The United States In 1945 Flashcards
(15 cards)
The legacies of the Second World War:
How was the experience of the Second World War like for the American people 1941 - 1945?
For the American people the experience of war between 1941 and 1945 had been different from all the other nations involved.
Outside the USA the legacy of war included:
- mass destruction
- massive casualties
- huge social disruption
- and serious economic hardship.
Millions of people in Europe and the Far East suffered:
- bombings
- food shortages
- and rationing as well as occupation by foreign armies.
None of this happened to the American people.
- No foreign soldier set foot on American soil and American pride was enhanced by the size and success of the war effort with many Americans, military or civilian, strongly believing that the Second World War was a ‘good war’.
The legacies of the Second World War:
Why was the US in the strongest position by 1945?
By the start of 1945 the USA was clearly in the strongest position of any country.
With a mere 7 per cent of the global population, the US had:
- 42 per cent of the world’s income
- 62 per cent of its discovered oil
- 50 per cent of its manufacturing output
- 80 per cent of its cars
- and 33 million households owned a radio.
The ideas of ‘American exceptionalism’ and the country’s ‘manifest destiny’ had grown in many minds.
- The economy had recovered strongly from the Great Depression thanks partly to war spending, there was a strong sense of national unity, President Roosevelt was popular and there was little criticism of the political system.
KEY TERM
American exceptionalism: the idea that America is unique or exceptional which has become a popular part of conservative American thinking.
The legacies of the Second World War:
What was the Political Scene like by 1945?
12 April 1945 the 32nd president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died following a stroke, bringing to an end his 12 years as president.
- He is still the longest-serving president, being in office for 1500 days longer than any other.
- Roosevelt had presided over two major crises: the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Second World War and his approval rating at the time of his death stood at 70 per cent, having never dipped below 48 per cent.
His successor and Vice President Harry S Truman therefore had a difficult act to follow, not least because the wars in Europe and the Pacific were still going on and because he was seen by many as a compromise candidate for the vice presidency and not up to the top job.
- When Truman offered his consolations to the widowed Eleanor Roosevelt,
saying, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ Mrs Roosevelt responded, ‘Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.’
Harry S Truman (1884–1972), the 33rd president, had been vice president under Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) for less than three months when FDR died. Dealing with the post-war fall out, communism at home and abroad, as well as civil rights issues and an economy in transition, Truman plumbed depths of unpopularity in opinion polls. However, his uncompromising and honest approach (he had a sign on his desk that read ‘the buck stops here’) saw him re-evaluated on his death in 1972.
Why was Truman ‘in trouble’ according to Eleanor Roosevelt ?
Truman lacked the political capital of Roosevelt, and Mrs Roosevelt was right to suggest that he was in trouble.
The complicated set up of the US political system could easily leave a weak president faced with an uncooperative Congress and Supreme Court, along with uncooperative individual states.
This system was designed to prevent the kind of dictatorships that had developed in Europe but it also served to create tension between the states and the Federal government, between Congress and the president and between the president and the Supreme Court.
In addition, with the system of elections for president, the House of Representatives and the Senate overlapping it was possible to have a Republican president and a Democrat controlled Congress and vice versa, leading to intransigence in the passing of legislation with both Congress and the president blaming each other.
Why did Truman believe his executive power would repeatedly be challenged ?
Truman also had to face up to the fact that both Congress and the individual states felt that Roosevelt had increased Executive power at their expense.
With the coming of peace and an inexperienced new president there was every reason to believe that Executive power would be challenged repeatedly at home.
However the Constitution made little reference to the powers that the president could exercise in Foreign Affairs, and the role of the president in international diplomacy had expanded in the early twentieth century.
As a result, Truman found it considerably easier to wield power internationally than at home.
What were the main American Political parties ?
The main political parties:
Roosevelt’s Democrat Party was a loose coalition that included:
● urban (mostly Catholic) ethnic voters in the North, e.g. Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans
● workers and the unemployed across the nation
● the ‘Solid South’, where whites traditionally voted Democrat because Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party had ended slavery in the Civil War era. All Southern members of Congress were white because whites prevented black voting. Southern Democrats were the most conservative Democrats.
The other main political party was the Republican Party which:
● was greatly influenced by big business and the rich
● generally preferred an economy unregulated by the federal government
● hated Roosevelt’s New Deal because it was pro-labour unions and used taxes on the wealthy to help poorer Americans.
Post war Prosperity:
What impact did the War have on American economy?
The first and perhaps most important impact of the war was that it restored the American economy.
- It is often claimed that it was not the ‘New Deal’ that pulled the USA out of the Great Depression but rather that it was the war that kick-started real economic recovery.
In 1940, unemployment still stood at nearly 8 million.
- In the war years there was full employment, and even some shortages of workers in certain areas of the economy, especially agriculture.
What advantage did the UsA have on other foreign powers and why was this prosperous ?
While the USA had emerged as a prosperous nation, its rivals such as the British Empire, Germany, Japan, France and the Soviet Union had been badly damaged by the war.
This gave the USA a huge advantage in trade in the years that immediately followed.
1. Other countries needed goods and raw material to rebuild and the USA was in a position to supply them.
2. The country also benefitted from the repayment of loans it had made to the Allied powers and the reparations it had received in the post-war settlements.
- These included patents of German inventions such as the soft drink ‘Fanta’.
Prosperous:
In this climate of economic advantage and undamaged industry, the US economy flourished and the average American benefitted not least because of the growth of the major trades union organisations during the war.
The American Federation of Labour (AFL) and, even more so, the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) had defended worker’s rights and campaigned for pay rises which were difficult to turn down in the war years.
What were regional divisions like in America post war?
The South was predominantly agricultural and its white population kept black residents in a position of legal, economic, social and political inequality.
The North had great cities containing manufacturing industries, e.g. Pittsburgh (steel) and Detroit (cars). West Coast cities (e.g. Los Angeles and Oakland) had expanded thanks to wartime defence industries. Great urban centres (e.g. New York City) were more open to change than rural and ‘small-town’ Americans in regions such as the Midwest.
However, the war had decreased regionalism amongst America’s 140 million people. By 1945:
● over 10 per cent had left their homes for training camps (75 per cent of those then served overseas)
● around 13 per cent had changed their county of residence
● 8 million had permanently located to a different state, 4 million to a different region.
In general, the direction of this mass migration was from the agricultural South to the industrial North and from the South and East to West Coast cities that had attracted war industries (Los Angeles, Oakland, Portland, San Diego and Seattle).
What were ethnic divisions in America like Post-war?
White people:
1. In 1945 white people dominated the US population with over 130 million
people.
2. Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans were proud of their heritage, German-Americans always had been proud but their willingness to assert their German origins declined significantly during the war years.
Asian-Americans:
1. Asian-Americans were a much smaller part of the population with just over 250,000 being registered in the 1940 census and only 320,000 by 1950.
2. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, known as the McCarran-Walter Act, made immigration easier from Asia.
- As a result, by 1980 there were 3.5 million Asian Americans. Of these, most were Chinese who had come to the country in waves since the mid-nineteenth century to work on the railways and had stayed predominantly in the west of the country.
3. Japanese-Americans made up a smaller group but had suffered greatly from racism since the 1920s.
- Many Americans were troubled by the way the treatment of Japanese-Americans conflicted with the national myth about all kinds of people becoming Americans in the ‘melting pot’ of integration, which was so firm a part of the idea of ‘American exceptionalism’.
African-Americans:
1. African-American was the largest ethnic group after white, amounting to 14 million people, about 10 per cent of the population as a whole.
2. They were concentrated in the South owing to the legacy of slavery and plantation work but had been moving north and west for over 30 years in a demographic shift known as the ‘Great Migration’.
3. Most moved to large industrial cities such as Detroit and Los Angeles, driven by the injustice of ‘Jim Crow’ Laws, increased mechanisation of agriculture in the South and the lure of far higher wages in the service sector and industry which had been boosted by the war and Roosevelt’s FEPC.
Hispanics:
1. Hispanics were the next largest group constituting nearly 2 million citizens in 1945, mainly concentrated in the South West in the states near the Mexican border.
Native - Americans
1. Native Americans made up the smallest and most neglected of the ethnic groups, with barely 350,000 members spread widely between tribes that were often unwilling to work together.
- Several commentators expected the Native American population to simply die out over the subsequent decades, but were to see their numbers increase.
How did the Great Depression and post-war boom affect different social and ethnic groups in the USA?
The Crash and subsequent Great Depression reduced the wealth of the middle classes and created a culture of ‘thrift’ and hard work.
- The very rich survived the Crash and Depression with their wealth largely intact.
- However, for the rest of society there was little difference in wealth between the managerial professions and ‘blue collar’ industrial workers whose rights were well protected by Trade Unions, known as ‘Organized Labour’. - However this relatively equitable situation did not apply if you were part of a minority group.
- African-Americans and Native Americans were at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy and were far more likely to live in poverty and lack good quality education, healthcare and housing.
- They were joined in the ranks of those for whom the American Dream was less attainable by Hispanic-Americans and, to a lesser extent, AsianAmericans. - Poor white people could also be found, often living in rural areas such as the Appalachian Mountains and in farming towns in the Midwest and South.
- In these areas, however, poverty went unseen until the 1960s owing to the growing abundance of cheap food and clothing in the post-war boom.
How did the war lead to an increase in social mobility ?
KEY TERM social mobility: a term meaning people’s ability to move between classes in society, i.e. to go from being poor to becoming wealthier
The war had led to an increase in social mobility.
- Many young men who served in the armed forces left their home districts for the first time and large numbers of jobs were therefore freed up in agriculture for other groups including women and African-Americans.
- Many women were also employed in the munitions industry and parts of the economy that were previously dominated by men. By 1944, 36 per cent of the workforce was female.
Why did social changes made by the war pose a hidden threat ?
However, the social changes brought about by the war posed a hidden threat:
- 12 million American soldiers returned from Europe and the Pacific expecting jobs, meaning that women who had been liberated by war work would face exclusion from the workforce.
- African-American soldiers who had served in segregated units in a war against a racist power returned home to the South to find that Jim Crow Laws were still in place and the GI Bill was not applied equally to them.
- By 1946, only one fifth of the 100,000 black men who had applied for the educational fund had succeeded in registering for college.
Other than social changes made by the war posing a hidden threat, what other factor posed a threat ?
A perceived threat also existed in terms of communism.
- As Stalin’s armies were encamped in Europe, the fear of communism began to grow and any group or figure suspected of leaning to the left became a source of suspicion.
- Many Congressmen saw the increasing power of Trade Unions or ‘Organized Labor’ as the first stirrings of a communist threat to the USA itself and it was to this problem, at home and abroad, that Truman would dedicate much of the rest of his presidency.
