ACHESON, DEAN GOODERHAM (1893–1971). Born to a privileged family in Middletown, Connecticut, Dean Acheson attended Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 1918. He served briefly in the navy in 1918, and after working as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, he joined a Washington law firm in 1921 and practiced until 1941.
A conservative Democrat, Acheson joined Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in 1933 as undersecretary of the treasury but resigned quietly that same year in disagreement over monetary policy. With the onset of war in Europe, he became a fervent interventionist and pushed for measures supporting Great Britain and provided an important legal brief in support of the Destroyers-for-Bases Agreement in 1940. Named assistant secretary of state for economic affairs in 1941, he played a significant role at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, which established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Acheson was undersecretary of state from 1945 to 1947, and in 1949 President Harry S. Truman appointed him secretary of state. He served until 1953, helping shape U.S. policies in the early Cold War, including the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. He was one of the leading architects of the political, economic, and military structures to contain the Soviet Union—a Cold War strategy codified in National Security Council Report 68 in 1950. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the decision to build the hydrogen bomb, the U.S. military response to North Korean aggression, the substantial defense build-up, and the incorporation of West Germany and Japan into the Western Alliance all reflected his influence. Despite his anticommunist policies and convictions, Acheson was subjected to merciless criticism by the right wing of the Republican Party, especially Senator Joseph McCarthy, particularly over failures in Asia—the “loss of China” and the Korean War—but also for refusing to turn his back on Alger Hiss. He dismissed such criticism as the work of “primitives.” His tailored suits, neat moustache, and fastidious attention to appearance led to him being accused of pomposity and snobbery. He did, however, retain the support of President Truman.
Acheson returned to his law practice in 1953 but remained involved in foreign policy issues and vigorously defended the strategy of containment he had helped implement. When Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson sought his advice, he consistently supported a tough line until 1968, when he abruptly urged U.S. disengagement from the Vietnam War. His aptly titled memoir, Present at the Creation, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.
AFRICAN AMERICANS. The African American population (11.8 million in 1930) felt the impact of the Great Depression and World War II as much as their white counterparts, but those effects were reflected through a prism of continuing racial prejudice and discrimination. As the economy failed, black Americans were “last hired, first fired” and experienced unemployment at more than twice the rate of white workers. In 1935, 30 percent—approximately 4 million—African Americans were on relief. More than 75 percent were still located in the South, where falling farm prices meant that black sharecroppers were further impoverished and were often evicted from the land and their homes by landlords or banks. The number of black sharecroppers fell by almost 100,000 during the 1930s.
The economic crisis increased feelings of racial prejudice. One slogan demanded “No Job for Niggers until Every Whiteman Has a Job.” Racial hatred was evident too in the continued lynching of African Americans—about 20 per year for most of the decade, except for 1932, 1938, and 1939, when the number dropped to single figures. While attempts to secure the passage of antilynching legislation in Congress gained publicity from these atrocities, southern congressmen were always able to prevent the passage of such measures.
African Americans responded to discrimination in a variety of ways. They took enormous pride in the sporting achievements of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, who both undermined theories of white racial superiority. Some African Americans responded at a practical level. In the South, blacks joined white tenant farmers to form the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) in 1934. The vice president of the STFU was an African American, O. H. Whitfield, and the approximately 25,000 black members constituted about one-third of the total. In the North too, African Americans organized in the form of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boycotts and protests in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by Walter White, was also more conspicuously active in campaigning for civil rights during this period. However, anger could also surface, and in March 1935, for example, Harlem, the black community in New York City where 100,000 people were on relief, erupted in a two-day explosion of frustration directed at the largely white-owned stores and buildings, inflicting more than $2 million in damage.
The Depression years appeared to bring to an end the literary and artistic movement of the 1920s known as the “Harlem Renaissance,” but black writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston continued to produce during the 1930s and 1940s, while newcomer Richard Wright made a considerable impact with his work in the 1940s.
Like Wright, a small number of African Americans looked to left-wing groups for support. The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) did win some backing among African Americans for its role in the Scottsboro case and that of Angelo Herndon, an African American found guilty in 1933 of organizing insurrection in Atlanta, Georgia, where he had organized a demonstration of unemployed black and white workers. After five years, the Supreme Court overthrew his 18-year sentence. An African American, James W. Ford, was the vice presidential candidate for the CPUSA in 1932, 1936, and 1940. Although it failed to attract many votes, black or white, the CPUSA worked with the National Negro Congress and the Southern Negro Youth Congress, formed in 1937. However, what little support the party had among African Americans was lost following the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 and even more so after 1941, when it opposed civil rights protests that might threaten the war effort.
While President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not speak out on race relations himself, the presence of white progressives in his administration helped bring about greater recognition for African Americans in and by the federal government. The appointment of several leading African Americans, including Mary McLeod Bethune to the National Youth Administration, William Hastie to the Department of the Interior, and Robert C. Weaver to the Federal Housing Administration, led to talk of a Black Cabinet. As a consequence of this and the benefits from some of the New Deal measures, there was a dramatic change in black voting. Whereas in 1932, 70 percent of black votes were cast for the Republican Party, by the end of the decade this was reversed with 70 percent of votes going for the Democratic Party. This allegiance was to continue well into the late 20th century. Arthur W. Mitchell became the first black Democrat elected to Congress in 1934. In 1942, Republican William Dawson and Democrat Adam Clayton Powell were also elected to the House.
Although African Americans did benefit from a number of political developments, the local operation of most New Deal agencies ensured that they also experienced a considerable amount of discrimination. The National Recovery Administration was known among the black community as “Negroes Ruined Again” because of the agency’s discrimination and because increases in wage levels meant it was now cheaper to mechanize such industries as tobacco producing rather than employ African American workers. Similarly, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s policies to reduce farm production to raise prices often encouraged southern landlords to simply evict their black tenants. Many African Americans were excluded from Social Security legislation because of their concentration in agricultural work or domestic service. Relief payments were also significantly lower for black families than for whites. Although African Americans constituted 11 percent of the workforce of the Tennessee Valley Authority, they received only 9 percent of the wages. Black Americans did, however, make up a considerable proportion of the people put to work by the Works Progress Administration and those provided federal housing by the Federal Housing Administration. Despite early discrimination and the continuation of segregation, the percentage of black Americans among the workforce of the Civilian Conservation Corps rose from 3 to 8 percent.
African Americans were significantly affected by World War II. The war against Nazism and for the “four freedoms” had a particular resonance for an underprivileged minority. African Americans demanded inclusion from the start in A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement and later in the Pittsburgh Courier’s “Double V” campaign for victory at home and abroad. The combined challenge of war and black protest brought some change in military policies. More than 1 million African Americans served in the armed forces, including 4,000 black women. Half a million African Americans saw service overseas, the majority in service of supply regiments. While military segregation remained intact other than for an exceptional period during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, access to military service widened to include all branches of the services by the end of the war, including the air force and marines, from which they had previously been excluded. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. became the first black general in 1940, and his son, Benjamin Davis Jr., became the highest ranking black officer in the air force.
Initially the navy confined African Americans like Dorie Miller to service in the kitchens, galleys, or boiler rooms, but they were gradually admitted to all branches in auxiliary vessels. In total, 150,000 served in the navy, and 20,000 served in the marines. Beginning in 1941, African Americans were admitted into the air force, and almost 600 pilots trained at Tuskegee Institute after 1941 and served in most theaters of the war.
During the war, the newly-established Fair Employment Practices Committee and more significantly mounting labor shortages ensured greater employment of African Americans. An additional 1 million black workers joined the labor force, and the number of African Americans in skilled and semiskilled occupations doubled by 1945. There was also an increase in the number of African Americans employed by the federal government during the war. Increased employment opportunities in war industries located in the North and West encouraged more than a million African Americans to leave the South. While they found work in defense plants, they also encountered resistance from white workers. When black streetcar workers were upgraded from porters to drivers in Philadelphia in August 1944, a transit strike necessitated the use of military force to persuade white employees back to work. In the South, conflict over the upgrading of black workers to the position of welders in the Alabama Drydock and Shipping Company was followed by a riot in 1943, a year when conflict over jobs, housing, and public transportation, heightened by wartime anxieties, led to an outbreak of more than 240 riots and racial incidents across the country, the worst occurring in Detroit. Other major outbreaks took place in Los Angeles and Harlem.
At the war’s end, there was some fear that returning black service personnel would face the racial violence they had encountered in the aftermath of World War I, and there were some incidents in which black servicemen were the targets of racial hatred. There were also outbreaks of racial violence in Athens, Alabama; Columbia, Tennessee; Philadelphia; and Chicago. However, such events were not on the scale of the “Red Summer” of 1919. They were relatively few in number and were met with widespread condemnation, including that of President Harry S. Truman. Truman also took significant steps to bring greater equality in the federal civil service and to end segregation in the armed forces. The latter neared completion during the Korean War when more than 600,000 African American served in the military, many in integrated units.
Other significant breakthroughs came in sports, where Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play for a white baseball team in the major leagues. The Supreme Court also issued a number of significant rulings against segregation in the immediate postwar years. However, while the Cold War may have encouraged the federal government to insist that America practiced what it preached, it also discouraged radical protest for fear of being labeled “communist.” The black singer and civil rights campaigner Paul Robeson and former civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois both had their passports withheld in 1950 and 1951 because of their association with left-wing groups. Despite such actions, African Americans found encouragement in developments at home during the 1940s and early 1950s and also in the growing process of decolonization abroad. See also AMOS ‘N’ ANDY; ANDERSON, EDWARD LINCOLN (EDDIE, “ROCHESTER”); ANDERSON, MARIAN; ARMSTRONG, LOUIS; BUNCHE, RALPH JOHNSON; ELLINGTON, EDWARD KENNEDY (“DUKE”); HAYES, ROLAND; HOUSTON, CHARLES HAMILTON; MARSHALL, THURGOOD; MISSOURI EX REL. GAINES V. CANADA; RED BALL EXPRESS; ROOSEVELT, (ANNA) ELEANOR; SHELLEY V. KRAEMER.
AGEE, JAMES RUFUS (1909–1955). A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, journalist, and film critic, James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. Following his father’s death in a road accident, he was educated at several boarding schools before attending Harvard University, where he became editor of the Harvard Advocate. Following his graduation he wrote for Fortune, Time, The Nation, and New Masses. His book of poetry, Permit Me Voyage, was published in 1934.
In 1936 Agee, together with photographer Walker Evans, spent several weeks among the white sharecroppers of Hale County, Alabama, working on an assignment for Fortune. The material was not published by the magazine, but it appeared in book form in 1941 as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Not a best seller in its day, it is now recognized as a classic of the Depression years, documenting the poverty and hardship of rural life with a combination of photographic images and a literary reporting style.
During World War II, Agee was the film critic for Time and The Nation. He became a freelance writer in 1948 and also wrote film scripts, two of which, The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955) (although there is some question about the authorship of this work), became major successes of the 1950s. A Death in the Family, a novel published in 1957, won Agee a posthumous Pulitzer Prize the following year. Several pieces of his film criticism were published as Agee on Film (1960). See also GREAT DEPRESSION; LITERATURE AND THEATER.
AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT, 1933. Passed on 12 May 1933, the Agricultural Adjustment Act was intended to tackle the plight of farmers in the Great Depression and to raise the prices of wheat, corn, cotton, and other crops and livestock and return the farmers’ purchasing power to pre-World War I levels. The act was based on ideas developed during the 1920s, particularly the “domestic allotment plan” involving acreage reduction by government allotment. The act designated “basic commodities” that would be covered by “marketing agreements” in which farmers would agree to reduce their output. They would be compensated with funds raised by a processing tax levied on the first domestic processing of the commodity. The act was to be administered by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Initially some crops had to be plowed under and livestock, including 6 million piglets, were slaughtered, but by 1934, 40 million acres had been withdrawn from production. Amendments to the act extended it to include cattle, sugar cane, and sugar beets in 1934. However, in United States v. Butler in 1936, the Supreme Court ruled that the act was unconstitutional. It was later superseded by the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938. See also AGRICULTURE; BANKHEAD COTTON ACT; BANKHEAD COTTON CONTROL ACT; EMERGENCY FARM MORTGAGE ACT.
AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT, 1938. Replacing the first Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and supplementing the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, the 1938 act established a “granary” principle setting marketing quotas, crop insurance, and parity price payments. This system paid farmers to store surplus commodities produced during good years so that they could be released during lean years. The funds were raised out of general taxation. See also AGRICULTURE.
AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ADMINISTRATION (AAA). The AAA was established in 1933 to implement the Agricultural Adjustment Act and was headed by George N. Peek. However, the AAA was criticized because of the decision to destroy millions of acres of crops already in production and to slaughter 6 million piglets and 200,000 sows. Moreover, Peek proved a controversial figure, and his refusal to accept the principle of crop reduction rather than the purchase and export of surpluses led to his resignation in December 1933. He was succeeded by Chester Davis. Although the Agricultural Adjustment Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1936, the AAA continued to administer the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, 1936, and then the second Agricultural Adjustment Act, 1938. In 1942, the AAA became the Agricultural Adjustment Agency, and its chief function was to encourage maximum production for wartime. In 1945, the AAA was taken over by the Production and Marketing Administration. See also AGRICULTURE.
AGRICULTURE. Perhaps no area was affected by the changing trends of the decades of the 1930s and 1940s as much as agriculture. Although for much of its history the United States was a predominantly agrarian economy, by the end of the 19th century, farmers were displaced socially and politically and experienced increasing economic problems due to overproduction and worldwide competition that resulted in falling prices. In the late 19th century, the anger of farmers—often directed at banks, railroads, and middlemen—found expression in the Populist movement that became incorporated into the Democratic Party.
While some of the farmers’ demands were met during the progressive presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, it was rising farm prices that brought relief—albeit temporary—to the farmers’ plight. World War I brought a boom in agriculture as world trade was limited. The demand for grain and food to feed both the U.S. and Allied armies brought an expansion in farm acreage and output. Mechanization and the use of tractors contributed further to farm efficiency. After the war, however, world competition resumed, and the artificially high commodity prices fell. American farmers once again struggled to pay off their debts, and many lost their farms. The farm population, which was more than 32 million in 1910, was 31.9 million in 1920 and had fallen to 30.5 million by 1930. As a proportion of the total population, this represented a drop from more than 30 percent to just under 25 percent.
Attempts in the 1920s to secure federal legislation to relieve the farmers’ situation largely failed, and the Great Depression only worsened the situation as agricultural prices collapsed after 1929. By 1932, the average farm income had dropped by two-thirds. With many farmers unable to meet mortgage repayments, almost a million farms were repossessed between 1930 and 1934. The drought and dust storms of the 1930s only added to the misery. Desperate farmers declared “farm holidays” in which they withheld their produce from the market or dumped it in the roads. Farm sales following evictions were often blocked, and farmers demonstrated in neighboring towns. By 1940, the number of farms had dropped from 6.3 million in 1930 to 6.1 million. President Herbert Hoover responded by signing the Agricultural Marketing Act in 1929 and attempted to stabilize prices through Federal Farm Boards. However, this had little immediate effect, and it was not until the coming of the New Deal that farming began to experience a recovery.
Tackling the problem of agricultural overproduction and falling farm incomes was a major priority for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Loans were quickly provided to farmers through the Farm Credit Act in 1933. Under the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) established that year, a system of domestic allotments was created for wheat, cotton, corn, hogs, rice, tobacco, and dairy products under which farmers were given cash subsidies to cut production. These payments were financed by a processing tax. By 1934, 40 million acres had been withdrawn from production, and although the AAA was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, these measures, combined with the impact of the droughts and floods that hit parts of the country in the mid-1930s, led to a 50 percent rise in farm income. A second Agricultural Adjustment Act was introduced in 1938 establishing a system of parity price payments and production quotas. Soil conservation schemes were introduced through the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, and the work of agencies like the Civilian Conservation Corps. Farmers also benefited from the Rural Electrification Administration, which assisted farmers in establishing cooperatives among themselves to bring electric power to their properties. In 1935, only 10 percent of farms had electricity. By 1940 this had risen to 40 percent, and by 1950 it was 90 percent. The Farm Security Administration, established in 1937, assisted displaced farm workers through the Resettlement Administration and provided further financial aid to farmers.
With the coming of World War II, American agriculture faced further change. The migration from the land continued during the war as people moved to take advantage of work in war industries across the nation. By 1950, the number of farmers had fallen again from 30.84 million in 1940 to 25 million, and the number of farms fell from 6.1 million to 5.3 million. While there were fewer farms, they tended to be larger. Shortages of farm labor were met by importing Mexican workers (braceros) and by the increased use of mechanization. Despite labor shortages, farm output per laborer increased by 36 percent as machines replaced horse-driven or man-powered equipment and as the number of tractors increased by almost 1 million between 1940 and 1945. Farm income rose by an estimated 250 percent during the war. After the war, various proposals were made to maintain the farmers’ position, the most radical being the Brannan Plan involving direct income-maintenance payments. However, after some debate in Congress, the American Farm Bureau Federation’s proposal to continue price supports was adopted. See also ANDERSON, CLINTON PRESBA; BANKHEAD COTTON ACT; BANKHEAD COTTON CONTROL ACT; BRANNAN, CHARLES FRANKLIN; EMERGENCY FARM MORTGAGE ACT; FARM CREDIT ACT; FARM CREDIT ADMINISTRATION (FCA); FARM-LABOR PARTY; PEEK, GEORGE NELSON; WALLACE, HENRY AGARD.
ALIEN REGISTRATION ACT. See SMITH ACT.
ALLEN, GRACIE (1895–1964). Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen was born in San Francisco, California. She first appeared on stage at the age of three as a dancer and with her three sisters appeared as an Irish singer and dancer in local vaudeville theaters before touring on the east coast. Failing to get work on her own, Allen enrolled in secretarial school in New York, but in 1923 she met George Burns, and they established a comedy routine together in which Allen assumed the comic role to Burns’s straight man. Allen established a persona of “Dizzy Dora,” who despite her lunacy, somehow made sense. The partnership quickly became successful, and she and Burns married in 1926. In 1930, they appeared in vaudeville on Broadway for a run of 17 weeks and shortly thereafter made their debut on American radio. In 1933, they began their own show on CBS, originally called “The Adventures of Gracie” and later named “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.” It was a favorite of U.S. listeners through 1950.
Allen and Burns made a number of movie shorts for Paramount between 1929 and 1931, followed by several feature films, including Six of a Kind (1934) with W. C. Fields. Allen did not enjoy making movies, and her last was Two Girls and a Sailor (1944). In 1950, Burns and Allen successfully moved to television. Their show ran until June 1958, when Allen insisted on retiring to spend more time with her adopted children and grandchildren. She suffered a serious heart attack in 1961 and died in Hollywood three years later. Although he provided most of their material, Burns always insisted that Allen “was the whole show” and that it was her comic timing and delivery that made them a success. See also CINEMA.
ALLIED CONTROL COUNCIL (ACC). The ACC was created on 5 June 1945 to oversee the postwar occupation of Germany. It consisted of representatives from Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The ACC ceased to exist after the withdrawal of the Soviet representative in March 1948 and was replaced in West Germany by the Allied High Commission.
ALLIED COUNCIL FOR JAPAN. In August 1945, the victorious Allied powers established the Allied Council under the command of General Douglas MacArthur to oversee the occupation of Japan. The council consisted of representatives from the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Australia, and the Philippines.
ALLIED HIGH COMMISSION. Following the breakdown of relations with the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of their representative on the Allied Control Council in 1948, an Allied High Commission consisting of the United States, Great Britain, and France was established to run West Germany and West Berlin. The commission was disbanded when West Germany became independent as the Federal Republic of Germany.
ALLIED POWERS. Initially, the Allied powers in World War II were Great Britain (and the Commonwealth countries, including Canada, New Zealand, Australia), France, and Poland, brought together in defense of the latter following the attack by Nazi Germany on 1 September 1939. In 1940, they were joined by Belgium, Norway, and the Netherlands; by the Soviet Union following the Nazi invasion of Russia in June 1941; and by the United States and China after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Other nations, particularly in Latin America, subsequently joined, and the Allied powers also became known as the United Nations with the Declaration of the United Nations on 1 January 1942. Their opponents were the Axis powers and their allies. See also JAPAN.
AMERASIA CASE. In January 1945, an article that seemed to be based on classified State Department papers appeared in Amerasia, a journal of Far Eastern affairs. Acting without a warrant, officers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) broke into the journal’s offices, where they found classified documents. The editor of the journal, Russian-born Phillip Jaffe, a State Department worker and naval intelligence officer, were arrested, as was John Stewart Service. Charges against Service were thrown out by a grand jury and, as there was no evidence that material had been passed to any enemy state, the other three accused were charged with illegal possession of government documents. Rather than proceed with the trial and reveal the FBI’s illegal actions, a deal was struck in which Jaffe pleaded guilty, the State Department member pleaded no contest, and charges against the naval officer were dropped. Despite this, the case was later referred to by Joseph McCarthy when he claimed that communist sympathizers were present in government.
AMERICA FIRST COMMITTEE (AFC). The AFC was formed in September 1940 in response to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. It quickly became the most influential voice of isolationism in the United States. The original members were Robert E. Wood, Charles A. Lindbergh, and John T. Flynn. The AFC’s policies were to encourage preparedness through the creation of a powerful U.S. defense to deter any foreign attack and to keep out of the European conflict. It opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy of “all aid short of war” and Lend-Lease. By 1941, the AFC had an estimated membership of more than 800,000 and 450 local chapters. It ceased to operate four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION (ACLU). The ACLU was founded in 1920 by social reformers, including Roger Baldwin, Jane Addams, Crystal Eastman, and Clarence Darrow. It was established to preserve civil liberties guaranteed under the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, namely, freedom of speech, press, and religion. During the 1920s, the ACLU supported John Scopes in the famous “Scopes Money Trial” (1925) and also Italian anarchists Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1927). It was involved in the defense of the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s. In 1933, the ACLU played a significant role in the case permitting James Joyce’s book Ulysses to be allowed into the United States.
From 1936 to 1943, the ACLU provided assistance to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in their campaign to allow children to be exempted from saluting the national flag on religious grounds. The Supreme Court found in favor of the flag salute requirements in 1940 but reversed itself in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette in 1943. During World War II, the ACLU helped represent the Japanese Americans challenging wartime internment in the cases of Korematsu v. United States and Hirabayashi v. United States.
During the Cold War years, the ACLU challenged the federal loyalty program and led the opposition to loyalty oaths in a number of states. However, the organization was divided during this period, with some members, including one of its founders, Roger Baldwin, supporting anticommunist measures.
AMERICAN FARM BUREAU FEDERATION (AFBF). Established in 1919 as a federation of state bureaus, the AFBF represented 36 states and developed from the farm extension programs established during World War I to disseminate more widely scientific and technical advances in agriculture. It established lobbies at state and federal levels to promote agricultural interests and by 1930, with a membership of 163,000, it was the most important farm organization. It was to have considerable influence on the New Deal. The aim of the AFBF was to achieve “parity,” meaning restoring the purchasing power of farmers to pre-World War I levels. It supported the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and again in 1938. However, it tended to argue that the Department of Agriculture should work primarily in the interests of farmers rather than for the greater good of the country as a whole. By the end of the 1940s, membership in the AFBF had risen to 1.3 million.
AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL). A federation of autonomous, craft-based trade unions formed in 1886 by Samuel Gompers and Adolph Strasser, the AFL was conservative and nonpolitical in outlook and largely excluded unskilled immigrant and black workers. Nonetheless, by 1910 it was established as the leading union organization and had a membership of more than 2 million. Although membership doubled during World War I, the organization was unable to consolidate upon wartime advances in the face of employer resistance in the more conservative 1920s. Following a series of defeats, union membership declined once more and by 1933 was only 2.3 million.
The AFL maintained its conservative outlook with regard to unskilled and immigrant workers, and this approach continued when William Green succeeded Gompers in 1924. The continued reluctance to organize industrial workers led the industrial-based unions headed by John L. Lewis, Sidney Hillman, and David Dubinsky to form the Committee of Industrial Organizations in 1934. In 1938, they broke away to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). As a consequence of both organizing drives and the recognition afforded by the National Labor Relations Act, AFL membership increased. With full employment achieved during World War II and the “maintenance of membership” agreement, the AFL increased in membership and by 1945 had more than 6 million members. Although stronger and more closely associated with the Democratic administrations during and after the war, it was not able to prevent the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. During the Cold War, it was staunchly anticommunist and assisted in establishing noncommunist organizations in postwar Europe. Green was succeeded after his death in 1952 by George Meany, and three years later the AFL merged with the CIO to form the AFL-CIO.
AMERICAN LIBERTY LEAGUE. An anti-New Deal organization, the American Liberty League was formed in August 1934 by conservative politicians and businessmen, including John Jakob Raskob, Jouett Shouse, and the Du Pont family. Alfred E. Smith was also a supporter. The league had a membership of about 125,000, but it faded after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election success in 1936 and was dissolved in 1940.
AMERICAN SCENE. The “American Scene” was the name given to the artistic movement of the 1920s and especially the 1930s that saw a concentration on American themes and subjects rather than European modernist images. It included regionalist painters John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, and Grant Wood, as well as such social realists as Edward Hopper and Ben Shahn. See also BURCHFIELD, CHARLES EPHRAIM.
AMERICANS FOR DEMOCRATIC ACTION (ADA). The ADA was a liberal political lobbying group, formed in January 1947 by people who opposed communism but wished to support a reform agenda. Included among the founders were Hubert Humphrey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Reuther, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. They supported Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal program and helped ensure the inclusion of a civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform in 1948.
AMOS ‘N’ ANDY. The longest-running radio program in broadcast history, at the height of its success in the 1930s Amos ‘n’ Andy attracted audiences of 30 to 40 million and was aired six times a week. The show was written and first performed in 1928 in Chicago by two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, playing the roles of African Americans in the style of old blackface comedy. It was broadcast nationally by NBC beginning in 1929 and by CBC beginning in 1939. The show moved to television in 1951, where it became the first television program with an all-black cast. However, its portrayal of demeaning racial stereotypes always attracted criticism, first from the Pittsburgh Courier and other black newspapers in the 1930s, and later from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The protests helped bring the program to an end in 1953.
ANDERSON, CLINTON PRESBA (1895–1975). Clinton Anderson was born in South Dakota. He attended Dakota Wesleyan University until 1915 and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor until 1916 but did not graduate from either institution. When he discovered he was suffering from tuberculosis in 1917, Anderson moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There he became a newspaper reporter and editor before turning to insurance in 1922. Anderson was also active in public affairs and was executive secretary of the New Mexico Public Health Service in 1919 and later chair of the state Democratic Party. During the 1930s, he worked for the New Mexico Relief Administration and later as a field representative for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). In 1940, he was elected to the federal House of Representatives, where he served until 1945 when he was appointed secretary of agriculture by President Harry S. Truman.
As secretary of agriculture from 1945 to 1948, Anderson helped establish the Famine Emergency Committee under President Herbert Hoover and also addressed the problem of farm prices in the Agricultural Act in 1949 maintaining the price support system rather than the Brannan Plan. In 1948, Anderson was elected to the Senate for New Mexico, and he held his seat until he retired in 1973. His most notable achievement was in support of the space program as chair of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Science from 1963 to 1973.
ANDERSON, EDWARD LINCOLN (EDDIE, “ROCHESTER”) (1905–1977). African American entertainer Eddie Anderson was born in Oakland, California, and joined his brother in vaudeville performances in the 1920s before moving to Hollywood. His first film acting performance was in What Price Hollywood (1932), but his first significant role was in Green Pastures (1936). He also appeared in Show Boat (1936) and Gone with the Wind (1939). Anderson continued to play roles in films until the 1960s. It was on radio that he finally became a national star, playing the part of the butler “Rochester” on the “Jack Benny Show” from 1937 until 1955. He was so successful that he was once the highest-paid African American performer. Anderson appeared on the televised version of the Benny show until 1965, but the stereotyped character eventually grew unpopular. See also CINEMA; TELEVISION.
ANDERSON, MARIAN (1897–1993). Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, African American contralto Marian Anderson became a national and international concert and opera singer, beginning with her first performance with the New York Philharmonic in 1925. She first sang in Europe in 1930 and established her reputation touring over the next five years. When the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to perform in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in 1939, Harold Ickes, supported by Eleanor Roosevelt, organized a public performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before an audience of 75,000. Anderson became the first black singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1955. She began her farewell tour in 1965 with a performance at Constitution Hall.
Anderson was awarded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Spingarn Medal in 1938 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon Johnson in 1965. She also received the United Nations Peace Prize in 1972.
ANDERSON, MARY (1872–1964). Swedish-born Mary Anderson moved to the United States in 1889. After working in a boardinghouse, she moved to West Pullman, Illinois, and found work in the garment industry and then in a shoe factory. Anderson became an active trade unionist and was the only woman to sit on the executive board of the International Boot and Shoe Workers’ Union. She joined the Women’s Trade Union League in 1905 and became a full-time organizer with the league in 1911. In 1918, she became assistant director of the government’s newly created Women in Industry Service (WIS), and in 1919 she became director. The following year the WIS became the Women’s Bureau within the Department of Labor. In 1933, Anderson was appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt to head the U.S. delegation to the International Labour Organization and as an adviser to the U.S. delegate at an international conference on the textile industry. During World War II, the Women’s Bureau was active in aiding the employment of women in war industries and campaigning for equal pay for equal work. The bureau issued several reports on women’s working conditions during the war. Anderson retired in 1944 but continued to campaign for equal pay for women into the 1950s.
ANTILYNCHING BILL. A bill to outlaw lynching was first introduced to Congress by Indiana Republican senator Leonidas Dyer and Republican congressman Charles Curtis of Kansas in 1921. It passed in the House of Representatives but failed to pass in the Senate in 1921 and 1923. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People drafted a new Federal Antilynching Bill in 1933, and it was presented to Congress by Democratic senators Edward P. Costigan from Colorado and Robert F. Wagner from New York. Having failed to make progress, it was reintroduced in 1935 and passed by the House in 1937 but abandoned following a filibuster in the Senate in 1938. Wagner and Republican congressman Joseph Gavagan from New York, introduced yet another bill in 1940, but it too met the same fate.
ANZIO. In the operation code-named “Shingle,” on 22 January 1944, U.S. and British troops landed on the beaches at Anzio, Italy, cutting the German lines between Rome and Cassino in an attempt to break the stalemate between Allied and Nazi forces. Although unopposed, U.S. forces failed to take advantage, and German forces regrouped and counterattacked. They were not defeated until May 1944, by which time the Allied forces had suffered heavy losses.
ARCADIA CONFERENCE, 1941–1942. Arcadia was the code name given to the meeting between British prime minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt and their respective military staffs in Washington, D.C., from 22 December 1941 to 14 January 1942, during which they agreed on their joint strategy for World War II. A unified command was established with a Combined Chiefs of Staff with a supreme military commander in each theater of war. The Allies also agreed that a “Germany first” policy would be pursued, while in the Pacific the first objective would be to prevent further Japanese expansion. The meeting also led to the issuing of the Declaration of the United Nations on 1 January 1942 that committed its signatories to uphold the principles of the Atlantic Charter and not to conclude any separate peace agreement with the Axis powers.
ARMSTRONG, LOUIS (1901–1971). Born in New Orleans, the great jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, also known as “Satchmo” or “Pops,” was placed in a Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys at the age of 12. He began his career as a professional musician in 1918, playing the cornet in clubs and on Mississippi River paddle steamers. In 1922, Armstrong moved to Chicago to play second cornet in Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. He made his first recordings between 1923 and 1924 with Oliver, including “Riverside Blues,” “Snake Rage,” and “Dipper Mouth Blues.” He moved to New York City to join Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra in 1924. It was this new band that developed the jazz style known as “swing.” Armstrong made a number of records playing trumpet with Henderson, including “One of these Days,” “Copenhagen,” and “Everybody Loves My Baby,” and he also recorded with Clarence Williams’ Blue Five, a group featuring Sydney Bechet and singers Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Armstrong returned to Chicago in 1925 and began to lead his own groups, the Hot Five and the Hot Seven, with whom he made some classic recordings of traditional jazz, including “Cornet Chop,” “Gut Bucket Blues,” and “Heebie Jeebies.”
Armstrong and his band moved to New York in 1929 and made several records on which he sang, often using his improvised “scat” singing. He achieved great success with “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” recorded in 1929. From 1930 through the 1940s Armstrong played with a number of big bands and returned to small combos after World War II. Between 1932 and 1965 he also appeared in nearly 50 movies, including Pennies from Heaven (1936), High Society (1956), and Hello Dolly (1969). Armstrong’s song “Hello Dolly” had already reached number one on the popular music charts in 1964. Through his long and successful career from the days of the Harlem Renaissance through to the post-civil rights period of the 1960s, Armstrong was one of the most significant figures in jazz music. See also AFRICAN AMERICANS; CINEMA.
ART. The visual arts captured and reflected the effects of the Depression in a number of ways, sometimes paradoxical. While photographers, particularly those working for the Farm Security Administration, depicted the poverty and suffering brought about by the economic crisis or the devastation of the land during the Dust Bowl in countless black and white images, painters often seemed to look back to the American past as a symbol of hope for the future. Regionalists and others like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton concerned with the American scene painted rich, lush, colorful landscapes. Some working in the Federal Art Project painted murals celebrating American achievements and workers, while others, like Ben Shahn provided some bleaker images of the Dust Bowl in federal posters and adverts. Edward Hopper produced bright, cheerful images of the New England coast but at the same time dark views of urban loneliness and alienation. During World War II, a number of artists like Shahn were employed to produce posters for the Office of War Information. Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series also appeared as covers for the Saturday Evening Post. By the end of the war, a new school of abstract expressionism—perhaps influenced by the many European exiles—was appearing and was best represented by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Both of these artists were among those exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of the Century gallery in New York City in October 1942. See also AGEE, JAMES RUFUS; BURCHFIELD, CHARLES EPHRAIM; EVANS, WALKER; LANGE, DOROTHEA; LEE, RUSSELL WERNER; ROTHSTEIN, ARTHUR; SHAHN, BEN; STRYKER, ROY EMERSON.
ASTAIRE, FRED (1899–1987). The son of Austrian immigrants, Fred Astaire was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and began dancing in vaudeville with his sister in 1906 at the age of seven. In 1917, they moved to stage performances, appearing on Broadway and in London in George and Ira Gershwin’s Lady, Be Good! (1924) and Funny Face (1927). In 1932, he starred on his own in Cole Porter’s The Gay Divorcée. Astaire began appearing in movies in 1933 and made the first film with Ginger Rogers, a version of The Gay Divorcée, in 1934. A number of successful films cemented their on-screen relationship and ensured box office success, most notably Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Shall We Dance (1937), and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). Following a dispute over fees, Astaire left Rogers to work on his own. Among others, he also appeared in Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940), Holiday Inn (1942), and Ziegfeld Follies (1945–1946).
After a brief period in retirement, Astaire returned to make 10 more films between 1948 and 1957. He had a major hit with Judy Garland in Easter Parade (1948) and made successful films with Cyd Charisse, Leslie Caron, and Audrey Hepburn (Funny Face [1957]). Astaire made a number of very successful television shows, including four musical specials between 1958 and 1968. His last musical film was Finian’s Rainbow (1968), but he also had several nondancing, nonmusical roles in On the Beach (1959), The Pleasure of His Company (1961), The Notorious Landlady (1962), The Midas Run (1969), and The Towering Inferno (1975). He also had dramatic roles in a number of television specials and series. See also CINEMA; MUSIC.
ATLANTIC CHARTER, 1941. As U.S. assistance to Great Britain increased following the Lend-Lease Act, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill met in Argentia Bay off Newfoundland in August 1941 to agree on common principles. On 14 August, they issued a joint declaration known as the Atlantic Charter listing eight principles that they hoped to see applied to better the future of the postwar world. These principles were 1) a declaration that signatories intended to make no territorial gains from the present conflict; 2) that any territorial changes should only be made in line with the wishes of the peoples concerned; 3) that the principle of self-determination should be applied; 4) that trade barriers should be lowered; 5) that global economic cooperation should be applied; 6) that there should be freedom from want and fear; 7) that there should be freedom of the seas; and 8) that there should be the disarmament of aggressor nations. In September 1941, representatives of the governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and the Free French signed the statement. The Atlantic Charter paved the way for the United Nations Charter.
ATOMIC BOMB. The atomic bomb was a weapon made using enriched uranium, which on detonation caused a chain nuclear reaction involving the fission of atomic particles. Development of the atomic bomb in the United States began after Albert Einstein wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1939 informing him of the early discoveries in atomic science and the potential to create a powerful bomb based on nuclear fission and warning of the need to develop such weaponry before Nazi Germany. In 1942, the government established the Manhattan Project under the leadership of General Leslie R. Groves, and on 16 July 1945 the first bomb was tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The first bomb was used during World War II when it was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945. A second bomb was dropped on 9 August on Nagasaki. Both bombs had devastating effects, and shortly afterward proposals were drawn up in an effort to prevent the proliferation of atomic weapons. These proposals were put to the United Nations in the Baruch Plan but were rejected by the Soviet Union. With the onset of the Cold War and the testing of an A-bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the threat of nuclear war became a real possibility. In 1952, the atomic bomb was superseded by the hydrogen bomb, a more powerful weapon based on nuclear fusion rather than fission. See also ATOMIC ENERGY ACT.
ATOMIC ENERGY ACT, 1946. The Atomic Energy Act, or McMahon Act (named after Democratic senator Brien McMahon from Connecticut, who proposed the act), passed in August 1946, established civilian control of the development of atomic energy in the United States under the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. It also controlled the release of information about atomic research. See also ATOMIC BOMB; BARUCH, BERNARD MANNES.
ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION (AEC). The AEC was a five-man board established by Congress in 1946 under the Atomic Energy Act to oversee the development and control of atomic energy. The commission took over control from the military and supported research in universities and industry on the use of radioactive material in all aspects, industrial and medical as well as military. The commission was first chaired by David E. Lilienthal, who was succeeded by Gordon Deans in 1950. The committee was supported by an advisory group and ran into some controversy when J. Robert Oppenheimer was suspended in 1953 as a security risk. The AEC ceased to exist in 1974, and its role was eventually taken over by the U.S. Department of Energy.
AUSTRALIA-NEW ZEALAND-UNITED STATES SECURITY TREATY (ANZUS). The ANZUS was a mutual defense security treaty agreed upon on 1 September 1951 and put into effect on 29 April 1952. It stated that an attack on any one of the countries—Australia, New Zealand, or the United States—would be regarded as an attack on them all. The treaty reflected both the close cooperation between the three nations during World War II and the impact of the Cold War in the Pacific following the communist takeover in China. However, the treaty came under strain in 1985 when New Zealand objected to nuclear testing in the Pacific by the United States and refused to allow nuclear vessels into its ports. The United States abrogated the treaty with regard to New Zealand in 1986, but New Zealand has not formally withdrawn from the agreement. Both Australia and New Zealand supported the United States in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan following the 1991 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City.
AVERY, SEWELL LEE (1874–1960). Businessman Sewell Avery was born in Saginaw, Michigan. He attended Michigan Military Academy and the University of Michigan Law School, where he graduated in 1894. He became the manager of a plaster works in Alabaster, Michigan, which later became part of U.S. Gypsum. Avery became president of the company in 1905 and held that position until 1937. Under his leadership, U.S. Gypsum became the nation’s biggest supplier of building materials. In 1931, Avery became chair of the Montgomery Ward mail-order company and once more led the company to success. However, during World War II he was in constant dispute with the National War Labor Board over its “maintenance of membership” policy, which strengthened trade union organization. In April 1944, Avery was physically removed from his office by soldiers, and the military took over the company in 1944 and 1945. After the war, Montgomery Ward’s success declined, and Avery’s high-handed management led shareholders to force his resignation in 1955.
AXIS POWERS. The primary Axis powers were Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Axis developed in 1936 from a Treaty of Friendship between Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s fascist Italy. It became a formal alliance between the two nations in 1939, and Japan joined with the Tripartite Treaty on 27 September 1940. Hungary, Rumania, Slovakia, and Bulgaria joined in 1940. The Axis powers were opposed during World War II by the Allied powers. The Axis effectively ended with the surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945.
AZERBAIJAN. This northernmost region of Iran was occupied by the Soviet Union during World War II. The Russians had indicated, both at the Tehran Conference and the Potsdam Conference, that they would withdraw at war’s end. However, in response to growing U.S. interest in the Iranian oilfields and separatist movements in the region, in December 1945 they established pro-Soviet provincial governments in Azerbaijan and neighboring Kurdistan. The crisis helped to convince President Harry S. Truman that the Soviets were intent on a policy of expansionism that should be resisted. Accordingly, the United States exerted diplomatic pressure both directly and through the United Nations and also increased the U.S. naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean. Faced with this opposition and promised oil concessions in Iran, Soviet forces withdrew in April 1946. Following this crisis, the policy of containment was extended to the Near East, and aid given to the Iranian government enabled them to regain control of the northern provinces.