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MERICAMERICAThe United States Since 1945 The United States Since 1945
Between 1945 and 1970, the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal largely determined the parameters of American domestic politics. The New Deal gave rise to a distinct pattern that signified a basic transformation in American society. This pattern included a dramatic increase in the role and power of the federal government, the rise of organized labor as a significant force in the economy and politics, a commitment to the welfare state, albeit a re-stricted one (Americans did not have access to universal health care as most other industrialized societies did), a grudging acceptance of the need to resolve minority problems, and a willingness to experiment with deficit spending as a means of spurring the economy.
One reason for the success of New Deal policies in the postwar era was the decision by the United States and its European allies to pursue free trade as a means of expanding global prosperity and preventing the vicious trade wars that had been a contributing factor in the Great Depression in the 1930s. The first step took place in 1947, when twenty-three leading nations accepted the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the goal of which was to lower tariffs and quotas in order to promote free trade on a global basis. The success of GATT led in 1995 to its replacement by the World Trade Organization (WTO), an organization of more than 150 nations dedicated to promoting trade agreements and moderating trade disputes.
These goals were facilitated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which had been established in the late 1940s. The IMF was to sta-bilize the global financial system by supervising exchange rates and offering financial and technical assistance to nations encountering economic difficulties. The World Bank was to provide grants and loans to assist developing nations in building up their infrastructure so they could compete more effectively in the global marketplace.
An Era of Prosperity and Social Commitment An Era of Prosperity and Social Commitment The influence of New Deal politics was bolstered by the election of Democratic presidents---Harry Truman in 1948, John F. Kennedy in 1960, and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Even the election of a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1952 and 1956, did not significantly alter the fundamental direction of the New Deal. As Ei-senhower conceded in 1954, ‘‘Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.’’
No doubt, the economic boom that took place after World War II fueled public confidence in the new American way of life. A shortage of consumer goods during the war left Americans with both surplus income and the desire to purchase these goods after the war. Then, too, the growing power of organized labor enabled more and more workers to obtain the wage increases that fueled the growth of the domestic market. Increased government expenditures (justified by the theory of English economist John Maynard Keynes that government spending could stimulate a lagging economy to reach higher levels of productivity) also indirectly subsidized the American private enterprise system. Especially after the Korean War began in 1950, outlays on defense provided money for scientific research in the universities and markets for weapons industries. After 1955, tax dollars built a massive system of interstate highways, and tax deductions for mortgages subsidized homeowners. Between 1945 and 1973, real wages grew at an average rate of 3 percent a year, the most prolonged advance in American history.
America on the Move
America on the Move The prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s also translated into significant social changes. More workers left the factories and fields and moved into white-collar occupations, finding jobs as professional and technical employees, managers, proprietors, and clerical and sales workers. In 1940, blue-collar workers made up 52 percent of the labor force; farmers and farmworkers, 17 percent; and white-collar workers, 31 percent. By 1970, blue-collar workers constituted 50 percent; farmers and farmworkers, 3 percent; and white-collar workers, 47 percent.
One consequence of this change was a movement from rural areas and central cities into the suburbs. In 1940, just 19 percent of the American population lived in suburbs, with 49 percent in rural areas and 32 percent in central cities. By 1970, those figures had changed to 38, 31, and 31 percent, respectively. The move to the suburbs also produced an imposing number of shopping malls and reinforced the American passion for the automobile, which provided the means of transport from suburban home to suburban mall and workplace. Finally, the search
for prosperity led to new migration patterns. As the West and South experienced rapid economic growth through the development of new industries, especially in the defense field, massive numbers of people made the exodus from the cities of the Northeast and Midwest to the Sunbelt of the South and West. Between 1940 and 1980, cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Cleveland lost between 13 and 36 percent of their populations, while Los Angeles, Dallas, and San Diego grew between 100 and 300 percent.
Vis
Visions ions of of InsInsecurecurityity Although the country was be-coming more affluent, it was also feeling more vulnerable as Cold War confrontations abroad had repercussions at home. The Communist victory in China aroused fears that Communists had infiltrated the United States. A demagogic senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, helped intensify a massive ‘‘Red scare’’ with unsubstantiated allegations that there were hundreds of Communists in high government positions. Congressional hearings on the subject were held by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and dozens of government officials or public figures were ac-cused of radical sympathies or past membership in the Communist Party. A number of film actors and producers were placed on a blacklist that prevented them from finding employment in Hollywood. One U.S. senator even accused General George C. Marshall of treason for his efforts to bring about a truce in the civil war in China.
In the end, McCarthy overplayed his hand when he attacked alleged ‘‘Communist conspirators’’ in the U.S.
Army, and he was censured by Congress in 1954. Shortly after, his anti-Communist crusade came to an end. The pervasive fear of communism and the possibility of a nuclear war, however, remained strong. For those millions of Americans living in major metropolitan areas, the wailing of a siren in the night always conjured up latent fears of a surprise nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.
Toward the Great Society
Toward the Great Society While the 1950s have been characterized (erroneously) as a tranquil age, the period between 1960 and 1973 was clearly a time of upheaval that brought to the fore some of the problems that had been glossed over during the Eisenhower years. The era began on an optimistic note. At age forty-three, John F. Kennedy (1917--1963) became the youngest elected president in the history of the United States and the first born in the twentieth century. The new administration focused pri-marily on foreign affairs, although it inaugurated an ex-tended period of increased economic growth, the result---in part---of lower taxes and a business-friendly atmosphere.
But the bright promise of a new era of peace, progress, and prosperity was suddenly shattered on November 22, 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated under mysterious cir-cumstances by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.
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Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson (1908--1973), who won a new term as president in a landslide in 1964, used his stunning mandate to pursue the growth of the welfare state, first begun in the New Deal. Johnson’s Great Society programs included health care for the elderly, a ‘‘war on poverty’’ to be fought with food stamps and a ‘‘job corps,’’ the new Department of Housing and Urban Development to deal with the problems of the cities, and federal assistance for education.
Focus on Civil Rights
Focus on Civil Rights Johnson’s other domestic passion was the achievement of equal rights for African Ameri-cans. The civil rights movement began in earnest in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court took the dramatic step of striking down the practice of maintaining racially segre-gated public schools. According to Chief Justice Earl Warren, ‘‘Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.’’ A year later, during a boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, the eloquent Martin Luther King Jr. (1929--1968) surfaced as the leader of a growing movement for racial equality.
By the early 1960s, a number of groups, including King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), were organizing demonstrations and sit-ins across the South to end racial segregation. In August 1963, King led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. This march and King’s impassioned plea for racial equality had an electrifying effect on the American people (see the box on p. 171). By the end of 1963, a majority of Americans (52 percent) called civil rights the most significant national issue; only 4 percent had done so eight months earlier.
On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers disappeared while investigating the torching of an African American church in Mississippi. A few weeks later, their bodies were discovered in a partially constructed dam nearby. President Johnson took advantage of the uproar caused by the incident to promote the cause of civil rights legislation. As a result of his initiative, Congress in 1964 enacted the Civil Rights Act, which ended segregation and discrimination in the workplace and in all public ac-commodations. The Voting Rights Act, passed the fol-lowing year, eliminated racial obstacles to voting in southern states. But laws alone could not guarantee a
‘‘great society,’’ and Johnson soon faced bitter social un-rest, both from African Americans and from the bur-geoning antiwar movement.
In the North and West, African Americans had had voting rights for many years, but local patterns of segre-gation resulted in considerably higher unemployment rates for blacks (and Hispanics) than for whites and left blacks segregated in huge urban ghettos. In these ghettos, calls for militant action by radical black nationalist leaders, such as Malcolm X of the Black Muslims, attracted more
attention than the nonviolent appeals of Martin Luther King. In the summer of 1965, race riots erupted in the Watts district of Los Angeles and led to thirty-four deaths and the destruction of more than one thousand buildings.
Cleveland, San Francisco, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit likewise exploded in the summers of 1966 and 1967. After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, more than one hundred cities experienced rioting, including Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital. The combination of riots and extremist comments by radical black leaders led to a ‘‘white backlash’’ and a severe division of Amer-ican society. In 1964, only 34 percent of white AmerAmer-icans agreed with the statement that blacks were asking for ‘‘too much’’; by late 1966, that number had risen to 85 percent.
A
A NaNatiotion n DiDividvideded Antiwar protests also divided the American people after President Johnson committed American combat troops to the costly war in Vietnam (see Chapter 7). The antiwar movement arose out of the
The Antiwar Movement.
The Antiwar Movement. As U.S. military casualties in South Vietnam began to mount in the mid-1960s, public protests against the war began to intensify on the home front. Many of the protesters were young Americans subject to the draft, but opposition to U.S. policies in Vietnam gradually spread throughout the country and eventually forced President Lyndon Johnson and his successor Richard M. Nixon to withdraw American troops from the country. Shown here is a vast protest demonstration against the backdrop of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
c W a l l y M c N a m e e / C O R B I S
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free speech movement that began in 1964 at the Uni-versity of California at Berkeley as a protest against the impersonality and authoritarianism of the large univer-sity. As the war progressed and U.S. casualties mounted,
protests escalated. Teach-ins, sit-ins, and the occupation of university buildings alternated with more radical demonstrations that increasingly led to violence. The killing of four students at Kent State University in 1970 by
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the Ohio National Guard caused a reaction, and the an-tiwar movement began to subside. Supporters contended that the antiwar movement had helped weaken the will-ingness of many Americans to continue the war. But the combination of antiwar demonstrations and ghetto riots in the cities also prepared many people to embrace ‘‘law and order,’’ an appeal used by Richard M. Nixon (1913--1994), the Republican presidential candidate in 1968.
With Nixon’s election in 1968, a shift to the right in American politics had begun.
America Shifts to the Right America Shifts to the Right
Nixon eventually ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam by gradually withdrawing American troops and appealing to the ‘‘silent majority’’ of Americans for patience in bringing the conflict to an end. A slowdown in racial desegregation appealed to southern whites, who had previously tended to vote Democratic. The Republican strategy also gained support among white Democrats in northern cities, where court-mandated busing to achieve racial integration had produced a white back-lash. Nixon was less conservative on other issues, no-tably when, breaking with his strong anti-Communist past, he visited China in 1972 and opened the door to the eventual diplomatic recognition of that Communist state.
Nixon was paranoid about conspiracies, however, and began to use illegal methods of gaining political in-telligence about his political opponents. One of the president’s advisers explained that their intention was to
‘‘use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.’’ Nixon’s zeal led to the infamous Watergate scandal---the attempted bugging of Democratic National Headquarters located at the Watergate complex in down-town Washington, D.C. Although Nixon repeatedly lied to the American public about his involvement in the af-fair, secret tapes of his own conversations in the White House revealed the truth. On August 9, 1974, Nixon re-signed from office, an act that saved him from almost certain impeachment and conviction.
After Watergate, American domestic politics fo-cused on economic issues. Gerald R. Ford (1913--2006) became president when Nixon resigned, only to lose in the 1976 election to the Democratic former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), who campaign ed as an outsider against the Washington establishment. Both Ford and Carter faced severe economic problems. The period from 1973 to the mid-1980s was one of economic stagnation, which came to be known as stagflation---a combination of high inflation and high unemployme nt.
In 1984, median family income was 6 percent below that of 1973.
The First Oil Crisis
The First Oil Crisis The economic downturn stemmed at least in part from a dramatic rise in oil prices. Oil had been a cheap and abundant source of energy in the 1950s, but by the late 1970s, half of the oil used in the United States came from the Middle East. An oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel as a reaction to the Arab-Israeli War in 1973 and OPEC’s subsequent raising of prices led to a quadrupling of the cost of oil. By the end of the 1970s, oil prices had increased twentyfold, encouraging inflationary tendencies throughout the entire economy.
Although the Carter administration produced a plan for reducing oil consumption at home while spurring do-mestic production, neither Congress nor the American people could be persuaded to follow what they regarded as drastic measures.
By 1980, the Carter administration was facing two devastating problems. High inflation and a noticeable decline in average weekly earnings were causing a per-ceptible drop in American living standards. At the same time, a crisis abroad had erupted when fifty-three Americans were taken and held hostage by the Iranian government of Ayatollah Khomeini (see Chapter 15).
Carter’s inability to gain the release of the American hostages led to the perception at home that he was a weak president. His overwhelming loss to Ronald Reagan (1911--2004) in the election of 1980 brought forward the chief exponent of conservative Republican policies and a new political order.
Dismantl
Dismantling the ing the WelfaWelfare re StateState The conservative trend continued in the 1980s. The election of Ronald Reagan changed the direction of American policy on several fronts. Reversing decades of the expanding welfare state, Reagan cut spending on food stamps, school lunch pro-grams, and job programs. At the same time, his admin-istration fostered the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. Total federal spending rose from
$631 billion in 1981 to more than $1 trillion by 1986. But instead of raising taxes to pay for the new expenditures, which far outweighed the budget cuts in social areas, Reagan convinced Congress to support supply-side eco-nomics. Massive tax cuts were designed to stimulate rapid economic growth and produce new revenues.
Reagan’s policies seemed to work in the short run, and the United States experienced an economic upturn that lasted until the end of the 1980s, although most of the benefits accrued to the most affluent members of American society. But the spending policies of the Reagan administration also produced record government deficits, which loomed as an obstacle to long-term growth. In the 1970s, the total deficit was $420 billion; between 1981 and 1987, Reagan’s budget deficits were three times that amount.
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The inability of George H. W. Bush (b. 1924), Reagan’s vice president and successor, to deal with an economic downturn led to the election of a Democrat, Bill Clinton (b. 1946), in November 1992.
Seizing the Political Center Seizing the Political Center
The new president was a southerner who claimed to be a new Democrat---one who favored fiscal responsibility and a more conservative social agenda---a clear indication that the rightward drift in American politics had not been reversed by his victory. During his first term in office, Clinton reduced the budget deficit and signed a bill turning the welfare program back to the states while pushing measures to strengthen the educational system and provide job opportunities for those Americans re-moved from the welfare rolls. By seizing the center of the American political agenda, Clinton was able to win re-election in 1996, although the Republican Party now held a majority in both houses of Congress.
President Clinton’s political fortunes were helped considerably by a lengthy economic revival. Thanks to downsizing and technological advances, major U.S. cor-porations began to recover the competitive edge they had lost to Japanese and European firms in previous years. At the same time, a steady reduction in the annual govern-ment budget deficit strengthened confidence in the per-formance of the national economy. Although wage increases were modest, inflation was securely in check, and public confidence in the future was on the rise.
Many of the country’s social problems, however, re-mained unresolved. Although crime rates were down, drug use, smoking, and alcoholism among young people
Many of the country’s social problems, however, re-mained unresolved. Although crime rates were down, drug use, smoking, and alcoholism among young people