American literature - přednášky

The United States since 1945, The peak Cold War years 1945 – 1960

• The Stalinization of eastern Europe and Soviet support of communist insurgencies in various parts of the globe

• Events came to a head in 1947 when Britain, weakened by a failing economy, decided to pull out of the eastern Mediterranean

• Truman now came into his own as a national leader, asking Congress to appropriate aid to Greece and Turkey and asserting, in effect, that henceforth the United States must help free peoples in general to resist communist aggression

• This policy, known as the Truman Doctrine

• The European Recovery Program, usually called the Marshall Plan

  • Europe’s economy had failed to recover after the war, its paralysis being worsened by the exceptionally severe winter of 1946–47. Thus, in June 1947 Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed the greatest foreign-aid program in world history in order to bring Europe back to economic health.

• Soviet Union countered this development in June 1948 by blocking all surface routes into the western-occupied zones of Berlin, Britain and the United States supplied the sectors by air for almost a year until the Soviet Union called off the blockade

  • A logical culmination of U.S. policy was the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance among 12 (later 16) nations to resist Soviet aggression.

• An Atomic Energy Commission for purposes of research and development

• The armed forces were reorganized under a secretary of defense by the National Security Act of 1947, which also created the U.S. Air Force as an independent service

• In 1949 the services were brought together in a single Department of Defense

• The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, helped ease military personnel back into civilian life. It provided veterans with loans, educational subsidies, and other benefits.

• A 21-point domestic program, including proposals for an expansion of social security and public housing and for the establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Act banning discrimination. These and subsequent liberal initiatives, later known as the Fair Deal, were rejected by Congress, which passed only the Employment Act of 1946

• Congress did approve a higher minimum wage, the extension of social security to 10 million additional persons, more public works, larger sums for the TVA and for rural electrification, and the Housing Act of 1949, which authorized construction of 810,000 units for low-income families

• Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin stood out among those who held that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations amounted to “20 years of treason.” In February 1950 McCarthy claimed that he had a list (whose number varied) of State Department employees who were loyal only to the Soviet Union

The Korean War

• On June 25, 1950, a powerful invading force from the Soviet-supported Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) swept south of the 38th parallel into the Republic of Korea

• The battle line was soon stabilized along the 38th parallel, and armistice talks began on July 10, 1951

• The talks dragged on fruitlessly, interrupted by outbreaks of fighting, until Eisenhower became president. The United States sustained some 142,000 casualties in this limited war, most of them occurring after China’s entry

• Tensions eased in foreign affairs as well. On March 5, 1953, Joseph Stalin died, opening the door to better relations with the Soviet Union. In 1955 the Soviets agreed to end the four-power occupation of Austria, and in that July Eisenhower met in Geneva with the new Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, for talks that were friendly though inconclusive

• In 1955 Martin Luther King, Jr., led a boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, giving rise to the nonviolent civil rights movement. But neither the president nor Congress became involved in the race issue until 1957, when the segregationist governor of Arkansas blocked the integration of a high school in Little Rock.