Truman's Domestic Policy
The ened of the war meant the end of wartime production. With fewer Jeeps, airplanes, guns, bombs, and uniforms to manu=facture, American businesses started laying off employees. Returning war veterans further crowded the job markey, and unemployment levels rose dramatically. At the Same time, many people who had hoarded their savings during the war started to spend more liberally causing prices to rise. In 1946, the inflation rate was nearly 20 percent. The poor and unemployed felt the effects the most. Truman offered some New Deal-style solutions to America's economic woes, but a new conservatism had taken over American politics. Most of his proposals were rejected, and the gfew that were implemented had little effect.
The new conservatism brought with it new round of anti-unonism in the country. Americans were particularly upset when workers in essential industries went on strike, as when the coal miners' strike cut off the energy supply to other industries, shutting down steel foundries, aito plants, and others. Layoffs in the affected industries exacerbated tensions. Americans cared little that the miners were fighting for basic rights. Truman follower the national mood, ordering a government seizure of the mines when a settlement could not be reached. During a later railroad strike, Truman threatened to draft into the military those strikers who held out for more than he thought they deserved. Consequently, Truman alienated labor, one of the core constituencies of the new Democratic coalition. Labor and consumers angry at skyrocketing prices formed an alliance that helped the Republicans take control of the Eightieth Congress in the 1946 midterm elections.

Election of 1948
Truman also alienated many voters by pursuing a civil rights agenda that, for its time, was progressive. He convened the President's Committee on Civil Rights, which in 1948 issued a report calling for an end to segregation and poll taxes, and for more aggressive enforcement of antilynching laws. Truman also issued an executive order forbidding racial discrimination in the hiring of federal employees. Blacks began to make other inroads. The NAACP won some initial, important lawsuits against degregated schools and busts; Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, a very important symbolic advance' and black groups started to form coalitions with liberal white organizations, thereby gaining more political clout. These advances provoked an outbreak of flgrant racism in the South, and in 1948 segregationist Democrats abandoned the party to support Strom Thurmond for president.
With so many core Democratic constituencies- labor, consumers, Southerners-angry with the president, his defeat in 1948 seemed certain. Truman's popularity, however, received an umintentional boost from the Republican-dominated Congress. The staunchly conservative legislature passed several antilabor acts too strong even for Truman. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed over Truman's veto, prohibited "union only" work environmenys, restricted labor's right to strike, prohibited the use of union funds for political purposes, and gave the government broad power to intervene in strikes. The same Congress then rebuked Truman's efforts to pass health care regorm, increase aid to schools, farmers, the elderly and the disabled, and promote civil rights for blacks. The cumulative effect of all this acrimony made Truman look a lot better to those he had previously offended. Still, as election time neared, Truman trailed his chief opponent, Thomas Dewey. he then made one of the most brilliant political moves in American history: He recalled the Congress, whose majority members had just dragted an extremely conservative Republican platform at the party convention and challenged them to enact that platform. Congress met for two weeks and did not pass one significant piece of legislation. Truman then went out on a grueling public appearance campaign, everywhere deriding the "do-nothing" Eightieth Congress. To almost everyone's surprise, Truman won reelection, and his coattails carried a Democratic majority into Congress.

The Korean War
The Korean War began when Communist North Korea invaded U.S.-backed South Korea. Believing the Soviet Union to have engineered the invasion, the U.S took swift countermeasures. Originally intending only to repel the invasion, Truman decided to attempt a reunification of Korea after some early military successes. Amerivan troops attacked North Korea, provoking China, Korea's northern neighbor. China ultimately entered the war, pushing American and South Korean troops back near the original border dividing North and South Korea. U.S. commander Douglas MacArthur recommended an all-out confrontation with China, with the objective of overthrowing the Communists and reinstating Chiang Kai-shek. Truman thought a war with the world's largest country might be imprudent and so decided against MacArthur. When MacArthur started publicly criticizing the president, Truman fired him. MacArthur was very popular at home, however, and his firing hurt Truman politically.
Although peace talks began soon after, the war dragged on another two years, into the Eisenhower administration. When the 1952 presidential election arrived, the Pepublicans took a page from the Whig playbook and chose Dwight D. Eisenhower, a war hero. By this point, the presidency had been held by the Democratic party for twenty years. Truman was unpopular; his bluntness is now seen as a sign of his integrity, but during his terms, it offended a lot of potential constituents. In short, America was ready for a change. Eisenhower beat Democratic challenger Adlai Stevenson easily.
THE EISENHOWER YEARS (1953 – 1960)
The fifties are often depicted as a time of conformity. Across much of America, a consensus of values reigned. Americans believed that their country was the best in t he world, that Communism was evil and had to be stopped, and that a decent job, a home in the suburbs, and access to all the modern conveniences (aka consumerism) did indeed constitute “the good life.” While this image is based in fact, it is also an oversimplification. The fifties also proved to be an era in which the civil rights movement made its first strides and met some violent resistance; an era plagued by frequent economic recessions; and an era of spiritual unrest that manifested itself in such emerging art forms as beat poetry and novels (on the Road, “Howl”), teen movies (Blackboard Jungle, The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause), and rock and roll (Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry).

Domestic Politics in the Fifties
Eisenhower arrived at the White House prepared to impose conservative values on federal government, which had mushroomed in size under Roosevelt and Truman. He sought to balance the budget, cut federal spending, and ease government regulation of business. In these goals he was, at best, only partly successful. The military buildup required by the continuing Cold War prevented Eisenhower from making the cuts to the military budget that he would have liked. He reduced military spending by reducing troops and buying powerful weapons systems (thus shaping the New Look Army), but not enough to eliminate deficit spending. The popularity of remaining New Deal programs made it difficult to eliminate them; furthermore, t he circumstances required Eisenhower to increase the number of Social Security recipients and the size of their benefits. Under Eisenhower, the government also began developing the Interstate Highway System. The results of the highway system were ultimately economically beneficial; the new roads not only sped up travel., but they also promoted tourism and the development of suburbs. The initial cost, however, was extremely high. As a result, Eisenhower managed to balance the federal budget only three times in eight years. (He was shooting for a perfect eight-for-eight.) Some of the most important domestic issues during the Eisenhower years involved minorities. In 1953 Eisenhower sought to change federal policy toward Native Americans. His new policy, called termination, would liquidate reservations end federal support to Native Americans, and subject them to state law. In devising this policy, Eisenhower did not take Native American priorities into account; in fact, he did not consult any tribes before implementing the plan. He aimed simply to reduce federal responsibilities and bolster the power of the states. Native Americans protested, convinced that termination was simply a means of stealing what little land the tribes had left. The plan failed and was ultimately stopped in the 1960’s, but not before causing the depletion and impoverishment of a number of tribes.
The civil rights movement experienced a number of its landmark events during Eisenhower’s two terms. In 1954 the Supreme Court heard the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a lawsuit brought on behalf of Linda Brown (a black school-age child) by the NAACP. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued the case for Brown. In its ruling, the Court overturned the “separate but equal” standard as it applied to education; “separate but equal” had been the law of the land since the Court approved it in Plessy v. Ferguson (1986). In a 9-0 decision, the court ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Although a great victory for civil rights, Brown v. Board of Education did not immediately solved the school segregation problem. Some Southern states started to pay the tuition of white children who went to private schools in order to maintain segregation. Some stats actually closed their public schools rather than integrate them. Although Eisenhower personally disapproved of segregation, he also opposed rapid change, and so did little. This inactivity encouraged further Southern resistance, and in 1957 the governor of Arkansas called in the state National Guard to prevent blacks from enrolling in a Little Rock high school. Eisenhower did nothing until one month later, when the courts ordered him to enforce the law. Arkansas, in response, closed all public high schools in the city for two years.
Another key civil rights event, the Montgomery bus boycott, took place in the fifties. The arrest of Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man as was required by Jim Crow laws, sparked the boycott. Outrage over the arrest, coupled with long-term resentment over unfair treatment, spurred blacks to impose a year-long boycott of the bus system. The boycott brought Martin Luther King, Jr. to a national prominence. Barely 27 years old at the time, King was a pastor at Rosa Parks’s church. Although clearly groomed for greatness—his grandfather had led the protests resulting in Atlanta’s first black high school, his father was a minister and community leader, and King had already amassed impressive academic credentials (Morehead College, Crozier Theological Seminary, University of Pennsylvania, and finally a Ph.D. from Boston University)—the year-long bus boycott gave him his first national podium.
King encouraged other to organize peaceful protests, a plan inspired by his studies of Henry David Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi. In 1960 black college students in Greensboro tried just that approach, organizing a sit-in at a local Woolworth’s lunch counter designated “white only.” News reports of the sit-in, and the resultant harassment the students endured, inspired a sit-in movement that spread across the nation to combat segregation.
America V. the Communists
There are a number of terms associated with the Cold War policy of Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that you need to know. The administration continued to follow the policy of containment, but called it liberation to make it sound more intimidating. It carried the threat that the United States would eventually free Eastern Europe from Soviet control. Dulles coined the phrase “massive retaliation” to describe the nuclear attack that the U.S would launch if the Soviets tried anything too daring. Deterrence described how Soviet fear of massive retaliation would prevent their challenging the U.S. Dulles allowed confrontations with the Soviet Union to escalate toward war, an approach called brinksmanship. Finally, the Eisenhower administration argued that the spread of Communism had to be checked quickly—once Communists took over one country, the others surrounding it would fall quickly like dominoes; hence, the domino theory.
Cold War tensions remained high throughout the decade. Eisenhower had hoped that the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 might improve American-Soviet relations. Initially, the new Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev offered hope. Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s totalitarianism and called for “peaceful coexistence” among nations with different economic philosophies. Some Soviet client states took Khrushchev’s pronouncements as a sign of weakness; rebellions occurred in Poland and Hungary. When the Soviet crushed the uprisings, U.S.-Soviet relations returned to where they were during the Stalin era. Soviet advances in nuclear arms development (the U.S.S.R. launched the first satellite, motivating the U.S. to quickly create and fund the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA) further heightened anxieties.
Meanwhile, the U.S. narrowly averted war with the other Communists, the Chinese. American-allied Taiwan occupied two islands close to the mainland China, Quemoy and Matsu. The Taiwanese used the islands as bases for commando raids on the Communists, which eventually irritated the Chinese enough that they bombed the two islands. In a classic example of brinksmanship, Eisenhower declared that the United States would defend the islands and strongly hinted that he was considering a nuclear attack on China. Tensions remained high for years, and Eisenhower’s stance forced him to station American troops on the islands. During the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy used the incident as a campaign issue, arguing that the two small islands were not worth the cost of defending them.

Third World Politics
World War II resulted in the breakup of Europe’s huge overseas empires. In the decades that followed the war’s end, numerous countries in Africa, Asia, and South America broke free of European domination. These countries allied themselves with neither of the two major powers; for this reason they were deemed the Third World. Both America and the Soviets sought to bring Third World countries into their spheres of influence, as these nations represented potential markets as well as sources of raw materials. The two superpowers particularly prized strategically located Third World countries that were willing to host military bases.
Neither superpower, it turned out, was at first able to make major inroads in the Third World. Nationalism swept through most Third World nations, recently liberated from a major world power. Enjoying their newfound freedom, these countries were reluctant to foster a long-term alliance with a large, powerful nation. Furthermore, most Third World countries regarded both powers with suspicion. America’s wealth fostered both distrust and resentment, prompting questions about U.S. motives. America’s racist legacy also hurt it in the Third World, where most residents were nonwhite. However, most Third World nations also saw how the Soviets dominated Eastern Europe, and so had little interest in close relations with them. These new nations were not anxious to fall under the control of either superpower.
However, the United States tried to expand its influence in the Third World in other ways. For example, in Egypt the U.S. tried ofereing foreign aid, hoping to gain an ally by building the much needed Aswan Dam. Egypt’s nationalist leader Gamal Nasser suspected the western powers of subterfugel furthermore, he detested Israel, a western ally. Eventually he turned to the Soviet Union for that aid. The American government also used CIA covert operations to provide a more forceful method of increasing its influence abroad. In various countries, the CIA coerced newspapers to report “disinformation” and slant the news in a way favorable to the United States, bribed local politicians, and tried by other means to influence local business and politics. The CIA even helped overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala in order to replace anti-American governments with pro-American governments. It also tried, unsuccessfully, to assassinate Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro.
The 1960 Presidential Election
In 1960 Eisenhower’s vice-president, Richard Nixon, received the Republican nomination. The Democrats nominated Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. Similar in many ways, particularly in foreign policy, both candidates campaigned against the “Communist menace” as well as against each other. Aided by his youthful good looks, Kennedy trounced an awkward Nixon in their first televised debate. Kennedy’s choice of Texas Lyndon Johnson as a running mate helped shore up the Southern vote for the Northern (and therefore, in the South, suspect) candidate. Nixon, meanwhile was hurt by his vice-presidency, where he had often served the role of Eisenhower’s “attack dog.” The fact that Eisenhower did not wholeheartedly endorse Nixon also marred his campaign. Still, it turned out to be one of the closest elections in history, and some believe that voter fraud turned a few states Kennedy’s way, without which Nixon would have won.
In his final days in office, Eisenhower warned the nation to beware of a new coalition that had grown up around the Cold War which he called the “military-industrial complex.” The combination of military might and the highly profitable arms industries, he cautioned, created a powerful alliance whose interests did not correspond to those of the general public. In retrospect, many would later argue that in his final statement, Eisenhower had identified those who would later be responsible for the escalation of the Vietnam War. (See next section)

THE SIXTIES AND BEYOND (1961-THE NEAR PRESENT)
At the outset, the sixties seemed the start of a new, hope-filled era. Many felt that Kennedy, his family, and his administration were ushering in an age of “Camelot.” As Arthur had had his famous knights, Kennedy too surrounded himself with an entourage of young, ambitious intellectuals who served as his advisers. The press dubbed these men and one woman “the best and the brightest” America had to offer. Kennedy’s youth, good looks, and wit earned him the adoration of millions. Even the name of his domestic program, the New Frontier, connoted hope. It promised that the fight to conquer poverty, racism, and other contemporary domestic woes would be as rewarding as the efforts of the pioneers who settled the West.
The decade did not end as it had begun. By 1969 America was bitterly divided. Many progressives regarded the government with suspicion and contempt, while many conservatives saw all dissidents as godless anarchists and subversives. Although other issues were important, much of the conflict centered around these two: the Vietnam War, and blacks’ struggle to gain civil rights. As you read through this summary of the decade, pay particular attention to the impact of both issues on domestic harmony.

KENNEDY AND FOREIGN POLICY
Like Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy perceived the Soviet Union as the major threat to the security of America and its allies. All the major foreign policy issues and events of his administration related primarily to these Cold War concerns.
Two major events during Kennedy’s first year in office is heightened American-Soviet tensions. The first involved Cuba, where a U.S.-friendly dictatorship had been overthrown by Communist insurgents led by Fidel Castro. When Castro took control of the country in 1959, American businesses owned more than 3 million acres of prime Cuban farmland and also controlled the country’s electricity and telephone service. Because so many Cubans lived in poverty, Cuban resentment of American wealth was strong, so little popular resistance occurred when Castro seized and nationalized some American property. The United States, however, was not pleased. When Castro signed a trade treaty with the Soviet Union later that year, Eisenhower took punitive steps, imposing a partial trade embargo on Cuba. In t he final days of his presidency, Eisenhower broke diplomatic relations with Cuba, and Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for financial and military aid.
Taking office in 1961, President Kennedy inherited the Cuban issue. Looking to solve the dilemma, the CIA presented the ill-fated plan for the Bay of Pigs invasion to the new president. The plan involved sending Cuban exiles, whom the CIA had been training since Castro’s takeover, to invade Cuba. According to the strategy, the army of exiles would win a few battles and then the Cuban people would rise up in support, overthrow Castro, and replace his government with one more acceptable to the United States. Kennedy approved the plan, and the U.S. launched the invasion in April 1961. The invasion failed, the Cuban people did not rise up in support, and within two days Kennedy had a full-fledged disaster on his hands. Not only had he failed to achieve his goal, but he had also antagonized the Soviet and their allies in the process. His failure also diminished America’s stature with its allies.
Later in the year, Kennedy dealt with a second foreign policy issue when the Soviet took aggressive anti-West action by erecting a wall to divide Easy and West Berlin. The Berlin Wall, built to prevent East Germans from leaving the country, had even greater symbolic significance to the democratic West. It came to represent the repressive nature of Communism and was also a physical reminder of the impenetrable divide between the two sides of the Cold War. In a show of solidarity with t he West Germans, Kennedy went to the Berlin Wall in 1963 and made a speech, the most famous line of which contains an also-famous grammatical error. (Instead of declaring “Ich bin Berliner,” which translates to “I am a Berlin native (or Berliner.”) As the rhetorical war between the antagonists increased, so too did the fears of a military confrontation somewhere in the indefinite future.
Then, in 1962 the United States and the Soviet Union came to the closest they had yet to a military (and perhaps nuclear) confrontation. The focus of the conflict was once again Cuba. In October, American spy planes detected missile sites in Cuba. Kennedy immediately decided that those missiles had to be removed at any cost; he further decided on a policy of brinksmanship to confront the Cuban missile crisis. He imposed a naval quarantine on Cuba to prevent any further weapons shipments from reaching the island, and then went on national television and demanded that the Soviets withdraw their missiles. By refusing to negotiate secretly, Kennedy backed the Soviets into a corner; if they removed the missiles, their international stature would be diminished. Therefore, in return, the Soviet demanded that the United States promise never again to invade Cuba and that the U.S. removed its missiles from Turkey (which is as close to the U.S.S.R. as Cuba is to the U.S.). When Kennedy rejected the second condition, he gambled that the Soviets would not attack in response. Fortunately, behind-the-scenes negotiations defused the crisis, and the Soviets agreed to accept America’s promise not to invade Cuba as a pretext for withdrawing the missiles. In return, the U.S. secretly agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey.
Anti-Communism even motivated such ostensibly philanthropic programs abroad as the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps’ mission was to provide teachers and specialists in agriculture, health care, transportation, and communications to the Third World, in the hopes of starting these fledgling communities down the road to America-style progress. The government called this process “nation building.” The Peace Corps had many successes, although the conflict between its humanitarian goals and the government’s foreign policy goals often brought about failures as well. Furthermore, many countries did not want American-style progress and resented having it forced upon them.
The greatest theater for American Cold War policy during this era, however, was Vietnam. Kennedy and Domestic Policy
Kennedy began the presidency with the promise that American was about to conquer a New Frontier. He promised a series of programs that would increase government aid to the elderly, combat racism, improve American education, assist the many farmers who were facing business failure, and halt the recession that had dogged the American economy throughout the fifties. Kennedy’s domestic programs aimed high, but his domestic legacy was, in fact, meager. His greatest successes were in the space program, which received a great boost from the Cold War fears and the Soviets’ early accomplishments in space flight. During his three years in office, Kennedy never learned how to rally Congress to his domestic agenda, and it was only during the Johnson administration that New Frontier ideals were realized.
Kennedy’s civil rights agenda produced varied results. Kennedy did support women’s rights, establishing a presidential commission that in 1963 recommended removed all obstacles to women’s participation in all facets of society. However, it was only late in his presidency that Kennedy openly embraced the black civil rights movement. After almost two years of near inaction, in September 1962 Kennedy enforced desegregation at the University of Mississippi. In the summer of 1963, he asked Congress for legislation that would outlaw segregation in all public facilities. After hi assassination in November, Lyndon Johnson was able to push that legislation—the Civil Rights Act of 1964—through Congress on the strength of the late president’s popularity.
Still, Kennedy’s presidency proved an active period for the civil rights movement as a number of nongovernmental organizations mobilized to build on the gains of the previous decade. Marin Luther King, Jr. led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which staged numerous sit-ins and other peaceful demonstrations. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the Freedom Riders movement; the Freedom Riders basically staged sit-ins on buses, sitting in sections prohibited to them by segregationist laws. The Freedom Riders were initially an integrated group, as was the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which did grass-roots work in the areas of voter registration and ant segregationist activism.