Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

by Alan Axelrod

Word for the Day

  Coined in 1947 by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope in a speech lie wrote for financier Bernard Baruch, cold war refers to the postwar strategic and political struggle between the United States (and its western-European allies) and the Soviet Union (and communist countries). A chronic state of hostility, the Cold War was associated with two major “hot wars” (in Korea and Vietnam) and spawned various “brushfire wars” (small-scale armed conflicts, usually in Third World nations), but it was not itself a shooting war. The end of Cold War was heralded in 1989 by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  Voice from the Past

  The crux of the North Atlantic Treaty, which created NATO, is Article 5: “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”

  Main Event

  On June 19, 1953, Julius Rosenberg (born 1918) and his wife, Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (born 1915), became the first United States civilians in history to be executed for espionage. Their trial and their punishment were sources of great bitterness and controversy during the Cold War.

  Julius Rosenberg, a member of the Communist party, had been employed as an engineer by the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II. He and Ethel were accused of supplying Soviet agents with atomic bomb secrets during 1944-45. Their chief accuser was Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who had worked on the “A-bomb” project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and had fed the Rosenbergs secret information. Because Greenglass turned state’s witness, he received a 15-year sentence, whereas, under the Espionage Act of 1917, the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death on April 5, 1951. The sentence provoked protests worldwide—including accusations of anti-Semitism—but President Eisenhower, convinced of the couple’s guilt, refused to commute the sentences.

  Word for the Day

  The A-bomb, or atomic bomb, first tested and used in 1945, operates on the principle of nuclear fission—the splitting of the nuclei of uranium or plutonium atoms—which suddenly releases an incredible amount of explosive energy. The H-bomb (hydrogen bomb), first tested in 1952, is a fusion rather than fission device, joining the nuclei of hydrogen atoms together in an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. The hydrogen bomb releases about 1,000 times more energy than an atomic bomb.

  Word for the Day

  Congress never declared war against North Korea or China. Officially, the conflict was called a police action–a localized war without a declaration of war.

  Stats

  Just how many Chinese and North Korean troops were killed in the Korean War is unknown, but estimates range between 1.5 and 2 million, in addition to at least a million civilians. The U.N. command lost 88,000 killed, of whom 23,300 were American. Many more were wounded. South Korean civilian casualties probably equaled those of North Korea.

  From the Back of the Bus to the Great Society

  (1947-1968)

  In This Chapter

  The African-American struggle for civil rights

  Start of the “space race”

  Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis

  Idealism and social reform in the Kennedy and Johnson years

  Assassinations

  With the ruins of war-ravaged Europe still smoldering, much of the world’s population remained hungry, politically oppressed, or both. But Americans, having triumphed over evil incarnate in the form of Nazi and Japanese totalitarianism and enjoying the blessings of liberty, had much to be proud of. True, the postwar world was a scary place, with nuclear incineration just a push of a button away. Childhood, which Americans prized as a time of carefree innocence, was now marred by air raid drills that regularly punctuated the school day. In an increasingly confusing world, America’s children were also menaced by a much-discussed and debated wave of “juvenile delinquency.” Yet, all in all, 1950s America was a rather complacent place—prosperous, spawning a web of verdant (if rather dull) suburbs interconnected by new highways built under the Interstate Highway Act of 1956.

  Postwar suburbia was an expression of the long-held American dream: a house of one’s own, a little plot of land, a clean and decent place to, live. But if suburban lawns were green, the suburbs themselves were white. As usual, African-Americans had been excluded from the dream—or, at least, relegated to the very back of it.

  Executive Order 9981

  On July 26, 1948, President Harry S Truman (1884-1972) issued Executive Order 9981, which mandated “equality of treatment and opportunity to all persons in the Armed Services without regard to race.” African-Americans had regularly served in the armed forces since the Civil War, but always in separate—segregated—units, though usually Linder white officers. Truman’s order did not use the word integration, but when he was asked point-blank if that is what the order meant, the president replied with his characteristic directness: “Yes.”

  Executive Order 9981 did much more than integrate the armed forces. It began a gradual revolution in American society. For many soldiers, sailors, and airmen, the army or navy or air force (itself newly created as a service branch independent from the army in 1947), became their first experience of integration. In even more immediate terms, Executive Order 9981 meant that the mom and pop owners of the tavern just beyond the post gate had to open their businesses to all personnel, white and black. If a local lunch counter refused to serve a black soldier, for example, it could be declared “off-limits” by the post commander—and there would be no one to serve.

  The Dream Deferred

  Of course, the integration of the armed forces did not completely transform American society, let alone transform it overnight. Racial prejudice was deeply ingrained in American life, and in some places, particularly the South, prejudice was even protected by law. In most Southern states, the “Jim Crow” legislation that had been passed during the bitter years following Reconstruction remained on the books in one form or another. Theoretically, Southern society was segregated such that publicly funded facilities (like schools) provided “separate but equal” service. In practice, services and facilities were certainly separate, but hardly equal. In the South, African-Americans were treated as an underclass. This was true in subtler ways up North as well, where segregation was often de facto rather than de jure.

  Following both world wars, African-Americans migrated in large numbers from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North. Industry welcomed their cheap labor, but many whites, fearing they would lose their jobs to the newcomers, met them with hostility. Up North, blacks typically found themselves restricted to menial labor and compelled to live in slum districts that became known as ghettoes. In effect, the entire American nation was both separate and unequal.

  Rosa Parks Boards a Bus

  On December 1, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama, was a typical Southern city, its social fabric shot through with the threads of major injustice and trivial humiliation carefully (if no longer quite consciously) interwoven to keep blacks “in their place.” Rosa Parks (b. 1913) boarded a city bus to return home from her job. Like any other commuter, she was tired after a hard day’s work. She settled into a seat in the forward section of the bus.

  In most parts of the world, this mundane action would have gone entirely unnoticed. But in Montgomery in 1955, it was a crime for a black person to sit in the front of a city bus. Told to yield her place to a white person, Parks refused, was arrested, and jailed.

  The arrest sparked a boycott of Montgomery city buses. If the town’s African-Americans could not ride in the front of the bus, they would not ride at all. Although most of Montgomery’s African-American population depended on the buses, they maintained the boycott for more than a year, focusing national attention on Montgomery and, more importantly, on the issues of civil rights for African-Americans.

  Emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr.

  The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, emerged during the Montgomery boycott as moral and spiritual leader of the developin
g civil rights movement. Born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of it prominent local minister, King was educated at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, and Boston University, from which he received a doctorate in 1955. Along with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Edward Nixon, King entered the national spotlight during the boycott. He used his sudden prominence to infuse the national civil rights movement with what he had learned from the example of India’s great leader, Mahatma Gandhi, who taught the principle of satyagraha—”holding to the truth” by nonviolent civil disobedience. Rosa Parks’s protest was a classic example.

  After Montgomery, King lectured nationally and became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He conducted major voter registration drives, demonstrations, marches, and campaigns in Albany, Georgia (December 1961-August 1962), Birmingham, Alabama (April-May 1963), and Danville, Virginia (July 1963). In August 1963, King organized a massive March on Washington, where he delivered one of the great speeches in American history, declaring “I Have a Dream.”

  In 1964, King was internationally recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize, then went on to conduct desegregation efforts in St. Augustine, Florida. King organized a voter-registration drive in Selma, Alabama, leading a march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965, which was met by angry white mobs. King expanded the civil rights movement into the North and began to attack not just legal and social injustice, but economic inequality.

  While King was planning a multiracial “poor people’s march” on Washington in 1968, aimed at securing federal funding for a $12-billion “Economic Bill of Rights,” he flew to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking sanitation workers. In that city, on April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr., fell to a sniper’s bullet.

  Or Does It Explode?

  The assassination of Dr. King, brilliant apostle of nonviolent social change, sparked urban riots across a number of the nation’s black ghettoes. These riots were not the first of the decade. Despite the nonviolent message of Dr. King, racial unrest had often turned violent. NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963; Birmingham, Alabama, was the site of the bombing of a black church, in which four girls were killed; three civil rights activists—including two whites—were killed in Mississippi while working to register black voters. On August 11, 1965, a six-day riot ripped apart the Watts section of Los Angeles after a police patrolman attempted to arrest a man for drunk driving. Riots broke out the following summer in New York and Chicago, and in 196 7 in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit. Following the King assassination in 1968, more than 100 cities erupted into violence.

  Emergence of Malcolm X and the Black Power Movement

  The racial violence of the 1960s was extreme evidence of the pent-up frustration and outrage long simmering within black America. Back in 1916, Jamaican-born Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940) came to New York to recruit followers for his Universal Negro Improvement Association and by 1921 claimed a million members. The organization, which had as its aim the establishment of a new black nation in Africa, was called “militant” by whites accustomed to seeing African-Americans behave passively and submissively.

  Not until the emergence of Malcolm X in the early 1960s was African-American militancy given compelling and eloquent direction. Malcolm X had been born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925. He turned bitter and rebellious after his father, an activist preacher, was murdered in 1931, presumably for advocating the ideas of Marcus Garvey.

  Malcolm Little moved to Harlem, where he became a criminal and, convicted of burglary, was imprisoned from 1946 to 1952. While in prison, he became a follower of Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975), leader of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, popularly called the Black Muslims. Rejecting his surname as a “slave name,” Malcolm Little became Malcolm X and, upon his release from prison, served as a leading spokesman for the Black Muslim movement.

  What Malcolm X said galvanized many in the black community, giving young black men in particular a sense of pride, purpose, and potential, even as his rhetoric intimidated and outraged many whites, who saw Malcolm X as one of several angry young activists. These included such figures as Stokley Carmichael, who called for “total revolution” and “Black Power”; H. Rap Brown, leader of the Student National Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who exhorted angry blacks to “burn this town down” in a 1967 speech in Cambridge, Maryland; and Huey Newton, leader of the militant Black Panther Party, which many whites saw as little more than a national street gang. By the mid 1960s, the civil rights movement was split between the adherents of King’s nonviolence and those who, having lost patience with American society, followed a more aggressive path.

  In fact, Malcolm X evolved ideas that were quite different from those not only of King, but of the young militants. Malcolm X split with the Black Muslims and founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity in June 1964, advocating a kind of socialist solution to the corruption of American society that had led to racial hatred and the subjugation of blacks. His original message, that the “white man” was (quite literally) the devil incarnate, had become transformed into a religiously inspired quest for racial equality. The quest was tempered by a conviction that black America had to look within, and not to white America, for the means to freedom and progress.

  The evolution of Malcolm X was cut short on February 21, 1965, when he was gunned down by three Black Muslims during a speech at Harlem’s Audubon Auditorium. His Autobiography (dictated to Alex Haley, who would later gain fame as the author of Roots, a sweeping novel of black history), published just after his assassination, became an extraor-dinarily influential document in expanding and redefining the civil rights movement.

  The journey of black America, like the life of Malcolm X, remained incomplete during the 1960s and remains incomplete to this day. The fact is that African-Americans generally live less affluently, amid more crime, and with less opportunity than white Americans. Yet the range of black leaders of the 1950s and 1960s, from Rosa Parks, to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X, brought hope and social visibility to black America.

  Sputnik and the New Frontier

  Despite growing racial disharmony, the United States was a fairly self-satisfied place in the 1950s. Then, on October 4, 1957, the world learned that the Soviet Union had successfully launched a 184-pound satellite into earth orbit. Called Sputnik I, its radio transmitter emitted nothing more than electronic beeps, but it sent shock waves through the American nation. Suddenly, the U.S.S.R., our adversary in the postwar world, the embodiment of godless communism, had demonstrated to the world its technological superiority. The launching of Sputnik began a “space race,” in which the United States came in (lead second during the early laps. The Soviets put a man, “cosmonaut” Yuri Gagarin, into orbit four years after Sputnik and one month before American “astronaut” Alan B. Shepard was launched on a 15-minute suborbital flight on May 5, 1961.

  Sputnik shook Americans out of their complacency. The 1960 presidential race, between Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon, and a dashing, youthful senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, almost ended in a tie. But the nation rejected the security of Eisenhower’s man and voted into office a candidate who embodied a new energy, vigor, and challenge.

  JFK

  At 43, John F. Kennedy was the youngest elected president in American history (Theodore Roosevelt was slightly younger when he assumed office after the assassination of William McKinley). Kennedy’s administration established the Peace Corps (an organization of volunteers assigned to work in developing nations), created the Alliance for Progress (which strengthened relations with Latin America), and set a national goal of landing an American on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Despite these accomplishments, Kennedy is best remembered for the magic (there is no better word) he and his beautiful wife, Jacqueline, brought to the White House and the national leadership.

  “The Torch Has Been Passed…”

  Intelligent (his books included
the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage), handsome, idealistic, athletic, irreverently witty, and a war hero, Kennedy declared in his inaugural address that the “torch has been passed to a new generation”—of which he was clearly the embodiment. Mired in a depressing Cold War, plagued by social problems, continually anxious over impending nuclear war, worried that the Soviets and the Chinese were winning the hearts and minds of the world, Americans eagerly embraced the attractive optimism of JFK.

  Bay of Pigs and Brink of Armageddon

  Although he was adored by many, Kennedy never succeeded in winning the support of Congress. He and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (1925-68), sought to further civil rights but were repeatedly thwarted by Congress. Kennedy tried to create programs to fund broad educational initiatives, only to see them diluted by Congress. He also introduced a program to provide medical care for the elderly, which was delayed by Congress.

  Early in Kennedy’s administration, the nation suffered the tragic humiliation of a bungled attempt to invade Cuba, which was under the communist rule of Fidel Castro (b. 1926). In March 1960, President Eisenhower had approved a CIA plan to train anti-Castro Cuban exiles for an invasion to overthrow the Cuban leader. Kennedy allowed the preparations to proceed, and some 1,500 exiles landed on April 17, 1961, at Bay of Pigs on the island’s southwestern coast.