Guided Reading Questions
Affluence and Its Anxieties
Know: IBM, Information Age, Ozzie and Harriet, The Feminine Mystique
1. What was life like for women in the 1950's? Life for women in the 1950's was changing drastically. Women appeared more and more in the workplace, despite the stereotypical role of women as housewives that was being portrayed on TV shows such as "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Leave it to Beaver." Women’s expansion into the workplace shocked some, but really wasn’t surprising if one observed the trends in history, and now,they were both housewives and workers. Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique was a best-seller and a classic of modern feminine protest literature. She’s the godmother of the feminist movement.
Consumer Culture in the Fifties
Know: Diner's Club, McDonald's, Disneyland, Television, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Playboy, The Affluent Society
2.How was popular culture changing and reflecting America?
Popular culture was changing and reflecting on America in many ways. Advertisers used television to sell products while “televangelists” like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Fulton J. Sheen used TV to preach the gospel and encourage religion. Sports shifted west, as the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants moved to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, in 1958. Elvis Presley, a white singer of the new “rock and roll” who made girls swoon with his fleshy face, pointing lips, and antic, sexually suggestive gyrations, that redefined popular music. Traditionalists were shocked by Elvis’s shockingly open sexuality, and Marilyn Monroe (in her Playboy magazine spread) continued in the redefinition of the new sensuous sexuality. Critics, such as David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd, William H. Whyte, Jr. in The Organization Man, and Sloan Wilson in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, lamented this new consumerist style. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith questioned the relation between private wealth and public good in The Affluent Society.
The Advent of Eisenhower
Know: Adlai E. Stevenson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Checkers Speech
3. Describe the 1952 presidential election.
In 1952, the Democrats chose Adlai E. Stevenson, the witty governor of Illinois, while Republicans rejected isolationist Robert A. Taft and instead chose World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president and anticommunist Richard M. Nixon to be his running mate. Grandfatherly Eisenhower was a war hero and liked by everyone, so he left the rough part of campaigning to Nixon, who attacked Stevenson as soft against communists, corrupt, and weak in the Korean situation. Nixon then almost got caught with a secretly financed “slush fund,” but to save his political career, he delivered his famous and touching “Checkers Speech.” In it, he denied wrongdoing and spoke of his family and specifically, his daughter’s cute little cocker spaniel, Checkers. He was forgiven in the public arena and stayed on as V.P.
The Rise and Fall of Joseph McCarthy
Know: Joseph McCarthy
4. Joseph McCarthy may have been more dangerous to our form of government than any communists who might have been in the country. Explain.
The success of brutal anticommunist “crusader” Joseph R. McCarthy was quite alarming, for after he had sprung onto the national scene by charging that Secretary of State Dean Acheson was knowingly employing 205 Communist Party members (a claim he never proved, not even for one person), he ruthlessly sought to prosecute and persecute suspected communists, often targeting innocent people and destroying families and lives.
Desegregating American Society
Know: Jim Crow Laws, Emmett Till, Jackie Robinson, NAACP, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr.
5. What conditions in the South brought about the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement?
Blacks in the South were bound by the severe Jim Crow laws that segregated every aspect of society, from schools to restrooms to restaurants and beyond. Only about 20% of the eligible blacks could vote, due to intimidation, discrimination, poll taxes, and other schemes meant to keep black suffrage down. Where the law proved sufficient to enforce such oppression, vigilante justice in the form of lynchings did the job, and the white murderers were rarely caught and convicted. However, with organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and their rulings such as the 1950 case of Sweatt v. Painter, where the Supreme Court ruled that separate professional schools for blacks failed to meet the test of equality, such protestors as Rosa Parks, who in December 1955, refused to give up a bus seat in the “whites only” section, and pacifist leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., who believed in peaceful methods of civil rights protests, blacks were making their suffering and discrimination known to the public.
Seeds of the Civil Rights Revolution
Know: Earl Warren, Brown v. Board of Education, All Deliberate Speed, Little Rock Central High School, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Sit-ins, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
6. Why was Brown v. Board of Education a landmark case?
The 1954 landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, reversed the previous 1896 ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson when the Brown case said that “separate but equal” facilities were inherently unequal. Under the Brown case, schools were ordered integrated. However, while the Border States usually obeyed this new ruling, states in the Deep South did everything they could to delay it and disobey it, diverting funds to private schools, signing a “Declaration of Constitutional Principles” that promised not to desegregate, and physically preventing blacks to integrate. Ten years after the ruling, fewer than 2% of eligible black students sat in the same classrooms as whites. Real integration of schools in the Deep South occurred around 1970.
Makers of America: The Great African-American Migration
7. Why did African Americans move north and west in the 1930's and 40's?
African Americans moved north and west in the 1930's and 1940's due to lack of jobs. There were not as many jobs due to the massive White Flight. After the caucasians who ran the major factories and jobs, the African Americans were left unemployed. They would follow the white folk across the Sunbelt to get their jobs back.
Eisenhower Republicanism at Home
Know: Dynamic Conservatism, Creeping Socialism, Interstate Highway Act, AFL-CIO
8. Did Eisenhower live up to his philosophy of dynamic conservatism?
Eisenhower came into the White House pledging a policy of “dynamic conservatism,” which stated that he would be liberal with people, but conservative with their money. Eisenhower also cracked down on illegal Mexican immigration that cut down on the success of the bracero program, by rounding up 1 million Mexicans and returning them to their native country in 1954. With Indians, though, Ike proposed ending the lenient FDR-style treatment toward Indians and reverting to a Dawes Severalty Act-style policy toward Native Americans. But due to protest and resistance, this was disbanded. However, Eisenhower kept many of the New Deal programs, since some, like Social Security and unemployment insurance, simply had to stay in the public’s mind. However, he did do some of the New Deal programs better, such as his backing of the Interstate Highway Act, which built 42,000 miles of interstate freeways. Still, Eisenhower only balanced the budget three times in his eight years of office, and in 1959, he incurred the biggest peacetime deficit in U.S. history up to that point.
A “New Look” in Foreign Policy
Know: John Foster Dulles, Strategic Air Command, Massive Retaliation, Military-industrial Complex
9. Was Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation effective? Explain.
Eisenhower had a "new look" on a policy of Massive Relatiation. Massive Reltaliation was the building up of our forces in the sky to scare the enemys. We created the Strategic Air Command (SAC). This was an airfleet of superbombers equipped with city-flattening nuclear bombs. These fearsome weapons would inflict "Massive Retaliation" on the enemy, and were also a great bang for the buck. Ike tried to thaw the Cold War by appealing for peace to new Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the 1955 Geneva Conference, but the Soviet leader rejected such proposals, along with one for “open skies.” However, hypocritically, when the Hungarians revolted against the U.S.S.R. and appealed to the U.S. for help, America did nothing, earning the scorn of bitter freedom fighters.
The Vietnam Nightmare Know: Ho Chi Minh, Dienbienphu, Ngo Dinh Diem, Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
10. How did the United States get involved in Vietnam?
In Vietnam, revolutionary Ho Chi Minh had tried to encourage Woodrow Wilson to help the Vietnamese against the French and gained some support from Wilson, but as Ho became increasingly communist, the U.S. began to oppose him. In March 1954, when the French became trapped at Dienbienphu, Eisenhower’s aides wanted to bomb the Viet Minh guerrilla forces, but Ike held back, fearing plunging the U.S. into another Asian war so soon after Korea. After the Vietnamese won at Dienbienphu, Vietnam was split at the 17th parallel, supposedly temporarily. Ho Chi Minh was supposed to allow free elections, but soon, Vietnam became clearly split between a communist north and a pro-Western south. Dienbienphu marks the start of American interest in Vietnam. Secretary Dulles created the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) to emulate NATO, but this provided little help.
Cold War Crises in Europe and the Middle East
Know: Shah of Iran, Gamal Abdel Nasser, The Suez Crisis, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Country
11. Why was the U.S. concerned about problems in the Middle East?
In 1953, to protect oil supplies in the Middle East, the CIA engineered a coup in Iran that installed the youthful shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, as ruler of the nation, protecting the oil for the time being, but earning the wrath of Arabs that would be repaid in the 70s. The Suez crisis was far messier: President Gamal Abdel Nasser, of Egypt, needed money to build a dam in the upper Nile and flirted openly with the Soviet side as well as the U.S. and Britain, and upon seeing this blatant communist association, Secretary of State Dulles dramatically withdrew his offer, thus forcing Nasser to nationalize the dam. Late in October 1956, Britain, France, and Israel suddenly attacked Egypt, thinking that the U.S. would supply them with needed oil, as had been the case in WWII, but Eisenhower did not, and the attackers had to withdraw. The Suez crisis marked the last time the U.S. could brandish its “oil weapon.” In 1960, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela joined to form the cartel Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC.
Round Two for "Ike"
Know: Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa, Landrum-Griffin Act, , Missile Gap, National Defense and Education Act
12. What labor problems became evident during Eisenhower's second term?
The 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act was designed to bring labor leaders to book for financial shenanigans and prevent bullying tactics. Anti-laborites forced into the bill bans against “secondary boycotts” and certain types of picketing.
The Continuing Cold War
Know: U-2 Spy Plane
13. Describe efforts at disarmament during the Eisenhower administration.
Humanity-minded scientists called for an end to atmospheric nuclear testing, lest future generations be deformed and mutated. Beginning October 1958, Washington did halt “dirty” testing, as did the U.S.S.R., but attempts to regularize such suspensions were unsuccessful. However, in 1959, Khrushchev was invited by Ike to America for talks, and when he arrived in New York, he immediately spoke of disarmament, but gave no means of how to do it. Later, at Camp David, talks did show upward signs, as the Soviet premier said that his ultimatum for the evacuation of Berlin would be extended indefinitely. However, at the Paris conference, Khrushchev came in angry that the U.S. had flown a U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory (in this U-2 incident, the plane had been shot down and Eisenhower embarrassingly took personal responsibility), and tensions immediately tightened again.
Cuba's Castroism Spells Communism
Know: Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro
14. Why was revolution in Cuba such a concern to America?
Latin American nations resented the United States’ giving billions of dollars to Europe compared to millions to Latin America, as well as the U.S.’s constant intervention (Guatemala, 1954), as well as its support of cold dictators who claimed to be fighting communism. In 1959, in Cuba, Fidel Castro overthrew U.S.-supported Fulgencio Batista, promptly denounced the Yankee imperialists, and began to take U.S. properties for a land-distribution program. When the U.S. cut off heavy U.S. imports of Cuban sugar, Castro confiscated more American property. In 1961, America broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. Khrushchev threatened to launch missiles at the U.S. if it attacked Cuba; meanwhile, America induced the Organization of American States to condemn communism in the Americas. Finally, Eisenhower proposed a “Marshall Plan” for Latin America, which gave $500 million to the area, but many Latin Americans felt that it was too little, too late.
Kennedy Challenges Nixon for the Presidency
Know: Richard Nixon, Kitchen Debate, John Kennedy, New Frontier
15. Was Nixon a good presidential candidate in 1960?
The Republicans chose Richard Nixon, gifted party leader to some, ruthless opportunist to others, in 1960 with Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as his running mate; while John F. Kennedy surprisingly won for the Democrats and had Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate. Kennedy was attacked because he was a Catholic presidential candidate, but defended himself and encouraged Catholics to vote for him. As it turned out, if he lost votes from the South due to his religion, he got them back from the North due to the staunch Catholics there. In four nationally televised debates, JFK held his own and looked more charismatic, perhaps helping him to win the election by a comfortable margin, becoming the youngest president elected (TR was younger after McKinley was assassinated).
An Old General Fades Away
Know: Alaska, Hawaii
16. Evaluate Eisenhower's presidency.
Eisenhower had his critics, but he was appreciated more and more for ending one war and keeping the U.S. out of others. Even though the 1951-passed 22nd Amendment had limited him to two terms as president, Ike displayed more vigor and controlled Congress during his second term than his first. In 1959, Alaska and Hawaii became the 49th and 50th states to join the Union. Perhaps Eisenhower’s greatest weakness was his ignorance of social problems of the time, preferring to smile them away rather than deal with them, even though he was no bigot.
The Life of the Mind in Postwar America
Know: Catch-22, Arthur Miller, Catcher in the Rye, George Orwell
17. What do the books and plays of the post-war period say about the times in which they were produced?
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Travels with Charlie showed that prewar writers could still be successful, but new writers, who, except for Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, spurned realism, were successful as well. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughter-House Five crackled with fantastic and psychedelic prose, satirizing the suffering of the war. Authors and books that explored problems created by the new mobility and affluence of American life: John Updike’s Rabbit, Run and Couples; John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal; Louis Auchincloss’s books, and Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge. The poetry of Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell (For the Union Dead), Sylvia Plath (Ariel and The Bell-Jar), Anne Sexton, and John Berryman reflected the twisted emotions of the war, but some poets were troubled in their own minds as well, often committing suicide or living miserable lives.
Know: IBM, Information Age, Ozzie and Harriet, The Feminine Mystique
1. What was life like for women in the 1950's? Life for women in the 1950's was changing drastically. Women appeared more and more in the workplace, despite the stereotypical role of women as housewives that was being portrayed on TV shows such as "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Leave it to Beaver." Women’s expansion into the workplace shocked some, but really wasn’t surprising if one observed the trends in history, and now,they were both housewives and workers. Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique was a best-seller and a classic of modern feminine protest literature. She’s the godmother of the feminist movement.
Consumer Culture in the Fifties
Know: Diner's Club, McDonald's, Disneyland, Television, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Playboy, The Affluent Society
2.How was popular culture changing and reflecting America?
Popular culture was changing and reflecting on America in many ways. Advertisers used television to sell products while “televangelists” like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Fulton J. Sheen used TV to preach the gospel and encourage religion. Sports shifted west, as the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants moved to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, in 1958. Elvis Presley, a white singer of the new “rock and roll” who made girls swoon with his fleshy face, pointing lips, and antic, sexually suggestive gyrations, that redefined popular music. Traditionalists were shocked by Elvis’s shockingly open sexuality, and Marilyn Monroe (in her Playboy magazine spread) continued in the redefinition of the new sensuous sexuality. Critics, such as David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd, William H. Whyte, Jr. in The Organization Man, and Sloan Wilson in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, lamented this new consumerist style. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith questioned the relation between private wealth and public good in The Affluent Society.
The Advent of Eisenhower
Know: Adlai E. Stevenson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Checkers Speech
3. Describe the 1952 presidential election.
In 1952, the Democrats chose Adlai E. Stevenson, the witty governor of Illinois, while Republicans rejected isolationist Robert A. Taft and instead chose World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president and anticommunist Richard M. Nixon to be his running mate. Grandfatherly Eisenhower was a war hero and liked by everyone, so he left the rough part of campaigning to Nixon, who attacked Stevenson as soft against communists, corrupt, and weak in the Korean situation. Nixon then almost got caught with a secretly financed “slush fund,” but to save his political career, he delivered his famous and touching “Checkers Speech.” In it, he denied wrongdoing and spoke of his family and specifically, his daughter’s cute little cocker spaniel, Checkers. He was forgiven in the public arena and stayed on as V.P.
The Rise and Fall of Joseph McCarthy
Know: Joseph McCarthy
4. Joseph McCarthy may have been more dangerous to our form of government than any communists who might have been in the country. Explain.
The success of brutal anticommunist “crusader” Joseph R. McCarthy was quite alarming, for after he had sprung onto the national scene by charging that Secretary of State Dean Acheson was knowingly employing 205 Communist Party members (a claim he never proved, not even for one person), he ruthlessly sought to prosecute and persecute suspected communists, often targeting innocent people and destroying families and lives.
Desegregating American Society
Know: Jim Crow Laws, Emmett Till, Jackie Robinson, NAACP, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King Jr.
5. What conditions in the South brought about the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement?
Blacks in the South were bound by the severe Jim Crow laws that segregated every aspect of society, from schools to restrooms to restaurants and beyond. Only about 20% of the eligible blacks could vote, due to intimidation, discrimination, poll taxes, and other schemes meant to keep black suffrage down. Where the law proved sufficient to enforce such oppression, vigilante justice in the form of lynchings did the job, and the white murderers were rarely caught and convicted. However, with organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and their rulings such as the 1950 case of Sweatt v. Painter, where the Supreme Court ruled that separate professional schools for blacks failed to meet the test of equality, such protestors as Rosa Parks, who in December 1955, refused to give up a bus seat in the “whites only” section, and pacifist leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., who believed in peaceful methods of civil rights protests, blacks were making their suffering and discrimination known to the public.
Seeds of the Civil Rights Revolution
Know: Earl Warren, Brown v. Board of Education, All Deliberate Speed, Little Rock Central High School, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Sit-ins, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
6. Why was Brown v. Board of Education a landmark case?
The 1954 landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, reversed the previous 1896 ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson when the Brown case said that “separate but equal” facilities were inherently unequal. Under the Brown case, schools were ordered integrated. However, while the Border States usually obeyed this new ruling, states in the Deep South did everything they could to delay it and disobey it, diverting funds to private schools, signing a “Declaration of Constitutional Principles” that promised not to desegregate, and physically preventing blacks to integrate. Ten years after the ruling, fewer than 2% of eligible black students sat in the same classrooms as whites. Real integration of schools in the Deep South occurred around 1970.
Makers of America: The Great African-American Migration
7. Why did African Americans move north and west in the 1930's and 40's?
African Americans moved north and west in the 1930's and 1940's due to lack of jobs. There were not as many jobs due to the massive White Flight. After the caucasians who ran the major factories and jobs, the African Americans were left unemployed. They would follow the white folk across the Sunbelt to get their jobs back.
Eisenhower Republicanism at Home
Know: Dynamic Conservatism, Creeping Socialism, Interstate Highway Act, AFL-CIO
8. Did Eisenhower live up to his philosophy of dynamic conservatism?
Eisenhower came into the White House pledging a policy of “dynamic conservatism,” which stated that he would be liberal with people, but conservative with their money. Eisenhower also cracked down on illegal Mexican immigration that cut down on the success of the bracero program, by rounding up 1 million Mexicans and returning them to their native country in 1954. With Indians, though, Ike proposed ending the lenient FDR-style treatment toward Indians and reverting to a Dawes Severalty Act-style policy toward Native Americans. But due to protest and resistance, this was disbanded. However, Eisenhower kept many of the New Deal programs, since some, like Social Security and unemployment insurance, simply had to stay in the public’s mind. However, he did do some of the New Deal programs better, such as his backing of the Interstate Highway Act, which built 42,000 miles of interstate freeways. Still, Eisenhower only balanced the budget three times in his eight years of office, and in 1959, he incurred the biggest peacetime deficit in U.S. history up to that point.
A “New Look” in Foreign Policy
Know: John Foster Dulles, Strategic Air Command, Massive Retaliation, Military-industrial Complex
9. Was Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation effective? Explain.
Eisenhower had a "new look" on a policy of Massive Relatiation. Massive Reltaliation was the building up of our forces in the sky to scare the enemys. We created the Strategic Air Command (SAC). This was an airfleet of superbombers equipped with city-flattening nuclear bombs. These fearsome weapons would inflict "Massive Retaliation" on the enemy, and were also a great bang for the buck. Ike tried to thaw the Cold War by appealing for peace to new Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the 1955 Geneva Conference, but the Soviet leader rejected such proposals, along with one for “open skies.” However, hypocritically, when the Hungarians revolted against the U.S.S.R. and appealed to the U.S. for help, America did nothing, earning the scorn of bitter freedom fighters.
The Vietnam Nightmare Know: Ho Chi Minh, Dienbienphu, Ngo Dinh Diem, Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
10. How did the United States get involved in Vietnam?
In Vietnam, revolutionary Ho Chi Minh had tried to encourage Woodrow Wilson to help the Vietnamese against the French and gained some support from Wilson, but as Ho became increasingly communist, the U.S. began to oppose him. In March 1954, when the French became trapped at Dienbienphu, Eisenhower’s aides wanted to bomb the Viet Minh guerrilla forces, but Ike held back, fearing plunging the U.S. into another Asian war so soon after Korea. After the Vietnamese won at Dienbienphu, Vietnam was split at the 17th parallel, supposedly temporarily. Ho Chi Minh was supposed to allow free elections, but soon, Vietnam became clearly split between a communist north and a pro-Western south. Dienbienphu marks the start of American interest in Vietnam. Secretary Dulles created the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) to emulate NATO, but this provided little help.
Cold War Crises in Europe and the Middle East
Know: Shah of Iran, Gamal Abdel Nasser, The Suez Crisis, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Country
11. Why was the U.S. concerned about problems in the Middle East?
In 1953, to protect oil supplies in the Middle East, the CIA engineered a coup in Iran that installed the youthful shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, as ruler of the nation, protecting the oil for the time being, but earning the wrath of Arabs that would be repaid in the 70s. The Suez crisis was far messier: President Gamal Abdel Nasser, of Egypt, needed money to build a dam in the upper Nile and flirted openly with the Soviet side as well as the U.S. and Britain, and upon seeing this blatant communist association, Secretary of State Dulles dramatically withdrew his offer, thus forcing Nasser to nationalize the dam. Late in October 1956, Britain, France, and Israel suddenly attacked Egypt, thinking that the U.S. would supply them with needed oil, as had been the case in WWII, but Eisenhower did not, and the attackers had to withdraw. The Suez crisis marked the last time the U.S. could brandish its “oil weapon.” In 1960, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela joined to form the cartel Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC.
Round Two for "Ike"
Know: Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa, Landrum-Griffin Act, , Missile Gap, National Defense and Education Act
12. What labor problems became evident during Eisenhower's second term?
The 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act was designed to bring labor leaders to book for financial shenanigans and prevent bullying tactics. Anti-laborites forced into the bill bans against “secondary boycotts” and certain types of picketing.
The Continuing Cold War
Know: U-2 Spy Plane
13. Describe efforts at disarmament during the Eisenhower administration.
Humanity-minded scientists called for an end to atmospheric nuclear testing, lest future generations be deformed and mutated. Beginning October 1958, Washington did halt “dirty” testing, as did the U.S.S.R., but attempts to regularize such suspensions were unsuccessful. However, in 1959, Khrushchev was invited by Ike to America for talks, and when he arrived in New York, he immediately spoke of disarmament, but gave no means of how to do it. Later, at Camp David, talks did show upward signs, as the Soviet premier said that his ultimatum for the evacuation of Berlin would be extended indefinitely. However, at the Paris conference, Khrushchev came in angry that the U.S. had flown a U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory (in this U-2 incident, the plane had been shot down and Eisenhower embarrassingly took personal responsibility), and tensions immediately tightened again.
Cuba's Castroism Spells Communism
Know: Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro
14. Why was revolution in Cuba such a concern to America?
Latin American nations resented the United States’ giving billions of dollars to Europe compared to millions to Latin America, as well as the U.S.’s constant intervention (Guatemala, 1954), as well as its support of cold dictators who claimed to be fighting communism. In 1959, in Cuba, Fidel Castro overthrew U.S.-supported Fulgencio Batista, promptly denounced the Yankee imperialists, and began to take U.S. properties for a land-distribution program. When the U.S. cut off heavy U.S. imports of Cuban sugar, Castro confiscated more American property. In 1961, America broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. Khrushchev threatened to launch missiles at the U.S. if it attacked Cuba; meanwhile, America induced the Organization of American States to condemn communism in the Americas. Finally, Eisenhower proposed a “Marshall Plan” for Latin America, which gave $500 million to the area, but many Latin Americans felt that it was too little, too late.
Kennedy Challenges Nixon for the Presidency
Know: Richard Nixon, Kitchen Debate, John Kennedy, New Frontier
15. Was Nixon a good presidential candidate in 1960?
The Republicans chose Richard Nixon, gifted party leader to some, ruthless opportunist to others, in 1960 with Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as his running mate; while John F. Kennedy surprisingly won for the Democrats and had Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate. Kennedy was attacked because he was a Catholic presidential candidate, but defended himself and encouraged Catholics to vote for him. As it turned out, if he lost votes from the South due to his religion, he got them back from the North due to the staunch Catholics there. In four nationally televised debates, JFK held his own and looked more charismatic, perhaps helping him to win the election by a comfortable margin, becoming the youngest president elected (TR was younger after McKinley was assassinated).
An Old General Fades Away
Know: Alaska, Hawaii
16. Evaluate Eisenhower's presidency.
Eisenhower had his critics, but he was appreciated more and more for ending one war and keeping the U.S. out of others. Even though the 1951-passed 22nd Amendment had limited him to two terms as president, Ike displayed more vigor and controlled Congress during his second term than his first. In 1959, Alaska and Hawaii became the 49th and 50th states to join the Union. Perhaps Eisenhower’s greatest weakness was his ignorance of social problems of the time, preferring to smile them away rather than deal with them, even though he was no bigot.
The Life of the Mind in Postwar America
Know: Catch-22, Arthur Miller, Catcher in the Rye, George Orwell
17. What do the books and plays of the post-war period say about the times in which they were produced?
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Travels with Charlie showed that prewar writers could still be successful, but new writers, who, except for Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, spurned realism, were successful as well. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughter-House Five crackled with fantastic and psychedelic prose, satirizing the suffering of the war. Authors and books that explored problems created by the new mobility and affluence of American life: John Updike’s Rabbit, Run and Couples; John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal; Louis Auchincloss’s books, and Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge. The poetry of Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell (For the Union Dead), Sylvia Plath (Ariel and The Bell-Jar), Anne Sexton, and John Berryman reflected the twisted emotions of the war, but some poets were troubled in their own minds as well, often committing suicide or living miserable lives.