Learning Content: Cold War Domestic Policy

Causation: How did the Cold War impact domestic policies of the late 20th century?

Principle: Limited Government

Adapted from works by Patrick Allitt, Emory University; Maurice Isserman, Hamilton College; and Andrew Busch, Claremont McKenna College

Introduction

World War II ended in 1945. The United States and the Soviet Union had cooperated to defeat Nazi Germany, but they mistrusted each other. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, believed the Americans had waited too long before launching the D-Day invasion of France in 1944, leaving his people to bear the full brunt of the German war machine. It was true that Soviet casualties were more than 20 million, whereas American casualties in all theaters of war were fewer than half a million.

On the other hand, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, who had become president after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, believed Stalin had betrayed a promise made to Roosevelt at the Yalta summit in February 1945. That promise was to permit all the nations of Europe to become independent and self-governing at the war’s end. Instead, Stalin installed Soviet puppet governments in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, the parts of Europe his armies had recaptured from the Nazis.

These tensions between the two countries set the stage for the Cold War that came to dominate foreign and domestic policy during the postwar era. The world’s two superpowers turned from allies into ideological and strategic enemies as they struggled to protect and spread their systems around the world, while at the same time developing arsenals of nuclear weapons that could destroy it. Domestically, the United States emerged from the war as the world’s unchallenged economic powerhouse and enjoyed great prosperity from pent-up consumer demand and industrial dominance. Americans generally supported preserving the New Deal welfare state and the postwar anti-communist crusade. While millions of white middle-class Americans moved to settle down in the suburbs, African Americans had fought a war against racism abroad and were prepared to challenge it at home.

The Truman Doctrine and the Cold War

Journalists nicknamed the deteriorating relationship between the two great powers a “cold war,” and the name stuck. In the short run, America possessed the great advantage of being the only possessor of nuclear weapons as a result of the Manhattan Project. It had used two of them against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war in the Far East, with destructive power so fearsome it deterred Soviet aggression. But after nearly four years of war, Truman was reluctant to risk a future conflict. Instead, with congressional support, he pledged to keep American forces in Europe to prevent any more Soviet advances. This was the “Truman Doctrine,” a dramatic contrast with the American decision after World War I to withdraw from European affairs.

The National Security Act, passed by Congress in 1947, reorganized the relationship between the military forces and the government. It created the National Security Council (NSC), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the office of Secretary of Defense. The Air Force, previously a branch of the U.S. Army, now became independent, a reflection of its new importance in an era of nuclear weapons. Eventually, NSC-68, a secret memorandum from 1950, was used to authorize large increases in American military strength and aid to its allies, aiming to ensure a high degree of readiness for war against the Soviet Union.

Containment became the guiding principle of U.S. anti-Soviet policy, under which the United States deployed military, economic, and cultural resources to halt Soviet expansion. In 1948, the United States gave more than $12 billion to Western Europe to relieve suffering and help rebuild and integrate the economies through the Marshall Plan. The Europeans would thus not turn to communism in their desperation and America would promote mutual prosperity through trade. The Berlin crisis of 1948–1949 was the policy’s first great test.

Berlin, jointly occupied by the major powers, lay inside Soviet-dominated East Germany, but access roads led to it from the West. In June 1948, Soviet forces cut these roads, hoping the Americans would permit the whole of Berlin to fall into the Soviet sphere rather than risk war. Truman and his advisors, recognizing the symbolic importance of Berlin but reluctant to fire the first shot, responded by having supplies flown into West Berlin, using aircraft that had dropped bombs on Berlin just three years earlier. Grateful Berliners called them the “raisin bombers” in tribute to one of the foods they brought.

After 11 months, recognizing their plan had failed, the Soviets relented. West Berlin remained part of West Germany, making the first test of containment a success. On the other hand, the United States was powerless to prevent a complete Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, whose government had shown some elements of independence from Moscow’s direction.

Alarm about the Czech situation hastened the American decision to begin re-arming West Germany, where an imperfect and incomplete process of “de-Nazification” had taken place. The United States also supervised the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance of Western nations to forestall Soviet aggression in central Europe. The U.S. government also continued research on and development of new and more powerful nuclear weapons. Americans were dismayed to learn, in 1949, that the Soviets had successfully tested an atomic bomb of their own, greatly facilitated by information provided by Soviet spies. Europe and much of the world were divided between the world’s two superpowers and their allies.

Prosperity and the Baby Boom

The late 1940s and early 1950s were paradoxical. They were years of great geopolitical stress, danger, and upheaval, yet they were also a time of prosperity and opportunity for millions of ordinary American citizens. Far more babies were born each year than in the 1930s, resulting in the large “baby boom” generation. Millions of new houses were built to meet a need accumulated over the long years of the Great Depression and the war. Suburbs expanded around every city, creating far better and less-crowded living conditions than ever before. Levittown housing developments were just one example of the planned communities with mass-produced homes across the country that made homeownership within the reach of many, though mostly white families, thanks to cheap loans for returning veterans (See the Levittown Videos, 1947–1957 Primary Source). Wages and living standards increased, and more American consumers found they could afford their own homes, cars, refrigerators, air conditioners, and even television sets—TV was then a new and exciting technology. The entire nation breathed a sigh of relief on discovering that peace did not bring a return of depression-era conditions and widespread unemployment. (See The Sound of the Suburbs Lesson.)

Full employment during the war years had strengthened trade unions, but for patriotic reasons, nearly all industrial workers had cooperated with their employers. Now that the war was over, a rash of strikes for better pay and working conditions broke out. In 1945, Truman expanded presidential power by seizing coal mines, arguing it was in the national interest because coal supplied electricity. He then forced the United Mine Workers to end their strike the following year.

Although coal miners won their demands, the power of organized labor waned over the next few decades. Republican members of Congress, whose party had triumphed in the 1946 mid-term elections, passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, aiming to curb the power of unions by banning the closed shop, allowing states to protect the right to work outside the union, setting regulations to limit labor strikes and excluding supporters of the Communist Party and other social radicals from their leadership. Truman vetoed the act, but Congress overrode the veto. In 1952, Truman attempted to again seize a key industry and forestall a strike among steelworkers. However, the Supreme Court decided in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952) that Truman lacked the constitutional authority to seize private property, and steelworkers won significant concessions.

From Truman to Eisenhower

After the 1946 midterm election, in which Republicans won a majority in the House and the Senate, the Democratic President Truman struggled to advance his domestic program, called the Fair Deal in an echo of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. For instance, Truman was the first American president to propose a system of universal health care, but the Republican Congress voted it down because they opposed the cost and regulations associated with the government program and called it “socialized medicine.” Truman did succeed in other areas. He was able to encourage Congress to pass the Employment Act of 1946, committing the government to ensuring full employment. By executive order, he desegregated the American armed forces and commissioned a report on African American civil rights. He thus played an important role in helping advance the early growth of the civil rights movement.

Four years later, exhausted by Korea and the fierce stresses of the early Cold War, Truman declined to run for another term. Both parties hoped to attract the popular Supreme Allied commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to be their candidate. He accepted the Republicans’ invitation, defeated Adlai Stevenson in November 1952, and won against the same rival again in 1956.

Rather than roll back the New Deal, which had greatly increased the size and reach of the federal government since 1933, Eisenhower accepted most of it as a permanent part of the system, in line with his philosophy of “Modern Republicanism.” He worked with Congress to balance the budget but signed bills for the expansion of Social Security and unemployment benefits, a national highway system, federal aid to education, and the creation of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In foreign policy, he recognized that for the foreseeable future, the Cold War was here to stay and that each side’s possession of nuclear weapons deterred an attack by the other. The two sides’ nuclear arsenals escalated during the 1950s, soon reaching a condition known as “mutually assured destruction,” which carried the ominous acronym MAD and would supposedly prevent a nuclear war.

At the same time, Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles supported the “New Look” foreign policy, which increased reliance on nuclear weapons rather than the more flexible but costly buildup of conventional armed forces. Despite the Cold War consensus about containment, Eisenhower did not send troops when the Vietnamese defeated the French in Vietnam; when mainland China bombed the Taiwanese islands of Quemoy and Matsu; when the British, French, and Egypt fought over the Suez Canal in 1956; or when the Soviets cracked down on Hungary. Instead, Eisenhower assumed financial responsibility for the French war effort in Vietnam and sent hundreds of military advisers there over the next several years. (See the Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 1961 Primary Source.)

The Space Race

The desegregation of schools was only one aspect of public concern about education in the 1950s. The Soviet Union launched an artificial orbiting satellite, “Sputnik,” in 1957 and ignited the “Space Race.” Most Americans were horrified, understanding that a rocket able to carry a satellite into space could also carry a warhead to the United States. Congress reacted by passing the National Defense Education Act in August 1958, devoting $1 billion of federal funds to education in science, engineering, and technology in the hope of improving the nation’s scientific talent pool.

NASA had been created earlier that same year to coordinate programs related to rocketry and space travel. NASA managed to catch up with the Soviet space program in the ensuing years and later triumphed by placing the first person on the moon in 1969. Better space rockets meant better military missiles. NASA programs also stimulated useful technological discoveries in materials, navigation, and computers. (See the Sputnik and NASA Narrative and the Was Federal Spending on the Space Race Justified? Point-Counterpoint.)

Another major initiative, also defense related, of the Eisenhower years was the decision to build the interstate highway system. As a young officer just after World War I, Eisenhower had been part of an Army truck convoy that attempted to cross the United States. Terrible roads meant that the convoy took 62 days, with many breakdowns and 21 injuries to the soldiers, an experience Eisenhower never forgot. He had also been impressed by the high quality of Germany’s autobahns near the war’s end. A comprehensive national system across the United States would permit military convoys to move quickly and efficiently. Commerce, the trucking industry, and tourism would benefit too, a belief borne out over the next 35 years while the system was built; it was declared finished in 1992. (See The National Highway Act Narrative)

By 1960, the United States was, without question, in a superior position to its great rival the Soviet Union—richer, stronger, healthier, better fed, much freer, and much more powerful. Nevertheless Eisenhower, in his farewell address, warned against the dangers of an overdeveloped “military-industrial complex,” in which American traditions of democracy, decentralization, and civilian control would be swallowed up by the demands of the defense industry and a large, governmental national security apparatus. He had no easy remedies to offer and remained acutely aware that the Cold War continued to threaten the future of the world.

Additional Resources

• Rise and Fall of Joseph McCarthy | Homework Help
• Reading Mr. X’s “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”

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Causation: How did the Cold War impact domestic policies of the late 20th century?

Principle: Limited Government

There is a wealth of resources available in our Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness digital textbook. The resources are organized into different categories including:

📎 Inquiry Organizer: Summary of chapter objectives and resources

📖 Chapter Introductory Essay: In-depth overview of significant events in the time period

🔎 Narratives: Shorter essays on a dramatic story or individual

📍 Decision Points: Narratives that describe a pivotal decision in history

💬 Point-Counterpoints: Differing sides of an argument presented by scholars or historical figures

✒️ Primary Sources: Firsthand accounts from the time period

📝 Lessons: Instructions and handouts to engage students in the classroom

✏️ Unit Essay Activity: Culminating essay based on AP LEQs to assess chapter objectives

Using the provided reflection questions, review the following resources:

1. 🔎 Postwar Red Scare Narrative
2. 💬 Was Federal Spending on the Space Race Justified? Point-Counterpoint
3. ✒️ Eisenhower’s Farewell Address Primary Source

Then choose at least two more resources to review. In the discussion, you will be asked to share your reflections of these resources.

Reflection Questions:

1. What do these resources reveal about limited government and domestic policy during the Civil War?
2. How do these resources help in understanding the impact of the Cold War on domestic policy?

Other Resources

• 🔎 The G.I. Bill Narrative
• 🔎 Cold War Spy Cases Narrative
• 🔎 The National Highway Act Narrative
• 🔎 Sputnik and NASA Narrative
• ✒️ Levittown Videos Primary Source Activity
• ✒️ Harry S. Truman’s “Truman Doctrine” Address Primary Source Activity
• ✒️ George Kennan (“Mr. X”), “Sources of Soviet Conduct,” July 1947 Primary Source Activity
• ✒️ Critics of Postwar Culture: Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Excerpts), 1957 Primary Source Activity
• 📝 McCarthyism DBQ Lesson
• 📝 Cold War DBQ Lesson

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Causation: How did the Cold War impact domestic policies of the late 20th century?

Principle: Limited Government

Adapted from works by Patrick Allitt, Emory University; Maurice Isserman, Hamilton College; and Andrew Busch, Claremont McKenna College

Foreign Policy in the Kennedy Administration

The Kennedy administration soon faced a series of foreign policy crises only 90 miles off the coast of Florida. A young Marxist named Fidel Castro, son of a wealthy farmer, wanted to lead a communist revolution in his native country of Cuba. He joined revolutionary movements in Latin America and then returned to Cuba from Mexico with a group of revolutionaries in 1956. In 1959, they overthrew a corrupt, U.S.-backed dictatorship and installed a new communist dictatorship. Castro’s government seized private property and imposed a one-party state before forming an alliance with the Soviet Union.

The presence of a communist state so close to the United States was regarded by U.S. foreign policy experts as a humiliating Cold War defeat and a threat to national security. The Eisenhower administration set in motion plans to train, equip, and deploy an invasion force composed of anti-communist Cuban exiles to overthrow the Castro regime. On April 17, 1961, less than three months after Kennedy’s inauguration, these 1,400 invaders landed on a Cuban beach known as the Bay of Pigs and were routed by Castro’s forces. President Kennedy publicly took the blame for the fiasco, a humiliating setback for his young administration.

In June 1961, Kennedy met with his Soviet counterpart, Premier Nikita Khrushchev, at a Vienna, Austria, summit meeting. With the Bay of Pigs setback on both men’s minds, Khrushchev attempted to intimidate the young and inexperienced president. A shaken Kennedy remarked to a reporter afterward in confidence, “Now we have a problem in making our power credible.”

Kennedy soon faced another and deadly challenge in Cuba (see The Cuban Missile Crisis Narrative.) In the fall of 1962, American spy planes photographed construction sites in Cuba that intelligence analysts soon realized were bases intended to house Soviet missiles. When completed, these bases would greatly enhance Soviet capabilities to wipe out American defenses and command centers in a nuclear attack. This meant the Soviet Union would have first-strike capabilities and so could win a nuclear war. That possibility undermined the logic of mutual assured destruction (MAD), which held that neither side would launch a nuclear strike because each was assured that it, in turn, would be destroyed when the other side responded. The resulting “Cuban Missile Crisis” proved the most perilous moment in the entire Cold War. While Soviet freighters carrying missiles steamed toward Cuba, Kennedy’s advisers called on him to use military force to bomb the missile bases or even invade Cuba. Kennedy opted for a more measured response, positioning American warships to blockade Cuba instead. In the end, Khrushchev called back the freighters, while in return, Kennedy secretly pledged to dismantle U.S. missiles based in Turkey, near the Soviet border, and also to refrain from invading Cuba.

Other foreign challenges arose. At the start of Kennedy’s administration, the Communist insurgency in far-off South Vietnam seemed like a relatively minor foreign policy problem, compared with Cuba or a divided Berlin. Since the division of Vietnam in 1954 into a Communist-controlled north and an anti-Communist south, the United States had increased economic and military aid to the South Vietnamese government. When Kennedy took the oath of office, there were only 800 U.S. military advisers stationed in the former French colony, and there had been only two U.S. combat deaths.

But matters soon took a turn for the worse. South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, installed by a fraudulent election, was a brutal autocrat ruling over a sullen population. Moreover, he was a Catholic in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country. The Communist-organized National Liberation Front (NLF), also called the Viet Cong, was gaining strength in the rural areas of South Vietnam. And in the cities, particularly the capital city of Saigon, the Diem regime faced increasing opposition from Buddhists, who launched protests calling for free elections and engaged in fiery suicides. Diem responded with violent repression.

President Kennedy was increasingly worried by these developments. But he felt he had no choice but to continue the U.S. commitment to shoring up the Saigon government, fearing a repetition of the “Who Lost China?” controversy, when blame for the fall of China to communism undermined the Truman administration.

The Kennedy administration responded to the bad news from South Vietnam by increasing the number of military advisers (who increasingly played a direct role in combat), until, by November 1963, their number stood at 17,000, with more on the way. Meanwhile, the political situation in Saigon was slipping into chaos. Kennedy’s advisers decided Diem had to go and quietly encouraged South Vietnamese generals to launch a coup. On November 2, 1963, the conspirators struck, arresting and then executing Diem. Kennedy was personally shocked by the assassination, but his advisers hoped the coup would bring political stability to Saigon. That hope was in vain. Although some in Kennedy’s circle would later argue that by the fall of 1963 he was contemplating winding down U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, there is no compelling evidence that he would have done so in the year that followed. The political risks as Kennedy prepared for a re-election campaign were too high, plus he was concerned about maintaining American credibility with allies on the world stage by opposing Communist expansion. On the eve of 1964, the United States remained committed to a global conflict with Communism.

Domestic Policy in the Kennedy Administration

Although Kennedy paid relatively little attention to domestic reform issues until near the end of his time in office, he supported some measures in the postwar liberal agenda. In the spring of 1961, Congress passed the administration’s Area Redeployment Act, which provided loans to businesses willing to relocate to depressed areas like Appalachia, as well as a small increase in the minimum wage. The next year, Congress passed, and Kennedy signed, the Manpower Development and Training Act, which created programs for the retraining of workers displaced by automation. Neither measure did much to stimulate economic growth or lift Americans out of poverty, however.

Kennedy’s economic advisers were unhappy with this limited course because they understood that the cautious “fiscal responsibility” of the Eisenhower era had led to the economic recessions of 1954, 1957, and 1960. Kennedy at first expressed conventional sentiments about balancing the federal budget. Eventually, he was persuaded to embrace the “New Economics,” or Keynesianism—the deliberate use of government fiscal policy to stimulate the economy. A tax cut was aimed at stimulating businesses and putting money back in the pockets of middle-class consumers, whose purchases of cars, televisions, and other goods would lead to economic growth. However, large swaths of the population in economically declining areas, like West Virginia, as well as racial minorities in the rural South and urban North, were unable to take advantage of the opportunities provided by an expanding economy, especially as factories began to relocate overseas.

In the spring of 1962, an obscure author named Michael Harrington published a short book called The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Harrington’s argument was two-fold. First, using U.S. Census statistics, he showed that poverty was much more widespread than most affluent Americans assumed. Forty million to 50 million Americans were ensnared by poverty in what Harrington called “the other America.” And second, poverty was not just the lack of adequate income. There was a “culture of poverty,” defined by poor health, substance abuse, mental distress, and lowered aspirations, and it was passed down from one generation to another. “Society,” Harrington concluded, must help the poor “before they can help themselves.” Harrington’s book caught Kennedy’s attention. In the fall of 1963, the president asked his economic advisers to begin preparing legislation for the following year to wage what came to be called the “war on poverty,” but Kennedy was assassinated before he could lobby for the plan in Congress.

The 1964 Election

John Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), took the oath of office as the thirty-sixth president of the United States on the flight from Dallas back to Washington, DC, on November 22, 1963, the day of Kennedy’s assassination. Johnson’s background was that of a politically connected but homespun Texan rather than a member of the East Coast elite. He had been elected to the House of Representatives in 1937 and to the Senate in 1948. A master of the legislative process in Washington, he became Senate majority leader in 1955. His ambitions were boundless. And now, thrust into the White House with the next presidential election less than a year away, Johnson had to prepare for the greatest challenge of his political life.

He planned to continue, and indeed expand, Kennedy’s reform agenda. The Republican Party, meanwhile, was moving decisively rightward, nominating conservative senator Barry Goldwater from Arizona as its presidential standard bearer. Goldwater did himself no favor in declaring at a raucous Republican national convention that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” His words did not go down well with the public. Johnson, calling for the creation of a “Great Society,” benefited from a surging economy and public support for his tough stance on communism abroad (see the Lyndon B. Johnson, Commencement Address at the University of Michigan (“Great Society” Speech), May 22, 1964 Primary Source). In November, he swept past Goldwater with 61 percent of the popular vote, the greatest landslide in the history of presidential elections. The Democrats also secured strong majorities in both houses of Congress. However, Goldwater won five states in the Sun Belt as the Republicans made inroads into the Democratic Solid South that paid them dividends after 1968.

The Great Society

President Johnson began delivering on his promise of liberal legislation months before his triumph in November. In the spring of 1964, he secured passage of the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in public places. He also secured passage of Kennedy’s tax cut. Then, in August, Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act, the fulfillment of his call in his State of the Union address the preceding January for “an unconditional war on poverty” (see the Was the Great Society Successful? Point-Counterpoint).

The resulting programs were certainly nothing on the scale of the public works programs of the 1930s’ New Deal. As Sargent Shriver, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, put it, Johnson’s were programs designed to offer a “hand up not a handout” to the poor. There were job-training programs and childhood enrichment programs administered by local community action agencies. The war on poverty was separate from the traditional form of welfare programs, like Aid to Families of Dependent Children (AFDC), but it did include one new benefit, the Food Stamp program. There was also VISTA, a kind of domestic Peace Corps, enlisting volunteers for social service work in poor communities.

In the first six months of 1965, Johnson proposed 87 bills to Congress, which passed 84 of them. These included Medicare (federal health insurance for the elderly) and Medicaid (health insurance for the poor). The Voting Rights Act followed the Civil Rights Act as a key piece of legislation for equal rights in Johnson’s vision of a Great Society. In the fall, Johnson signed into law two important environmental initiatives, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. Also that fall, he signed the 1965 Immigration Act, ending the discriminatory quota systems put in place in the 1920s that had allowed only a trickle of immigration from countries other than those in Europe. As a result, legal immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America increased dramatically in decades to come.

President Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam

Although President Johnson assured voters in the 1964 campaign that he was not going to send “American boys” to fight a war in Vietnam that should be fought by “Asian boys,” he was already considering an escalation of the conflict after the election. On the night of August 4, 1964, after an incident involving North Vietnamese torpedo boats a few days before in the Gulf of Tonkin, the USS Maddox responded to sonar signals and, deciding it was once again under attack, fired into the darkness.

There were no attackers, but nonetheless, Johnson ordered retaliatory U.S. airstrikes against North Vietnamese coastal installations. He also secured congressional approval of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which served as a functional declaration of war against North Vietnam until it was repealed in 1971. What Congress did not know was that the administration had been prepared since May to submit such a resolution when the right incident came along. Congress also did not know about the Maddox’s role in ongoing raids along the North Vietnamese coastline.

These actions were part of a pattern of deception practiced by successive administrations in Vietnam, which the American public learned of only with the publication of the “Pentagon Papers,” a top-secret Defense Department study of the war, commissioned in 1967 and leaked to the press in 1971. In the spring of 1965, President Johnson dramatically escalated the American war effort by initiating Operation Rolling Thunder (an air assault on North Vietnam) and dispatching marines and soldiers to engage in. As the number of American troops fighting in Vietnam increased, closing in on 500,000 by the end of 1967, so did the number of American casualties. Only 206 American soldiers had died in the war in 1964; in 1967, more than 11,300 lost their lives.

President Johnson spoke of steady progress toward victory, but the American public grew increasingly uneasy. Support for the war collapsed when the Communists launched their surprise “Tet Offensive” at the end of January 1968, attacking Saigon and dozens of smaller cities across South Vietnam. The United States lost more than 2,000 soldiers in February, the highest monthly death toll to date. The Communists lost far more and, militarily, the offensive was a significant military defeat for them because their forces were decimated. But psychologically it proved a victory, fatally undermining public support for the war in the United States (see the Walter Cronkite Speaks Out against Vietnam, February 27, 1968 Primary Source). The shock also led to President Johnson’s decision to not seek reelection in 1968.

Additional Resources

• Reading the “Port Huron Statement” | A Primary Source Close Read w/ BRI

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Causation: How did the Cold War impact domestic policies of the late 20th century?

Principle: Limited Government

There is a wealth of resources available in our Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness digital textbook. The resources are organized into different categories including:

📎 Inquiry Organizer: Summary of chapter objectives and resources

📖 Chapter Introductory Essay: In-depth overview of significant events in the time period

🔎 Narratives: Shorter essays on a dramatic story or individual

📍 Decision Points: Narratives that describe a pivotal decision in history

💬 Point-Counterpoints: Differing sides of an argument presented by scholars or historical figures

✒️ Primary Sources: Firsthand accounts from the time period

📝 Lessons: Instructions and handouts to engage students in the classroom

✏️ Unit Essay Activity: Culminating essay based on AP LEQs to assess chapter objectives

Using the provided reflection questions, review the following resources:

1. 💬 Was the Great Society Successful? Point-Counterpoint
2. 📝 Vietnam War DBQ Lesson

Then choose at least two more resources to review. In the discussion, you will be asked to share your reflections of these resources.

Reflection Questions:

1. What do these resources reveal about limited government and domestic policy during the Civil War?
2. How do these resources help in understanding the impact of the Cold War on domestic policy?

Other Resources

• 🔎 Students and the Antiwar Movement Narrative
• 🔎 The Election of 1968 Narrative
• 📍 Protests at the University of California, Berkeley Decision Point
• 📍 Free Speech and the Student Anti-War Movement Decision Point
• 📍 Lyndon B. Johnson’s Decision Not to Run in 1968 Decision Point
• ✒️ Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” Speech Primary Source Activity
• ✒️ Image Analysis: March on the Pentagon, 1967 Primary Source Activity
• ✒️ Walter Cronkite Speaks Out Against the Vietnam War Primary Source Activity
• 🔎 Neil Armstrong and the Moon Landing Narrative
• 📝 Cold War DBQ Lesson

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Causation: How did the Cold War impact domestic policies of the late 20th century?

Principle: Limited Government

Adapted from works by Patrick Allitt, Emory University; Maurice Isserman, Hamilton College; and Andrew Busch, Claremont McKenna College

The Nixon Administration: Foreign Policy

On the foreign policy front, Nixon faced a dilemma. The Democratic Congress, which had supported Johnson’s Vietnam policy for years, would not do the same for Nixon. Most Democratic politicians expected Nixon to walk away from the war. North Vietnamese leaders had no incentive to negotiate peace, because they knew Congress was inclined to abandon South Vietnam. Nixon did not wish to give up on South Vietnam, but he also knew he could not escalate the war by sending more U.S. troops. Complicating matters, the American public had conflicting views: they wanted to end the war but disliked the idea of handing victory to North Vietnam. Yet, the majority of Americans despised both the war and the anti-war protestors. Nixon believed his best options were to find wiggle room among the public’s conflicting desires and to bypass Congress as much as possible. (See the Vietnam War DBQ Lesson.)

The troops and material support North Vietnam received from its allies, the Soviet Union and China, had been a critical factor in preventing an American military victory in South Vietnam. Thus, Nixon knew he had to drive a wedge between the two major communist powers and North Vietnam. He also had to exploit the growing divisions between the Soviet Union and China, both of which had imperial ambitions in Asia. Working largely out of sight of the news media and Congress, Nixon prepared the groundwork for trade and weapons negotiations with the Soviet Union and China. In 1972, he went to China and established diplomatic relations to play that nation off against the Soviet Union.

Nixon continued to divide the communist powers by negotiating nuclear arms reductions (via Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty [SALT]) with the Russians and trying to decrease Cold War tensions. The SALT I treaty limited the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and antiballistic missile defense systems. As a result of détente, both the Soviet Union and China reduced their support for North Vietnam. Given its own increased concerns over China’s growing power, the Soviet Union saw détente with the United States as its best option. Détente was the policy of decreasing tensions between the two superpowers to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war and conflict around the globe.

The Nixon Administration: Domestic Policy

On the domestic front, Nixon had several goals. First, he wanted to drastically reduce campus anti-war protest and unrest. Second, he sought to continue the process begun in 1968 of winning over elements of the Democratic electoral coalition. Third, he worked on building a Republican electoral majority by capturing the votes of working-class southern whites and northern Catholics. And fourth, he embraced some traditionally Democratic issues, such as federal welfare programs and environmental regulation, which would divide liberals and perhaps promote defections to the Republican Party. His domestic policies sought to replace Great Society programs with more conservative social policies.

Reducing campus protest proved easy. Nixon suspected most students were not really protesting the Vietnam War or even the larger policy of communist containment. They were protesting because of their fear of being drafted if they flunked out of college and lost their student draft deferments. All Nixon had to do in 1969 was substitute the student deferment with a draft lottery based on birthdays. The higher a man’s draft number, the less likely he would be called up, especially because Nixon was cutting back the number of U.S. troops in South Vietnam. Campus disruptions and violence virtually ceased, earning great applause from working-class law-and-order Democrats.

Nixon believed he could appeal to Wallace’s voters by cracking down on drug abusers and violent criminals. One of the ways to achieve that goal was to make narcotics possession and related criminal activities federal offenses. Nixon achieved this in 1973 with the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). To increase support from working-class voters, he then forced the Democratic Congress into a bidding war over which branch of government would claim credit for dramatically increasing Social Security payments during an election year. Nixon and Congress indexed increases in Social Security to inflation, which was rising rapidly at that time, and created Supplemental Security Insurance (SSI) for the disabled, blind, and elderly.

In a shrewd move, Nixon co-opted one of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson’s pet projects, Earth Day 1970, and established the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that same year. Nixon knew air and water pollution affected everyone across all sectors of the electorate. Ecology-minded Democrats like Nelson had little choice but to support the EPA, which, in effect, meant supporting Nixon and giving him credit for environmental protection. Congress and Nixon passed the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, the Pesticides Control Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to address pressing environmental problems.

Nixon was a conservative who expanded the welfare state even as he sought to present an alternative to Great Society liberalism. His most significant proposal was the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which was to guarantee a basic minimum income to all American families and, particularly, to supplement the income of the working poor. Unlike Aid to Families with Dependent Children, FAP would encourage people to work and families to stay together. However, Congress did not pass this plan for welfare reform.

The Nixon administration also advanced the idea of “New Federalism” to restore the balance of power between the federal government and the states. According to this idea, the federal government dispensed money to states in block grants with fewer controls over how the money was spent. In August 1971, Nixon made dramatic changes to federal economic policy. He introduced wage and price controls to try to contain spiraling inflation and took the United States off the gold standard, allowing the value of the dollar to float relative to other currencies, though inflation continued to increase.

Economic Troubles in the 1970s

Nixon’s downfall represented just one of many shocks Americans experienced in the 1970s. In 1973, because the United States supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, the mainly Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) retaliated by embargoing oil to the United States. As a result, American consumers paid 400 percent more for oil and gasoline, waiting in line for hours to buy gas while businesses raised prices to cover higher energy costs. The OPEC oil embargo commenced an era of simultaneously escalating inflation and economic stagnation known as “stagflation.” The popular postwar Keynesian theory of economics now seemed bereft of solutions, because cutting or raising spending or taxes would only make one of the twin problems worse. (See The 1973 Oil Crisis and Its Economic Consequences Narrative.)

Meanwhile, increasing overseas competition from Japan, China, and European nations flooded U.S. markets with less expensive and often better-quality industrial goods. Domestic producers, especially of automobiles and steel, had a choice between laying off well-paid workers and embracing automation or going bankrupt. In Michigan, between 1979 and 1982, a quarter of a million unionized autoworkers’ jobs disappeared. As manufacturing jobs vanished from urban industrial centers in the North, violent crime continued on an upward trajectory.

The deindustrialization of midwestern and northeastern states devastated a once economically dynamic region. At the same time, new postindustrial business enterprises, especially computing, expanded in the West and some areas of the South. The “Sun Belt” also prospered, in part due to the concentration of federal defense spending in the region. Sun Belt voters wanted an assertive, anti-communist foreign policy and fewer federal regulations imposed on their businesses. Many were motivated by their views on taxes and federal regulations, whereas others were Christian conservatives focused on culture and social issues.

The Carter Administration: Domestic Policy

Former Democratic Governor James “Jimmy” Earl Carter of Georgia ran for the presidency as a Washington outsider in 1976 and won on a pledge to fix the American economy and heal the cultural divisions of the 1960s. He rallied white southerners to his side, including Southern Baptist minister Jerry Falwell of Virginia, while assuring African Americans that he was a civil rights champion. Carter also told social conservatives he supported traditional family values while he embraced legalized abortion and ratification of the ERA.

Carter attempted several initiatives with Congress to reduce American dependence on foreign oil. Congress deregulated oil and gas prices and invested in private development of alternate energy sources. Environmentalists opposed strip mining for coal, however, and a crippling accident at the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, diminished enthusiasm for nuclear energy as an alternative to oil, gas, and coal. To conserve fuel, Congress passed regulations raising automobile mileage standards and lowering speed limits. Foreign-oil imports dropped from 48 percent of the nation’s consumption to 40 percent during the Carter presidency, but another oil shock and more gas lines occurred in 1979 because of OPEC’s response to the Iran hostage crisis. The energy issue endured for decades on the nation’s political and economic agenda.

The Carter Administration: Foreign Policy

Beyond cultural divisions and an economically crippling double-digit inflation rate, Carter faced enormous foreign policy challenges. In 1975, when North Vietnam invaded and conquered South Vietnam, many Americans had looked away, trying to forget the war. Two years later, President Carter gave an address at Notre Dame University in which he decried America’s “inordinate fear of communism.” Carter repudiated the Truman Doctrine and containment that guided American foreign policy during the Cold War for three decades and attempted to make human rights the center of his foreign policy. He achieved his greatest foreign policy success in negotiating a Middle East peace accord. Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat met at Camp David to discuss their lingering hostility after recent wars. The 1978 Camp David Accords led to Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt’s granting Israel access to the Suez Canal, and formal diplomatic relations between the two nations.

The Soviet Union perceived Carter’s foreign policy initiatives and détente generally as a sign of U.S. weakness and expanded its power around the globe. The Russians used profits from soaring oil prices to pay for a massive nuclear and conventional arms build-up to threaten the United States. The Soviet Union also financed and advised guerrilla insurgencies in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Angola, Somalia, and Yemen. The overthrow of the American ally and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza by the Marxist and Soviet-funded Sandinistas created trouble for Carter’s human rights foreign policy. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev installed a communist puppet government in Afghanistan, which sparked an uprising in 1979. Brezhnev responded by invading Afghanistan. He had no idea the Soviet Union had inspired an Islamic awakening and resistance that would spread across the world. Carter’s response was to boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, stop grain exports to the Soviet Union, and withdraw from the SALT II Treaty.

Soviet aggression caught Carter by surprise, but it was far from his only foreign-policy problem. A champion of international human rights, Carter had criticized American allies who repressed their citizens’ liberties. For example, he had expressed great impatience with the shah (ruler) of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1979, the terminally ill shah fled his chaotic country, leaving Iran to fundamentalist revolutionaries who established an Islamic Republic. The young student revolutionaries subsequently seized 52 American personnel at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding them hostage for 444 days. During each additional day of the “hostage crisis,” the international news media depicted Carter as weak and incompetent. A failed rescue attempt in which dozens of U.S. special forces were killed only worsened the situation.

Contextualizing 1980-Now

Republican Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, decisively defeating incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter and independent candidate John Anderson and bringing a Republican Senate to Washington on his coattails. Reagan was reelected in a 49-state landslide in 1984, and his vice president, George H. W. Bush, won a solid victory in 1988 by promising to continue Reagan’s policies. The result was the crafting of domestic and foreign policies including smaller government, lower taxes, and a stronger national defense that the conservative movement had sought since the 1960s.

The Conservative Movement and Reaganomics

Reagan’s victory represented a long-term triumph for the conservative movement, which had grown more sophisticated and more powerful since Barry Goldwater’s failed presidential run in 1964. In his campaign, Reagan proposed limiting government, reducing the rate of growth of domestic spending, cutting taxes, and scaling back federal regulation of the economy. He advocated the conservative belief that dependence on welfare was damaging families, discouraging work, and inadvertently trapping people in poverty. He also argued for states’ rights in a federal system and for strict construction of the Constitution. His Cold War foreign policy was predicated on “peace through strength,” promising to rebuild American military power and stop Soviet aggression around the world. (See the Comparing Presidential Campaign Advertising 1964–1980 Lesson.)

As president, Reagan won congressional approval of a package of tax and spending cuts that significantly changed the direction of federal policy. Initially, Congress passed a 25 percent across-the-board personal income tax cut over three years, indexed income taxes so inflation would not push taxpayers into higher tax brackets, and cut taxes on business. Later, Congress passed a comprehensive tax reform supported by Reagan that simplified the tax code and reduced tax rates again. From 1980 to 1990, discretionary domestic spending (e.g., grants to state and local governments) fell by one-third. Reagan’s administration also pursued deregulation and free trade. A final pillar of Reagan’s economic policy was support for anti-inflationary monetary policies enacted by the Federal Reserve Board. Reagan underscored his limited-government approach in 1981 by firing members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) after an illegal strike (federal law prohibits strikes by federal government employees), dealing a major blow to federal public-employee unions.

In short, Reagan’s economic policies were held together by a commitment to the view that the economy would perform better if the free market was left to operate with less government intervention. Reagan also believed economic freedom and political freedom went hand in hand. Two schools of economic thought particularly influenced Reagan’s policies. The first was monetarism, which advocated restricting the money supply (and thus the availability of credit) to fight inflation, and the second was supply-side economics, which aimed to promote noninflationary economic growth by reducing taxes and regulations to encourage individuals and businesses to work, invest, and produce. (See the Ronald Reagan and Supply-Side Economics Narrative.)

High interest rates that were part of the Federal Reserve Board’s fight against staggering inflation rates contributed to a deep recession in 1981–1982, the second half of a “double dip” recession that had started under Jimmy Carter in 1979–1980. The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, and other members decided to attack rising prices by increasing interest rates, making money more difficult to borrow. Although the strategy was successful, American workers and the economy paid a high price. Unemployment reached nearly 11 percent. The Reagan administration also paid a high political price for its unpopular move, in the form of Democratic gains in the House of Representatives and state governorships in the 1982 midterm elections. However, a strong recovery began in early 1983 as the tax cuts took hold, and it continued for the rest of the decade. Nearly 20 million jobs were created, family incomes rose, and inflation and unemployment both fell dramatically.

Reagan’s Cold War Foreign Policy

At the same time, Reagan followed a foreign policy of “peace through strength,” supporting big increases in the defense budget and the deployment of new weapons systems. He presided over the largest peacetime defense budget in history—approximately $220 billion in 1981 and increasing at 7 percent annually—which greatly enhanced American military readiness and modernization but contributed to growing federal deficits. He also embraced a research program called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), intended to develop a defense against nuclear missiles. The Soviets objected strongly to SDI, but Reagan persisted, arguing for the moral superiority of a free society against Soviet totalitarianism. In 1983, he made a speech in which he indicted the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” and he frequently predicted that communism was doomed to collapse because of its economic inefficiency and denial of basic human freedom. Whereas previous administrations had embraced détente, Reagan rejected that idea and instead pursued policies to facilitate the collapse of communism.

Reagan restored the policy of containment by strengthening traditional alliances with Western Europe and Japan, building a strategic partnership with China, and giving aid to the embattled government of El Salvador in its fight against Cuban-backed communist guerrillas. Going on the Cold War offensive, he announced the Reagan Doctrine, a policy of trying to roll back the Soviet empire by aiding anti-communist guerrillas in Afghanistan (the mujahideen), Nicaragua (the “contras”), Cambodia, and Angola, countries that had fallen into the Soviet orbit in the 1970s. “We must not break faith,” Reagan argued, “with those who are risking their lives—on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.” He ordered the invasion of the Caribbean island country of Grenada when hardline communists seized power and killed the prime minister. The administration feared for the lives of American medical students on the island and especially a possible Soviet and Cuban military presence there. Reagan also approved a policy of economic warfare against the Soviet regime, including reducing its access to Western money and technology, with the aim of bringing about its downfall.

After a series of aging leaders died in office in the early 1980s, a new generation took power in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev, understanding that the collapsing Soviet economy and stagnating society were in need of reinvigoration, pursued a policy of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring with freer markets). He also proved open to a new relationship with the United States. Reagan and Gorbachev held summit meetings in Geneva in 1985, Reykjavik in 1986, Washington, DC, in 1987, and Moscow and New York in 1988. With Reagan pressuring the Soviet leader and the Russians unable to keep pace with western computer technology, the two agreed to make significant cuts in their nuclear arsenals.

In 1987, Reagan spoke at the Berlin Wall, which divided the city into free and communist sectors, calling on Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev attempted to reform and save Soviet Communism through glasnost and perestroika, but when the peoples of the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe embraced those principles, they undermined the repressive Communist regime. Two years later, mostly peaceful uprisings against communism swept over the Eastern European countries, and the Berlin Wall came down. Gorbachev decided to withdraw the Soviet army from the city and not intervene to repress the people who were fighting the puppet regimes of Eastern Europe for their liberties. Two years after that, the Soviet Union itself disintegrated. These events spelled the end of the Cold War between the two superpowers that had lasted since 1945. (See the Ronald Reagan, “Tear Down this Wall” Speech, June 12, 1987 Primary Source) (See the “Tear Down This Wall”: Ronald Reagan and the End of the Cold War Decision Point.)

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Causation: How did the Cold War impact domestic policies of the late 20th century?

Principle: Limited Government

There is a wealth of resources available in our Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness digital textbook. The resources are organized into different categories including:

📎 Inquiry Organizer: Summary of chapter objectives and resources

📖 Chapter Introductory Essay: In-depth overview of significant events in the time period

🔎 Narratives: Shorter essays on a dramatic story or individual

📍 Decision Points: Narratives that describe a pivotal decision in history

💬 Point-Counterpoints: Differing sides of an argument presented by scholars or historical figures

✒️ Primary Sources: Firsthand accounts from the time period

📝 Lessons: Instructions and handouts to engage students in the classroom

✏️ Unit Essay Activity: Culminating essay based on AP LEQs to assess chapter objectives

Using the provided reflection questions, review the following resources:

1. 🔎 The 1973 Oil Crisis and its Economic Consequences Narrative
2. 🔎 The Space Shuttle Program and the Challenger Disaster Narrative
3. 📍 “Tear Down this Wall”: Ronald Reagan and the End of the Cold War Decision Point
4. ✒️ Ronald Reagan’s “Tear Down this Wall” Speech Primary Source Activity
5. 📝 Cold War DBQ Lesson

Then choose at least two more resources to review. In the discussion, you will be asked to share your reflections of these resources.

Reflection Questions:

1. What do these resources reveal about limited government and domestic policy during the Civil War?
2. How do these resources help in understanding the impact of the Cold War on domestic policy?

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Causation: How did the Cold War impact domestic policies of the late 20th century?

Principle: Limited Government

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The following instructional plan is an example of a conceptual teaching approach, centered on an overarching essential question. Not all resources on this topic available in Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness have been included. Review the plan using the provided reflection questions.

• To what extent are the constitutional principles and historical reasoning skills evident in the materials and activities used in the instructional plan?
• To what extent does the conceptual focus of this instructional plan help students answer the essential question (How did Cold War policies impact domestic policies of the late 20th century?)?
• What adjustments might you make to better address the constitutional principles and/or historical reasoning skills?
• What adjustments might you make to the timeframe, guiding questions, and/or instructional activities for it to suit your classes?
• How will these adjustments positively change the student outcome for understanding and using these principles and/or skills?

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Before you engage in the assessment for this module, you will participate in a discussion with the course instructor and other course participants.

For our discussion, we will reflect on the following questions:

• Explain what these resources reveal about limited government and domestic policy during the Cold War.
• Describe how these resources help in understanding the impact of the Cold War on domestic policy.
• Which resources do you think helped most in answering the guiding question: How did Cold War policies impact domestic policies of the late 20th century? Why?
• How might you change or adjust those resources to suit your classes?