- What was the Truman Doctrine?
- What were the Pumpkin Papers?
- Why were the Rosenbergs executed for espionage?
- What was McCarthyism?
- Who fought in the Korean War?
- Milestones in the Korean War
- What were the results of the Korean War?
- What was Brown v. Board of Education?
- Why did the arrest of a woman named Rosa Parks change American life?
- Why did President Eisenhower send the army into Little Rock, Arkansas?
- What was Sputnik?
What we think of as the fifties really began in 1945. The war was over. The boys came home. America was triumphant, now first among nations. "The American Century" proclaimed earlier by Time magazine's publisher Henry Luce seemed to be fully under way.
It was time to enjoy Uncle Miltie, Lucy, and daring novels like Forever Amber and Peyton Place. Most people fondly recall the postwar era as a respite of prosperity and social normality, a comfortable time. For eight of those years, Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), the gentle-faced golfer whom America called "Ike," held office, a comforting President. His campaign buttons simply read "I Like Ike," and that said it all. With his wife, Mamie, as First Lady, it was like having everyone's favorite aunt and uncle sitting in the White House.
America started to watch television - more than 4 million sets were sold in 1950 - and listen to the comfortable sound of Perry Como. There was no hip-swiveling jailhouse rocker on the scene. Yet.
America moved to the comfortable suburbs; 13 million new homes went up between 1948 and 1958, many of them in the cookie-cutter fashion pioneered by developer William J. Levitt's phenomenally successful Levittown, Long Island. Coming back from the Big War and later the Korean conflict, former GIs wasted no time, and America's maternity wards were over-flowing - 76.4 million "baby boomers" were born between 1946 and 1964. The country was reading Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care and Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking.
But not everything was rosy - even though America saw Red wherever it looked. There were commies everywhere. In Eastern Europe and Asia. In the State Department and the army. They seemed to be under every rock. Even in Hollywood!
There was also a generation of young writers looking at the underside of this dream, straining against the new American dream and its conformist constraints. In his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), Norman Mailer (b. 1923) presented a different and uncomfortable picture of the American GI in combat. A short-story writer named J. D. Salinger (b. 1919) would capture the alienation of youth forever in his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951). In several novels of the period, including The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Saul Bellow (b. 1915) would also express the angst of a generation. By 1955 with On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) would help lead a generation of "beats" who broke the era's social restraints, becoming self-proclaimed outcasts from a nation that prized stability and "normality" above all. Books like David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd ( 1950) and William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) also examined this peculiar American need to conform, an American characteristic that Tocqueville had perceptively brought to light more than a hundred years earlier.
What Was The Truman Doctrine?
Any dreams for an era of postwar cooperation between the two new giants of the world, the United States and the Soviet Union, quickly evaporated. The map of Europe had been redrawn and, in Churchill's ominous phrase, an "Iron Curtain" had descended across Eastern Europe as the Soviets under Stalin established a ring of socialist states around its flanks. The future, it appeared, would produce a string of flare-ups as the two nations contended for power and influence.
In 1947, when it appeared that Greece and Turkey were the next targets for Communist takeovers, and the British informed President Truman that they would be unable to prevent such takeovers, Truman asked Congress for aid to both governments. In what became known as the Truman Doctrine, the President told Congress, "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."
With $400 million worth of American advisers and military aid, the Greek and Turkish governments prevailed. But instead of installing representative government in the so-called cradle of democracy, Athens came under the rule of an oppressive, right-wing military regime, as did Turkey. But that was less important to political leaders of the United States at the time than that both countries remain aligned with the United States.
The theoretical underpinnings of the Truman Doctrine came from a State Department official named George F. Kennan. Writing under the pseudonym "X" in the influential journal Foreign Policy, Kennan introduced the pivotal concept of "containment," which essentially meant using American might to counter Soviet pressure wherever it developed. "Containment" of the Communist threat would color every foreign-policy decision in America for decades to come, as well as help bring about the great domestic fear of Communism that swept the country during the 1950s. Besides the Truman Doctrine, "containment" also led to the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 to defend Western Europe against Soviet Bloc attack, and the Marshall Plan to address the serious economic crisis in postwar Europe.
American Voices
From Secretary of State George C. Marshall's Harvard commencement address justifying the European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan (June 5, 1947):
The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products - principally from America - are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help, or face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character.
. . . Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.
Conceived by Undersecretary of State Will Clayton and first proposed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893-1971), the Marshall Plan pumped more than $12 billion into Europe in the next four years. It provided the economic side of Truman's policy of containment by removing the economic dislocation that might have fostered Communism in Western Europe. It also set up a Displaced Persons Plan under which some 300,000 Europeans, many of them Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, were granted American citizenship.
By most accounts, the Marshall Plan was an enormously successful undertaking to return a devastated Europe to a state approaching health. But was it simply pure American altruism, as we learned in school - the goodhearted generosity of America's best intentions? Not so, say critics on the left. To them, the Marshall Plan was simply an extension of a capitalist plan for American economic domination, a calculated Cold War ploy to rebuild European capitalism. Or, to put it simply, if there was no Europe to sell to, who would buy all those products the American industrial machine was turning out?
What Were The Pumpkin Papers?
To America, Communism was on the march around the world. Roosevelt and his liberal coterie had "given away" Eastern Europe at Yalta. In a test of U.S. resolve, the Soviets had tried to close off Berlin, forcing the United States to conduct a massive airlift in 1948 that finally cracked the Russian hold on the city. In China, the Nationalists were crushed by Mao's Communist forces in 1949. At about the same time, it was revealed that the Soviets had the Bomb. The world seemed to be in the grasp of a Communist conspiracy of international domination, and the President had responded with the "Truman Doctrine," with the complete support of a bipartisan Congress.
The obsessive fear of Communism in America was nothing new. Americans had been battling the Red Menace for years, and the first wave of Red hysteria had followed World War I. (See Chapter 6.) But it seemed as if the fears were much more real now, heightened by the terror of the mushroom cloud. Communism was the cutting issue on which people voted. To be "soft" on communism was political suicide, and ambitious young men, like Representative Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913) of California, could see that Communist-bashing was the ticket to the future.
Responding to this anti-Red pressure, Truman had set up loyalty boards in 1947 to check on reports of Communist sympathizers in the federal government. Thousands were investigated, but there was no meaningful trace of subversion, even though careers were destroyed as suspicion replaced evidence. These were the first of the anti-Communist "witch hunts" in which the burden of proof was on the accused, who couldn't face or know his unnamed accusers. Hearsay testimony from unreliable witnesses became Holy Writ.
The fear got front-page headlines in 1949, when Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961), a "reformed" Communist Party member and later an editor at Time magazine, charged that Alger Hiss was a Communist spy. To those who knew Hiss, this was nonsense that took the paranoia too far. A Roosevelt New Dealer, Hiss (b. 1904) was born and bred to the Eastern Establishment, with impeccable credentials as a progressive. But to conservatives, Hiss was blemished because he had been with Roosevelt at Yalta and was Secretary General of the United Nations organizing conference in 1945-46. Both Yalta and the UN were increasingly viewed as parts of the Communist scheme for weakening America and achieving world domination. In 1947, Hiss became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. But his integrity and loyalty were unquestioned.
Disheveled, overweight, and a somewhat ill-bred character, Chambers claimed that in the 1930s, Hiss had been a Communist who had given Chambers classified documents to be passed on to Moscow. Pressed by Congressman Richard Nixon in a hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating alleged Communist subversion in government, Hiss denied the allegations. Everything in his demeanor and bearing seemed to demolish the allegations made by the unseemly Chambers. But there were also some damaging revelations that left nagging suspicions. The most sensational of these came to light when Chambers produced copies of old purloined microfilm that had allegedly been concealed inside a hollowed-out pumpkin in Chambers's garden. Overnight, these became the "Pumpkin Papers."
The case might have blown over, except that Hiss sued Chambers for libel, and the evidence against this paragon of American progressive-liberalism turned out to be strong. In the courtroom, Chambers showed that he knew intimate details of Hiss's life, and even produced papers showing that Hiss had once given him an old car. While the statute of limitations protected Hiss from espionage charges, he was indicted for perjury for lying to a congressional committee. Tried and convicted in January 1950, he was sentenced to five years in prison. And people still argue this case with passion.
Why Were The Rosenbergs Executed For Espionage?
At about the same time Hiss's story held the headlines, Americans learned that Klaus Fuchs, a respected European scientist who had total access to Los Alamos during the war, had been passing secrets to the Russians. Harry Gold, an American associate of Fuchs, was caught at the same time as an American couple, David and Ruth Greenglass. Greenglass, who also worked at Los Alamos, testified that he had passed on crude drawings of atomic weapons to his brother-in-law and sister, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Claiming innocence at their trial, the Rosenbergs relied on the Fifth Amendment when asked if they were Communists. Their day in court came in the midst of the Korean War, presided over by a judge who, in a throwback to the Sacco and Vanzetti case, was totally in league with the prosecution. The Rosenbergs' defenders - then and now - have claimed that the Rosenbergs were framed, convicted, and executed in an atmosphere of anti-Semitic, anti-Communist frenzy.
The other conspirators were given prison sentences, including Fuchs himself, because they all agreed to help the prosecution, which the Rosenbergs refused to do. And that was ultimately the reason they were sent to the electric chair. While the evidence against them was strong, what has emerged is a consensus that Julius Rosenberg may have indeed been a spy, but that the secrets he passed along were far less damaging than those Fuchs turned over. The government wanted to make the Rosenbergs symbols of its fervent anti-Communism. But the years have turned the couple into the martyrs of America's rabid, irrational fears.
What Was McCarthyism?
It was from this toxic cloud of hysteria that Senator Joseph McCarthy (1909-1957) emerged, and was taken up by the right-wing press as a new Paul Revere. He was the freshman senator from Wisconsin, elected to the Senate in 1946 by lying about his wartime service record and smearing his primary- and general-election opponents. In a short time this scruffy, mean-spirited alcoholic was lining his pockets with lobbyist money and was generally thought of as the "worst senator" in Washington. By 1950 he was looking for the issue that would keep his leaky political boat from sinking.
McCarthy found that issue when he was fed some obsolete documents relating to old investigations of Communists in government jobs. In February 1950, McCarthy told a women's club in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he held, "here in my hand," a list of 205 men in the State Department named as members of the Communist Party who were part of a spy ring. The numbers changed from day to day, and even McCarthy wasn't sure where he had gotten them. His bulging briefcase of "evidence" generally held only a bottle of bourbon. But this was the beginning of his "Big Lie," consisting of evidence and charges fabricated by a desperate man. In the following days, the emptiness of McCarthy's "evidence" should have ended his Senate career. But it didn't work out that way. In 1950, America was more than ready to believe what Senator McCarthy had to say.
Although a Senate committee investigated and then refuted everything McCarthy claimed, their findings were ignored. True or not, McCarthy's irresponsible accusations caught the public ear, made headlines, and sold newspapers. The Senate investigations dismissing his charges got buried on the back pages with the ship sailing notices.
Time has altered the meaning of "McCarthyism." In 1950 it meant a brave, patriotic stand against Communism, with the broad support of the media and people. Now it has come to mean a smear campaign of groundless accusations from which the accused cannot escape, because professions of innocence become admissions of guilt and only confessions are accepted. Many of those who came before McCarthy, as well as many who testified before the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), were willing to point fingers at others to save their own careers and reputations. To fight back was to be tarred with McCarthy's "Communist sympathizer" brush. For many, particularly in the entertainment industries of radio, motion pictures, and television, that meant "blacklisting" that ruined careers. In this cynical atmosphere, laws of evidence and constitutional guarantees didn't apply to "devious Communists." For four years, McCarthy was as powerful as any man in Washington. He could force the President to clear appointments through him, and McCarthy's rampage forced President Eisenhower to institute a new round of "loyalty" programs to prove that he too was "tough" on Communism.
But in 1954, McCarthy took up a battle that turned against him when he challenged the U.S. Army to purge supposed Communists from the Pentagon. With the resourceful assistance of Roy Cohn, a young attorney whom McCarthy had earlier dispatched overseas to eradicate "communistic books" from U.S. International Information Administration libraries, McCarthy had begun to attack certain army officers as Communists. Once again he captivated the public imagination with his charges. But this time he overreached himself. The Army was Ike's turf. Eisenhower and the army started to hit back, first by investigating David Schine, Roy Cohn's wealthy companion on his book-purge trip, who, having subsequently been drafted into the army, had used McCarthy's influence to win soft military assignments.
The media also turned on him. CBS's legendary reporter Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965), the man who had brought the Blitz of London live to America on radio during the war, took aim at McCarthy on his TV program "See It Now," a predecessor to "60 Minutes." By simply showing clips of McCarthy without editorializing, Murrow allowed the senator's bluster to undermine him, exposing McCarthy for the charlatan he was.
During the thirty-six days of the Army-McCarthy hearings, McCarthy finally came undone, his cudgel-like attacks, remorseless crudeness, and unfounded accusations being revealed in an unpleasant light. The daily televised hearings dissolved as Joseph Welch, the respected lawyer representing the army, turned the tables on McCarthy and routed him in public. The hearings ended inconclusively, but the rest of the Senate smelled blood. By the end of 1954, McCarthy was condemned by his peers, and his public support eroded. His hold on the Senate and the public gone, McCarthy spiraled downward in a pathetic drunken tailspin. He died in May 1957 of health problems brought on by his alcoholism.
American Voices
Joseph N. Welch (1890-1960), special counsel for the army at the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, in response to an attack by McCarthy on a young associate in Welch's law firm:
Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.... Have you no decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
Who Fought In The Korean War?
As if Hiss and the Rosenbergs, Mao's millions and McCarthyism, and the Soviet bomb weren't enough to strike fear into 1950s America, 90,000 North Koreans did the trick. In June 1950, after a large-scale artillery barrage, the sound of bugles signaled the massed charge of North Koreans who came down out of the mountains to roll over an American-sponsored government in South Korea. Armed and trained by the Soviets, this was the most efficient fighting force in Asia after the Soviet Red Army.
This was the onset of the Korean War, a "hot war" in the midst of the Cold War maneuvering, and one that cost more than two million Korean lives as well as 100,000 American casualties. As political strife in South Korea continues even today to move through successive phases of protests and militaristic repression, it is still not really over.
Most contemporary American perceptions of the Korean War come from the TV series "M*A*S*H*." The Korean conflict remains something of an ambiguity, unlike the "people's war" that preceded it or the unpopular war that followed it. For Americans at home in the 1950s, Korea wasn't the "good war." Korea was a far-off mystery, and fighting for "containment" lacked the moral urgency behind the crusade against the Nazi scourge and the "murderers" of Pearl Harbor and Bataan. But American boys were being soundly whipped by the Korean invaders. President Truman and General MacArthur said we should fight, and in 1950 that was good enough for most Americans.
Americans still relied on radio and newsreels for their news, rather than the television that would bring Vietnam into the living room with such astonishing immediacy. But there are some clear parallels between Korea and America's tragedy in Vietnam. (Moreover, the first American involvement in Vietnam actually came during the Korean War, in the form of aid to the French anti-Communist effort in Indochina.) In both wars, an American-supported right-wing government was under attack by Communist insurgents supported by the Soviet Union and China. Both wars were fought to "contain" Asian Communism in nations split by postwar agreements with the Soviets. The Asian Communists were assumed in 1950 to be part of a worldwide Communist conspiracy that reached right into the heart of America's government - as Senator McCarthy was "proving."
While the rebels in both places were fighting a civil war for reunification under their control, the stakes were higher in Washington and Moscow, which poured in the military support to keep the wars going. While the United States provided the bulk of the troops and funds in Korea and Vietnam, both wars were ostensibly fought by an alliance of nations. But although the United States actually fought in Korea under a United Nations flag, it held no such pretensions in Vietnam. There is one other significant difference. In Vietnam, the United States fought against a mainly Vietnamese force of both guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars. In Korea, the fighting started out against the North Koreans, but it quickly escalated into a much deadlier and more dangerous war against the massive armies of Red China.
At home, both wars produced "hawks" who supported total commitment to the effort. In the Korean period, they were led by General MacArthur and the powerful "China lobby" of senators and media moguls like Henry Luce who wanted all-out war against Communism - including an assault on Mao's China. Although Korea never produced the broad social divisions that came later with Vietnam, the American people had little heart for the fighting in Korea.
As with Vietnam, the war in Korea helped end the presidency of a Democratic President - Harry S. Truman, in this case, and opened the way for a Republican - Dwight D. Eisenhower. (The Twenty-second Amendment, ratified in 1947, limits a President to two terms or to a single elected term for a President who has served more than two years of his predecessor's term, as Truman had. Truman was exempt from these provisions, however, and could have run again in 1952, but chose not to.)
American Voices
From the "Checkers Speech" by Richard Nixon (September 1952):
I should say this - that Pat [Nixon's wife] doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she would look good in anything.
One other thing I should probably tell you, because if I don't they'll be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the nomination. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog and, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. . . . You know what it was?
It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas - black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Checkers. And you know the kids, like all kids, love that dog and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're going to keep it."
Nixon's speech came in the midst of Eisenhower's campaign against Adlai Stevenson. While the Republicans ran on a platform of scourging Democratic corruption in Washington, Nixon was accused of keeping a "secret slush fund" provided by "fat cat" contributors. It certainly existed, but was legal. The appearance of the "war chest" was terrible for the Republicans, however, and Nixon was on the verge of resigning from the ticket. Instead, he took to the ariwaves in a televised speech that would be called maudlin and mawkish by the media. But the speech won heartland votes and it saved Nixon's career and the Republican ticket's chances.
Milestones in the Korean War (1950-1953)
1950
June 25
Trained and equipped by the Soviet Union, 90,000 North Korean troops pour over the 38th-parallel border and invade the Republic of Korea. The following day, President Truman authorizes the U.S. Navy and Air Force to assist South Korean armies in defending against the invasion. Within three days North Korean troops, encountering token resistance from what is essentially a South Korean military police force, capture the capital, Seoul, located only forty miles south of the border.
June 27
The United Nations Security Council first adopts a cease-fire resolution. The Soviet Union's envoy to the UN is not present, as he is boycotting the Security Council because it recognizes Nationalist China instead of Communist China. The resolution passes the Security Council 9-0. In a few weeks, a second resolution will commit a UN force to support the South Korean government.
June 30
General Douglas MacArthur visits the collapsing South Korean front lines and calls for U.S. troops. President Truman commits U.S. ground troops to South Korea, announces a naval blockade of the Korean coast, and extends the draft for another year. He also increases aid to the French fight against Communist rebels in Indochina.
July 8
A third UN resolution acknowledges American leadership of UN forces and Gen. Douglas MacArthur is placed in command of UN troops in South Korea. Although U.S. and South Korean troops will form the bulk of the UN forces, soldiers from sixteen nations, including Australia, Great Britain, and the Philippines, also see action. Initially, U.S. troops prove woefully unprepared for combat. Pulled from soft occupation duty in Japan, they lack training and are out of shape and ill-armed. American military strength is at its lowest state of readiness since Pearl Harbor. In the first weeks of fighting, U.S. forces are pushed back to a defensive perimeter at Pusan. American air power, which controls the skies over Korea and harasses North Korean supply routes, is the only reason North Korea fails to overwhelm the South.
August 6
The North Korean offensive is finally stopped by the line around Pusan.
September 15
In what is usually considered the single most brilliant stroke in his long military career, General MacArthur leads an amphibious assault on the port city of Inchon, deep behind North Korean lines. The invasion force encounters light resistance and moves quickly toward Seoul. With dangerously over-extended supply lines, the North Koreans are trapped between MacArthur's landing force and the defenders at Pusan. They begin an immediate retreat back across the border. Two weeks after the landing at Inchon, Seoul is recaptured by UN troops, who meet unexpectedly stiff resistance from remaining North Korean troops in the capital.
September 29
The UN forces reach the 38th parallel, marking the boundary separating North and South. Presumably, the aims of the war have been accomplished with the North driven back across its border. But Korean President Syngman Rhee announces his intention to continue the war by uniting Korea under his rule and punishing the North for its aggression. This plan is fully supported by MacArthur, a staunch anti-Communist, and the American military command in Washington, but any action against China is expressly ruled out.
October 7
Shifting from the containment policy to a goal of overthrowing a Communist government, MacArthur's UN forces invade North Korea. The move is denounced by the Communist government of China, which says it will not stand idly by. The Chinese threat is ignored as a bluff. The United States has no relations with China, and only recognizes the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan (Formosa). Nearly one million Chinese troops had been massed in Manchuria.
October 15
President Truman and General MacArthur meet on Wake Island. Truman wants to rein in the headstrong soldier who has spent his career countering presidential orders. Truman leaves Wake thinking that MacArthur is resolved to abide by his general orders.
October 20
UN troops capture the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and continue to advance north toward the Yalu River, the border with Manchuria.
November 1
Massing under the cover of smoke from huge forest fires, Chinese troops attack South Korean troops in the North, destroying one army.
November 2
General MacArthur announces that the Chinese constitute a serious threat. Under attack by the Chinese, the U.S. Eighth Army retreats south.
November 4
A massive Chinese counteroffensive begins. MacArthur reports that the Chinese are in Korea in such numbers that they threaten his command, and demands reinforcements.
November 6
Abandoning their concealment tactics, a million Chinese move into Korea. U.S. pilots watch a steady stream of Chinese troops cross the Yalu River separating Korea from Manchuria. MacArthur announces a plan to bomb the Yalu bridges, but it is overruled by Washington. MacArthur begins a political offensive in favor of all-out war against the Chinese that will not only reunite Korea but topple the Communist government in China, allowing Chiang Kai-shek to retake the mainland. In his worst strategic maneuver, MacArthur has split his armies, and the Chinese easily drive through the center of the UN forces.
December 5
In the face of enormous Chinese manpower willing to accept huge casualties, UN troops abandon Pyongyang and are eventually pushed out of the North. The Chinese continue their offensive, promising to drive the Americans into the sea. MacArthur reports to Truman, "We face an entirely new war."
December 8
President Truman announces an embargo on U.S. goods shipped to China.
December 16
President Truman declares a national emergency and calls for an army buildup to 3.5 million men. Three days later, Dwight Eisenhower, who is serving as president of Columbia University, is named supreme commander of Western European defense forces.
December 29
General MacArthur announces that the United States should attack China, and advocates atomic attacks on China and the use of half a million Nationalist Chinese troops to overthrow the Communist government in China.
1951
January 4
Chinese troops capture Seoul. MacArthur complains about being hampered by Truman's decision not to bomb Chinese supply dumps in China. UN troops eventually regroup and halt the Chinese offensive.
March 14
UN forces recapture Seoul and eventually push Chinese troops back across the border.
April 5
In the United States, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are sentenced to death on their conviction of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The execution will be carried out in June 1953.
April 11
President Truman removes General MacArthur as commander in Korea after MacArthur openly defies Truman's plan to negotiate a Korean peace. In March, General Matthew B. Ridgeway takes command of forces in Korea. Returning to the States as a national hero and greeted by huge crowds (some reports put New York crowds welcoming MacArthur in a ticker-tape parade at 7 million), MacArthur later addresses a joint session of Congress with a speech urging an expanded war against China. There is a huge popular outcry against Truman, and thousands of letters calling for his impeachment descend on the White House and Congress.
American Voices
President Harry S. Truman on the firing of General MacArthur, from Merle Miller's biography of Truman, Plain Speaking (1973):
I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. That's the answer to that. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.
July 10
While fighting continues, the United States joins peace talks between the UN and China. The U.S. goal is a negotiated truce confirming the staus quo before the war - a return to the containment policy.
1952
January 24
Peace talks with the Chinese are declared stalled. The war continues, fought primarily in a seesaw battle in North Korea's cold, rugged mountain terrain. These battles, for Heartbreak Ridge, Bloody Ridge, the Punchbowl, and other hills essentially end in a bloody stalemate, bringing to mind the trench warfare of World War I.
November 4
Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected President. Richard M. Nixon is his Vice-President. His opponent, Democrat Adlai Stevenson, has won only nine states.
December 5
President-elect Eisenhower visits troops in Korea and attempts to break the stalemate in truce talks.
1953
July 27
An armistice is signed at Panmunjon, halting the Korean fighting. The war ends where it started, at the 38th parallel.
What Were The Results Of The Korean War?
The war cost America more than 54,000 dead and another 100,000 casualties. More than 2 million Koreans were killed in the fighting. After three years, the situation in Korea was almost exactly what it had been when the North first attacked the South. All of the fighting and deaths had changed almost nothing, and it has remained that way to this day. At home, the war produced a massive call for militarization and a buildup of American conventional and nuclear forces - strengthening what President Eisenhower himself would later label "the military-industrial complex."
American Voices
From Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison (1952):
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you sometimes see in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me.
What Was Brown V. Board Of Education?
Every day, eight-year-old Linda Brown wondered why she had to ride five miles to school when her bus passed the perfectly lovely Sumner Elementary School, just four blocks from her home. When her father tried to enroll her in Sumner for fourth grade, the Topeka, Kansas, school authorities just said no. In 1951, Linda Brown was the wrong color for Sumner.
In July 1950, a year before Linda was turned away, segregated black troops from the 24th Infantry Regiment scored the first American victory of the Korean War when they recaptured Yechon. A few months after that, Pfc. William Thompson was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism in Korea - the first black so honored since the Spanish-American War. (It's hard to win combat awards when the army will only let you peel potatoes and dig slit trenches.) In September 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Annie Allen, the first black ever cited by the Pulitzer Committee. And that month, American diplomat Ralph J. Bunche (1904-1971) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation of the Palestinian conflict, the first black to win that honor.
For most of the 15 million American blacks - in 1950 they were Negroes - these accomplishments held little meaning. In the first place, a good many of those 15 million people couldn't read about these achievements. Illiteracy among America's largest racial minority (approximately 10 percent of the total population in 1950) was commonplace. Schools for blacks, where they existed, didn't offer much in the way of formal education. The law of the land remained "separate but equal," the policy dictated by the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. "Separate but equal" kept Linda Brown out of the nearby Topeka schoolhouse and dictated that everything from maternity wards to morgues, from water fountains to swimming pools, from prisons to polling places, were either segregated or for whites only. Exactly how these "separate" facilities were "equal" remained a mystery to blacks: If everything was so equal, why didn't white people want to use them?
Nowhere was the disparity more complete and disgraceful than in the public schools, primarily but not exclusively in the heartland of the former Confederacy. Schools for whites were spanking new, well maintained, properly staffed, and amply supplied. Black schools were usually single-room shacks with no toilets, a single teacher, and a broken chalkboard. If black parents wanted their children to be warm in the winter, they had to buy their own coal. But a handful of courageous southern blacks - mostly common people like teachers and ministers and their families - began the struggle that turned back these laws.
Urged on by Thurgood Marshall (b. 1908), the burly, barb-tongued attorney from Baltimore who led the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, smalltown folks in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware balked at the injustice of "separate but equal" educational systems. The people who carried these fights were soon confronted by threats ranging from loss of their jobs to dried-up bank credit and ultimately threats of violence and death. In 1951, one of these men was the Reverend Oliver Brown, the father of Linda Brown, who tried to enroll his daughter in the all-white Topeka school. Since Brown came first in the alphabet among the suits brought against four different states, it was his name that was attached to the case that Thurgood Marshall argued before the Supreme Court in 1953.
Marshall seemed to have momentum on his side. In 1950 the Supreme Court had already made three important decisions that chipped away at Plessy: the Sweatt decision said equality involved more than physical facilities; the McLaurin decision said black students in state universities could not be segregated after admission; and in the Henderson case, railroad dining-car segregation was banned. But these were limited, circumscribed cases without broader interpretations.
There had also been a change in the makeup of the Court itself. After the arguments in Brown v. Board of Education were first heard, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, the Truman appointee who had ordered the other justices flown back to Washington to ensure that the Rosenberg execution would proceed on schedule, died of a heart attack. In 1953, with reargument of the case on the horizon, President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren (1891-1974) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. No legal giant, Warren was a good Republican soldier, a fairly moderate California governor, and the vice-presidential candidate on the 1948 Dewey ticket. His past held only one black mark - at least in retrospect. As California's attorney general, he had pressed the cause of internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, a policy he had then helped carry out in his first term as California's governor. But in 1953, that seemed like evidence of good sense rather than the grievous smudge it would be today.
Certainly nobody at the time suspected that Warren would go on to lead the Court for sixteen of its most turbulent years, during which the justices took the lead in transforming America's approach to racial equality, criminal justice, and freedom of expresssion. President Eisenhower, the good general and hero of democracy who marched firmly in place when it came to civil rights, later said the appointment of Warren was "the biggest damfool mistake I ever made."
From the moment the justices began to confer on the case, Warren - as yet unconfirmed by the Senate - made it clear that he would vote to overturn Plessy because he believed that the law could no longer tolerate separating any race as inferior, which was the obvious result of "separate but equal" laws. But Warren was an adroit politician as well as a jurist. He knew that the case was so important and politically charged that it demanded unanimity. Achieving that unanimity was less simple than forming his own decision. But through gentle persuasion, Warren was able to shape the consensus he wanted - and what the case needed. All nine of the brethren not only voted to overturn Plessy, but allowed Warren's single opinion to speak for them. When Warren read the simple, brief ruling, it was the judicial equivalent of the shot heard 'round the world.
In Simple Justice, a monumental study of the case and the history of racism, cruelty, and discrimination that preceded it, Richard Kluger eloquently assessed the decision's impact:
The opinion of the Court said that the United States stood for something more than material abundance, still moved to an inner spirit, however deeply it had been submerged by fear and envy and mindless hate.... The Court had restored to the American people a measure of the humanity that had been drained away in their climb to worldwide supremacy. The Court said, without using the words, that when you stepped on a black man, he hurt. The time had come to stop.
Of course, Brown did not cause the scales to fall from the eyes of white supremacists. The fury of the South was quick and sure. School systems around the country, South and North, had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the courts toward desegregation. The states fought the decision with endless appeals and other delaying tactics, the calling out of troops, and ultimately violence and a venomous outflow of racial hatred, targeted at schoolchildren who simply wanted to learn.
American Voices
Chief Justice Earl Warren, from the unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (May 17, 1954):
We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does....
To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone....
... We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
Why Did The Arrest Of A Woman Named Rosa Parks Change American Life?
In its historic judgment, the Supreme Court gave the civil rights movement its Ten Commandments. What the movement lacked was its Moses. Rosa Parks may not have been Moses, but she certainly was a voice crying out from Egyptian bondage. In 1955, Egypt was Montgomery, Alabama.
A forty-three-year-old seamstress who worked in a downtown Montgomery department store, Rosa Parks was on her way home from work on a December day. Loaded down by bags filled with her Christmas shopping, Rosa Parks boarded a city bus and moved to the back - legally, traditionally - and, it seemed, eternally - the Negro section. Finding no seats there, she took one toward the middle of the bus. When the driver picked up more white passengers, he called out, "Niggers move back," an order to vacate the white seats even if it meant standing. Mrs. Parks refused. Active in the local chapter of the NAACP, Rosa Parks had already decided that she would make a stand if asked to give up her seat.
Unwilling to leave that seat, Rosa Parks was arrested for violating Montgomery's transportation laws. Mrs. Parks was ordered to court on the following Monday. But over the weekend, the blacks of Montgomery found their Moses. Meeting to protest Mrs. Parks's arrest and the reason for it, the black community of Montgomery selected the twenty-seven-year-old pastor of Mrs. Parks's church, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its leader. Calling for a peaceful form of resistance, the young minister urged his people to boycott the buses of Montgomery. His name was Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968). In a short time the bus boycott and the movement it inspired in Montgomery would raise him to world fame and make him one of the nation's most admired and reviled men.
King was born in Atlanta, the son of one of that city's prominent black ministers and grandson of the man who had organized a protest that created Atlanta's first black high school, named for Booker T. Washington, which King himself attended. He went on to Atlanta's Morehead College, studied theology and philosophy at Crozier Theological Seminary and the University of Pennsylvania, and had completed his Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University in 1955 when he took the call at Dexter Avenue. Buttressed by the twin principles of nonviolence and civil disobedience inspired by Henry David Thoreau and India's Mahatma Gandhi, King planned to shape a civil rights movement using the fundamental moral teachings of Christianity - love, forgiveness, humility, faith, hope, community - as its bedrock. The Montgomery boycott, begun on December 5, 1955, presented him with the first opportunity to try this approach.
For more than a year the boycott was hugely effective. Angry because they couldn't make these Negroes ride the buses, the whites of Montgomery looked for other ways to retaliate. Mrs. Parks was rearrested for failing to pay her fine. King was arrested, first on a drunk-driving charge and later for conspiring to organize an illegal boycott. Insurance companies cancelled the auto insurance on cars being used to circumvent the buses. When peaceful means failed, black homes were firebombed. A shotgun blast broke the windows of King's home. And of course the KKK appeared on the scene, to march through the streets of Montgomery.
The case wound its way back to Washington, where the Supreme Court, now armed with the Brown precedent, was beginning to roll back "separate but equal" statutes in all areas of life. The Court ordered an end to Montgomery's bus segregation in November 1956, and on the morning of December 21, 1956, the blacks of Montgomery went back to the buses. They had won a battle, but the war was just beginning. The peaceful boycott movement gathered momentum and was duplicated throughout the South. For the next ten years these peaceful protests led the civil rights movement until the painfully slow process finally boiled over in the urban racial violence of the mid-1960s.
Despite the success of the protest, the international notoriety Martin Luther King had gained created some dissension within the ranks, according to David J. Garrow's book Bearing the Cross. Mrs. Parks, who lost her job as a seamstress, later took a job at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, and remained a living symbol of the civil rights movement.
In 1957, King moved to Atlanta and organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Later that year he led the first civil rights march to Washington in a Prayer Pilgrimage. This time 50,000 blacks joined him. In the future he would return with hundreds of thousands.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court had issued a second ruling in May 1955, known as Brown II, which attempted to address some of the practical concerns of its desegregation order. Walking a dangerous tightrope without a safety net, the Court reasserted that the states in the suits must begin to make a prompt, reasonable start toward full compliance with the 1954 ruling. But Warren concluded with the now-famous phrase that this process should move with "all deliberate speed." The Court had told the country to go fast slowly. Of course, to the advocates of integration, the emphasis was on speed. To segregationists, "deliberate" meant sometime in the days of Buck Rogers.
Why Did Eisenhower Send The Army Into Little Rock, Arkansas?
Through all of these Supreme Court decisions and during the Montgomery boycott and other peaceful protests that followed, the Eisenhower White House stood as a vacuum of moral leadership on the civil rights issue. While the Cold War general was making the world "safe for democracy," his own vision of a free society seemed to have no room for blacks.
Apparently fearful of alienating the powerful bloc of "Dixiecrats," the southern Democratic congressmen whose votes he needed, Eisenhower was ambiguous in his public comments. He promised to uphold the laws of the land, but refrained from endorsing the Court's rulings. At the time, a word of leadership or outrage at Jim Crow conditions from this popular President might have given the civil rights movement additional vigor and force. Instead, Eisenhower was ultimately forced to act, with great reluctance, in a showdown that was more about presidential power than about the rights of black children.
In September 1957, the governor of Arkansas, Orville Faubus, posted 270 men from the Arkansas National Guard outside Little Rock Central High School. Fully armed, their duty was to prevent nine black children from entering the previously all-white school. On American television and all over the world, people watched with revulsion as the children tried to enter school and were turned away by the guard as an angry, jeering mob spat and cursed at them, all under the watchful eyes of the guardsmen. A federal district court order forced Faubus to allow the children into the school, but the governor withdrew the Arkansas state guard, leaving the protection of the black children to a small contingent of resentful local policemen, some of whom refused to carry out the order.
Finally Eisenhower, in order to defend the sovereignty of the federal court, had to order 1,100 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne to Little Rock and place the state national guard under his direct orders. For the first time since Reconstruction, U.S. troops were in the South to protect the rights of blacks. Eisenhower had not acted out of concern for the students' rights or safety, but because he believed that he couldn't allow the force of federal law to be ignored.
The troops remained in Little Rock Central High for the rest of the school year, and eight of the black students stayed through the year despite curses, harassment, and abuse. Whatever else it proved, Little Rock showed that the civil rights movement was going to need the full force of the federal government to enforce the laws that the Supreme Court had created.
American Voices
From "The Southern Manifesto" signed by ninety-six congressmen from the South in response to the Brown decision (March 12, 1956):
. . . This unwarranted exercise of power by the court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the states principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through ninety years of patient effort by the good people of both races. (Emphasis added.) It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.
What Was Sputnik?
On the educational Richter scale, Brown had been the equivalent of the Great San Francisco Earthquake. It leveled everything. While Brown's tremors sent shock waves across the country, America got another tremendous jolt that shook the country to its foundations. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik (whose name in Russian meant "little traveler"), man's first artificial satellite.
Weighing in at about 185 pounds, Sputnik was a little bigger than a basketball and traveled 18,000 miles per hour some 560 miles about the earth, emitting a steady beep-beep-beep radio signal. The launch was not only an unexpected technological achievement but a work of propaganda genius. The Soviets had given Sputnik an orbit and trajectory that sent the satellite over the earth's most populous areas and low enough that it could be seen at times with the assistance of powerful binoculars. Ham radio operators could pick up the distinctive message it beamed back to Earth.
The Sputnik shock was redoubled in November when the Russians lofted a second satellite, dubbed Sputnik II. Not only was this a substantially larger satellite, weighing more than 1,100 pounds, but it carried a passenger. A small dog was strapped into the satellite, hooked up to monitoring equipment that relayed information about the physical effects of space travel.
The paranoia that the twin Sputnik launchings induced was extraordinary, and it worked on two levels. The first was the gut reaction of fear: If the Russians can put something like this up in the sky, maybe they can send up something that will drop bombs on us. More realistically, it meant that the Soviets had taken the lead in development of the intercontinental ballistic missile, thereby fundamentally altering the balance of power between the two competing powers. Sputnik obliterated the American assumption of its nuclear superiority. It was all the more reason for wives to yell at their husbands to forget the baseball game and get back to work on digging that fallout shelter in the backyard.
The fear of the bomb merged with the reality of man moving into space and the constant drumbeat of anti-Communist hysteria to produce a paranoid pop culture that blossomed in the science fiction books and films of the fifties. Before World War II, science fiction had been a respectable sort of fantasy, most popularly practiced by H. G. Wells or the pleasant utopian visions of Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward. Radio's Buck Rogers gave new life to notions of space travel and futuristic death rays, but that was mostly child's play. The specter of totalitarian police states in Germany and the Soviet Union, heightened by the threat of the bomb, had turned science fiction darker. The trend began with such classics as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and was later reflected in such books as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the classic about a futuristic society in which all books are burned, which was written in the midst of Senator McCarthy's witch hunts and a movement to purge American libraries of "subversive" works. In the movies, the paranoia was reflected in films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
A more serious but equally hysterical fear rocked the American education system, reeling under the pressures of desegregation. Already struggling against the Soviets in an arms race, America now found itself left at the starting line in the new "space race." Worse than that, America didn't even have its sneakers on. To all the wise men in the land, the reason for America's sad technological performance while the Soviets had leapt into space was obvious: the American education system was falling down, while the Soviet system, which rigorously drilled its children in math and the sciences, was producing a super-race of mathematicians and scientists who would rapidly outdistance the American child in their achievements.
The decline in American standards was blamed on that favorite of whipping boys, "progressive education." In the late 1950s, "back to basics" was the call to arms. It is a story that was replayed in the mid-1980s, when it was determined that America's schools were falling prey to a "rising tide of mediocrity." The eighties also produced a new archvillain who was out-educating America's children. Instead of the Soviets, the new bogeyman was the Japanese, and the media were filled with reports of the superiority of the Japanese educational system, an uncanny reprise of the debate in the late fifties. Once again, "back to basics" was the simplistic answer to the problems of the miserable American school systems.
The practical response to Sputnik was a total overhaul of American education, with a new commitment on the part of the federal government to aid public schools, along with an overhaul of research and development in the rocketry field, spearheaded by a compelling urgency to overtake the Soviets in the area of missile delivery systems. Sputnik had been the space equivalent of the Russian atomic bomb. In the years ahead, the United States would devote enormous resources to victory in the new space race.
Success would be built on failures. And the first of these was nearly devastating. On December 6, 1957 - uncomfortably close to the anniversary of Pearl Harbor in many minds - a Vanguard rocket that was to carry America's first satellite into space blew up on the launching pad. It was an inauspicious beginning to America's race for the moon.
American Voices
From Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address (January 17, 1961):
[The] conjunction of an immense military establishment and large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for the development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
This speech was a little bit like Dr. Frankenstein yelling "Look out!" after the monster has escaped the laboratory. As the leading proponent of Cold War containment, Eisenhower had presided over the rise of this "military-industrial complex," created to give the United States the military might it needed to carry out the containment policy, a policy that continued to dictate American decision-making in the White House and Congress in the decades ahead.
§
Title:
Don't Know Much About History
Author:
Davis, Kenneth C.
Date: New
York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1990