Harry S Truman (1884–1972) ascended to the White House after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. Truman was elected in his own right in 1948 in an extremely close race, but his popularity plummeted during the Korean War (1950–1953), and he did not seek another term in 1952.
In domestic affairs, Truman, a Democrat, proposed a set of welfare and employment policies known as the Fair Deal, but Republicans in the United States Congress blocked most of them and forced Truman to accept new restrictions on labor unions. Truman desegregated the military by executive order in 1948, a crucial civil rights milestone.
However, it was foreign policy in the wake of the World War II (1939–1945) that dominated Truman’s presidency. With large parts of Europe and Asia in ruins, the United States was suddenly thrust into the role of the world’s biggest military power.
The great question facing Truman was how strong a stand to take against communism. Under dictator Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), the Soviet Union had occupied much of Eastern Europe after the war and installed puppet communist regimes.
Some factions within Truman’s own Democratic Party, led by former vice president Henry Wallace (1888–1965), favored a soft-line policy toward the Soviets, who had fought side by side with US forces during the recently ended war. On the other hand, Truman also faced pressure from the Right, urging him to attack the Soviets immediately to end communist domination of Eastern Europe.
In the end, Truman took the middle road, an approach that would become known as the Truman Doctrine. The United States would not try to topple existing communist regimes, Truman declared in a policy first outlined in 1947, but would actively seek to thwart future communist expansion.
The Korean War tested the limits of Truman’s policy and ultimately caused the Democrats to lose the White House. In 1952, with no end to the fighting in sight, the Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), won the election by promising to end the conflict. However, the Truman Doctrine remained the basic guiding force for American foreign policy for the remainder of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union into the 1980s.
1. Truman is the last United States president who did not graduate from college.
2. As FDR’s vice president, Truman had not been told about the atomic bomb program and had to decide whether to drop the bomb on Japan only a few weeks after learning of its existence.
3. Truman’s middle initial, S, does not actually stand for anything.
World War II (1939–1945) required the largest mobilization of armed forces in American military history. Near the end of the war, the United States Congress passed the GI Bill of Rights to help returning veterans readjust to civilian life. The GI Bill, one of the most successful government programs in history, paid college tuition and subsidized mortgages for millions of soldiers, reflecting a new sense of what the American government owed those who served in uniform.
After the Civil War (1861–1865) and World War I (1914–1918), Congress had provided pensions and modest aid to soldiers and their widows and had also built retirement homes for veterans. Still, many—crippled by war injuries or psychological damage from combat—felt their government had abandoned them. This dissatisfaction culminated in the Bonus March in 1932, during the Great Depression, when more than 20,000 World War I veterans marched on Washington, DC, demanding immediate payment of a war bonus that they had been promised. In a low point of his presidency, Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) was forced to call out the army to chase angry crowds of veterans out of the capital.
The GI Bill, passed in 1944 and signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), promised a far more active role for government in helping soldiers reenter civilian life. In addition to the education benefits, soldiers could also receive lowinterest loans for buying a house and generous unemployment benefits while they looked for a job. In all, more than two million soldiers used their education benefits after World War II, causing a massive increase in college enrollment nationwide.
In addition, the government greatly expanded the medical care available for veterans after World War II and the Vietnam War (1957–1975). In 1988, President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) created the cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs to manage the chain of hospitals, financial assistance, retirement facilities, and cemeteries for soldiers. Today the GI Bill remains the centerpiece of the federal government’s commitment to veterans and a significant force for giving the disadvantaged access to a college education.
1. GI, the famed nickname for American soldiers, does not actually stand for anything and is not official government terminology. The official name of the GI Bill was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act.
2. The act provided unemployment insurance for returning soldiers who couldn’t find work, but in the booming postwar economy, far fewer GIs than expected needed the help.
3. President Roosevelt, hoping to avoid a repeat of the Bonus Army fiasco, had first proposed a GI bill during the 1930s as part of the New Deal, but Congress did not approve the program.
During World War II, minority soldiers fought with distinction in segregated military units, including the famous all-black Tuskegee Airmen and the all-Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The heroism demonstrated by black soldiers in the war made continued discrimination in the military increasingly indefensible, and in 1948 President Harry Truman (1884–1972) signed Executive Order Number 9981, fully integrating the armed forces.
Truman’s order ended a century of second-class treatment for African-Americans in the military. Although hundreds of thousands of black soldiers had enlisted in the Civil War (1861–1865), World War I (1914–1918), and World War II (1939–1945), they were often kept in segregated barracks. While the army appointed a handful of black officers, the navy and marines did not commission an African-American until the closing days of World War II. Black units fighting in Europe often received secondhand equipment and inadequate training.
The military desegregation order also had ramifications that extended beyond the battlefield. In an era when virtually all American men were subject to the draft, the military was an important social institution. In the Korean War (1950–1953), which began two years after Truman’s order, thousands of white soldiers would fight alongside black ones and learn to regard them as comrades.
In the years since Truman’s order, the military has transformed into one of the most racially diverse institutions in American society and has played a leading role in promoting acceptance of integration. About forty years later, a black general, Colin Powell (1937–), led American forces to victory in the 1991 Gulf War.
1. Many top officers, including World War II hero Omar Bradley (1893–1981), opposed desegregation as being bad for morale, but Truman ignored them.
2. In total, more than one million blacks served in World War II, making up about 10 percent of the entire United States force.
3. Truman’s pro–civil rights stance enraged the so-called Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party, which abandoned him in the 1948 election.
The Shepherd-Towner Act, a health-care law approved by the United States Congress in 1921, was one of the first steps in the creation of the modern welfare state. Although modest by contemporary standards, the grants for poor mothers and children authorized by the bill represented one of the first concerted national efforts to construct a social safety net. The act, which sponsored wellness care for mothers and newborn babies, expired in 1929, but would serve as a model and precedent for the social welfare programs enacted during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, infant mortality in the United States approached 20 percent. For every 1,000 babies born in 1900, for instance, 165 died before reaching their first birthday. Many families lacked awareness of fundamental hygiene and could not afford doctors or a hospital delivery for their babies.
The Shepherd-Towner Act, one of the key reforms of the Progressive Era, stemmed from the advocacy of urban reformers like Jane Addams (1860–1935). It was also, not coincidentally, passed by the first Congress elected with women’s votes following the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1920. During the years the law remained in effect, thousands of nurses funded by the federal government visited pregnant women across the nation, offering education on basic child-care techniques. Along with other progressive reforms, the law had a far-reaching impact; by 1930, infant mortality was less than 80 per 1,000 and would continue to fall.
The passage of the act signaled a shift in attitudes about welfare that would accelerate during the Great Depression. Prior to Shepherd-Towner, aid to the poor was widely perceived by the American public as the function of private charities or local governments. However, the Depression overwhelmed these traditional sources of “relief.” As a result, the federal government greatly expanded its role in the welfare system, creating Social Security and many employment programs. The welfare state expanded still further in the 1960s thanks to the Great Society programs championed by President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973).
1. Congress passed the act amid fears that newly enfranchised women would vote strictly based on gender; those fears dissipated after it became clear in the 1920s that women voted along much the same lines as men.
2. Because it involved the federal government in child care, the Shepherd-Towner Act was controversial; one Ohio medical journal inveighed against what it called the “federal, detached, impersonal, expensive and paternalistic system” created by the act.
3. The League of Women Voters was a major force behind the bill and convinced legislatures in every state but Connecticut, Illinois, and Massachusetts to provide matching funds.
The bedroom community of Levittown, New York, was built in 1947 to house American veterans returning home from World War II (1939–1945). Considered one of the first modern suburbs, Levittown was the template for thousands of housing subdivisions that led to profound demographic and cultural changes in postwar American society.
After the war, the United States faced an unprecedented housing shortage. Millions of returning veterans wanted to get married and start a family but encountered difficulty in finding an affordable place to live. The GI Bill guaranteed veterans low-interest housing loans, but housing was so scarce that many were unable to use them.
To capitalize on the massive demand for housing, the construction firm of Levitt and Sons bought a defunct potato farm on Long Island in New York and announced plans to build 2,000 homes. Within days, the houses had all been rented, many of them to ex-GIs. The company mass-produced the homes, which kept costs low but produced street after street of identical houses.
Levittown was a huge success, and the Levitts rapidly expanded the community to meet demand. By 1948, their army of workers was completing thirty new homes a day. In 1950, family patriarch William Levitt (1907–1994) was featured on the cover of Time magazine. The firm also built suburbs in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, making the word Levittown synonymous with suburb.
With the growth of the suburbs, the American population began to melt away from city centers, a major demographic shift. Cars quickly replaced trains as the most popular form of transportation, and city planners like New York’s Robert Moses (1888–1981) built new expressways to carry suburbanites to their jobs in the city. The exodus to suburbia intensified in the 1960s with the “white flight” of the middle class from strife-torn urban areas. Levittown, the prototypical suburb, now boasts a population of about 50,000—more than many small cities.
1. Most of the early homes in Levittown were built without a basement to save time and money.
2. Beginning in 1950, Levitt homes came with a TV set preinstalled.
3. The Levitts refused to sell to African-Americans, and the suburb is still about 95 percent white.
In 1956, three years after his critically acclaimed debut novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, author James Baldwin (1924–1987) released a second novel, Giovanni’s Room. The novel surprised many of Baldwin’s readers. Unlike Go Tell It on the Mountain, a story about an African-American teenager and his tyrannical father, the main characters in Giovanni’s Room were white. And, far more controversially, they were gay. In the novel, the two main characters engage in a homosexual love affair at the Paris apartment belonging to one of the men.
First as a black man in the United States, then as an American expatriate in France, and always as a gay man in a hostile world, Baldwin was a perpetual outsider. He was born in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City and grew up in an intensely religious household ruled by a cruel stepfather who disapproved of his artistic ambitions. Baldwin was mentored by several Harlem Renaissance writers, especially Richard Wright (1908–1960), but later broke with Wright and moved to France. Go Tell It on the Mountain was highly autobiographical and explored the contradictory role of religion in African-American life as both the glue holding the community together and a cruel, repressive force.
Baldwin published Giovanni’s Room long before such frank discussions of homosexuality were considered mainstream, and the book received a puzzled, lukewarm response. Despite Baldwin’s dedication to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, his writing on homosexuality caused many leaders of the movement to keep their distance from him. In a later interview in the New York Times Book Review, Baldwin acknowledged that he had spent most of his literary career as a “maverick”—“in the sense that I depended on neither the white world nor the black world,” he said.
In addition to his fiction, Baldwin published many articles and an influential book of autobiographical essays, Notes of a Native Son. In the opinion of some critics, including the poet Langston Hughes (1902–1967), Baldwin’s essays were superior to his fiction. “He is much better at provoking thought in the essay than he is in arousing emotion in fiction,” Hughes wrote. Baldwin died at age sixty-three at his home in France; his funeral in New York City was attended by many leading writers, including Toni Morrison (1931–), Maya Angelou (1928–), and Amiri Baraka (1934–).
1. Baldwin was made a commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986 by the French government.
2. The title of Go Tell It on the Mountain was inspired by a well-known religious spiritual.
3. Baldwin participated in the 1963 civil rights march in Washington, DC, that was the setting for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Singer and guitarist Chuck Berry (1926–) is one of the most influential musicians in American history, a rock pioneer imitated by countless stars. He also was one of the most high-profile victims of the extreme racism African-American performers were subjected to in the 1950s.
Born in St. Louis, Charles Edward Anderson Berry listened to blues and swing music on the radio as a child and began singing and playing guitar at parties in high school. In 1944, however, Berry and several friends were arrested for robbery in Kansas City and sentenced to ten years in juvenile prison. Berry was released after three years, married, and got a job at an automobile plant in his hometown.
In the early 1950s, Berry joined a blues band and began to play gigs at nightclubs in St. Louis. The trio flourished, largely thanks to Berry’s energetic stage presence. A born entertainer, Berry quit his factory job and soon became the leader of the band.
In 1955, during a trip to Chicago, Berry cut his first record for Chess Records, the single “Maybellene.” The song, half rock and half country, was an instant hit, selling a million copies and reaching number one on the Billboard R&B chart. Berry was cheated out of two-thirds of the royalties, however, in his first bitter taste of the music industry’s racist treatment of African-American stars.
More big hits followed, including “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “School Days,” and “Rock and Roll Music.” Many of his songs, particularly “Roll Over Beethoven,” became rock standards that were covered by countless other artists.
Berry was imprisoned again in 1961 after being convicted by an all-white jury on dubious charges of transporting a minor across state lines for the purpose of prostitution. While Berry was in jail, the Beatles and Rolling Stones achieved huge commercial success in the United States with songs heavily influenced by Berry. Although both of these British bands idolized Berry, he would develop a lifelong animosity toward Stones guitarist Keith Richards (1943–), once allegedly punching him backstage at a concert.
Berry continues to perform and is now recognized as one of the founders of rock and roll. In a testament to Berry’s influence, the late Beatle John Lennon (1940–1980) once said, “If you tried to give rock ’n’ roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.”
1. Berry’s last hit was the ribald 1972 single “My Ding-A-Ling,” which is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about.
2. One of Berry’s songs, “You Never Can Tell,” was used on the sound track of the 1994 movie Pulp Fiction.
3. The Chuck Berry song “School Days” was covered by the Simpsons TV show character Bart Simpson on a novelty album in 1990.