Saylor.org HIST212: "Cold War America"

In this lecture, we're going to focus more on Cold War America. We're going to talk about how the United States tries to go about protecting Western Europe and defending the people of Western Europe against Soviet aggression during the 40s and early 50s. We're going to talk more about the Cold War on the world stage, and once again, how the U.S. in Asia is trying to do its part to contain the Soviet Union and contain the spread of communism. And finally, we're going to talk about this Cold War in the United States, how this growing conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union affects Americans and those who would seek to combat communism domestically. Now, in our last lecture, we talked more about the origins of the Cold War and the early policies of containment that people like George Kennan proposed to help defend the United States by containing the spread of communism internationally. And this policy of containment becomes really the official U.S. doctrine that's employed to try to combat the strength and the spread of the Soviet Union. Containment of course has its American components as well. Americans become very concerned about the spread of domestic communism, and you get these might, today they might seem extremely kind of ridiculous and exaggerated, but people really did believe that the United States was under threat by communism. And in some ways, it was better to be dead than red. It was better to fight against the Soviet Union in one way or the other than to be under Soviet or communist influence. And so we may today sort of see this as kind of amusing or exaggerated, but people during the time really did believe it, and they really were afraid of just what kind of a threat the Soviet Union and communism might represent to the United States in one way or another. Well, we're going to begin the lecture today talking about the Cold War abroad, both in Europe as well as in parts of Asia in the late 40s and early 1950s. Now by the late 1940s, the United States had really assumed a role as a major player in Europe. The United States had troops stationed in Europe. There weren't a lot of troops at that point because many troops had been sent home after World War II, but there were troops stationed in Europe. And of course, the Soviet Union had essentially put governments in place in Eastern Europe that were propped up by the Soviet Union as well. And so there was this standoff forming in Western Europe, especially over the boundary between Western half of Germany and the Eastern half of Germany, what becomes West Germany and what becomes East Germany. And this boundary between the two Germanys as a major focal point in the conflicts that developed between the United States and the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. Now in the late 40s, Germany was a very interesting situation. West Germany, the Federal Republic, East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, and then you had this little enclave of the West in Berlin. Berlin was essentially a divided city, split down the middle, if you will, between a Western half and an Eastern half. And in the West, it was the American and Allied forces who were dominant. In the East, it was the Soviet Union. Now this was an era before the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was built in the 1960s, so it was an era when Berlin was still relatively open. People in the Western half of Berlin could go to the East. People in the Eastern half of Berlin could go to the West. But it was also isolated, because the only way to get into Western Berlin was through East Germany. And so there were a number of road and railroad connections that allowed people and supplies to be moved from the West into West Berlin, across East Germany. And the Soviet Union didn't particularly like this. Soviet leaders like Joseph Stalin didn't like that the West had access to West Berlin, and used a number of strategies to try to put pressure on the Allies in the West to either abandon West Berlin and give it up to Soviet occupation and control, or to perhaps cause some kind of a war that would give them an excuse to take over West Berlin. So Joseph Stalin and his leaders, and other Soviet leaders during this era, were trying to come up with ways to provoke a conflict to force the West to abandon Berlin, either voluntarily or through military force. One of these conflicts emerges in 1948, and it actually had a very sort of mundane origin. It had to do with currency. The West German government established a new form of currency, and they wanted to use it in West Berlin. And the Soviets opposed it and argued that only the East German currency should be used. And as I said, it's a fairly mundane, although at the time a very important issue, that sparked off a conflict. Because in mid-1948, under orders by Stalin, the East Germans cut off access to West Berlin. And they block all the border crossings, and they turn back trains and trucks and other equipment that were transporting coal and oil, and that were transporting food supplies to people living in West Berlin. The goal was that they were going to starve out the West Berlin people, and they were going to either force America and its allies to give up West Berlin, or try to force the West Berliners to basically give up on their own and embrace Soviet and Eastern German domination. Well, things didn't go quite according to plan, because American military leaders as well as West Berliners felt that they couldn't let this stand. Now at the time period, the U.S. and Western Europeans had worked out an agreement with the Soviet Union that they did have air access to West Berlin. And they decide to use this air access, and to launch what becomes known as the Berlin Airlift. And essentially, to resupply all of the needs of people living in West Berlin via aircraft. Via these transport aircraft that would be flown from bases in West Germany to West Berlin. Of course, the Soviets didn't believe that this would be possible. They didn't think for a minute that the Americans and the British could support the people of West Berlin either by transporting coal and oil, or by transporting food. But the Berlin Airlift is launched. The Soviets kind of sit back, there are reports that they use spotlights occasionally to try to blind pilots and cause accidents. But for the most part, the Soviets let this happen, because they're convinced it's going to be a failure. Well, the Airlift ultimately sustains West Berlin during the fall and winter of 1948. And the Russians are forced to back down. They don't get what they want, and they realize after a while that the Americans and the British are just going to keep this up as long as necessary to prove the point. As a result, the Soviets back down. But the Berlin Conflict is one of the things that really convinces the United States and other Western European nations that they need to form a formal military defense alliance to protect the West against Soviet aggression. And this alliance that's formed is called NATO. North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We have the flag here of NATO. And NATO is a political and a military pact designed to defend the nations of Western Europe against the Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union attacks one of them, it's attacked them all. And the US pledges itself to defend the nations of Western Europe against Soviet aggression and potentially Soviet invasion. Well, the Soviet Union establishes their own under the agreement in Warsaw, Poland, and it becomes known as the Warsaw Pact. And like the NATO, the Warsaw Pact is intended to the nations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union defend themselves against any potential attack from the West. Although that was highly unlikely, but they felt that it was a potential threat, and so that it deserved to be essentially defended against the West. So by 1949, essentially, the two Cold War military structures have been put in place. And as a result, we have NATO defending the West, the Warsaw Pact, the defensive organization in the East. And essentially, from this point until really the end of the Cold War, these are the two military alliances that govern Western Europe, that govern the conflict that brews in Western Europe. Now Western Europe wasn't the only place where containment was an issue, where the Soviet Union or communism was a problem. Containment was also very relevant for Americans in Asia, especially as the Chinese Revolution runs its course. And in 1949, the Chinese communists capture the eastern cities of China and establish the People's Republic of China. And this is just a very dramatic and shocking event for many Americans. The Chinese communists have managed to essentially conquer and create an entire communist nation in China under the leadership of Mao Zedong and other Chinese communists. And this, as I said, is a very shocking moment, and Americans begin to worry about the threat of Chinese communism. They didn't worry about Russian communism in Asia, but now suddenly there's the threat of Chinese communism. And the Chinese leaders also prove themselves to be very willing to export the communist revolution to other adjoining nations. So gradually the Chinese begin to provide military assistance to the North Koreans, they provide military assistance to communist rebels in Vietnam, and so over the next twenty or so years, the United States becomes very involved with defending Asia against the threat of communism. In 1950, the United States enters the Korean War because North Korean forces, with support from the Chinese, attack across the 30th parallel, which had been created as a dividing line between the two Koreas, and attack the somewhat semi-democratic Republic of South Korea. The U.S. and ultimately other United Nations forces defend South Korea and push back the North Koreans to the border of China, at which point the Chinese join in the invasion, and essentially the U.S. is fighting a war not only with North Koreans but also directly with Chinese. A very miserable war that just lasts and lasts and lasts, a conflict that lasts for nearly three years before a ceasefire is reached. There's no true peace agreement, it's just a ceasefire. Another conflict, as I already mentioned, that begins because of the Chinese attempting to spread communism is in Vietnam. Initially Vietnam is controlled by France, following the war, Vietnam had been a French colony, the French had re-established control, but they're fighting against communist guerrillas throughout Vietnam. And, once again, the United States becomes involved in Vietnam by giving military support to the French. Eventually, by the 1960s, the United States would be directly drawn into the conflict. We'll look at that in a future lecture. But needless to say, the United States is playing sort of a global policeman by trying to prop up the governments, the non-communist governments in Asia, against the threat of communism spreading from Russia and spreading from China. Another thing that's going on, that's part of this broader strategy of global containment the United States has to worry about, is that many colonies, especially colonies in Africa, colonies in other parts of Asia, are gaining their independence during the 1950s and early 1960s. So a lot of former colonies are becoming independent nations. And those independent nations are trying to decide, what do we do? Do we embrace Soviet-style communism? Do we embrace American-style kind of liberal capitalism and democracy? And many of these nations faced wars as they sort of struggled what to do. The United States, of course, was very concerned about this because, well, if nations in Africa or parts of Asia embrace communism, it just gives the Soviet Union a new foothold to expand communism throughout the world. And so containment also involved trying to do something about these newly independent nations in Asia and parts of Africa. Now these newly independent nations, many of them didn't want to be involved in the Cold War, didn't want to become intermediaries in this conflict, and actually some of them went as far as trying to create something called the unaligned movement, in which case they said, we don't want to be either communist under influence of the Soviet Union or democratic under influence of the United States, we just want to do our own thing and be left alone. And so there actually are efforts made to create this sort of unaligned alliance between many of these newly independent nations, and it's only moderately successful. But it is another front in the Cold War that the United States has to worry about. Now domestically, the Cold War, as I mentioned at the beginning of the lecture, is a major, major concern. We've already mentioned some of these things in a previous lecture, but Americans are very fearful of the potential threat of communism in the United States, and Americans become very paranoid that the communists are trying to undermine the United States, either through military action or through spying or through other sorts of political practices. And so Americans become very fearful of this looming threat of Soviet communism trying to undermine American institutions and put the United States under, you know, and go so far as people protesting, people engaging in the kind of violent activities to defend the United States against communism. So for the 1950s especially, this fear of communism becomes very acute in the United States. And supportive communism becomes equated to being supporting the Soviet Union. If you're a communist in the United States, you're seen as automatically being a supporter of the Soviet Union, and therefore you're seen as being anti-American. Loyalty becomes a very important idea in the United States. This idea, this phrase loyalty, if you're opposed to the United States or your American policies in some way, you're disloyal. And if you're disloyal, you're probably a communist. And if you're a communist, well, you're a supporter of the Soviet Union, so you're bad and something needs to be done with you. And so this idea of loyalty, of communism, and anti-communism becomes very much a part of American politics and American society during this decade of the 50s. And goes so far as people challenging, for instance, communist labor unions. There were a number of communist labor unions in the United States, and people organized counter-protests against these labor unions. And it actually has a very strong impact on workers, because communists had been very active in the 1930s during the Great Depression in helping organize labor unions. So many of these communist labor unions had been actually very helpful in getting rights for workers. But by the 50s, it becomes kind of politically dangerous to belong to a communist union. And so many of these unions are destroyed. The workers either lose representation, or in some cases, they end up joining other unions. So it becomes very dangerous in the 1950s to be in any way affiliated with communism, whether you belong to a communist union in the 30s, whether you belong to some other communist organization. Those sorts of, that sort of information can be used against you. And a lot of people get in trouble and lose jobs, lose entire careers, because they belong to some communist organization in the 30s, and that evidence is used against them to try to destroy their careers. Well, to talk a little bit about communism in the United States, we have to talk about McCarthyism. McCarthyism is sort of the catch-all phrase that's used to describe this effort to go after people who had supposedly communist loyalties or communist backgrounds and destroy them, or in some ways, just remove them from positions where they might have any influence politically or academically or socially in American society. Now McCarthyism is a phrase, and it refers to Joseph McCarthy, who becomes probably the most well-known practitioner of this style of action against people who had maybe questionable backgrounds. But McCarthyism, in a way, predates Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Really the first anti-communist organization that was part of the U.S. government was an organization called the Dyes Committee. And it's led by a gentleman named Martin Dyes, who was a U.S. congressman. And he was interested in creating an investigative committee in Congress to go after people who had potentially communist influences. Initially, it sort of targeted after the New Deal. He believed that a lot of people in New Deal organizations under Franklin Roosevelt were communists, and so he was part of a group that was actually sort of trying to bring down these New Deal organizations. Well, the Dyes Committee eventually evolves into an organization known as HUAC, which was actually shorthand for the House Un-American Activities Committee. So HUAC, sometimes also called the House Committee on Un-American Activities, depending on what you look at. Well, HUAC is founded, is created out of the Dyes Committee, and again, becomes an organization to investigate and expose communists in government and other places. By 1945, it actually becomes a permanent or a standing house committee. In other words, it has permanent funding. It doesn't have to be reauthorized every couple years. And it becomes a very powerful organization in Congress, because it can force people to testify if they are called, and if they refuse to testify, they can actually be jailed for being in contempt of Congress. And so they use, the HUAC basically will investigate people on HUAC, pick who they want to investigate, they go out and issue a bunch of subpoenas, and they force people to appear in Washington D.C. and testify about whether they were communists or whether they've ever had any affiliation to the Communist Party. And it becomes a very blunt instrument to investigate and also to really intimidate a lot of people in the United States. HUAC has a number of very significant campaigns during its lifespan. One of these is that it goes after communists in Hollywood, or people who had supposed communist connections. And what comes out of this is the so-called Hollywood 10 investigation, these 10 members who were directors, producers, screenwriters in Hollywood who had supposedly communist affiliations. And they're called before the HUAC committee in 1947 to testify, and many of them take the fit. They refuse to testify, and they're held in contempt of Congress. Some even receive jail time. And as a result, their careers are utterly ruined in Hollywood. Essentially what becomes known as blacklisted. They're blacklisted. Their names are essentially put on the list, and they can't get work. No one wants to hire them to direct movies. No one wants to hire them to write movies. And it ruins many of these people. It ruins their careers. The blacklists become a very effective tool, and a lot of people who are accused of being communists, even if there's no real evidence, find themselves blacklisted. They find themselves unable to get work in their fields and forced, in some cases, to essentially give up their careers, in other cases forced to take assumed names and work kind of under false identities as a result of this. Another one of these HUAC investigations that has very devastating consequences for one individual is a case against a gentleman by the name of Alger Hiss, who had been a State Department employee and was then accused of perhaps passing secret data and information to the Soviet Union. And Hiss is called before HUAC and investigated. He gives testimony that's later deemed to be perjury, that's, in other words, a lie, and he goes on trial and is eventually convicted and sentenced to 10 years for lying to Congress about his potential connections with passing on information to the Soviet Union earlier in his life. And so HUAC becomes a very dangerous and powerful committee. Another thing that happens is that in 1950, the McCarran Internal Security Act is passed over the objection and over the veto of President Harry Truman. And this Internal Security Act essentially outlaws communism. It outlaws the political movement of communism in the United States. Anyone who's communist or who has any affiliation to communism in the Soviet Union is forced to register with the government. And essentially, the idea is that most people will stop being communist because they're afraid to register with the government. And the idea was that if the government, in an event of a war with the Soviet Union or other communist nation, these people could be rounded up and essentially put in camps, concentration camps, for the duration of the conflict. And so it really, the idea is that it outlaws communism. Of course, many people challenge this in court, and the courts strike down some of the provisions, they uphold others, but it's again a reflection of this paranoia, this growing fear in the United States about the threat of communism. Well, now of course, the man who gives his name to the movement itself, Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, in 1950, breaks into the national scene. He had been a junior senator from Wisconsin, he'd been a fairly unremarkable member of the Senate, had really done very little to warrant much of attention. But in 1950, he gives a very famous speech called, Traitors in High Places, and he claims to have a list of 205 names of employees of the federal government who were communists or had communist affiliations. And over the course of the next year or so, the number changes. Sometimes it's 205, occasionally it's 57. There's no real consistency to how many people, and eventually, congressional committees investigate his claims and find that there's really not a lot of proof of it. Many of the cases, some of the people he had named no longer even worked for the government, or in some cases, the names are simply wrong. People who share the same names as somebody else who might have been a member of the Communist Party. So there are a lot of errors. But at the time, the press just jumps on this number, and McCarthy becomes an overnight celebrity, an overnight powerful influential figure in Washington, D.C. And he begins a series of investigations of communism, both in D.C. and also travels around to other parts of the country, and becomes well-known for a style of investigation where he basically subpoenas people, forces them to show up at his committee, and then browbeats them and accuses them of being communists, and accuses them of being traitors and disloyal, and just doesn't even give them an opportunity to defend themselves, or forces them to take the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify because they're afraid of being arrested or prosecuted for various things. And McCarthy just becomes famous for inspiring fear, and really because of how he destroys the careers of people, and forces them onto blacklists. So McCarthy, for a couple years, has a very, really very dangerous and kind of powerful career. He finally overextends himself in 1953 by investigating the U.S. Army, accusing a number of prominent U.S. Army figures of being communists or having communist affiliations, and that kind of is just a little bit too far. He pushes it a little bit too far, and the Army, of course, and people who support the Army, the Army is a very popular institution, of course, in the United States, push back. And he also gets in trouble because it turns out that one of his aides was given preferential treatment when he was drafted, and McCarthy's kind of career starts to come tumbling down. Eventually, in 1954, the U.S. Senate actually censures him for abusing his power, and for essentially doing things that were beyond the scope of what a senator should be able to do, which essentially ruins his career. He's not elected, he ends as sort of a disgraced figure. But during his time when he was indeed a very powerful member of the U.S. Senate, McCarthy played a huge important role in really destroying and ruining the careers of many people because of his ability to make accusations on a national level, and even though there's no evidence of people doing anything, and destroying their careers. So in many cases, to sort of conclude in a way, the Cold War in the United States is certainly a record of abuse of power, certainly in a record of abuse and a sense of paranoia, and many people who were accused and later on exonerated, but of course their careers were already destroyed, or in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two individuals who were accused of spying for the Soviet Union, passing along secret information about nuclear weapons to the Soviet government, they were actually executed in 1953, based on somewhat tentative evidence. Subsequently, historians have looked at declassified information from the Soviet Union, and it's pretty clear that Julius Rosenberg was indeed involved in spying, he and one of his cousins were definitely involved, but Ethel Rosenberg may in fact have known absolutely nothing about what her husband was doing, yet both are executed in probably one of the greatest excesses of this Cold War paranoia of the 1950s. So there were indeed victims, many, many victims of this sort of Cold War paranoia, many people lost their jobs, their careers were ruined, in the case of the Rosenbergs, they're executed, and that's about as excessive as it gets, but needless to say, it was not a very pleasant time period if you had any affiliations with the Communist Party, or even in some cases the Socialist Party or Socialist movements in the United States. Ultimately, the question came down, and in many cases still comes down to, collective security versus individual rights. Did the government have the right to restrict your freedom, restrict your individual rights, if it deemed it important to protect the population as a whole of the United States? Did the government have the right to essentially outlaw the Communist Party if that meant protecting Americans from threats by international and domestic communism? It's a question that remains open to this day, and certainly was not a question that was resolved during that time period, but it was a question that became very important and made a lot of people concerned about what was happening in the course of the United States politically during this decade.