In the Twentieth century, there were three great transforming events. The Great Depression from 1929 to the outbreak of World War II, World War II itself and the Vietnam War from 1960 to 1975. Before World War II began, Americans lived in a world threatened by Germany's Nazis, Italy's Fascists, and the Soviet Union's Communists. Japanese militarists had invaded China in 1934 and threatened the entire Far East from Korea to Singapore, and Indonesia. Japan had no oil to operate its industrial machinery and had no raw materials to produce weapons. It had to buy steel abroad to build its army, navy and aircraft. Its Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere visualized territorial expansion and military power.
In Europe, Germany occupied Austria in 1938 and claimed the Sudetenland of Czechslovakia. Italy had colonies in Africa and wanted more. So Benito Mussolini bombed helpless Ethiopia into submission in 1937. The Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 was the forerunner of a far greater war involving the struggle against dictatorship, with both Germany, Italy, and Russia providing weapons to the combatants. On July 18, 1936 Francisco Franco proclaimed a military rebellion and became head of state a few months later as El Caudillo, the leader, of Spain's Fascist Party. However, Franco did not defeat the leftist Popular Front troops until just before the outbreak of war in Europe, April 1, 1939. Spain remained relatively neutral during World War II.
The immediate cause of World War II was a total failure of will on the part of Great Britain and France. Nothing was done when Hitler announced in 1938 that Austria has a new province of Germany. Neville Chamberlain, Britain's Prime Minister returned from Munich with a useless piece of paper, Hitler's promise that he wanted no more Lebensraum, or living space for Germans. This promise was broken on September 1, 1939. World War II began on September 3, 1939. Two days earlier, Adolf Hitler's Nazi forces had marched into Poland. In this Blitzkrieg, the Nazi forces quickly acquired control of the air with Stuka dive bombers and other aircraft now seen only in museums. German Panzer divisions, supported by tanks seemed invincible. They were, and Polish forces were soon defeated. Great Britain and France both had treaties with Poland that required they intervene with their own forces in defense of Poland. On September 3, 1939 both Great Britain and France declared war on Germany.
 Europe in 1914 |  Europe in 1939 |
British troops began arriving in France to defend that country so ill-prepared for war. Its leaders were living with a Maginot Line mentality. The Maginot Line was a series of underground fortresses built on the border between France and Germany. Unfortunately, its military architects did not anticipate that German forces would invade France by marching through Belgium and the Netherlands. This was the same invasion route used by the German troops of Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I (1914 to 1918). By September 28, 1939 Hitler and Joseph Stalin divided up conquered Poland and the treaty signed by both just before war broke out allowed the Soviet Union to occupy Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. Nazi forces were busy in early 1940. They defeated Noway and occupied Yugoslavia and Greece. By June, 1940 Hitler's Nazi forces had occupied Paris. The Japanese launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, and most of the world was at war.
After gearing up for wartime production after the attack on Pearl Harbour, the first landing of American troops in the near-European theater of war occurred in November, 1942. They landed in French Morrocco and fought across North Africa. Allied troops invaded Italy in late 1943 and drove German and Italian forces northward in some of World War II's bloodiest battles. Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected President of the United States in 1952, was Supreme Commander of all allied forces in Europe. He knew that infantry and tanks would win the war, but Eisenhower also knew that control of the air was essential. American bombers were produced almost on an assembly line basis, first the B-17 or Flying Fortress, the B-24 Liberator, and later the B-29. British and American aircraft flew almost daily missions to knock out German railway hubs and that country's heavy industry.
After World War II, Germany lay in ashes, its major cities bombed, and Italy was prostrate economically. The Soviet Union became an enemy of the West with its plan to expand the reach of Communism, and the Cold War began in 1947. It changed the way we lived and waged war.
For Russia, World War II began on June 22, 1941 when Hitler's armored forces invaded the Soviet Union using a defeated Poland as a military springboard. Hitler's generals didn't like invading Russia over a hundred years later; they remembered Napoleon's defeat by Russia. Napoleon I invaded Czarist Russia in 1810 and was driven back by Russian troops. Hitler, however, was Der Führer, so they followed orders. Eventually, the Soviet Red Army drove these German forces back as far as Berlin in 1945. Germany surrendered to the Allies in May, 1945. Adolf Hitler took his own life in his Berlin bunker command post.
For the United States, World War II began on December 7, 1941, when Japanese carrier-launched aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, sinking some Navy vessels, including battleships and destroying most of the American aircraft on the ground. Within four days days, President Franklin Roosevelt had requested Congress to declare war against Japan, Germany, and Italy. Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, had joined forces with Hitler only after most of France was occupied by Hitler's Nazis in 1940. Four years later, on June 6, 1944 Allied forces landed in Normandy and began the series of battles that led to Berlin and Germany's surrender. In that German capital, American, British, French, and Canadian troops met troops of the Soviet Union's Red Army at the River Elbe.
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Meeting of East & West American soldier & Russian soldier shake hands at the bank of the River Elbe, 1945 |
The war in the Pacific used air power and forces from the Army and the Marines to occupy the island chain from Midway to Okinawa, beginning with the invasion of New Guinea and Guadalcanal in 1942. The carrier battle of Midway in June, 1942 was probably the turning point of the war in the Pacific. The Japanese Navy lost four carriers and was never again a real force at sea. The United States Navy used Eniwetok as a huge harbor for its supply line to ships, allowing them to refuel at sea and launch their aircraft to provide air cover for troops. These troops invaded the Mariannas, Guam, Tinian and Saipan, Iwo Jima, and finally the Philippines in 1944 and early 1945. With Guam, the Army had a base from which its B-29s could bomb Japan itself.
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Japanese Carrier Mogami This dramatic photo was taken throught the scope of the US Sub "Nautilus". |
In August, 1945 American aircraft dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan and three days later dropped the second on Nagasaki. In both cities combined, an estimated 200,000 Japanese civilians died. President Truman has been criticized for his decision to use these bombs. However, he authorized them based on the evidence he had at the time. His military staff told him that thousands of American soldiers would be killed in any invasion of Japan itself. Truman would have been severely criticized, even impeached had he decided not to use these two atomic bombs to shorten the war and save American lives.
Nuclear weapons were widely available to the United States, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and eventually China. In this country, an entire new industry was created to build nuclear weapons and the missiles to launch them against targets in the Soviet Union. These targets were fixed in advance using new technology, a combination of gyroscopes and computers for guidance of missiles. What developed was the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). The possession of enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire planet was more than enough to stop the United States from launching missiles toward the Soviet Union. Its leaders knew that the United States faced devastating retaliation from Soviet missiles if it resorted to a first use of these deadly weapons. In the more than forty years of the Cold War from 1947 to 1989, no nuclear missile was ever launched in anger, either by this country or by the Soviet Union.
In 1945, very little was known about the radioactive, toxic fallout from the use of these bombs. It was not until 1950 that the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy learned a lot about radioactivity. It began nuclear testing in 1951 at the Nevada Test Site. The only victims, American citizens, lived in areas drenched by radioactive fallout, most of whom died horribly of cancer. The government concealed the danger to humans and lied for thirty years about what happened as a direct result of nuclear testing. See Allen et al v. United States, 588 F. Supp. 247 (Central Division Utah 1984). Plaintiffs were granted compensation for their injuries, but the District Court was reversed by the appellate court, 816 F. 3d 1417 (10th Cir. 1987), cert den 484 U.S. 1004 (1987). Random House published a book of photographs of some victims with text and individual stories assembled by the photographer, Carole Gallagher. Its title is American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War.
Even before the German surrender, American, British, Canadian and Soviet troops advancing west discovered the horrifying Nazi death camps. Jews had been sent there as prisoners who were either killed by the Nazis or found, starving and emaciated, by Allied troops. Hitler believed in a Germany, free of any but pure Aryan stock. Six million Jews were killed, many by poison gas of German manufacture, and their remains were either burned in the furnaces of Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka or other death camps, some located in Poland. Both Israel and the United States built memorial museums of the Holocaust, so the world would not forget those atrocities. [See the Simon Wiesenthal Center]. The same cruel practices were used in the former Yugoslavia fifty years later and described by Serbian leaders as "ethnic cleansing," also known as genocide.
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Belsen Death Camp The weak and the dying carry the dead bodies to the heap of the dead at Belsen |
Politically, economically, militarily, and culturally, World War II was a transforming event in the history of the United States. It was the crucible that reshaped the thinking of all those who lived through it and continues to affect those born after it. Only the struggle to end British rule of America in 1776, the Revolutionary War ending British rule of the United States, the drafting and ratification of the Constitution by the original thirteen colonies, the expansion to the west in America, the Civil War that ended slavery in the United States and preserved the union, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Vietnam War rank with World War II in importance.
Out of this war, American experts developed the computer and its scientists developed rockets and the fuel sufficient to put men on the moon in 1969. Our jet aircraft, both passenger and military were second to none anywhere in the world. More people than ever before entered school or college after 1945, most of the older students returning veterans. Their education was financed by the G. I. Bill of Rights enacted by Congress in 1944. In the same year, the Supreme Court held that black Americans could vote in national elections. Smith v. Allright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944). The struggle for civil rights was to begin with the end of World War II
In 1945, delegates from eighty nations met in San Francisco. Their purpose was to create the United Nations. Even with its present imperfections, it has worked well, particularly when it sends its blue-hatted soldiers on missions around the world to separate potentially warring factions in a peaceful manner.
American factories devoted only to wartime production -- they turned out some 295,000 aircraft, 71,000 ships, and 86,000 tanks -- converted to peacetime production soon after the end of the war in August, 1945. During the war, American factory production and Allied troops won the war, having helped both Russia and the Western allies rearm. Some sixteen million women worked on assembly lines of plants turning out all these wartime products. About 300,000 women wore uniforms, and a lot of them served in combat zones. Returning veterans displaced women. Those who had been paid well were suddenly unemployed. The end of World War II left some unsolved problems that President Truman and later presidents had to deal with in a race to superpower status by the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War had begun.
The Soviet Union's Red Army was both intact and a threat to Western Europe. In 1947, the United States, France, Great Britain, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Canada joined forces to establish the North American Treaty Organization (NATO). From the very outset, NATO was intended to defend Europe against a threat from the Soviet Union. East Germany -- it was divided by Soviet occupation -- Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania joined forces to create the Warsaw Pact.
In August, 1961 Eric Honecker, the president of East Germany, authorized construction of the Berlin Wall, principally to prevent East Germans from fleeing the communist Honecker régime. While some Germans were shot and killed trying to escape East Germany, hordes of East Germans managed to flee through Austria via Hungary and freedom in the West. The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia during 1989, rebellion in Poland that led to free elections there, and resistance to communist repression in Hungary all brought about the collapse of communist governments there and in Rumania. The Soviet Union itself was in disarray, and some of its republics actually seceded to establish governments of their own. Chechnya was one break away republic in 1992. Russian forces bombed unarmed civilians there, trying to recapture Grozny, its capital. President Boris Yeltsin ran for reelection in 1996 and won in the runoff, but the war in Chechnya was unpopular enough with the Russian people to threaten Yeltsin's bid to serve another four years.
In November, 1989 liberated Germans celebrated the demolition of the Berlin Wall. Its demolition marked the symbolic ending of the era known as the Cold War. It was more than symbolic for the Central European states. East Germany was unified with the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. Poland held free elections. The Baltic states slowly recovered their freedom from Soviet occupation. Czechoslovakia and Hungary both held free elections. Bulgaria and Rumania followed suit with mixed results. For details of the mostly nonviolent liberation of these occupied nations, see Without Force or Lies: Voices from the Revolution of Central Europe in 1989-90 edited by William M. Brinton and Alan Rinzler.
Europe in 1996
From 1945 to 1989, nine presidents of the United States developed foreign policies on the assumption that the division of Europe the Cold War symbolized would continue indefinitely. During this period of forty-four years the United States and the Soviet Union were superpowers presiding respectively over the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact nations of central and eastern Europe. George Kennan's policy of containing Communism dominated Washington's reactions to Soviet adventurism for years. There were many examples of this adventurism. In 1956, Soviet forces moved into Hungary to subdue those who questioned Russian authority, and in 1968 Soviet troops occupied Prague to end the "Prague Spring" of Anton Dubcek in Czechslovakia. The United States did nothing about this aggressive conduct, a decade apart, first in Hungary and then in Czechoslovakia.
Washington was driven by a fear of Communism during the 1950s. In 1957, for example, Congress indicated its approval of the Eisenhower Doctrine. It authorized the President to provide assistance, including American armed forces "to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such [Middle East] nations, requesting such aid, against overt aggression from any nation controlled by international communism."
Abdul Gamal Nasser, president of Egypt was the principal culprit. Nasser was an Arab nationalist who had allowed the Soviet Union to arm his forces with Russian weapons and aircraft in response to Western hostility. Washington, together with Paris and London saw all this as a threat to the Suez Canal and oil from the Persian Gulf states. Actually, the Suez Canal was closed for a short time in 1956, but by Nasser himself. He nationalized it. Nasser ordered ships in the canal sunk, closing the Suez. President Eisenhower demanded that Britain, France and Israel withdraw from the Sinai Desert from which they were about to launch an attack to protect the Suez Canal against its nationalization by Nasser. "It wasn't timely," he said.
Eisenhower will always be remembered for his farewell speech of 1960, in which he warned Americans about the dangers of "the military-industrial complex." Congress simply ignored this advice; Congress asked the American taxpayer to pay the bill for arming America against Communism which had a long history of repression and territorial ambitions. NATO was Europe's first line of defense against the Soviet Union. Early in the history of NATO, some 400,000 American troops were stationed in Europe.
Communism began in Russia with its apostles Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin. In November, 1917 Lenin formed the world's first communist government, having first ordered the execution of the Russian Tsar and his entire family. Lenin died in 1923 and was succeeded by Joseph Stalin. Stalin was a ruthless tyrant responsible for the deaths of at least nine million "kulaks" and political dissidents who silently opposed Stalin's prison camps in Siberia where most of them were sent to die. The kulaks were farmers who resented agricultural collectives run for the state.
In 1939, Stalin struck a Faustian bargain, a nonaggression treaty, with Adolf Hitler. One month later, Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. Almost two years later, Hitler, having defeated England and France in Europe, ordered the German attack on the Soviet Union. By the terms of its agreement with Germany, the Soviet Army occupied the Baltic states, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia in 1940. England carried on alone until 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour.
Communism existed on the other side of the world. It arose partly out of the corruption of the Manchu Dynasty in China and partly because of the appeal of communism for people like Sun Yat-sen. Sun is widely regarded as the father of modern China. He unified China and established a republic. Sun died in 1925, but his Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, survived to the point of agreeing with Mao that they should jointly oppose the Japanese invasion of mainland China.
In 1934, Mao Tse Tung was driven out of Jiangxi Province by local anticommunist forces. So Mao marched north in what was known as the Long March. In the next year, however, Mao's forces and the Chinese Nationalists forged a united front to oppose the Japanese who had occupied parts of China. This united front ended in 1945, and by 1949 Mao's forces had prevailed in his postwar revolution against corrupt warlords and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. During and even after World War II, the United States supported Chiang's Nationalists. In 1949 Chiang was displaced by Mao. It took Mao six years to design and launch his Great Leap Forward in 1955. It was an economic disaster for China. To deal with rising opposition within the communist government, Mao launched his Cultural Revolution. This program was also a disaster that wrecked the party bureaucracy, paralyzed education and research, and left China's economy in a shambles.
Chiang Kai-shek was forced to leave China for refuge in Taiwan with his armed forces. Politicians in the United States were quick to criticize the Democrats for "losing China" and leaving Mao's Communists in full control of the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC). China was not ours to lose; its own internal dynamics absolutely guaranteed what happened. A largely peasant population without land of its own saw Mao as a leader who could justify seizing land from corrupt owners and installing peasants instead. Mao simply surrounded Chinese cities and compelled the urban population to acknowledge his claim as leader or starve.
Until 1953, Mao's China and Stalin's Soviet Union enjoyed cordial relations, but a deep ideological split divided them in 1955. Mao came to consider the Soviets as revisionists and thus traitors to the cause of world revolution. The PRC and the United States normalized diplomatic relations in 1979 with the clear understanding that there was only one China. The PRC considered Taiwan as an upstart island province that would, in due time rejoin mainland China.
In 1979, Russian forces invaded Afghanistan, and the CIA saw this Soviet intervention as an opportunity. Weapons made in America were funneled to Afghan fighters via Pakistan, a country led by right wing generals. This American support for potential or actual rightists has been a persistent theme in Washington so long as the rightist and corrupt military was staunchly anticommunist. This Leitmotif led the United States to ignore human rights in El Salvador, support the contras in Nicaragua, and a corrupt regime in Vietnam.
The United States has not hesitated to deploy its armed forces since 1945. American forces were sent to Korea in 1950, they invaded Grenada in 1985, Panama in 1989, and they assembled the largest contingent of troops in the Gulf War of 1991. From 1954 to 1975, American forces fought the war in Vietnam, and 58,000 of them died there. All five of these wars were in violation of the Constitution and international law.
In Grenada, American forces found only a few bewildered Cuban construction workers. They were working on an airport expansion and supervised by a few Soviet technicians. This was enough for President Reagan; the Communists were coming, and they had to be stopped. In Panama, the army captured General Manual Noriega. Curiously, the Bush Administration is thought by many Panamanians to have deliberately let Noriega get out of control. The United States would then have enough reason to send its Army to invade Panama to restore order. Then, by effectively demobilizing the Panamanian army, the Bush Administration would have a reason to retain control of the Panama Canal. The treaty by which the United States agreed to relinquish control over the Panama Canal would terminate at noon Panama time on December 31, 1999. At that time, the Republic of Panama would take over the obligation of defending the Canal. However, without an army, it could not assume any such obligation. A referendum on whether the people of Panama want the United States to remain as their military protector is scheduled for 1996. In any event, Noriega was tried in Florida and convicted of drug offenses. However, the costs of this invasion are estimated at over $3 billion; this amount covered reconstruction of civilian housing damaged by bombs dropped from American military aircraft. In March, 1990 President Bush proposed and Congress approved an economic aid package for Panama.
The war in Vietnam was instructive. Initially, in 1952, it was seen as a post-World War II French effort to restore its former colony, Indochina, with U.S. military assistance. The French defeat in 1954 had very little effect on American policy during the next seven years, except that alarm bells rang in Washington at this victory by Ho Chi Minh's forces. Vietnam was cut in half by the Geneva Accords of 1954. Washington had already made a policy commitment to send arms to Saigon in South Vietnam. The war began in 1961 as a blundering exercise in do-good deployment; first the weapons were sent with advice about how to use them, and then the soldiers. The French resented the advice, but used the weapons. The local Vietnamese didn't want to fight an American-initiated war on their own soil.
South Vietnam and its absolutely corrupt regime should be saved so it could serve as a bulwark against Communism in Asia. Otherwise, this American rationale goes, friendly nations like Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines would fall like "dominoes." As time passed, it became clear that the South Vietnamese were just not willing to fight against their ethnic brothers from the North led by a wily revolutionary named Ho Chi Minh. He was a nationalist who thought the United States would agree to support him by ending French colonial rule.
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Company "E" (1968) Members of Company "E", 2nd Bn, 327th Inf, 101st. Abn Div, make their way across a river near Hill 608 in the A Shau Valley during operation "Somerset Plain" |
Instead, Washington gave the French both arms and advice until the French surrendered at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Thereafter, the war escalated beginning in 1961. So more and more Americans were sent to Vietnam to fight, and the military infrastructure to support them expanded by quantum leaps. It was not until 1968 and the Tet offensive that the American business community was convinced that the affair was too costly. The United States could not impose a solution except at a price in life and treasure too costly in terms of its domestic priorities. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, first for John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson, confirmed all this in his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam published in 1995.
In his confirmation hearings as Secretary of Defense, Mr. McNamara -- he was nominated by President John F. Kennedy -- offered an apocalyptic view of Communism. "There is no parallel," he said, "to the drive of Soviet Communist imperialism to colonize the world...To this primitive concept of total obliteration [of the free world], the Communists have brought the resources of modern technology and science...." The available evidence suggests that the Soviet Union had no intention of expanding its dominion by using a nuclear umbrella to pursue its imperialist ambitions. Deterrence, the notion that the Soviet Union was deterred from using its nuclear weapons by the possession by the United States of nuclear-tipped missiles, worked quite well. However, all the costs associated with the development and deployment of nuclear weapons from 1942 to 1996 added up to an estimated $4.7 trillion in the gross national debt of the United States.
These wars were not without a huge cost to taxpayers, most of it funneled to corporate America via the Pentagon during the Reagan-Bush years from 1980 to 1992. Three years later, the new Republicans in Congress authorized three B-2 Stealth bombers in for a Department of Defense that did not want them at all; they cost taxpayers one billion each, and the old B-2s had not passed their performance tests for six successive years. The military industrial complex was quite busy and enormously profitable, and the Pentagon authorized the most expensive aircraft toilet seats anywhere at $800 a copy. The executives of corporate America now enjoy inflated salaries and other forms of extravagant compensation, a fact only intermittently noticed by the national press. In 1980, the national debt was about $1 trillion. In 1992, after two Republican presidents, this debt had risen to about $4 trillion, an average increase of $250 billion in each of twelve years. To the extent that this money was spent, ie., distributed within the United States, it was distributed unevenly.
This political largesse represented the largest redistribution of wealth in the country's history. The income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor has widened to unprecedented levels in the last ten or twelve years. California is only one example of this stunning disparity. Its overall poverty rate in 1994 was 18.6 percent of the population. Approximately 2.36 million children in California lived in poverty as of the end of 1994. This was the year that the Republicans gained control of both the House and Senate for the first time in forty years. The new Republicans entertain ideas other than reducing the funds for those living in poverty. Prayer in the nation's public schools was part of their agenda.
Amending the First Amendment to introduce religion in America's public schools was unthinkable as recently as 1992. However, the Christian Coalition has different ideas. It pushed hard for a constitutional amendment to do just that by demanding prayer in the public schools. Right now, there is a test case in Utah, Bauchman v. West High School in Salt Lake City, No. C 2:95CV506. On June 2, 1995 the United States District Court for the Central District of Utah issued a preliminary injunction in this case. It enjoined the singing of religious music at a graduation ceremony and insisted on secular music. Notwithstanding the court's order, a student led the assemblage in singing the religious music enjoined. So much for the law-abiding school officials who passively ignored this violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. It's ordinarily considered a contempt of court. Defendant school officials filed a Notice of Appeal to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals on June 6, 1995. Religion belongs in the church and at home, not in the public schools. Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985). However, the Republicans elected in 1994 have different ideas; they want compulsory prayer or reading scripture in the nation's public schools. This is state-supported coercion. Adoption of a constitutional amendment is not the only change proposed by the new Republicans. They have already declared war on children and the poor by cutting welfare and nutrition programs.
In the elections of 1994, the South emerged again as the nation it once was in the 17th, 18th, 19th and most of the Twentieth centuries. The eleven states of the Old South, the Confederacy, had both a separate culture and institutional problems arising out of its plantation mentality before and after the Civil War. These elections shifted political and ideological control of Congress from the Democrats to the Republicans. The new Republicans promised they would reduce the annual deficit and balance the budget by 2002. On June 29, 1995 Congress gave final approval to a seven-year budget plan with the politically risky combination of budgetary austerity and a total of $345 billion in tax cuts over seven years. Whether voters will support reductions in welfare and related antipoverty programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and perhaps Social Security can't be known except for the biennial elections of each year through 2002. Most voters saw these spending reductions as a way of financing the tax cut of $245 billion.
With the end of the Cold War in 1989, the United States went through a steep recession. California was hit the hardest because of its many defense industries. Corporate America also discovered restructuring, or downsizing, the notion that companies could profitably produce with fewer employees and more technology. Unemployment was widespread, over 9 percent at its worst. So the United States entered 1994 with job security and stagnating wages as the greatest single issue on the minds of working Americans. In 1995, producing a balanced budget was a high priority item on the Republican agenda.
The new Republicans first tried a constitutional amendment mandating a balanced budget, but it failed in the Senate by one vote. Ratification of such an amendment by the states might have postponed Republican disclosure of program cuts. Of necessity, the Republicans then had to identify the programs that had to be either cut or substantially reduced to balance the budget by 2002. Balancing the budget in every year after 2002 seems a worthwhile, but probably impossible objective without another recession.
The new Republicans announced that Social Security would be left intact, until it became clear that the Social Security trust fund would run out of money by the year 2013. Congress might even have to reduce their individual pensions to a level used by corporate America. Even corporate welfare was targeted for reduction in a furious race to reduce federal spending. The Republican Congress never laid a glove on corporate welfare; instead, it included some pork in the budget proposal of December, 15, 1995. Medicare and Medicaid, health care programs for the elderly and the poor, were then on the block. Furthermore, the Republican Contract with America promised regulatory reform. This meant amendments to existing laws, such as the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and other environmental measures that had worked well for twenty years or more. The new industry in the South and its agriculture polluted the Mississippi River to the point that persons in the business of netting fish in the Gulf of Mexico and selling them were adversely affected.
Gutting laws protecting the environment from degradation by corporate America is quite different from what voters wanted in the elections of 1994. So is a drastic change in our legal system as, for example, in ending suits against companies for fraud, or limiting product liability recoveries. Not many voters even foresaw a possible raid on Medicare, nor did they anticipate a substantial tax cut benefiting only the few at the top of the economic heap. By historical accident, however, it is the South that produced members of Congress conservative enough to support all these extravagant proposals. The anecdotal residue of the Civil War continues to influence Southern thinking; the South then had to have slave labor to exist.
In the Nineteenth century, the South had seceded from the Union with the shots fired at Fort Sumter in April, 1861. Abraham Lincoln fought to preserve the Union and, in 1862, freed the slaves with his Emancipation Proclamation. The ensuing Civil War ended only in 1865 with General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomatox. Thereafter, the Reconstruction ruined what was left of the Old South, and it never again arose as a separate "nation" until 1994.
According to B.C. Hall and C.T Wood, who collaborated in writing The South published by Scribner in 1995, the Old South included all the states south of the Mason-Dixon Line: Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. West Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland were border states. That is, they were part free and part slave. In their book, the flap copy suggests nostalgia. "There is a nation within the American commonwealth. It is a nation older than the United States....a nation whose icons are sour mash whisky, the Savage Ideal, college football, Good Old Boys, King Cotton, Southern belles, the Lost Cause, and stock car racing." The Lost Cause, of course, was the Civil War. At the rate Southern Democrats re registered as Republicans, the South might again become the "nation" visualized by the authors of this book. Some observers argue that the South ought to be allowed to become a nation on its own. What's left might be more governable, and Gingrich could be Speaker of the Congress in the new Confederation.
The United States expanded to the West after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. This purchase more than doubled the land area of the United States. Expansion had its own moral and economic baggage. The slavery issue became a point of controversy so serious that it helped bring about the Civil War in 1861. In 1819, a bill was introduced in the House authorizing the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave state. But James Talmadge of New York introduced an amendment moving that no more slaves be brought into Missouri. His amendment was rejected in the Senate. The next Congress agreed to a compromise when Maine sought admission as a free state. Senator James Thomas of Illinois proposed that with the exception of Missouri, new slave states would not be not be admitted out of the territory included in the Louisiana Purchase north of 360 30' N Latitude. Thus, Missouri became the 24th state on August 10, 1821. After the Mexican War, however, the addition of more territory to the west of the Louisiana Purchase revived the issue of slavery. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act modified the Missouri Compromise in which new slave states could not be created north of 360 30.'
In 1842, the United States and Great Britain negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Both nations committed themselves to the maintenance of naval squadrons off the coast of Africa to stop vessels engaged in the slave trade. However, the language used in Article IX virtually anticipated failure of this effort to end slavery.
With the end of the Mexican War in 1848, the United States owned vast stretches of territory without any local government, including New Mexico, Utah, and California. However, gold was discovered in California in 1848, and thousands of would-be capitalists migrated in search of riches. California was admitted as a free state in 1849, while Henry Clay and Daniel Webster offered a compromise. New Mexico and Utah would be admitted to the Union as free states in exchange for the revision by Congress of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. In Jones v. Van Zandt, 46 U.S. 215 (1847), the Supreme Court had upheld a particularly harsh interpretation of the 1793 law. As part of the Compromise of 1850, Congress did revise the 1793 Act, making it even harsher than before.
Then, in Scott v. Sandford (Dred Scott Case), 60 U.S. 393 (1857), the Supreme Court held that slaves were property of their owner. Congress had exceeded its authority when it forbade or abolished slavery in territories because no such power could be inferred from the Constitution. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote for a bitterly divided court, and the ensuing violence was predictable, inflaming both sides of the slavery issue.
The Dred Scott case triggered violent reactions, unleashing irreconcilable partisan passions that merged with other forces already building toward the coming calamity of the Civil War in 1861. Exactly seventy years earlier, the original thirteen colonies had ratified the first ten amendments to the Constitution of 1789 drafted in Philadelphia. It established the Union the South had attacked in 1861 when it fired on Fort Sumter on April 10 of that year.
The Civil War ended in 1865, and reconstruction of the battered and defeated South began. The period between 1865 and 1877 is generally regarded as the Reconstruction era. A Young Readers' History of the Civil War, entitled Reconstruction was published by Lodestar Books in 1994 and appears to have been used as a textbook for young readers. It reminds me of a recent book by James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.
In 1980, Frances Fitzgerald demonstrated that widely used school textbooks presented simplistic, fatuous, and often inaccurate versions of American history. Random House published her book, America Revised, in 1980. Zak Mettger's Reconstruction does little to advance knowledge and contains several major errors. It begins with a drawing with the caption below noting that "Black men, most of whom had spent their entire lives as slaves, won the right to vote during Reconstruction." In the drawing, one may see a bearded, benevolent black man dropping his ballot in a glass bowl, presumably for later counting. For a brief period, freed slaves had a limited vote, but only in state elections. Even this limited franchise suffered from the Ku Klux Klan and its white-sheeted terrorists. Actually, black Americans did not get the vote in national elections until 1944. Smith v. Allwight, 321 U.S. 649 (1944).
Then, on a later page, this passage appears. "The stage was set for a fierce political battle. On one side were the 'Radical Republicans, who believed that the South should not be allowed back into the Union until it granted freedmen full political and civil rights. On the other side were those, including President Andrew Johnson, who favored denying such rights to black Americans and keeping all control in white hands. This battle nearly cost Johnson his presidency." Actually, the House had voted a bill of impeachment. In his trial by the Senate, Johnson missed impeachment by one vote. A slave owner himself, Johnson should have been impeached for blatant racism, a continuation of the war by other means. In any event, young students reading this book were never given a chance to discuss impeachment with teachers, a process that appears in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution. She might have briefly described the origins of America's two-party system.
Devoting many pages of her book (45-97), to partisan politics during the Reconstruction, the author left most readers with an erroneous impression. Electoral politics was dominated by two political parties, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. The former supported a strong federal government, but it died out in 1816 because of its opposition to the War of 1812. However, what was left split into two parties, The conservative Eastern elements of the divided party favored a strong nationalism, protective tariffs, and a national bank. They took the name of National Republicans. The other wing represented the South and the West. It believed in states' rights, tariffs only for revenue, and an independent treasury. It took the name of Democratic, and elected Andrew Jackson in 1828 and 1832. The National Republicans and anti-Jackson factions merged to form the Whigs. It was not until 1848 that the Whigs elected a president, Zachary Taylor.
During this period of the years between 1848 and 1860, the slavery issue brought about a realignment of the parties, and the Whigs had disappeared, having compromised on slavery. In 1856, a new Republican Party was formed in Ripon, Wisconsin and opposed slavery. Most of the Southern Whigs joined the Democrats, while the Northern Whigs joined the new Republican Party opposed to slavery. In 1860, the Republicans elected Abraham Lincoln. Republicans controlled Congress for 72 years except for the 16 years marked by Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson in the White House during World War I. The Democrats were described as the party of slavery and secession and relegated to the political background until the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In 1920, Republican Warren G. Harding was elected president and died in 1923. One of his few constructive accomplishments was establishing the Office of the Budget. Today, it's known as the Office of Management and Budget. Thus, since 1921, the budget of the United States has been the responsibility of the president, subject to Congressional approval. The process begins when the various departments and agencies prepare their appropriation requests, based on expenditures required under existing law and those estimated under new legislation to be proposed by the president. When the budget reaches the House, it is distributed among the subcommittees of the Appropriations Committee. Revenues fall under the jurisdiction of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Calvin Coolidge succeeded Harding upon his death in 1923 and was elected president in 1924. Harding had taken office during a depression and promised to enact agricultural measures to help farmers sell their crops. Unfortunately, Congress enacted the Capper Agricultural Credits Act of 1923 and the Fordney-McCumber Act. The latter was the highest tariff in history at the time. Neither act worked well. Harding alienated veterans of World War I by vetoing a veterans' bonus and signed a bill restricting immigration. Harding's Administration was marked by scandal, the Teapot Dome oil matter, and his Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall was indicted and convicted.
Calvin Coolidge, as governor of Massachusetts did better by the Republicans, having gained notoriety by using the National Guard to quell a Boston police strike in 1919. "There is no right against the public safety," he said, "by anybody, anywhere, at any time." President Ronald Reagan took a leaf out of Coolidge's book by firing most of the air traffic controllers in 1981. They had only threatened to strike. Coolidge did manage to reduce the national debt by about $1 billion and cut taxes in all income brackets. Coolidge also presided over what historians now describe as "Coolidge prosperity." He supported virtually unlimited credit leading to inflation and high corporate profits. In 1928, Coolidge announced he would not seek a second term, so the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover. He was elected in a landslide, and took office in 1929.
Only seven months later, the country was engulfed in a depression that swept the entire world. Hoover was unfairly blamed for the Great Depression which in part was caused by the unlimited credit supported by Coolidge and the Smoot Hawley Tariff of 1930. This tariff was enacted to protect the farmers, and most Western nations retaliated with high tariffs. It merely accelerated the economic decline that began in September 1929 with the stock market crash of that year. Many people buying stocks on margin were wiped out by margin calls, and those with cash were afraid to spend it. By 1932, stocks sold at 10 percent of their 1929 value. Bank failures wiped out those with cash on deposit, and mortgage foreclosures wiped out most farmers. Widespread poverty and unemployment were to continue until 1940.
In that year, the Arms for Democracy program helped stimulate the manufacture of military weapons and ships. The United States had begun a program of assistance to help Great Britain and France with arms to resist Adolf Hitler's Nazis after 1939 and the outbreak of World War II. Franklin Roosevelt was Governor of New York and saw the ravages of the depression at first hand. Some of his biographers have argued he decided to run for president, because Hoover was doing nothing to help those in need, farmers and people who lost their homes via bank foreclosures.
In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in a landslide, defeating Hoover by 472 electoral votes to Hoover's 59 votes. Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933 and quickly initiated programs that would shape the form of government for the next sixty-five years. They included the Social Security Act of 1935, the National Labor Relations [Wagner] Act of 1936, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt The 1932 Election. |
One of the outstanding books about this period in our history is The Great Depression: America in the 1930s by Tom H. Watkins and published in 1993 by Little, Brown & Company. It is copiously illustrated and was the foundation of a film series by PBS. Watkins believed that the New Deal was just the sort of activist, federal government that most people want today. He may not harbor quite the same feelings after the 1994 elections. They transferred control of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in forty years. During this interregnum, five Republicans served as president for a total of twenty-eight years; Dwight Eisenhower (8), Richard Nixon (6), Gerald Ford (2), Ronald Reagan (8) and George Bush (4).
In his book, Mr. Watkins revived memories. In addition to the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression and the utter misery of its victims , the United States suffered the greatest drought in its history. "....day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year of little or no rain," he wrote, "until by 1935 they [the farmers] were facing ruin in a world ruled by the mocking oppression of dust.... In 1934, nearly 30 percent of all Americans still lived on farms, and a good part of how the nation viewed itself was rooted in its agricultural traditions and experience....During just one [dust] storm between May 9 and May 11, 1934, an estimated 350 million tons of soil disappeared in the West and reappeared in the East. Chicago got four pounds of it for every person in the city, and Washington, New York, Boston, and other cities burned their street lamps in the middle of the day....People began to leave the home states in growing numbers after the terrible summer of 1934...Throughout the Plains states, 2.5 million people would ultimately leave for other parts." See pp 189-195 for text omitted. The Okies and the Arkies were on the move, and a lot of them took dirty, battered automobiles and their families for the drive to the promise of California.
California was not exactly a hospitable state. In 1937, its Legislature enacted the "Okie Law." It made it a misdemeanor for any person, firm or corporation to bring an "indigent person" not a resident of California into the state. The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously held this statute was "an unconstitutional barrier to interstate commerce." Edwards v. California, 314 U.S. 160 (1941). "The right to move freely from state to state, "Justice Byrnes wrote, "is an incident of national citizenship protected by the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment against state interference."
Literature of the time included John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939), a moving chronicle of the Joad family. Its members left their foreclosed farm in Oklahoma for the dim misery and violence of the migrant workers in California. Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth Century Fox made a film of this book, and Henry Fonda played the lead. It was a cinematic masterpiece, and Franklin Roosevelt reportedly arranged a showing at the White House in 1940.
Ever since 1880, the Supreme Court had been the arbiter of the place of labor unions in American life. All this changed with the New Deal, even after the court had sanctioned the use of injunctions to break strikes. In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895). Thereafter, unions fought an all out war to gain recognition by corporate employers. The Ford Motor Company even used professional strike breakers as late as 1933. In 1932, Congress enacted the Norris-Laguardia Act prohibiting injunctive relief in labor-management disputes. Finally, the Supreme Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, 301 U.S. 1 (1937). And the court also held that picketing by unions was speech protected by the First Amendment. Hague v. Congress of Industrial Organizations, 307 U.S. 496 (1937).
The New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt attracted millions of Americans bankrupted by the nationwide poverty of the Great Depression. Black voters, whose loyalties were to the Republicans since Lincoln, moved into the Democratic Party together with union members and the disenfranchised poor. This New Deal coalition continued to dominate the presidency after Roosevelt's death in 1945 when Harry Truman succeeded to the presidency. Truman was reelected president in 1948. Except for two sessions in 1947-48 and 1953-54, this coalition controlled Congress until 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected. Reagan served two terms and George Bush became president in 1988, only to lose to Bill Clinton in 1992. The Reconstruction period had left its mark on both parties, Republicans and Democrats alike.
While Democrats were the party of slavery for years after the Reconstruction, many of those elected to Congress during the Twentieth Century were considered conservative enough to qualify as Republicans; they were sometimes known as Dixiecrats. In 1948, for example, Southern Democrats rebelled against the civil rights policies of the Democrats and nominated Strom Thurmond as their candidate. He lost, but in 1968, George Wallace, governor of Alabama and a Southern symbol of resistance to desegregation of public schools, ran as the candidate of the American Independent Party.
Harry Ashmore described Wallace in his book, Civil Rights and Wrongs, published by Pantheon Books in 1994. "...the heart of his appeal was unabashedly racist, feeding on the resentment of those in the lower-income brackets who saw government-assisted improvement in the lot of blacks as a threat to their own [rights]." Wallace lost in 1968, but got the largest number of popular votes ever given a third-party candidate, 9,606,000. Had Wallace not run, Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat, would probably have defeated Richard Nixon, a Republican. Alternatively, the election of 1968 might have been decided in the House, where each state has one vote in accordance with Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. If no candidate for president has a majority in the Electoral College, the House may choose the president.
Finally, the last chapter in this children's book about the Reconstruction dealt with its legacy. Zak Mettger wrote: "By the end of the nineteenth century few signs remained of the great conflict that had taken place in the South more than thirty years earlier." The author did, to her credit, discuss Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). The 100th anniversary of this wretched decision was in 1996 on May 18. In this case, the court merely gave segregation of the races its judicial blessing in the South and the opportunity to legislate cradle to the grave segregation. It was not expressly overruled until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). In this case, the Supreme Court had held that separate but equal schools were a denial of equal protection. Enforcement of this rule was left to the courts, so it did not once again divide the Union as the Civil War had. The South still resists compliance with the Supreme Court's orders to desegregate its public schools "with all deliberate speed."
The Union had arisen out of the ashes of the Articles of Confederation that itself had followed the Revolutionary War. This war began with British refusal to allow the colonies to govern themselves despite the Declaration of Independence of 1776. It did not end until 1781. General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown in Tidewater Virginia. It is no accident that the first five presidents of the United States were all slave owners. Indeed, slavery was recognized in the Constitution itself by Article I, Section 2. In part, this read: "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons including those bound to service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons..."
Thus, the decennial Census included indentured persons, but excluded Indians who were treated as neither free nor slaves. Indians were the victims of American expansion to the west and mercilessly harassed by armed forces of the United States. Native Americans were also the victims of settlers in the western territories for over a hundred years. They were finally driven into reservations where their rights were established by various treaties. Most of these treaties were simply ignored by administration after administration until even today they are confined to reservations, or so-called tribal nations.
There is a widespread but erroneous belief that what is now the United States was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492. Actually, there is evidence that the Vikings were here first, even though the evidence of their presence in the year 1000 is found in Newfoundland. Where Columbus first landed is thought to be one of the Caribbean islands. However, he made a second trip to the New World and landed in Haiti. Here, he killed most of the indigenous Indians and sent many of them back to Europe as slaves. Most of those not killed by Columbus died from diseases imported from Europe. In 1992, David E. Stannard wrote a book published by the Oxford University Press, American Holocaust: the Conquest of the New World. One of Stannard's targets was the myths surrounding Christopher Columbus. An idea of what Stannard described appears on page x of his Prologue. "The destruction of the Indians of the Americas -- Hispaniola -- was," he wrote, "far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world." Columbus and some of his European contemporaries, as well as American settlers moving westward after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 must bear the responsibility for this American Holocaust.
Florida was discovered by Ponce de Leon in 1513 and settled by Spaniards over the following years. By courtesy of Charles V, Hernando de Soto was appointed governor of what is now Florida. He arrived in Florida in 1539 and later set out on his expedition through Florida into Georgia and Alabama to the Mississippi. In 1562, French Huguenots fled from religious persecution in France and established a small settlement near the St. Johns River.
Various wars in Europe were settled there with effects in the New World. By its treaty in 1763, Spain gave up Florida to England in exchange for Cuba. During the Revolutionary War in the United States, England returned Florida to Spain in 1778. By the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, Spain ceded all Florida to the United States in return for a promise in Washington to relinquish any claim it had to Texas. However, in 1960, the United States brought an original action against several states. United States v. Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, 363 U.S. 1 (1960) seeking a declaration with respect to title to minerals, such as oil. In its opinion, which took judicial notice of ancient records, the court said: "Texas, the only one of the defendant states, which had the status of an independent nation immediately prior to its admission, contends it had a three-league maritime boundary which 'existed at the time [it] became a member of the union in 1845.... Texas declared its independence from Mexico on March 2, 1836...In March 1837 this country recognized the Republic of Texas.
On April 25, 1838 the United States entered into a convention with the Republic to establish a boundary between the two countries and to provide for a survey of part of it. On April 12, 1844 President Tyler concluded a Treaty of Annexation with the Republic, but on June 8, 1844 the Senate refused to ratify it. On March 1, 1845 President Tyler signed a Joint Resolution of Congress annexing Texas...Pursuant to this Resolution, the people of Texas adopted a constitution, Const. 1854 Vernon's Ann. St., which was submitted to Congress. By Joint Resolution of December 29, 1845, Texas was admitted to the Union in accordance with the terms of the previous Joint Resolution..."
The court further traced the claims made by Texas and the United States, mentioning that the original boundary of Texas was in breach of the Treaty of Paris in 1806 and might have overstated the amount of land claimed by Texas. It had enacted its own Boundary Act in 1836. After Texas had consented to annexation and had been admitted to the Union, Mexico sent its army to recover what it had lost by annexation. President Polk requested Congress to declare war against Mexico to repel this invasion of a state of the United States. In a later message to Congress, Polk explained that the peace treaty proposed by Mexico required "the United States to dismember Texas..." However, Polk had sent a commissioner to Mexico to negotiate peace with instructions containing language later incorporated into the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as finally signed on February 2, 1848. The boundary line of this treaty conformed in every respect with the boundary claimed by Texas. This boundary was reaffirmed in the Gadsden Treaty of 1853.
With this historical background, it seems reasonable to say the United States fixed the boundaries of Texas based on its cartographic aggression against Mexico. Furthermore, the court scarcely mentioned the 1821 treaty under which the United States relinquished any claim it might have to Texas. It had not then acquired the status of an independent nation. Other states were to be created by actual aggression on the part of the United States. New Mexico, a Spanish province was one of them, having been forcibly seized by American armed forces in 1846. The Territory of New Mexico was created two years later by the Compromise of 1850. Arizona was carved out of this territory ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The Gadsden Purchase of this territory from Mexico established the southern boundary of what is now New Mexico in 1853. The northeastern section of the New Mexico Territory was annexed in 1861 by the new Colorado Territory, and it was further reduced in 1863 when the Territory of Arizona was created.
In 1947, the Supreme Court had dealt with ownership of oil and gas rights in the submerged lands up to three miles off California's coast. United States v. California, 332 U.S. 19 (1947). The court rejected California's claim, notwithstanding it was admitted to the Union in 1849 "on an equal footing with the original thirteen states in all respects whatever." However, Justice Black, writing for the court, noted that "neither the English charters granted to this nation's settlers, nor the Treaty of Peace with England in 1793 showed a purpose to set apart a three-mile ocean belt for colonial or state ownership." Since the court did not discuss California's history as support for its decision, other sources were used, eg., Tiara: Treaties and International Agreements of the United State Researchers' Archive on a CD-ROM published in 1993 by Oceana Publications, Inc.
What is now California, once a Spanish, then a Mexican territory was ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 following the Mexican War. In 1853, Article XII was repealed by the Gadsden Treaty and replaced with a boundary description. In 1845, John Fremont led a military expedition to northern California, encouraging American settlers there to rebel against Mexican rule. Proclaiming a republic, California was admitted to the Union in 1849. Ten years later, the Legislative body in Sacramento voted unanimously to divide the State to create two states. Accounts of this appeared in the Sacramento Bee, a newspaper still in existence. Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution, however, requires the consent of Congress. Thus, when the Civil War began in 1861, the entire project was abandoned. Getting Congress to consent then appeared out of the question with war in the offing.
With the end of the Civil War in 1865, Congress approved amendments to the Constitution -- the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments; these were ratified by the states. During this period lasting well into the Twentieth Century, territorial expansion continued as well as the movement west of Americans. They simply pushed the Indians aside to make room for the settlers. Freed slaves and many black Americans moved north fleeing from the South and its repressive, discriminatory practices. Talent came with them.
During the period between 1867 and 1920, many black Americans migrated to the urban centers of the country, New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, and Baltimore. With them, these migrants brought their art and musical talents. New York rapidly became the cultural capital of America. Ann Douglas has written a monumental work of some 600 pages, Terrible Honesty, chronicling the rise of music, art, theater, literature, and vaudeville in New York, complete with an extensive bibliography and an index. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1995. Douglas directed her principal attention to the 1920s, writing about luminaries in her world like W.B. E. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Franklin P. Adams, H.L. Mencken, Louis Amstrong, Duke Ellington, and Scott Fitzgerald to name only a few. In her own words, Douglas described why she wrote about this period. "My book," she wrote, "is an attempt to describe, first, the larger American emancipation and then, the African-American movement of liberation within it. Only a 'World City' is vast enough to welcome extreme ethnic and racial diversity and concoct the brew of blasé tolerance and vividly random curiosity that is the New York style." She also mentions reformer Carrie Chapman Catt. She enlisted a president as her ally and women got the vote in 1920 with ratification by the states of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, so the country was moving rapidly to expand.
Except for the Alaska Purchase of 1867 and admission of this state and Hawaii, westward expansion of the United States was complete by 1957, even though some states were not admitted to the Union until 1912, such as New Mexico. All hostilities with Spain had not ended during the 19th Century.
War in Cuba began with its struggle for independence. Spurred by the inflammatory journalism of the Hearst press, the public was appalled by the brutality of Spanish rule in Cuba. By 1896, there were demands for intervention in the war between Spain and Cuba. When riots broke out in Havana, the United States sent its battleship, the USS Maine, to protect the considerable interests of Americans. It was promptly sunk in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898. President McKinley sent an ultimatum to Spain. It was rejected, so the president asked Congress to authorize the dispatch to Cuba of armed forces "to secure a full and final termination of hostilities between Spain and Cuba," possibly the first time any president of the United States had ever intervened in a war between two foreign states. The war was fought on two fronts, the other being in the Philippines, then a Spanish possession. Spain asked France to help end hostilities, and the formal peace negotiations were held in Paris. By the treaty, Spain granted Cuba its full independence, and the United States acquired Puerto Rico and Guam. President McKinley reluctantly agreed to annex the Philippines. It was a dreadful mistake. The United States had to fight a three-year guerilla war in which for the first time genocide was used to describe the killing of an estimated 600,000 Filipinos by armed forces of the United States. Mark Twain was one of the fiercest critics of this phase of the war and wrote a powerful essay, "To the Person Sitting in Darkness." In it, he stated that "the American flag should have the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by skull and crossbones." There was only one positive note struck in this war with Spain. It made the construction of the Panama Canal inevitable to accommodate the needs of a two-ocean Navy. This international waterway was completed in 1914.
Coincidentally, 1914 was also the year in which Europe was at war with Germany. Barbara Tuchman has written two books, The Proud Tower and The Guns of August, both recommended for historians writing about World War I. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson, a racist president, ran for reelection with the statement that he had kept the United States "out of war." However, in 1917, after the sinking of the Lusitania and other provocations, the United States declared war on Germany. The surrender of Germany on November 11, 1919, left a defeated country. It was compelled by the Treaty of Versailles to pay heavy reparations. These, in turn, led to wildly uncontrolled inflation and the beginning of the rise to power in 1933 of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Hitler became Chancellor of all Germany in 1934.
During the 1930s, Hitler annexed Austria and demanded more. He wanted the Sudetenland then part of Czechoslovakia. England's Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to Munich to negotiate with Hitler and returned with a document that he waved while stepping down from his plane in London. "Peace in our time," he announced. Less than a year later, Europe was at war with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, led by Benito Mussolini.
Hitler's Nazis launched Germany into World War II and the Holocaust, in which approximately 6 million Jews were killed in various death camps scattered around Germany and Poland. On the other side of the world, Japanese troops invaded and occupied the Philippines with the outbreak of war on December 7, 1941. British-held Singapore was also overrun by Japanese troops, as was Indonesia for its oil to fuel the army's aircraft and ships, as well as autos on the home island of Hokkaido. World War II did not finally end until the surrender of Japan in 1945. President Harry Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt on his death in 1945, had authorized the use of atomic bombs, one on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki. In 1995, the Smithsonian Institution sought to revive the issue of their use, assigning part of the blame for the war with Japan on "American imperialism. "This revision of history so enraged veterans' groups and other survivors of the war, that the Smithsonian Institution backtracked and left history intact.
The presence of the United States in the Philippines until 1947, when this island nation was granted its independence, was to place the United States in the way of Japanese expansion during the 1930s. This had fateful consequences. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war against Japan and the Axis powers, Adolf Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. After the greatest war in history, General Dwight Eisenhower accepted the surrender of Germany in May, 1945. General Douglas McArthur presided at the surrender in Tokyo on the battleship, the USS Missouri. In the same year, delegates from some fifty nations had convened in San Francisco to negotiate the terms of the United Nations in treaty form. The Senate of the United States ratified this treaty in 1946.
The United Nations now has about 180 nations as members. In the early years of its existence, its General Assembly adopted a number of resolutions on human rights. They include: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948; the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights of January 16, 1966; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide -- not ratified by the Senate until 1988 -- of December 9, 1948; the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.Then, on December 21, 1965; the General Assembly approved the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
All contents © 1996 William M. Brinton
All photographs © Archive Photos, New York
All film © Archive Film, New York