SAN FRANCISCO CONFERENCE, 1945. Convened on 25 April 1945 the conference at San Francisco was attended by representatives of 50 nations and was the location where the United Nations Charter was completed. The charter was signed on 26 June and went into effect on 24 October 1945.
SAN FRANCISCO LONGSHOREMEN’S STRIKE. In the summer of 1934, a strike of stevedores on the West Coast escalated following the shooting of two strikers in San Francisco on 5 July. Led by Harry Bridges, other trade unions instigated a general strike involving 12,000 workers in San Francisco on 16 July 1934. The strike lasted four days before being settled on the dock workers’ terms by arbitration.
SANDBURG, CARL (1878–1967). After a time as an itinerant worker and serving in the Spanish-American War, poet and writer Carl Sandburg became a reporter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and then worked for the Chicago Daily News. His poetry celebrating the city and working people, Chicago Poems (1915), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920), won him prizes and national and international recognition as a “poet of the people.” He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for his four-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, The War Years (1939), and for his Complete Poems in 1951. He was awarded the gold medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1952 for his work in history and biography. He published Harvest Poems in 1960 and Honey and Salt in 1963. See also LITERATURE AND THEATER.
SCHECHTER POULTRY CORP. V. UNITED STATES (295 U.S. 495 1935). In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, the Schechter Poultry Corporation and Schechter Live Poultry Market were charged with violating the codes agreed upon in the poultry business in New York City under the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). The Schechters were convicted and appealed, and when the circuit court ruled that it had no power to examine the maximum hours and minimum-wage aspects of the case, it went to the Supreme Court. On 27 May 1935, the court ruled unanimously that the NIRA was unconstitutional in delegating legislative powers to the president and regulating business that was not interstate. The decision dealt a death blow to the NIRA and the National Recovery Administration.
SCHLESINGER, ARTHUR MEIER, JR. (1917–2007). Born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger Jr., the future historian later changed his name to that of his father, Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr., himself a distinguished historian. Schlesinger Jr. attended the Collegiate School and Phillips Exeter Academy. He went to Harvard in 1938 but did not complete his Ph.D. During World War II, he served in the Office of War Information and from 1943 to 1945 in the Office of Strategic Services. He continued his historical research and in 1945 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Age of Jackson. His three-volume study, The Age of Roosevelt, came out in 1957, 1958, and 1960, respectively. From 1946 to 1961, Schlesinger was professor of history at Harvard and from 1966 professor of humanities at the City University of New York.
However, Schlesinger’s significance was as much for his influence on politics as for his historical writing. A supporter of liberal politics, he was an influential member of Americans for Democratic Action; in 1949, he wrote The Vital Center, calling for a reformist alternative to what he perceived as the totalitarianism of the communist left and fascist right. Schlesinger was a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and George McGovern. His study of the Kennedy presidency, A Thousand Days (1966), won another Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote the study Robert F. Kennedy and His Times (1978). Among his other works were Bitter Heritage (1967), Violence: America in the Sixties (1968), and the influential study The Imperial Presidency (1973).
SCOTTSBORO BOYS. Scottsboro, Alabama, was the location of a trial that became an international cause célèbre in the 1930s. In March 1931, nine black youths ranging in ages from 12 to 21 were accused of raping two white women while riding a freight train traveling from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Memphis, Tennessee. The nine boys were Roy and Andy Wright, Eugene Williams, Haywood Patterson, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Charlie Weems, and Willie Roberson. They were arrested in Paint Rock, Alabama, and sent to Scottsboro to face trial. Twelve-year-old Roy Wright was released when the judge declared a mistrial, but an all-white male jury found the other eight youths guilty, and they were all sentenced to death, despite a lack of strong evidence against them and the unreliable nature of the two main witnesses. The Communist Party of the United States of America immediately mobilized an appeal for the black teenagers through their legal department, the International Labor Defense (ILD). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) mobilized separately on the boys’ behalf and called on the famous labor lawyer, Clarence Darrow, to defend the case, but it was the ILD that initially acted for the boys.
In 1932, in Powell v. Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that the African Americans had not had an adequate defense and ordered a retrial. In a second trial, the jury once again convicted and called for the death penalty, but the presiding judge overturned the conviction on the grounds that the evidence of the two women in the case was unreliable. A third trial was held with the same result as the previous two, and once again the case was taken to the Supreme Court. In Norris v. Alabama (1935), the court overturned the convictions on grounds of discrimination due to the exclusion of blacks from the juries. The Alabama state prosecutors dropped the charges against four of the youths but brought five back to trial and once again secured guilty convictions. One of the accused, Clarence Norris, was sentenced to death; three were given sentences ranging from 75 to 99 years; and one, Ozzie Powell, was sentenced to 25 years for assaulting a police officer. The Scottsboro Defense Committee, coordinated by the NAACP, was able to secure the reduction of the death penalty for Norris to life imprisonment. By 1950, all of the boys had been freed on parole or appeal, or in one case, as with Patterson, escaped.
“SECOND NEW DEAL.” The New Deal has traditionally been divided into two parts with a “First New Deal” covering 1933 and 1934 and the “Second New Deal” lasting from about 1935 through 1937. The emphasis in the “Second New Deal” was more on reform measures to tackle the long-term problems identified as a result of the Great Depression. Consequently, it has often been seen as a move to the “left” because of the emphasis on social welfare like the Social Security Act and prolabor legislation like the National Labor Relations Act. The “Second New Deal” came to an end with the attempt at “court-packing” and the so-called “Roosevelt recession” in 1937. The last major piece of legislation of the Second New Deal was the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Foreign affairs also began to dominate politics as the crisis in Europe developed with the approach of World War II.
SECURITIES ACT (FEDERAL SECURITIES ACT), 1933. Intended to provide protection for investors, the Securities Act of 27 May 1933 required the sellers of securities to provide detailed information to the Federal Trade Commission and provide the potential investor with a detailed prospectus outlining details of the securities and the company concerned.
SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE ACT, 1934. The Securities and Exchange Act was a supplement to the Securities Act that required all stock exchanges to register and provide details of securities, dealers, and brokers. It created a Securities and Exchange Commission to administer the act.
SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION (SEC). Established under the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 as part of the New Deal program to stabilize financial institutions, the SEC was an independent regulatory agency created to enforce the federal securities laws and license and regulate stock exchanges. The SEC consisted of five members. The first chair appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt was Joseph P. Kennedy.
SECURITY COUNCIL. The Security Council is the senior body of the United Nations (UN). The Allied leaders agreed at the Yalta Conference that it would consist of five permanent members—the United States, Great Britain, China, France, and the Soviet Union—and six elected nations chosen on a rotating basis for a two-year period. The permanent members were given veto powers over decisions of the UN General Assembly. The council sits in continuous session and considers any peace-threatening situations.
SELECTIVE SERVICE ACTS, 1940, 1948. The Selective Training and Service Act introduced on 6 September 1940 was the first-ever peacetime draft in the United States. It initially required all males between the ages of 21 and 36 to register. Men were selected by a lottery at the state level through 40,000 local boards. More than 16 million males registered immediately, and 1 million were inducted between 1940 and 1941. In 1942, the draft age was lowered to 18, and the upper limit was raised to 37, but all men between 18 and 65 were required to register. Between 1941 and 1945, 10 million men were drafted.
The original act came to an end in March 1947 and was replaced by a second act on 22 April 1948, which required all men between the ages of 18 and 26 to register. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the act was further amended by the Universal Military Service and Training Act in 1951 that extended the period of service from 18 to 24 months. Proposals to introduce six months compulsory military training for all able-bodied 18-year-old males were defeated in 1952. See also CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS.
SELECTIVE SERVICEMEN’S READJUSTMENT ACT, 1944. Often known as the “G.I. Bill of Rights,” the Selective Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 provided financial support to enable those who had served in the military to return to school or college, get guaranteed loans for home or business purchase or improvement, or qualify for 52 weeks of unemployment compensation at $20 per week. By 1951, 8 million veterans—more than 50 percent—had befitted from the educational provisions of the act, and 4.3 million had used the support to purchase homes. In 1952, the act was extended to veterans of the Korean War in the Veterans’ Readjustment Act. It was subsequently extended again to provide support for veterans of the Vietnam War.
SELZNICK, DAVID O. (1902–1965). David Selznick took over his father’s filmmaking business in 1923 and after some success moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and became a producer. He moved to Paramount in 1928 and produced a number of successful movies. He established his own production unit in 1931 and then worked for RKO, for whom he made King Kong in 1933. Selznick returned to MGM in 1933 and produced some famous films, particularly versions of such literary works as David Copperfield (1935) and Anna Karenina (1935). His later productions included Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), and Gone with the Wind (1939). Selznick later made a number of major movies with director Alfred Hitchcock, including Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945). Following the success of Gone with the Wind, he was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award by the Academy of Arts for his outstanding contribution to the movie industry. Selznick continued to produce films into the 1950s despite declining success and failing health. See also CINEMA.
SERVICE, JOHN STEWART (1909–1999). John Stewart Service was born the son of missionaries in China. He completed his high school education in California and graduated from Oberlin College in 1931. After taking the Foreign Service entrance examination in 1933, he was posted to China. During World War II, Service was critical of Chiang Kai-shek. He also spent some time liaising with Mao Zedong and wrote positively about the communist leader. In 1945, Service returned home and was indicted but cleared by a grand jury in the Amerasia affair. However, in March 1950 he was accused of working with the communists by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Service was twice cleared by internal investigations but subsequently dismissed on grounds of “reasonable” doubt. He appealed the decision, and it eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor. Service returned to the State Department in 1957 but was given limited responsibility and retired in 1962. He completed an M.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, and became a librarian in the Center of Chinese Studies. In 1971, he was invited back to China in advance of the visit by President Richard M. Nixon.
SHAEF. See SUPREME HEADQUARTERS OF THE ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCES (SHAEF).
SHAHN, BEN (1898–1969). Born in Lithuania, Ben Shahn immigrated to the United States with his family in 1906 and settled in Brooklyn, New York. He trained as a typographer and studied at New York University from 1919 to 1921, City College of New York in 1922, and the National Academy of Design in 1922. His paintings of Italian anarchists Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed after being convicted for murder, and of labor activist Tom Mooney, attracted public attention, and Shahn worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on a controversial mural in Rockefeller Center in New York City in 1933. He also worked on a mural for the New York Public Works Administration. He was recommended to Roy Stryker, the head of the Resettlement Administration (RA), by Walker Evans and joined the team of photographers documenting the United States during the Great Depression. Shahn left the RA, then the Farm Security Administration, in 1938. He worked on a number of government commissions as a muralist and from 1942 to 1943 produced graphic designs for the Office of War Information, creating several powerful antifascist posters. Shahn also did work for the Congress of Industrial Organizations and Political Action Committee. In 1947, he worked for Henry A. Wallace producing campaign materials and posters. Notable among his later work is The Saga of the Lucky Dragon (1960–1962), depicting the experience of Japanese fishermen exposed to radiation due to U.S. nuclear tests in the Pacific.
SHAPE. See SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ALLIED POWERS EUROPE (SHAPE).
SHELLEY V. KRAEMER (334 U.S. 1 1948). When an African American family by the name of Shelley bought a house in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1945, neighbors sued to prevent them from taking ownership citing a restrictive covenant in the deeds prohibiting the sale of the property to nonwhites. The case reached the Supreme Court, and in 1948 the court ruled that such covenants were unconstitutional.
SHIRER, WILLIAM LAWRENCE (1904–1993). Journalist and historian William L. Shirer was born in Chicago, Illinois, and educated at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He was the European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune from 1925 to 1932 and then joined the Berlin office of the Universal News Service. In 1937, Edward R. Murrow recruited him for CBS’s European Bureau, and working from Vienna, and then Berlin, he reported on the Anschluss with Austria, the German march into the Sudetenland, and the invasion of Poland. He also provided the American audience with an insight into Nazi Germany. He was with the German troops when they invaded France and provided first-hand reports of the signing of the armistice between France and Germany on 22 June 1940. Rather than submit to Nazi controls, Shirer fled from Germany in December 1940. He published his Berlin Diary in 1941. At the end of the war, he reported on the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials.
In 1947, after a difference with Murrow, Shirer left CBS. He worked as a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune and gave public lectures and broadcasts. In 1960, he published his best-selling volume, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, establishing his reputation as one of the foremost historians of Nazi Germany. He subsequently published a number of other historical studies, including The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler (1961), Sinking the Bismarck (1962), and several works of fiction.
SHOUSE, JOUETT (1879–1968). Born in Kentucky, Jouett Shouse moved with his family to Missouri, where he attended school and the University of Missouri at Columbia. He was editor of the Lexington Herald, from 1898 to 1904, practiced law, and served as a state senator from 1913 to 1915 and then U.S. congressman from 1915 to 1918. He was assistant secretary of the treasury at the end of Woodrow Wilson’s administration from 1919 to 1920. In the 1920s, Shouse was president of the Association against the Prohibition Amendment and, active in the Democratic Party, he served as chair of the Democratic National Committee from 1929 until 1932. Increasingly disenchanted with the New Deal, he was active in the American Liberty League. He subsequently worked for different business interests and continued his own law practice until his retirement in 1965.
SILVER PURCHASE ACT, 1934. Intended as an inflationary measure to increase money supply, the Silver Purchase Act of 1934 empowered the Treasury Department to purchase all domestic silver until either the price of silver reached $1.29 an ounce or the amount held by the Treasury equaled one-third of the value of federal gold stocks. The Treasury also purchased $1 billion worth of silver abroad. The measure had little effect at home but did adversely affect foreign nations with a silver monetary system.
SINATRA, FRANCIS (FRANK) ALBERT (1915–1998). Singer Frank Sinatra was born of Italian immigrant parents in Hoboken, New Jersey. He did not finish high school, and after working in a variety of casual jobs, he took up singing in 1932. After some success performing with a group, he earned a living as a singing waiter until he was discovered by Harry James, who hired him to sing with his band in 1939. He joined Tommy Dorsey’s band later that year. He had his first hit with Dorsey, “I’ll Never Smile Again” in 1940, and appeared in two films, Las Vegas Nights (1941) and Ship Ahoy (1942). Deferred from military service because of a punctured eardrum, Sinatra left the Dorsey band in 1942 to pursue a solo career. Appearing with the Benny Goodman band in December that year, he was met with screaming fans and became a teenage idol. His earlier recording of “All or Nothing at All” became a hit in 1943, and Sinatra not only hosted a regular radio program for two years but also appeared in a string of films, including Anchors Aweigh (1945), On the Town (1949), and Take Me to the Ball Game (1949). He also starred in his own television series from 1950 to 1952.
After a lull in which it seemed that his career might come to an end, Sinatra achieved renewed success as an actor and a singer, starting with his appearance in the film From Here to Eternity in 1953, which won him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He was nominated as best actor for his role in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Sinatra signed with a new record company, Columbia Records, and began working with arranger Nelson Riddle. He recorded more than 300 songs between 1953 and 1962, many of them becoming classics. In 1960, he established his own Reprise Records and by the late 1980s had recorded more than 400 songs, including the major hits “Strangers in the Night” (1966), “That’s Life” (1966), “Something Stupid” (1967), and “My Way” (1969). He continued to make films, including the highly-acclaimed Manchurian Candidate in 1962. He retired in 1971, made a comeback in 1973, made several new records, and performed live before huge crowds before finally retiring for good in 1994. In 1997, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to add to his many film and record awards. See also CINEMA; MUSIC.
SINCLAIR, UPTON BEALL (1878–1968). Born in Baltimore, Maryland, writer Upton Sinclair graduated from the City College of New York in 1897, briefly attended graduate school at Columbia University, and joined the Socialist Party of America in 1902. Challenged to write a novel about capitalism, Sinclair produced The Jungle in 1906, a study of immigrant life and work in Chicago, Illinois. The descriptions of meatpacking in the book helped secure the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Sinclair wrote more than 90 books, mostly works of social protest, including Cry for Justice (1915), King Coal (1917), Oil, (1927), and Boston (1928), dealing with the Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti murder case.
Sinclair moved to California after World War I and ran for office as a socialist candidate several times. His greatest achievement in politics came in 1934 when his End Poverty in California movement and his book, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty (1933), won him the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial nomination. Sinclair’s proposed program of production for use not profit had great appeal. However, a well-financed opposition orchestrated by the largely Republican-owned press led to his defeat, although his campaign helped push the New Deal to the left. Sinclair retired from politics but continued to write, producing such political novels dealing with the rise of Adolf Hitler and fascism as It Can’t Happen Here (1935), which was turned into a dramatic production by the Federal Theater Project; the 1943 Pulitzer Prize-winning Dragon’s Teeth (1942) and the 11-volume Lanny Budd series. The last book in the series, The Return of Lanny Budd (1953), dealt with America’s anti-Soviet position during the Cold War. He published The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair in 1962. See also LITERATURE.
SIPUEL V. OKLAHOMA BOARD OF REGENTS (332 U.S. 631 1948). Ada Sipuel became the first African American woman admitted to the University of Oklahoma School of Law in 1949. She first applied in 1946 but was denied entry on grounds of her race. When ordered to provide facilities for her, the university established a separate building with separate staff. In Sipuel v. Oklahoma Board of Regents, Sipuel sued the university, and on 12 January 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that as the separate provision provided was inadequate, she must be admitted under the equal rights provision of the Fourteenth Amendment. Sipuel was, however, forced to sit separately in classes, the library, and the cafeteria. Such action was subsequently prohibited by the Supreme Court in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents in 1950. See also SWEATT V. PAINTER.
SIT-DOWN STRIKES. During the 1930s, various groups of workers adopted a new method of striking. Rather than simply withdraw their labor by walking out, they brought about the closure of factories by sitting down and occupying the plant. The first such strike occurred in 1936 among members of the United Automobile Workers union at the Fisher Body plant of General Motors (GM) in Flint, Michigan. The strike lasted 40 days, and Governor Frank Murphy mobilized the National Guard to prevent violence. GM eventually signed an agreement recognizing the union. In 1936, there were 48 sit-down strikes, and in 1937 there were more than 450 in different industries, but in 1939 in National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp., the Supreme Court ruled that sit-down strikes were illegal. Nonetheless, the sit-down was inspirational during the civil rights protests of the 1960s. See also AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (CIO); REUTHER, WALTER; TRADE UNIONS.
SKELTON, (“RED”) RICHARD BERNARD (1913–1997). Born in Vincennes, Indiana, Red Skelton began working as a boy delivering papers and singing. He left school at the age of 14 to work on river showboats and later toured with a circus and appeared in burlesque shows. In 1938, Skelton gave a performance before President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House, and it led to a role in the movie Having a Wonderful Time in 1938. He went on to appear in 24 movies in the 1940s, like Whistling in the Dark (1941), which led to a successful radio series, Scrapbook of Satire, which ran from 1941 to 1944 and introduced such characters as the Mean Widdle Kid and Clem Kadiddlehopper. Drafted into the army in 1944, Skelton frequently performed for the troops, but he was released on a medical discharge in 1945.
After the war, Skelton resumed his film and radio career. Among his film successes were The Fuller Brush Man (1948), A Southern Yankee (1948), and Neptune’s Daughter (1949). In the 1950s, he achieved great success on television with the Red Skelton Show, which began on NBC in 1951 and moved to CBS in 1953. It ran until 1970 and won Emmy Awards in 1951 and 1961. Skelton was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in 1986.
Judged by some to be the greatest clown in show business, Skelton’s own personal life was marked by tragedy. He was married several times, his eight-year-old son died of leukemia, and a former wife committed suicide. See also CINEMA.
SMITH, ALFRED (AL) EMANUEL (1873–1944). Al Smith, as he came to be known, was born and raised in New York City, where he worked a variety of jobs, including the fish market, having left school at the age of 14. He was involved in local politics at an early age and elected to the New York State legislature in 1903, where he served until 1915. He became Democratic Party leader in 1911 and speaker in 1913. Smith took part in the state factory commission established after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 people in 1911, and he sponsored a number of bills to protect the health and safety of workers, particularly women and children. He was sheriff of New York County from 1915 to 1917 and president of the New York Board of Aldermen in 1917. In 1918, he was elected governor of New York and served for four terms from 1919 to 1920 1923 to 1928. Following his failure to win reelection in 1920, Smith served on the National Board of Indian Commissioners and Port of New York Authority. He also acted as chairman of the United States Trucking Corporation.
Smith’s time as governor was associated with the continuation of a reform program: limiting the working hours of women and children, improving railroad safety, expanding public education, and reforming state government. He also supported measures to repeal prohibition. In 1924, he failed to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination for the presidency. He won the nomination in 1928, but lost the election in part because of his Catholic-Irish background and his opposition to prohibition. However, given the apparent prosperity at the time, Herbert Hoover’s election victory for the Republicans was fairly inevitable.
Following his defeat, Smith became president of the company that managed the Empire State Building in New York City. Having failed to win the party’s nomination himself, he reluctantly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt’s nomination in 1932 and became increasingly critical of the New Deal for creating what he saw as a class conflict. In 1936, he joined the American Liberty League and campaigned against Roosevelt and in favor of Republican Alf Landon. In 1940, Smith supported Wendell Willkie. Although he supported U.S. involvement in World War II, Smith was given no role in the war administration.
SMITH, GERALD LYMAN KENNETH (1898–1976). Gerald Smith was born in Wisconsin and graduated from Valparaiso University in 1917. He attended Butler University in Indiana, where he became active in the Ku Klux Klan. In 1928, he moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, and in 1928 became a church minister. In 1930, he was appointed as assistant to Huey Long and was the organizer of the national Share Our Wealth clubs. Smith assumed leadership of the clubs following Long’s assassination in 1935. In 1936, he joined with Francis Townsend and Father Charles Coughlin to form the Union Party. In 1936, Smith also began to echo the German Nazi movement and called on young American men to seize the government. He was expelled from the Union Party in 1936 because of his extreme views. He campaigned against U.S. entry into World War II and organized the America First Party in 1942, publishing a right-wing journal, The Cross and the Flag. He ran as presidential candidate for the America First Party in 1944 and attracted a mere 1,781 votes. In 1947, he called for a Christian Nationalist Crusade and attacked Jews, denying the Holocaust and calling for the deportation of African Americans to Africa and the dissolution of United Nations. In the 1948 election, he received 48 votes. Smith established a center in Los Angeles, California, in 1953 but in 1964 moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas. In 1966 he erected a huge statue of Jesus, Christ of the Ozarks, on a nearby mountain and organized a regular passion play and established a Bible museum.
SMITH, HOWARD WORTH (1883–1976). Born in Virginia, Howard Smith graduated from Bethel Military Academy in 1901 and Virginia Law School in 1903. He had his own legal practice from 1904 to 1917 and during World War I was an assistant general counsel to the Alien Property Custodian. After the war, he served as commonwealth attorney of Alexandria, Virginia; judge on the corporation court of Alexandria until 1928; and judge on the judicial circuit of Virginia from 1928 to 1930. In 1930, Smith was elected as a Democratic congressman to the U.S. House of Representatives. He became a member of the House Rules Committee in 1933. A typical states’ rights Democrat, Smith was one of the conservative bloc in Congress that opposed much of the New Deal. President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to have him unseated in the “purge of 1938” but failed. In 1939, he was one of the leaders of the investigation that attacked the National Labor Relations Board and in 1940 was the sponsor of the Smith Act—also known as the Alien Registration Act—aimed at radical groups. During the war, he cosponsored the Smith-Connally Act—also known as the War Labor Disputes Act. From 1955 onward, Smith was a powerful influence as chair of the House Committee on Rules and worked to block increases in social security, housing reform, and civil rights legislation. He inserted a clause requiring equal opportunity for women in the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Some historians have claimed that it was a deliberate attempt to jeopardize the act, while others have pointed to Smith’s history of support for women’s rights and see it as a genuine move on his part. In 1966, he was defeated for renomination and resumed his private legal practice in Alexandria.
SMITH ACT, 1940. The Alien Registration Act of 1940, known as the Smith Act, made it illegal to advocate, teach, or organize the overthrow of any government in the United States by force or violence or to disseminate material calling for such action. It also required all noncitizens to register with the government. The legislation was used in 1949 to prosecute a number of the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States of America. However the Supreme Court increasingly found such convictions unconstitutional, and by the late 1950s the act was more or less inoperative, although it remains on the statute books.
SMITH V. ALLWRIGHT (321 U.S. 649 1944). In Smith v. Allwight, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Lonnie E. Smith, an African American from Houston, Texas, who had sued the state Democratic Party for excluding black voters from participating in the state primary. The court accepted the argument that as Texas was virtually a one-party state, exclusion from the primary effectively denied black voters of their franchise. In arriving at this decision, the court overturned its previous ruling in the 1935 case Grovey v. Townsend, when it had accepted exclusion of African Americans on the grounds that the Democratic Party was a private organization. See also CIVIL RIGHTS.
SMITH-CONNALLY ACT. See WAR LABOR DISPUTES ACT.
SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION (SDF). The SDF was formed in 1936 by individuals disgruntled with the leadership of the Socialist Party of America. Led by Jasper McLevy, the socialist mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, from 1933 to 1957, and Algernon Lee, president of the Rand School of Social Science in New York City, the SDF called for a broad liberal-left third party but with little success. The SDF eventually merged back into the Socialist Party in 1956.
SOCIAL SECURITY ACT, 1935. The central pillar of the U.S. welfare system, the Social Security Act was passed in 1935 and amended and extended successively thereafter. The act established a Social Security Board—later the Social Security Administration within the Federal Security Agency—to administer the terms of the act and provide for unemployment compensation; old-age insurance; assistance for the destitute blind; and assistance for homeless, disabled, dependent, and delinquent children. Unemployment compensation was financed by a federal tax on employer payrolls—initially 1 percent and rising to 3 percent by 1938—to be administered at the state level. Old-age insurance was a federal program financed by equal taxes on employers and employees starting at 1 percent in 1937 and rising to 3 percent by 1949. Pension payments started for those over the age of 65 in January 1942. In 1939, this payment was brought forward to 1940 and survivors’ insurance was also added. Southern congressmen amended the original bill to exclude agricultural and domestic workers, thus eliminating the majority of African Americans. These restrictions were gradually lifted through amendments in 1950, 1954, and 1956, and single parents were given benefits from 1950 onward. Medicare and Medicaid were added in 1965.
SOCIALIST LABOR PARTY (SLP). Originally formed in 1877 and led by Daniel De Leon, the SLP was the first national Marxist party in the United States. The SLP had some success in attracting support in the 1890s, but expectation that it would be even more successful during the Great Depression turned out to be misplaced. In 1932, its presidential candidate, Verne L. Reynolds, received only 34,028 votes. In 1936, with John W. Aiken as the candidate, the vote fell to 12,790. Support for the party appeared to rise in 1944 with 45,226 votes, probably a reflection of wartime sympathy with the Soviet Union, but this did not continue. Under the leadership of Eric Hass, there was another revival in fortunes in the late 1950s and 1960s, but the SLP was always a minority party. It did not put forward a presidential candidate after 1976.
SOCIALIST PARTY OF AMERICA (SPA). In 1901, the Social Democratic Party, led by Eugene V. Debs, joined with reformist elements of the Socialist Labor Party, led by Morris Hillquit, to establish the SPA. The SPA was committed to state ownership of the means of production and the equitable distribution of wealth among the working classes. It sought to achieve these ends through evolutionary rather than revolutionary means and supported social and economic reform through the political process. Support for the SPA was particularly strong in working-class immigrant communities, but it began to attract such middle class intellectuals as Upton Sinclair, Walter Lippmann, and John Reed in the years before 1914. However, when the party opposed U.S. entry into World War I, many people deserted, and the majority of its leaders were jailed under the wartime Espionage Act and Sedition Act. At the end of the war, the party divided between those who wished to follow a revolutionary path along Soviet lines and those who continued to espouse a reformist path. The Red Scare of 1919 and 1920 further weakened the party, and membership fell from 24,661 in 1921 to a mere 8,477 by 1926.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the leader of the party was Norman Thomas, but even at the height of the Great Depression, he attracted less than 900,000 votes, about 2 percent of the vote (the total number of voters having increased considerably since 1912 with the enfranchisement of women.) After 1932 the SPA was increasingly undermined by the reforms introduced by the New Deal and was divided by factional differences. The vote for Thomas in 1936 was 187, 720, and in 1940 it fell to 99, 557. During the Cold War years, and with the effects of McCarthyism, membership in the SPA fell to below 2,000. The party was increasingly more of a radical wing of the Democratic Party, and in 1968 it supported Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey. After 1956, it did not run its own candidate again until 1976. See also TRADE UNIONS.
SOIL CONSERVATION ACT AND DOMESTIC ALLOTMENT ACT, 1935, 1936. In 1933, Congress made the Soil Conservation Service part of the Department of the Interior on a permanent basis, then relocated it within the Department of Agriculture in 1935, and established soil conservation districts throughout the country as a way of tackling the problems of flooding and erosion. The Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936 was passed after the Supreme Court declared the Agricultural Adjustment Administration unconstitutional. It provided for payments of up to $10 per acre for farmers who substituted such soil-conserving crops as peas, beans, clover, rye, and alfalfa for such soil-depleting crops as cotton, corn, tobacco, and wheat. Money was also provided to assist farmers using fertilizers, lime, potash, and phosphates.
SOUTHERN TENANT FARMERS’ UNION (STFU). Formed in July 1934 in Arkansas, the STFU was an organization of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and small landowners formed by socialists to protest against the impact of the Great Depression in rural areas and the discrimination in payments between landowners and tenants made under the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The STFU spread to Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama, and in 1935, with a membership of about 25,000, the organization struck for higher wages for picking cotton. The violent reaction of landowners to the SFTU brought the plight of tenant farmers to the national attention and led to the passage of the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act of 1937. However, division within the STFU between socialist and communist sympathizers weakened the organization, and by 1943 it had effectively disappeared.
SOVIET UNION (USSR). The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established in 1922 following the success of the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and the Civil War in the former Imperial Russia. A one-party state committed to the principle of communism, beginning in 1924 the USSR was led by Joseph Stalin, who increasingly exerted dictatorial control. Until his death in 1953, Stalin led the USSR through rapid industrial development brutally imposed under Five-Year Plans. He enforced his views through a series of “purges” and show trials that resulted in the removal of any political opponents.
The United States did not recognize the USSR until 1933, but relations were distant until both countries became allies in response to Adolf Hitler’s expansionist policies in 1941. Meetings between Stalin, Winston Churchill, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam were reasonably successful, but once the war was over, old suspicions and rivalries based on fundamental ideological differences resurfaced. The presence of Soviet armies in Eastern Europe and the imposition of communist-backed governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere led to a Cold War that dominated world affairs until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, the new U.S. president, Harry S. Truman, was much less inclined than Roosevelt to be conciliatory, and he immediately stopped lend-lease aid to Russia and demanded that the USSR honor wartime agreements, even though they were sometimes rather ambiguous in meaning. In a speech in February 1946, Stalin reaffirmed the prewar view of irreconcilable differences between socialism and capitalism and the inevitability of conflict between the two. Soviet control in Eastern Europe was tightened and reinforced in 1947 with the establishment of the Communist Information Bureau (COMINFORM). In face of the perceived Soviet threat, Truman announced the Truman Doctrine and a policy of containment in March 1947, and a program of economic aid to Europe under the Marshall Plan was announced in June that year. Although the USSR was invited to participate in the plan, it rejected the notion of external inspections and withdrew, taking its eastern satellites with it. It instead established an equivalent Molotov Plan.
The economic recovery of Western Europe sharpened differences over the future of Germany and demands for the payment of reparations to the USSR, which came to a head when the Western Allies—Great Britain, France, and the United States—established a common currency and began the economic unification of the West German sectors. The USSR responded by imposing a blockade on Berlin in June 1948, resulting in the Berlin Airlift which lasted until May 1949. The Western powers responded to the threatening Soviet action with the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in April 1949. When West Germany was included in NATO in 1955, the USSR established the Warsaw Pact among the communist states of Europe. The growing military confrontation was made more dangerous by the successful testing of an atomic bomb by the USSR in 1949 and by the support given to Mao Zedong’s communist China that year. While direct conflict was avoided, Stalin, perhaps reluctantly, supported the North in the Korean War.
Although Cold War tensions eased to some extent following Stalin’s death, the confrontation between the USSR and the United States dominated international affairs until the 1990s, at times, as with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, coming close to open conflict. Ultimately, however, the costs of this global struggle proved too much for the USSR, and despite attempted reform in the 1980s, it disintegrated with the withdrawal of separate states in 1991.
SPANISH CIVIL WAR, 1936–1939. The Civil War in Spain began when military leaders led by General Francisco Franco rose in revolt against the left-wing Republican government. Spain became an ideological battleground between left and right as the Soviet Union backed the Republicans, while Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s fascist Italy supported Franco. Opinion in the United States was divided about the war, and the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt supported the nonintervention policy urged by Great Britain and France and adopted a policy of impartial neutrality. As support for the Republicans grew, Roosevelt asked for and in January 1937 obtained a congressional resolution imposing an embargo on war materials going to Spain. This did not, however, prevent American volunteers from taking part, and several thousand joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and George Washington Brigade to fight for the Republican cause. Among those who supported the cause was Ernest Hemingway and members of the League of American Writers.
SPORT. Sport was affected by the Great Depression and World War II in terms of reduced audiences at live events, but it continued to attract huge audiences on the radio. Stars from the 1920s like the baseball player Babe Ruth continued to play, although with a 10 percent pay cut, but new figures also emerged. The rise of African American athletes was a significant development with the domination of boxing by Joe Louis from 1937, the success of Jesse Owens and other black athletes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the breakthrough of black baseball players on previously all-white teams, starting with Jackie Robinson in 1947.
Radio audiences listened to Louis’s fights in huge numbers and were also thrilled by the achievements of Joe DiMaggio, who led the New York Yankees to nine World Series victories between 1936 and 1951. Louis and DiMaggio, like many sportsmen, entered the U.S. armed forces during World War II. Of the 5,700 baseball players in the Major League and Minor League, 4,000 donned military uniforms. As a result, many of the games were of a lower level of play than normal. The St. Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees dominated baseball, winning four of the wartime World Series between them. The fifth, in 1945, was won by the Detroit Tigers. After the war, the Yankees resumed their monopoly, winning the World Series in 1947 and from 1949 through 1953. American football was affected in a similar way, and many teams relied on older players or those who were regarded as unfit for military service. Many colleges did not have football teams during the war, and instead service teams were the main attraction, with the army’s team being outstanding.
STALIN, JOSEPH VISSARIONOVICH (1879–1953). Born Joseph Dzhugashvili in Georgia, Russia, the future leader of the Soviet Union assumed the name Stalin, meaning “man of steel,” in 1913. By then, he had become a communist and member of the Bolshevik movement. He was jailed and exiled several times between 1902 and 1917, but following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, he increased his influence and was appointed general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922. He assumed power after Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924 and gradually displaced his enemies, most notably Leon Trotsky in 1928. He consolidated his dictatorial rule with the “Great Purge” during the 1930s. Under Stalin’s Five-Year Plans launched in 1928, the Soviet Union went through rapid, enforced industrialization that cost some 10 million lives by execution or through famine.
Isolated from the West, Stalin hoped to prevent an attack by Nazi Germany when he signed a Nonaggression Pact in August 1939. However, the Soviet Union was attacked in June 1941, and the USSR and Great Britain suddenly became unlikely Allies and were joined in December 1941 by the United States in World War II. Although German forces almost took Moscow, Stalin mobilized the Russian people in defense of “Mother Russia,” and the tide of battle turned at Stalingrad between August 1942 and February 1943. Soviet armies pushed into Poland and eventually Germany itself.
Although Stalin was angered by apparent delays in opening a Second Front, agreement about the shape of the postwar world appeared to be reached in conferences where he met his counterparts, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt at Tehran and Yalta, and Harry S. Truman at Potsdam. However, after the war, Stalin announced in a speech launching another Five-Year Plan on 9 February 1946 that there were irreconcilable differences between communism and capitalism that would lead to war. Disagreements about the future of Germany and about governments in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, led to growing hostility culminating in the onset of the Cold War in 1947. Stalin gradually increased communist control in Poland, East Germany (later the German Democratic Republic), Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. For many people in the West, he became a second Hitler, an example of totalitarianism and the personification of communist dictatorship. Soviet policy gradually became more flexible after his death in 1953, and there were denunciations of the “cult of personality” he had fostered.
STATES’ RIGHTS PARTY. In 1948, many southerners bolted the Democratic National Convention in 1948 to form the States’ Rights Party due to the adoption of a strong civil rights plank and Harry S. Truman’s call for the beginning of desegregation in the U.S. armed forces. Known as Dixiecrats and with the slogan “Segregation Forever,” they nominated Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina, as their presidential candidate. In the election, they carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina and won 39 Electoral College votes. Despite this and defections to the liberal Progressive Party, Truman won the election. The Dixiecrats reappeared as the American Independent Party behind the candidacy of Governor George Wallace of Alabama in 1968 in what eventually led to a realignment of political party structures in the United States.
STEAGALL, HENRY BASCOM (1873–1943). Born in Clopton, Alabama, Henry Steagall attended Southeast Alabama Agricultural School and then the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He graduated with a degree in law in 1893 and practiced in Ozark. In 1898, he was appointed county solicitor, and in 1906 he served one term in the state legislature. In 1914, he was elected as a Democratic representative to Congress and served until his death. Steagall became chair of the House Committee on Banking and Currency in 1930 and helped establish the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He was cosponsor of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that separated investment banking from commercial banking. Steagall supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and helped push through the Banking Acts of the “First Hundred Days.” During the war, he maintained a watching brief on the impact of wartime controls on agriculture.
STEEL WORKERS’ ORGANIZING COMMITTEE (SWOC). In June 1936, the newly formed Committee of Industrial Organization targeted a bastion of antiunionism since the late 19th century—the steel industry—as their focus for trade union membership drives. They established the SWOC, led by Philip Murray, and on 2 March 1937 the “Big Steel” companies agreed to recognize the unions rather than face strikes. Smaller companies led by Republic Steel, Bethlehem Steel, and Youngstown Sheet & Tube, however, refused to such an agreement, and a bitter strike ensued. One of the worst episodes in U.S. labor history occurred in the Memorial Day Massacre outside the Republic Steel plant in South Chicago, Indiana, when 10 people were killed. Despite a wave of public sympathy for the strikers, the “Little Steel” companies did not recognize the unions until 1941.
STEINBECK, JOHN ERNST (1902–1968). Writer John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California. He enrolled at Stanford University in 1919 but studied only erratically and left without graduating in 1925. After failing to establish himself as a freelance writer in New York City, Steinbeck took a number of casual jobs and concentrated on writing. His first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929. It was in the 1930s that Steinbeck emerged as a major literary figure with his novels of social commentary, including To a God Unknown (1933), Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the classic that helped define the Great Depression years, Grapes of Wrath (1939). A best seller, The Grapes of Wrath charted the experience of the Joad family, displaced tenant farmers from Oklahoma who made the migration westward to California in hopes of finding a better life. It incorporated documentary passages with fictional narrative and captured the suffering of thousands of similar “Okies.” Although criticized by farmers’ and growers’ associations and some migrant groups, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. The film of the same name, starring Henry Fonda, was also a huge success that year. Seventeen of Steinbeck’s books were made into films, and he also had some success as a screenwriter. His screenplay for Lifeboat (1944) won an Academy Award in 1945.
In 1942, Steinbeck published a fictional account of European resistance to the Nazis in The Moon Is Down, but he struggled to match his earlier success. After a period as a war correspondent, he produced the humorous Cannery Row (1945) and a string of much less significant works. With East of Eden (1952), a modern tale of Cain and Abel, Steinbeck once again recaptured his previous form, and in 1962 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, stung by critical reviews of his The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), he abandoned fiction and concentrated on journalism and more famously a travelogue, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962). His last published work, America and Americans (1966), reflected his disillusionment with the hypocrisy, greed, and racial division he witnessed in the country. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.
STETTINIUS, EDWARD REILLY, JR. (1900–1949). Born in Chicago, Edward Stettinius Jr. attended school in Connecticut and then enrolled in the University of Virginia. He left the university in 1924 without graduating and took a job in the Hyatt Roller Bearing company of General Motors (GM). In 1931, he became vice president of GM. Because of his long-time involvement in social work, Stettinius also worked as a liaison officer between the National Industrial Recovery Administration and the Industrial Advisory Board. In 1934, he became vice chairman in the Finance Department of U.S. Steel and implemented a new welfare program for employees. In 1938, he took over as chair of U.S. Steel, a position he held until 1940 when he was appointed chair of the War Resources Board, a short-lived body created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 to plan industrial mobilization. In 1941, he became a director in the Office of Production Management and in 1942 was put in charge of the Lend-Lease administration. In 1943, he succeeded Sumner Welles as undersecretary of state, and he was involved in the reorganization of the department. In 1944, Stettinius visited Great Britain to discuss postwar economic issues, and in 1944 he headed the U.S. Delegation at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, where he helped draft the plans for the United Nations (UN).
In 1944, President Roosevelt appointed Stettinius to succeed Cordell Hull as secretary of state. He accompanied the president to the Yalta Conference, where he played a leading role in policymaking. He also went to the conference in Mexico City, Mexico, that produced the Chapultepec Agreement. Afterward, Stettinius led the U.S. Delegation to the San Francisco Conference, which established the UN and worked to overcome conflict with the delegates from the Soviet Union to secure the final agreement in June 1945. Stettinius became the first U.S. representative to the UN General Assembly after Harry S. Truman replaced him as secretary of state with James F. Byrnes. Frustrated at his lack of involvement in shaping postwar foreign policy, Stettinius resigned his position in 1946 and became rector of the University of Virginia. He also became involved in promoting U.S. investment in Liberia. In 1949, Roosevelt and the Russians, his account of the Yalta Conference justifying Roosevelt’s decisions was published.
STEVENSON, ADLAI EWING, II (1900–1965). Born in Los Angeles, California, Adlai Stevenson moved to Bloomington, Illinois, as a child, where he attended a number of schools before going to Choate and Princeton University. After briefly working as a journalist, he went to Northwestern Law School in 1925. Once he was qualified, he worked in a legal practice in Chicago, Illinois, until 1933, when he went to Washington, D.C. He returned to Chicago after two years. His speeches and writing on behalf of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies brought him to the attention of Frank Knox. When Knox became secretary of the navy in 1940, he appointed Stevenson as his special assistant.
During the war, Stevenson led the Foreign Economic Mission to determine the economic needs of Italy following the country’s liberation and later went to Europe on behalf of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. In 1945, he worked for the State Department to mobilize public support for the United Nations (UN), and he became senior adviser to the U.S. Delegation and a delegate in the New York sessions in 1946 and 1947.
In 1948, Stevenson was elected Democratic governor of Illinois and did much to tackle corruption in public service. He gained national prominence for his refusal to implement a loyalty oath. In 1952, he was nominated on the fourth ballot as the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Although an inspirational and intelligent speaker, Stevenson was easily defeated by the Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nonetheless, he was chosen again in 1956 but was defeated once more by Eisenhower. In 1960, he lost the nomination to John F. Kennedy, who appointed him ambassador to the UN. He was very involved during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when he advocated concessions to reach a settlement. Under President Lyndon Johnson, Stevenson opposed the escalation of the war in Vietnam and the unilateral intervention in the Dominican Republic. He died of a heart attack while on a visit to London, England.
STEWART, JAMES MAITLAND (1908–1997). The actor, James Stewart (better known as “Jimmy”), was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania. After attending Mercersburg Academy, he went to Princeton University in 1928 and graduated with a degree in architecture in 1932. However, he had already begun acting while a student. Soon after leaving Princeton, he found work with a theater group, making his first appearance on Broadway that year. After several successful stage roles, he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1934 and appeared in his first film in 1936. Stewart acted in a number of movies including You Can’t Take It with You (1938) and It’s a Wonderful World (1939) and also did radio work before his major breakthrough as a star in the western, Destry Rides Again and Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, both in 1939. In 1940, he won an Oscar for his role in The Philadelphia Story in which he starred with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.
Stewart was initially rejected for the draft as underweight, but after fattening himself up was accepted for the Army Air Corps in 1941. He rose to the rank of colonel and was awarded the Air Medal and Distinguished Flying Cross and the French Croix de Guerre for his service during World War II. After the war, Stewart starred in the lead role in Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Although not an enormous success at the time, the film was to become a perennial Christmas classic in later years. However, his career was really re-established with his performances in the western Winchester ’73 and the comedy Harvey, both in 1950. He also played the lead in Broken Arrow (1950), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Glenn Miller Story (1953), and in two films by Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958), and as Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis (1957). Stewart’s career in cinema spanned through to the 1970s; in addition, he often appeared in roles on television. He was given a Life Achievement Award by the American Film Institute in 1980 and an Honorary Academy Award in 1985.
STILWELL, JOSEPH WARREN (1883–1946). Born in Florida, Joseph Stilwell graduated from West Point Military Academy in 1904. He served two tours of duty in the Philippines and also taught at West Point before serving as an intelligence officer during World War I. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his achievements. After the war, Stilwell held a number of commands, including Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth. He also served on three separate occasions in China, where he became familiar with Chiang Kai-shek.
During World War II, Stilwell commanded forces in the China-Burma Campaign and also served as chief of staff to Chiang. Reliant on poorly led Chinese troops, Stilwell was forced out of Burma, leading a group on foot into India. In 1943, he was appointed deputy supreme allied commander under British Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, and despite differences with the British, he was successful in leading the forces in retaking northern Burma and establishing the Ledo Road—later renamed the Stilwell Road—as an alternative supply route into China. However, Stilwell was increasingly critical of Chiang’s corruption, the misuse of Lend-Lease funds, and the failure to engage with the Japanese forces. At Chiang’s insistence, he returned to the United States in 1944. Stilwell saw further action in Okinawa in 1945 and then was made head of the War Department Equipment Board. He died of cancer in 1946.
STIMSON, HENRY LEWIS (1867–1950). One of America’s longest-serving statesmen, Henry L. Stimson was born in New York City; attended Phillips Academy, Andover; and graduated from Yale University in 1888. He went to Harvard Law School, qualified in law in 1890, and practiced in New York City. Stimson was U.S. attorney for southern New York and in 1910 ran unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate for governor. In 1911, President William Howard Taft appointed him secretary of war. He resumed his legal practice in 1916.
During World War I, Stimson served as a colonel with the artillery in France and then resumed his career as a Wall Street lawyer. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge appointed him to mediate between warring factions in Nicaragua. From 1927 to 1929, he served as governor general of the Philippines and resisted early moves toward independence.
In 1928, President Herbert Hoover appointed Stimson as secretary of state, and in that capacity he chaired the U.S. Delegation to the London Naval Conference from 1930 to 1931. In 1931, he issued a statement that became known as the Stimson Doctrine, expressing the opposition of the United States to the Japanese conquest of Manchuria and refusing to accept any change in territorial possession as a consequence of the invasion. Stimson tried to mobilize European opposition to Japanese aggression and would have preferred to take stronger action, but he bowed to Hoover’s wishes to maintain a purely limited diplomatic response.
In 1940, Stimson was one of two Republicans appointed to the cabinet when President Franklin D. Roosevelt made him secretary of war (the other was Frank Knox). He supported the introduction of Selective Service in 1940 and advocated support for Great Britain before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Once the United States became involved in the war, he called for a speedy invasion of Europe. He expressed opposition about the massive bombing of Germany and the later firebombing of Tokyo, and he recommended offering the Japanese terms for surrender that would allow them to keep the emperor. Stimson also opposed the plan proposed by Henry Morgenthau with regard to postwar Germany, arguing that the economic destruction of the country would simply repeat the mistakes that had followed World War I. However, he was also the president’s senior adviser on atomic weapons and accepted the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945 and was responsible for the choice of targets. Nonetheless, at the war’s end, he seemed to suggest a policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union rather than confrontation based on atomic superiority. Stimson published his memoirs, On Active Service in Peace and War, in 1948.
STOCK MARKET CRASH. See WALL STREET CRASH.
STONE, HARLAN FISKE (1872–1946). Born in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, and a graduate of Amherst College in 1894 and Columbia University Law School in 1898, Harlan Fiske Stone became the eleventh chief justice of the Supreme Court. After beginning his own private law practice, he joined the faculty of Columbia University Law School in 1899, where he became dean in 1910. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge appointed him as attorney general, where he helped reform the federal prison service and the Alien Property Custodian’s Office, an area of corruption during the previous administration. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1925. With Louis D. Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo, who replaced Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1932, Stone was part of the “liberal” group on the Supreme Court and an upholder of judicial restraint.
A defender of civil liberties, Stone dissented in Minersville School District v. Gobitis in 1940 against the decision approving mandatory saluting of the flag in public schools. The court accepted his view when it reversed their original ruling in 1943 in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Stone as chief justice to succeed Charles Evans Hughes in 1941. However, he did not seem able to impose his personality or a consistent view on the court. His own position was often difficult to characterize as he supported the decisions upholding the internment of Japanese Americans but dissented when the court ruled to uphold the right to deny citizenship to conscientious objectors in Girouard v. United States in 1946. He died shortly after reading that decision.
STRYKER, ROY EMERSON (1893–1975). Born in Great Bend, Kansas, Roy Stryker graduated from high school in 1912 and entered the Colorado School of Mines. He failed to complete his studies and served in the infantry during World War I. After the war, Stryker went to Columbia University to study economics. There he met Rexford Tugwell, and after graduating he taught economics with him. When Tugwell was appointed to head the Resettlement Administration (RA) in 1935, he made Stryker chief of the Historical Division of Information with responsibility for documenting the impact of the Great Depression on rural America. Stryker gathered a team of photographers, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn. The project continued after 1937 when the RA became the Farm Security Administration, and together the group compiled some of the most iconic images of the 1930s. Of 250,000 photographs, some 77,000 were used in such magazines as Life and Fortune by the press and in exhibitions across the country to publicize the plight of the rural poor and the work of the New Deal.
In 1942, the photographic unit was reassigned to the Office of War Information and then disbanded. Stryker resigned his position and worked for Standard Oil from 1943 to 1950, again choosing photographers to record the company’s work. Some of the team of photographers followed Stryker when he established the Pittsburgh Photographic Library at the University of Pittsburgh from 1950 to 1952. From there, Stryker documented the work at Jones & Laughlin Steel before returning to Colorado, where he did freelance work and acted as a consultant.
SULLIVAN, JOHN LAWRENCE (1899–1982). Born in New Hampshire, John L. Sullivan was a graduate of Dartmouth College in 1921 and Harvard Law School in 1924, and he practiced law in New Hampshire. A Democrat, he failed twice to win the gubernatorial elections in the 1930s but in 1939 became first assistant to the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service and then was chosen as assistant secretary in the Treasury. In 1947, he was awarded a Distinguished Service Award and Silver Medal for his work on wartime finances. In 1945, he was appointed assistant secretary of the navy for air and then undersecretary of the navy before finally becoming secretary of the navy in 1947. However, Sullivan resigned in protest at the policies of the defense secretary, Louis Johnson, in 1949 and returned to his legal practice.
SUPREME COURT. The Supreme Court is the highest federal court in the land consisting of nine justices, each appointed for life by the president. During the progressive period prior to World War I, the court moved from its predominantly conservative and probusiness position upholding principles of laissez faire to a more reformist stance that recognized that law should respond to social change. The court upheld limitations on working hours where the health and safety of workers—both men and women—were affected but not where it violated workers’ rights to accept whatever working conditions they chose. Regulation of trusts was upheld but increasingly narrowed to apply only to “unreasonable” restraint of trade.
In the 1920s, the court once more tended to protect business and private property. Warren Harding’s conservative appointments resulted in decisions against child labor laws and a minimum wage law for women but upheld restrictions on trade unions. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, the court had a solid bloc of four conservatives—Pierce Butler, James McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter. They were often supported by Owen J. Roberts. The liberals on the court were Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Harlan Fiske Stone. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes tended to take a middle position.
In 1935, the court declared by a five-to-four margin three New Deal measures unconstitutional, including the National Industrial Recovery Act. They also ruled against a number of social reform measures at the state level and in 1936 declared the Agricultural Adjustment Administration unconstitutional. Faced with the possibility that the court would effectively undermine the rest of the New Deal, President Roosevelt attempted to alter the court’s composition. In 1937, he proposed a measure that would allow the appointment of up to six new justices on the basis of one for every sitting justice over the age of 70 who failed to retire. The proposed court reorganization act was seen as “court packing” and was met with considerable congressional and public opposition. However, on 29 March 1937 in the “switch in time that saved nine,” the court reversed itself and ruled in favor of a state minimum wage law in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. One of the conservatives on the court, Van Devanter also indicated that he would retire. Subsequent retirements allowed Roosevelt to make further sympathetic appointments, and the court increasingly adopted a more liberal position and approved the later reform measures. The court reorganization act was defeated in Congress in July 1937. See also BLACK, HUGO LAFAYETTE; BYRNES, JAMES FRANCIS; DOUGLAS, WILLIAM ORVILLE; FRANKFURTER, FELIX; JACKSON, ROBERT HOUGHWOUT; MURPHY, FRANK (FRANCIS) WILLIAM; REED, STANLEY FORMAN.
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ALLIED POWERS EUROPE (SHAPE). SHAPE was established in April 1951 as part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
SUPREME HEADQUARTERS OF THE ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCES (SHAEF). SHAEF was initially established in London, England, during World War II under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Once the Allied forces were established in Europe, it moved to Versailles, France.
SUTHERLAND, (ALEXANDER) GEORGE (1862–1942). Born in England, George Sutherland moved to the United States with his family in 1864 and settled in Utah. Sutherland was educated at Brigham Young Academy and graduated in 1881. In 1896, he was elected as a Republican senator in Utah’s first state legislature and became chair of the judiciary committee. In 1900, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and 1905 was appointed to the U.S. Senate, where he established a national reputation as a legal expert and leading opponent of Woodrow Wilson. He was defeated in the election of 1916.
In 1922, Sutherland was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Warren Harding. He wrote the majority opinion in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, ruling against minimum wage legislation for women, a decision that was overturned against his dissent in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish in 1937. While he voted with the other conservative justices—Willis Van Devanter, James McReynolds, and Pierce Butler—against most of the New Deal measures, Sutherland also wrote the majority decision in 1936 recognizing that the president had substantial powers in foreign policy matters deriving from needs of international relations. He also wrote the majority opinion overturning the conviction of the Scottsboro Boys in Powell v. Alabama in 1932 and concurred with the ruling that a tax on newspaper advertising was an unconstitutional restraint of the press. Although suffering ill-health, he refused to retire until after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt at “court packing” had been defeated. He finally retired in 1938.
SWEATT V. PAINTER (339 U.S. 629 1950). Herman Sweatt was an African American who was rejected by the University of Texas when he applied for admission to the Law School in 1946. When Sweatt filed a lawsuit claiming that he was being denied the rights guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment, the university established a separate law school for African Americans, as approved by the Supreme Court in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada in 1938. Sweatt refused to accept this, and in Sweatt v. Painter in June 1950, the court found in his favor, recognizing that the university could not make a separate provision that was equal in quality to its main law school. This decision, along with McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, was an important step toward the landmark ruling against segregation in pubic schools in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. See also CIVIL RIGHTS.
SWOPE, GERARD (1872–1957). Gerard Swope was an engineer with the Western Electric Company in Chicago, Illinois, who served as an assistant to George W. Goethals during World War I. In 1919, he joined General Electric as president of its international operations and became chairman of General Electric itself in 1922. With Owen Young as chairman, Swope took control of day-to-day running of the company and with great attention to detail helped increase sales and production through increased efficiency and a reduced workforce. Swope, who had lived and worked at the Hull House settlement in the 1890s, was instrumental in the introduction of policies of “welfare capitalism” but was unsuccessful in gaining employee approval for an unemployment insurance plan.
In response to the Wall Street Crash, Swope proposed the “Swope Plan” in 1931, which called upon companies to organize by industry and agree on codes of fair competition with agreed working hours and conditions in return for the suspension of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Elements of the plan were discernable in the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration (NRA). Swope chaired the Department of Commerce’s Business Advisory and Planning Council formed to advise the NRA in 1933. He later worked toward the implementation of social security and labor relations legislation and was a member of the National Labor Relations Board. He accepted union recognition within General Electric between 1936 and 1939, and after his retirement in 1939 he served as chair of the New York City Housing Authority. He briefly returned to General Electric during World War II. After the war, he chaired the Institute of Pacific Relations looking at U.S. foreign policy in the Far East. See also TRADE UNIONS.
SYMINGTON, (WILLIAM) STUART (1901–1988). Stuart Symington was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, but his family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where he went to school. He enlisted in the military at the age of 17 and after the war went to Yale but left in 1923 without graduating. He became an iron molder, studied at night, and by 1925 was president of the Eastern Clay Company. After holding several other executive posts, Symington became chair of the Surplus Property Board in 1945 and then assistant secretary of war for air in 1946. In 1947, he was appointed first secretary of the air force, and he helped establish the new service. In 1950, he chaired the National Security Resources Board and in 1951 the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
In 1952, Symington was elected Democratic state senator for Missouri. He stood unsuccessfully for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1960. The successful candidate, John F. Kennedy, considered Symington as his vice presidential running mate but finally opted for Lyndon Johnson. Instead, Symington served four terms as senator, in which time he was a critic of Joseph McCarthy, a supporter of defense spending, and initially a supporter of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He changed his position after 1967. Critical of the administration of Richard M. Nixon, Symington opposed the antiballistic missile system. He retired in 1976.