Washington for Jobs and Free- 
dom,  planned for the late summer of 1963, it belatedly endorsed the event, sponsored by 
a coalition of civil-rights and labor organizations. 
On August 28, 1963, an integrated group of more than 200,000 people marched through 
the nation s capital to the Lincoln Memorial. There, Martin Luther King, Jr., deliveredhis 
famous  I Have a Dream  speech. Most other speakers generally applauded Kennedy s latest 
initiatives, but some urged a broader agenda. Demands included a higher minimum wage and 
a federal program to guarantee new jobs. Well-organized and smoothly run, this one-day 
demonstration received overwhelmingly favorable coverage from the national media, especially 
television, and put even greater political pressure on the White House and Congress to 
lend their assistance to the movement. 
Women s Issues 
The seeds of a resurgent women s movement were also being sown, although more qui- 
etly, during the early 1960s. All across the political spectrum, women began speaking out 
more forcefully and visibly than they had during the 1950s. The energy of suburban war- 
riors on the political right nurtured the grassroots of their movement. Phyllis Schlafly, whose 
book A Choice, Not an Echo(1964) became one of the leading conservative manifestos, sug- 
gested how women could blend careers in politics with ones as wives and mothers. African 
American activists such as Bernice Johnson Reagon (whose work with the Freedom Singers 
combined music and social activism) and Fannie Lou Hamer (who spearheaded the orga- 
nization of a racially integrated Freedom Democratic Party in Mississippi) fought discrim- 
ination based on both race and gender. Female union leaders pushed for greater employ- 
ment opportunities and more equitable workplace environments. Chicana farm workers 
became key figures in union organizing efforts in California. Women also played an impor- 
tant role through organizations such as the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) 
and the Women s Strike for Peace in orchestrating opposition to the U.S. Soviet arms race. 
During Kennedy s final year in office, 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, 
which observers soon credited for helping to revive organized feminist activity in the 
United States. Friedan s book drew on her own social criticism from the late 1950s. 
Decrying the narrow confines of domestic life and the lack of public roles available to well- 
educated women, it resonated with the many middle-class women who became standard- 
bearers for  Second Wave Feminism.  
Anxious to address women s concerns, Kennedy appointed a Presidential Commission 
on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. Negotiating differences between 
moderate and more militant members, the commission issued a report that documented 
discrimination against women in employment opportunities and wages. Kennedy 
responded with a presidential order designed to eliminate gender discrimination within 
the federal civil service system. His administration also supported the Equal Pay Act of 
1963, which made it a federal crime for employers to pay lower wages to women who were 
doing the same work as men. 
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The Assassination of John F. Kennedy 
During fall 1963, the Kennedy White House, although still struggling to reframe both 
its domestic and foreign policies, expected JFK would rather easily win reelection in 
1964. Then, around noontime, on November 22, 1963, the president was shot dead as 
his motorcade moved through Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Vice President Lyndon Johnson, 
who had accompanied Kennedy to Texas, hurriedly took the oath of office and then 
rushed back to Washington. Equally quickly, the Dallas police arrested Lee Harvey 
Oswald and pegged him as JFK s assassin. Oswald had loose ties to organized crime, 
had once lived in the Soviet Union, and had a bizarre set of political affiliations, includ- 
ing shadowy connections with groups interested in Cuba. Oswald, who declared his 
innocence, never faced trial. Jack Ruby, whose Dallas nightclub catered to powerful 
underworld figures, killed Oswald, on national television, while the alleged gunman 
was in police custody. A hastily conducted investigation by a special commission 
headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that both Oswald and Ruby had acted 
alone. 
The Warren Commission s account of a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, came under 
intense scrutiny. Competing theories about the number of shots, the trajectory of the bullets, 
the nature of Kennedy s wounds, and the identity of his assassins began to proliferate. Over 
time, a myriad of conspiratorial scenarios including ones pointing toward the CIA, 
high-ranking governmental officials, Castro s Cuba, anti-Castro Cubans, organized 
crime, and even Lyndon Johnson took flight. Oliver Stone s JFK(1991) refocused 
attention on obvious shortcomings in the Warren Commission Report. 
Kennedy s life and presidency remain topics of lively historical debate and tabloid-style 
speculation. Researchers have provided new details about his poor health, reliance on exotic 
medications, and dalliances with women, all of which his loyal aides and a compliant press 
had once kept from public view. As historians speculate about how such revelations might 
have affected Kennedy s ability to make crucial decisions, they continue to debate older ques- 
tions, particularly what JFK might have done in Vietnam and on the domestic front had he 
won the 1964 presidential election. The passage of time, in short, has diminished neither 
scholarly nor popular interest in John F. Kennedy and his 1,000-day presidency. 
Conclusion 
After 1953, conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union increasingly migrated 
to the Third World, where conflict over Cuba, in 1962, brought the two superpowers to 
the brink of nuclear war. Even on those occasions, such as after the Missile Crisis, when 
signs of tension with the USSR seemed to subside, the United States continued to chart a 
determinedly anticommunist course. It pursued the buildup of nuclear weapons, new 
forms of economic pressure, and expanded abilities to conduct covert activities. Develop- 
ments in the Third World, particularly in Cuba and Southeast Asia, became of growing 
concern to U.S. policy makers. 
1100  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
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At home, the economy grew steadily between 1953 and 1963. A cornucopia of new 
consumer products encouraged talk about an age of affluence and abundance but also pro- 
duced apprehension about conformity, unruly youth, and mass culture. At the same time, 
the millions of people sidelined by economic inequality and often disadvantaged by racial 
and ethnic discrimination moved to the center of public debate over liberty and equality. 
Some critics charged that the Eisenhower administration seemed overly cautious in using 
the power of government to spread affluence more widely or to fight discrimination. More 
quietly, particularly in the political and cultural arenas, a new conservative movement also 
began to take shape. These critics from the right claimed that Eisenhower and JFK used 
the power of government too much, not too little. 
The policy initiatives of the Kennedy administration grew, in large part, from the political, 
social, and cultural criticism of the 1950s. Although Kennedy preferred to focus on mat- 
ters of foreign policy, the press of events, particularly those associated with the civil-rights 
movement, forced the president to consider how the power of his office might be used to 
address the issues of liberty and equality at home. 
The post-Kennedy era would continue to highlight questions about liberty, equality, 
and power. Was the United States encouraging freedom in the Third World, particularly 
in Vietnam? Was it sufficiently active in supporting equalitarian movements at home? The 
troubled era of  America s longest war,  1963 74, would turn on how different people 
attempted to respond to these questions. 
S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS 
James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945 1974(1996) provides a good 
overview of the years from 1953 to 1963. For accounts of Eisenhower s presidential leadership, 
begin with Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (rev. ed., 
1994). Chester Pach, Jr. and Elmo Richardson,The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower(1991) 
presents a useful, brief history. On JFK, see Robert Dallek,An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 
1917 1963(2003); Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power(1994); and Seymour 
Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot(1997). 
There are many studies of Eisenhower s foreign policy, but a good sense of the issues and 
scholarly debates can be gleaned from Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging 
Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy(2000). John Prados,Presidents  
Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II through the Persian Gulf 
(1996), and Zachary Karabell, Architects of Intervention: The United States, the Third World, 
and the Cold War, 1946 1962(1999) put an important aspect of policy in a broad perspective. 
Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945 1961 
(1997) argues that cultural initiatives provided weapons in the Cold War. Lawrence Freedman, 
Kennedy s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam(2000) illuminates the major international 
crises of the Kennedy years. 
For events on the home front, James B. Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America s Reaction to 
the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s(1986) discusses cultural fears; Karal Ann Marling, As 
Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (1994) stresses the importance 
Conclusion " 1101 
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of visual imagery; andJames B. Gilbert, Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of 
Science(1997) examines another aspect of America s changing culture. W. T. Lhamon, Jr., 
Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s(2002) advances a 
provocative interpretation. The highly readable examination of the struggle against racial dis- 
crimination by Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954 1963 
(1988) may be augmented by James Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights 
Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy(2001); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the 
Struggle for Postwar Oakland(2003); John D Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of 
Bayard Rustin (2003); and David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the 
Death of Jim Crow(2004). 
On women and families during the 1950s, Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American 
Families in the Cold War Era (rev. ed., 1999) stresses the new emphasis on domestic life and the 
family wage. Consult also, the relevant pages of Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the 
Modern Women s Movement Changed America(2000). Leila J. Rupp, Survival in the Doldrums: 
The American Women s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s(1987); Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., 
Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945 1960(1994); Stephanie 
Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trip(1992); and Martin 
Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s to 1970s 
(2006) work against that grain. 
1102  "CHAPTER 28  "Affluence and Its Discontents, 1953 1963 
Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to 
this textbook: http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin 
Also find self-tests and additional resources at ThomsonNOW. ThomsonNOW is 
an integrated online suite of services and resources with proven ease of use and 
efficient paths to success, delivering the results you want NOW! 
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America during Its Longest War, 
1963 1974 
T 
he years from 1963 to 1974 brought political, social, and cultural upheaval to most 
areas of the world, including the United States. Lyndon Baines Johnson promised to fin- 
ish what John Kennedy had begun, but popular memory has come to recall LBJ s troubled 
presidency (1963 69) more negatively than Kennedy s. When looking at foreign policy, 
Johnson faced a critical question: Should the United States deploy its own combat forces 
to prop up South Vietnam, its beleaguered ally? When surveying the domestic scene, 
where Johnson hoped to focus his attention, he already knew what he would do: mobilize 
the federal government s power to promote greater liberty and equality. Very quickly, 
however, Johnson saw his domestic dreams begin to vanish in the face of the ongoing for- 
eign nightmare in Vietnam and turmoil at home. By 1968, the United States was politically 
polarized and awash in both foreign and domestic crises. 
The polarization so much in evidence during 1968 seemed to worsen during the years 
that followed. By 1974, when a series of political scandals, known as the  Watergate Crisis,  
forced Richard Nixon to leave the presidency under pressure of impeachment, the nation s 
political and social fabrics looked very different from those of 1963. 
The Great Society 
29 
Lyndon B. Johnsonlacked Kennedy s media-friendly charisma, but he possessed other 
political assets. As a member of the House of Representatives during the late 1930s and early 
1940s and as majority leader of the U.S. Senate during the 1950s Johnson mastered the art 
of interest-group horse trading. Few legislative issues, it appeared, defied an LBJ-forged con- 
sensus. Every significant interest group could be flattered, cajoled, or threatened into lending 
this towering Texan its support. During Johnson s time in Congress, his wealthy Texas bene- 
factors gained valuable oil and gas concessions and lucrative construction contracts, while 
Johnson acquired his own personal fortune. Johnson s skill in gaining federal funding for 
Focus Question 
How did the Johnson administration define Great Society goals, and how did it 
approach problem solving? Why did the Great Society produce so much controversy? 
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ambitious building projects brought economic growth to cities such as Dallas and Houston 
and to much of the Southwest. 
Kennedy s death gave Johnson, who had been frustrated by his limited job descrip- 
tion while serving as JFK s vice president, the opportunity to display his political skills 
on the presidential stage. Confident of being able to forge a national consensus behind a 
bold program for social and economic change, Johnson began his presidency by asking 
Congress to honor JFK s memory. He urged passage of legislation that Kennedy s admin- 
istration had proposed and bombarded legislators with much grander proposals of his 
own. Between January 8, when he delivered his first State of the Union address, until 
August 27, 1964, when he accepted the Democratic Party s presidential nomination, 
Johnson concentrated on three domestic issues: tax cutting, civil rights, and economic 
inequality. 
1104  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
1963 Johnson assumes presidency and pledges to continue Kennedy s initiatives 
1964 Congress passes Kennedy s tax bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Economic Opportunity Act  " Gulf 
of Tonkin Resolution gives Johnson authority to conduct undeclared war  " Johnson defeats Barry 
Goldwater in presidential election 
1965 Johnson announces plans for the Great Society  " Malcolm X assassinated  " U.S. intervenes in Dominican 
Republic  " Johnson announces significant U.S. troop deployments in Vietnam  " Congress passes Voting 
Rights Act  " Violence rocks Los Angeles and other urban areas 
1966 Black Power movement emerges  " Mirandav. Arizonadecision guarantees rights of criminal suspects  " 
Ronald Reagan elected governor of California  " U.S. begins massive air strikes in North Vietnam 
1967 Large antiwar demonstrations begin  " Beatles release Sgt. Pepper s Lonely Hearts Club Band 
1968 Tet offensive accelerates debates over war (January)  " Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated (April)  " Robert 
F. Kennedy assassinated (June)  " Violence rocks Democratic national convention in Chicago  " Civil Rights 
Act of 1968 passed  " Vietnam peace talks begin in Paris  " Richard Nixon elected president 
1969 Nixon announces  Vietnamization  policy  " Reports of My Lai massacre become public 
1970 U.S. troops enter Cambodia  " Student demonstrators killed at Kent State and Jackson State  " First Earth 
Day observed  " Environmental Protection Act passed  " Clean Air Act passed 
1971 Pentagon Paperspublished  " White House  Plumbers  formed  " Military court convicts Lieutenant Calley 
for My Lai incident 
1972 Nixon crushes McGovern in presidential election 
1973 Paris peace accords signed  " Roev. Wadeupholds women s right to abortion  " Nixon s Watergate troubles 
begin to escalate 
1974 House votes impeachment, and Nixon resigns  " Ford assumes presidency 
1975 Saigon falls to North Vietnamese forces 
C HR O NO L O G Y 
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Closing the New Frontier 
Even as Johnson closed JFK s New Frontier, he staked out additional political territory. In 
May 1964, during an address at Michigan University, Johnson declared it was time to 
 move upward to the Great Society,  which rested on  liberty and abundance for all.  The 
Great Society, according to LBJ, would not provide Americans with  a safe harbor, a rest- 
ing place, a final objective, a finished work,  but rather  a challenge constantly renewed, 
beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous 
products of our labor.  
To stimulate the economic growth needed to produce the Great Society s abundance, 
Johnson had first, several months earlier in his presidency, emphasized the importance of 
cutting taxes. Intensively lobbying members of Congress who opposed the budget deficits 
that tax reductions would produce, he secured passage of the $10 billion tax-cut package 
JFK had earlier proposed. Its supporters hailed the measure as the guarantor of continu- 
ing economic growth. Although economists continue to disagree as to how much this tax 
measure actually contributed to the economic boom of the mid-1960s, it appeared to work. 
GNP rose 7 percent in 1964 and 8 percent the following year, unemployment dropped, 
and inflation remained low. 
Advocating greater liberty and equality, Johnson pushed a more extensive version of 
Kennedy s civil-rights proposal through Congress. In early February 1964, the House of 
Representatives passed its own civil-rights bill. It included an amendment, Title VII of the 
measure eventually signed into law, that barred discrimination based not simply on  race  
but on  sex  as well. Some southern Democrats had hoped that such a provision might 
scuttle the entire bill, but other House members saw the addition as a welcome victory for 
women. This provision would soon assist an already resurgent women s movement. 
Although Johnson was championing the civil-rights bill as another memorial to 
Kennedy, he fully recognized that southerners in the Democratic Party would continue try- 
ing to block it. Consequently, he and his allies in the U.S. Senate courted crucial Republi- 
can support for curtailing a southern-led filibuster, for hammering out compromises on key 
provisions, and for reconciling the differing bills passed by the two houses of Congress. 
Johnson finally obtained the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a truly bipartisan measure, in 
July 1964. It strengthened existing federal remedies, to be monitored by a new Equal 
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), against job discrimination. More contro- 
versially, the act s  public accommodations  provision, which resembled an 1875 civil- 
rights law that an earlier Supreme Court had invalidated, prohibited racial discrimination 
in all facilities such as hotels, motels, and restaurants in any way connected to the flow 
of interstate commerce. Opponents of this section saw it as an overextension of federal 
power and an attack on the personal liberties of property owners. Its proponents pre- 
dicted, correctly as it turned out, that the current Supreme Court would reject these 
constitutional claims. 
Finally, Congress responded favorably to Johnson s third domestic priority, legislation to 
deal with socioeconomic inequality. A month after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 
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under constant prodding from the White House, legislators adopted another landmark 
measure, the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA). Coming only six months after Johnson 
had called for  an unconditional war on poverty in America,  during his January 1964 
State of the Union address, the EOA provided LBJ with the means to launch a multifront 
campaign. 
A new executive agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) would coordinate 
a variety of different initiatives. LBJ charged the OEO, first headed by R. Sargent Shriver, 
a member-by-marriage of the Kennedy family, with eliminating  the paradox of poverty 
in the midst of plenty.  In addition to establishing the new agency, the EOA mandated 
federal-government loans for rural and small-business development; established a work- 
training program called the Jobs Corps; created Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), 
a domestic version of the Peace Corps; provided low-wage, public service jobs for young 
people; and began the  work-study  program to assist college students. In addition, it 
authorized grassroots social initiatives, Community Action Programs (CAPs), to be planned 
by local community groups but funded by Washington. 
Meanwhile, however, Lyndon Johnson and the rest of the nation could already see signs 
that conflict would surely accompany change, particularly on the issue of civil rights. Dur- 
ing the same summer that Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and created the 
OEO, violence connected to racial issues broke out in different parts of the country. In 
New York City, tensions between police officers and African American demonstrators, 
protesting policing practices that had led to the fatal shooting of a black youth, flared into 
confrontations during mid-July. 
At almost the same time, a different kind of violence rolled through those parts of 
Mississippi where a coalition of civil-rights groups was sponsoring what it called  Freedom 
Summer. This campaign to register black voters, by an interracial group of young vol- 
unteers including white northern college students, produced a murderous backlash from 
some segregationists. At least six civil-rights workers met violent deaths during that blood- 
soaked Mississippi summer. In the most notorious incident, whose legal fallout would last 
into the 21st century, KKK members and law-enforcement officials from Neshoba County, 
Mississippi, conspired to kidnap and brutally murder three volunteers James Chaney, 
Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. 
Other activists pressed forward, only to see the grassroots organizing of that summer 
frustrated by Lyndon Johnson and a majority of the national Democratic Party. Pressured 
by LBJ, the 1964 Democratic convention voted to seat Mississippi s  regular  all-white del- 
egates, people who clearly intended to desert LBJ and the national party during the fall 
election. Democratic leaders gave only token recognition to members of the alternative, 
racially diverse  Freedom Democratic Party  (FDP). This rebuff prompted people, such as 
Fannie Lou Hamer, who had risked their lives to create the FDP, to recall earlier suspi- 
cions about Lyndon Johnson. Although LBJ seemed more committed to civil rights than 
John Kennedy had been, where would Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, his handpicked 
vice presidential running mate stand after the 1964 election? During a bittersweet meeting 
1106  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
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with Humphrey, Fannie Lou Hamer pointedly wondered if a willingness to reject the FDP 
signaled that this longtime supporter might soon abandon the civil-rights cause altogether. 
The Election of 1964 
By the fall of 1964, changes occurring within GOP ranks made Democratic support seem 
especially important to civil-rights forces. After a series of bitterly contested primary contests, 
the Republicans nominated Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the hero of conservatives 
from the South and Far West, to challenge Lyndon Johnson. Strategists for Goldwater pre- 
dicted that an aggressive campaign, based on an unabashedly conservative platform, would 
stir the hearts of the millions of voters who presumably rejected both Democratic policies 
and Dwight Eisenhower s moderate Republican ones. Goldwater denounced Johnson s for- 
eign policy for tolerating communist expansion and attacked his domestic agenda, including 
strong support for civil rights, for destroying individual liberties. One of only eight Republi- 
can senators who had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Goldwater denounced the mea- 
sure as an unwarranted extension of national power to meet the kind of problem, discrimi- 
nation, which only state and local governments could remedy. 
As the presidential campaign heated up, Goldwater s well-documented tendency for 
making ill-considered pronouncements haunted his candidacy. Goldwater once suggested 
that people who feared nuclear war were  silly and sissified.  He wondered, out loud, if 
Social Security should become a voluntary program. His proclamation, at the 1964 Repub- 
lican convention, that  extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice  and  moderation in 
the pursuit of justice is no virtue,  fed Democratic claims that Goldwater represented polit- 
ical  extremism  rather than Republican, or even principled conservative, values. In time, 
Democrats succeeded in denying Goldwater one of his primary assets, his refusal to tem- 
porize on most controversial issues. Instead, they successfully portrayed the blunt-speaking 
Goldwater as wildly mercurial, perhaps even fanatical or mentally unbalanced. Republi- 
cans, for their part, leveled equally outsized charges against LBJ. One anti-Johnson tract, 
A Texan Looks at LBJ(1964), accused him of everything from stuffing ballot boxes to plot- 
ting murderous violence against political opponents. 
As fantastical name-calling of this kind marked the 1964 campaign trail, a significant 
bloc of normally Republican voters deserted Goldwater, whose candidacy seemed to 
have strayed too far from middle-of-the-road signposts. The senator from Arizona led the 
GOP to a spectacular defeat in November. Johnson carried 44 states and won more than 
60 percent of the popular vote; the Democrats also gained 38 additional seats in Congress. 
On the surface the 1964 election seemed a triumph for Lyndon Johnson s vision for 
using governmental power to change domestic life. 
In retrospect, however, the 1964 election signaled important political changes that would 
soon rebound against Johnson and, in time, the national Democratic Party. During the 
Democratic primaries, Alabama s segregationist governor, George Wallace, had run strongly 
as a  protest candidate  against the president in several states. Already well-positioned as an 
opponent of the civil-rights movement, Wallace began to broaden his message, denouncing 
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any kind of  meddling  by Washington in local affairs. The 1964 election proved the last 
in which the Democratic Party would capture the White House by proposing to expand 
the domestic reach of the national government. 
The GOP s 1964 effort, in contrast, merely provided a refueling stop for the conserva- 
tive political machine that had propelled Goldwater s candidacy. His staff pioneered sev- 
eral innovative campaign tactics, such as direct-mail fundraising. While working to refine 
these techniques, conservative strategists insisted that 1964 would mark the beginning, 
not the end, of the Republican Party s movement to the right. 
Goldwater s stand against national civil-rights legislation, his supporters noted, helped 
him carry five southern states. These victories along with George Wallace s earlier appeal 
during the Democratic primaries suggested just how much the GOP might gain by 
opposing additional civil-rights measures. After many years of tentative courtship, the 
Republican Party finally seemed ready to win over southern whites who had once been 
solidly Democratic. In an important sign of desertions to come, Senator J. Strom Thurmond 
of South Carolina announced during the 1964 campaign that he was permanently leaving 
the Democratic Party and joining the GOP. 
Less-noticed voting trends in California provided conservatives with another sign of 
how racial issues were continuing to reshape political alignments. Although the Johnson- 
Humphrey ticket easily carried California, winning more than 60 percent of the popular 
vote, a coalition of real-estate interests and suburban activists sponsored a successful refer- 
endum,  Proposition 14.  It repealed the state s recently enacted  Rumford Act,  which pro- 
hibited racial discrimination in the sale or renting of housing. To overturn this statewide 
open housing measure, proponents of Proposition 14, which gained 65 percent of the vote 
1108  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
LBJ S 1964 Campaign against Barry Goldwater In this television ad from the 1964 campaign, Lyndon Johnson s supporters 
exploited Republican Barry Goldwater s image as a far-right extremist who might take the nation into a nuclear war. 
11019_29_ch29_p1103-1154.qxd  6/4/07  3:38 PM  Page 1108
throughout the state and much higher percentages in newer suburban areas, downplayed 
racial issues. Instead, they denounced the Rumford Act because it regulated what prop- 
erty owners could do with their homes and apartment buildings for trampling on per- 
sonal liberties and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. 
The Goldwater campaign of 1964, especially in California and the Sunbelt states, also 
introduced an important group of conservative activists to national politics. Ronald Reagan  
previously a radio personality, Hollywood actor, labor leader, corporate spokesperson, and 
Roosevelt Democrat proved such an effective campaigner in 1964 that conservative 
Republicans in California began grooming him for electoral politics. Younger conserva- 
tives, such as William Rehnquist and Newt Gingrich, entered the national arena by work- 
ing for Goldwater. Historians now generally credit Goldwater s 1964 candidacy for help- 
ing to refashion conservatism as a political force capable of dismantling the Democratic 
coalition that had dominated national politics since the 1930s. 
Lyndon Johnson s Great Society 
During the fall of 1964, however, the Democratic ranks seemed stronger than they had 
been in decades. Confident of his political support, Lyndon Johnson hoped to move 
quickly. Detailing plans he had hinted at during his 1964 campaign, Johnson fully 
unveiled a domestic vision designed, in his words, to  enrich and elevate our national life.  
Some parts of LBJ s Great Societyseemed constructed on top of the designs of his 
Democratic predecessors. Nationally funded medical coverage for the elderly (Medicare) 
and for low-income citizens (Medicaid) appeared to be capstones to efforts begun during 
the New Deal and Fair Deal eras. Similarly, an addition to the president s cabinet, the 
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), built on earlier plans for improv- 
ing coordination and execution of urban revitalization programs. This new cabinet post, LBJ 
promised, would prevent urban renewal from becoming urban removal (see chapter 28). 
In 1965, Congress enacted two other milestone measures, both of which addressed 
matters long discussed and long avoided. A new immigration law, the first measure ever 
directed through the Senate by newly elected Edward Kennedy, finally abolished the geo- 
graphically discriminatory  national origins  quota system established in 1924. Hence- 
forth, all nationalities of people wishing to immigrate to the United States faced roughly 
the same set of hurdles. This change, in practice, removed some of the previous barriers 
to people coming from regions outside of Europe (see chapter 31). The Voting Rights Act 
of 1965, which created a federal oversight system to monitor election procedures in the 
South, capped a long-term effort to end racial discrimination at the ballot box. 
Other Great Society proposals rested on the economic growth that seemed, during the 
mid-1960s, destined to go on forever. Even an increasingly costly war in Southeast Asia 
could not dampen Johnson s optimism. Continuing prosperity would provide the tax dollars 
the president needed to underwrite his bold expansion of national power. 
The array of Johnson-sponsored initiatives that rolled through Congress in 1965 and 
1966 heartened LBJ s supporters and appalled his conservative critics. By one count, leg- 
islators passed nearly 200 new laws. The  Model Cities Program  offered smaller-scale 
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alternatives to urban renewal efforts. Rent supplements and an expanded food stamp pro- 
gram went to help feed low-income families. Head Start provided educational opportunity 
for children who came from backgrounds social scientists labeled  disadvantaged.  New 
educational programs targeted federal funds for upgrading classroom instruction, especially 
in low-income neighborhoods, and the Legal Services program promised government 
lawyers for clients who could not afford private attorneys. Planners of the Great Society 
stressed that measures such as these would provide social services that could help people 
fight their own way out of economic distress. This service-based approach to domestic 
social policy, Johnson insisted, would give people a  hand up  rather than a  handout.  
The CAP initiative, part of the earlier EOA legislation, took a significantly different tack. 
Although drawing on social-science expertise, which had guided and informed other Great 
Society measures, this initiative ultimately sought to free ordinary citizens from the dictates 
and directions of social-service bureaucracies. CAP proposed to empower grassroots 
activists, working through neighborhood organizations rather than through political chan- 
nels dominated by local city hall establishments, to design community-based projects. The 
most promising of these, EOA legislation promised, could gain funding from Washington. 
Those who embraced CAP hailed its potential for redistributing power. It offered local 
communities the leverage that came from enjoying adequate financial resources while still 
allowing them, rather than outside bureaucracies, the political power to make crucial deci- 
sions about their own needs and priorities. By promoting  maximum feasible participation  
by ordinary citizens rather than relying entirely on the expertise of social planners or on 
the political clout of party leaders, the architects of CAP hoped to grow new varieties of 
grassroots democracy that could change U.S. political culture from the bottom up. 
Evaluating the Great Society 
How did the Great Society most of which initially enjoyed large, sometimes bipartisan 
majorities in Congress become so controversial, so quickly? Most obviously, programs 
that further extended Washington s influence rekindled old debates about the use of the 
powers of the national government, as both an issue of constitutional law and a matter of 
pragmatic policy making. The Great Society, in this sense, gave an already well-positioned 
conservative movement another set of convenient targets. In addition, Johnson s extrava- 
gant rhetoric, such as promising to win an  unconditional  victory over poverty, raised 
expectations that no administration could possibly satisfy within the time frames voters 
normally use to judge the success or failure of governmental initiatives. 
Perhaps most importantly, the expectation that continued economic growth would gen- 
erate tax revenues sufficient to finance new social programs faded as the nation s economic 
engine began to sputter. Facing financial worries of their own, many people who had ini- 
tially been willing to accept the Great Society became receptive to the argument, first pop- 
ularized by George Wallace and the Goldwater campaign, that bureaucrats in Washington 
were taking their hard-earned dollars and wasting them on flawed social experiments. 
Worsening economic conditions, exacerbated by the escalating cost of the war in Vietnam, 
1110  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
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made federal expenditures on domestic social welfare measures more controversial than at 
any time since the 1930s. 
Although historians agree about how Johnson s domestic programs lost support, there 
has been considerable disagreement about the Great Soiety s impact on daily life. Charles 
Murray s influential Losing Ground (1984) framed one powerful view. This study first 
charged that LBJ s social programs encouraged antisocial behavior. It argued that too many 
people, lured by what they could gain from Great Society measures, abandoned the goals 
of marrying, settling down, and seeking employment. Moreover, the money given over to 
Great Society programs created government deficits that slowed economic growth. Had ill- 
advised social spending not undermined personal initiative and disrupted the nation s 
economy, continued economic growth could have provided virtually all workers with a 
comfortable lifestyle. This conservative argument portrayed the Great Society as the cause 
of, not the solution for, economic distress and social disarray. 
Most other close students of social policy treated the Great Society slightly more kindly. 
They found scant evidence, as opposed to colorful anecdotes, for the claim that most peo- 
ple preferred receiving welfare to seeking meaningful work. They generally blamed spend- 
ing in the military sector because of the U.S. commitment in Vietnam, rather than outlays 
for domestic social programs, for generating the soaring budget deficits and a burgeoning 
national debt. Funds actually spent on Great Society programs, in this view, neither 
matched Johnson s promises nor reached the lavish levels claimed in conservative studies 
such as Losing Ground. 
From a different perspective, many antipoverty activists faulted the Great Society for 
not seriously challenging the prevailing distribution of political and economic power in the 
United States. The Johnson administration, they argued, remained closely wedded to large- 
scale bureaucratic solutions, forged and then directed by people connected to Washington 
elites and entrenched interest groups. The White House jettisoned, for example, the CAP 
model for grassroots empowerment after local political officials complained about having 
to compete with activist groups for federal funds. In addition, by assuming that economic 
growth would continue to underwrite the financing of most federal initiatives, the people 
who planned the Great Society had also failed to consider revision of the tax code and 
other measures designed to redistribute income and wealth more equitably. Proponents of 
this critique concluded that the Johnson administration never seriously tried to fulfill its 
own domestic promises. 
Most economists and historians have come to agree that the Great Society signaled a 
significant, though not revolutionary, break with the past. The national government, for 
the first time in several decades, devoted substantial new funding to social welfare pro- 
grams. Washington s financial outlay on the domestic front increased more than 10 percent 
during every year of LBJ s presidency. According to one study, federal spending on social 
welfare in 1960 constituted 28 percent of total governmental outlays; by 1970, this figure 
had risen to more than 40 percent. Moreover, some Great Society programs produced sig- 
nificant change. Medicaid, the legal services program, and job training initiatives gave 
The Great Society  " 1111 
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many low-income families access to things that more affluent families had long taken for 
granted. Civil-rights laws, even if they failed to eliminate all forms of discrimination, did 
use federal power to expand legally protected freedoms. 
The Great Society, however, proved a political failure, unable to retain the popular sup- 
port it had claimed in 1964 65. Variations on the severe evaluation framed in Losing Ground 
came to dominate popular memory and political culture. Continued allegiance to the Great 
Society agenda, as a matter of political pragmatism, could become a serious liability for 
nearly all Republican and most Democratic politicians during the late 1960s and early 1970s. 
Over time, as a highly critical view of the Great Society s flaws and failures helped energize 
the conservative wing of the GOP, fewer Democrats would risk stepping forward to defend 
Lyndon Johnson s vision. In short, Johnson s domestic policies helped inflame political pas- 
sions, which soon turned against LBJ and his Great Society. A new generation of Democrats 
eventually came to dismiss  big government  as a relic of the past (see chapter 32). 
Escalation in Vietnam 
1112  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson s ultimately divisive crusade to build a Great Society at home 
found its counterpart abroad. His pledge to preserve South Vietnam as a noncommunist, 
pro-U.S. enclave demanded ever more of his nation s resources. Even as Johnson s policies 
in Vietnam strained the U.S. economy, they polarized its politics and culture. 
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution 
Immediately after John Kennedy s assassination, Johnson hesitated to widen the war in 
Southeast Asia. A committed Cold Warrior, however, LBJ hated the thought that his politi- 
cal associates let alone the general electorate might judge him  soft  on communism. He 
soon accepted the recommendation of his military advisers: Only the use of air strikes against 
targets in North Vietnam could save the South Vietnamese government from imminent col- 
lapse. He prepared a congressional resolution authorizing such an escalation of hostilities. 
Events in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam, provided the rationale for 
taking this resolution to Capitol Hill. On August 1, 1964, the U.S. destroyer Maddox,while 
on an intelligence-gathering mission in disputed waters that North Vietnam claimed as its 
own, exchanged gunfire with North Vietnamese ships. Three days later, the Maddox 
returned to the same area, accompanied by the Turner Joy. During severe weather, which 
distorted radar and sonar readings, U.S. naval commanders reported what possibly could 
have been signs of a failed North Vietnamese torpedo attack. 
Focus Question 
Through what incremental steps did the Johnson administration involve the 
United States ever more deeply in the war in Vietnam? What seemed to be the 
goal of its policies? 
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Although the Maddox s commander later radioed that the episode needed further analy- 
sis, Johnson immediately denounced  unprovoked aggression  by North Vietnam against 
the United States and appealed to Congress for support. (A subsequent study concluded 
that the initial attack had likely occurred, but that reports of hostile fire on the second 
occasion lacked credible supporting evidence.) Congress quickly, and overwhelmingly, 
authorized the president to take  all necessary measures to repel armed attack.  Johnson 
treated this  Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as tantamount to a congressional declaration of 
war and cited it as legal justification for all subsequent U.S. military action in Vietnam. 
Despite his vigorous response to events in the Gulf of Tonkin, Lyndon Johnson suc- 
cessfully positioned himself as a cautious moderate during the presidential campaign of 
1964. When Barry Goldwater demanded stronger measures against North Vietnam and 
even hinted at possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, Johnson s campaign managers 
cited Goldwater s proposed strategies as further evidence of his extremist bent. One noto- 
rious TV ad even portrayed the Republican candidate as a threat to the survival of civi- 
lization. Johnson seemed to promise he would not commit U.S. combat troops to any land 
war in Southeast Asia. 
Soon after the election, however, Johnson decisively deepened the U.S. involvement 
there. More than a year after the 1963 coup against Diem (see chapter 28), South Vietnam 
faced continued political chaos. The incompetence of successive governments in Saigon 
was still fueling popular discontent, and South Vietnamese troops were still deserting at 
an alarming rate. In January 1965, another Saigon regime collapsed, and factional discord 
stalled the emergence of any viable alternative. 
Lacking an effective ally in South Vietnam, Johnson once more pondered his options. 
His close aides offered conflicting advice. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy pre- 
dicted Saigon s defeat unless the United States greatly increased its own military role. 
Arguing for this same option, Walt W. Rostow assured Johnson that once North Vietnam 
recognized the United States would never abandon its commitment, this small nation 
could only conclude that it would never overrun South Vietnam. Undersecretary of State 
George Ball, by contrast, warned that the introduction of U.S. combat troops could not 
preserve South Vietnam. He wrote that  no one has demonstrated that a white ground 
force of whatever size can win a guerrilla war . . . in jungle terrain in the midst of a popu- 
lation that refuses cooperation to the white forces.  Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, 
who held an advanced degree in Asian history, urged Johnson to find some way of reunit- 
ing Vietnam as a neutral country. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, afflicted by interservice rival- 
ries, provided conflicting readings of the current military situation and no clear guidance 
on how Johnson might proceed. 
Although privately doubting U.S. chances of preserving an anticommunist South Vietnam, 
Johnson became obsessed about the political and diplomatic consequences of a U.S. pull- 
out. He feared that the domestic reaction to anything resembling a communist victory  
such as Washington s acceptance of a coalition government in Saigon that included the 
NLF would enrage conservative activists in the United States and thereby endanger his 
Escalation in Vietnam " 1113 
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Great Society programs. Moreover, Johnson accepted the familiar Cold War proposition 
that a U.S. withdrawal would undoubtedly set off a  domino effect,  toppling noncom- 
munist governments in Asia. A pullback there would, then, encourage communist-leaning 
insurgencies in Latin America, increase Soviet pressure on West Berlin, and damage U.S. 
credibility around the world. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy, before him, had staked U.S. 
prestige on preserving a noncommunist South Vietnam. Johnson either had to abandon 
that commitment, by allowing South Vietnam s government to collapse, or chart an uncer- 
tain course by employing U.S. power to prop it up. 
While remaining pessimistic about the results of his decision, Johnson chose the second 
option: dramatically expanding U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. He ordered a 
sustained campaign of bombing in North Vietnam, code-named  Rolling Thunder.  He 
also deployed U.S. ground forces in order to help the government in Saigon regain lost ter- 
ritory, expanded U.S.-directed covert operations, and stepped up economic aid to the 
beleaguered South Vietnamese government. Only six months after the 1964 presidential 
election, with his advisers still divided, Johnson decided the United States had no choice 
but to wage a wider war. 
The War Continues to Widen 
The war grew more intense during 1965. Hoping to break the enemy s will, U.S. military 
commanders sought to inflict ever-increasing casualties. The Johnson administration 
authorized use of napalm, a toxic chemical that almost instantly charred both foliage and 
people, and allowed the Air Force to bomb new targets. Additional U.S. combat troops 
also arrived in South Vietnam, but every U.S. escalation seemed to require a further one. 
After North Vietnam rejected a Johnson-sponsored peace plan, which it viewed as little 
more than an offer for Hanoi to surrender, the United States once again stepped up its mil- 
itary effort. North Vietnam s leader, Ho Chi Minh, who was now pursuing a long-term strat- 
egy of attrition, became convinced that Johnson could not continue to find public or con- 
gressional support in the United States to fight such a costly war so far from U.S. shores. 
In April 1965, Johnson applied his Cold War, anticommunist foreign policy closer to 
home. Responding to exaggerated reports about a communist threat to the government of 
the Dominican Republic, Johnson sent U.S. troops to unseat a left-leaning, but legally 
elected, president and to install a Dominican government eager to support U.S. interests. 
This U.S. incursion into the Dominican Republican violated a long-standing  good neighbor  
pledge, by the United States, to avoid military intervention in Latin America. Although 
Johnson s action angered critics throughout the hemisphere, the overthrow of a leftist 
government in the Dominican Republic seemed to steel the White House s determination 
to hold the line against communism in Vietnam. 
Later that same spring as yet another government, the fifth since Diem s 1963 murder, 
appeared in Saigon, U.S. strategists continued to wonder how they might stabilize South 
Vietnam. General William Westmoreland, who directed the U.S. military effort there, recom- 
mended moving even more aggressively and sending additional numbers of U.S. troops on 
1114  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
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 search and destroy  missions against communist forces. In July 1965, Johnson publicly 
announced he would send 50,000 additional military personnel to Vietnam. Privately, LBJ 
pledged that the Pentagon could have another 50,000, and he left open the possibility of send- 
ing even more. To supplement the search-and-destroy strategy, he also approved  saturation 
bombing in the South Vietnamese countryside and an intensified air campaign against North 
Vietnam. (See Map 29.1, Vietnam War, in the color insert following page 1248.) 
Some advisers urged Johnson to admit candidly the greatly expanded scope of the U.S. 
effort. They recommended seeking an outright declaration of war by Congress or at least 
legislation allowing the executive branch to wield the economic and informational controls 
that previous presidential administrations had used during wartime. But Johnson worried 
about arousing greater protests in Congress and from a growing antiwar movement. Rather 
than risk debates that could ramp up dissent against his policies, Johnson decided to stress 
the administration s willingness to negotiate and to act as if the war the United States was 
now fighting was not really a war. As the Johnson administration talked of seeing  light at 
the end of the tunnel  in Vietnam, it apparently hoped that most people in the United 
States would remain largely in the dark. 
Over the remaining years of Lyndon Johnson s presidency, U.S. involvement steadily 
grew. By late 1965, the number of U.S. combat troops in Vietnam totaled more than 
200,000; three years later, this figure had more than doubled, to about 535,000. The level 
of violence escalated as well. In pursuit of  Operation RANCHHAND,  an effort to elimi- 
nate the natural cover for enemy troop movements, the United States dropped huge quan- 
tities of herbicides, scorching South Vietnam s croplands and defoliating roughly half of its 
forests. Approximately 1.5 million tons of bombs more than all the tonnage dropped 
during the Second World War pounded North Vietnamese cities and pummeled villages 
and hamlets in the South. Still, Johnson carefully avoided bombing close to the North 
Vietnamese Chinese border or doing anything else that might provoke either China or the 
Soviet Union to go beyond supporting and supplying North Vietnam. 
Despite all of the troops and violence, Vietnam remained a  limited  war. The U.S. strat- 
egy concentrated on straining the NLF and North Vietnam by continually escalating the cost 
they would pay, in lost lives and bombed-out infrastructure. Once the price of continuing 
to fight became too high, the Johnson administration reasoned, the other side would finally 
stop its effort to displace a pro-U.S., anticommunist government in South Vietnam. 
The weekly  body count  of enemy purportedly killed became the primary measure for 
gauging U.S. progress in South Vietnam. Pentagon estimates that a kill ratio of 10 to 1 would 
force North Vietnam and the NLF to pull back not only encouraged the U.S. military to 
unleash more firepower but also to inflate enemy casualty figures. This same calculation 
provided an automatic justification for more U.S. troops: Whenever the number of 
enemy forces seemed to increase, the Pentagon required additional U.S. troops to main- 
tain the desired kill ratio. Johnson, whose notorious temper flared at the first hint of bad 
news, welcomed improving kill statistics as a tangible sign that victory was around the 
corner. North Vietnam, assisted by the Soviet Union and China, however, managed to 
Escalation in Vietnam " 1115 
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match every U.S. escalation. 
Conscripting younger fighters 
and employing more women in 
support positions, the North 
Vietnamese continued to funnel 
troops and supplies into the 
South, using a shifting network 
of roads and paths called the 
 Ho Chi Minh Trail.  By the end 
of 1967, several of Johnson s 
key aides, most notably Sec- 
retary of Defense Robert 
McNamara, decided that the 
United States could not sustain, 
from any reasonable costs ver- 
sus benefits perspective, its 
seemingly open-ended commit- 
ment to South Vietnam. The 
majority of Johnson s advisers, 
however, refused to accept such 
a gloomy assessment. 
Meanwhile, the destruction wreaked by U.S. forces was giving NLF, North Vietnamese, 
Chinese, and Soviet leaders a decided advantage in what had become an international war 
of images. Critics of the U.S. effort, in the United States and around the world, high- 
lighted pictures showing the results of Johnson s strategy. Demonstrations against the 
United States became especially prominent features of political life in Western 
Europe. Antiwar protestors hounded LBJ and members of his administration, every- 
where they went, and the president began complaining of becoming a prisoner in his 
own White House. 
In addition, the United States failed to find an attractive, or even very effective, ally in 
South Vietnam. The devastation of the countryside, the economic destabilization caused 
by the flood of U.S. dollars, and the corruption in Saigon took their toll. The  pacification  
and  strategic hamlet  programs, which gathered Vietnamese farmers into tightly guarded 
villages, sounded viable in Washington but created greater chaos by uprooting at least one- 
quarter of the South Vietnamese citizenry from its villages and ancestral lands. Buddhist 
priests persistently demonstrated against foreign influence. When, in 1967, two generals, 
Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky, after having sustained a military regime longer 
than any of their predecessors, tried to legitimate their rule with a nationwide election, 
the effort fell short. A voting process marked by corruption only highlighted the precar- 
iousness of their political position and underscored their dependence on support from 
Washington. 
1116  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
An Image That Shocked This 1968 photo, widely reproduced because of the 
absence of formal governmental censorship during the Vietnam conflict, shows a 
South Vietnamese military officer summarily executing a suspected Viet Cong 
leader on the streets of Saigon. The prevalence of images such as this one 
complicated the U.S. government s attempt to portray its support of South 
Vietnam as a fight for freedom and the rule of law. 
A 
P 
 
Im 
a 
g 
e 
s 
/E 
d 
d 
ie 
 A 
d 
am 
s 
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The Media and the War 
Johnson continually gave presidential lectures about the necessity for upholding the 
nation s honor and diplomatic commitments, but dissent slowly mounted. During the 
SecondWorld War and the conflict in Korea, presidential administrations had restricted 
media coverage. Hoping to avoid the controversy that overt censorship would surely have 
caused, the Johnson administration employed informal ways of managing the flow of 
information about Vietnam. Many of the print reporters sent to Southeast Asia seemed 
content, at first, to accept the reassuring reports handed out by U.S. officials in Saigon. 
Only a relatively few, such as David Halberstam, ventured into the South Vietnamese 
countryside, where they saw a different conflict than the one being described back at U.S. 
headquarters. Even before media pundits started talking about television making Vietnam 
a  living room war  one that people in the United States could watch in their own 
homes Johnson kept three sets playing in his office in order to monitor what viewers 
might be seeing. Most of what he saw, early on, he liked. 
Antiwar activists continually assailed what they viewed as the U.S. media s uncritical 
reporting about events and policies in Vietnam. According to a common complaint, too many 
media executives appeared willing to accept story frames constructed by the White House, 
and too many journalists seemed to base their stories on official handouts. During the early 
years of U.S. involvement, few print publications or TV reports contained stories that dis- 
sected either the U.S. military effort or the travails of Washington s South Vietnamese ally. 
In time, however, the tone and substance of media coverage changed. Images of unre- 
lenting destruction came across television screens. After gazing at his TV sets, LBJ began 
telephoning network executives, castigating them for critical broadcasts and urging them 
to root for the United States, not its communist enemies. Print journalists generally out- 
paced their TV counterparts in breaking away from the government line, and some fol- 
lowed Halberstam in forthrightly challenging U.S. officials in Saigon. Gloria Emerson s 
grim reports portrayed the U.S. effort as one in which poor and disproportionately nonwhite 
troops seemed to be fighting, and dying, so that wealthy families, many with  fortunatesons  
who held draft exemptions, might reap war-related profits. In 1966 and 1967, Harrison 
Salisbury of theNew York Times sent back stories from North Vietnam that highlighted 
the impact U.S. bombing missions exacted on civilian targets. Accounts by younger journal- 
ists, such as those published by Michael Herr in Esquire, represented the war as a violent, 
amoral, and drug-drenched venture into the surreal. 
As the conflict dragged on, the media began to talk about a  war at home  that paral- 
leled the one in Vietnam. TV and most print media adopted a stark, bipolar story frame: 
It pictured  hawks  those who wanted to fight, as long and as hard as necessary, until 
the United States defeated the communist forces fighting against  doves  those who, 
whatever their earlier views, now desired to end U.S. involvement in Vietnam as quickly as 
possible. In response to those who called for an even greater use of military force, President 
Johnson insisted his administration was following time-tested containment policies. His 
secretary of state, Dean Rusk, warned doves of the dangers of  appeasement.  But an 
Escalation in Vietnam " 1117 
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increasing number of influential U.S. politicians, led by J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, 
dissented. This influential head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee 
warned of misplaced priorities and of an  arrogance of power.  Meanwhile, the antiwar 
movement merged into several other movements, many of which were coming to chal- 
lenge the larger direction of U.S. politics and culture. 
The War at Home 
1118  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
Millions came to oppose the war in Southeast Asia, and support for the Great Society at 
home began to erode. By 1968, tensions escalated into confrontation, violence, and one of 
the most divisive presidential election campaigns in U.S. history. 
The Movement of Movements 
Popular memories generally will recall the 1960s as the time of a  youth revolt.  Young peo- 
ple from a  New Left,  most of them college students, protested against the war in Vietnam 
and in favor of social change, especially in race relations. Other imagery from the 1960s 
displays the colorful signs of a  Counterculture, again viewed as a preoccupation of the 
college-aged population. Devotees of this Counterculture urged people to expand their 
minds, often with a little help from drugs and rock music, and to seek alternative ways of 
seeing, and then living out, their everyday world. Another set of iconic images from this time 
represents new forms of racial and ethnic consciousness, beginning with the  Black Power  
movement. Now more easily accessible than ever before, all of this memorable imagery has 
etched pictures of life during America s longest war deeply into historical memory. 
Increasingly, though, historians look beyond individual pictures of separate movements, 
each of which can claim its own background and trajectory, to a kaleidoscopic panorama 
composed of what one historian calls a  movement of movements.  All across the political 
and cultural spectrum not simply on some New Left or among the young or African 
Americans or cultural dissenters people joined movements that aimed to challenge key 
parts of the established order. Activists from a wide variety of different backgrounds and 
circumstances placed their energies at the active service of one movement or another. 
The combined energy produced by this movement of movements tended to tilt, albeit 
in different ways, against two dominant ideals of the 1950s and early 1960s: the faith in 
political (or interest group) pluralism and the parallel conviction that deeply held spiri- 
tual beliefs ultimately united, rather than divided, the nation and its diverse people (see 
chapter 28). As the war in Vietnam dragged on, people increasingly doubted that the 
Focus Question 
What domestic social movements emerged during America s longest war? How did 
they seek to change U.S. political culture and the direction of public policy? What 
role did commercial media play in the  movement of movements ? 
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existing political system could actually solve problems. At the same time, disparate move- 
ments based on deeply held values involving issues such as war and peace, race rela- 
tionships, gender politics, the environment, and sexuality appeared headed in different 
directions or on collision courses. 
Ultimately, this movement of movements produced political, social, and cultural polar- 
ization. No one group, say a New Left or a youth culture, could lay exclusive claim to the 
historical era often called  the Long Sixties,  the period from roughly 1963 to 1974, which 
coincided with America s longest war. Numerous social movements sought to redirect 
national life down different paths, often with no clear maps. 
Most movements could not avoid dealing with commercial, particularly visual, media. 
Media imagery did not create or manufacture, for popular consumption, this movement 
of movements. Activists recognized, however, that even the briefest of time in the media 
spotlight could help them display their deep personal commitments and demonstrate 
their passionate disdain for policies they opposed. Often beginning with posters and pam- 
phlets, movements such as the one pressing for a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam 
began to produce increasingly sophisticated imagery and to stage media-catching public 
demonstrations. 
Television, in particular, offered these social movements a potentially vast audience. 
Some movement activists became media celebrities. In a 1965 internal memo, the then-head 
of SNCC referred to himself, tongue in cheek, as  Mr. Stokely Carmichael (star of stage, 
screen, and television).  Behind the scenes, less famous activists worked both to sustain their 
movements as viable organizations and to help script the kind of political performances that 
could attract media attention. 
Four of the earliest and most prominent of the movements that accompanied America s 
longest war involved the New Left, the Counterculture,  Black Power,  and antiwar protest. 
The War at Home  " 1119 
100% 
90% 
80% 
70% 
60% 
50% 
40% 
30% 
20% 
10% 
0 
March 
1966 May 
1966 
R 
e 
sp 
on 
se 
 ( 
in 
 p 
e 
rc 
en 
t 
) 
February 
1967 July 
1967 February 
1968 April 
1968 February 
1969 October 
1969 January 
1970 May 
1970 January 
1971 
Yes 
No 
American Attitudes Toward the Vietnam War Responses to the question:  Do you think that the United States made a 
mistake in sending troops to fight there?  
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Movements on College Campuses: A New Left 
Colleges and universities became important sites for mobilizing students and organizing 
them as forces for social change. Only a relatively small number of college students ever 
became active in social movements, but their activities set the tone for campus politics, 
attracted extensive media interest, and eventually generated popular controversy. 
In 1962, two years after conservatives had already formed the YAF (see chapter 28), 
students at the left end of the political spectrum established Students for a Democratic 
Society (SDS). Young men, mostly of European descent and eager to link their grand ideals 
to specific political activities, dominated the early SDS effort. Beginning with a call for 
mobilizing the power of government to expand liberty and promote equality, SDS 
endorsed measures, such as civil-rights laws, that seemed little different from those that 
Lyndon Johnson would soon champion. 
SDS attracted far greater attention, however, for the more spiritual and personalized 
style of its politics. The  Port Huron Statement  of 1962, SDS s founding manifesto, 
pledged opposition to the  loneliness, estrangement, isolation  that supposedly afflicted 
so many people. It charged that arrogant political elites, immersed in the techniques of 
interest-group pluralism, ignored underlying moral values. These insiders allegedly 
prized the expertise of bureaucrats over active engagement by ordinary citizens and 
favored policies promoting economic growth over opportunities for meaningful work. 
SDS claimed to speak for alternative visions. In politics, it called for  participatory 
democracy  grassroots political activities and small-scale institutions responsive to the 
needs of local communities. 
Students from North Carolina A&T University had earlier sparked the sit-in movement 
of 1960 (see chapter 28), and college students continued to play important roles in many 
of the civil-rights dramas that followed. Localized struggles in communities throughout 
the South, such as those waged during Freedom Summer in Mississippi, seemed tangible 
examples of participatory democracy. They appeared to promise a regeneration of the 
nation s politics and a reorientation of its moral compass. Organizing efforts in the Deep 
South thus attracted idealistic white students from schools in the North. Only partially 
aware of the violence and social challenges they would face, these activists left their own 
campuses to work alongside those from historically black institutions, such as Tuskegee, 
who were trying to register African American voters and organize them for political action. 
Some of these students remained in the South; others turned their energies to neighborhood- 
based political projects in northern cities; and some brought their experiences in the South 
back to their own campuses. 
New Left activists insisted on a constantly expanding view of what counted as  politics.  
Political practice should be broadly participatory, but active participation by large num- 
bers of ordinary people only provided the starting point. Although voter registration dri- 
ves in the South did seek greater access to the existing political process, New Left activists 
placed far greater emphasis on alternative, often disruptive political forms, such as sit-ins 
and demonstrations. 
1120  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
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Their emerging vision of politics favored action over contemplation, improvisation 
over careful advance planning, and personal feelings over extended political analysis. 
As Mario Savio, a Berkeley graduate student who had participated in the Mississippi 
Freedom Summer, proclaimed in 1964, the dominant political machinery sometimes 
 becomes so odious  that  you can t even tacitly take part  in its operations. Instead, 
people needed to put their own  bodies upon the gears  and try  to make it stop.  Later, 
a prominent Jewish rabbi, Abraham Herschel, offered a similar formulation of this basic 
political ideal:  Mere knowledge or belief  could sometimes be  too feeble a cure,  and 
the  only remedy was the kind of personal sacrifice  exemplified by activists such as 
Martin Luther King, Jr. 
Students attracted to an expansive concept of personalized politics saw their own cam- 
puses as centers for testing new political styles more than as places for ingesting the wis- 
dom of the past. Seeing older academic-activists, such as C. Wright Mills, as attractive role 
models, these college students viewed their generation as uniquely situated to confront a 
political system dominated by powerful and entrenched interests. Although a worldview 
focused on personally expanding the range of political options seemed to appeal more to 
students in the humanities and social sciences than to those in the  hard  sciences, busi- 
ness, or engineering, plenty of potential recruits remained. The rapid expansion of higher 
education, along with the Baby-Boom population bulge, greatly swelled the number of 
young people who enrolled in colleges and universities during the early 1960s. 
Students who embraced movement politics, following in the footsteps of academics such 
as Mills, saw activism and intellectualism as complementary pursuits. They denounced 
courses and research projects that appeared irrelevant to the pressing issues of the day. They 
confronted administrators who tried to impose lifestyle restrictions, such as sex-segregated 
living arrangements and dorm hours, on students that state laws otherwise treated as adults. 
Far worse, these politically active students argued, giant universities, accepting funding from 
the Pentagon and corporations, seemed oblivious to the social and moral implications of 
their war-related research. Although accounts of campus activism once highlighted only a 
few institutions, such as the University of California at Berkeley, recent histories have shown 
most schools, some even earlier than Berkeley, played host to social and political movements. 
Still, events at a few select schools, including Berkeley, dominated the media spotlight. 
Initially working to mobilize around domestic issues such as civil rights, student-led 
movements at Berkeley became generational lightning rods. Protests on and around the 
Berkeley campus, which began in earnest in 1964, over restrictions against on-campus 
political activity, provided some of the most prominent, and lasting, symbols of what media 
pundits came to call  the war on campus.  After organizing a  Free Speech Movement,  in 
opposition to limits on political expression, students and sympathetic faculty mounted 
the  Berkeley Revolt.  This effort included sit-ins, boycotts of classes, contention among fac- 
ulty members, and intermittent clashes between dissenting students and law enforcement 
officials. Activists demanded an end to any cultural divide, let alone legal regulations, 
which tried to separate activism on campus from that in the wider world. 
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The Counterculture 
Berkeley also came to symbolize the interrelationship, however uneasy, between political 
movements associated with a New Left and the vertiginous energies of a Counterculture. 
The Counterculture of the 1960s has always seemed a difficult  movement  to identify, 
especially since one of its self-defining slogans proclaimed  Do Your Own Thing.  It elected 
no officers, held no formal meetings, and maintained no central office to issue manifestos. 
Bursting into view in low-income neighborhoods, such as San Francisco s Haight-Ashbury 
area, and along thoroughfares bordering college campuses, such as Berkeley s Telegraph 
Avenue, the Counterculture maintained a vague sense of unity through a loose infrastruc- 
ture of small shops, restaurants, and overcrowded living units. People who claimed to 
speak for the Counterculture espoused values, styles, and institutions hailed as both 
 utopian  and as  realistic  alternatives to those of the prevailing or  straight  culture. 
Countercultural groups such as San Francisco s Diggers, a commune that mixed improvi- 
sational street-theater productions with social-service projects, distanced themselves from 
Great Society organizations. 
Dissenting cultural ventures did not spring up spontaneously but drew on earlier mod- 
els, such as the  Beat movement  of the 1950s. A loosely connected group of writers and 
poets, the Beats had denied that either the material abundance or conventional spiritual 
ideals of the 1950s fulfilled the promise of liberty. Rejecting the  people of plenty  credo, 
the Beats claimed that an overabundance of consumer goods, a commercialized culture 
industry, and oppressive technologies condemned most people to wander through alien- 
ated lives that seemed oppressive, emotionally crippling, or just plain boring. 
Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road(1957), praised the rebels of 
their generation. They saw nonconformists like themselves challenging settled social rou- 
tines and seeking more instinctual, more sensual, and more authentic ways of living. The 
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, in works such as Howl (1956), decried soulless materialism and 
puritanical moral codes for tempting a culture already awash in alienation to acts of mad- 
ness and despair. In search of alternative visions and oppositional lifestyles, Ginsberg s 
poetry celebrated the kind of liberty that drugs, Eastern mysticism, and same-sex love 
affairs could supposedly provide. Beats such as Ginsberg, in contrast to critics who merely 
condemned conformity (see chapter 28), seemed commited to testing the possibilities of 
liberty by seeking to live their everyday lives beyond conventional boundaries. 
Many of the Beats, especially Ginsberg, nonetheless had recognized how conventional 
commercial media might play to their advantage. Media exposure, respectful and (more 
often) disdainful, helped the Beats sustain bohemian-style communities in San Francisco s 
North Beach and New York City s Greenwich Village. In time, as influential cultural crit- 
ics and college professors praised the Beats, young people began encountering their writ- 
ings and poetry in humanities courses and literary-minded bookstores. Ginsberg s status 
as a dissenting celebrity continued to grow, especially on college campuses, and he eagerly 
promoted his iconic status as a link between the Beat movement of the 1950s and the 
Counterculture of the 1960s. 
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This Counterculture perhaps best seen as a collection of alternative subcultures rather 
than a single impulse left its imprint on a wide range of movements. These included 
nonprofit urban cooperatives, radical strains of feminism, environmentalism, and the 
fight against restrictions, especially involving sexuality, on lifestyle choices. 
Mass media of the 1960s, however, initially treated the Counterculture as a source for 
titillating stories about longish and unkempt hair styles, flamboyant clothing, and unin- 
hibited sexuality. The media also liked to portray countercultural lifestyles, among young 
people who came to be known as  hippies, as being on the cutting edge of a supposedly 
massive, fun-filled youth rebellion. Observers of this Counterculture also highlighted its 
use of drugs, particularly marijuana and LSD, and its preference, often because of finan- 
cial necessity, for communal living arrangements. 
New musical stylings, such as the folk-rock of The Byrds and the acid-rock of The 
Grateful Dead, also helped identify the Counterculture. The singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, 
who had abandoned acoustic folk music and  gone electric  in 1965, gained unwanted 
recognition as the Counterculture s prophet-laureate. Fusing musical idioms used by 
African American blues artists such as Muddy Waters with poetic touches indebted to the 
Beats, Dylan s  Like a Rolling Stone  (1965) exploded onto both the Top-40 charts of AM 
radio and the freewheeling play lists of the alternative FM stations and college radio stations 
linked to the Counterculture. Publications primarily aimed at college students, including 
the magazine Rolling Stone, dispatched youthful journalists to report on and also partic- 
ipate in the countercultural scene. 
The more traditional commercial marketplace also welcomed images and products from 
the Counterculture. The ad agency for Chrysler Motors, alert to the appeal of countercultural 
imagery, urged car buyers to break away from older patterns, purchase a youthful-looking 
1965 model, and thereby join the  Dodge Rebellion.  The clothing industry marketed color- 
ful countercultural-looking styles as the latest in  hip  fashions. For women, this generally 
meant expensive versions of bohemian-style garb, which typically displayed a considerable 
amount of skin (as with the miniskirt) and avoided restrictive foundation garments (as in the 
braless look). Marketers urged men seeking a more youthful appearance to exchange white 
shirts and regimental neckties for more colorful and more casual clothing styles. 
Recognizing the appeal of bands such as San Francisco s Jefferson Airplane, the popular 
music industry saw profits to be made from the sound, as well as the look, of the Counter- 
culture. An early countercultural happening,  the Human Be-In,  organized by community 
activists from San Francisco in early 1967, provided a model for subsequent, commercially 
dominated music festivals such as Monterrey Pop (later in 1967) and Woodstock (in 1969). 
Back on college campuses, some of the students and faculty attracted to New Left 
political movements seemed baffled by the Counterculture. The novelist and LSD-guru 
Ken Kesey, for example, shocked a 1965 political demonstration at Berkeley with a style 
of politics indebted to the theatrics of the Counterculture. Accompanied by veterans from 
the Beat movement and youthful members of his communal group,  the Merry 
Pranksters,  Kesey ridiculed other speakers. They were playing the same tired political 
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game parsing the details of alternative foreign policies as Lyndon Johnson. Between 
singing choruses of  Home on the Range,  Kesey advised pursuing pleasurable activities of 
genuine interest to oneself and, ultimately, of real help to others. Everyone should aban- 
don conventional politics and pursue a more personalized political agenda, one focused 
on revolutionizing, especially through drugs such as LSD, how they lived their own lives. 
African American Social Movements 
Meanwhile, this movement of movements and changing ideas about the nature of politics  
also reshaped specific efforts to achieve freedom and equality for people of African 
descent. Initiatives that still looked to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., faced growing criticism 
for embracing too limited a vision of political action. Moreover, as with other areas of 
movement politics, the battle against discrimination involved differences over how to 
address the ever-present commercial mass media. 
Early on, Dr. King tacitly acknowledged how much SCLC campaigns depended on com- 
mercial media, especially the weekly news magazines and television. Network TV images of 
the violence directed against his 1965 voter registration drive in Selma, Alabama, substantially 
aided his cause. In a moment that dramatically framed the politics at stake in Selma, ABC tele- 
vision interrupted the network premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg, an anti-Nazi movie, in 
favor of pictures showing all-white squads of Alabama state troopers beating peaceful voting- 
rights marchers. Lyndon Johnson also recognized the power of these images. Going on tele- 
vision several nights later, to urge Congress to speed passage of the landmark Voting Rights 
Act of 1965, he promised that  we shall overcome  the nation s  crippling legacy of bigotry 
and injustice,  supposedly evident to people looking at TV images from Selma. 
At the same time, however, other people interpreted such TV images differently. Growing 
numbers of people saw direct-action movements for liberty and equality as subversive agita- 
tion and demanded a renewed commitment to conventional forms of politics and to measures 
restoring law and order. 
Less than a week after congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act, six days of violent 
conflict devastated parts of Los Angeles. The violence apparently began with an altercation, 
near the largely African American community of Watts, between a white California highway 
patrol officer and a black motorist. A growing crowd, additional law-enforcement officers, 
long-standing differences over policing practices in LA, and deep-seated grievances within 
Watts soon spiraled into what some called a  riot,  others an  insurrection  or an  uprising.  
By whatever name, burning and looting swept over Watts and edged into other areas of 
south-central Los Angeles. Thirty-four people died; fires consumed hundreds of businesses 
and homes; heavily armed National Guard troops patrolled the city s streets; and platoons of 
television camera crews carried images from LA across the nation and around the world. 
What should be the response to events in Watts, people immediately asked? Most local 
political leaders, including LA s mayor and police chief, denied any responsibility for the 
violence, blamed civil-rights  agitation  for the troubles, and sought additional resources 
for the LAPD. Dr. King rushed to the scene, preaching the politics of nonviolence, only to 
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S 
pike Lee, the U.S. film industry s best-known African 
American director, campaigned aggressively to 
make a movie about Malcolm X. For nearly 25 years, Hol- 
lywood moguls had been trying to portray the Black 
Power leader who was gunned down in 1965 and whose 
Autobiography became a literary classic. Delays in 
obtaining financing, crafting a script, and finding a 
director always stymied production plans. 
Lee, who had denounced the Hollywood establish- 
ment for passing over his celebrated (and controversial) 
Do the Right Thing (1989) for an Academy Award nomina- 
tion, insisted that only he could do justice to the story of 
Malcolm X. Initially buoyed by a $34 million budget, Lee 
eventually encountered problems of his own, including 
his insistence on releasing a movie that ran for more than 
three hours. Lee calledMalcolm X  my interpretation of 
the man. It is nobody else s.  
The finished film displays Lee s desire to show the 
presence of the past in the present. Produced by Lee s 
own independent production whose name,  Forty 
Acres and a Mule,  recalls the land-distribution program 
advanced by advocates of Radical Reconstruction after 
the Civil War the movie argues for Malcolm X s contin- 
uing relevance to social and racial politics. 
The segments that begin and end the movie employ 
collages of iconic images that underscore this aim. 
Against the backdrop of the Warner Brothers logo, the 
soundtrack introduces the actual voice of Malcolm X, 
decrying U.S. history as a story of racist actions. Malcolm s 
accusations continue as a giant American flag, perhaps a 
reference to the popular film Patton (1970), appears on 
screen. Then, the image of the flag is cut into pieces by 
jagged images from the homemade videotape of the 
1991 incident in which Los Angeles police officers beat an 
African American man named Rodney King. Next, the flag 
begins to burn until, revealed behind it, a giant  X,  
adorned with remnants of the flag, dominates the film 
frame. The ending uses substantial archival footage of 
Malcolm, along with images of South African freedom 
fighter Nelson Mandela, while the soundtrack features 
the voice of Ossie Davis, the celebrated African American 
actor, giving a eulogy to Malcolm X. 
Released near Thanksgiving, the film opened to 
packed houses and took in considerably more money than 
Oliver Stone s JFKhad garnered when it had debuted only 
one year earlier. Despite a multimedia publicity blitz, 
Malcolm X s box-office revenues steadily declined. 
Reviewers and industry spokespeople reported that the 
lengthy, episodic movie seemed to tax the patience and 
attention span of most filmgoers. 
WatchingMalcolm X on video or DVD, however, can 
allow a viewer to concentrate on its many stunning 
sequences, speeding by ones that seem to drag, and return- 
ing to ones that may seem unclear at first viewing.Malcolm 
X remains a fascinating cinematic history of the early Black 
Power movement and, more generally, of the social fer- 
ment that gripped the nation during its longest war. 
Malcolm X (1992) 
Directed by Spike Lee.Starring Denzel Washington (Malcolm X),Angela Bassett (Betty Shabbaz), 
Al Freeman,Jr.(Elijah Muhammad). 
Denzel Washington stars as Malcolm X. 
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encounter, as he had expected, anger from both LA s political establishment and local 
black organizations. Only aggressive, sometimes even violent, forms of political action, 
some black activists were insisting, could get the attention of Californians who ignored 
racial inequalities in jobs, housing, and law enforcement. Only the previous year, white 
suburbanites had voted overwhelmingly to scrap the Rumford Act, the hard-won open- 
housing law. Lyndon Johnson, stunned by what he saw on his trio of TV sets, quickly 
responded through the kind of politics he understood best. Even as fires continued to 
burn, LBJ ordered up new social-welfare resources for LA:  Let s move in money, mar- 
bles, and chalk.  Groups more attuned to participatory democracy began reorganizing 
local movements and creating new ones, such as the Watts Writers  Workshop, convinced 
that changing times dictated shifting forms of response. 
Among African Americans, new movement initiatives had been appearing throughout the 
1950s and 1960s (see chapter 28). Some of the most recent looked to Malcolm X, a charis- 
matic African American minister whose February 1965 death amplified, rather than silenced, 
his powerful voice. While still calling himself Malcolm Little, he had engaged in petty crim- 
inal activities, served time in prison, and reoriented his life by joining the Nation of Islam 
during the 1950s. As Malcolm X, he soon became a leader of this North American based 
group, popularly known as the  Black Muslims,  which had emerged during the 1930s. 
Malcolm X s fiery denunciations of the civil-rights movement, which gained him a lurid 
reputation in commercial media, found a receptive grassroots audience in many urban 
black neighborhoods in the North and West. Dr. King s gradualist, nonviolent campaign 
for new civil-rights laws, Malcolm X charged, simply ignored the everyday problems of 
most African Americans and the undesirability indeed, the impossibility of integration. 
 White America  would never accept persons of African descent as equals, and dark- 
skinned people should thus work, as the Nation of Islam and other  black nationalist  
groups had long urged, to build and strengthen their own communities. Although he 
never advocated initiating confrontation, Malcolm X strongly endorsed self-defense,  by 
any means necessary.  
Although mainstream media continued to portray Malcolm X as a dangerous subver- 
sive, he offered more than angry rhetoric. He called for pride in African American cultural 
practices and for economic reconstruction. He urged African Americans to  recapture our 
heritage and identity  and  launch a cultural revolution to unbrainwash an entire people.  
Seeking a broader movement, one that could forge multiracial coalitions, Malcolm X eventu- 
ally broke from the Black Muslims and established his own Organization of Afro-American 
Unity. Murdered by enemies from the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X soon became, especially 
after the posthumous publication of his Autobiography(1965), a source for black-oriented 
political and cultural visions. 
These visions, which reshaped many older movements and inspired new ones, diverged 
from the political perspectives that dominated Lyndon Johnson s administration. Officially 
committed to additional civil-rights legislation, particularly a national open-housing law and 
to new Great Society programs, the president was also coming to sense that manyfederal 
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laws ignored the root causes of current conflicts. He began listening to members of his 
administration who suggested social programs, which would later be called  affirmative 
action  measures, specifically intended to assist African Americans. In a 1965 speech, he 
suggested that centuries of racial discrimination against people of African descent had pro- 
duced  wounds  and  weaknesses  that had become  the special handicaps of those who 
are black in a Nation that happens to be mostly white.  
Although Johnson intended his words to soothe, they tended to inflame. African 
Americanswho now viewed empowering black communities as a major civil-rights goal, 
for example, wondered if the president s subliminal message might be that laws could not 
adequately advance liberty and equality because black culture and society seemed, from 
his perspective,  inadequate ? Could Johnson be hinting that differences in America arose 
because of  superior  and  inferior  societies and cultures? 
Disparate answers from different movements to questions such as these along with 
growing opposition to specific Johnson administration policies became evident during 
the fall of 1965. When the president invited several hundred black leaders to the White 
House for a  racial summit,  two veteran activists, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, 
used the occasion to lobby for their  Freedom Budget,  an implicit indictment of LBJ s 
funding priorities. They called for a 10-year plan for spending $100 billion on infrastruc- 
ture projects in low-income neighborhoods. Other critics denounced a recent study writ- 
ten by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a social scientist who had worked for both JFK and LBJ. 
The Moynihan Report, apparently intended as a prelude to new White House proposals but 
widely seen as a response to Watts, argued that social conditions within African American 
communities often made laws mandating equality largely irrelevant. It singled out the 
prevalence of families headed by single women.  The harsh fact is that . . .in terms of ability 
to win out in the competition of American life,  this report concluded, African Americans 
were simply  not equal to most of the groups with which they will be competing.  
People such as Rustin, who focused on pocketbook issues and on brick-and-mortar 
matters, dismissed this  black family debate  as a distraction. Most younger movement 
activists, however, argued that Moynihan s single report spoke volumes about the Johnson 
administration s paternalistic mindset. Accustomed to dealing with competing interests 
from which he could cobble a consensus, Lyndon Johnson privately denounced move- 
ment leaders for using, in reference to the Freedom Budget, hissummit to start  raising un- 
shirted hell and saying it s got to be a 100 billion.  
Meanwhile, events in the South also highlighted the increasingly frenetic and the also 
gradually more effective movement-of-movements phenomenon. SNCC and Dr. King s 
SCLC continued to press forward, though often along separate paths. Their movements con- 
stantly faced the threat of violence and death and confronted state and local legal systems 
seemingly unable to restrain or punish vigilantes who attacked, or even killed, civil-rights 
workers. White southern legal officials, moreover, appeared no better at overseeing electoral 
contests. Charging that vote-counters had robbed of victory a SNCC-sponsored slate in a 
local election in Lowndes County, Alabama, Stokely Carmichael began toorganize, against 
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the advice of King s SCLC, an all-black political organization in that locale. To symbolize 
the militancy of this third-party movement, the  Lowndes County Freedom Organization,  
SNCC commissioned a special logo: a coiled black panther. 
The following spring, SNCC joined other movements in a well publicized foray into 
Mississippi. In June 1966, a KKK gunman shot James Meredith, who was conducting a 
one-person  March against Fear  from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. Con- 
vinced of the need to defy violence, representatives from most of the individual move- 
ments that comprised the wider antidiscrimination cause hastily gathered in Mississippi. 
Although state officials provided only minimal protection and armed KKK vigilantes assem- 
bled at almost every crossroad, most activists, including Stokely Carmichael and Dr. King, 
remained determined to stay on course. 
An enlarged March against Fear became the first large-scale movement project in 
contrast to the 1963 March on Washington or the 1965 voting-rights campaign in 
Alabama that did not seek new civil-rights legislation. In this sense, it seemed an effort 
to demonstrate that movements for liberty and equality now also emphasized struggles 
for dignity, pride, and empowerment. Moreover, highly symbolic political activities of the 
kind coming into prominence obviously relied on media visibility, and Meredith s shoot- 
ing had already focused national news coverage on Mississippi. Considerations such as 
these seemingly justified a difficult and dangerous group effort to complete the quixotic 
crusade one person had begun. Displaying a remarkable degree of solidarity if not 
always unanimity the March Against Fear ended with an interracial crowd of 15,000 
people, most of whom had arrived in Mississippi just before the finale, marching into 
Jackson in late June. 
This march also underscored differences, in rhetorical and programmatic emphases, 
among (and within) various movements. As Stokely Carmichael played to the omnipresent 
TV cameras, Dr. King, an old hand at this political art form, admiringly acknowledged 
the younger activist s shrewd grasp of media routines. After being hauled off to jail, dur- 
ing one of the local voter registration campaigns that accompanied the march, an enraged 
Carmichael claimed he would never again, passively and nonviolently, submit to arrest. 
Carmichael now explicitly urged that the struggle not remain just one for  Freedom,  
the byword of the SCLC, but also for  Black Power.  As different movements within this 
march s ranks chanted  Black Power,  others called for  Freedom.  During one lengthy 
debate among the marchers, Carmichael rejected a compromise slogan,  Black Equality,  
and insisted that Black Power best described the kind of politics that direct-action move- 
ments such as SNCC should now embrace. 
Black Power did not magically spring forth from the March against Fear. Always a slip- 
pery concept to grasp, especially when applied to constantly shifting political values and 
strategies, Black Power provided an apparently inflammatory label for a sometimes com- 
monsensical set of claims. At different times and places during the 1960s, African American 
activists determined that they should seek greater on-the-ground power both in and 
for their own communities. If black-led movements in cities such as LA and Oakland, 
for example, could not count on their state s hard-won open-housing law to remain in force 
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or if local political establishments could block federal funding of CAP initiatives, seeking 
greater power for a grassroots black politics seemed a logical, if politically uncertain, move. 
Operating from this perspective, in 1966, several college students from Oakland, who 
were already active in community-based projects, announced formation of a new Black 
Power organization. Taking its name, the  Black Panther Party,  from SNCC s earlier effort 
in Lowndes County, this movement issued a platform that employed militant rhetoric on 
behalf of 10 objectives, many already familiar to local civil-rights groups. These included 
greater economic opportunities for housing, education, and employment and greater 
legal protections, especially against police misconduct and flawed legal proceedings. The 
group also created its own grassroots social programs, including ones to improve health 
and nutrition in low-income black neighborhoods. 
The Panthers quickly became a media phenomenon. Adapting quasi-military symbols 
and organizational forms from Third World revolutionary movements, a trio of media-savvy 
young men Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver quickly gained national 
attention for the Black Panthers. A 1967 rally on behalf of the Second Amendment right 
to use firearms for self-defense, against what armed demonstrators called  fascist pig  
police officers, attracted the notice of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI head eventually made 
destroying the Black Panther Party, by almost any available means, a key goal. 
Far less flamboyantly than the Black Panthers, other groups and movements extended 
Black Power ideals to a wide range of issues. Fully embracing the word blackand a cultural 
agenda that stressed racial identity, they asserted their power to pursue separate, African 
American directed routes not just toward liberty and equality but, sometimes,  liberation  
from the prevailing U.S. political culture. Receiving a more generous hearing from com- 
mercial media than Malcolm X had gained during his lifetime, many Black Power efforts, 
more importantly, forged political links and cultural networks within African American 
communities.  Black Is Beautiful  became a watchword. James Brown, the  Godfather  of 
soul music, captured this new spirit with his  Say It Loud, I m Black and I m Proud  (1968). 
Against this rapidly changing backdrop, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act 
of 1968. A central provision of this omnibus measure, the last newcivil-rights legislation of 
the 20th century, sought to eliminate racial discrimination in the real estate market. This sec- 
tion of the law, popularly known as the  Fair Housing Act,  provided a national version of 
open housing legislation. Its initial proponents, however, considered the final version shot 
through with exemptions and plagued by enfeebled enforcement mechanisms. Moreover, 
another section of the same Civil Rights Act declared it a crime to cross state lines in order 
to incite a  riot.  Supporters hailed this provision as a law-and-order measure, while critics 
insisted it illegally targeted specific political activists, especially ones espousing Black Power. 
Whenever tested in federal court, though, this section passed constitutional scrutiny. 
The Antiwar Movement 
Meanwhile, one movement began to overshadow all others. Even as campus-centered fer- 
ment, countercultural activities, and African American empowerment efforts continued  
and other movements, such as environmentalism and second-wave feminism, began to 
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emerge the one that sought to pressure Lyndon Johnson into abandoning his crusade in 
Vietnam dominated U.S. politics and culture. 
The antiwar movement, as with the broader movement-of-movements impulse, never 
fell into neat categories. The dominant media frame of the day, hawks against doves, failed 
to account for the diverse coalition that came to oppose the Johnson administration. Some 
of the strongest  antiwar  sentiment, for example, blamed LBJ for not prosecuting the war 
aggressively enough. Convinced that he would never strive for a clear-cut victory, some peo- 
ple in this camp decided to oppose continued U.S. involvement, at least on Johnson s 
terms. At the other end of the antiwar spectrum, as the White House and its supporters 
constantly noted, were small movements that called for a North Vietnam NLF victory. 
 Ho, Ho, Ho Chi-Minh/NLF s Gonna Win  went a chant that enraged Johnson and dis- 
tressed many members of the antiwar coalition. 
The broad middle ground of the anti-Johnson, antiwar alliance could never fully agree 
on many issues. A diverse constituency, in another concrete example of participatory 
democracy, continually debated how and why the United States had ever become com- 
mitted to preserving a noncommunist South Vietnam. They also split over how and if the 
antiwar movement could change LBJ s course. In addition, the antiwar cause faced the 
same questions as all other movements of the 1960s: What kind of politics best expressed 
the ethical and spiritual values of its supporters? And how might mass-mediated images of 
this movement s activities represent its politics to a broader audience? 
By 1967, the issue of Vietnam had become thecontroversy on most college campuses. 
At a series of  teach-ins,  supporters and opponents of the war had already debated their 
positions. Later, these events had given way to street demonstrations, in both local com- 
munities and in Washington, D.C., against Johnson s Vietnam policies. Most malestudents 
possessed a direct stake in such activities. Their local draft boards normally granted them 
educational deferments, but these expired at graduation and could be revoked or denied, 
sometimes because of a young man s view of Johnson s policies. Many students, joining 
the less fortunate sons who did not attend college, complied with draft regulations, and 
a good number volunteered for service in Vietnam. A strong draft-resistance movement, 
often symbolized by the burning of draft cards and sometimes marked by the flight to for- 
eign countries, especially Canada, also emerged. During October 1967, campus protests 
against war-related activities passed a crucial threshold when a pitched, bloody battle broke 
out between antiwar demonstrators and police at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. 
That same year, 1967, saw two other important antiwar milestones. Long critical of the 
war, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. now faced intensive pressure, especially from activists 
among the clergy, to spell out his moral and spiritual position. At the same time, many of 
his civil-rights allies warned against doing anything that might break his already severely 
strained relationship with the Johnson White House and escalate attacks from enemies 
such as J. Edgar Hoover. Speaking in early April 1967, at New York s Riverside Church, 
Dr. King boldly laid out his views. In an analysis similar to that of Black Power spokespeople 
and of critical journalists such as Gloria Emerson, Dr. King noted a black-and-white truth. 
African American troops, mostly from low-income communities, served and died in 
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numbers far greater than their proportion of the U.S. population  for a nation that has 
been unable to seat them together in the same schools  with the white soldiers now at 
their side in Vietnam. The immoral  madness  in Vietnam  must cease,  Dr. King thun- 
dered, but he also wondered if  the world now demands a maturity of America that we 
may not be able to achieve.  
This speech provided an important gauge of both the growing antiwar movement and 
the expanding polarization within the country. Although Dr. King had expected a back- 
lash, he failed to anticipate that voices from all across the political-media spectrum would 
condemn his address. Although the editorial board of the New York Timesdid not, as some 
commentators did, call King a  traitor,  it read his antiwar pronouncement through the 
familiar frame of narrowly imagined interest groups. The Timescharged him with seeking 
media attention and with damaging the civil-rights cause by expounding on a matter about 
which he likely knew little and on which he might lack the political credentials to comment 
intelligently. Why should people give his foreign policy opinions more weight than those 
of the boxer Muhammad Ali, who had been widely condemned for his antiwar statements? 
The same interrelated issues raised by King s speech the nature of politics and the role 
of the media also surrounded popular discussion of a massive 1967 antiwar demonstra- 
tion in Washington, D.C. This event underscored how the politics of the New Left and the 
spirit of the Counterculture marched together, at least when in opposition to Lyndon 
Johnson s policies in Vietnam. 
Noting the visual media s voracious appetite for pictures of political and cultural dissent, 
a small group of experienced activists decided to feed media outlets a uniquely prepared 
supply of imagery. To do this, they invented a kind of  nonmovement movement,  which 
bypassed the hard work of mobilization and organization in favor of hoping media images 
would do the mobilizing and organizing for them. Two members of this group, Abbie 
Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, proclaimed themselves leaders of a (nonexistent)  Youth Inter- 
national Party  or  YIPPIE!  and simply waited for media coverage to surround their 
activities, as they knew it would. 
Hoffman and Rubin raised the curtain on a neo-vaudevillian, countercultural style of 
politics. In one famous incident, they tossed fake money onto the floor of the New York 
Stock Exchange. Invoking the sit-in movement, they joked about staging department-store 
 loot-ins  to strike at  the property fetish that underlies genocidal war  in Vietnam. Even 
more audaciously, they announced their contribution to the 1967 antiwar march would 
be a separate trek to the Pentagon. There, they claimed, marchers chanting mystical incan- 
tations would levitate this five-sided head of the military-industrial complex several hun- 
dred feet into the air. 
Although the Pentagon remained firmly planted, events around its perimeter generated 
eye-catching TV footage and gained novelist Norman Mailer a National Book Award for his 
first-person report. According to Mailer s admirers, his book Armies of the Night(1968),by 
interweaving Mailer s personal politics with a journalistic account of a public event, reinvented 
orthodox political reporting in a way that seemed to parallel how activists were reinventing 
what counted as politics. 
The War at Home  " 1131 
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1968 
Other observers of events at the Pentagon and harsher critics of Armies of the Night s journal- 
istic style dissented. Might not media images of colorful quipsters such as Hoffman and Rubin 
be helping to fuel cultural polarization rather than to provide new models of useful political 
action? Might the media s taste for spectacular demonstrations be trivializing underlying 
issues, including moral ones? Questions such as these became even more pressing during the 
tumultuous 12 months of 1968, a year that saw violence and upheaval span most of the globe. 
Turmoil in Vietnam 
January of 1968 had not even concluded when Lyndon Johnson s crusade in Vietnam, 
though not the violence accompanying it, effectively ended. Late that month during a truce 
declared in observance of Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year celebration, NLF and North 
Vietnamese forces suddenly went on the attack throughout South Vietnam. One group 
even temporarily seized the grounds of the U.S. embassy in Saigon. U.S. strategists had 
fully expected some violation of the Tet truce, but they never anticipated the breadth and 
ferocity of the communist offensive. 
The Johnson administration tried to assess the fallout. Militarily, U.S. forces emerged 
victorious from this Tet offensive. After regrouping, they inflicted heavy casualties on 
NLF and North Vietnamese troops, who gained relatively little territory at considerable 
cost. Supporters of the war in the United States soon blamed media imagery for exagger- 
ating the effect of the early attacks, ignoring NLF and North Vietnamese losses, and 
thereby turning  victory  into  defeat.  Critics of the war countered that the Tet offensive 
had initially caught U.S. military commanders ill-prepared and, later, highlighted their 
inability to effectively pursue the badly mauled enemy forces. 
In any case, Tet proved a defeat for the Johnson administration. Events seemed to belie 
its constant assurances of improving fortunes and imminent victory. Walter Cronkite, the 
esteemed CBS-TV anchor, returned from a post-Tet tour of Vietnam and proclaimed, to a 
national television audience, that the United States would never prevail militarily on the 
battlefield and needed to consider negotiating its withdrawal. Reportedly, Lyndon Johnson 
mused that if he had lost the celebrity anchor then known as  the most trusted person in 
America,  he had also lost much of the rest of the country. 
LBJ received more bad news when he summoned his most trusted advisers and a dis- 
tinguished group of elderly statespeople, the so-called wise men, to consider General 
Westmoreland s request for an additional 206,000 U.S. troops. To Johnson s surprise, a 
majority advised against another massive infusion of U.S. troops. If South Vietnam were to 
survive, its own forces needed to shoulder more of the military burden. Johnson capitulated 
to this argument, conceding that another large increase in U.S troops, even if forces could 
have been spared from other duties, would have further fanned opposition to his policies. 
The Tet offensive threw Lyndon Johnson s own political future into question. Faced 
with open revolt by antiwar Democrats, who rallied behind a presidential bid by Senator 
1132  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
11019_29_ch29_p1103-1154.qxd  6/4/07  3:38 PM  Page 1132
Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, Johnson reconsidered, for the final time, his political 
options. Although LBJ controlled enough party-selected delegates to bury McCarthy s can- 
didacy at the Democratic national convention, McCarthy s primary campaigns against 
Johnson, which attracted youthful volunteers and abundant media coverage, revealed how 
little political capital the president now possessed. 
Eugene McCarthy, who was athletic enough to have considered a professional baseball 
career and sufficiently academic to have been a college professor, had always seemed 
uncomfortable with the path he did choose, electoral politics. After serving, capably but as 
if on autopilot, in both houses of Congress, McCarthy suddenly achieved instant political 
fame as an unorthodox presidential hopeful. LBJ technically defeated McCarthy in the 
1968 New Hampshire primary, but the antiwar message of  Clean Gene  (as media pun- 
dits dubbed him) resonated both with voters who favored the United States bombing its 
way to victory and with those who favored a speedy withdrawal. 
With McCarthy poised to defeat LBJ in the Wisconsin primary, Johnson surprised all but 
his closest aides and reconfigured the diplomatic and political landscapes. On March 31, 
1968, he went on TV to declare a halt to the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, to announce 
an offer to begin peace negotiations, and to proclaim he would not seek reelection. Deprived 
of his greatest asset, not being LBJ, Eugene McCarthy pledged to continue his fight for the 
Democratic nomination, He prepared to square off against his former senatorial colleague 
from Minnesota and Johnson s ever-loyal vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey. 
Turmoil at Home 
Among the many former LBJ supporters gladdened by the turn in political events, was 
Dr. MartinLuther King., Jr. He hoped that the Democratic Party would reject Humphrey 
and embrace an antiwar candidate, preferably Senator Robert Kennedy (RFK) of New 
York, JFK s younger brother, who had belatedly entered the presidential sweepstakes after 
Johnson s surprise announcement. 
Less than a week after seeing glimmers of political hope, on April 4, 1968, King met 
the violent death he had long anticipated. While visiting Memphis, Tennessee, in sup- 
port of a labor strike by African American sanitation workers, the civil-rights leader 
received an almost instantly fatal head wound, as he stood on the balcony of the Lor- 
raine Motel. Law enforcement officials soon identified (and eventually apprehended) the 
alleged shooter: James Earl Ray, a drifter with a lengthy criminal record. Ray quickly 
pleaded guilty to having assassinated King, waived a jury trial, and received a 99-year 
sentence. Subsequently, though, Ray recanted and claimed to have been a pawn in some 
larger white supremacist conspiracy. Ray died in 1998, still insisting on his innocence, a 
claim that intrigued several members of the King family but convinced very few legal 
observersor historians. 
As news of King s murder spread, violent protests swept through urban neighborhoods. 
More than 100 cities and towns witnessed outbreaks; 39 people died; 75,000 regular and 
National Guard troops were called to duty. When President Johnson proclaimed Sunday, 
1968 " 1133 
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April 7, as a day of national mourn- 
ing for the slain civil-rights leader, 
parts of the nation s capital city, 
including neighborhoods near the 
White House, remained ablaze. 
Claiming he would devise poli- 
cies to end violence at home and in 
Vietnam, Robert Kennedy mounted 
a nonstop campaign for the Democ- 
ratic presidential nomination. Un- 
willing to risk a test of his personal 
popularity, Humphrey stayed out of 
the Democratic primaries, inheriting 
most of the nonelected delegates 
previously pledged to LBJ and leav- 
ing RFK and McCarthy to fight over 
the rest. His celebrity-assisted cam- 
paign recalling memories of JFK s, 
Robert Kennedy sought to convince 
Democrats pledged to Humphrey or 
favoring McCarthy that only another 
Kennedy could win the presidency 
in November. 
Then, on June 5, after besting 
Eugene McCarthy in California s pri- 
mary, RFK fell victim to an assassin s 
bullets. Bystanders immediately grabbed Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-born immigrant, who 
was later charged and convicted of killing Kennedy. Television coverage of Kennedy s body 
being returned to Washington, D.C., and of his funeral provided poignant, and disturbing, 
reminders of Dr. King s recent murder and of the assassination of JFK five years earlier. Was 
there, some people wondered, some  sickness  afflicting U.S. political culture? Did  gov- 
ernment by gunplay  rather than political pluralism best describe the prevailing system of 
governance? 
The violence of 1968 continued. During the Republican national convention in Miami, 
presidential candidate Richard Nixon promised to restore law and order. Inside the con- 
vention hall, he unveiled a surprise choice as his running mate, Governor Spiro Agnew of 
Maryland, an outspoken critic of movement activists. Outside, in a largely African American 
section of Miami, clashes broke out between police and citizens, during which four people 
lost their lives. Later that summer, in Chicago, thousands of people, drawn from a cross- 
section of the antiwar movement, converged on the Democratic Party s convention to 
protest the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, who was still loyally supporting Johnson s 
1134  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
Martin Luther King, Jr. s Funeral Cortege Martin Luther King, 
Jr. s assassination in 1968 sparked both violent protests and solemn 
mourning for the slain civil rights leader. Thousands of his grieving 
supporters followed the cart, drawn by mules, which carried King s 
body through the streets of his native Atlanta. 
© 
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. 
11019_29_ch29_p1103-1154.qxd  6/4/07  3:38 PM  Page 1134
policy in Vietnam. Responding to acts of provocation by some demonstrators, including 
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, police officers struck back. Some used indiscriminate force 
against antiwar activists and members of the media. Although an official report later talked 
about a  police riot,  opinion polls showed that most people approved of how police officers 
had acted in Chicago. Humphrey easily captured the Democratic presidential nod, but dif- 
fering views over Johnson s Vietnam policy and over the meaning of the violence in Chicago 
left his party bitterly divided. 
The Election of 1968 
Both Humphrey and Nixon worried about the candidacy of Alabama s George Wallace. After 
adroitly organizing a third-party run, Wallace stumbled badly by tabbing retired general Cur- 
tis LeMay, who immediately hinted at the possibility of using nuclear weaponry against North 
Vietnam, as a running mate. With his own views in favor of victory in Vietnam and against 
civil rights well established, Wallace could play to opinion polls that suggested growing 
sentiment against the Counterculture and the antiwar movement. If any  hippie  protestor 
ever blocked his motorcade, Wallace once announced,  it ll be the last car he ll ever lay down 
in front of.  Declaring his independence from the interest groups that supposedly controlled 
the political process, Wallace also courted voters who saw themselves as captive to  tax-and- 
spend  bureaucracies in Washington. 
George Wallace never expected to 
gain the presidency. He hoped, how- 
ever, to secure enough electoral votes 
to deny Humphrey or Nixon a major- 
ity. Then, as the U.S. Constitution 
prescribed, the selection of a presi- 
dent would rest with the House of 
Representatives, where Wallace 
might act as a power broker on 
behalf of his favorite issues and his 
own political fortunes. 
Nixon narrowly prevailed in 
November. Hinting at a secret plan 
to honorably end the war in Viet- 
nam, Nixon also promised to 
restore tranquility at home. 
Although the former vice president 
won 56 percent of the electoral 
vote, he outpolled Humphrey in the 
popular vote by less than 1 percent. 
Humphrey had benefited when 
Johnson ordered a pause in the 
1968 " 1135 
WA 
9 
OR 
6 
CA 
40 
NV 
3 
MT 
4 
ND 
4 
SD 
4 
WY 
3 
ID 
4 
UT 
4 CO 
6 
AZ 
5 
AK 
3 
HI 
4 
NM 
4 
TX 
25 
OK 
8 
KS 
7 
NE 
5 
MN 
10 
IA 
9 
LA 
10 
AR 
6 
MO 
12 
FL 
14 
MS 
7 AL 
10 
GA 
12 
SC 
8 
TN 
11 
NC 
N-12 W-1 
KY 
9 
WI 
12 MI 
21 
IL 
26 
IN 
13 
OH 
26 
VA 
12 
WV 
7 
PA 
29 
NY 
45 
ME 
4 
NH 
4 
VT 
3 
MD 
10 
DE 
3 
NJ 
17 
MA 
14 
CT 
8 
RI 
4 
DC 
3 
Humphrey 
(Democrat) 191 35.5 31,275,166 42.9 
301 56.0 31,785,480 43.6 
46   8.5 9,906,473 13.5 
Nixon 
(Republican) 
Wallace 
(American Independent) 
Electoral Vote    
Number     %    
 Popular Vote 
  Number            %    
Map 29.2 Presidential Election, 1968 George Wallace s 
independent, third-party candidacy influenced the election of 1968. 
Compare this map with ones of earlier and later election years to see how 
the southern states gradually left the Democratic column and, in time, 
became a base of Republican power. 
11019_29_ch29_p1103-1154.qxd  6/4/07  3:38 PM  Page 1135
bombing of North Vietnam and pledged to begin peace talks in Paris, an initiative that 
Nixon secretly worked to undermine through back-channel negotiations with the South 
Vietnamese government. In the end, Humphrey carried only Texas in the South. George 
Wallace picked up 46 electoral votes, all from states in the Deep South, and 13.5 percent 
of the popular vote nationwide. Nixon won five crucial southern states and claimed the sup- 
port, from all across the country, of those whom he called  the forgotten Americans, the 
non-shouters, the non-demonstrators.  
The Nixon Years,1969 1974 
1136  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
Focus Question 
What new domestic and foreign policies did the Nixon administration initiate? 
Raised in a modest Quaker home in southern California, Richard Nixon campaigned for the 
presidency in 1968 as the kind of leader who could restore domestic tranquility. The begin- 
ning of Richard Nixon s presidency, however, coincided with more, rather than less, turmoil. 
Lawbreaking and Violence 
A handful of people on the political fringe, such as those in a tiny group known as the 
 Weather Underground,  openly embraced violence. According to one assessment, 
authorities logged approximately 40,000 bomb threats, most unfounded, during the first 
18 months of Nixon s first term. There were, though, nearly 200 actual and attempted 
bombings on college campuses during the 1969 70 academic year, with an explosion at the 
University of Wisconsin claiming the life of a late-working grad student. Nonlethal attacks 
rocked other targets, including the Bank of America, the Chase Manhattan Bank, and even 
the U.S. Congress. On one highly publicized occasion in 1970, three members of the 
Weather Underground blew themselves apart when their own bomb factory exploded. 
At the same time, governmental officials stepped up their use of force. Several promi- 
nent Black Power figures, including Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers and the cele- 
brated prison activist George Jackson, died under circumstances their supporters likened 
to political assassination but public officials considered normal law enforcement activities. 
J. Edgar Hoover s FBI went beyond shadowing members of entirely peaceful antiwar and 
women s organizations to harass activists, plant damaging rumors, and even operate as 
agent provocateurs,urging protestors to undertake actions that officials might later prosecute 
as criminal offenses. After a lengthy investigation of COINTELPRO a once-secret FBI 
program aimed at disrupting a wide range of activist groups a congressional committee 
concluded that the FBI had illegally ruined careers, severed friendships, besmirched rep- 
utations, bankrupted businesses, and even endangered lives. The Bureau terminated 
COINTELPRO in 1971, only after documents stolen by antiwar activists from an FBI office 
in Pennsylvania revealed its existence. 
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The Nixon Years, 1969 1974 " 1137 
State and local officials stepped up their own efforts to restore order. During the fall of 
1971, for instance, New York s Governor Nelson Rockefeller suddenly broke off negotiations 
with representatives for more than a thousand prison inmates, who had seized several cell 
blocks and taken a number of guards hostage while protesting what they considered to be 
intolerable living conditions at Attica State Prison. Rockefeller then ordered heavily armed 
state troopers and National Guard forces into the complex. When this  Attica Uprising  
finally ended, 29 prisoners and 11 guards lay dead. At the same time, on college campuses, 
local officials and administrators seemed increasingly ready to employ force against demon- 
strators, a course praised by law-and-order advocates and decried by civil libertarians. 
A New President 
Richard Nixon continued to insist that his vast public experience made him the ideal pres- 
ident for such troubled times. After graduating from Whittier College, Nixon had studied 
law at Duke University and served in the Navy during the Second World War. He then 
enjoyed a meteoric political career that took him to the House of Representatives in 1946, 
the Senate in 1950, and the vice presidency in 1952. His 1960 presidential defeat, at the 
hands of John Kennedy, began an equally rapid descent. After his failure, in 1962, to win 
the California governorship, Nixon denounced media commentators and announced his 
retirement from politics. 
Nixon, however, seemed to thrive on confronting a constant series of personal chal- 
lenges. He entitled an early memoir of his political life Six Crises. The defeat of Goldwater, 
for whom Nixon had doggedly campaigned in 1964, and Johnson s problems resurrected 
the former vice president s political fortunes. He emerged from the 1968 election more 
confident than ever before, it seemed, of his leadership abilities. 
Once in the White House, Nixon even expected to tame a media that had long bedev- 
iled him. Although his staff remained suspicious of media figures, and eventually 
clashed with many of them, the president and his key aides felt they possessed more skill 
than Johnson s administration in the image-making arts. Media personalities might be 
considered  con artists,  Nixon once mused, but politicians could expend  energy to try 
to rig the news . . . their way.  Public officials and media reporters entered  the ring 
together, each trying to bamboozle the other.  Nixon s close advisers, many with back- 
grounds in advertising and in Southern California s image-driven popular culture, threw 
themselves into the sport of shaping media portrayals of the Nixon White House. 
The Economy 
One area in which Nixon seemed less prepared to act almost immediately threatened to 
upset his political plans. Nixon s presidency coincided with economic problems that 
would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier. No single cause can account for these 
difficulties, but most economic analyses begin with the war in Vietnam. This expensive 
military commitment, along with increased domestic spending and a volatile international 
economy, began curtailing economic growth. 
11019_29_ch29_p1103-1154.qxd  6/4/07  3:38 PM  Page 1137
Lyndon Johnson, determined to stave off defeat in Indochina without cutting Great 
Society programs or raising taxes, had concealed the true costs of the war, even from his 
own economic advisers. Nixon inherited a deteriorating (although still favorable) balance 
of trade and rising rate of inflation. Between 1960 and 1965, consumer prices grew an 
average of only about 1 percent per year; by 1968, this figure exceeded 4 percent. 
By 1971, just as the Nixon administration began planning for the 1972 election, eco- 
nomic conditions worsened, with the unemployment rate topping 6 percent. According to 
conventional wisdom, expressed in a technical economic concept called  the Phillips 
curve,  when unemployment increases, prices should stay flat or even decline. Yet both 
unemployment and inflation remained on the rise. Economists coined the term stagflation 
to describe this puzzling convergence of economic stagnation and price inflation. Stagfla- 
tion contributed to another disturbing trend: U.S. exports becoming less competitive in 
international markets. For the first time in the 20th century, the United States ran a trade 
deficit in 1971, importing more products than it exported. 
With his plans for a two-term presidency perhaps in jeopardy, Richard Nixon faced yet 
another of his crises. Long opposed to governmental regulation of the economy but now 
fearful of the political consequences of stagflation and trade imbalances, he needed a quick 
cure for the nation s economic ills. Suddenly, in what one observer likened to a religious 
conversion, Nixon proclaimed his belief in governmentally imposed economic controls 
and announced, in August 1971, his  new economic policy.  It included a 90-day freeze 
on any increases in both wages and prices, to be followed by government monitoring to 
detect  excessive  increases in either. 
Seeking to address the trade deficit, Nixon radically revised the relationship between 
the United States and the world monetary structure. Dating from the 1944 Bretton 
Woods agreement (see chapter 26), the United States had tied the value of its dollar to 
that of gold, at the rate of $35 per ounce of the precious metal. To guarantee stability in 
currency markets, the United States stood ready to exchange, at this rate, its dollars for 
gold whenever any other nation s central bank requested it to do so. As dollars piled up 
in foreign banks because of trade deficits and military spending abroad, however, the 
fixed value of the U.S. dollar came under pressure from the threat that foreign banks 
might suddenly demand massive gold conversion. There had been a brief flurry of this 
kind of activity toward the end of LBJ s presidency, prompting Johnson to institute a  tax 
surcharge,  but gold again steadily poured out of the United States under Nixon s watch. 
The president had little choice but to abandon the fixed gold-to-dollar ratio in August 1971. 
Henceforth, the U.S. dollar would  float  in world currency markets. This meant its value, no 
longer pegged to a fixed price in gold, could fluctuate in relationship to that of all other cur- 
rencies. The U.S. dollar, consequently, quickly devalued, and the Nixon administration 
expected U.S. goods would become cheaper, and thus more competitive, in global markets. 
Social Policy 
At the urging of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democrat who had written the controversial 
1965 report on black family structures, Nixon also proposed an equally dramatic overhaul 
1138  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
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of social welfare policy. A special presidential adviser on domestic issues, Moynihan sug- 
gested Nixon could sponsor truly  radical  changes because his popular political image as 
a  conservative  would help deflect criticism from within his own Republican party and 
from southern Democrats. 
Following Moynihan s lead, Nixon advanced a  Family Assistance Plan  (FAP). Under FAP, 
every family would be guaranteed an annual income of $1,600. FAP also proposed scrapping 
most existing welfare measures, particularly the controversial and increasingly costlyAid to 
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which provided government payments to cover 
basic care for low-income children who had lost the support of a bread-winning parent. 
Moynihan touted FAP as advancing equality because it would replace existing arrangements, 
which assisted onlythose with special circumstances (such as mothers eligible for AFDC), with 
a system that aided alllow-income families. The sheer simplicity of FAP, Nixon also promised, 
would allow for significantly trimming back federal bureaucracies 
The FAP proposal debuted to tepid reviews. Conservatives decried the prospect of gov- 
ernmental income supplements for families with regularly employed, albeit low-paid, wage 
earners. From this perspective, FAP looked too costly and too much like  socialism.  
People with a more favorable view of assistance programs, in contrast, argued that FAP s 
income guarantee seemed too miserly. The U.S. House of Representatives approved a 
modified version of FAP in 1970, but a curious alliance of senators who opposed Nixon s 
proposal for very different public policy reasons blocked its passage. In time, Nixon 
seemed to lose interest in pressing his own plan, and the nation s welfare system would 
not be overhauled until the 1990s. 
Meanwhile, however, the Nixon White House and Congress agreed on several signifi- 
cant changes in domestic policy. In one important move, Congress passed the president s 
revenue-sharing plan, part of Nixon s  new federalism.  It returned a portion of federal tax 
dollars to state and local governments in the form of  block grants. Instead of Washington 
specifying how these funds could be used, the block grant concept allowed state and local 
officials, within general guidelines, to spend the funds as they saw fit. In some areas, such 
as the construction of low-income housing, Nixon s new federalism provided state and 
local governments with significantly more federal money than they had earlier received 
under Great Society programs. 
A Democratic-controlled Congress and a Republican White House also cooperated on 
other social-welfare matters. Although Nixon vetoed a congressional measure that would 
have established federally funded day-care centers for use by women who worked outside 
of their homes, he endorsed a less comprehensive bill that provided tax benefits for those 
who used existing facilities. The two branches of government also agreed to increase fund- 
ing for many Great Society initiatives, including Medicare, Medicaid, rent subsidies for 
low-income people, and Supplementary Security Insurance (SSI) payments to those who 
were elderly, blind, or disabled. Moreover, in 1972, Social Security benefits were 
 indexed,  which meant they would increase along with the inflation rate. 
The reach of federal social-welfare programs actually expanded during Nixon s presi- 
dency. According to one estimate, the amount spent for nondefense programs grew nearly 
The Nixon Years, 1969 1974 " 1139 
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50 percent during the years between Lyndon Johnson s last budget and Richard Nixon s 
1971 72 one. In addition, the percentage of people living below the governmentally defined 
 poverty line  dropped during Nixon s first term as president. After reflecting on Nixon s 
domestic record, a prominent political scientist suggested, only partly in jest, that this Repub- 
lican chief executive might well be called  the last Democratic president  of the 20th century. 
Environmentalism 
A new environmental movement became a significant political force during Nixon s pres- 
idency. Landmark legislation of the 1960s such as the Wilderness Act of 1964, the 
National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, and the National Trails Act of 1968 had 
already protected large areas of the country from commercial development. During the 
early 1970s, a broader environmental movement focused on people s health and on eco- 
logical balances. Accounts such as Rachel Carson sSilent Spring(1962) had raised con- 
cern that the pesticides used in agriculture, especially DDT, threatened bird populations. 
Air pollution in cities such as Los Angeles had become so toxic that simply breathing 
became equivalent to smoking several packs of cigarettes per day. Industrial processes, 
atomic weapons testing, and nuclear power plants had prompted fear of cancer-causing 
materials. The Environmental Defense Fund, a private organization formed in 1967, 
went to court in an effort to limit use of DDT and other dangerous toxins.  Earth Day,  
a festival-like event first held in 1970 and growing out of countercultural movements, 
aimed at raising popular awareness about the hazards of environmental degradation. 
Although the Nixon administration did not sign up to help sponsor Earth Day, it 
did take environmental issues seriously. The White House supported creation of the 
EnvironmentalProtection Agency (EPA),and Nixon signed several major pieces of con- 
gressional legislation. These included the Resources Recovery Act of 1970 (dealing with 
waste management), the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, 
the Pesticides Control Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. National parks 
and wilderness areas were expanded, and a new law required that  environmental impact 
statements  be prepared in advance of any major government project. 
The new environmental standards brought both unanticipated problems and significant 
improvements. The Clean Air Act s requirement for taller factory smokestacks, for exam- 
ple, moved pollutants higher into the atmosphere, where they produced a dangerous by- 
product,  acid rain.  Still, the act s restrictions on auto and smokestack emissions cleared 
smog out of city skies and helped people with respiratory ailments. This law would reduce 
six major airborne pollutants by one-third in a single decade. Lead emissions into the 
atmosphere would soon decline by 95 percent. 
Controversies over Rights 
New legislation on social and environmental concerns accompanied political struggles 
over constitutionally guaranteed rights. The struggle to define these rights embroiled the 
U.S. Supreme Court in controversy. 
1140  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
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A majority of justices, supporters of the Great Society s political vision, had stood ready 
to announce an expanding list of constitutional rights. As this group had charted the 
Court s path during the 1960s, two Eisenhower appointees, Chief Justice Earl Warren and 
Associate Justice William Brennan, often led the way. Although nearly all of the Warren 
Court s decisions involving rights issues drew critical fire, perhaps the most emotional 
cases involved persons entangled in the criminal justice system. 
Mirandav. Arizona(1966) had held that the Constitution required police officers to 
advise persons suspected of having committed a felony offense of their constitutional 
rights to remain silent and to consult an attorney, with the government providing a 
lawyer to people without money to hire their own. Defenders of this decision, which 
established the famous  Miranda warning,  saw it as the logical extension of precedents 
involving libertyand equality. The Court s critics, in contrast, accused its majority of 
inventing liberties not found in the original Constitution or in any of its amendments. 
Amid rising public concern over crime, political conservatives made Mirandaa symbol of 
the judicial coddling of criminals and the Warren Court s supposed disregard for consti- 
tutional limits on its own power. 
Richard Nixon had campaigned for president as an opponent of the Warren Court and 
promised to appoint federal judges who would  apply  rather than  make  the law. Apparently 
worried about a Nixon victory, Earl Warren announced, prior to the 1968 election, his 
intention to retire as Chief Justice. A Republican Southern Democratic alliance in the Senate, 
however, blindsided Lyndon Johnson and blocked his plan to anoint Associate Justice 
Abe Fortas, an LBJ confidante, as Warren s successor. Consequently, the victorious Nixon 
could appoint a Republican loyalist, Warren Burger, to replace Earl Warren. Subsequent 
vacancies, including one produced by the resignation of a scandal-plagued Fortas, allowed 
Nixon to bring three additional Republicans Harry Blackmun, William Rehnquist, and 
Lewis Powell onto the High Court. 
This new  Burger Court  faced controversial rights-related cases of its own. Lawyers 
sympathetic to the Great Society vision advanced claims of a constitutionally protected 
right to receive federal economic assistance sufficient to provide an adequate living stan- 
dard. The Supreme Court, however, rejected this claim when decidingDandridge v. 
Williams(1970). It held that states could limit the amount they paid to welfare recipients 
and that payment schedules could vary from state to state without violating the constitu- 
tional requirement of equal protection of the law. 
Rights-related claims involving health-and-safety legislation generally fared better. A 
vigorous consumer movement, drawing much of its inspiration from Ralph Nader s exposé 
about auto safety (Unsafe at Any Speed, 1965), joined with environmentalists to gain laws 
that recognized rights to workplace safety, consumer protection, and nontoxic environ- 
ments. Overcoming opposition from many business groups, their efforts found congres- 
sional expression in such legislation as the Occupational Safety Act of 1973 and stronger 
consumer and environmental protection laws. The Burger Court invariably supported the 
constitutionality of these measures. 
The Nixon Years, 1969 1974 " 1141 
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At the same time, a newly energized women s rights movement pressed another set of 
issues. It first sponsored an  Equal Rights Amendment  (ERA)to the Constitution. This 
measure, initially proposed during the 1920s and supported by both Republicans and 
Democrats, promised to explicitly guarantee that women possessed the same legal rights 
as men. Easily passed by Congress in 1972 and quickly ratified by more than half the 
states, the ERA suddenly stalled. Conservative women s groups, such as Phyllis Schlafly s 
 Stop ERA,  charged that this constitutional change would undermine traditional  family 
1142  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
Women s Rights Demonstrators, August 16, 1970 Activists, who have gathered in Washington, 
D.C., to demonstrate on behalf of women s rights, take time to rest. Symbolically, they effectively 
 occupy  a statue erected in honor of a 19th-century military hero, Admiral David G. Farragut. 
A 
P 
 
Im 
a 
g 
e 
s 
11019_29_ch29_p1103-1154.qxd  6/4/07  3:38 PM  Page 1142
values  and expose women to new dangers, such as those they would encounter when 
serving in the U.S. military on a equal basis with men. The ERA failed to attain approval 
from the three-quarters of states needed to ratify any amendment to the Constitution. Ulti- 
mately, women s groups abandoned the ERA effort in favor of using the judicial system to 
adjudicate equal rights claims on a case-by-case, issue-by-issue basis. 
One of these issues, whether a woman possessed a constitutional right to terminate a 
pregnancy, became far more controversial than the ERA. In Roev. Wade (1973), the 
Burger Supreme Court narrowly ruled, with Republican Harry Blackmun writing the key 
opinion, that a state law making abortion a criminal offense violated a woman s  right to 
privacy.  The Roedecision outraged antiabortion groups, which countered with their own 
rights-based arguments on behalf of unborn fetuses. This  Right-to-Life  movement soon 
provided important new sources of support, especially from religious groups, for the still 
expanding conservative wing of the Republican Party. On the other side, movements orga- 
nizing on behalf of women s issues made the rights of privacy and individual liberty, espe- 
cially as related to reproductive decisions, central rallying calls. 
Outside of the Supreme Court spotlight, Richard Nixon s administration pressed for- 
ward, often relatively quietly, on several rights-related matters. With little controversy, the 
president signed a bipartisan congressional extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 
Another Nixon-approved measure, popularly known as  Title IX,  banned sexual discrim- 
ination in higher education. In time, it became the legal basis for pressing colleges to adopt 
 gender equity  in all areas of their programming, including intercollegiate athletics. In 
addition, Republican appointees of the Nixon administration, who assumed leadership 
positions in agencies such as the EEOC, successfully pressed for small policy changes that 
expanded the federal government s role in monitoring and enforcing laws barring both 
gender and racial discrimination in employment. 
Perhaps most surprisingly, members of Nixon s administration refined the  affirmative 
action  concept, which had surfaced during Lyndon Johnson s presidency. Beginning with 
the limited  Philadelphia Plan  of 1969, which was applicable to a single city, the White 
House built on a campaign pledge to give African Americans tangible economic assistance. 
Ultimately, Nixon s Department of Labor required that all hiring and contracting that 
depended on federal funding take  affirmative  steps to enroll, without being held to any 
bright-line quota, greater numbers of African Americans as union apprentices. When 
Nixon s critics claimed to detect a clever plan to unsettle labor union politics, other polit- 
ical observers noted how an important group in the Nixon administration hoped to chart 
a political course that could gain the GOP new support from African Americans. 
Foreign Policy under Nixon and Kissinger 
In 1968, while campaigning for the White House, Richard Nixon had promised an admin- 
istration that would  bring us together.  Instead, as it struggled with the issue that had 
brought down Lyndon Johnson, U.S. policy in Vietnam, Nixon s administration found 
Foreign Policy under Nixon and Kissinger  " 1143 
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itself making decisions that seemed to promote greater violence in Indochina and more 
divisiveness on the home front. 
Even as it wrestled with domestic policy concerns, the Nixon White House appeared 
far more interested in international matters. Henry Kissinger, Nixon s national security 
adviser and then secretary of state, laid out a grand, three-part strategy: (1)  détente with 
the Soviet Union, (2) normalization of relations with China, and (3) disengagement from 
direct military involvement in South Vietnam. 
Détente and Normalization 
Although Richard Nixon had built his early political career on a hard-line version of anti- 
communism, he and Kissinger considered themselves  realists  who favored flexibility 
when trying to advance the interests of the United States in the international arena. By 
seeking to ease tensions with the Soviet Union and China, the Nixon-Kissinger team 
expected that improving relations could lead these two major communist nations to 
reduce their support to North Vietnam, thus increasing chances for a successful U.S. pull- 
back from the war in Southeast Asia. 
Arms-control talks took top priority in U.S. Soviet relations. In 1969, the two super- 
powers opened the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT); after several years of high-level 
diplomacy, they signed an agreement (SALT I) that limited further development of both 
antiballistic missiles (ABMs) and offensive intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). SALT I s 
impact on the arms race proved relatively limited because it said nothing about the number 
of nuclear warheads that a single missile might carry. Still, the ability to conclude any arms- 
control pact signaled the possibility of improving relations between Washington and Moscow. 
Nixon s overtures toward the People s Republic of China brought an even more dramatic 
break with the Cold War past. Secret negotiations, often conducted personally by Kissinger, 
led to a slight easing of U.S. trade restrictions and, then, to an invitation from China for 
U.S. table-tennis players to compete against Chinese teams. This much-celebrated ping-pong 
diplomacy  presaged more significant exchanges. Most spectacularly, in 1972 Nixon vis- 
ited China, with the U.S. media firmly in tow. TV crews pictured the president, once a bit- 
ter foe of  Red China,  talking with communist leaders, including Mao Zedong, and 
strolling along China s Great Wall. A few months later, the UN admitted the People s 
Republic as the sole representative of China, and in 1973 the United States and China 
exchanged informal diplomatic missions. 
Vietnamization 
In Vietnam, the Nixon administration decided to speed withdrawal of U.S. ground forces, 
the policy called  Vietnamization. Putting this move, which had quietly begun under 
Johnson, in a grander frame, the president announced, in July 1969, a  Nixon Doctrine.  
It pledged that the United States would extend military assistance to anticommunist govern- 
ments in Asia but would require them to supply their own combat forces. From the outset, 
Vietnamization imagined the removal of U.S. ground troops without accepting a coalition 
1144  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
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Foreign Policy under Nixon and Kissinger  " 1145 
between the NLF and the government in 
Saigon or permitting North Vietnamese 
forces to defeat those of South Vietnam. 
While officially adhering to Johnson s 
1968 bombing halt over the North, 
Nixon and Kissinger accelerated both 
the ground and air wars by launching 
new offensives inside South Vietnam. In 
1970, they approved a controversial mil- 
itary invasion of Cambodia, an ostensi- 
bly neutral country, through which 
North Vietnam had been sending troops 
and military supplies into the South. A 
quick strike into Cambodia, the White 
House gambled, would buy further time 
for executing its Vietnamization strategy. 
The 1970 Cambodian invasion, 
which gained the United States a scant 
military payoff, set off a new wave of 
protests around the world and in the 
United States. As the campus antiwar 
movement revived, many colleges and 
universities exploded in angry demon- 
strations. Bomb threats prompted some 
schools, which were besieged by stu- 
dent protestors, to begin the 1970 sum- 
mer vacation earlier than originally planned. White police officers fatally shot two students 
at the all-black Jackson State Collegein Mississippi, and National Guard troops at Kent 
State University in Ohio opened fire on unarmed protestors, killing four students. As anti- 
war demonstrators descended on Washington, President Nixon seemed personally 
unnerved by the domestic furor surrounding his Vietnam policies. 
The continuing controversy over the  My Lai incident  further polarized sentiment 
over continuing the war. Shortly after the 1968 Tet episode, troops had entered the 
small Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai and murdered more than 200 civilians, most of 
them women and children. After a bungled cover-up, news of this massacre became 
public in 1969 and refocused debate over U.S policy. Military courts convicted only 
one officer, Lieutenant William Calley, of any offense. This controversial decision 
prompted charges that higher-ups had offered Calley up as a scapegoat for a failed 
strategy that emphasized body counts and lax rules of engagement. (Nearly forty years 
later, researchers found evidence of many other smaller-scale incidents resembling that 
at My Lai.) Injecting the White House into the Calley controversy, Nixon ordered that 
Jackson State In 1970, the violence associated with America s 
longest war came home. In May, police gunfire killed two students and 
wounded 15 others at Jackson State University in Mississippi. This 
picture was taken through a bullet-riddled window in a women s dorm. 
© 
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11019_29_ch29_p1103-1154.qxd  6/4/07  3:38 PM  Page 1145
the young lieutenant, pending the results of his appeal, be confined to his officer s 
quarters rather than imprisoned. Ultimately, a higher military court ordered that Calley, 
because of procedural irregularities, be released from custody. 
Meanwhile, the Nixon administration widened its operations to include Laos as well as 
Cambodia. Although the United States denied waging any such campaign, its bombing ravaged 
large areas of these largely agricultural countries. As the number of refugees in Cambodia 
swelled and food supplies dwindled, the communist guerrilla force there the Khmer 
Rouge became a well-disciplined army. The Khmer Rouge eventually came to power and, 
in a murderous attempt to eliminate dissent, turned Cambodia into a  killing field.  It slaugh- 
tered more than a million Cambodians. While Nixon continued to talk about U.S. troop 
withdrawals and to conduct peace negotiations with North Vietnam and the NLF in Paris, 
the Vietnam Warbroadened into a conflict that seemed to be destabilizing all of Indochina. 
Even greater violence was yet to come. In spring 1972, a North Vietnamese offensive 
approached within 30 miles of Saigon, and U.S. generals warned of imminent defeat. 
Nixon responded by resuming the bombing of North Vietnam and by mining its harbors. 
Just weeks before the November 1972 election, though, Kissinger again promised peace 
and announced a ceasefire. After Nixon s reelection, when peace negotiations again stalled, 
the United States unleashed even greater firepower. During the  Christmas bombing  of 
December 1972, the heaviest bombardment in history, B-52 planes pounded military and 
civilian targets in North Vietnam around the clock. 
By this time, however, the Nixon administration found it increasingly difficult to carry 
out its war policies. Support, all across the political spectrum, seemed to grow ever thin- 
ner. Critics condemned the violence in Asia and the administration s effort to expand its 
domestic power when responding to dissent at home. Perhaps most importantly, sagging 
morale among troops in the field began to undermine the U.S. effort. An increasing num- 
ber of soldiers questioned the purpose of their sacrifices; some refused to engage the 
enemy; and a few openly defied their own superiors. At home, Vietnam Veterans against 
the War (VVAW), a new organization, joined the antiwar coalition. 
Running out of options, Nixon proceeded toward full-scale Vietnamization. In January 
1973, the United States signed peace accords in Paris that provided a timetable for the 
withdrawal of U.S. troops. As U.S. ground forces departed, an increasingly demoralized 
and ineffectual South Vietnamese government, headed by Nguyen Van Thieu,continued 
to fight with U.S. support. In spring 1975, nearly two years after the Paris accords and 
with Nixon s successor in office, South Vietnam s army and Thieu s government would 
collapse as North Vietnamese armies entered the capital of Saigon. America s longest 
war ended in defeat. 
The Aftermath of War 
Between 1960 and 1973, approximately 3.5 million American men and women served in 
Vietnam: 58,000 died, 150,000 were wounded, and 2,000 were classified as missing. In the 
aftermath of this costly, divisive war, people struggled to understand why the United States 
1146  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
11019_29_ch29_p1103-1154.qxd  6/4/07  3:38 PM  Page 1146
failed to prevail over a small, barely industrialized nation. Those who supported the war 
to the end argued that it had been lost on the home front. They blamed an irresponsible 
media, a disloyal antiwar movement, and a Congress afflicted by a  failure of will.  The 
war, they still insisted, had been for a laudable cause. Politicians, by setting unrealistic lim- 
its on the Pentagon, had prevented military strategists from attaining victory. 
By contrast, others doubted the possibility of any U.S.  victory,  short of devastating 
North Vietnam and risking a wider war with China. These analysts stressed the overex- 
tension of U.S. power, the misguided belief in national omnipotence, and the miscalcula- 
tions of decision makers. Many concluded that the United States had waged a war in the 
wrong place for the wrong reasons. The conflict s human costs, to the United States and 
the people of Indochina, outweighed any possible gain from preserving a pro-U.S., non- 
communist South Vietnam. 
Regardless of their positions on the war, most Americans seemed to agree on a single 
proposition, which carried different meanings: There should be  no more Vietnams.  For 
most national leaders, this meant the United States should not undertake another substantial 
military operation unless it involved clear and compelling political objectives, sustained 
public support, and realistic means to accomplish a goal that clearly advanced the national 
interest. Eventually, however, the people who wanted to aggressively reassert U.S. power 
in the world, worried that what they called  the Vietnam syndrome  might shape a timid 
and ineffective foreign policy. 
Expanding the Nixon Doctrine 
Meanwhile, Nixon and Kissinger extended the premise of the Nixon Doctrine to the entire 
world. The White House made it clear that the United States would not dispatch its own 
troops to quash insurgencies but would generously aid anticommunist governments or 
factions willing to fight their own battles. 
During the early 1970s, U.S. Cold War strategy came to rely on supporting staunchly 
anticommunist regional powers. These included nations such as Iran under Shah Reza 
Pahlavi, South Africa with its apartheid regime, and Brazil with its repressive military dicta- 
torship. All of these countries built large, U.S.-trained military establishments. U.S. military 
assistance, together with covert CIA operations, also incubated and protected anticommu- 
nist dictatorships in South Korea, the Philippines, and much of Latin America. U.S. arms 
sales to the rest of the world skyrocketed. In one of its most controversial foreign policies, 
moreover, the Nixon administration employed covert action against the elected socialist 
government of Salvador Allende Gossens in Chile in 1970. After Allende took office, 
Kissinger pressed for the destabilization of his government. On September 11, 1973, the 
Chilean military overthrew Allende, immediately suspended democratic rule, and announced 
that Allende had committed suicide. 
Subsequent debates about U.S. foreign policy under Nixon and Kissinger often high- 
lighted events in Chile in order to illustrate broader claims. Democratic Senator Frank 
Church, for example, directed Senate hearings during the mid-1970s that suggestedpolicies 
Foreign Policy under Nixon and Kissinger  " 1147 
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toward Chile exemplified how the Nixon administration, in the name of anticommunism, 
often had wedded the United States to questionable covert activities and military dictators. 
Supporters of Nixon and Kissinger, in contrast, praised the pair for conducting a pragmatic 
foreign policy that combined détente directed toward the communist giants, the USSR and 
China, with containment directed toward the spread of revolutionary movements, includ- 
ing that of Allende s government in Chile. 
The Wars of Watergate 
1148  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
Focus Question 
What political and legal controversies entrapped the Nixon administration, and how 
did Watergate-related events ultimately force Nixon s resignation? 
Nixon s presidency ultimately collapsed as a result of fateful decisions made in the Oval Office. 
Nixon and his closest aides came to Washington with a view of politics that was as expansive 
as that espoused by many of the social movements the Nixon White House abhorred. The 
 new Nixon  endorsed a  new politics  evidenced in his foreign policy moves toward China 
and the Soviet Union and in his short-lived enthusiasm for FAP. 
At the same time, reminders of the  old Nixon  constantly surfaced. Long known as 
a political loner, who ruminated about taking revenge against his enemies, Nixon often 
seemed to be his own greatest foe. Even as his administration publicly built a domes- 
tic record that often seemed sympathetic to matters of liberty and equality, it secretly 
pressed the power of the presidency in constitutionally suspect, and often simply fool- 
ish, ways. It ordered the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to harass prominent Democrats 
with expensive audits, placed antiwar and Black Power activists under illegal surveil- 
lance, and conducted risky covert activities on the domestic front. Some of these activ- 
ities even rattled the constitutional sensibilities of an old Nixon ally, J. Edgar Hoover, 
who rarely worried about legal niceties when his own FBI swung into action. 
The Nixon administration prosecuted leading antiwar activists for allegedly impeding 
the Selective Service process and on various conspiracy charges. It also encouraged Vice 
President Spiro Agnew to assail media commentators for daring to criticize White 
House policies. 
Largely isolated from political give-and-take, with a close-knit group of advisers, Nixon 
eventually created his own secret intelligence unit, which set up shop in the White House. 
The Nixon administration planned to use this group to undertake secret presidential mis- 
sions against selected enemies. Its first job, to plug  leaks  of information about Vietnam 
to the media, soon provided the unit with a name,  thePlumbers.  
During the summer of 1971, stories in the Washington Post and, later, the New York 
Timesenraged the president. These papers had culled their revelations about deceptions 
and miscalculations by previous presidential administrations from a top-secret history of 
U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, popularly known as the Pentagon Papers. Daniel 
11019_29_ch29_p1103-1154.qxd  6/4/07  3:38 PM  Page 1148
Ellsberg, an antiwar activist who had once worked in the national security bureaucracy, 
had sent photocopies of this lengthy, classified document, commissioned in 1967 by 
Robert McNamara, to selected media outlets. 
Although the material in the Pentagon Papersconcerned events that preceded Nixon s 
presidency, his administration responded angrily. It became determined to make an exam- 
ple of what would happen to anyone else who trafficked in leaked and classified docu- 
ments. The administration s legal counterattack failed when the Supreme Court rejected, 
by a 6-3 margin, an attempt to halt through court injunction all media publications based 
on the Papers. More ominously, the White House unleashed its  plumbers.  Seeking infor- 
mation that might discredit Ellsberg, this clandestine unit burglarized his psychiatrist s 
office. Thus began a series of  dirty tricks  and outright crimes, sometimes financed by 
funds solicited for Nixon s 1972 reelection campaign, which would culminate in the con- 
stitutional crisis that became known as  Watergate.  
The Election of 1972 
Because Republicans had fared rather poorly in the mid-term elections of 1970, Nixon s polit- 
ical strategists worried that domestic and foreign troubles might deny the president another 
term. Creating a campaign organization separate from that of the Republican Party, with the 
ironic acronym of  CREEP  (Com- 
mittee to Re-elect the President), they 
secretly raised millions of dollars, 
much of it from illegal contributions. 
As the 1972 presidential cam- 
paign took shape, Nixon s chances 
for reelection dramatically improved. 
An assassin s bullet crippled George 
Wallace. Senator Edmund Muskie 
of Maine, initially Nixon s leading 
Democratic challenger, made a 
series of blunders (some of them, 
perhaps, precipitated by Republican 
dirty tricksters) that derailed his 
campaign. Eventually, Senator 
George McGovern of South Dakota, 
an outspoken opponent of the 
Vietnam War but a lackluster 
campaigner, won the Democratic 
nomination. 
McGovern never seriously chal- 
lenged Nixon. Early on, opinion 
pollsters suggested, a majority of 
voters decided that McGovern 
The Wars of Watergate  " 1149 
WA 
9 
OR 
6 
CA 
45 
NV 
3 
MT 
4 
ND 
3 
SD 
4 
WY 
3 
ID 
4 
UT 
4 CO 
7 
AZ 
6 
AK 
3 
HI 
4 
NM 
4 
TX 
26 
OK 
8 
KS 
7 
NE 
5 
MN 
10 
IA 
8 
LA 
10 
AR 
6 
MO 
12 
FL 
17 
MS 
7 AL 
9 
GA 
12 
SC 
8 
TN 
10 
NC 
13 
KY 
9 
WI 
11 MI 
21 
IL 
26 
IN 
13 
OH 
25 
VA 
N-11 
H-1 
WV 
6 
PA 
27 
NY 
45 
ME 
4 
NH 
4 
VT 
3 
MD 
10 
DE 
3 
NJ 
17 
MA 
14 
CT 
8 
RI 
4 
DC 
3 
McGovern    17        3.1        29,170,383      37.5 
(Democrat) 
Nixon                      520      96.7        47,169,911      60.7 
(Republican) 
Hospers                          1        0.2                 3,673       ---- 
(Libertarian) 
Schmitz                        ----       ----          1,099,482       1.4 
(American) 
Electoral Vote    
Number     %    
 Popular Vote 
  Number            %  
Electoral Vote    
Number     %    
 Popular Vote 
                 
Map 29.3 Presidential Election, 1972 This map shows 
what is commonly called a landslide election. Less than two years later, 
however, Nixon would resign from the presidency to avoid facing 
impeachment charges connected to his role in the Watergate burglary 
and other  dirty tricks  associated with his presidency. 
11019_29_ch29_p1103-1154.qxd  6/4/07  3:38 PM  Page 1149
seemed too closely tied to the antiwar movement, New Left activists, and the Countercul- 
ture. His key issues a call for higher taxes on the wealthy, a guaranteed minimum income 
for all Americans, amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters, and the decriminalization of 
marijuana fell outside of what most potential voters considered the  political main- 
stream.  In foreign policy, McGovernurged deep cuts in defense spending and an immedi- 
ate peace initiative in Vietnam. Nixon successfully portrayed these proposals as signs of 
the South Dakota senator s  softness  on communism and  weakness  on foreign policy. 
Nixon won an easy victory in November. He received the Electoral College votes of all but 
one state and the District of Columbia. Although the 26th Amendment, ratified one year 
before the election, had lowered the voting age to 18, a surprisingly small number of newly 
enfranchised voters cast ballots. Never seriously interested in helping other GOP candidates, 
Nixon watched the Democrats retain control of Congress. 
Nixon Pursued 
In achieving victory, the president s supporters left a trail of crime and corruption. In June 
1972, a surveillance team with links to both CREEP and the White House Plumbers had 
been arrested while fine-tuning eavesdropping equipment in the Democratic Party s head- 
quarters in Washington s Watergate office complex. Apparently, Nixon and his aides 
feared that Democratic leaders possessed documents that might hinder the president s 
reelection drive. In public, Nixon s spokespeople initially dismissed the Watergate break- 
in as a  third-rate burglary  and, then, as an unseemly incident unconnected to anyone of 
substance at the White House. Privately, though, the president and his inner circle imme- 
diately launched a cover-up campaign, which gradually unraveled. They paid hush money 
to the Watergate burglars and ordered CIA officials to misinform the FBI that any investi- 
gation by that agency would jeopardize national security operations. The White House 
succeeded in limiting the political damage until after the 1972 election, but events soon 
overtook their efforts. 
While reporters from the Washington Post pursued the taint of scandal around the White 
House, Democrats in Congress and federal prosecutors sought evidence of illegal activities 
during the 1972 campaign. In 1973, Judge John Sirica, a Republican appointee presiding 
over the trial of the Watergate burglars, pushed for additional information, and Senate 
leaders convened a special, bipartisan Watergate Committee. Headed by North Carolina s 
conservative Democratic senator Sam Ervin, it enjoyed broad power to investigate election- 
related issues, including the Watergate break-in. Then, prosecutors uncovered evidence 
that seemed to link key administration figures, including John Mitchell, Nixon s former 
attorney general and later the head of CREEP, to illegal activities. 
During the spring of 1973, one of the Watergate burglars and other witnesses testified 
before the Senate s Watergate Committee about various illegal activities committed by 
CREEP and the White House. Senator Ervin called Nixon s closest aides, though not the 
president, before the committee, and the televised hearings became a daily political drama 
that attracted a large and loyal viewer audience. Ultimately, testimony from John Dean, 
1150  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
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who had been the president s chief legal counsel, linked Nixon to attempts to conceal the 
Watergate episode and to other seemingly illegal activities. The president steadfastly denied 
Dean s charges. 
Along the way, though, Senate investigators discovered that Nixon had ordered installation 
of voice-activated taping machines, which had recorded every conversation in his Oval Office. 
These tapes (now housed at the National Archives) opened the way to determining whether 
the president or Dean, Nixon s primary accuser, was lying. While maintaining he was not  a 
crook,  Nixon also claimed an  executive privilege  to keep the tapes from being released to 
either Congress or federal prosecutors, but Judge Sirica, Archibald Cox (a special, independent 
prosecutor in the Watergate case), and Congress all demanded access to the tapes. 
If Nixon s own problems were not enough, his outspoken vice president resigned in 
October 1973, after pleading no contest to charges of income-tax evasion. Spiro Agnew 
agreed to a plea-bargain arrangement to avoid prosecution for having accepted illegal 
kickbacks, which he had not reported as income, while in Maryland politics. Acting under 
the 25th Amendment (ratified in 1967), Nixon appointed and both houses of Congress 
confirmed Representative Gerald Fordof Michigan, a Republican Party stalwart, as the 
new vice president. 
Nixon s Final Days 
Nixon s clumsy efforts to protect himself, while retaining his tapes, backfired. During 
the fall of 1973, Nixon ordered the Justice Department to dismiss Archibald Cox, a 
move intended to prevent the special prosecutor s office from gaining access to the 
White House tapes. When Cox s firing only seemed to confirm suspicions of a Nixon 
cover-up, political pressure forced the president to agree to the appointment of an 
equally tenacious and independent replacement, Leon Jaworski. Nixon s own release of 
edited transcripts of some Watergate-related conversations delivered another self-inflicted 
wound. These flawed documents only helped strengthen the case for independent ears hear- 
ing the original recordings. Finally, by proclaiming that he would obey only a  definitive  
Supreme Court decision, Nixon all but invited the justices, including ones he had 
appointed, to deliver a unanimous ruling on the question of the tapes. On July 24, 1974, 
the Court did just that in the case of U.S. v. Nixon. A claim of executive privilege could 
not override the refusal to release evidence required in an ongoing criminal investigation. 
Meanwhile, the Democratic-controlled Congress, with support from some Republican 
members, began steps to impeach Nixon and remove him from office. After televised deliber- 
ations, a bipartisan majority of the House Judiciary Committee voted three formal articles 
of impeachment against the president for obstruction of justice, violation of constitu- 
tional liberties, and refusal to produce evidence. Nixon promised to rebut these accusa- 
tions before the Senate, the body authorized by the Constitution (Article I, Section 3) to 
render a verdict of guilty or not guilty after impeachment by the House. 
Nixon s aides, however, were already orchestrating his departure. One of his own attor- 
neys had discovered that a tape Nixon had been withholding contained the long-sought 
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 smoking gun,  clear evidence of a criminal offense. This recording confirmed, during a 
1972 conversation, that Nixon had helped hatch the plan by which the CIA would advance 
its fraudulent claim of national security in order to stop the FBI from investigating the 
Watergate break-in. At this point, Nixon s own secretary of defense ordered militarycom- 
manders to ignore any order from the president, the constitutional commander-in-chief, 
unless the secretary countersigned it. Now abandoned by almost every prominent Repub- 
lican, most notably Barry Goldwater, and confronted with enough Senate votes to convict 
him of the impeachment charges, Nixon capitulated. He went on television on August 8, 
1974, to announce his resignation. On August 9, Gerald Ford, who had never even been 
elected to the vice presidency, became the nation s 38th president. 
The events that ended Nixon s presidency have helped to highlight some of the dynam- 
ics of historical memory. Shortly after Nixon s departure, most people told pollsters they 
considered the  Watergate Crisis  to be one of the gravest threats by unchecked power to 
constitutional liberty in the long history of the republic. As time passed, though, the details 
of Watergate faded away. Opinion polls conducted on the 20th anniversary of Nixon s res- 
ignation suggested that most people already only dimly recalled what had prompted 
Nixon to leave office. 
What specific forces could account for this change? One of these might be that Nixon 
avoided being prosecuted for his actions. Although nearly a dozen members of his 
administration including its chief law enforcement officer, John Mitchell were con- 
victed or pleaded guilty to having committed criminal offenses, Nixon received an 
unconditional pardon from his successor. Gerald Ford claimed he wanted to spare the 
nation another media spectacle: one featuring a former president undergoing a lengthy 
trial process. Ford s action, however, also prevented any authoritative accounting, in a 
court of law, of a traumatic political-legal episode. 
Another reason for changing memories may be the media s habit of affixing the Water- 
gate label to nearly every political scandal of the post-Nixon era. The suffix-gatebecame 
attached to apparently grave constitutional episodes and to obviously trivial political 
events. As the Nixon presidency receded in time, many people came to consider  Water- 
gate  a synonym for  politics as usual.  Finally, the specific images of what the historian 
Stanley Kutler calls the  wars of Watergate  have tended to blend into the broader pictures 
of the political, social, economic, and cultural turmoil that accompanied U.S. involvement 
in the nation s longest war. 
Conclusion 
Attempts to extend the power of the national government marked the years between 1963 
and 1974. Lyndon Johnson s Great Society provided a blueprint for waging a War on 
Poverty, and his administration dramatically escalated the war in Vietnam. This use of gov- 
ernmental power prompted divisive debates that helped polarize the country. During 
Johnson s presidency, both the war effort and the economy faltered, top leaders became 
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discredited, and Johnson abandoned the office he had so long sought. His Republican suc- 
cessor, Richard Nixon, became implicated in abuses of power that ultimately drove him 
from the White House. The hopes of the early 1960s that the U.S. government could 
aggressively promote liberty and equality both at home and throughout the rest of the 
world ended in frustration. 
The era of America s longest war was also a time of changing ideas about politics, cul- 
tural and racial patterns, and definitions of patriotism. It saw the slow convergence of a 
wide array of social movements, a veritable movement of movements. As different groups 
invoked different explanations for the failures of both the Great Society and the war effort, 
divisions from this era would shape U.S. politics and culture for years to come. Many peo- 
ple became skeptical, some even cynical, about enlarging the power of the federal govern- 
ment in the name of expanding liberty and equality. 
S UGGE S T E D RE ADI NGS 
On Lyndon Johnson, see Robert J. Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 
1961 1973 (1998), Irving Bernstein, Guns or Butter: The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (1996), 
and Randall B. Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition(2006). 
The many outstanding overviews of U.S. involvement in Vietnam include George Herring, 
America s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950 1975 (rev. ed., 2001); Robert 
D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941 1975(1997); David 
Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War(2000); 
Frederick Logevall, The Origins of the Vietnam War (2001); James Mann, A Grand Delusion: 
America s Descent into Vietnam(2001); and James H. Willbanks, Abandoning Vietnam: How 
America Left and South Vietnam Lost its War(2004). Working-Class War: American Combat 
Soldiers and Vietnam(1993) and Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides 
(2003), both by Christian Appy, provide a wide range of perspectives. See also, Odd Arne 
Wested, The Global Cold War (2005) and Jussi Hanhimaki, The Flawed Architect: Henry 
Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (2004). Jeffrey Kimball, The Vietnam War Files: 
Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era Strategy (2004) collects and skillfully organizes 
a revealing set of documents. Finally, David Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight: War and 
Peace; Vietnam and America October 1967(2003) moves back and forth, between Vietnam 
and the home front, during a single crucial month. 
The  movement of movements  during the 1960s can be surveyed, from diverse vantage 
points, in David W. Levy, The Debate over Vietnam(rev. ed., 1994); Lynn Spigel andMichael 
Curtain,The Revolution Wasn t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict(1997); Maurice 
Isserman andMichael Kazin,America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s(1999); and Edward 
K. Spann and David L. Anderson, eds., Democracy s Children: The Young Rebels of the 1960s 
and the Power of Ideals(2003). 
On the civil-rights movement and its larger context, Taylor Branchconcludes his multivol- 
ume history with Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963 1965(1998), and At Canaan s 
Edge: America in the King Years, 1965 1968(2006). William L. Van Deburg,New Day in Babylon: 
The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965 1975(1992), along with Kathleen 
Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A 
New Look at the Panthers and their Legacy(2001) offer useful overviews, while Robert Self, 
Conclusion " 1153 
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American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland(2003) provides a superb local 
study, as does Gerald Horne,Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s(1995). See also, 
Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Tradition(2002). 
On the late 1960s and early 1970s, begin with the opening portions of Bruce J. Shuman,The 
Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics(2001) and Andreas Hillen, 
1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America(2006). The 
year of 1968 is the subject of numerous volumes, including Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and 
Detlef Junker, eds, 1968: The World Transformed(1998); Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins, 1968: 
Marching in the Streets(1998); Mark Kurlansky,1968: The Year that Rocked the World(2003); 
and the broader account by Jeremy Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of 
Détente(2003). 
On the riddle that was Richard Nixon, see Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the 
White House(2001); David Greenberg, Nixon s Shadow: The History of an Image(2003); and 
Mark Feeney,Nixon at the Movies(2004). Stanley I. Kutler, ed.,Abuse of Power: The New Nixon 
Tapes(1997) provides evidence of Nixon s approach to politics and constitutional limits, in his 
own words, along with commentary that updates Kutler s own The Wars of Watergate (1992). 
John D. Skrentny, The Minority Revolution (2002) details the bureaucratic activism that 
expanded rights during the Nixon years, while interpretations of activism on the Supreme Court 
can be found in Morton J. Horwitz, The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice(1999) and in 
Lucas A. Powe, Jr., The Warren Court and American Politics(2000). 
1154  "CHAPTER 29  "America during Its Longest War, 1963 1974 
Visit the Liberty Equality Power Companion Web site for resources specific to 
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Power and Politics,1974 1992 
F 
ollowing the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War, 
the national government continually expanded its30 
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