Alan Axelrod - Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

Jubilation at the end of World War II was short lived, as the Western capitalist nations and the eastern European and Asian communist nations squared off for a Cold War.

A policy of “containing” communism and a fear of touching off a nuclear World War III dominated American foreign policy in the postwar years.

The major German war criminals were prosecuted in the Nuremberg Trials, which took place in that German city from November 1945 to October 1946, presided over by jurists from the Allied nations. The principal trial brought 22 German Nazi leaders to justice, of whom 12 were sentenced to death, including Wilhelm Keitel (Hitler’s closest military adviser), Joachim von Ribbentrop (German foreign minister), Alfred Rosenberg (a principal architect of Nazi genocide programs), and Martin Bormann (Hitler’s secretary). Bormann vanished after Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945, and was tried in absentia; in 1972, a skeleton identified as his was discovered in West Berlin. Hermann Goering, second only to Hitler in authority, committed suicide before he could be executed. Three other war criminals were given life sentences, and four received 20-year terms. Three of the first 22 tried were acquitted. Over the succeeding months, lesser criminals were tried in a series of 12 proceedings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In This Chapter

The African-American struggle for civil rights

Start of the “space race”

Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis

Idealism and social reform in the Kennedy and Johnson years

Assassinations

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

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

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

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

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