APUSH Chapter 29 Flashcards
(43 cards)
Spring of 1964
SV conditioned worsened LBJ advisers planned a bombing campaign against NV
August: The National Security Agency
Reported 2 attacks against US destroyers by NV patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of NV
- 2nd attack never happened but report prompted LBJ to order retaliatory airstrikes against bases in NV
The Gulf of Tonkin resolution
Gave President LBJ the power to use military force in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war.
- Moved unanimously through the House & passed the Senate on August 7 with only two dissenting votes.
Viet Cong
An epithet & umbrella term to refer to the communist-driven armed movement & united front organization in SV.
Operation Rolling Thunder
A campaign of gradually intensifying air attacks against NV.
- November 1965: the total topped 165,000 & more troops were on the way
- Late 1968: the US had dropped more than 3 million tons of bombs on V
Morley Safer in August 1965
CBS News report
- CBS Evening in News showed Marines setting fire to the thatched homes of civilians.
- Government was losing moral support for war
- Networks showed the awful horrifying things that were happening in V
Free Speech Movement
Wanted participatory democracy
- Students wanted a say in their education
Counterculture: 1967
Summer of Love,” the population of the Haight-Ashbury district swelled by 75,000 as youthful adventurers from around the world gathered for a huge “be-in.”
- Hippies
- More kids having sex with teens/young adults in the 1960s
- The “pill”
Timothy Leary
Harvard professor
- Urged young people to “turn on, tune in, drop out” & also advocated the mass production & distribution of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), which was not criminalized until 1968.
Woodstock Music Festival in NY
- 400,000 people in August for a 3 day rock concert
- Thousand took drugs even with security officials local police around
- The Woodstock Nation counterculture was not representative of all young people
- The large minority seeking a peaceful alternative to the intensifying climate of war.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
American student organization that flourished in the mid-to-late 1960s & was known for its activism against the Vietnam War.
SDS moblived 20,000 people in an antiwar match on the nation’s capital
Students want an end to war related research their campuses made by the expansion of higher education in the 1960s
Vietnam Veterans Against the War
Summer 1967: begun to organize returning soldiers & sailors, encouraging them to cast off the medals & ribbons they had won in battle.
- Other activists determined to “bring the war home” went beyond civil disobedience.
- 40,000 bombing incidents or bomb threats took place from January 1969 to April 1970; more than $21 million of property was damaged, & 43 people were killed.
Teenage Soldiers
Average age of soldiers who fought in V was 19
Focused on recruiting in poor communities by advertising the armed forces as a provider of vocational training & social mobility.
Many LA & AA signed up in large numbers under these inducements
High school dropout & AA (especially) had a higher casualty rate
- Were not isolated from changes in generation, many G.I.s still smoked marijuana, listen to rock music & hung psychedelic posters in their brackets
PTSD
Mostly finding and keeping a job proved to be particularly hard in the shrinking economy of the 1970s
Economic Opportunity Act in August 1964
The legislation established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)
- Coordinated a network of community-based programs designed to help the poor help themselves by providing opportunities for education & employment
Examples of programs from the OEO
VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), domestic Peace Corps: brought several thousand idealistic volunteers into poor communities for social service work.
- Educational programs were more successful
Community Action Program (CAP), mandated “maximum feasible participation” of local residents.
- Community power to help the poor
- Led to fights between local government officials & the poor over who should control funding.
The Legal Services Program: staffed by attorneys, helped millions of poor people in legal battles with housing authorities, welfare departments, police, & slumlords
Crisis in the Cities
- Great Depression, WW2,& suburbs movements = a decline in housing stock in the nations cities
- City officials favored the middle class
- 1968: a federal survey showed that 80 percent of those displaced under these programs were people of color
- By the mid 1960s, African Americans had become near majorities in the nation’s decaying inner cities.
-Many had fled rural poverty only to find themselves earning minimum wages at best & living in miserable, racially segregated neighborhoods.
Urban Uprisings
Summers of 1964 to 1968: more than 100 urban uprisings
August 1965: Watts in LA - a six-day rebellion, sparked by a traffic stop & arrest, resulting in 34 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, & extensive property damage.
July 12, 1967, in Newark, New Jersey: a city with severe housing shortages & the nation’s highest black unemployment rate, the beating & arrest of a black taxi driver by a white police officer sparked five days of looting & burning of buildings that ended with 25 people dead.
One week later Detroit police rated a bar & arrested the after-hour patrons, after week 34 people dead and 7,000 under arrest
In July 1967, President Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the riots.
The Tet Offensive
A series of coordinated attacks launched by NV & Viet Cong forces against SV during the lunar new year (Tet) holiday in late January 1968
- Huge death tool
- As many as 1 million SV became refugees, villages ruined
Affects of The Tet Offensive for the US
US stopped the Tet Offensive but weakens the resolve of many Americans
US won war abroad but was losing it at home
- US modest calaites, 1,100 dead & 8,000 wounded
- The first time, polls showed strong opposition to the war, 49 percent concluding that the entire operation in Vietnam was a mistake.
On March 31, the president appeared on television to declare a pullback in bombing over North Vietnam and the readiness of the United States to enter into comprehensive peace talks with Hanoi.
- LBJ did not go for another term
~Lost his presidency in Asia like Truman
MLK Assasination
FBI was harassing MLK
Spring of 1968, King chose Memphis, Tennessee, home of striking sanitation workers, to launch a Poor People’s Campaign for peace and justice.
- There he delivered his final speech, a message of hope
The next evening, April 4, 1968, as he stood on the balcony of his motel, King was shot & killed.
MLK Assaination Affect
The world mourned
Riots broke out in more than 100 cities, on college campuses, & on military bases in V
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley ordered his police to shoot to kill.
In Washington, DC, U.S. Army units set up machine guns outside the Capitol & the White House.
King’s dream of the nation as a “Beloved Community” died with him.
1968 Election, the Democrats
Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York emerged as the candidate of choice.
- Had a strong record on civil rights
- Like King, he had begun to interpret the war as a mirror of injustice at home.
- Assassinated on June 4
Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who had announced his candidacy in April, was now the sole Democrat with the credentials to succeed Johnson.
Alabama senator George Wallace ran as a 3rd party
- Pro-segregation
- “Segregation forever” he said
1968 Election, Richard Nixon
- built on voter hostility toward youthful protesters & the counterculture.
- “silent majority”—those Americans who worked, paid taxes, and did not demonstrate or picket.
-Running mate the governor of Maryland, Spiro T. Agnew
Nixon & Agnew barely won the popular vote percentage win
Black Power
1966, Stokely Carmichael, who had helped turn the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) into an all-black organization, began to advocate Black Power
- Take control of their own AA communites
The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland, CA, in 1966 by Huey P. Newton & Bobby Seale, demanded “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, and justice.”
- They monitored local police
- Volunteers ran free breakfast programs for school children, established medical clinics, & conducted educational classes.
- Procecited by FBI, leaders of organization arrest & jailed = effectively destroyed the organization
The Reverend Jesse Jackson: rallied AA in Chicago to boycott the A&P supermarket chain until the firm hired 700 black workers.
- Jackson encouraged AA to support their own business & services
