Gregory Bodenhamer Cash Innovation Business Solutions Disarmament. Two factors prompted American calls for disarmament during the 1920s. First, many Americans believed the arms buildup, particularly the Anglo-German naval rivalry, was a cause of World War I and that reducing military strength would therefore help prevent another war. Furthermore, the United States was concerned that the growing military power of Japan, which had taken advantage of the war to seize German possessions in China and the western Pacific, was a threat to American interests in the region. Limiting Japan's military capabilities would protect those interests. At the Washington Armaments Conference (November 1921–February 1922), the United States, Japan, Great Britain, France, and Italy signed the Five-Power Treaty, which limited the tonnage of their navies and placed a ten-year moratorium on the construction of aircraft carriers and battleships. The treaty did not place any restrictions on the construction of non-capital ships, such as cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. Several diplomatic agreements were also reached in Washington that focused on maintaining the status quo in Asia. Japan, Great Britain, France, and the United States, for example, recognized each other's possessions in Asia and agreed to consult on outside threats or to settle disputes among themselves. In the Nine-Power Treaty, a wider circle of nations (Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, China, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United States) pledged to support the Open Door Policy and respect the territorial integrity of China.

Disarmament. Two factors prompted American calls for disarmament during the 1920s. First, many Americans believed the arms buildup, particularly the Anglo-German naval rivalry, was a cause of World War I and that reducing military strength would therefore help prevent another war. Furthermore, the United States was concerned that the growing military power of Japan, which had taken advantage of the war to seize German possessions in China and the western Pacific, was a threat to American interests in the region. Limiting Japan's military capabilities would protect those interests. At the Washington Armaments Conference (November 1921–February 1922), the United States, Japan, Great Britain, France, and Italy signed the Five-Power Treaty, which limited the tonnage of their navies and placed a ten-year moratorium on the construction of aircraft carriers and battleships. The treaty did not place any restrictions on the construction of non-capital ships, such as cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. Several diplomatic agreements were also reached in Washington that focused on maintaining the status quo in Asia. Japan, Great Britain, France, and the United States, for example, recognized each other's possessions in Asia and agreed to consult on outside threats or to settle disputes among themselves. In the Nine-Power Treaty, a wider circle of nations (Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, China, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United States) pledged to support the Open Door Policy and respect the territorial integrity of China.

Subsequent attempts at disarmament did not prove as successful. In 1927, President Coolidge called the signatories of the Five-Power Treaty together in Geneva to work out limits on the building of smaller ships. France and Italy refused to attend, and Great Britain, the United States, and Japan could not reach an agreement on restrictions. At the 1930 London Naval Conference, Great Britain, the United States, and Japan signed a treaty that required scrapping some battleships and placed limitations on cruisers and submarines; France and Italy accepted some of the terms but were not formal signatories. The agreement, however, did not forestall Japanese aggression in Manchuria the following year.

War debts and reparations. The total war debt incurred by Europe exceeded $10 billion, the bulk of which Great Britain and France owed to the United States. Although the nation's wartime allies wanted the United States to cancel the debts altogether, both the Harding and Coolidge administrations approved only reducing the interest rates and forgiving a portion of the obligation. For example, the interest rate Italy paid was lowered to .4 percent and more than 80 percent of Italy's debt was canceled in 1926. Even with these adjustments, European countries found it difficult to pay off their loans. They argued that the high rates imposed by the Fordney-McCumber Tariff (1922) dramatically reduced the amount of U.S. dollars they could earn through exports and also that they would not be able to pay back their war debts until Germany paid them reparations. Germany, however, was unable to make its reparations payments.

Germany defaulted on its reparations in early 1923. French troops responded by occupying the industrial Ruhr Valley. As German workers protested the occupation with a strike, runaway inflation hit Germany's economy. To avert an international financial crisis, President Coolidge appointed a number of American businessmen, including Charles Dawes and Owen Young, to an international group of experts investigating the problem. The resulting Dawes Plan (1924) fixed Germany's payments over the next five years and provided for a rather large foreign loan, with most of the funds coming from American banks. Essentially, the plan allowed Germany to meet its reparations obligations with U.S. money and for Great Britain and France to use the reparations they received from Germany to pay off their debts to the United States. The Young Plan (1929) reduced the total amount of reparations due from Germany and extended the payment period until 1988 at a fixed interest rate. The plan also provided for the possibility of additional reductions if the United States was willing to cut Allied debts further. The onset of a worldwide depression soon made the entire war debt and reparations question moot.

The Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. In August 1928, the United States and France, along with 13 other nations, signed the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact. Officially known as the Pact of Paris, the agreement outlawed war as an instrument of foreign policy, although all of the signatories (which eventually included 62 countries around the world) reserved the right to defend themselves in the event of an attack. Events that occurred in China after the signing of the pact, however, made it clear that there were no means of enforcing the treaty — beyond whatever force international public opinion might carry.

From 1931 to 1932, Japan occupied Manchuria and set up a puppet state called Manchukuo. This action was a clear violation of the Peace Pact as well as the Nine-Power Treaty and the League of Nations Covenant. Despite pleas from China for assistance, neither the League nor the United States took any action to punish Japanese aggression. Rather than imposing military or economic sanctions, the American response was to simply refuse to recognize territorial changes in China achieved by force of arms. This policy of non-recognition was known as the Stimson Doctrine, after then Secretary of State Henry Stimson.

Developments in the Western Hemisphere. American relations with Caribbean and Central American countries were mixed during the 1920s. In the Dominican Republic, for example, the Marines were withdrawn in 1924 following the election of a constitutional president. Although American troops left Nicaragua in 1925, they returned in 1927 when a civil war broke out. In his message to Congress announcing the intervention, President Coolidge justified the action by stating that its purpose was to protect American business interests, investments, and property rights in the country. A shift in policy, however, became evident during the Hoover administration. Through the Clark Memorandum (1928), the State Department repudiated the decades old Roosevelt Corollary and maintained that the Monroe Doctrine could not be used to justify American intervention in the Western Hemisphere. Hoover went on a ten-nation goodwill tour of Latin America in 1928 and was quite well-received.

Foreign Policy and the New Deal

The Franklin Roosevelt administration promoted change in two areas of foreign policy. Using the groundwork for change laid by Hoover, Roosevelt adopted the Good Neighbor policy and formally abandoned military intervention in the Western Hemisphere. Another important change was the extension of diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. As peace in Europe became increasingly fragile — with the Fascists in power in Italy and Adolph Hitler as chancellor of Germany — Congress passed a series of laws designed to keep Americans from fighting in another European war. The president initially supported and then strongly opposed this move toward isolationism.

The Good Neighbor policy. Roosevelt announced the intention of the United States to be a “good neighbor” in his first inaugural address. The administration deemed improving relations with countries in the Western Hemisphere essential to increasing trade and strengthening the nation's strategic position in the region. The first concrete results of the new policy came at the Pan-American Conference held in Montevideo, Uruguay, in December 1933, when the United States accepted a nonintervention provision in the Convention on Rights and Duties of States. A new treaty with Cuba (May 1934) ended the Platt Amendment that had restricted the Cuban government's powers and had authorized U.S. military intervention in Cuba. American troops were withdrawn from Haiti (August 1934), and Panama gained additional commercial rights in the Canal Zone through an agreement signed in 1936 and ratified by the Senate in 1939. When Mexico nationalized the property of American oil companies in 1938, Secretary of State Cordell Hull recognized Mexico's right to take the property but demanded that a compensation plan be negotiated between the two countries. Even with these nonintervention approaches to Latin American countries, American foreign policy in the region continued to support conservative governments that promoted stability and protected U.S. economic interests. Following the 1933 meeting in Montevideo, the United States continued to push hemispheric solidarity through a series of international conferences, especially as the threat from Nazi Germany grew.

Recognition of the Soviet Union. The United States had refused to recognize the Soviet Union because the Soviet government would not assume Russia's debts, and it actively promoted revolution. For their part, the leaders of the Soviet Union found it difficult to forget that American troops had participated in the Allied intervention during the Russian revolution in 1918. As with Central and South America, a combination of economic and security concerns contributed to the development of a new policy toward the Soviet Union. For the Roosevelt administration, the possibility of extensive trade with the USSR and the potential value of the Soviet Union as an ally against Japanese expansion led to the reestablishment of diplomatic relations in 1933. As the price for recognition, the Soviet Union agreed not to spread propaganda in the United States, to protect the rights of Americans residing in the USSR, and to consider a settlement of the war debt question. None of these promises were kept.

The Nye Committee and neutrality legislation. Between 1934 and 1937, Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota chaired a Senate committee investigating American involvement in the First World War. The committee concluded that bankers and arms dealers, the so-called “merchants of death,” had made enormous profits during the war. Although unable to show a direct cause-and-effect relationship between either the finance or the munitions industry and the U.S. declaration of war, Congress believed that identifying the way the United States had been drawn into war in 1917 was key to keeping the country out of a future conflict. The neutrality laws passed between 1935 and 1937 reflected this attitude.

Enacted in response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in May 1935, the Neutrality Act of 1935 prohibited the sales of arms and munitions to countries that were at war and prohibited Americans from traveling on warring countries' ships, except at their own risk. The Neutrality Act of 1936 extended the legislation and added an additional ban on making loans or extending credit to belligerents (nations at war). In 1937, Congress reacted to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (which pitted the pro-Fascist forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco against those loyal to the Spanish government) by expanding the neutrality laws to cover civil conflicts. Legislation adopted in May completely banned travel by Americans on warring countries' ships and empowered the president to identify commodities that could be sold to belligerents on a cash-and-carry basis only. With the cash-and-carry policy, goods had to be paid for immediately, and belligerents' ships (not the U.S. merchant marine) had to pick up and transport the goods.

Although support for isolationism as expressed in the neutrality acts was strong, some Americans believed that collective security — determined action by the nations of the world against those who committed aggression — was the best way to prevent war. During a speech in Chicago in October 1937, the president called on countries to “quarantine the aggressor” through economic boycott, a statement viewed by many as a call for collective security and a change in American foreign policy. Public response to the speech was mixed. Isolationists criticized Roosevelt's stance, while others supported his internationalist approach to the problems in Europe and Asia. A sentiment was growing in the United States that blanket neutrality laws that did not distinguish between aggressor states and victims actually encouraged more aggression.

The Outbreak of War in Europe

Conditions in Europe rapidly deteriorated between 1936 and 1939. In March 1936, Germany violated the Treaty of Versailles and reoccupied the Rhineland. In November 1937, Italy joined Germany and Japan in the Anti-Comintern Pact, which united the three countries against the Soviet Union. Germany then annexed Austria in March 1938 and, at the Munich Conference in September 1938, Great Britain and France agreed to give Germany the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia (the Sudentenland) in return for “peace in our time.” By March 1939, Hitler annexed the rest of the country, and an independent Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. The August 1939 signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, in which Germany and the Soviet Union agreed not to attack each other, gave Germany a green light to invade Poland on September 1. This aggression in turn caused Great Britain and France, who had formed a military alliance with Poland that guaranteed Poland's independence, to declare war on Germany on September 3. The Second World War had begun.

American response to the war. Although Roosevelt quickly announced that the United States would remain neutral, he did not ask the American people to be neutral in thought, as Wilson had done in 1914. Although most Americans still wanted to stay out of the war, they had little sympathy for Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Americans' attitudes were reflected in the change of policy that occurred with the Neutrality Act of 1939, which repealed the 1935 arms embargo on belligerents and provided for the export of military equipment on a cash-and-carry basis.

In the spring of 1940, after a seven-month lull known as the Phony War, the German army began its march again. Denmark and Norway were invaded in April, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg fell in May, and France sued for peace in June. Any pretense of American neutrality ended as Great Britain stood alone. Defense spending and military production accelerated, with the focus on airplanes and motorized equipment. In September, Britain and the United States entered into the “destroyer-naval-base deal” — the exchange of 50 aging American destroyers for leases to British naval and air bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and British Guiana. The first peacetime draft was provided for in the Selective Training and Service Act, which registered men between the ages of 21 and 35 and planned to train more than 1.2 million troops and 800,000 reserves within a year.

The election of 1940. Germany's aggression and British requests for aid convinced Roosevelt to be “drafted” by the Democrats to run for an unprecedented third term. Even anti-New Deal Democrats believed the president was the best person to respond to the volatile international crisis. To give his foreign policy a more bipartisan appeal, Roosevelt appointed Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox to Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy, respectively, in June 1940. Meanwhile, the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, a young, wealthy New York businessman, who had voted for Roosevelt in 1932. Both Roosevelt and Wilkie were internationalists who supported military preparedness and advocated providing as much assistance to Great Britain as possible. They also repeatedly stressed a determination to keep the United States out of the war. Diehard isolationists believed that Roosevelt's and Wilkie's internationalist outlook would eventually drag the country into another European conflict. The America First Committee, whose most noted spokesperson was aviator Charles Lindbergh, argued that a Nazi victory would not directly threaten U.S. national security. American public opinion, however, strongly favored backing the British “in their finest hour.” Although the popular vote was the closest since 1916, and Willkie ran considerably better than either Hoover or Landon, Roosevelt won an easy electoral victory, 449 votes to Wilkie's 82.

The “arsenal of democracy.” In a fireside chat after the election, Roosevelt called on Americans to become the “arsenal of democracy” — remaining out of the war but giving the British what they needed to fight. To implement this idea, he submitted the lend-leasebill to Congress in January 1941. It gave the president the authority to lend, lease, sell, transfer, or exchange military equipment and other supplies to any country whose defense was deemed vital to American security. Although the isolationists opposed the legislation, the Lend-Lease Act passed the House and the Senate in March, and the initial appropriation of seven billion dollars went primarily to Great Britain. Not long after the unexpected German invasion of Russia in June 1941, lend-lease aid was also extended to the Soviet Union. During the spring and summer of 1941, the United States steadily prepared itself for the possibility of war. Providing direct aid to the British and the Russians meant transporting supplies on merchant ships across the Atlantic Ocean. Because German U-boats (submarines) sank millions of tons of shipping during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1941, the U.S. Navy began escorting ships further from American shores. American troops were sent to both Greenland and Iceland to forestall Germans from occupying and using these locations as bases of operations against the Western Hemisphere. British and American military planners met secretly to map out strategy for the war, agreeing that if both countries were fighting Germany and Japan, the defeat of Germany would take precedence. In August 1941, in a more public show of solidarity, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, a joint statement of their war aims that called for self-determination, free trade and freedom of the seas, equal access to raw materials, and a new system of collective security.

By the fall of 1941, the United States and Germany were already fighting an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic. When a German submarine fired upon an American destroyer in September, Roosevelt ordered the Navy to “shoot on sight” any enemy warships in the western Atlantic. After the destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed on October 31 with the loss of 115 lives, Congress approved the president's request to arm merchant ships and to allow them to sail through combat zones to the ports of belligerents. The sinking of the Reuben James effectively scrapped the Neutrality Acts, and any further incident could have led to a formal declaration of war against Germany.

The Road to Pearl Harbor

As the dominant power in Asia, Japan had long resented that the United States, Great Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands controlled parts of the Asian mainland and the Pacific. It wanted to replace these colonial powers with its own Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and was prepared to use force to achieve this goal. Japan followed up the occupation of Manchuria with the bombing of Shanghai in 1932 and began a full-scale war in China in 1937. Japan's action in China led to an informal American boycott of Japanese goods as well as a major building program that would prepare the U.S. Navy to fight in both the Atlantic and Pacific. By 1940, Japan was planning to extend its control to the natural-resource-rich French colonies in southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies.

Growing tensions with the United States. During the summer of 1940, the collaborationist Vichy government in France gave the Japanese military access to Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). In September, Japan formally joined the Axis by signing the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. The treaty committed the signatories to declare war on any nation that attacked one of them. By the time the mutual assistance pact was signed, the United States had already announced restrictions on exports of aviation fuel and scrap metal to the Japanese. With the exception of coal, Japan was heavily dependent on other countries for raw materials, and the United States hoped to exploit this weakness through economic sanctions. Negotiations during the spring of 1941 to resolve outstanding differences were ineffective, however.

By July 1941, the Japanese occupied all of French Indochina in a prelude to invading the Dutch East Indies, an important source of oil and rubber. Roosevelt froze all Japanese assets in the United States, bringing an end to trade between the two countries. Although Japanese leaders approved an attack against American forces in the Pacific as early as September, talks continued and Japan presented a formal proposal for a peaceful settlement to Secretary of State Cordell Hull on November 20. In the proposal, Japan agreed to cease its southern expansion if the United States would cut off aid to China, restore trade, and help secure access to supplies that Japanese industry needed from the Dutch East Indies. This was not a serious offer. The party supporting war had already taken over the Japanese government in October when General Hideki Tojo became prime minister. As Tojo expected, the United States rejected the proposal and instead called for Japan to immediately withdraw from Indochina and China. On the same day (November 26), a task force of Japanese carriers left for Pearl Harbor.

The attack on Pearl Harbor. American cryptographers had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and knew that an attack was imminent by the end of November. Even though the War and Navy Departments believed that the most likely targets were either the Philippines or southeast Asia, they issued warnings to all U.S. commanders in the Pacific. At Hickham Field in Hawaii, General Walter Short was more concerned about sabotage than an air attack and placed his planes wing tip to wing tip to make it easier for the sentries to patrol. His decision proved disastrous when Japanese planes dropped their bombs on the morning of December 7, 1941.

Japanese military planners realized they could not win a protracted war with the United States. They pinned their hopes on quickly knocking out the U.S. Navy with a single blow against Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii, the home base of the Pacific fleet. The air attack was the costliest naval defeat in American history — 19 ships were either sunk or severely damaged (including 3 battleships), about 150 planes were lost, and more than 2,300 soldiers and sailors were killed. But the attack failed in two important respects. The destruction of the fleet was not as complete as the Japanese had planned; the three American aircraft carriers stationed at Pearl Harbor were on maneuvers and were not in port on December 7. Moreover, the oil depots were not bombed. Their loss would have forced the surviving ships to return to the mainland for refueling.

The Japanese government had intended to present its final message breaking off negotiations with the United States to the State Department before the air attack began, but the message was delivered an hour late. When the Japanese envoys (who were unaware that the war had already started) met with Hull, the secretary scathingly told them what their country had done. In addition to Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces were also attacking the Philippines, Guam, and Midway Island, as well as the British in Hong Kong and Malaysia on December 7, in a coordinated strike across the Pacific. Roosevelt asked Congress for a formal declaration of war against the Empire of Japan on December 8, 1941. Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, who had also voted against war in 1917, cast the only dissenting vote. Three days later (December 11), Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The war in Europe and the war in Asia had merged into a global conflict.

The Home Front

Even though the draft was instituted in 1940, and rearmament began before Pearl Harbor, the full mobilization of the United States for war required a Herculean effort. Fifteen million American men and women ultimately served in the armed forces during the Second World War, and wartime production reached unprecedented levels. The gross national product rose from $91 billion in 1939 to $166 billion in 1945, and 17 million new jobs were created during the same period.

Americans were fighting a two-front war. In Europe, the Allies were initially divided on the best and quickest way to defeat Nazi Germany; the military and diplomatic decisions that were made between 1942 and 1945 planted the seeds of the Cold War. Meanwhile in the Pacific, after some initial setbacks, the United States went on the offensive against Japan. The first major action was the August 1942 invasion of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The difficult island-hopping campaign that ensued during the next three years culminated with the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ushered in the Nuclear Age.

The war brought an end to the Great Depression. Unemployment, which stood at more than 17 percent in 1939, dropped to an all-time low of 1.2 percent by 1944. The labor problem in the war years was too few workers, not too few jobs, and in factories across the country, millions of women replaced men who were in the service. Although almost every family had someone in uniform, the war was still remote to many Americans. Support for the war was built through bond drives, which raised revenue to help finance the war, and through movies, which presented the war in a way that promoted patriotism. Shortages in food and raw materials led to “victory gardens” and well-publicized campaigns to collect rubber and scrap metals, adding to the public's sense of participation in the war effort. But there were some Americans, such as African-Americans, Hispanics, and particularly Japanese-Americans, who did not benefit from the war and whose wartime hardships and sacrifices were oftentimes the results of discrimination.

The wartime economy. Success on the battlefield hinged on the rapid conversion of American industry from producing consumer goods to making planes, ships, and tanks. This transformation was overseen by a new federal agency, the War Production Board ( WPB), which was responsible for the allocation of scarce raw materials and supplies. By early 1942, automobiles, refrigerators, washing machines, and even tennis balls ceased to be manufactured because the steel and rubber were needed for the war. Private residential housing construction also ceased because lumber was critical to the war effort. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation made loans available for businesses to expand plants and finance new equipment. Government contracts also guaranteed war-related industries significant profits and exemption from antitrust action. The demands of war made the manufacturing process highly efficient — a “Liberty” ship (a merchant ship which, according to Roosevelt, would bring liberty to Europe) that took about 180 days to build in 1941 could be finished in less than two weeks in 1943.

A shortage of workers meant higher salaries, and as personal incomes rose and spending increased, the government became concerned about inflation. One check on inflation was the Office of Price Administration ( OPA), which established rent ceilings and maximum prices on thousands of commodities, including farm products. The OPA was also responsible for implementing the nation's rationing program, beginning in December 1941 with tires and eventually expanding to include gasoline, shoes, and foodstuffs, such as sugar, coffee, meats, butter, cheese, and fats and oils. Wages were controlled by the National War Labor Board ( NWLB), which also set hours, monitored working conditions, and mediated labor disputes. Workers were allowed to retain their union membership under war contracts in return for a “no strike pledge.” That pledge was broken in May 1943, however, when the United Mine Workers struck for higher wages. The federal government ended the strike by taking over the mines. Similarly, the Army ran the railroads throughout the country for a brief period in December 1943 to avert a work stoppage.

The government financed the war through a combination of taxation and borrowing. The Revenue Act of 1942 raised tax rates on both individuals and corporations and significantly increased taxes on excess profits. With the broadening of the tax base during the war, many Americans paid federal income taxes for the first time, and in 1943, these taxes began to be withheld in the form of payroll deductions. Federal tax policy also helped to curb inflation and brought about a limited redistribution of wealth in the United States. Altogether, taxes paid for approximately 40 percent of the cost of the war, with the remainder coming from the sale of war bonds and direct borrowing from banks.

Life for women, African-Americans, and Hispanics. More than 200,000 women served in the military, primarily in the Women's Army Corps (WACs) and its Navy counterpart, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). The number of women in the workplace grew by more than five million between 1941 and 1943, with many women taking nontraditional jobs in defense plants. “Rosie the Riveter,” the symbol of all women in the factory, was one of the most enduring images of the home front. Typically, female workers were married and older than those in the prewar labor force and were motivated by a combination of patriotism, a desire to get out of the house, and the opportunity to make additional money. Overall, they received lower wages than men, even if they had the same level of experience at the same job, and most left work when the war ended either by choice or because companies were required to hire returning veterans.

African-Americans still found it difficult to find work, even with the return of prosperity. Those African-Americans who enlisted or were drafted into the military found themselves in segregated units being trained for menial jobs and commanded by white officers. The situation led A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to organize a march on Washington protesting hiring policies and segregation in the military. The march, which was set for July 1, 1941, was called off when President Roosevelt bowed to the pressure and issued Executive Order 8802 prohibiting discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origin in defense-industry and federal-government jobs; the Fair Employment Practices Committee ( FEPC) was established to enforce the order. Although the FEPC had only moderate success, nearly two million blacks were working in war plants by 1944, and the number of African-Americans in combat grew as well. The most well-known all-black unit was the Army Air Corps 99th Pursuit Squadron, the famous “Tuskegee Airmen.”

During the war, Americans were a people on the move. More than 700,000 African-Americans left the South as jobs became available in the cities of the North and West. The influx of newcomers, both black and white, along with a severe housing shortage and limited recreational facilities, heightened racial tensions in several communities. A race riot in Detroit in June 1943 left 25 blacks and 9 whites dead before the Army restored order. Mexican-Americans were also targets of prejudice and violence, despite their heroism on the battlefield, which won a high proportion of Spanish-speaking soldiers and sailors the Congressional Medal of Honor and other citations for bravery during the war. In Los Angeles, many young Mexican-American men adopted a fashion fad begun in Harlem known as the zoot suit — a long jacket with padded shoulders and tapered pants, often worn with a wide-brim hat and a big keychain. On the nights of June 3–7, 1943, white sailors roamed Mexican neighborhoods in Los Angeles and indiscriminately beat up “zooters” while the local police and Navy officials took no action.

Internment of Japanese Americans. The outbreak of the war only intensified long-held prejudices against Japanese living on the West Coast. Rumors of possible invasion and acts of sabotage created an anti-Japanese hysteria that pressured Roosevelt to take action. Executive Order 9066 (February 19, 1942) effectively authorized the removal of persons of Japanese ancestry from the strategically sensitive areas of California, Oregon, and Washington. The evacuation began in late March. By September, more than 110,000 men, women, and children — two-thirds of whom were born in the United States and were therefore American citizens — had been placed in ten “relocation centers” in Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. The internment was, without a doubt, racially motivated. No credible security threat existed; the FBI, which had no input on the policy, already had the names of enemy aliens to detain when the war began. Japanese-Americans were not evacuated from Hawaii, and no incidents of sabotage occurred there. Additionally, no comparable action was taken against Italian or German Americans, and, in fact, travel restrictions against Italian-American resident aliens were rescinded in October 1942.

Despite internment in what critics called “America's concentration camps” and the forced liquidation of their homes and businesses at a fraction of their true value, Japanese-Americans enlisted or were drafted into the armed forces and fought in segregated units under white officers, just as African-Americans did. The all- Nisei (Japanese-American citizen) 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which saw action in Italy, was the most decorated unit of the Second World War. When the constitutionality of internment was challenged in Korematsu v. the United States, the Supreme Court upheld the legislation on the basis of national security. The federal government did not admit the injustice of the policy until 1982. In 1988, Congress approved limited compensation ($20,000) to Japanese-American survivors of the camps.

Politics in war. Roosevelt stayed out of the 1942 congressional elections. Although the Democrats remained in control of Congress, the Republicans made significant gains in both the House and the Senate. Indeed, a coalition of Republicans and conservative southern Democrats had enough votes to determine the legislative agenda, and, as a result, several major New Deal social programs were terminated, and the Works Projects Administration and the National Youth Alliance were quickly scrapped in 1943. Perhaps the most important domestic initiative passed during the war years was the “GI Bill of Rights” (March 1944), officially known as the Servicemen's Readjustment Act. The law provided returning veterans a wide range of benefits, including preference in hiring, subsidized loans to buy businesses or homes, and tuition allowances for education. The fact that men and women in uniform in the United States and war zones could vote in 1944 was certainly a factor in the bill's enactment.

With the war still going on, Roosevelt decided to run for a fourth term in 1944, in spite of his poor health. The Democrats replaced liberal vice president Henry Wallace with the more moderate Senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, who had gained a degree of national recognition as chair of the watchdog Senate Select Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, who had been a contender for the nomination in 1940, was the Republican choice. Roosevelt won easily, although his popular vote margin was the lowest of all his presidential elections — 53.5 percent. The American people, including the four million soldiers and sailors who cast ballots, were not about to change leaders during the war.

The World at War

The United States could not fight all out in two theaters of war, so the decision was made — even before Pearl Harbor — to concentrate on first defeating Germany. Against Japan, the strategy that evolved during 1942 was to use Australia as a base of operations for retaking the Philippines and the south coast of China while defeating the Japanese fleet and capturing the islands in the Central Pacific. In Europe, America's entry into the war helped to revitalize the Allied forces. The Soviet Union pressed for the United States and Great Britain to open a second front with an Allied invasion of France as soon as possible, hoping a western front would force the Germans to redistribute their troops that were currently fighting against the USSR in the east. However, the British, remembering the heavy casualties in France during the First World War, were extremely reluctant to send their troops into Europe, and an invasion across the English Channel was postponed several times until June 1944. In the interim, British and American forces drove the Germans out of North Africa and invaded Sicily and Italy while Soviet troops pushed westward into Eastern Europe.

Naval war in the Pacific. In the days and weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded Malaya and captured Singapore, Guam, and Wake Island. Hong Kong was soon taken, and Japanese troops landed in the Philippines. When American forces on Bataan and Corregidor surrendered in the spring of 1942, General Douglas MacArthur left for Australia. Early in 1942, Japan also occupied the Dutch East Indies and Burma. Although U.S. bombers from the carrier Hornet did attack Tokyo (April 18, 1942), the famed Doolittle raid's primary purpose was to boost Allied moral; it did little damage. The key engagements early in the Pacific war took place at sea.

In May 1942, carrier-based planes from the Japanese and American fleets met in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Although the American Navy suffered heavy losses, Japan's attempt to seize Port Moresby in southern New Guinea and cut off Australia failed. Less than a month later (June 3–6, 1942), Japan's attempt to take Midway Island was also thwarted. The Japanese lost four aircraft carriers and almost 300 planes in the Battle of Midway, which ended the threat to Hawaii. American troops went on the offensive in August 1942 with the invasion of the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomons. The intense fighting and naval engagements on and around Guadalcanal lasted until February 1943 when the Japanese, unable to land additional troops, abandoned the island.

Under MacArthur, American and Australian troops gained control of the northern coast of New Guinea by the end of 1943. The campaign in the Central Pacific then moved from the Gilbert to the Marshall to the Mariana Islands, which provided the bases from which the new American plane, the B-29 Superfortress, began the systematic bombing of Japan in June 1944. MacArthur returned to the Philippines in October 1944, and what remained of the Japanese fleet was decisively beaten at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. By the spring of 1945, U.S. troops had captured Manila, the capital of the Philippines. The war in the Pacific, however, was far from over, and the Japanese fought harder as Allied forces moved closer to their home islands.

North Africa, Sicily, and the Italian campaign. Almost from the moment that Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Russian leader Joseph Stalin demanded the opening of a western front to relieve pressure on his army, which was fighting the bulk of the enemy forces. Although the United States was willing to consider an offensive in Europe, the British were reluctant. Neither country was prepared to mount a major campaign in France in 1942, and they decided instead to invade North Africa. A combined Anglo-American force commanded by General Dwight Eisenhower landed in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942. The inexperienced American troops suffered major setbacks, but by the spring of 1943, all of North Africa was under Allied control. While the fighting was still going on, Churchill and Roosevelt met in Morocco to discuss strategy. At the Casablanca Conference (January 1943), the leaders agreed that the war would continue until the “unconditional surrender” of Germany and Japan. While this decision was intended to calm Stalin's fears about Great Britain and the United States negotiating a separate treaty with the Axis powers, the cross-Channel invasion was postponed again in favor of an attack against what Churchill called “the soft underbelly of Europe” — Sicily and Italy.

The Allied invasion of Sicily (July–August 1943) was a complete success, but securing Italy was another matter. Although Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had been overthrown (July 25), and Italy had surrendered (September 8), German troops still fought back. British and American forces took Naples less than a month after the initial landings at Salerno (September 1943), but difficult fighting during the winter of 1943-44 brought them only within reach of Rome. Americans did not liberate Rome until June 4, 1944, just two days before the Normandy invasion. During the same period, the Russians inflicted a major defeat on the Germans in the Battle of Stalingrad (January 1943) and began to push west along the thousand-mile eastern front.

The Teheran Conference and D-Day. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, known as the Big Three, met for the first time at the Teheran Conference in November 1943. They agreed that the cross-Channel invasion would take place in the following spring along with a Russian offensive in the east. This decision meant that while the British and American forces would control Western Europe, Soviet troops would liberate Eastern Europe and would probably remain in control there when the war ended. Stalin agreed that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan after Germany was defeated, a pledge the United States believed was critical to victory in the Pacific. The three leaders also discussed postwar Germany and the formation of a new international organization to replace the League of Nations but made no final decisions.

On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the second front was finally opened when American, British, Canadian, and free-French forces stormed the beaches of Normandy in Operation Overlord. Although there was stiff resistance at Omaha Beach, the invasion surprised the Germans, who expected the attack to come at the narrower Channel crossing near Pas de Calais. The Allied troops broke out of the Normandy beachhead in July and drove toward Paris, which was liberated in August. At the same time, the Allies launched another invasion of southern France. By September, the German army was driven out of France and Belgium, but the Allied advance stalled late in the year because of a lack of supplies. On the eastern front, Soviet forces were poised to move into Germany in late 1944.

Toward Final Victory

During the spring and summer of 1945, the Big Three met for a second time, at the Yalta Conference, to decide the shape of the postwar world. Two months after the Yalta conference, Roosevelt was dead (April 12, 1945) and it was left to Harry Truman to bring the United States to victory in Europe and against Japan. While Nazi Germany collapsed in May, fighting in the Pacific was some of the heaviest in the war and American casualties were mounting. The prospect of even higher causalities prompted the United States to use a new weapon — the atomic bomb — to bring the war against Japan to an end.

The Yalta Conference. At Yalta, a resort on Russia's Crimean coast, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed to divide Germany into four zones of occupation, with France, Great Britain, and the United States in the west and the Soviet Union in the east. Although entirely within the Russian zone, Berlin would be administered by all four powers. The same arrangement would apply to Austria and Vienna. Stalin insisted that Russia keep the Polish territory it had occupied between 1939 and 1941 and suggested compensating Poland for its losses with German lands in the west. While he agreed in principal to holding free elections in Eastern Europe, Stalin supported the pro-Communist government that was running Poland at the time and also demanded “friendly states” on the borders of the USSR. Roosevelt appreciated that it would be difficult to ensure a noncommunist Eastern Europe with Soviet troops on the ground but was willing to make concessions to ensure that the Russians would join in the war against Japan. Stalin confirmed at Yalta that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan two or three months after Germany's surrender.

The defeat of Germany. The Germans launched a major offensive in the weeks before Christmas 1944 in the Ardennes Forest in France. This offensive, the Battle of the Bulge (December 16–January 16), proved only a short-lived success, however, and British and American forces soon pushed into Germany from the west while the Russians advanced from the east. By the end of April, American and Soviet troops met at the Elbe River, and the battle for Berlin was in its final days. Adolph Hitler committed suicide in his bunker under the city on April 30, and the German military unconditionally surrendered to the Allies on May 8, 1945.

As the war in Europe ended, delegates from 50 countries met in San Francisco to create the United Nations. The structure of the new international organization, whose charter was signed in June 1945, included the General Assembly, in which each member state had a vote. At Stalin's insistence, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed at Yalta to give the Soviet Union three seats — one for the USSR and one each for the republics of Belorussia and the Ukraine. The General Assembly was little more than a forum for discussing world issues, however, and the additional votes had little impact. Responsibility for maintaining peace fell to the Security Council, in which the five permanent members — China, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States — have veto power. In addition, the charter provided for a number of agencies under the U.N. umbrella, such as the International Court of Justice and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Decision to drop the bomb. American troops in the Pacific faced a difficult fight as the war moved closer to the Japanese islands. The battle of Iwo Jima (February–March 1945) cost U.S. Marines more 20,000 casualties. During the three-month battle for Okinawa (April–June 1945), only 350 miles from Japan, 12,000 Americans were killed and 36 wounded. Attacks by Japanese suicide planes, the kamikaze (or “divine wind”) caused the heaviest damage ever to the U.S. Navy. The invasion of Japan itself, which was being planned for late 1945, would mean even greater losses, perhaps as many as a million men, according to some estimates. These circumstances were the context in which the decision to use the atomic bomb was made.

The result of a scientific, technical, and industrial program known as the Manhattan Project, the first atomic bomb was successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. President Truman received word about the test as he met with Stalin and British Prime Minister Clement Atlee (who had replaced Churchill due to the Labour Party victory in the 1945 parliamentary elections) at the Potsdam Conference, held in a suburb of Berlin. The United States and its Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration (July 26) that promised “prompt and utter destruction” if Japan did not unconditionally surrender — an ultimatum Japan rejected on July 29. An atomic bomb was used against Hiroshima on August 6, completely destroying four square miles of the city and killing more than 70,000 people upon impact. A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, causing 40,000 deaths. Emperor Hirohito, long a figurehead in Japanese politics, then insisted on surrender. The Japanese agreed to Allied terms on August 14, thus ending World War II.

The decision to use an atomic bomb has long been and continues to be controversial. Historians argue that by the summer of 1945, Japan was on the verge of collapse, and the continued air attacks would have led to surrender. Some claim that the real reason the bombs were used was as a show of American strength for the Soviet Union, a theory that would make Hiroshima the first salvo of the Cold War, the icy U.S.–Soviet rivalry that followed World War II. Others maintain that racism was a factor, insisting that the bomb would never have been used against Germany, for example. Scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project wanted, in fact, to demonstrate the destructive force of the bomb for the Japanese military in one more test, hoping that witnessing the power the United States could unleash would cause Japan to surrender. In the end, however, the fact remains that Japan refused to surrender. Faced with the possible loss of tens of thousands of American troops in an invasion, Truman and his military advisors were determined to use every weapon available. Truman noted that the bomb ended the war quickly and that in so doing, it saved not only American lives but Japanese as well.

Postwar America

With a monopoly on the atomic bomb and an economy fortified by World War II, the United States in 1945 was the strongest nation in the world. The country demobilized quickly, and Americans were determined to enjoy the fruits of peace after years of depression and wartime sacrifice. The end of the war did not initiate retreat from international responsibilities, as it had after World War I, however. As tensions with the Soviet Union intensified into a cycle of political and economic antagonism known as the Cold War, the United States combated the threat posed by the USSR by forming new alliances and providing economic and military assistance to weakened democracies. The onset of the Cold War also affected domestic politics. Fear of internal subversion allowed anticommunist demagogues, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, to wield considerable political power and led to congressional investigations of Communist infiltration of the government, the film industry and even the U.S. Army.

After V-J Day, when Japan surrendered, men and women in uniform and civilians alike expected the government to “bring the troops home by Christmas.” Indeed, demobilization of the armed forces and reconversion of the economy occurred faster than anyone expected. The size of the armed forces was reduced from 12 million at the end of the war to 3 million by mid 1946 and to 1.5 million in 1947. Across the country, defense plants shifted back to producing civilian goods, so quickly, in fact, that the first new automobiles were ready to roll off the assembly line for the 1946 model year. By and large, the economy was ready to absorb the returning veterans. About two million took advantage of the GI Bill, returning to school rather than entering the labor market immediately. Those veterans who did need a job usually found one since pent-up demand for consumer goods drove the creation of jobs to produce those goods. Additionally, millions of women who had entered the workforce during the war were either laid off or left their jobs when the war ended. However, even though the postwar depression that people feared would occur never materialized, the country did face economic and social challenges.

Inflation and labor unrest. The country's main economic concern in the immediate postwar years was inflation. The president worried that a sudden end to price and wage controls would result in a dramatic rise in prices. Under pressure from both workers and business leaders to end wartime restrictions as quickly as possible, Truman reluctantly ended most price controls in the summer of 1946 and all wage controls in November 1946. The result was a nearly 25 percent jump in the overall consumer price index and an even greater increase in food prices. This decrease in purchasing power did not sit well with either consumers or organized labor. Not only were people able to buy less because of inflation, but they were earning less due to the end of the double shifts and overtime hours that were common during the war. The response was a wave of strikes in 1946 for higher wages involving more than 4.5 million workers.

Truman reacted strongly to the labor unrest. When the United Mine Workers struck, he ordered the federal government to seize the coal mines. When a national railroad strike loomed, he threatened to do the same thing and even asked for the authority to draft striking railroad workers into the Army. These actions cost the Democrats labor support, allowing the Republicans to use the public's dissatisfaction with Truman's handling of the economy to their advantage and win control of both the House and the Senate in 1946. The new Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman's veto in 1947. Widely seen as an antilabor measure, the legislation gave the president the authority to order striking workers back to work for an 80-day “cooling-off” period. The act also prohibited strikes by federal employees, banned the closed shop (workplaces that did not allow the hiring of nonunion workers), and permitted the union shop (workplaces that hired both union and nonunion workers, but required nonunion workers to join the union after being hired), except in states that had right-to-work laws. (Right-to-work laws state that union membership or nonmembership is irrelevant in getting or keeping a job.) Many states, particularly in the South, adopted such laws in the wake of the Taft-Hartley Act.

The baby boom and suburbia. Making up for lost time, millions of returning veterans soon married and started families. Indeed, twice as many Americans were married in 1946 as in 1932. The birth rate soared between 1946 and 1964, reaching its highest level in 1952. During this baby boom, about 76 million children were born, which contributed to the expanding postwar economy and also created an enormous demand for housing. Because of the housing shortage, young families often moved in with their parents, couples shared living space until an apartment became available, and wartime Quonset huts on college campuses became married-student housing for those on the GI Bill. When these families did find housing, it was usually a home that they owned in the suburbs rather than an apartment they rented in the city. William Levitt first introduced small, massproduced, and relatively inexpensive suburban homes on Long Island in 1947. His “Levittowns” soon sprang up in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the pattern of suburban development was repeated in Chicago and Los Angeles. The government supported suburban growth by making money available for homes through the GI Bill and authorizing the Federal Housing Administration to insure loans for up to 95 percent of the value of a home.

Because the overwhelming majority of those who moved to the suburbs were white, the ethnic composition of urban America began to change. Many of the new housing developments had restrictive covenants that prohibited sales to African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, and other minorities, so a home in the suburbs was not an option for them. Consequently, as whites left the cities, blacks and other minorities made up a larger and larger percentage of inner-city residents in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia. In Los Angeles, the Mexican-American population also increased, especially as whites spread out in suburban neighborhoods across Los Angeles and Orange Counties. The rise of suburbia was also part of a larger migratory pattern. Blacks continued to desert the South for the Midwest and Northeast, while whites in those regions began to settle in the sunbelt states of Florida and California.

The election of 1948 and the Fair Deal. Few thought Truman could win an election in his own right in 1948. Inflation was still a problem, the Republican Congress had blocked his legislative program, and the Democratic Party was badly split. The left wing of the party backed Henry Wallace, who had served under Roosevelt as Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, and Vice President. Wallace ran as the Progressive Party candidate on a platform that supported expanding the New Deal and improving relations with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, several Southern delegations bolted the Democratic convention because of the inclusion of a civil rights plank in the platform. Called the Dixiecrats, they formed the States Rights Party and nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president. Campaigning against the “do-nothing” Eightieth Congress, Truman managed to keep most of the Roosevelt coalition together and upset Republican candidate Thomas Dewey to win the election. Despite the loss of four states to Thurmond, Truman won most of the electoral votes in the South and received strong support from African-Americans, Catholics, Jews, farmers, and organized labor.

Truman announced an ambitious domestic agenda, known as the Fair Deal, at his inauguration in January 1949. Some Fair Deal programs that were implemented included an increase in the minimum wage, an expansion of Social Security, funding for low-income public housing, and farm price supports. However, even with Democrats back in control of both houses, the president could not get Congress to back other key elements of the Fair Deal. Conservatives in both parties were able to muster enough votes to block his really significant policy initiatives, such as civil rights legislation that would expand on Truman's executive orders prohibiting discrimination in federal government hiring and ending segregation in the armed services; national health insurance (which the American Medical Association labeled “socialized medicine”); federal aid to education; and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. The president's foreign policy had broader bipartisan support.

The Origins of the Cold War

The Cold War had its roots in World War II, when the repeated delays in opening a second front in Europe made the Russians suspicious of the Western Allies' motives. Those concerns were heightened when the United States discontinued lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union soon after the war ended. Stalin's commitment at Yalta to allow free elections in Eastern Europe was quickly broken. To ensure “friendly states” on its western borders, the USSR supported and helped install Communist-dominated governments in Poland, Bulgaria, and Rumania (Romania) in the spring and summer of 1945. Within a year, as Winston Churchill told an American audience, an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, separating the “free” democratic nations of the West from the “captive” Communist nations of the East.

The containment policy and the Truman Doctrine. George Kennan, a State Department official stationed in Moscow, developed a strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union in the postwar years. In a lengthy telegram to Washington in February 1946, he outlined what became known as the containment policy. Kennan argued that while the USSR was determined to extend its influence around the world, its leaders were cautious and did not take risks. Faced with determined opposition (from the United States, for example), Kennan postulated that the Soviet Union would back down. The policy was concerned with future Soviet expansion and accepted, in effect, Russian control over Eastern Europe.

An early test of containment came in Greece and Turkey. In 1946, a civil war broke out in Greece, pitting Communist groups against the British-supported government. At the same time, the Soviet Union was pressuring Turkey to allow it to build naval bases on its northwestern coast, thereby giving the Soviet Black Sea Fleet easy access to the Mediterranean. When Great Britain announced it no longer had the resources to help the two countries meet the threats to their independence, the United States stepped in. Truman asked Congress for $400 million in military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey in March 1947, citing the United States' obligation to back free peoples resisting control by an armed minority or outside pressures. This policy, known as the Truman Doctrine, appeared to work: the Communists were defeated in the Greek Civil War in October 1949, and the foreign aid helped strengthen the Turkish economy.

The Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift. Two years after the end of World War II, much of Europe still lay in shambles; European countries struggled to rebuild their devastated infrastructures, and the continuing hardships people faced contributed to the growing electoral strength of the Communist parties in France and Italy. The United States recognized that bolstering the economies of the European states would not only undercut Communist influence but would also provide markets for American goods. Consequently, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced a massive commitment of financial assistance to Europe in June 1947. Between 1948 and 1951, more than $13 billion was funneled to 16 countries through the Marshall Plan, contributing significantly to the reconstruction of Western Europe. The United States was also ready to provide help to the USSR and Eastern Europe, but the Soviet Union flatly refused to participate in the aid program.

The first direct confrontation between Russia and the West came over Germany. In 1948, Britain, France, and the United States began to merge their zones of occupation into a unified state. The Soviet Union responded by blocking all access to Berlin in June 1948. With the blockade, Stalin hoped to force the Western powers to either relinquish Berlin to the Communists or end the plan to unify West Germany. Truman avoided a direct confrontation with the USSR by ordering a massive airlift of supplies to the two million residents of West Berlin. For almost a year, British and American planes landed around the clock at Tempelhof Airport and unloaded food, clothing, and coal. The president also sent B-29 bombers, the only planes that could carry atomic bombs, to bases in Britain as a clear warning to the Soviet Union about how far the United States was prepared to go. Seeing that the Berlin airlift could continue indefinitely, the Russians ended the blockade in May 1949.

Another factor in ending the Berlin crisis was the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in April 1949. Under its terms, the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland agreed that an attack against one country would be treated as an attack against all. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO) was created in the following year to integrate the military forces of the member states in Europe. NATO was expanded in 1952 to include Greece and Turkey, and the admission of West Germany in 1955 caused the Soviet Union to establish a counterpart to the alliance through the Warsaw Pact.

The Cold War in Asia. In October 1949, the Communist party, led by Mao Zedong, came to power in China. The Communists had been fighting the Chinese Nationalists since the 1920s, and although the civil war ended in 1937 because of the war against Japan, the fighting between Communists and Nationalists resumed in 1946. Corruption within the administration of nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) cost the Nationalists considerable popular support that even two billion dollars in American aid could not shore up. When the Nationalist government collapsed in 1949 and the Communists established the People's Republic of China, Jiang and the Nationalists retreated to the island of Formosa (Taiwan). The United States continued to recognize Jiang's party as the legitimate Chinese government until 1972. While the Communist victory sparked a debate over “who lost China,” most historians agree that there was little the United States could have done, short of providing direct military assistance to the Nationalists. Less than a year after the Communist takeover in China, the United States did commit American troops to fight Communism in Asia when North Korea invaded South Korea.

In 1948, the Korean Peninsula, which had been occupied by the Russians and the Americans since the end of World War II, was split Democratic into two separate countries — the Communist-run People's Democratic Republic of Korea, north of the 38th parallel, and the U.S.-supported Republic of Korea in the south. In June 1950, the North Korean army invaded South Korea. Truman brought the matter to the United Nations Security Council, which called on member states to provide South Korea with all possible aid to resist the aggression. The Security Council was able to take action because the Russian representative was not present to exercise the Soviet Union's veto. (The Russians were boycotting the Council because of the United Nations' refusal to admit the People's Republic of China.) Although 16 countries sent troops, the Korean War was largely a United States operation, loosely under U.N. auspices. The U.N. troops were under American command — first by General Douglas MacArthur and then by General Matthew Ridgeway — and about 90 percent of those troops were American. Altogether, more than 1.5 million American men and women served in Korea.

The North Koreans were successful in the early months of the war. In the fall of 1950, however, MacArthur's forces landed at Inchon behind the North Korean lines, captured Seoul, and moved north of the 38th parallel. When they advanced toward the Chinese border at the Yalu River, Chinese “volunteers” intervened (October–November 1950) and forced a general retreat to the south. By March 1951, the fighting had stabilized, and Truman was ready to negotiate a settlement to restore the pre-invasion boundary. Wanting total victory, MacArthur opposed the settlement. He undermined the president and threatened to attack China directly, causing Truman to relieve him of his command in April 1951. Talks between North and South Korea finally began in July but dragged on for two full years. By the time a truce was signed in July 1953, more than 30,000 Americans had been killed and the truce line was pushed slightly north of the 38th parallel.

The Cold War at Home

The Cold War shaped more than American foreign policy. As the perception of the Soviet Union changed from wartime ally to dangerous adversary, concern grew regarding Communist subversion within the United States. The existence of the Soviet-controlled Eastern bloc in Europe, the “loss” of China to communism, and the fact that the USSR had exploded an atomic bomb (1949), long before anyone expected it to, fueled suspicions that some Americans were actively working to aid the Communist cause and hoping to overthrow the U.S. government. The period of anticommunist hysteria lasted from the late 1940s well into the 1950s.

Loyalty checks and internal security. Under Executive Order 9835 (March 1947), President Truman created the Federal Employee Loyalty Program. More than three million government workers were investigated and cleared, 2,000 resigned, and just over 200 were dismissed from their jobs. The small number of dismissals is surprising considering that an employee could be suspected of subversion merely by being perceived as “potentially disloyal” or considered a security risk. People viewed as security risks included homosexuals, alcoholics, and those who were in debt and needed money. States and municipalities followed the administration's example and required many of their workers to take a loyalty oath as a condition of employment. The oaths typically stated that a person was not and had never been a member of the Communist party or any organization that advocated the overthrow of the government of the United States. Teachers were often targets of suspicion. When the Supreme Court ruled in Tolman v. Underhill (1953) that professors at the University of California could not be singled out, the state required all of its employees to take loyalty oaths.

In 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security Act (known as the McCarran Act after its author, Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada) that required Communists and Communist-front organizations to register with the attorney general. The act also authorized internment of individuals during periods of national emergency, and prohibited the employment of Communists in defense industries. The law went into effect over Truman's veto at a time when the threat of subversion seemed very real. In March 1950, for example, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born scientist, was convicted in Great Britain of providing information to the Soviet Union about the atomic bomb. Evidence that came out at his trial led to the 1951 U.S. trial and conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges and their execution two years later.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities. Created in 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities ( HUAC) was charged with examining internal subversion in the United States. In 1947, the committee turned its attention to the extent of communist influence in the motion picture industry. Although many witnesses called before HUAC identified individuals who had been Communists or supporters of left-wing causes, a group of writers known as the Hollywood Ten refused to testify. They were found guilty of contempt of Congress and were sentenced to terms in federal prison. Out of the hearings came the infamous blacklist — anyone accused or even suspected of being a Communist or a Communist sympathizer was barred from working in Hollywood.

A more prominent matter before HUAC was the investigation of Alger Hiss, who had worked in the Department of Agriculture during the New Deal and had served as an assistant secretary of state. Whittaker Chambers, who left the Communist party in 1938 and became an editor at Time magazine, claimed in 1948 that Hiss had been a Communist in the 1930s. When Hiss sued him for libel, Chambers produced microfilm of classified documents that Hiss had allegedly given to him to turn over to the Soviet Union. Hiss was charged with lying to the committee about his relationship with Chambers and was eventually convicted of perjury, even though the evidence against him was shaky. Besides providing proof of subversion to those who believed that communist infiltration of the government was widespread, the Hiss case made the career of Richard Nixon. The young congressman from California was a high-profile member of the committee during the investigation, which helped him get elected to the Senate in 1950 and to win the Republican vice-presidential nomination in 1952.

Senator Joseph McCarthy. The politician whose name became synonymous with the anticommunist crusade of the early 1950s was Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. He seized upon communists in the government as the issue that would get him elected to a second term in 1952. In a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, McCarthy claimed to have the names of 205 Communists working in the State Department. Despite the fact that he often changed the number of communists, never identified a single communist in the State Department, and had no evidence to back up the charges, his popularity grew. The start of the Korean War and the arrest and trial of the Rosenbergs played into McCarthy's hands. The fact that all of his targets were Democrats made him acceptable to the Republican leadership.

McCarthy became more powerful when the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1952. As chair of the Government Operations Committee, he used its Permanent Investigations Subcommittee as a base for his ongoing search for subversives. McCarthy, who had questioned the loyalty of Secretary of Defense George Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, overstepped his bounds when he took on the U.S. Army after his former assistant, G. David Shine was drafted. The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised nationally between April and June 1954 and did more than anything else to erode his public support. The absurdity of the charge that the Army was “soft” on communism aside, McCarthy came across as a bully and a demagogue. He was censured by the Senate in December 1954 and died a broken man three years later.

The election of 1952. As the Korean War dragged on, Truman's popularity fell. After he lost the New Hampshire presidential primary to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, he decided not to run for a second term in 1952. The president's decision opened up the race for the Democratic nomination, which was won on the third ballot by Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. To prevent a repeat of 1948 when several southern states had voted for the Dixiecrat party, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama was chosen as Stevenson's running mate. At the Republican convention, two potential candidates emerged — Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, who represented the party's conservative wing, and General Dwight Eisenhower, who had just relinquished his post as the Supreme Commander of NATO and was backed by the Republican moderates. Eisenhower was nominated on the first ballot with the delegates convinced that he was the only candidate who could guarantee victory in November. The Republicans balanced the ticket and placated the anticommunist party members by selecting Richard Nixon as Eisenhower's running mate.

During the campaign, the Republicans focused on three issues — Korea, corruption, and communism. With a stalemate at the Korean truce talks and American casualties continuing to mount, Eisenhower's pledge to go to Korea if elected was a powerful slogan; the public believed that he could bring the war to an end. Meanwhile, public support for the Democrats suffered as the Truman administration was plagued by charges of cronyism and political favoritism. In response to charges of inefficiency and corruption, Truman had proposed a major reorganization of the Bureau of Internal Revenue in early 1952 that replaced political appointees with district commissioners drawn from the ranks of the civil service. Despite the loyalty program, the Hiss and Rosenberg cases made the Democrats susceptible to charges that they were not vigilant enough against the Communist threat. The Republicans were not free from scandal, however. In the midst of the campaign, newspaper reports claimed that businessmen in California had provided Nixon with a slush fund for his personal expenses. Nixon went on television to defend himself against the charges and told the national audience that one of the gifts he received and would not return was a cocker spaniel puppy that his daughter had named Checkers. The “Checkers”speech ensured that Nixon would stay on the ticket.

The 1952 election was a smashing Republican success. Eisenhower easily defeated Stevenson by more than 6 million votes and won 442 electoral votes, including several key southern states — Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. In addition to breaking into the Solid South, Eisenhower did well among white ethnics and Catholics in cities that had traditionally been part of the New Deal coalition.