Both political parties asked war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) to run for president after World War II (1939–1945), and he chose the Republicans in 1952. As president, between 1953 and 1961, Eisenhower enjoyed historically high public approval ratings and presided over a thriving economy after ending hostilities in the unpopular Korean War (1950–1953). Eisenhower’s amiable, pragmatic personality reflected a nation eager to get back to business after the upheavals of the war.
As a general in World War II, Eisenhower lacked the flamboyance and outsize ego of colleagues like George Patton (1885–1945) and Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), but his quiet managerial talent propelled him to the top of the ranks. He brought the same traits—outwardly unassuming but adept at working behind the scenes—to the presidency.
In foreign affairs, Eisenhower’s presidency was dominated by the continuing Cold War with the Soviet Union. He ended the fighting in Korea but approved controversial CIA-sponsored coups against the governments of Iran and Guatemala. In 1957, during Eisenhower’s presidency, the Soviet Union launched its first Sputnik satellite, setting off the space race.
On the domestic front, Eisenhower’s presidency coincided with the first stirrings of the major social changes that would accelerate in the 1960s. Civil rights first reemerged as a major national issue after the US Supreme Court ordered school desegregation in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. While no trailblazer on civil rights, Eisenhower firmly supported Brown and sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to force local authorities to comply with the ruling by admitting black students.
Eisenhower, who had shown little interest in politics until his run for the presidency, had little zeal for partisan combat, and his presidency was an age of comparative political peace on Capitol Hill. His most famous and lasting domestic initiative, the multibillion-dollar National Highway System, enjoyed wide bipartisan appeal.
ADDITIONAL FACTS:
1. Eisenhower graduated sixty-first in his class of 164 cadets at West Point.
2. In the New Hampshire primary of 1952, Eisenhower did not campaign because he was still on active military service.
3. Eisenhower’s likeness was on the dollar coin between 1971 and 1978.
The Cold War (1945–1991) was the international contest between communism and democracy during the last half of the twentieth century. During this era, the foreign policy of the United States was mostly driven by the desire to stop the spread of communism. Although the Cold War had a strong military dimension and trillions was spent on weaponry, the war was more a clash of ideas and a battle for the hearts and minds of people increasingly connected by technology. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of the Cold War, although communist governments still remain in Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere.
The roots of the conflict date back to 1917, when the autocratic Russian czar was overthrown and replaced by the world’s first communist leader. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) rapidly expanded its industrial base but also murdered millions of its citizens in purges and government-instigated famines. Although the United States and the USSR were allies against Nazi Germany in World War II (1939–1945), both sides regarded the other with suspicion, and relations quickly soured after the defeat of the Nazis.
After Germany’s surrender, it was unclear how the United States would respond to the USSR’s growing power. The Red Army had liberated several countries in Eastern Europe from the Nazis and installed communist puppet governments in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, among others. In 1947, US president Harry Truman (1884–1972) promulgated the Truman Doctrine. While tacitly recognizing existing communist governments, Truman said the United States would actively oppose any further efforts to spread communism.
The Cold War was not without controversy. The ill-fated US involvement in Vietnam stemmed from the desire to stop communism from spreading in Asia. The United States also frequently backed authoritarian anticommunist governments in foreign countries. The tension between supporting democracy and opposing communism proved a difficult balance for Cold War presidents and foreign-policy makers.
The Cold War effectively ended in 1989, when jubilant crowds of young Germans destroyed the Berlin Wall in a wave of anticommunist revolutions in Eastern Europe. The Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time on December 25, 1991.
1. The term third world dates from the Cold War period and refers to nations that were neither part of the capitalist first world nor of the communist second world.
2. Germany, which had been split into the two nations of East and West Germany after World War II, reunited on October 3, 1990. The postwar Allied occupation of Germany officially ended in 1991.
3. At a speech in Missouri in 1946, former British prime minister Winston Churchill coined the term iron curtain to refer to the divide between communist Eastern Europe and the democratic West that emerged after World War II.
The 1954 United States Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas outlawed racial segregation in American public schools—one of the single most important and controversial decisions in the Court’s history. The Brown decision provoked an enormous outcry in the South but set the stage for the civil rights movement and the demise of Jim Crow laws.
Prior to Brown, the Court had sanctioned segregation in its notorious 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson. Emboldened by the Plessy precedent, Southern states had imposed strict racial segregation in their school systems. While theoretically black and white schools were “separate but equal,” in practice schools for whites were nearly always better funded and equipped.
The Brown case originated in Topeka, Kansas, where a group of African-American parents filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the city’s segregated elementary schools. The NAACP agreed to take their case and assigned lawyer Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) to represent the parents when the Supreme Court heard arguments in late 1953.
A few months later, the Court released its unanimous decision, holding that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Topeka was ordered to desegregate its elementary schools. Plessy v. Ferguson, after nearly sixty years, was overturned.
In the South, lawmakers immediately grasped the huge implications of the Brown ruling and promised “massive resistance” if the federal government sought to integrate Southern schools. In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) sent federal troops to Arkansas to integrate Little Rock High School in a show of force that demonstrated the government’s resolve to enforce the Court’s order.
The Brown decision did not end segregation overnight, but it provided an enormous boost to civil rights advocates. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), in praising the Supreme Court’s ruling, said, “It served to transform the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope.”
1. Topeka’s Monroe Elementary School, the focus of the Brown ruling, became a national historic site in 1992.
2. The US government, concerned about its image abroad during the Cold War, filed a brief on behalf of the families, explaining that segregation in the South was “a source of constant embarrassment to this government in the day-to-day conduct of its foreign relations.”
3. In the South, some towns closed their school districts rather than allow integration.
On the morning of Thursday, October 24, 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average crumbled. Stocks had gone up virtually without interruption since World War I (1914–1918), but the day that became known as Black Thursday wiped out billions of dollars in investments in a few hours. By lunchtime, the first suicides of speculators had been reported. The market actually regained some of its value in the afternoon of Black Thursday, but the next day the slide resumed. The following week, amid increasingly panicked trading, the market lost 13 percent on Monday and another 12 percent on Tuesday. By 1932, when the market bottomed out, the Dow had lost almost 90 percent of its value.
The five days of the stock market crash of 1929 were perhaps the single most traumatic events in the economic history of the United States up to that point. Compared to other crashes like the Panic of 1837 and the Panic of 1873, the losses on Wall Street in October 1929 were far greater in magnitude and affected almost every sector of the market. Additionally, during the prosperous 1920s, many average Americans had invested their savings in stocks, making the impact much more real and devastating for them than previous financial downturns had been.
Economists continue to debate the exact cause of the crash. In essence, analysts agree that the overheated market of the 1920s had pushed speculative stocks to unsustainable levels. The stock bubble had been fueled by unrealistic expectations and easy credit; when stocks collapsed, the banking industry was left holding millions of dollars in worthless loans. As a consequence of the crash, the entire banking industry was nearing insolvency by 1933.
The stock slide destroyed public confidence in the markets and wiped out the life savings of many Americans. Whether Black Thursday “caused” the Great Depression, however, is a matter of some dispute; the crash may have only reflected the same underlying economic forces that would cause the mass unemployment and business losses of the 1930s. The crash eventually led the United States Congress to impose stricter regulation on Wall Street. Stocks would not return to their pre–Black Thursday levels until the mid-1950s.
1. The biggest one-day percentage decline in stock market history was October 19, 1987, when the market fell by more than 20 percent.
2. At the time of the 1929 crash, stock market information was transmitted by the ticker tape machine; trading volume during the crash was so heavy that the machine often fell hours behind.
3. Under current New York Stock Exchange rules, trading is halted if the Dow declines more than 10 percent, a measure designed to prevent cataclysmic collapses like the 1929 crash.
The gambling mecca of Las Vegas was constructed after World War II (1939–1945) by mobsters, who transformed the dusty desert town into a worldwide symbol of fun and debauchery. With a population of about 550,000 today, Las Vegas is the biggest American city that was founded in the twentieth century.
Las Vegas was originally named by Spanish travelers before the United States acquired the territory in the Mexican War (1846–1848). Las Vegas means the meadows in Spanish. For decades, however, the area was mostly uninhabited. The United States Army built Fort Baker there in 1864, and it was connected by railroad in 1905. The city was officially founded by charter in 1911, although its population remained small. The State of Nevada legalized casino gambling in 1931, but it would be another fifteen years before Las Vegas became a major destination.
In 1946, the turning point in the city’s history, the first big casino opened in Las Vegas. Built by Los Angeles gangster Bugsy Siegel (1906–1947), the Flamingo actually lost money at first, leading to Siegel’s execution by his investors. Within a few years, however, the casino was a stunning success, and other organized crime figures moved to the city’s famous Las Vegas Strip to open more casinos.
By the 1960s, Vegas, as it was familiarly called, was a thriving boomtown. Elvis Presley (1935–1977), Frank Sinatra (1915–1998), and other singers performed in Vegas casinos, making the city an all-purpose entertainment capital. (The city now calls itself “The Entertainment Capital of the World.”) The influence of organized crime, meanwhile, was curtailed by city reformers.
To many writers, the explosive growth of Las Vegas and its unapologetic pursuit of human pleasure made the city an irresistible symbol of the United States in the twentieth century, both for bad and for good. In one of the most famous literary portrayals of the city, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, author Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) described the city as the last bastion of the American dream but also an icon of consumerism and conformity in modern American life.
1. Prostitution is legal in some Nevada counties, but not in Las Vegas.
2. Siegel’s downfall was depicted in the 1991 movie Bugsy, which starred Warren Beatty (1937–) as the legendary gangster.
3. The US military tested atomic bombs for decades at a location near Las Vegas.
Although he lived in the United States for only about twenty years, Russian author Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) wrote several of the finest American books of the twentieth century, including his shocking 1955 novel Lolita, the story of a pedophile and his infatuation with a twelve-year-old girl that is widely considered one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language.
Nabokov was born into an extremely wealthy Russian family in the czarist capital of St. Petersburg, where he was raised in an atmosphere of aristocratic privilege. The family was forced to flee Russia after the outbreak of the communist-led Russian Revolution in 1917, and Nabokov would never return to his homeland. The family ended up in Berlin, where Nabokov wrote nine novels in Russian. Just before the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he fled to the United States, where he switched to writing in English.
In addition to his literary pursuits, Nabokov was an accomplished entomologist. After coming to the United States, he was made a curator of a science museum at Harvard, and he is credited with discovering several new species of insects, including one known as Nabokov’s satyr (Cyllopsis pyracmon nabokovi). During his summers, he took long road trips across the United States to catch butterflies; his experience staying in roadside motels would figure prominently in Lolita.
With its main theme of pedophilia, Lolita has been controversial virtually since the day it was released. Nabokov was rejected by four publishers before he could find one willing to print the novel. It was banned by many libraries and labeled “highbrow pornography” by a New York Times reviewer. The novel follows the disturbing story of its narrator, a European expatriate named Humbert Humbert, who becomes enamored of a twelve-year-old girl named Dolores Haze, whom he lovingly refers to as “Lolita.”
The proceeds from Lolita gave Nabokov financial independence, and in 1959 he moved to Switzerland with his wife. He spent the last seventeen years of his life in a luxury hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva, where he wrote several more novels in English, including Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969), also considered masterpieces.
1. Nabokov held teaching positions at Stanford, Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell; one of his students at Cornell was the author Thomas Pynchon (1937–).
2. For the screenplay adaptation of Lolita, Nabokov was nominated for an Academy Award in 1962.
3. Nabokov’s father was assassinated in Berlin in 1922 for his anticommunist views.
One of the most well-known living American painters, Jasper Johns (1930–) achieved fame at an early age with his abstract portraits of numbers, beer cans, flags, and mysterious blank spaces. In recent years, paintings by Johns reportedly have fetched $80 million at auction, stunning prices that are testament to his enduring appeal.
Born in Georgia in 1930, Johns grew up in South Carolina, served a brief stint in the US Army, and then moved to New York in 1953 to complete one of his most famous works, Target with Four Faces, at age twenty-five. Like many of his other paintings, Target with Four Faces has no obvious meaning. It shows four orange human faces, their eyes obscured, above a large, menacing blue and yellow target. The painting evokes fear and paranoia, and critics have interpreted it as a commentary on McCarthyism, homophobia, or even atomic weapons.
By the early 1960s, Johns was a leader of the American art scene and an inspiration to pop art innovators like Andy Warhol (c. 1930–1987). Other famous works by Johns include canvases largely made up of a single color, such as White Flag (1955), a monochromatic painting of the American flag that sold for $20 million in 1998. Johns’s works are highly abstract and rarely show human figures or identifiable objects.
By his thirtieth birthday, Johns was one of the most prominent artistic forces in the United States. His paintings and prints have been displayed prominently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Smithsonian Institution, and around the world. At the same time, Johns is an occasional lightning rod for critics who decry what they see as the difficulty and obscurity of modern art.
1. Some critics have speculated that Johns’s interest in flags derives from one of his ancestors, Sergeant William Jasper (1750–1779), a hero of the American Revolution.
2. In the 1970s, Johns illustrated a book by the famously difficult Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906– 1989), Fizzles.
3. Johns appeared in 1999 in cartoon form, as himself, on an episode of the animated TV show The Simpsons.