Aug 15, 2022

Article #4 in a Series >>>>> Subject Area Reference Documents for Teachers and Students in the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>> American and United States History

Article # 4

 

American and United States History          

                                                

I.  Evolution of Native American Cultures

 

About 17,000 years ago, with the world at the height of its last Ice Age, an icy bridge across today’s Bering Strait served as the conduit for people following their game herds from Siberia into Alaska.  From there, they trekked southward to the Rocky Mountains by about 10,000 years ago and from the Rockies moved eastward to the Atlantic coast.  These peoples fashioned bows and arrows, war clubs, and spears from wood and stone;  with the wooly mammoth extinct as they were in the midst of their migrations across the plains and prairies of the upper West and Midwest, they hunted small game, deer, moose,  and the American bison (buffalo).  By about 1500 B. C. (CE), some of these hunter-gatherers learned to cultivate crops on land along rivers, settling into small villages and developing distinct cultures.

 

The Aleut of southwestern Alaska lived in sod houses, going forth to fish and hunt wildlife, including sea mammals;  women used an original two-strand twining technique to weave clothes and blankets.  The Inuit people spread out from southeastern Alaska to Greenland, hunting whale, seal, and caribou;  in response to their Arctic climate, they built ice igloos, constructed the versatile kayak, and wore footwear highly adapted to ice and snow. 

 

The Ottawa people originally lived north of the Great Lakes before moving to an inlet (Georgia Bay) of Lake Huron in southeastern Ontario.  The Huron people also lived in Ontario, as did a portion of the Iroquois confederacy (comprised of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca);  the Iroquois  also settled in today’s Quebec Province and New York State.  The Narragansett people constructed their wigwams (domed houses with sapling frames covered with bark and deerskin) in Rhode Island.  

 

Arapaho, Blackfoot, Comanche, Cree, Crow, and Flathead tribes lived and hunted in various areas of the Great Plains;  the Cree also lived in the woodlands along and north of today’s Canadian border.  To the northwest (today’s Idaho, Oregon, and Washington) lived the Nez Perce, while across the expanses of today’s Midwest lived Cheyenne, Dakota, Kickapoo, Ojibwe, Osage, and Shawnee. 

 

The Cherokee were skillful farmers who lived in the southern Allegheny Mountains of Alabama, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee.  The Delaware built their rectangular, bark-covered houses in the woodlands areas extending from the Atlantic.  The Miami also were an Eastern Woodlands people who burned forest land to clear fields and control brush to abet their agricultural economy;  they also, though, hunted buffalo (unusual for those living so far east).  The Shawnee lived in Kentucky and West Virginia after being pushed southeastward from Ohio. 

 

The eight clans of the Seminole lived in Florida.  The Chickasaw hunted panther, deer, bear, beaver, and otter in northern Mississippi;  males distinctively shaved both sides of the head, leaving a central crest.  In other areas stretching across the American South were Natchez, Choctaw, and Creek, the latter composed of 50 distinct bands.  The Kiowa were a highly mobile people, based in Oklahoma but roaming and raiding far enough to bring back parrots and monkeys from South America.  In the American Southwest lived Apache, Hopi, Navaho, and Utes.  The Yaqui were ardent warriors dominating northern and northwestern Mexico.

 

Native American societies responded to their natural environments and local circumstances of life in ways that produced a variety of cultural traits, economic activities, and artistic expressions. 

 

The Iroquois used wampum, belts or strings with knots and beaded designs serving as mnemonic aids for chroniclers of stories and legends;   wampum also served as currency and as a unit of measure.  Pueblo tribes crafted items associated with kachina dancers, including masks that the dancers wore and dolls representing the dancers themselves;  they also produced turquois and shell jewelry and exquisite pots.  In a fascinating practice comparable to those of Tibetan Buddhists, the Navajo created colorful sand paintings from sand, charcoal, cornmeal, and pollen to depict religious symbols and to create a sense of spiritual reverence---  then, as comment on the evanescence of physical existence and material objects, they scattered the coloring agents back into nature.  

 

Native American groups made logically adaptive decisions in matters of diet, physical security, and economy.  The Inuit (Eskimo) cured and stored meat and fish for the winter.  Tribes of the Pacific Northwest fished from 50-foot long dugout canoes that were perfect for seafaring.  The Eastern Woodlands people used hoes and digging sticks to work fields productive of maize and tobacco.  The Dakota and other Plains people adroitly whipped up a stampede among buffalo and drove these over cliffs.  Many peoples of the American Southwest ground acorns into flour that they made into dough, which they flattened and placed on heated stones for producing wafer-thin bread.

 

Certain concepts and practices undergirded most Native American belief systems, while others were highly distinctive to particular groups.  Most Native American groups gave high status to a shaman who was perceived to mediate between human beings and the gods, spirits, and souls of the dead.  The special powers of the shamans were often associated with a striking physical appearance, including features that we today think of as being those of the handicapped or disfigured.  The shaman would typically acquire dramatic insight while suffering a physical ordeal and drifting into a trance.  Realization of her or his powers would come with the sensation of leaving the body to soar through the realms of the gods and the dead.  The shaman was many things to her or his people:  spirit medium, mystic seer, wise sage, eloquent poet.  The shaman was also a physician who could both apply curative herbs and oust an offending spirit. Curing disease by expelling a malevolent spirit would involve an emotional array of activities:  swaying, drumming, chanting, sighing, groaning, and laughing hysterically---  with the emotional state deepening and the sound rising as the healing rite moved through successive stages.

 

Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest told tales of land and sea, bear and salmon, military victories and dramatic historical events.  Clan-based totemic societies formed to express the mystic  relationship between one’s group and an emblematic  figure.  The clan’s legends and history would be told by masked dancers or master storytellers among the elders.  Totemic societies performed rites  venerating the Sun, Moon, Sky Being, and Creator (in the form of a Trickster Raven). 

             

The Cree people venerated spirits associated with the hunt, and they revered an Earth Goddess who gave life and maternal attention to all animals.  Generations past, present, and future existed in close association:  The souls of the ancestors lingered in close proximity to their living descendants.  Legends featuring talking animals and the Four Directions gave testimony to Cree belief in the unity of Nature.

 

The Inuit (Eskimo) conveyed myths of the whale, the walrus, mysterious ghosts, and fantastic creatures.  During long winter months, the Inuit would often sit waiting for caribou, or they would situate themselves by blowholes for hunting fish or seal;  such scenarios could animate imaginations productive of wondrous spirits and startling occurrences.  Sitting and peering into the winter sky, the Inuit would see family and friends in the aurora borealis (Northern Lights) dancing in a realm beyond Earth, the life to come.

 

Native Americans on the Great Plains revered the Spirit of the Buffalo and the Earth Mother.  Men organized themselves into ritual societies that prepared them and sustained them in the activities of governance, war, and hunting.  Frequently under the counsel of a spirit guide, young people would come of age with a Vision Quest in which they would dwell under conditions of fasting and physical seclusion, productive of dream-states giving insights into their future life missions and roles in family and society.

 

The Iroquois believed in an impressive but remote “All Father” who dwelled in every aspect of  Nature.  Spirits in the natural world were thought to be more active in daily life and in annual events, controlling the seasons and animating major festivals associated with the agricultural calendar.

 

Pueblo people sat atop mesas, the rocky tableland of the American Southwest, peering into a world in which visionary beings brought the blessings of life and received love and veneration in return.  Native Americans living in Pueblo communities told tales from a vast assortment of myths conveying the relationship between humankind and the plants and animals of the Natural World.

 

Among those Native Americans dwelling and farming in the American South, the Natchez were notable for belief in a Sacred King.  Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws told tales of a Trickster Spirit, a personified Rabbit, and the origins of tobacco and maize.

 

In the American Southwest, shamans communicated intensely with gods, ancestors, and the spirits of Maize, Rainbow, Sun, and Thunder.  Around communal fires, storytellers told of dramatic events associated with the hunt and the experiences of the ancestors.  Boys at eleven or twelve years of age typically went on the Vision Quest.

 

The Native American peoples were the first inhabitants of what we now call the United States.  Their logical rhythms of life, intimate connections to nature and ancestors, and rational economic responses to environmental circumstances were severely disrupted by the arrival of Spaniards, British and French in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries.  

 

II.  Arrival and Colonial Settlement of Europeans

 

Between 1492 and 1630, the explorers Columbus, Dias, Da Gama, Magellan, Cabot, Frobisher, Cartier, Ribault,  Cortez, Pizarro, De Leon, De Vaca, Coronado, De Soto, Hudson, and Champlain arrived, explored, and created pathways for others to follow to what we now call the United States;  and the Spaniards explored and established settlements in the areas now covered by Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California.

 

As the Spaniards went busily about governing Florida and the great expanses of the American Southwest under their control, the British established settlements all along the Atlantic coast:  Virginia (1607), Massachusetts Bay (1620), New Hampshire (1623), Maryland (1634), Connecticut (1636), Rhode Island (1636), Delaware (1638), North Carolina (1663), South Carolina (1663), New York (1664), New Jersey (1665), Pennsylvania (1681), and Georgia (1732).  

 

The London Company founded Great Britain’s first permanent colony along the Atlantic seaboard in Virginia.  On 6 May 1607, three ships carrying 100 men arrived at Chesapeake Bay, moving inland 40 miles to erect a fort, thatched huts, as storehouse, and a church.  Tales of the Americas providing abundant sources of gold had impelled these settlers on their journey.  When they did not find the gold for which they sought, there was a period of dissolution in which their lack of woodland skills (many of these people were aristocrats who had little experience in fishing, hunting or farming) left them hungry, languid, and demoralized.   The Captain John Smith projected himself as leader and laid down the law that “he that will not work will not eat.”  Jamestown survived largely because Smith cultivated good trading relations with the indigenous Powhatan group and roused the community for economically productive activity, including cultivation of maize in the manner taught them by those native to the area.

 

In 1620 a Separatist group of Protestants who became known as the Puritans, seeking to escape the dictates of the Church of England, journeyed from England via Holland aboard the Mayflower across the Atlantic with Virginia as destination.  These Pilgrims (as they are also known as religious journeyers to North America) were blown off course, landing at Cape Cod and coming ashore in Plymouth Harbor at a site known as Plymouth Rock.  In the absence of any official governmental jurisdiction, forty-one of these men on 21 November 1621 signed the Mayflower Compact, a formal agreement to abide by laws as established by their leaders.  At first suffering terribly from exposure and disease, survival again came on the strength of skills in maize cultivation taught to them by the indigenous peoples, in this case the Wampanoag (Narragansett) group.  A member of this group by the name of Squanto has loomed particularly large among those Native Americans given credit for friendship and instruction rendered to the Pilgrims. 

 

In spring 1630 John Winthrop led six boatloads of settlers ashore to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony and before year’s end he welcomed voyagers aboard 17 other boats to the colony for which he served as governor.  Winthrop himself had traveled aboard the Anabella and while aboard that craft had delivered a ringing sermon proclaiming that he and his fellow Puritans would build a “a shining city on a hill” that would do God’s work on earth.  Winthrop did in fact lead a theocracy in the quest to cleanse the Church of England of the last vestiges of Catholicism.

 

But some were not enamored with the Puritan brand of Protestantism.  One member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Roger Williams recoiled at the fact that land had been taken from Native Americans without compensation;  and he objected to the rigid conformity imposed by Winthrop and his fellow theocrats.  He readily moved on when invited to leave in 1635, trekking to Narragansett Bay to found Providence upon land for which the indigenous people of the area were given fair return. This became the colony of Rhode Island, the first among the original thirteen to legislate religious freedom.   This sort of freedom in Rhode Island became a study in contrasts when zealous Puritans in Massachusetts executed four young women in the aftermath of the Salem Witchcraft Trials. 

 

In 1663 Charles II, the reigning monarch in the aftermath of the English Civil War, granted the Carolinas to eight lord proprietors;  in 1669 he sent forth three ships with a total of 100 settlers that arrived in at coastal South Carolina.  They moved several miles along the Ashley River to a site they dubbed Charles Town (later Charleston).  The community shifted downstream to Oyster Point, overlooking Charleston Harbor, in 1680, and in 1719 the colony reverted from proprietorship to direct control by the royal court.  Originally governed in common, the territory was thereafter divided into the two separate colonies of North Carolina and South Carolina.

 

In 1681 William Penn endeavored to claim and lead an area to which his father had been granted proprietary rights.  Penn was an energetic and religiously motivated leader who circulated advertisements that attracted 1,000 English settlers to join a population that already included  settlers from the Netherlands and Sweden.  Arriving himself aboard a ship with 100 settlers, Penn established Philadelphia (“City of Brotherly Love”) at the confluence of Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers.  In 1682 the Charles II granted control of Delaware to Penn, which had functioned effectively as a colony since 1636.  Under the leadership of Penn and his fellow Quakers, both Pennsylvania and Delaware were known for religious tolerance, ethical governance, and good relations with the indigenous people.

 

General James E. Oglethorpe governed the last colony established, Georgia (1733, granted to 21 proprietors), as a philanthropic experiment that began with 120 colonists who had been impoverished, persecuted, and formerly imprisoned.  The colony was centered on Savannah, near the mouth of a river given the same name.  That location made Georgia a buffer against the territorial ambitions of the Spaniards.

 

Such a buffer recognized the reality of competition among European powers on North American soil.  Queen Anne’s War (1701-1713) was one of those extended, multi-participant, territorially extensive wars in which aspiring imperialists worked out their ambitions in violent conflict.  In 1702, forces out of Charleston (assisted by Yemassee and Creek Native American contingents) successfully attacked the first permanent European fort in North America, St. Augustine, destroying this hallmark of Spanish rule in Florida.   The French and their own Native American supporters raided villages from Maine to Massachusetts in 1704, sacking several in the latter state.  The British struck back and secured, according to the terms of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, recognition of their sovereignty over Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, St. Christopher, Acadia (later Nova Scotia)---  and the Iroquois Confederacy.  

 

But ambitions near the Canadian border did not abate.  In King George’s War (1744-1748), Massachusetts Governor William Pepperell superintended victory over the French at Fort Louisbourg on Cape Breton, but the war ended in a stalemate.  What’s more, agreed in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), the British to return Fort Louisbourg in exchange for Madras, the city on the coast of India that had been taken by the French.

 

Then, in the North American manifestation of the Seven Years’ War, the French and Indian War (1755-1763), French and British forces once again squared off, this time in competition over the Ohio Valley.  The French captured Forts Oswego, George, and Ticonderoga, but then in succession they lost Forts Louisbourg, Frontenac, and Duquesne.  But most momentously, and at the same time that the war against the British in India also was going badly for the French, James Wolfe moved on the forces of General Louis Joseph de Montcalm in Quebec  and after five days of fighting capture Quebec.  By the Treaty of Paris (1763), the French ceded almost all North American and Indian territory to the British, a dramatic event that forever changed the course of history in the United States, Canada, and India.

 

On the cusp of the American revolution, a national identity was forming,  Three contending social forces are notable:

 

The first force was religiosity.  Many people who came to the Atlantic coast were deeply religious.  By the 18th century, pious Americans bristled at the manner in which worldliness and materialism were encroaching on religiosity.  The pious struck back in the Great Awakening, the spirit of which is captured in the classic Jonathon Edwards sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.’     

The Great Awakening shook the religious establishment and rattled the barons of secular society, resulting in depleted old orders and giving rise to new denominations:  Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist.

 

The second force was rugged frontier individualism.  Living far from European homelands that included not only British but Dutch, German, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Swiss, French, Danish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Bohemian (Czech), and Polish national origins;  these people sought freedom to go where they wanted to go, worship as they wanted to worship, and work in the jobs that could maximize their personal and familial fortunes. 

 

The third force was the spirit of the Enlightenment, that great age of science and reason that found experimental ground on the soil of the emerging young nation.  As that young nation incubated over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, John Winthrop, Jr. (1606-1676), a member of the Royal Society (an association of the scientifically inclined, based in London), brought the first telescope to the colonies.  John Winthrop IV (1714-1779) introduced calculus to the colonies and emerged himself in astronomy, geology, chemistry, and electricity.

 

The latter subject was famously an interest of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1793), who identified the lightning force of nature with electricity in his famous kite experiments (1751).  Franklin was by trade a printer, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanac.  He also established  a library, founded a fire department, founded the University of Pennsylvania, and founded a debating society that in time became the American Philosophical Society.  Franklin brought all of his intellectual acumen to assemblages convened to consider the break with Great Britain and to construct a government when that step had been taken.

 

The construction of a governmental and societal framework for the United States was one of the most audacious experiments of the Enlightenment, with the new nation serving as a testing ground for the ideas of political philosophers Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.  As Benjamin Franklin entered the productive final decades of his fully-lived life, the forces of religiosity, individualism, and Enlightenment would blend and contend in the upstart United States of America.   

 

 

III.  American Revolution and National Independence

 

Military victory entails costs in people and currency.  The French and Indian War was costly, and inasmuch as this was just one geographic manifestation of the global Seven Years’ War, all sides paid dearly in both wa ys.  British national debt doubled during in the course of 1755-1763:  George III had bills to pay, so he turned to the colonies via the British Parliament.   Five acts of that legislative body raised high the ire of the colonists:  Proclamation of 1763, forbidding colonists to settle west of the Appalachian Mountains;  Revenue Act of 1764, identifying revenue gathering as the main purpose of the colonies;   Currency Act of 1764, criminalizing the printing of paper currency in the colonies;   Quartering Act of 1765, requiring the colonists to quarter (house) and feed British troops as needed;  Stamp Act of 1765, imposing a tax on all printed goods.

 

The latter act affected powerful colonists working in paper-heavy professions:  lawyers, publishers, merchants, shopkeepers, estate owners, speculators, and tavern-keepers.  They resented the monetary imposition, which required payment in gold and silver.  And they further bristled at trials being made exclusive to vice-admiralty courts---  without benefit of juries.

 

These acts impelled colonist to boycott British products:  They eschewed tea in favor of sage and sassafras brews;  they wore homespun garments in patriotic pride.  In October 1765, a Stamp Act Congress convened in New York, with colonial delegates formulating a moderate message to the British government.  In Resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress, delegates expressed loyalty to British government and institutions but explained in very measured terms the unacceptability of being taxed by a body that offered them no representation.

 

Parliament did rescind the Stamp Act in 1766 but then passed the Declaratory Act reasserting absolute supremacy over all matters pertinent to colonial governance.  Then during May and June 1765, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts suspending the New York Assembly pending full compliance with the Quartering Act;  placing taxes on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea;  and creating a Board of Customs Commissioners in Boston to curtail smuggling;  and adding four of the already despised Vice-Admiralty Courts.  In response, colonists continued their boycott and eagerly embraced the message in John Dickenson’s Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer (1767) conveying acceptance of Parliaments’ right to regulate commerce but strenuously objecting to the levying of taxes on colonists to boost the coffers of the British government.

 

In Boston, the situation grew increasingly tense.  Among a citizenry reliant on trade, resentments ran deep.  In May 1768, a crowd attempted to prevent customs agents from seizing John Hancock’s ship, the Liberty.  Agents requested troops for their protection, and the following September two regiments of British troops (Redcoats) arrived alongside foreign mercenaries for encampment on Boston Commons.  Time passed.  Tensions rose further.  On 5 March 1770, a Bostonian mob began taunting sentries outside the customs office in Boston.  In panic, soldiers fired, killing five colonists and wounding six in an incident that was prompt dubbed the “Boston Massacre.”

 

The colonial population stood at two million in 1770.  The colonists were dependent on the export of raw materials and importation of manufactured goods.  But acts of Parliament increasingly favored British imports until the colonists were limited to those good alone, curtailing free trade and economic liberty.  Trade restrictions and the economic pain felt from increased taxes energized a movement toward colonial revolt.

 

In the incident known as the Boston Tea Party (December 1773), a group of Bostonians in Native American dress dumped a shipment of East India Company Tea into the sea.  British authorities closed the port and imposed what colonists dubbed the “Intolerable Acts,” restricting self-governance in Massachusetts.  Fifty-five delegates from all of the colonies but Rhode Island met as the First Continental Congress on 5 September 1774, calling for rescission of all offensive legislation since 1763, protesting punishment of Massachusetts, vowing to continue collection of taxes but without payment until repeal of the objectionable acts, and advocating the assemblage of arms for colonial defense.  In a draft of the Declaration of American Rights, delegates affirmed Parliament’s authority to regulate commerce but rejected the imposition of taxes.  George III considered colonial convening of the Congress and issuance of the Declaration to constitute a state of rebellion.

 

With the incidents of Lexington and Concord (April 1775), the “Shot Heard Round the World” projected colonists toward war.  But the Second Continental Congress (May 1775), Battle of Bunker Hill (June 1775), Olive Branch Petition (July 1775), and Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (July 1775) ensued without a formal declaration f war.  Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense (January 1776)  though, stirred patriotic emotions.  Fellow revolutionaries prevailed upon Thomas Jefferson to author the Declaration of Independence, which delegates reconvening in the Second Continental Congress approved on 4 July 1776. 

 

Jefferson’s exposition restated John Locke’s compact theory of government as a social contract necessitating recognition of citizen prerogatives, which Jefferson formulated as the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (the last right altering Locke’s ”life, liberty, and property”).  Jefferson outlined the oppressive acts of the British that had impelled colonists toward rebellion.  In making these assertions, Jefferson set a new precedent for asserting the right of people to disavow allegiance to monarchical authority and establish a new and different form of government. 

 

But though the revolutionary sentiment was widespread, not all colonists supported the revolutionary cause.  Those preferring continuance of British rule became “Loyalists,” as opposed to “Patriots” supporting revolution.  Loyalists typically clustered in seaports.  They included governors, judges, and royal officials whose livelihood depended on the British government.  Merchants who were not greatly affected by taxes and trade restrictions might remain supportive of British rule.  Owners of large plantations had to think hard about a Patriot versus Loyalist stance:  They sold agricultural raw materials to British buyers, making a Loyalist stance appealing;  but they also owed debts from which they could gain relief as Patriots.  Backwoods folks tended toward the conservative Loyalist position.

 

But Patriot sentiment dominated and prevailed.  When war ended at Yorktown in 1781, the United States of America effectively took its place among the nations of the world, a status made official by the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

 

IV.  The First Half-Century of the United States as a Practicum for Enlightenment Thought

 

The Framing of a Constitution as a Firm Guide to Centralized National Governance

 

John Dickenson and a committee appointed by members of the Second Continental Congress (1775) took the first crack at devising a constitution for the new nation.  Their product was less than stellar.  Approved in 1781, the Articles of Confederation created a governmental framework whereby a unicameral legislature assumed authority for foreign diplomacy but did not have power over foreign trade, interstate commerce, or taxation.  Each of the thirteen states were considered sovereign and independent.  The national government had no dependable source of revenue, dependent upon voluntary contributions from the states.  The nation had no president or single figure of wide-ranging authority:  An Executive Committee took responsibility for superintending the national government and elected a chairperson to take the lead.

 

The greatest centralizer in the early years of the United States, Alexander Hamilton, knew that this document could never stand as a guide for national governance.  He called delegates from five states together in Annapolis, Maryland, in September 1786;  this group then prevailed upon a very willing Congress to call a convention for revising the Articles.  But goal view of Hamilton and other centralizers was not revision but creation:  They advocated for writing an entirely new constitution that could serve as a viable guide to national governance.

                   

Thus it was that delegates to the Constitutional Convention (May-September 1787) deliberated on the basis of Hamilton’s advocacy:  They would be creating a new constitution.   James Madison wrote the document, adroitly balancing concerns about popular participation versus mob rule;  the relative power of states with large versus those will small populations; and the role of the national government versus states’ roles in taxation.  Madison’s Constitution of the United States of America was based on Montesquieu’s principle, “separation of powers,” so that executive, legislative, and judicial branches had certain “checks and balances” on each other.  The thirteen states acted quickly to ratify the Constitution in late 1787, and the new supreme law of the land went into effect in 1789. 

 

Alexander Hamilton served as the first Secretary of the Treasury, the department of the executive branch given authority over national financial matters in the United States Constitution.  Congress passed his proposal to fund the prevailing $54 million in federal debt and to assume the $21 million in state debt;  to establish an excise tax on distilled liquor, setting a precedent for federal (national) revenue-generating tax collection;  and the creation of a national bank to abet the payment of national financial obligations and to facilitate any borrowing necessary in meeting the exigencies of the national budget.

 

In 1791, the first ten amendments to the Constitution were made;  known as the Bill of Rights, these amendments protect freedom of speech, press, and religion;  guard against unreasonable search and seizure;  and provide for right to counsel and trial by jury. 

 

The last echoes of the Articles of Confederation reverberated with an assertion of states’ rights, now in the context of a much more powerful national government:  The Tenth Amendment states that, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the States respectively, and to the people.”

 

But then, twelve years later, came an opinion of the Supreme Court that swung the focus back on the importance of the central government and the Constitution of the United States as the supreme law of the entire nation, to be contravened neither by laws passed by state legislatures nor by the United States Congress:

 

So it was that in 1803 Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the main opinion in Marbury v. Madison that strengthened the role of the central governmental and the power of his court to interpret the Constitution.  This meant that justices of the Supreme Court must have authority to nullify any acts passed by Congress that run contrary to the Constitution as supreme law of the land:

 

It is a proposition too plain to be contested, that the Constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it;  or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it.

 

If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the constitution is not law:  If the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable…

 

Certainly all those who have framed written constitutions contemplate them as forming the fundamental and paramount law of the nation, and consequently, the theory of every such government must be that an act of the legislature, repugnant to the constitution, is void.  

 

Thus, the particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the Constitution is void;  and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument.

 

Centralization and Party Politics in the First Presidential Elections

 

The degree of centralization in the national government was a key issue in the first presidential elections of the United States.  George Washington, who was elected first president in 1789, belonged to no party and distrusted the very idea of political parties, but when his vice-president (John Adams) ran for president in 1796 he ran as a Federalist.  Federalists favored a strong central government, while Anti-Federalists touted states’ rights.  Adams won the presidency in 1800 but lost in 1804 to Thomas Jefferson. 

 

Jefferson ran as a Democrat-Republican, which incorporated Anti-Federalists into their ranks and counseled caution in going too far with centralization.  In office, though, Jefferson was vigorous in asserting the national interest in territorial expansion, overseeing the Louisiana Purchase in April 1803;  and sending Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the vast region of the United States beyond the Mississippi River to the Pacific Northwest during 1804-1806.  Recent accounts of the Lewis and Clark Expedition have emphasized that in doing this they obtained considerable assistance from Sacajawea, a Shoshone woman who served as liaison and interpreter when they crossed the territory of various Native American groups, guiding them through present-day North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.

 

So by the early 19th century the most important national issues required more nuanced views concerning the prerogatives of the national government versus those of the states.  The Federalists accomplished much in establishing the foundations for a strong central government with finances handled via a Central Bank;  but they never won another national election after 1796, although they did run against Democrat-Republican candidates in 1800, 1804, 1808, 1812, and 1816.  The Federalists lost respectively to Thomas Jefferson (in 1800 and 1804), James Madison (1808 and 1812), and James Monroe (1816).  

 

The elections of 1820 and 1824 were entirely intraparty competitions among fellow Democrat-Republicans, won respectively by James Monroe and John Quincy Adams.  Then in 1828 Andrew Jackson won the presidency under the banner of a party that called itself simply Democrat.   Jackson defeated John Quincy Adams, the person for whom he had served as vice-president;  Adams, who had been a Democrat-Republican as president, ran in that election of 1828 under the banner of a short-lived party calling itself National Republican. 

 

From 1832 through 1852, presidential contests were between Democrats and a party that appeared on the political scene as the Whigs.  Democrats in these years were generally more populist politicians who appealed to the hard working southern farm laborers.  But the Democrats also formulated a program that spoke to the interests of plantation owners in that same region of the American South.  The Whigs cultivated a constituency among the urban manufacturers and financiers of the Northeast.  Jackson won reelection in 1832 and fellow Democrat Martin Van Buren won in 1836.  In 1840 William Harrison won as a Whig;  Zachary Taylor would record one more victory for the Whigs in 1848, after they had lost to Democrat James Polk in 1844.  The last year of Whig participation in national elections was in 1852, when they lost to Democrat Franklin Pierce.

 

Then in 1856 the enduring Republican Party was formed, with its fundamental initial principle being opposition to slavery.  The Republicans lost to Democrat James Buchanan in 1856, but Abraham Lincoln initiated a string of presidential victories for the Republicans in 1860 that he would continue in 1864; and that Ulysses Grant (1868 and 1872);  Rutherford B. Hayes (1876); and James A. Garfield (1882) would continue well into the last half of the 19th century.

 

The United States was a unique national experiment, a testing ground for the ideas of the Enlightenment.  There was no guarantee that people considered citizens of a republic, rather than subjects of a monarchy, would exercise their civic duties wisely.  Power vested in one person or a few people can be much more efficient and is not necessarily used for abusive purposes.  So Paine,  Jefferson, and Madison were implying that rather than hope that a good ruler landed on a throne, they would assume that Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu were right about the propensity of people to draw upon reason if given freedom to do so, acting then as citizens for human good.  And as students of natural science, Franklin and Jefferson were willing to conduct this grand experiment in self-government experiment, implying that deductive reasoning based on the Constitution and inductive reasoning in response to unforeseen issues and situations would lead over time to improvements in the human condition.

 

The first half of the 19th century was a time of huge contradictions, a period when admirable successes and courageous ventures and adventures ran concurrently with stunning incidents and abiding situations of cruelty.  The grand experiment in self-government worked and was often conducted well, but the experimenters were far from perfect.  One must remember that most of those who voted in national elections and participated civically for many decades into the 19th century were middle class and wealthier white men.  Women did not secure suffrage until 1920 (19th Amendment). 

 

Thomas Jefferson was until his death in 1823 a slave owner;  he did not think that his famous assertion of the human right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” applied to slaves, and he must not have considered them “created equal” to other human beings.

 

James Madison mostly avoided the issue of slavery in writing the United States Constitution, thereby tacitly condoning human servitude.   His only reference to slavery in the Constitution was oblique:  his explanation that membership in the House of Representatives should be

 

determined by adding the Whole number of  free persons, including those

bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed,

three-fifths of all other persons.

 

Bottom line, a slave---   the economic and social condition for most African Americans until 1866 (13th amendment) populace---  was considered three-fifths of a person. 

 

So active citizenship mostly involved white males, and during the four decades following the first presidential election (1789), civically engaged and empowered people tended to be those of substantial means.  But by 1829, a new sense of democracy flourished among those constitutionally able to participate and vote.  As new states entered the Union, they produced constitutions amenable to a wider franchise, so that more adult free males could vote---  and more of those of humble economic means did so.  Politicians then had to have more mass appeal, so that they began to host barbecues and parties, and to use posters, ribbons, and buttons in their campaigns

 

Parties put forward excellent candidates in the elections that resulted in the first six presidencies, and the electoral process produced an interesting and transformative president in Andrew Jackson;  the next six presidencies were less distinguished, but the sixteenth was arguably the best of all:  Abraham Lincoln---   who did in fact address the issue of slavery as leader of a party the initial purpose of which was to advocate for abolition. 

 

So the faith of the Founders in Enlightenment ideals relevant to natural rights and the power of reason in political processes seemed evidentially sound during the first half of the 19th century.  There was abominable judgment on the matter of slavery, fathomable only in the social context of the times and in the very partial evolution of human ethics.  But a viable economic and political system based on participatory republican democracy was prosperous and well-governed.

 

Successes in many realms provided justification for faith in liberty, reason, and science. 

 

The litany of technical and technological breakthroughs and innovations was impressive:  the first efficient, productive manufacturing plant at Slater’s Mill (1791);  Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (1794);   Cyrus McCormick’s reaping machine (1831);  first electric telegraph (Samuel Morse, 1835);  Samuel Colt’s revolver (repeat-fire pistol, 1836);  development of anesthetic ether (William Morton, 1846);  Isaac Singer’s sewing machine (1851;  invention of the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell, 1876).

 

The economy grew at an admirable pace and, while the domestic market absorbed most production, the growth of foreign trade was explosive:  imports of manufactured goods grew from about $30 million annually during the 1790s to $360 million In the year 1860.  Foreign investors recognized the potential for profit:  Foreign commerce financed many American entrepreneurial ventures during the first half of the 19th century.  Textiles, shoes, and other products from factories in New England and the mid-Atlantic states increased by the decade.  Sold initially to supply the domestic market in the South, Midwest, and West, these items also increasingly found markets overseas:  Only 5% of manufactured items in the United States were exported in 1820, but this figure rose to about 12.5% by 1850.    

 

This was a time of enormous geographical expansion.  In 1803 came the massive addition of Louisiana (then encompassing the states of the Upper Midwest and West from the Mississippi River to the Oregon Country [today’s Oregon and Washington]).  Representatives of Spain signed Florida away to the United States in the 1819 Adams-Otis Treaty.  Territorial acquisitions following victory in the War with Mexico (1846-1849) resulted in confirmed annexation of Texas by the United States government and added 500,000 square miles in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming;  the southern portions of Arizona and New Mexico came with the Gadsden Purchase, settling remaining boundary disputes. 

 

Maine and Missouri became states in the Missouri Compromise (1820), with Missouri gaining entrance as a slave state and Maine as a free state;  the southern border of Missouri (the 36-30 line) thereafter served as the dividing line for the westward extension of slavery and demarcated the slave

holding South from the North (only in Missouri itself among those states north of the line was slavery legal).  The Oregon Territory was claimed under the principles of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), stating that United States interests in the Americas precluded further intrusion by nations external to the Western Hemisphere;  in this case, Britain relented to United States governance in the 1846 Oregon Treaty.  

 

The American spirit to push westward, exploring the expanses of the Upper West;  claiming preeminence in the Western Hemisphere;  and pressing territorial claims over Spain, Mexico, and Great Britain; seemed to United States Magazine and Democratic Review editor John Louis O’Sullivan to entail a sense of “Manifest Destiny,” a term he coined in 1845.  So startling had the successes of this still very young nation been that in O’Sullivan’s view citizens had already come to see their relentless movement westward as a divine process inspired and justified by the superiority of the United States.

 

But treatment of indigenous peoples and those of African origins represented counterpoints to this talk of divinity and brought heavy burdens to the people of the United States at mid-century.  Successes in the national experiment to put the ideals of the Enlightenment into action were abundant but could not obscure abiding contradictions that caused many to suffer and threated the very unity of the states avowedly united in the experiment.    

 

Consequences of the Limits of Reason

 

The Founders of the United States had towering intellects, supreme dedication, and enormous foresight.  The Constitution that they generated is the world’s greatest statement of democratic republican governance.  The people who dwelled in the United States during the first seven decades of national existence were energetic, adventurous, and frequently successful.  But the Founders, the people whom they led, and their guiding document---  for all of their greatness---   were deeply flawed.

 

American society ran roughshod over Native and African American people.

 

In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act;  by 1835, representatives of the United States government had coerced, cajoled, or convinced Native American leaders to sign 94 separate treaties. The culturally adaptive and diplomatically skilled Cherokee filed two Supreme Court cases to contest the Indian Removal Act:  Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832).  In the former case, the Justices ruled that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction over a “domestic dependent nation”;   in the latter, the Justices declared the Cherokee a “distinct political community” within which state law could not be enforced.   These decisions left some scope for Cherokee claims to rights as a self-governing (although “dependent”) community, but President Andrew Jackson and officials in Georgia were inclined to emphasize Cherokee dependence on their guidance, and that guidance convinced the Cherokee to capitulate in 1835.  Members of the Cherokee confederation departed for Indian Territory (Oklahoma) in 1838;  they were followed by Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles in a treaty-induced exit from the lands of their ancestors and their homes of recent habitation.

 

But there had already been considerable armed opposition on the part of Native Americans to  encroachment upon their territory, and so there would be to attempts at removal.  During the War of

1812, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh (1768-1813) was partially successful in his grand attempt to unite tribes from Florida into Canada.  Seminole leader Osceola (c. 1804-1838) answered the Indian Removal Act with an uprising vigorously waged by his people.  And Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise (c. 1812-1874) waged a persistent and protracted campaign against the policies of the United States government, doggedly conducting raids on settlements and encampments from the 1850s until his capture in 1871.

 

In the years just after the capture of Cochise, fellow Chiricahua Apache Geronimo (1829-1909) fought federal troops and settlers in southeast Arizona and New Mexico.  Particularly active between 1875 and 1885, Geronimo finally was corned by United States troops and surrendered in the latter year.  He spent two years in a Florida prison, was moved to Alabama, then was transported to Fort Sill in Oklahoma.  He spent his last fourteen years confined to Ft. Sill, except those times when he made appearances at events such as the Omaha Exposition (1898), Pan American Exposition in Buffalo (1901), the St. Louis World’s Fair (1904), and Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade (1905).  By then Geronimo  had become a sad caricature.  He drank himself into an alcoholic stupor one cold evening early in 1909, fell from his horse, contracted pneumonia, and died on 17 February 1909.

 

Comanche chief Quanah Parker refused confinement to a reservation according to the terms of the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge.  Over the course of seven years, he and his band raided sites throughout Texas and Mexico.  But in the dogged Red River campaign of 1874-1875, the United States pursued Quanah and the others until they surrendered in exhaustion at Fort Sill on 2 June 1875.

 

After gold was discovered on land to which they had agreed to retreat in 1868, Dakota Chiefs Crazy Horse and Red Cloud rebelled when the United States army tried to reclaim the property.  They massacred General George Armstrong Custer and all 264 of his soldiers in the Battle of Little Bighorn (25 June 1876) but could not prevail:  Crazy Horse was captured and executed in 1877.    

 

Opposition on the part of Native Americans to removal, treaty terms, and treaty violations would continue as an impediment to United States policy until 1890.  That was the year of the last major confrontation, at Wounded Knee (South Dakota);  when the forces of the United States Army prevailed in that violent struggle, the Native American heart for and ability to mount viable resistance waned.  

 

During the early 19th century, agricultural products dominated United States exports.  So sought after was American cotton. and therefore so good the prices, that both Northern and Southern economic interests induced heavy cultivation of this labor-intensive crop.  During 1816-1820 cotton shipments represented 40% of total exports, and in some years thereafter that figure rose to 67%.  Capitalists in both Great Britain and New York lent funds for cotton cultivation to plantation owners in the American South, promoting a level of specialization that impeded economic diversification.

 

Slaves did the work for plantation owners and by definition, once costs for purchase were recovered, constituted free labor.  Despite the vested interests on the part of Northern investors and cotton exporters and Southern plantation owners, by 1817 an abolitionist movement was underway.  In that year, a group pf abolitionist organized the American Colonization Society, with the goals of gradual emancipation, the eventual assemblage of former slaves into colonies, and monetary compensation for erstwhile plantation owners.  Moderate abolitionists of this sort established the Liberty Party in the mid-1840s;  more radical abolitionists, though, were unwilling to settle for gradualism:  They encouraged slaves to destroy agricultural equipment, feign illness, deliberately slow their pace of work, run away, or revolt violently as various opportunities materialized.   

 

Slaves were considered portable property, and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made the return of any fleeing property a legal imperative.   This statutory law was implicitly given constitutional approval in the 1857 Supreme Court ruling, Dred Scott v. Sanford, whereby Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote for the majority, “The Negro has no rights that the white man is bound to consider.”

 

Such a ruling could be said to flow from deductive reasoning upon a racist body of assumptions, but such reasoning was unreasonable by the loftiest standards of the Age of Reason:  The racist assumptions were absurd and ran counter to human progress.  Activist abolitionists themselves countered by organizing the Underground Railroad, metaphorically uniting the well-planned escape routes of runaway slaves to safe houses stretching from the Deep South through Kentucky and Ohio and on to havens beyond the Canadian border.  Former slave Harriet Tubman (1820-1913) is credited with having assisted more than 300 slaves make such escapes during 185o-1861.

 

Tubman soon would commit her efforts in the context of Civil War (1861-1865).  When Abraham Lincoln was elected as President in 1860 at the behest of a Republican Party founded (1858) to achieve abolition, those atop the power structure in the American South heard cracks in the foundation.

 

Seven southern states seceded from the Union.  The first was South Carolina (December 1860), followed by Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas (the latter in February 1861).  In the course of 1861, these leaders of these states formed the Confederate States of America, with President Jefferson Davis heading a government at Montgomery, Alabama, that would alter move to Richmond, Virginia.

 

On 12 April 1861, Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard ordered cannon to fire on federal ships endeavoring to supply Fort Sumner in Charleston, Carolina.  President Lincoln put the United States on notice to be ready for armed conflict.  On 17 April the state of Virginia left the Union, and in the course of the next five weeks the Confederate States of America was fully formed with the addition of Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

 

IV.  Civil War and Reconstruction

 

Civil War (1861-1865)

 

The Civil War harnessed the energies of those committed to the abolition of slavery, in opposition to those whose livelihood depended on continuance of what C. Van Woodward identified as  the “Peculiar Institution.”  Matters of livelihood made the conflict about much more than the ethical drive to eliminate human bondage. 

 

Economics very much undergirded the conflict.  The North still maintained a predominately rural population, but this population was mostly organized into small farms and villages;  what’s more, many communities had factories churning out industrial goods, and the North by now featured a number of major cities---  New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland---  wherein industry and commerce flourished.  The South was overwhelmingly agricultural.  Most farms were small, but the big planters dominated the economy, driving production toward cotton, utilizing the labor of some four million slaves, and setting the pace for a distinctive culture that valued gentlemanly conduct, feminine charm, fancy balls, fine dining, courtly behavior, and attendance at churches that did not emphasize the egalitarian features of Christianity nor in any way challenge the precepts of slavery.

 

These had become two different societies and arguably could have been two distinct nations.  If they had been allowed to secede and exist unchallenged as the Confederate States of America, the eleven states of that national composition might have thrived on the basis of shared culture and values.  But inasmuch as those values were largely corrupt and atavistic, they would have faced opposition from more enlightened populations.  Economically, the going would have been tough, given the undiversified nature of the economy.

 

In any case, Abraham Lincoln was adamant that the Union should remain intact.  He even eschewed the name, “Confederacy,” and he did not attitudinally or conversationally acknowledge that the states that assembled under that appellation had actually seceded.  He regarded those states simply to be in rebellion and his task to be that of pulling them back into the Union.  He kept the bordering slave states of Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri in the Union under quick threat of military action, but he could not persuade the states that had already seceded to renew acceptance of governance under the United States.                                                   

 

Thus, in spring 1862 Lincoln ordered Union occupation of 50,000 square miles in Tennessee and the lower Mississippi Valley, forestalling confederate action in the places protected by these troops.  But Confederate armies were well led by General Robert E. Lee, a brilliant tactician.  The soldiers of the South had already won several major battles in 1861 and had continued success in early 1862.  Generals Joseph Johnson and P. G. T. Beauregard joined forces in a pincer movement to achieve clear victory in the Battle of Manassas.  General Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson led a force from the Shenandoah Valley to link with General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to fend off a Union attempt to take the Confederate capital at Richmond in June 1862.  

 

In 1863, the Confederacy achieved naval success with British-made ships, a technical violation of British neutrality but an expression of British disgust with a Union blockade that denied them access to cotton imports that made up 80% of the supply to their home factories.  The C.S S. Alabama and     C.S.S. Florida sank or captured nearly 100 merchant vessels.

 

Despite adroit leadership, effective tactics, and high motivation in the early stages of the Civil War, the challenges facing the Confederacy were daunting.  Only $27 million in hard currency was available, and efforts to secure public loans and to collect income and commercial taxes proved inadequate.  The solution of simply printing money, without backing in precious metal, and in the context of low industrial supply of desired and needed goods, logically engendered greatly inflated

prices for staples such as cloth, beef, and flour.   Confederate military leaders resorted to appropriation of agricultural crops, livestock, and machinery from private individuals, but because of shortages they  frequently could not avoid sending soldiers forth to march barefoot, stomachs growling from hunger, wearing uniforms of Union origin, blue dyed over to brown.   

 

The Union had more dependable sources of revenue via taxes and loans.  The Internal Revenue Service placed a tax on incomes of more than $800, the first such tax in United States history;  the federal government continued to collect the tax until 1872.  Like the Confederate government, the United States government also resorted to currency backed entirely on faith, not on precious metal.  But greater supply of goods for which those dollars could be spent kept inflation at lower levels in the North by comparison with the South;  still, at war’s end Union “greenbacks” were worth only 67 cents on the dollar. 

                                                                                     

The North had a huge edge in factory-produced goods, including those needed for the waging of war.  Lincoln also could enforce a blockade of southern ports, very important when the Confederacy appealed to Great Britain for assistance;  Great Britain and France did try to broker an agreement between Confederate and Union forces, but at a time when Lincoln saw no advantage in pursuing discussions not likely to achieve national reintegration.  In addition to having advantages in industrial production and economic leverage, the North also could command most of the railroad lines necessary to move soldiers and materiel expeditiously to highly strategic points over the expanses of the northern states, the border areas, and into the upper South.  The power that the Union held in wide-ranging railway access was further symbolized with the formation of the first intercontinental railroad , for which construction began in the midst of the Civil War, in 1863---  to be completed six years later when the Union Pacific Railroad (moving westward from  Omaha, Nebraska) and the Central Pacific Railroad (moving eastward from Sacramento, California) linked 1,770 miles of track on 10 May 1869.

 

In 1863, the forces of Union military leader Ulysses S. Grant captured a Confederate army contingent at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and dissolved another at Chattanooga, Tennessee.  At the Battle of Gettysburg (Pennsylvania,  4 July 1863), Confederate General Robert E. Lee went down to very

bloody defeat.  Confederate armies still had victories ahead of them, but the path to winning the larger contest now seemed obscure.  Much blood flowed during 1863-1864 as the conclusion of the war seemed inevitable.  In the course of 1864-1865, General William T. Sherman sent forth his soldiers on a “March to the Sea,” burning and looting much that lay in their way.

 

This was a violent phase in a bloody war full of brutal encounters in which 620,000 Americans died.  The development of the musket rifle in the 1850s made these weapons available for use just in time for the Civil War.  Sharpshooters might be able to hit targets even beyond those of 400-500 yards, the latter distance imminently possible for the regular infantry soldier.  This made heroic assaults on horseback obsolete and reduced face to face encounters:  Shots fired from entrenched positions became much more common.  And Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling’s invention of the multiple-barrel, revolving machine gun (“Gatling Gun”) made an even more powerful statement on the battlefield.

 

Sherman’s March to the Sea closed out the Civil War for a Confederate army exhausted and demoralized.  At Appomattox Court House on 2 April 1865, General Lee surrendered to General Grant, ending the Civil War.  Confederate President Jefferson Davis surrendered to captors in Georgia on 10 May.  

 

Reconstruction (1866-1877)

 

On 14 April 1865, a disgruntled actor and Confederate sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth, fired a bullet into the head of President Lincoln, who was watching the play, Our American Cousin, with his wife Mary at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D. C.  Lincoln died the following morning, succeeded in his office by Vice President Andrew Johnson, the former governor of Tennessee, who entered office as the seventeenth president.

 

In Congress, a group known as the Radical Republicans pressed forward with a Reconstruction program, the purpose of which was to integrate former slaves into the social and political life of the nation.  This necessitated stationing federal troops in the South to protect African Americans from physical violence, and to ensure that they had access to voting booths, schools, libraries, and public offices where they might receive needed services to meet life’s exigencies after decades of servitude.

 

During 1866-1870 Congress momentously passed and the states ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution respectively abolishing slavery, providing full rights of citizenship, and guaranteeing voting privileges.  The 13th Amendment was passed and ratified in 1866;  the 14th Amendment was passed in 1867 and ratified in 1868;  and the 15th Amendment was passed in

1869 and ratified in 1870.  The Reconstruction program as it went forward in 1867 required that states write new constitutions that protected African American rights and included statements ratifying the 13th and 14th Amendments (the 15th Amendment had not yet been passed by Congress).

 

The Reconstruction program represented a real effort on the part of Congress to bring African Americans into the civic life of the nation.  So much work needed to be done, that any such effort would have to be a work in progress, but public offices throughout the South offered places where African Americans could inquire about purchasing land apply for loans that could help them do so.  The federal government funded job training programs that could empower people seeking work other than farm labor.  Schools were established for the specific mission of increasing literacy and providing basic education.  Land grants were issued to educators aspiring to start colleges for African American students;  these multiplied and eventually formed the network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCs or HBCUs) that still play an important educational role today.

 

Under the protection of federal troops, hundreds of African Americans voted for the first time.  Many ran for office.  Throughout the South, African Americans took positions as state representatives, county commissioners, city council members, and mayors.  State electorates (which during Reconstruction excluded the vast majority of the populace that had supported the Confederacy) made decisions in favor of African American candidates, placing a governor and two lieutenant governors in office.  At the national level, 14 African Americans won election to the House of Representatives and two gained election as Senators.

 

But this hopeful time came crashing to a halt in 1877.  Already, the Republican party was losing its abolitionist and Reconstructionist zeal, turning to industrialists and big business interests in the urban North as their prime political constituencies.  Then in the presidential election of 1876, the stage was set for the most critical event in African American history since the slavery and the Civil War:

 

The election between Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican) and Samuel B. Tilden (Democrat) was close.  Tilden had the edge in the popular vote, but there was essentially a deadlock in the Electoral College that turned attention to Florida, where a dispute over the vote count ensued.  The Democrats offered a deal that in essence went as follows:  We’ll concede Florida and therefore the presidential election to you on condition that you withdraw federal troops from the South.

 

The Republicans took the deal.  Hayes took office as the 19th president, succeeding Ulysses S. Grant (18th president, 1869-1877).  He promptly recalled federal troops from the South.

 

With this critical event, the way was clear for white power establishments to resituate themselves in positions of power, and for African Americans to endure ordeals that exceeded slavery in cruelty:  lynching mobs, homes put to the torch, unjust court decisions, confinement to sharecropping and other ill-paid labor, putative routes to a Promised Land in the cities of the North that descended into hellish environments at the urban core.

 

V.  United States History During an Age of Imperialism and Industry 

 

In the years between the Civil War (1861-1865) and World War I (1914-1918), the United States surged into international prominence, thrusting into the global ether an image of a dynamic young nation in which democratic spirit and capitalist energy offered the high quality of life for which people yearned throughout the world.   There was of course an abiding irony in the seeming triumph of this young exemplar of the liberal republic economic and political formation:  African Americans and Native Americans were being brutalized, and no women could be full participants in the civic life of the nation.  But if one could stare through or see around that impediment to behold the idealized image of democratic capitalism working wonders, then there were discrete examples that could be used to support that view.

 

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) received over 1,000 patents for items that included the quadruplex telegraph, carbon-button telephone transmitter, phonograph, electric light bulb, and an electrical generation and distribution system.  These devices caught the public imagination as powerful indication of the United States as international technological leader, following a pattern witnessed in the inventive spirits of Slater, Whitney, McCormick, Morse, Singer, and Bell.

   

Technology, industry, and commerce surged as factors in the American economy in the late 19th century.  The Gross National Product (GNP) increased from $2 billion in 1859 to $9.1 billion in 1870 and  to $13 billion in 1899;  then, in just one year, the GNP tripled to $37 billion by 1900.  The total value of exports from the United States rose from $858 million in 1870 to $1.4 billion in 1900, a growth of , a 63% increase in just 30 years.  

                                                                             

Inspired by the views of Alfred Thayer Mahan at the United States Naval Academy, some Americans longed to join the European powers in the quest for overseas empire.  Mahan maintained that in an industrial age markets for surplus goods produced in the United States must be found

overseas.  Having located these markets, private commercial ships would sail forth on seas that could be dangerous, potentially necessitating the response of a strong navy.   In the course of the late 19th century, the naval fleet expanded and the federal government oversaw the construction of numerous new stations on the islands of many seas for the purpose of refueling and reparation of ships.

 

Thus it was that Hawaii loomed large in the American imagination.  With the stated immediate motivation of protecting contingents of American missionaries (who had arrived on the islands as early as the 1820s), the United States presidential administration of John Tyler invoked the Monroe Doctrine when the British showed imperialist interest in the Hawaiian Islands in 1842.  In the aftermath of an uprising of the Hawaiian indigenous people in 1875, American plantation owners effectively governed the islands.  This agro-business elite staged a bloodless revolution in 1893, setting in motion processes by which Hawaii would be annexed as a United States territory on 7 July 1898 and designated a state in 1950.   

 

At the time of the Hawaiian annexation the United States government and military were also pursuing imperialist interests in the Spanish-held territories of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.  The American sugar industry craved control of these islands for the opportunity to access sugar cane without the intermediation of Spanish middlepersons.  On 15 February 1898, an explosion of the USS Maine occurred in Havana Harbor that killed 260 American sailors.  In the United States strident newspaper articles and political cartoons played a significant role in steering public sentiment toward war.  The refrain “Remember the Maine!” became common among war-inclined patriots.  On 19 April 1898, Congress did issue a formal declaration of war.  The war lasted from April into August 1898, at a cost of 5,000 lives, all but 379 of them due to soldiers’ contraction of tropical diseases. 

 

According to terms of the treaty that succeeded the war, the United States gained the desired control over Puerto Rice and the Philippines.  The Filipino people, though, had viewed defeat of Spain as a chance to gain independence, putting them at odds with American imperialist and commercial interests.  A violent struggle to resolve the dispute took 4,300 American and 57,000 Filipino lives.  The United States prevailed and annexed the Philippines as a formal territory in 1902.

 

United States imperialist actions and aggressiveness across the oceans were given presidential justification under the Roosevelt Corollary (1904), by which Theodore Roosevelt asserted that to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, the United States must assume “international police power” when situations arose that had the capacity to provoke European intervention.  The Roosevelt Corollary could be applied retroactively to explain United States actions in the Spanish-American War, and it was invoked many times during the years leading up to 1930 to justify United States involvement in South American affairs.  At the time that Roosevelt articulated his corollary, his administration was already superintending construction of the Panama Canal, with the motivation of moving ships more easily between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

 

Quest for overseas empire occurred in the context of the closing of the American frontier, a phenomenon emphasized by Frederick Jackson Turner in a paper that he gave at a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893.  Turner, using data from the United States census of 1890 wrote about the importance that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and

the advancement of American settlement westward” had played in the nation’s history.  Jackson stressed the economic value in American natural resources:  the abundance of arable land, the great endowment in minerals and waterways, and the vast plains for grazing animals.  He also emphasized the psychological value of having somewhere to go if one’s circumstances provoked a desire to migrate, a safety valve for when times turned rough or dangerous.  This worked a hardship on the American imagination that lent additional force to the impulse for imperial conquest.

 

In 1908, the very activist President Theodore Roosevelt moved to conserve large acreages of  land that had formerly comprised part of that great frontier of which Turner had written.  Seeking to preserve a generous amount of land for protection of natural resources and use for public purposes,  Roosevelt empowered  Gifford Pinchot, his chief of the Bureau of Forestry, to establish bureaus and commissions staffed by geologists, hydrologists, foresters, and engineers.  A National Conservation Congress met in 1908 that impelled most states to set up their own conservation commissions.

 

The restless desire for movement was abetted by the invention of startling new means of transportation.  At Kittyhawk, North Carolina, in 1903 Orville Wright rode a flying machine (named

“Flyer”) powered by a twelve horsepower gasoline engine;  the feat, which lasted just 12 seconds, is credited as the first human flight in a heavier than air machine.  Henry Ford (1863-1947) utilized an assembly line along which workers used interchangeable parts to boost production of the “Model T” from 10,607 automobiles (costing $850 each) in 1908 to 730,041 (costing $360 each) in 1916.  Ford’s plants began using conveyor belts in 1913, influencing industrialists who were seeking maximum productivity for the manufacture of many different goods.   Registered automobiles increased from 8,000 to 1.2 million during 1900-1913.

 

The adult population that could serve as a market for these vehicles had burgeoned in the course of the late 19th century:  In 1850, the population of the United States was 23,191,876;  the figures for the next six decades were 31,443,321 (1860),39,818,449 (1870), 50,155,783 (1980), 62,947,714 (1890), 75,994,575 (1900), and 91,972,266 (1910);  hence, the population had almost quadrupled between 1850 and 1910 and nearly doubled between 1880 and 1910.  Immigration was behind much of the population increase.  In 1869, 352,569 people came as immigrants into the United States, by 1884, the comparable figure was 1.5 million.  Before 1870 most immigrants originated in Northern and Northwestern Europe.  During the last three decades of the century, immigrants tended to be from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe;  the immigrant population that originated in Asia also was sizable during these years.  Immigrants thought first of settling in cities, abetting a trend toward urban growth:  In 1880, just 26% of the United States population resided in cities;  by 1910, that figure was 46%. 

 

The rapid pace of change during the last half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century brought stresses in American society of many sorts, engendering a diversity of responses:

 

This was an era when big business was getting bigger.  Between 1894 and 1904, mergers of smaller companies produced many corporations the names of which are still familiar in 2015:  DuPont, General Electric, General Foods, Nabisco, and Westinghouse.  In 50 industries, a single holding company controlled 60 percent of factory production and employed the majority of workers for certain goods. In 1882, John D. Rockefeller became the titan of the big business era with his establishment of Standard Oil, pressuring 77 companies into transferring a majority of their stock to the nine-member board of trustees firmly under his control.  By the middle 1980s, Standard Oil controlled 90% of oil production in the United States.

 

In many industries workers (who totaled 3.2 million in 1900) toiled long hours for low wages in unsanitary conditions.  To advocate for workers, Samuel Gompers formed the American Federation of Workers in 1886.  Gompers led his union toward a moderate stance, not agitating for the demise of trust and monopolies and making only limited use of strikes and boycotts;  his goal was to promote incremental change toward shorter hours, higher wages, and safer conditions.  As unions became a political force, aspirants to government office and their supporters in the business community did recognize the wisdom of forestalling more radical demands, and worker conditions gradually improved.

 

In 1892, a group of farmers gathered in Omaha, Nebraska, to found the Populist Party.  They issued a manifesto demanding public ownership of transportation and communications companies that were conspiring to charge high rates for shipping agricultural goods.  The manifesto also called for a secret ballot in national elections, a graduated income tax, direct election of United States Senators, and improved labor conditions.  And they demanded “free silver,” a clamor that had arisen during 1870-1890, when silver production had quadrupled with the opening of huge mines in Nevada;  owners of the mines and other advocates maintained that coins should have a silver to gold ratio of sixteen to one. 

 

Grover Cleveland was the only successful presidential candidate for the Democrats in the late-19th century aftermath of Civil War (1861-1865) and Reconstruction (1866-1877).  The Republican James Garfield won in 1880, Cleveland won in 1884 but lost to Benjamin Harrison in 1888 before mounting a comeback in 1892 (the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms).  The populists thought they saw a chance for victory, first on their own and then by joining forces with the Democrats, who had cultivated a constituency among the famers in the South.  The Populist (People’s) Party fielded an unsuccessful presidential candidate, James Weaver, in 1892.  William Jennings Bryan likewise was defeated as a candidate with a populist following, losing under the banner of the Democrat-People’s Party in 1896;  the Democrat-Populist Party in 1900;  and the Democrat Party in 1908.  By this time, the populist movement was waning, but Bryan was a dynamic speaker who garnered respectable totals in the popular vote.

 

A more middle class response to the problems engendered by rapid urban growth, industrial expansion, and big business dominance was the Progressive Movement.  Like the populists, the progressives saw government regulation as key to countering the tremendous power of big business.  But the progressives were more urban in character than the populists and in general they had greater wealth and higher levels of educational attainment.  They were patriotic nationalists who believed in America’s potential, turning to William James as intellectual guide.  James was Harvard psychology professor who wrote the classic, Pragmatism, in which he asserted that the way to solve social problems was to tackle them in the field of action, finding what works and discarding what does not.

 

Progressives counterpoised themselves to the Social Darwinism of social philosopher Herbert Spencer, who appropriated the biological theories of Charles Darwin in the interests of big business.

Spencer maintained that natural social processes only fail when a social agent such as the federal government interfered.  He and those drawn to his ideas promoted strict laissez faire economics and opposed legislation to improve conditions for industrial workers.

                                                                                                                                       

Among those who chafed at Social Darwinist ideas and endeavored to solve social problems in the field of action were social reformers who founded settlement houses:  Jane Addams and Ellen Starr (Hull House, Chicago, 1889);  Robert A. Woods (South End House, Boston ,1891); and Lillian Wald (Henry Street Settlement, New York, 1895).  Much in the mold of progressives, most settlement house workers were middle class, idealistic young people, often college-educated women.  They worked to make settlement houses into havens for the downtrodden, often serving immigrants or others newly arrived to urban areas.  They provided childcare, adult education, recreation, and classes enhancing cultural development (dance, music, visual art) and practical skills (cooking, sewing, carpentry).  

 

VI.  The Eventful First Half of the 20th Century

 

During the first half of the 20th century people in the United States experienced two world wars, and between those two global conflicts came quarter after quarter, year after year of relentless economic regression that is remembered as the Great Depression.  Because the United States entered each of the wars later than did the other major participants, and because the war was not fought on American soil, the war was not as devastating as it was for Europeans, North Africans, and the Japanese. In particular, United States soldiers were not subjected to the abject stupidity of trench warfare strategy that characterized the struggle on the Western Front in World War I.  And American forces did not have to face the brunt of the German blitzkrieg , the sort of occupation that the French endured, or the intensive bombing campaign that the Germans waged against the British.  But United States losses were heavy in the Pacific War in which Americans took the lead for the Allies, and the entire first half of the 20th century constituted a major test of the nation’s resiliency and politico-economic foundations.

 

The United States Experience in World War I    

 

Even before the United States entered World War I, American popular sentiment tended toward the Allies.  Conflicts with the British in the American Revolution and the War of 1812 now seemed temporally remote, and British-American relations were good at the beginning of the 20th century.  And although those conflicts with the British did seem distant, warm feelings toward the French had lingered over the century and more since the Revolution for invaluable assistance rendered during that time when Americans were striving against a great imperial power to found a new nation.  During the period of American neutrality before 1917, the Lafayette Escadrille and other private military units from the United States drew many young Americans into the conflict on the side of the French in particular and the Allies in general.

 

Likewise, the propaganda machine of the Committee on Public Information, led by George Creed, catalyzed American energies for the war effort prior to formal participation.  Creel superintended the production of a series of “Hang the Kaiser” films, printing of numerous posters, and placement of  billboards in towns small and large across the United States.  The Committee printed pamphlets numbering 75,000 in many different languages. And the Committee paid a like number of “Four Minute Men” to whip up pro-war sentiment with speeches delivered on street corners.  This propaganda could fall heavily on the 10 million immigrants from Germany and Austro-Hungary. 

 

Americans were inclined to regard Germans as militaristically aggressive on the international scene, arousing antagonist feelings that could become xenophobic, as when a 500-strong crowd in St. Louis stripped a German American, bound him in an American flag, and lynched him.  Many large universities discontinued instruction in the German language.  Streets bearing German appellations were renamed.  German measles became “liberty” measles and a young Dachshund became a “liberty” puppy.  Xenophobes and cultural zealots ripped songs of German origin out of songbooks.  Officials arrested and deported German-born Boston Symphony conductor Karl Muck when he refused to play the Star Spangled Banner at a 1917 concert;  the following year, the Boston Symphony hired its first American-born conductor.  This was very much in the spirit of the popular slogan, “100% Americanism,” and followed congressional restrictions on hiring foreigners. 

 

The years of the World War I were in general not good for free speech.  In an atmosphere in which Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory could say, “Free expression of opinion is dangerous to American institutions,” the Wilson government suppressed statements issued by pacifists and leftist organizations such as the American Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World.  Federal attorneys prosecuted more than 1,500 individuals under congressional legislation aimed at treasonous activity (Espionage Act [1917], Trading with the Enemy Act [1917], Sedition Act[1918]).

 

The succession of Republican presidencies had continued with William McKinley’s election in1896;  Theodore Roosevelt’s assumption of the presidency after McKinley’s assassination in 1901, followed by reelection in 1904;  and William Howard Taft’s election in 1908.  But Democrat Woodrow Wilson ended the streak in 1912 with his defeat of Taft.  Roosevelt actually garnered more votes than  Taft as the candidate for the Progressive Party (nicknamed the “Bull Moose Party”) in that year, and Eugene Debs claimed a small percentage of the popular vote as the Socialist Party candidate.  In 1916, Woodrow Wilson won again, and in so doing touted the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” for his apparent success in terminating the provocative submarine warfare in which Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm had been engaged. 

 

But in the aftermath of Wilson’s reelection, multiple events took place that impelled the United States toward war.  In December 1916 Wilson requested a statement of goals for the war from both the Allies and the Central Powers.  Germany refused, but Britain and France issued a clear response expressing their intention to hold Germany responsible for the costs of the war.  Germany had continued provocative behavior on the seas following the sinking of the British liners Lusitania (7 May 1915, 128 Americans killed) and Arabic (19 August 1915, two Americans killed).  Upon Wilson’s demand, the Kaiser publicly ordered the cessation of attacks on passenger ships in 1915 but then on 10 February 1916 announced the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. 

 

The Kaiser’s latest stated change of policy came after the Allies started arming merchant marines and ordering them to attack German submarines.   The German sinking of the ferry Sussex in the English Channel (24 March 1916), apparently an accident, nevertheless now seemed suspicious.  But the Kaiser issued a new statement claiming that no merchant vessels would be sunk without warning, and the seas were fairly calm through the election of Wilson in November 1916.

 

But then in February 1917, British intelligence intercepted a message from German foreign secretary Alfred Zimmerman to the German ambassador in Mexico, instructing him to offer that nation an alliance with Germany should the United States enter the war.  This came just after Wilson had recalled United States troops (January 1917) under the command of General John J.( “Black Jack”) Pershing after a ten-month unsuccessful pursuit of the bandit Pancho Villa across the border into

Mexico.  The Zimmerman note pledged German assistance in returning Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to the map of Mexico, a provocative promise given the tattered United States-Mexico relationship stemming from the border raids of Villa and Pershing’s failed pursuit of him into the mountains of northern Mexico.

 

On 2 August 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, citing violations of war, murder of innocent Americans, and the danger posed to United States security by the promises in the Zimmerman Note.  Wilson furthermore charged the “Prussian aristocracy” with having declared war on humanity.  And, in language that would have enormous appeal for Progressives in their optimistic aspirations for the perfectibility of the human condition, Wilson stated that “The world must me made safe for democracy through this war to end all wars.”  

 

World War I impelled the United States government toward a much more activist role in the life of the people than had ever theretofore been the case.  The Wilson administration created almost 5,000 special government agencies to oversee aspects of the war effort.  The Council on National Defense endeavored to unify business, labor, and government behind the war effort.  Congress designated a seasonal daylight savings time;  enforced rationing of coal and oil;  and passed the 1917 Selective Services Act, according to which all males ages 18 to 45 had to register for the draft.  During 1917-1919, the number of “doughboys” (soldiers) increased from 200,000 to four million.  Women entered the armed forces for the first time and took on many jobs traditionally occupied by men.  These female contributions to the military effort and to economic production created momentum for passage of the 19th Amendment (1920) granting women’s suffrage. 

 

The government spent much more money than had ever been expended in any military effort

outside the territorial bounds of the United States.  The federal government had lent $4 million to the Allies even before the United States entered the war;  by war’s end, expenditures had risen to a total of $26 billion, then with payment of veterans’ benefits in the aftermath of war that figure would rise to $112,000 billion.

 

Entry of the United States into the war on the Western Front came as events moved swiftly toward dramatic change in Russia, with implications for the military chessboard on which German commanders would make their moves.  Following the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, V.I. Lenin and others in the new government authorized signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, thereby removing Russia from involvement in World War I.  In this context of reduced pressure to the East, German

commanders seized the moment to launch a major military offensive on the Western Front.   In March 1918 German troops moved toward the Marne River, arriving in May. 

 

An advance force then moved forward toward Paris but, as they arrived at a point just 50 miles from the French capital, the Germans for the first time faced opposition from the American Expeditionary Force.  Four military units from the United States assiduously pushed the Germans behind the Marne, then the Americans held positions in Belleau Wood through three weeks of tough combat. By mid-July, American troop levels reached one million, bolstering an offensive in the Meuse-Argonne Forest.  With the German attack stalled, a coup removed the Kaiser from the throne;  in place of the old monarchy, leaders of the revolt established a new Weimar Republic.

 

With the success of the World War I effort as background, the Wilson administration sent 8,000 United States troops to Russia’s Arctic ports;   troops landed first on 2 August 1918, and another group landed in Siberia at the middle of the same month as part of a 14-nation Allied effort to protect Allied provisions and lend support to the White Russian opponents of the Red Russian revolutionaries (Bolsheviks).   The Bolsheviks prevailed, though, their leaders thereafter harboring deep suspicions of the Western Powers as intractable opponents of the Soviet regime.

 

Fighting ended on the Western Front on 11 November 1918.  On 28 June 1919 came signing of the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors at the famous palace where Louis XIV had held court. 
Arguments for a punitive treaty overcame most of Woodrow Wilson’s rhetorical flourishes in behalf of his Fourteen Points.  The idea for a League of Nations was included, though, and in the next few months went into operation with the ironic absence of United States participation.

 

Wilson went on an 8,000-mile, 22-day campaign across the nation, making 36 speeches to make the case for United States entry into the League of Nations.  The president collapsed from exhaustion in Colorado and a few days later a massive stroke left him paralyzed on his left side.  He served out his term with the energetic assistance of his wife Edith and his secretary Colonel House.  The United States Senate would never approve the Treaty of Versailles or allow entry of the nation into the League of Nations;  the nation concluded a separate peace with Germany.  Wilson lived until 1924 as a man with broken health and a dimmed vision for making the world safe for democracy.

 

The Roaring Twenties and the Depressed Thirties

 

Americans looked for fun and profit in the aftermath of war.  During the war, silent movies had become a force in American life, providing grim newsreels on the reality of war but also launching the careers of stars such as “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford and movie cowboy William S. Hart.  The musical form of jazz also took off as an American fascination and cultural export to France.  Composers and instrumentalists merged diverse musical ideas from the surging American blues scene with inspiration from European classical forms.  Chicago, Kansas City, and New York drew southern musicians northward into clubs that teemed with physical and cultural excitement. 

 

Newly enfranchised women felt a sense of liberation during the 1920s, although they expressed it with the shallow libertine self-absorption that characterized much of American life in

the 1920s.  They smoked, drank, hiked up their skirts, and danced frivolously to the Charleston and other popular dances, often in “speakeasies.”  The latter were saloons featuring backrooms where bartenders filled the glasses and mugs of patrons, despite the outlawing of intoxicating beverages in the supreme law of the land: 

 

In 1919 (a year before passage of the 19th Amendment granting women’s suffrage), the 18th Amendment gained congressional and state approval for what became known as Prohibition, forbidding the manufacture, sale, transport, import, and export of intoxicating alcohol.   The Anti-Saloon League lobbied persistently and with ultimate success for this constitutional amendment, but their noble aspirations were widely flaunted.  Profit-seeking criminal organizations led by ambitious and colorful characters such as Chicago-based Al Capone superintended the illegal manufacture and sale of liquor.  In 1933 came congressional and state reversal on the issue:  The 21st Amendment nullified the Prohibitionist provisions of the 18th Amendment. 

 

Given the wild and wacky nature of life in the United States during the 1920s, Warren G. Harding’s slogan pledging a “return to normalcy” in winning the 1920 presidential election proved to be ironic.  In addition to the departure from normalcy in social mores during the early years of the 1920s, aspects of Harding’s administration during that same period were decidedly not normal.  President Harding governed inattentively and his administration gained notice for an abnormal level corruption.  The highest profile case of corruption was the Teapot Dome Scandal:  Interior Secretary Albert Fall was convicted of taking bribes for allowing oil companies onto land (Teapot Rock) in Wyoming that had been set aside as a naval reserve.   And Harding’s death was atypical, inasmuch as he was one of only three presidents to die of natural causes while in the presidency (William Henry Harrison and Franklin Roosevelt were the others):  He died in 1923 of a heart attack.  His vice-president Calvin Coolidge took over and won reelection on his own in 1924.  Herbert Hoover made the decade of the 1920s a sweep for Republican presidential candidates with his victory in 1928.

 

In 1919, another Hoover---  Edgar J., a young Justice Department official---  made the first of what was to be many headlines for him, this one in the “Red Scare” episode.  When the front porch of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home was destroyed by a mail bomb, he enlisted Hoover’s help in conducting raids under the guise of searching for Bolsheviks who might be responsible for Mitchell’s personal losses, and who might be guilty of more generally dangerous activity due to their Communist ideology.  As a result of the “Palmer Raids,” conducted in a “Red Scare” atmosphere, 5,000 suspicious people were arrested and 249 were deported.  Palmer predicted rioting on a wide scale for May Day (1 May 1920), but no such outbreaks of public disorder occurred.  The Red Scare abated for three decades, but as Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) chief for most of the last half of the 20th century, Hoover fanned the flames of anti-Communism and created an environment in which similar fears pervaded American society during the 1950s. 

 

Labor unrest did in fact make a generally conservative American society uncomfortable and open to assertions of Communist infiltration.  Numerous strikes ensued in the aftermath of World War I;  four thousand workers stayed away from work in a multiplicity of locations.  Included among these were controversial work stoppages by public employees, most famously the Boston Police Strike of 1919. 

 

Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge launched himself into national prominence with his conservative stance and clear statement:  “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”  Coolidge called out the National Guard of Massachusetts to break the strike and maintain order.  None of this was surprising for a rising political star in a Republican Party increasingly focused on its constituency among corporate leaders.  A few years later Coolidge, known for terse verbal formulations, would state that “The business of the American people is business.”   

 

American society during the 1920s featured opposing viewpoints and major tensions that were difficult to reconcile.  African Americans moving from the South on a Northern Migration sought safe havens in urban centers that fell very much short of expectations.  Americans who continued embedded in rural life found tales of the city confusing and disturbing;  urban society in turn tended to view such folk as country bumpkins.  Rural residents touted their fresh air and intimate relationship with the land;  urbanites were proud of their bustling enterprises and skyscrapers with steel girders that allowed them to reach toward the heavens (with 86 stories completed on 1 May 1931, the Empire State Building would be the tallest for many decades after the 1920s).  Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) was one of the most famous examples of a literary tendency of the period to focus on the banality of small town life;  small town folk returned the contempt, viewing urban culture as vice-ridden, corrupt, criminal, alien---  and too full of aliens.

 

Urban centers were also the carriers of strange new ideas.  Sigmund Freud’s theoretical formulations presented the human psyche as formed from past experiences that lay suppressed for lack of processing;  terms bearing his fundamental psychoanalytic concepts---  libido, inhibition, id, ego, superego, Oedipus complex, Electra complex, transference, sublimation, repression, conscious, unconscious, subconscious---  circulated in social conversations.  People were less adept at discussing the work of Albert Einstein, but many fairly well-educated people were at least aware that his mathematical models led him to question the reliability of Newtonian physics in predicting pathways for objects moving at great speeds and in the distant realms of the universe.  Thus, modernity seemed to hold unfathomable mysteries in both the inner world of the human soul and the outer world of the cosmos.

 

Thus, relativism captured the imaginations of intellectuals and artists.  Conflict gained acceptance as a catalyst for change.  Abstract painting eschewed representation and embraced symbolization.  Creative writers declared liberation from established rhyme schemes and organizational structures:  poets wrote in free verse, novelists in streams of consciousness, dramatists from the whisperings of interior monologues.  Artistic bohemian communities counterpoised themselves to bourgeois lifestyle and values, taking residence in New York’s Greenwich Village, Chicago’s South Side, and San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury. 

 

But mainstream culture was also undergoing major change.  Technological and commercial innovation resulted in a consumer revolution with an array of new products as vanguard:  matchbooks, lighters, oil furnaces, wristwatches, antifreeze, reinforced concrete, paint sprayers, dry ice, Pyrex, panchromatic film, rayon, cellophane.  By 1930, Americans were putting an aggregate of 20,200,000 telephones to use.  Electrical power output reached 117 billion kilowatt hours by 1929;  ten holding companies controlled  72% of all electrical power in the United States.  With WWJ in Detroit, KDKA in Pittsburgh, and WEAF in New York leading the way, 508 radio stations transmitted programs by 1922. 

 

The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) commenced linkage of stations in 1926;  the Federal Radio Commission (as of 1934, the Federal Communications Commission) began regulating the  communications industry in 1926, the same year that Philo Taylor Farnsworth produced the first all-electronic television image.  Movie theaters in both urban and small-town settings attracted audiences who were mesmerized by the fantasy world of the big screen.  The Warner Brothers produced the first “talkie”---  Don Juan---  in 1926;  a year later came the hugely popular The Jazz Singer.

 

And the revolution in transportation continued unabated.  In 1925, the factories of the Ford Motor Company churned out a new car every ten seconds---   over two million automobiles each year.  Aviation technology had improved rapidly over the two decades since the Wright brothers made their flight.  Very limited use had been made of airplanes during World War I, but some daredevil pilots had dropped bombs from these still fragile machines, while others had used dirigible airships and balloons for the same purpose.  By the 1920s, though, pilots were recording many first-ever feats in much more durable airplanes.  Richard Bryd made the first flight over the North Pole in 1926 and accomplished the same feat over the South Pole in 1929.  Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh completed the first solo flight over the Atlantic Ocean in May 1927, traveling from New York to Paris in 33 hours, 30 minutes.  Amelia Earhart flew trans-Atlantic in 1929, the first woman to do so.  Others gained reputations among the pioneers of aviation for their skill as pilots;  these included Jimmy Doolittle, Wiley Post, and Howard Hughes.  

 

Dramatic change in American life impelled many people to seek security in the familiar and the fundamental:

 

Nativists feared immigration and stigmatized foreigners.  In 1920, police arrested Italian immigrants and avowed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on suspicion of payroll robbery and murder.  The trial judge referred to the defendants as “anarchist bastards”;  the verdict was guilty and the sentence execution.  News of the death of Sacco and Vanzetti circulated internationally and appalled leftists and humanitarians convinced that the two were convicted for their beliefs rather than for their alleged crimes. 

                                                                                 

Religious fundamentalists, convinced that modernism threatened American spiritual life and values, insisted on their particular interpretation of the Holy Bible as paramount over evidence from biologists and other natural scientists.  They had long opposed the work of Charles Darwin in his Origin of the Species, with its detailed presentation of evidence garnered from extended observations on the  Galapagos Islands.  Darwin’s work strongly indicated that animal and plant species thrive and survive on the basis of adaptation to their natural environments, evolving into new forms as situations demand.  While his work focused most closely on plant life and reptilian creatures on the Galapagos, he concluded from general observations and careful reasoning that human beings evolved as highly adaptive creatures in lineal relationship to the Great Apes.   This contravened Fundamentalist belief that God created the world and all forms of life over a seven-day span.

 

This issue of human origins gained great notice in the trial of John Scopes, who accepted a challenge issued by the American Civil Liberties Union to any teacher who would violate Tennessee law proscribing curriculum based on evolution.  Agnostic labor lawyer Clarence Darrow defended Scopes.  True Believer William Jennings Bryan prosecuted the case for the state.  As the trial neared conclusion, Bryan appeared as his own expert in biblical matters to declare that a “big fish” swallowed Jonah, Joshua made the sun stand still, and God created the world in seven days.  Caustic newspaper columnist H.L. Mencken and other critics of Fundamentalism derided Bryan’s biblical literalism.  The jury found Scopes guilty, but the fine was assessed at only $100.  Bryan’s oratorical exertions and the high-profile stress of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial took a physical toll:  He died of a heart attack within days of the last arguments.  The case inspired liberals and civil libertarians to claim academia as a realm for the free expression of ideas.    

 

Thus the tensions of a fast-changing society continued to produce stresses and strains within the American citizenry.  The momentum seemed to be with those who optimistically embraced rapid change and rode swiftly forward on currents of optimism.  But then one kind of optimism got a great come-uppance:

 

As Gross National Product (GNP) increased from $88.9 billion in 1920 to $104.billion in 1929, and as per capita income went from $672 to $872 during the same period, the national economy seemed to be following a perpetual upper trajectory.  Many investors regarded the stock market and real estate as can’t-miss investment.  Speculators invested heavily in Florida real estate.  The business-friendly administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover freed up funds for investment by cutting taxes.  Many did so with reckless abandon, making down payments and then covering the remainder of the investment with funds borrowed from stock brokers.  

 

Even as evidence accumulated that residential construction was exceeding demand, the market for automobiles was peaking, and consumers were reaching the limits of their ability and willingness to spend, investment in the stock market continued to follow a steadily upward curve.   During March-September 1929, the per-share price for stock in Radio Corporation of America (RCA) rose 600%.  But the market peaked on 3 September 1929 and the bubble of optimism burst on Tuesday, 29 October 1929.   Panicked sell-offs resulted in 16.4 million shares trading hands on what became known as “Black Tuesday”;  that figure for shares traded was far above the typical three million for a single day.

 

The stock market crash caused widespread misery.  Savings and fortunes evaporated, unemployment climbed precipitously, and total personal income declined from $82 million to $40 million during 1929-1932 as 9,000 banks closed.  Those operating factories and mines of many kinds in many places called a halt to production.  Thousands of farmers lost their land to foreclosure.

 

President Hoover had a history as an economic activist of a certain kind.  As Secretary of Commerce during the Harding and Coolidge administrations, Hoover promoted standardization in industry and encouraged the trade-association movement.  He added personnel and functions at the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce and directed the Simplified Practices Division of the Bureau of Standards to host conferences on industrial design, production, and distribution of goods.  In 1926, Hoover created the Bureau of Aviation and in 1927 established the Federal Radio Commission (FRC).

 

But Hoover took these actions to promote and increase efficiency in private enterprise.  He did not believe in heavy government expenditure to provide relief or economic stimulus.  When the stock market crashed, Hoover’s first impulse was to promote voluntarism.  Only reluctantly did Hoover fund a few public works projects, such as the Hoover Dam (on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona).  In 1932, the president created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) for dispensation of aid to institutions and agencies but not to individuals.  In that same year, Hoover approved of Congress’s passage of the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, with the aim of providing guaranteed loans for those demonstrating the economic potential to make mortgage payments as homeowners.

 

As the 1932 presidential election loomed, an incident occurred that would seal the outcome and change the course of American history.  In 1924 Congress had passed legislation providing for veterans’ endowment life insurance, payable in 1945 to those who had served in the armed services. 

 

But as the Depression hit, many veterans sought to claim their bonuses immediately.  In the course of spring 1932, 15,000 veterans entered Washington, D. C., setting up camp in empty government buildings and in a shantytown near the White House.  After the United States Senate voted unfavorably on a bill for early bonus payments, veterans felt dejected but many went home.  President Hoover prevailed upon congress to buy train tickets for those who lingered, but 300 stayed for lack of any certain place to call home.  An ugly confrontation ensued when police came to remove those still in the Shantytown.  A shot was fired, provoking a military response from Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley.  Hurley ordered United States troops to remove the veterans and clear the area.  The troops did so, setting the encampment on fire and utilizing tear gas to disperse the downcast, weary, and mostly desperate men who had held out till the end.

 

The American public blamed Hoover for the incident and for what people saw as an abiding lack of compassion for the veterans encamped in the Shantytown.    Hoover’s handling of what came to be known as the “Bonus Army” became instrumental in his defeat by Democrat Franklin W. Roosevelt (a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt) in the 1932 November election for president of the United States.

 

Roosevelt lost no time moving a much more aggressive federal government agenda to address the problems of Americans during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  So famous are those first measures that they are recognized as the First Hundred Days of the New Deal, a sweeping federal government initiative to combat the economic ills plaguing the people.  Inaugurated on 4 March 1933, Roosevelt within two days closed all banks in the United States and called members of Congress to Washington for a special session.  On 9 March 1933, Congress passed the emergency Banking Act providing for Treasury Department inspection of all banks before they could be reopened.  Within three days, 75% of all banks reopened and one billion dollars in hoarded currency and gold were redeposited.

 

The New Deal was an exercise in the sort of pragmatism associated with William James, much in the Progressive spirit of the late 19th century and early 20th century.  The idea was to experiment with various solutions, starting with logical steps to solve problems, then adding and subtracting programs according to what worked and what did not.  The programs included relief (aiding suffering people), recovery spurring the economy), and reform (preventing  another such financial crisis).  Particularly important programs included the Agricultural Adjustment Act ( AAA, 1933), limiting production of some crops and providing subsidies to farmers;  National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA, 1933) to facilitate cooperation between labor and business;  the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA, 1933);  the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA, 1933) to generate reasonably priced electrical power;  the Rural Electrification Administration (REA, 1935), providing power to people living in isolated rural areas;  the Social Security Act (1935), providing retirement income;  the Wagner Act (1935) providing for an eight-hour work day and overtime pay for weekly work beyond 40 hours;  the Works Progress Administration (WPA, 1935), providing government jobs for many different kinds of work, including that done by artists, writers, and skilled tradespeople;  and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC, 1935), another government employment program, providing public works projects for constructing buildings, roads, bridges, and parks, and for improving forestry and recreational areas.  

 

The New Deal drew criticism featuring a variety of perspectives, covering the political spectrum for left to right, and including populist sentiments of murky ideology.  Dr. Franklin Townsend (an elderly California physician) organized a movement that pressed for action beyond the initial programs of 1933 and impelled Roosevelt to support and Congress to pass the Social Security Act.  Father Charles Coughlin gave weekly radio sermons calling that could be ideologically erratic but most compellingly applied pressure for monetary reforms and full nationalization of the banking system.  Louisiana Senator Huey Long advocated a Share-Our-Wealth program that would have confiscated surplus wealth for redistribution to the needy.  One of his colorful phrases called for ensuring that there would be “a chicken in every pot.”

 

Protestant pastors in general opposed the New Deal as unscriptural and therefore sinful.  When Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, 70% of Protestant ministers supported his Republican opponent, Alf Landon.  In the course of the 1930s and 1940s, an emerging coalition of Jews, Roman Catholics, progressives, and southern populists provided sizable majorities for Roosevelt, who was reelected in 1940 and 1944 for a record four times in all.    

 

Under circumstances of economic depression, the political message of leftists found significant support.  In the run-up to the 1932 presidential election, fifty-three artists and intellectuals signed an open letter endorsing Communist Party candidate.  Others on the left formed John Reed Clubs, honoring and articulating positions consistent with those of the American journalist who observed and wrote sympathetically about the 1917 Russian Revolution.  By 1935, many leftist groups articulated a “popular front” position for alliance with socialist and liberal democratic groups in opposition to fascism.  Such groups included the League of American Writers (new incarnations of the John Reed Clubs), American Youth Congress, the American Negro Congress, and the American League for Peace and Democracy.

                              

The threat of fascism was very real as the 1930s came to a close.  Mussolini and his Black Shirts stirred up supra-nationalist sentiments and established a fascist regime in Rome.  Francisco Franco launched his movement for ouster of the Spanish monarchy and the establishment of a fascist republic.  Chauvinist militarism took hold in Japan and impelled that nation forward for territorial acquisition in Asia and the Pacific.  Hitler made his moves on the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.  When he invaded the latter nation on 1 September 1939, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany . 

 

World War II had now begun.  Attention in the United States now shifted from an economy in depression to an economy in mobilization.  The United States Congress passed neutrality laws forbidding the sale of arms to belligerents and warning citizens to stay off passenger liners owned by the nations contending on the Atlantic Ocean and in Europe.  But the United States was drawn inexorably into another world conflict.  According to the Lend-Lease program, and with changes in neutrality laws to allow transport of war materials, American ships sailed under threat from German submarines.  On 21 October 1941, a torpedo shot from a German submarine sank the United States destroyer Reuben James, prompting Roosevelt to issue a “shoot on sight” order;  thus, an undeclared state of naval war now brought the United States and Germany into confrontation on the high seas.

 

Formal entry into World War II for the United States came on 8 December 1941, the day after the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.  British Prime Minister Winston Churchill flew to the United States later in the month, and on 1 January 1945 he and Roosevelt announced a formal alliance that included the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union.  

 

Roosevelt’s New Deal had relieved suffering among the people, put people back to work, and halted the economic slide.  But government and private spending on wartime production energized the American economy and ended the Great Depression.  Participation in World War II, though, came with the ugly costs in blood and lives that make such conflicts always regrettable.

 

World War II

 

Americans were especially oriented toward fighting in the Asia-Pacific (1942-1945) theater of the war, but the Roosevelt military commitment also lent American lives for energization of the North Africa (1942-1943) campaign and for prime responsibility throughout the Italian (1943-1944) campaign.  Then United States forces contributed mightily to victory in both the European and Asia-Pacific theaters of the war:  Dwight D. Eisenhower directed the D-Day operation, and United States troops were heavily involved in follow-up battles that compelled the Germans to capitulate by 8 May 1945 (Victory in Europe [V-E Day]);  and island hopping maneuvers by United States naval, army, and amphibious units took back the Pacific from the Japanese, setting up conventional bombing of Tokyo and the fatal and fateful atomic bombings of Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945) that forced admission of defeat from Emperor Hirohito (14 August 1945) and formal surrender in Tokyo Bay (2 September 1945).    

 

The United States benefited from the influx of highly educated Jewish people and other refugees from Nazi persecution.  Most notably, the work of physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) provided the theoretical underpinning for development of atomic weaponry via the Manhattan Project, and he was among those who convinced President Roosevelt that he must develop an atomic bomb in order to counter the capability of the Germans to construct such a weapon.   Research on atomic fission was conducted at major universities (Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of California (Berkeley and sites), University of Chicago).   In 1943, the Roosevelt administration established a laboratory under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie R. Groves in Los Alamos, New Mexico, dedicated to the development of an atomic bomb.   At Los Alamos 125,000 people contributed their talents on a project the results of which were manifested on 16 July 1945 in a frighteningly successful test explosion in the White Sands Desert outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico.

 

Despite contributing mightily to the effort to end the Hitler regime, and benefiting tremendously from the talents of Jewish refugees and immigrants, the United States was not an entirely welcoming haven for Jews fleeing Nazi rule.  The ship St. Louis carried nearly 1,000 escaped German Jews to the Atlantic Coast at Miami, only to be turned away.  The State Department neglected to use  90% of its legal visa quota.  Allied bombers flew missions close to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, but United States military decision-makers demurred when advocates sought bombing of the death camps, or at least destruction of rail lines leading to the camps.  This policy persisted, despite clear understanding on the part of the Roosevelt administration that the Nazis were systematically rounding up Jews---  as well as Poles, Roman Catholics, Communists, homosexuals, gypsies, and others deemed undesirable---  for extermination.  The death toll in the concentration camps in eastern Germany and Poland tolled 10 million by war’s end;  six million (6,000,000 )of these were Jews. 

                                                                       

Forty-five percent (45%) of the funds that the United States government spent on World War II were derived from tax revenues.  The remaining 55% came from bond drives;  the 1945 Victory Drive near war’s end raised $150 billion.  Still, revenues never matched expenditures during the war:  Government spending stimulated the economy but also produced a national debt of $260 billion.  

As the first peacetime draft in American history took effect in September 1940 (three months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor), Roosevelt and Congress cooperated on a budget that increased defense spending from $2 billion to $10 billion.

 

Franklin Roosevelt prevailed upon Congress to make an initial $7 billion dollars available to those nations whose existence and economic well-being were vital to American interests.  He articulated a role for the United States as an “arsenal of democracy” via a “Lend-Lease” program providing munitions and other articles of warfare to the Allies.  This Lend-Lease program, which ultimately delivered $50 billion worth of military goods to the Allies, had a highly stimulative effect on the United States economy.  An even bigger boost came with the War Powers Act (1941) and the Second War Powers Act (1942), which empowered the federal government to direct industrial production as needed for the war effort.  The Roosevelt administration established the War Production Board in 1942 to direct industrial conversion, so that auto makers manufactured tanks, textile factories made mosquito netting, toy factories manufactured hardware, and home appliance factories produced munitions. 

 

Wartime production boosted the total value of goods and services, so that the Gross National Product (GNP) more than doubled, from $100.6 billion in 1940 to $213 billion in 1945.  Federal government expenditures increased from $20 billion in 1941 to $97.2 billion in 1944, and total federal government expenditures during the period encompassed by 1 July 1940 and 30 June 1946 followed a steep upward trajectory, reaching $337 billion by the latter date.  Of this total, spending for the war effort took $304 billion, over 90% all expenditures during the period.  The Great Depression ended because the demand for military goods provided a tremendous boost to industry, driving profits upward, inducing investment in capital goods for expansion, creating an abundance of jobs, and putting money in the pockets of workers.  Many of those jobs were essentially the same as the roles given to people in the fighting forces, which absorbed a great deal of previously unemployed and underemployed labor:  The  number of service women and men increased steadily year by year, as follows:  500,000 in 1940;  1.8 million in 1941;  3.8 million in 1942;  9 million in 1943;  11.4 million in 1944;  and 12 million in 1945.   

 

The need for workers to fill all of the new jobs was so great that a special “Rosy the Riveter” campaign, pictorially featuring a female welder, ensued to propel women into positions traditionally occupied by men.  By 1945, six million women entered the workforce, including 24 percent of all married women.  Women took jobs as toolmakers, machinists, crane operators, lumberjacks, stevedores, blacksmiths, and railroad workers.   Also, a total of 200,000 women served in the  Women’s Army Corps (WAC), Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (naval WAVES), and the Marine Corps, Coast Guard , and Army Air Force.

 

In an economy weighted toward production of military goods, shortages of consumer goods created inflationary pressures.  In January 1942, Congress authorized the Office of Price Administration to establish ceilings for high-demand goods.  According to the General Maximum Price Regulation (1942), prices were to be frozen at the highest levels that they had reached during the prior month.  This necessitated a rationing system whereby consumers paid for tires, sugar, coffee, gasoline, and meats with rationing coupons.

             

After the Pearl Harbor bombing brought the United States into World War II, there was a mobilization of the national spirit as well as the national economy.  President Roosevelt continued the “Fireside Chats” via radio that had provided consolation and inspiration to people during the Great Depression.  His voice was warm and reassuring, his message unflappably optimistic.  When photographed his demeanor matched his voice, showing a face ever smiling, with a touch of mischievousness, conveying courage, generosity of spirit, and faith in the people and their nation.  Journalists and photographers cooperated in photographing Roosevelt only in the most favorable

presentation, never revealing the polio that made him dependent on crutches, the wheelchair, and the arms of aides.  Roosevelt in fact cultivated the press as an extension of the presidential office: He suggested headlines and indicated topics that should be covered in media stories.

 

Roosevelt was also enthusiastic about the potential of popular movies to convey messages likely to stir enthusiasm for the war effort.  As the film industry became ever more technically sophisticated, so that movies, too, served to elevate the spirit of the American people and inspire them in the war effort.  Notable films of the period with inspirational wartime themes included Across the Pacific (1942);  Casablanca (1942);  Air Force (1943);  Sahara  (1943); and They Were Expendable (1945).

 

Franklin Roosevelt was a physically sick man by the time he attended the Yalta meeting with Churchill and Stalin in February 1945.  He retreated to Warm Springs, Georgia, for a last-gasp attempt to recover his health but suffered a stroke and died there on 12 April 1945.  He was succeeded by Vice-President Harry S. Truman, to whom devolved the careful weighing of options before deciding to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945) that brought a statement declaring cessation of the Japanese military campaign from the emperor Hirohito on 14 August 1945.  

 

As of 2 September 2015, World War II came to a formal conclusion, and the United States faced a bevy of issues that still abide in 2015.

 

VII.  Events and Issues, 1946-2015

 

The world was very different after World War II, and the United States had a new and much more exalted role on the international scene.  Over the course of the first years succeeding World War II, the United States emerged as a Superpower, with its chief contender now the Soviet Union.  The success of the 1948 Berlin airlift gave the United States a sense of self-confidence that its power could be used as necessary to keep the Soviet Union from abusing its own military might.  Under the reality of mutually assured destruction whereby the aftermath of a World War III was too horrible to contemplate, the two sides settled into a Cold War full of espionage, situational stare-downs, and hot  

wars fought through proxies.

 

A New Role in a Changed World, 1946-1965

 

A few months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in the autumn of 1941, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met off the coast of Newfoundland to discuss war aims, articulating these in the Atlantic Charter.  These aims included most importantly the freedom of the seas, self-determination for nations, and a permanent international peace organization.  The latter was similar in ideational content to the League of Nations proposed by Woodrow Wilson but founded in a very different time, facing substantially different issues, and given a new name:  United Nations, which brought to its chambers representatives from 51 nations at its founding in 1949;  in 2015, the United Nations has a 51-member constituency.

 

A bevy of new nations appeared across the globe within a few years of war’s end, and many more would form during the entire 1946-2015 period.  Two of the most important new nations were Israel and India, presenting, though, very different circumstances at their founding:

 

Israel was born in 1948 as a haven for the Jewish people from centuries of diaspora and the horrific experience of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis;  the founding of Israel occurred not as a revolt against imperial rule, although it occupied turf that had been controlled by Great Britain during World War II:  Israel was founded, rather, to protect a people who felt a biblical attachment to a territory perceived as promised to them by God (Yahweh), but on which Arabs had also dwelled for centuries in the land they called Palestine.  David Ben Gurion became first president.                    

 

India gained independence in 1947, a grand old civilization spread across a vast subcontinent coming together for the first time as a modern nation-state.  This was the India wherein Mohandas K. Gandhi had launched his satyagraha movement as the main force in the quest to oust the British.  Jawaharlal Nehru became first president of India;  his Congress Party, which was an incarnation of the Indian National Congress first formed in 1885, dominated India’s political scene for many years after independence.  Pakistan also became an independent nation in 1947, led by Muhammad Jinnah.

 

These two new nations loomed large in the consciousness of leaders many citizens of the Untied States.  Israel received much material and moral support from Jewish people in the United States, and from both major parties;  over time, Democrats would especially cultivate a political constituency among the Jewish people.  India emerged as a rather messy but genuine democracy, therefor serving as a bulwark against the Soviets in a world full of colonized and oppressed people to whom Marxist rhetoric often appealed. 

 

Very disconcerting to the United States, and among the reasons to celebrate the democratic system in India, was the founding of the People’s Republic of China.  Mao Zedong for two decades of the but postwar period presented the most authentic vision of the modern Communist state.  He was an avowed antiimperialist and his rhetoric expressing antipathy to the United States as the chief bearer of capitalist values could pierce American sensibilities.  For the most part, though, he concentrated on development within China, overseeing the establishment of a modern infrastructure while experimenting with various rural and urban collectivization schemes.  A great deal of the countryside was gradually collectivized and for a time seemed to lift production as landowners were ousted and peasants moved to the fore.  But Mao overreached in his Great Leap Forward (1958-1959), which attempted to take collectivization to the level of the multi-village Commune;  and later in his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which whipped up revolutionary zeal among young people who were encouraged to criticize anyone (including parents and family members) who evidenced belief and action contrary to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. 

 

These two large political movements (Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution) caused considerable misery and loss of life, but much of that was hidden until Mao’s death in 1976.  The turmoil, though, was palpable and very frightening to the leadership of the United States.  Although Mao broke with the Soviet Union in 1962, to people in the United States, a map across the expanse of Asia from the Ural Mountains and Asiatic Russia through China appeared far too “Red,” and Mao seemed far too intent on making a mass-based Communist state a reality.

 

And this occurred within the context of a world in which the Iron Curtain had been drawn across Eastern Europe, communist insurgencies loomed in Southeast Asia, and the Soviets seemed bent on exporting the tenets of their system to the leadership of any emerging state in Africa and Latin America that proved ready to listen---  and accept aid, which many did.

 

In this context went forward the Marshall Plan (articulated as Congressional legislation, in 1947, implemented 1948-1951) to rebuild the economies in Europe, including that of West Germany;  and the essentially benign American Occupation of Japan (1945-1952).  In the latter case, the United States worked with Japanese friendly to liberal democracy and capitalism to establish a framework for postwar governance.  The constitution went into effect in 1953, describing the legal tenets for a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system of representation, utilizing the emperor as a symbol of state and a force for cultural continuity---  but with the renunciation of divinity.

 

Implementation of the Marshall Plan and the program of the American Occupation in Japan were among the most successful international initiatives of the United States in the postwar period.  The economies of Allies Great Britain and France revived, and a government and economy to American liking went into action in Japan.  The economies of Japan and West Germany were among the most successful in the world during the 1950s through the 1980s, and their governments were very friendly to the United States.  For the United States, securing the stability and friendship of these wartime opponents provided an ironic counterpoint to the antipathy for the American system expressed by the Soviet Union, their erstwhile ally against Nazi Germany.

 

The Cold War confrontation permeated domestic and international affairs.  In 1947, George F. Kennan wrote what at the time was an anonymous (unsigned) article for the journal Foreign Affairs that prescribed the policy that would guide United States policy-makers through the 1980s.   He wrote that “It is clear that the main element in any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”  Also in 1947, President Harry S. Truman paired Kennan’s article with his own policy of aid to Greece and Turkey and efforts to guide the politics of those nations, stating in what became known as the Truman Doctrine, “I believe that there must be a policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities and outside pressures.”

 

As the Iron Curtain drew tight, the Chinese Communist victory was secured (1949), Soviets detonated their own successful atomic bomb (1949), a Communist government took power in North Korea, and both the United States and the Soviets exploded hydrogen warheads (1953-1954), Kennan’s foreign policy imperative was internalized by strategists and public alike:  The Cold War was among the grimmest realities of postwar life.  As the United States and its allies in Western Europe formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)in 1949, and the Soviet and Eastern Bloc Communist states formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955, the two sides squared off for what was to be four decades of confrontation, propaganda, and maneuvering for advantageous international position.    

 

A virulent form of the anticommunist spirit in the United States during the 1950s came to be known as McCarthyism, for the influence of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy on the tenor of the times.  During a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, McCarthy raised a paper purported to be a list of 205 communists in the State Department.  McCarthy chaired a special subcommittee for investigation of subversion in public and private organizations.  Hearings drew heavy media coverage, and McCarthy rose to national prominence.  But McCarthy never produced evidence that any federal employee had communist connections.  After he recklessly attacked President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, and the armed services in 1954, the Senate held Army v. McCarthy hearings.  Among the first to be televised, these hearings presented to a disgusted public a crude and rude man who issued brutish accusations and cruel comments that had no substantive grounding.  McCarthy looked starkly ridiculous.  Senators turned on their colleague in December 1954, voting 67 to 22 to censure him for “conduct unbecoming to a senator.”  McCarthy died three years later of complications related to alcoholism.

 

The GNP grew from $214 billion in 1946 to $347 billion in 1952.  Gone were the days of 15-25% unemployment during the 1930s:  Economic mobilization for World War II produced a boom that did not abate during the 1950s and early 1960s, when unemployment stayed at about 5% or lower.

Suburbs, those residential areas ringing major urban centers, became much more populous and influential in American life.  Housing construction boomed and automobile ownership doubled. Per capita income increased more than 20% during 1945-1960, raising familial purchasing power accordingly.  During the 1950s, the United States had achieved a standard of living rising to heights unprecedented in world history. 

 

American society was a study in contradictions during the 1950s.  There was a discernible disconnect between mainstream society and the world of artists and intellectuals: 

 

Mainstream society sought security and contentment, goals that seemed imminently reachable in the context of the postwar economic boom.  Rosie the Riveter gave way to Helen the Homemaker, at least in the popular imagination and frequent aspiration.  Many men identified as providers in urban settings, often seeking work in corporate America, where loyalty rewarded employees with secure positions for employment during the working life and pensions in retirement.  Labor unions grew and could be contentious with big business but sought the same essential goals:  In time, the auto factory worker would also achieve middle class status, with good wages, health care benefits, and security in retirement.  The domestic coziness idealized by mainstream Americans seemed perfectly captured in the Norman Rockwell paintings, many of them finding their way onto the front covers of the Saturday Evening Post.

 

But there was another America that read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the poetry of Allen Ginsburg, and followed the life and novels of William S. Burroughs along the beatnik trail.  This was an American disgruntled with a perceived bourgeois banality.  The beat poets, bohemian beatniks, jazz innovators, absurdist playwrights (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot) and avant-garde artists (many of these latter having come as refugees from Nazism to stimulate Abstract Expressionism, as in the wildly colorful displays and sprays of Jackson Pollack), all harbored cultural viewpoints that presaged a shift in the zeitgeist during the 1960s. 

 

African Americans also were manifestly discontent, as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King (Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955) broadened a pathway to freedom on turf broken painstakingly by A. Phillip Randolph (leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) and Thurgood Marshall (chief attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] in Brown v. Board of Education [1954], which ended school segregation as a legal institution).  The late 1950s and early 1960s were replete with major events in a burgeoning effort to overcome the deep injustices of history wrought by the Compromise of 1877.  Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, confrontation at Little Rock’s Central High School (1957), the Emmett Till murder (1961), James Meredith’s troubled entrance and matriculation at the University of Mississippi (1962), the murder of four young girls in a Birmingham church (1963), lunch counter and other sit-ins in the early 1960s, and efforts to highlight the difficulty of voting in Mississippi and other southern states  during the same time span, all created momentum for the landmark passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.     

 

The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 cleared a pathway for a more amiable character, Nikita Khrushchev, to attempt to put a brighter face on communism in power.  Khrushchev liked to travel, and his shaking hands with factory workers on a trip to Great Britain abetted an image of the new Soviet leader as an earthy people person.  But Khrushchev also could be very prickly, as when he slammed his shoe down at the United Nations and declared to a United States contingent that “We will bury you!” Also the launching of Sputnik (1957), the construction of the Berlin Wall (1961), and the shakeout from Fidel Castro’s victory in Cuba (1959), gave the United States leadership a heightened sense of competition with this other major superpower.  The failed United States effort to undermine the new Castro government in the Bay of Pigs Incident (1961) and the tense stare-down in the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962) resulted in major initiatives to outshine the Soviets in matters of science and technology.

 

Many an academically talented United States youth got a free ride to an excellent university for the study of natural science and engineering via a major federal government scholarship initiative.  And young President John F. Kennedy gave the go-ahead and cultivated the necessary congressional cooperation for a full-tilt operation at the National Aeronautics and Space Association (NASA) to launch astronauts toward explorations of the universe.

 

John Kennedy came to office after the two-term (1953-56; 1957-1960) presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower (1952-1960), the former World War II Allied Supreme Commander and major strategist for D-Day.  Eisenhower avowed a preference for private enterprise and state-directed programs for achieving aims conducive to national progress, but in practice he was in many ways an activist president.  Eisenhower approved extensions of Social Security benefits, raised the minimum wage from $0.75 to $1.00 per hour, and prevailed upon Congress to establish the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.  He also lent enthusiastic support for the 1956 Highway Act for the construction of a 41,000-mile interstate system that vastly improved overland travel in the United States;  while serving as a great boon to the trucking industry, the interstate system also promoted the development of a car culture that had deleterious effects and impeded the hopes of those who would have preferred a wide-ranging mass transit system.

 

When the economic boom that had characterized most of the 1950s stalled in 1957 and the nation faced a recession, Eisenhower reluctantly proposed and received congressional authorization for greater federal spending.  This spending did help to rejuvenate the economy, but it dashed Eisenhower’s hopes for a balanced budget:  The national deficit when Eisenhower left office in 1961 was $12 billion.

 

Kennedy prevailed over Vice-President Richard Nixon in the closely contested presidential election of 1960.  Nixon had a reputation as a rabid anti-Communist and Cold War hawk.  Nixon had served as a high-profile congressperson from California in the United States House of Representatives and stayed before the public eye as Eisenhower’s vice-president.  Nixon had great appeal for staunch Republican conservatives but also was able to maintain support of more moderate types who admired Eisenhower.  Kennedy held most of the Roosevelt coalition that included highly disparate groups:  labor unions, farmers, Northeastern liberals, and most of the South.  But Kennedy had to contend with bias against his Roman Catholicism;  his choice of Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas abetted his retention of the vote in that state and those of the South, and Johnson’s service as Speaker of the House had given him strong ties to many constituencies important to the Democrats.

 

What may have been the deciding factor in the 1960 presidential context, though, was the televised debate that year.  Nixon eschewed stage makeup and at many junctures presented a swarthy and sweaty appearance.  Nixon matched Kennedy for skill in asserting his policy positions in the debate, and many experts in fact thought that Nixon won strictly on debate points.  But the vibrant image that Kennedy projected was perfect under the gaze of those peering into these fascinating new television screens, and his cause in the presidential contest got a mighty boost.  

 

Kennedy proved to be an enormously inspiring president, for whom the aura of the presidential office and domestic chambers (shared with wife Jacqueline Kennedy and children Caroline and John) invited media comparisons to the legendary Camelot of King Arthur.  But while Kennedy did successfully overcome the Soviet threat in the Cuban Missile Crisis and launch Americans toward the moon, his actual legislative accomplishments were slim.  Kennedy had to contend with an ultraconservative Republican-dominated Congress in both chambers that blocked most of his spending initiatives for health and education.  He dubbed his legislative agenda the “New Frontier,” through which he sought to regain full momentum from the 1957 recession.  Kennedy did achieve the needed boost, but in the form of increased spending for military goods and services, assistance for nations important in the Cold War chess match, and the space race.  His domestic agenda would have to wait for impulsion from Lyndon Johnson, who took over when Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963.  

 

Cataclysmic Social Change and the Limits of National Power, 1965-1980

 

The decade of the 1960s and the early years of the 1970s constituted a time of cataclysmic social change in the United States.  When Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency upon the death by assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, the nation soon observed a political operator of extraordinary skill.  Johnson spoke in the cadences of the Texan, one of the dialectics of the southern type, so that he was able to communicate the need for racial justice with an immediacy and language that his fellow southerners could understand.  Johnson was also magnificent in calling in political chips, using the political capital that he had built up in the course of more than 30 years in Congress.  It was he who secured passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act envisioned by Kennedy;  he went on to prevail upon Congress to enact legislation to provide for fair hiring practices and nondiscriminatory standards in the sale of residential housing, and through his Great Society programs he convinced Congress to create Medicare and Medicaid for the health care needs of elderly and low income people respectively, and he boosted education spending via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.   

 

But Johnson’s exertion of political energy to get his way on matters of military spending and troop commitments did not produce the same fortunate effects.  Johnson inherited policies from the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations that focused heavily on the situation in Vietnam.  After Ho Chi Minh and his nationalists ousted the French from Vietnam in 1954, the Geneva Convention called for a complete French exit from Indochina, with elections to be held to determine the leadership for all of Vietnam.  But the South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, who had ousted the emperor Bao Dai, dithered in setting a date.  He perceived that Ho Chi Minh would in all likelihood win the election and could not relent to that looming democratic verdict.  The Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations did not want a Ho Chi Minh victory, either, so they exerted no pressure on the Diem regime to move forward with an election.  But the Kennedy administration did grow weary of Diem’s prevaricating statements and actions, and Kennedy advisers worried about Diem’s personal unpopularity.  Thus, the Kennedy administration supported the coup that ousted Diem and brought Nguyen Van Thieu to power in South Vietnam in 1963.

 

By then, the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations had set the precedent for involvement in Vietnam.  The Truman and Eisenhower administrations kept that support at moderate levels of investment and low-key in terms of political and military commitments.  Truman and Eisenhower sent political and military advisers to help guide the political maneuverings that brought

Diem to power and kept Ho Chi Minh at bay.  Kennedy elevated the number of advisers to 17,000 by the early 1960s, and some questioned whether the proximity of United States military personnel to the field of military action really entailed a merely advisory role.

 

Johnson moved American policy in the direction of explicit military involvement.  Seizing on an August 1964 Tonkin Gulf Incident, during which an American ship was fired upon a few miles off the coast of North Vietnam, Johnson secured the Tonkin Gulf Resolution from Congress, allowing him to act as necessary to protect American lives.  Johnson used the resolution, which authorized him to respond with force if necessary to protect American lives and property, as an effective permit to wage war:   In February 1965 came increased air assaults on North Vietnam, and the first acknowledged American troop commitments went afield in Vietnam in April 1965.  American troop levels rose year by year until peeking at over 500,000 in 1968.  But the going was tough under conditions of guerrilla warfare, and the capacity of the Viet Cong (allies of the North Vietnamese government carrying the brunt of the fighting in the South) to wage the major Tet Offensive at the time of the Vietnamese New Year in January 1968 led many in the United States to question United States government reports and those of General Westmoreland (chief of United States military activity in Vietnam) that the battle against the North Vietnamese government of Ho Chi Minh was trending toward victory.

 

On 31 March 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced a pause in bombing   and his intention not to seek reelection.  An antiwar movement in the United States was gaining steam and making inroads into key constituencies in mainstream society that would pose electoral challenges to Johnson.  Richard Nixon completed a surprising political comeback by securing the Republican nomination in 1968, then defeating Johnson’s vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, in the general presidential election of 1968.  Nixon had said that he had a plan for ending the war.  That plan turned out to be gradual “Vietnamization” of the war, which took five years of troop reductions until the United States withdrawal was complete on 15 August 1973.  In the meantime, the Nixon administration had superintended a bombing campaign of communist positions in Cambodia and had continued to enlist support of the Laotian highland Hmong population to engage in reconnaissance and supply missions in behalf of the United States and their allies in South Vietnam.

 

The adversaries in the War in Vietnam signed a peace agreement on 28 January 1973.  But peaceful resolution of the issue of political leadership for all of Vietnam was not achieved, and over the course of the years 1973-1975 fighting resumed.  With the exit of their United States military backers, the leaders of South Vietnam were at a loss to mount a credible military campaign.  The North Vietnamese won a decisive victory in 1975, as all remaining United States personnel departed in a panic;  some of their more prominent South Vietnamese associates were able to get seats on the departing planes, but others clung desperately to the doors of planes to no avail:  Many of those South Vietnamese who had played important parts on the losing side spent time in prison or were executed.  The North Vietnamese set up a communist government under the appellation of the People’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam that remains in 2015, albeit amidst improving relations with the United States and generous incorporation of capitalist strategies in the program for economic development.     

 

The Vietnam War became one of those divisive issues that defined life in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s.  The early 1960s began as an extension of the 1950s, with the

malcontents from the world of the beatniks and the avant-garde still on the fringes or underground.  In the mid-late 1960s the forces of the discontented struck with a vengeance, either joining the discussion in mainstream forums or striking so forcefully at mainstream society as to alter all that was standing at the middle of the road:

 

Here came oppositional or invading feminists, hippies, homosexuals, British musicians, rioters, and revolutionaries demonstrating clearly and often angrily the degree of their discontent:

 

In 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appeared, recording the quiet desperation with which many housewives suffered through their lives.  Her book gave voice to women mired in traditional roles for whom being wife and mother were not enough to give them fulfillment.  In 1966, second-wave feminists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), then in 1972 Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes published the first stand-alone issue of Ms. Magazine (the very first edition had appeared as a supplement to the New York Times);  founding editors were Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, Mary Peacock, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Mary Thom.  

 

Among the many issues covered in Ms. Magazine was the movement to secure passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which had actually been written by first-wave feminists Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman and introduced into Congress in 1923.  In 1972, the ERA passed both houses of Congress;  but in route to what seemed like certain ratification by the states, the legislation encountered conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly and the opposition that she mobilized:  At both the original 22 March 1979 deadline and the 30 June 1982 extended deadline the ERA fell three short of the necessary 38 states needed for ratification.

 

Opponents had raised the specter of unisex restrooms and such, and they argued that under the ERA women might lose special privileges and protections in the workplace;  opponents of women serving in the military also argued against the ERA on that basis.  But the women’s movement continued to push for equal access to professional schools and for equal opportunities in all realms of American life. 

 

Many young people during the mid-late 1960s and early 1970s seemed bent on challenging the mores and values of their parents.  College campuses teemed with organizations founded on a perceived need to change some aspect of the political or economic culture of the United States;  they

were hugely important in providing the sheer mass of people power in demonstrations against the War in Vietnam, organized by such groups as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weathermen.  Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Tom Hayden were among those of the New Left who were seeking revolutionary change in American society. 

 

Rock music, powered by the “British invasion” of groups such as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and The Who took on a lyrical and tonal aura in sync with a time of great change.  American musicians with origins in the folk movement (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger) sounded similar sentiments for change, as did rockers such as Buffalo Springfield and Cream, and rhythm and blues artists, very prominently Marvin Gaye in his seminal What’s Goin’ On?   Near the end of the turbulent 1960s, an enterprising young rock enthusiast organized the concert that came to be known as Woodstock after the town in upstate New York near where the concert was held on a farm owned by Max Yeager.  The

multiday concert featured a great deal of drug use and promiscuous sexual behavior but was remarkably peaceful given the number of people in attendance.  Some attendees and vicariously thrilled admirers from afar wanted to feel that the event augured an era of peace and love, or the Age of Aquarius, as presented in a popular song and musical of the time.

 

Some African Americans grew restless with the nonviolent approach of Martin Luther King, giving support to groups such as the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) and Black Panthers.  At the urban core, discontent flamed into violent protest, with major incidents in the course of 1966 and 1967 in places such as Los Angeles (Watts district), Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Newark.  The Black Power movement stressed the need for immediate action to address continued inequality of treatment, with many arguing for the formation of a separate African American nation within a nation, or for the ultimate overthrow of the United States government.  The Black Culture movement asserted pride in African roots and African American culture;  visual, musical, and literary artists searched for and presented ethnically authentic artistic expression.

 

But the Age of Aquarius never arrived. 

 

The crushing loss of liberal Democrat George McGovern to conservative Republican Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1972 seemed to symbolize the thematic end to the 1960s.

 

By the mid-1970s, the movements for dramatic change were losing their former energy.  Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) efforts to undermine the Black Panthers, as with the shooting of Fred Hampton in Chicago in 1972, had an impact on the dissipation of that organization’s energy.  The problems of people at the urban core grew worse, as both fleeing whites and middle class African Americans fled the central cities.  The introspective singer-songwriter dominated the popular music charts at the beginning of the decade, and toward the end of the 1970s disco became a phenomenon, calling people away from the mean streets of protest to escapist fancies beneath the strobe light and bodies whirling to sounds of music explicitly crafted for this type of dance and for this sort of scene.  In such a setting of dissipated energy for movements of change, the very energetic conservative Schlafly was organizing to put a damper on the ERA initiative.

 

Americans also were forced to face the limits of American power and the limits of economic prosperity:  

 

In 1973-1974, the last of the major Arab-Israel wars precipitated an embargo by OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), sending gasoline prices to record highs and causing  many dislocations in national and international economic life. 

 

At about the same time, the War in Vietnam (which cost 58,000 American lives, almost half of them lost during the Vietnamization stage of the last few years) was winding down without victory. 

 

The second administration of Richard Nixon fell when evidence made clear that burglars employed by his Committee to Reelect the President had broken into the headquarters of the Democratic Party at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D. C., during the 1972 campaign--- and that Nixon had obstructed justice by impeding the investigation of the burglary;  after hearings by the Judicial Committee of the House of Representatives recommended articles of impeachment, Nixon resigned in August 1974.    

                                                                                     

Vice-President Gerald R. Ford took over as president and did an admirable job of restoring dignity and effective governance to the presidential office before losing to Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1976 campaign.

 

But the economy was headed toward stagflation (a seldom-witnessed phenomenon in United States history, entailing both stagnant economic growth and inflated prices for goods and services), and Ford bore some of the damage from the Watergate incident that accrued to Republicans in general;  this became all the more true when Ford decided to offer Richard Nixon a pardon that obviated the possibility for a trial.  Jimmy Carter---  engineer, peanut farmer, and former governor of Georgia---  defeated Ford in the fairly closely contested election of 1976.

 

Carter demonstrated in numerous ways his keen intelligence, never more so than in his adroit handling of negotiations in 1978 between Anwar Sadat (Egyptian president) and Menachem Begin (Israeli prime minister) that has resulted in peace between Egypt and Israel ever since.  He also superintended normalization of relations with China, so that on 1 January 1979 the nations exchanged ambassadors for the first time in many decades (only in 1972 had the United States ceased its opposition to entry of the People’s Republic of China into the United Nations).   But Carter could not stem the stagflation doldrums, and he acknowledged that the nation languished in a post-Vietnam,

post-Watergate funk that he as president had not been able to counter with transformative policies or inspirational leadership.  When beginning in 1979 Iranians captured and held Americans at the United States embassy in Tehran for 16 months---  and United States forces failed in a disastrous rescue attempt---  Carter’s fate in the 1980 election was sealed:  Conservative Republican Ronald Reagan won decisively in the presidential election of 1980, inaugurating a very different decade in the life of the nation.

 

Technological Fascinations and New Malefactions , 1980-2015

 

Ronald Reagan brought a reputation for purist conservatism to office in 1981 and maintained that aura over the course of his tenure.  People in the United States responded gratefully to a president who struck an optimistic tone with regard to the nations’ future and vowed a tough stance against the Soviet Union.

 

Reagan seemed vulnerable on matters of policy in the presidential election of 1984, when the economy was sluggish and Democrats asserted that Reagan’s retrenchment on spending for social programs while increasing defense expenditures represented misplaced priorities;  they also maintained that Reagan had contravened his avowed fiscal conservatism in failing to assure adequate government revenue while raising defense spending, thus contributing to a rising national debt.  Reagan and his advisers countered by touting the virtues of their application of supply side economics as advocated by conservative economist Arthur Laffer, who maintained that keeping taxes low while continuing to supply consumers with goods and services would eventually result in a strong market for the products of business and industry, stimulating economic growth. 

 

In 1982, the Reagan administration caught biting criticism for its placement of American troops in harm’s way in Lebanon, where a Muslim terrorist group struck at an American compound and killed 239 sleeping soldiers.  Reagan soon withdrew all United States personnel, which had been placed in Lebanon in an effort to prevent turmoil as Christian-Muslim tensions had grown worse with an Israeli invasion to rout forces of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). 

 

Despite contentious policies and international miscues, Reagan seemed benefit from a kind of “Teflon effect,” whereby voters overlooked imperfections while embracing the president’s persona.  Reagan’s personality and conservative message still resonated with most American voters, who returned him to office with a landslide victory over Democrat Walter Mondale in 1984.

 

By 1986, some of the bright sheen of Reagan’s popularity was tarnished in the Iran-Contra affair, whereby members of his administration were found to have surreptitiously superintended arms sales to the government of Iran, with some of the profits apparently going to aid the Contras in their opposition to the Marxist government of Daniel Ortega’s Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  The sales to Iran were also perceived to have been in exchange for return of American hostages;  for Iran, the main advantage in striking the deal lay in the acquisition of new weaponry in the war against Iraq.

 

Then, on 19 October 1987, the stock market plunged 508 points in continuation of a slide that had begun in August.  The market did recover half of its losses by the end of 1987, though.  And the Reagan administration could claim to have dramatically reduced inflation, which had risen as high as 13.5% during the Carter years;   in late 1988, the inflation rate stood at 5.5%.  Still, the national debt continued to rise as the “Laffer Curve’ and supply side economics proved to be much less successful in practice than theory had projected.

 

Democrat Michael Dukakis ran a lackluster campaign and exerted little personal appeal to voters in the 1988 presidential contest.  His rote responses to questions, seeming to come from some practiced liberal Democratic sourcebook, followed him to a low point in one of his debates with Republican George H. W. Bush, at which he was asked about his likely feelings toward a perpetrator of rape should the victim be his wife, Kitty.  Dukakis gave a formalistic reply stressing his opposition to capital punishment.  This moment in the debate, and a photographed scenario in which Dukakis seemed hopelessly ill at ease while seated in a tank, complete with a dutifully but awkwardly donned helmet, presented a candidate whose persona seemed to lack the genuine humanity that voters had perceived in Ronald Reagan.

 

George H. W. Bush also drew criticism for lacking what he himself termed the “vision thing,” but he prevailed in the election over Dukakis.  The first years of the Bush presidency proved very eventful, with the Eastern European communist regimes crumbling I 1989 and the Soviet Union itself passing from history in 1991.  And in the meantime, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait brought American coordination of a coalition that pushed Hussein’s forces out of this tiny nation of enormous oil wealth positioned on the southeast coast of the Arabian peninsula.  The military response was dubbed operation Desert Storm, lasting from 16 January 1991 through 28 February 1991. 

 

This successful military episode, while drawing criticism from those who would have preferred that Saddam Hussein be pursued and ousted from power, seemed to suggest an internationally resurgent United States, in a world in which Cold War was no more.  Bush seemed to have the inside track to victory in the 1992 presidential election in the immediate aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, with its favorable juxtaposition to the fall of the Soviet Union.  But Democratic candidate Bill Clinton followed the instruction of his political adviser James Carville to remember, “It’s the economy, stupid,”   and in all ways to project himself as the perfect presidential candidate, possessed of all of the personal appeal that Michael Dukakis had lacked---  and that George H. W. Bush did not possess in great abundance.  And Bush was certainly vulnerable on economic matters, since in 1992 unemployment stood at 7.8% and the poverty rate stood 14.2%.  The national debt had continued to grow, despite the fact that Bush had incurred the wrath of fellow conservatives by raising taxes, despite his frequently recounted “read my lips” vow that he would not do so.

 

Riding a high wave of expectations, Clinton largely succeeded.  Early in his presidency, Clinton prevailed upon Congress to end federal prohibition on the use of fetal tissue for medical research and repealed restrictions on abortion counseling at federally funded health care facilities.  Right away, Clinton appointed numerous women, African Americans, and people of diverse ethnicities to positions in his administration.  Ever politically astute, Clinton took an official position yielding to tradition in banning homosexuals from military service, but he raised no objection when Congress countered with a formulation rendered as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” 

 

Clinton’s years were not entirely smooth.  He vowed to bring universal health care to the United States and gave the assignment for making this happen to his wife, Hillary (who also bowed to tradition in changing the presentation of her last names to Rodham Clinton after years of simply using her natal surname, Rodham).  The health care initiative failed.  But Clinton’s otherwise politically canny and perceptibly effective economic policies counted on the issues about which voters care the most:  He won easily over Republican candidate Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential contest.  

 

The second term of Bill Clinton’s presidency was a study in policy effectiveness and personal trial: 

 

Clinton oversaw transformation of the key welfare program from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which came with a work or educational advancement requirement for all able bodied parents after five years of receiving

Assistance;  Clinton paired this initiative with successful expansion of the earn-income tax credit for the working poor.  He also secured a major tax cut in 1997, even as he worked with House leader Newt Gingrich to get a deficit-reduction package through Congress.  Clinton also greatly reduced the number of workers on the government payroll.

 

But when investigators found evidence that Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton had committed fraud in a deal related to property traded by Whitewater real estate firm in Arkansas, the president was subpoenaed to give a deposition.  No firm proof of fraud in the land deal was found, but in to have giving his deposition, Clinton denied having a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, a statement that he later admitted was false.  Technically this put Clinton in a position to be tried for perjury, for which the House of Representatives did impeach the president---  the only president other than Andrew Johnson to be impeached.  But the Senate did not find Clinton guilty, so that he survived to finish his second term. 

 

Quite notably, given all of the negative publicity swirling around him from the Whitewater and Lewinsky matters, Clinton left office a very popular leader, presiding as he did over a dynamic economy full of thriving businesses, successful job seekers, and enthusiastic consumers.  Clinton could also claim that he made no major commitment of troops during the two terms of his presidency, although lack of engagement in foreign conflicts also had a downside:  Americans largely ignored atrocities that resulted in one million deaths in the Hutu-Tutsi dispute in Rwanda (1994), and Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic perpetrated his Bosnian massacres (1995) against Bosniaks (a mostly Muslim population) and Croats (mostly Catholic) in the absence of any effective intervention by the United States, except as a small contingent within NATO forces.

 

Clinton’s vice-president Al Gore secured the Democratic nomination in 2000, running against Republican nominee George W. Bush.  Gore ran an thematically unfocused campaign;  he failed to take severable states generally considered winnable for Democrats, and he could not persuade constituents in his home state of Tennessee to give him a majority of their votes.  He did win the popular vote, but his loss of several states key to his Electoral College count made him ultimately dependent on the vote in Florida, where problem-plagued polling sites produced a dispute that went all the way to the Supreme Court.  The Justices ruled 6-3 that an official tally in Bush’s favor would stand;  Gore declined to mount any further challenge, yielding the presidency to his opponent.

 

George W. Bush took office on 15 January 2000.  He wanted to concentrate on a domestic agenda for which he vowed to apply conservative solutions in compassionate service to impoverished and other challenged populations often considered more politically responsive to programs of Democratic provenance:

 

In 2002, Bush oversaw bipartisan passage of legislation on which personnel at the United States Department of Education had worked;  officially a renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act first issued in 1967 during the presidency of President Lyndon Johnson, this legislation went by the more specific appellation of No Child Left Behind.   Consistent with President Bush’s “compass sionate conservative” agenda, the explanatory comments in the legislative document cautioned against the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and put forward an aggressive program to achieve educational equity by 2014.  To attain such a lofty goal, the legislation mandated the construction of tests (assessments) for evaluation of grade level performance at Grades 3-8 and the concomitant generation of instruments for measuring the achievement of high school students in math, reading, and writing.  The data were to be disaggregated to assess achievement of students according to gender, economic level, and ethnicity, and schools were to be held responsible for grade level achievement in all demographic categories.  Those schools that were found to be underserving any of the student populations were put on a five-year sequence of warning, hiring of outside tutoring, and restructuring for persistent failure.   Over the longer term, city, state, or private contractor control of perpetually failing schools and school districts was to be an option.

 

At first, Republicans were solidly behind the legislation, which conveyed a get-tough approach that made them feel that an old-school return to basics was moving forward.  But within a half-decade, came the conservative push-back against a federally mandated program:  Republicans began repeating a refrain in favor of local control and the effective disassembling of the working framework of No Child Left Behind.

 

As to Democrats, they were subject to immediate pressure from the education establishment---  especially the National Education Association (NEA)and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)and their local school district teacher union affiliates--- that typically contributed heavy cash to the campaigns of Democrats.  By the midpoint of the first decade of the new millennium, most Democrats both in Congress and local legislative chambers were working to gut No Child Left Behind.

 

By the time George Bush left office, No Child Left Behind had been so seriously undermined

as to have lost any potential for raising the performance level of all students.  When President Obama took office his staff at the United States Department of Education began a new program called, “Race to the Top,’’ which mandated that states show anew how they were going to address the persistent gap in performance levels between the white and the economically well-off, on higher performance side, and young people of color and low income, on the lower performance side.  Buying into the rhetoric and prevarication by both Democrats and Republicans, the Obama administration approved waivers from the mandates of No Child Left Behind in states that could construct and articulate the case for a program for achieving educational equity.

 

Thus it was that one of the few promising items from the George W. Bush domestic agenda was gutted by political forces at left and right---  and how we still wring our hands over the achievement gap, having, over the course of about ten years, destroyed the most promising program in American history for addressing the issue of educational equity. 

 

By the time that Bush secured passage of the eventually ill-fated No Child Left Behind legislation, the events of 11 September 2001 had altered the focus of his presidency.  The three bombings (one at each of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, and another at the Pentagon), along with the downing of Flight 93, put the Bush administration on notice that a threat at least as insidious as that represented by the Soviet Union during the Cold War must be countered.

  

Having received intelligence that the Sunni Muslim terrorist group Al-Qaeda had planned and implemented the attacks on 9-11, and knowing that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden organized his followers in Afghanistan with the cooperation of the Taliban regime (another terrorist organization with a skewed interpretation of Islam, in power since August 1994), the Bush administration opted to send bombers from the United States Air Force to strike Afghan cities on 7 October 2011;  Kabul fell on 13 November 2011, and thereafter the Bush administration sent advisers and ground troops into Afghanistan that remained throughout the George Bush (2001-2008) and into the Barack Obama (2009-2016) administrations.  The effort was to find Osama and to either rout the Taliban or prevent the return of the Taliban to power.  Special Forces of the United States did eventually hunt down and kill Osama, not in Afghanistan but in neighboring Pakistan.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration sought to stabilize minimally competent and not very popular regimes in Afghanistan, while having to settle for keeping the Taliban away from Kabul and on the defensive.

             

The Bush administration then opted to deal with the threat of world terrorism in another, quite tangential, manner---  by invading Iraq.   Airstrikes against Baghdad ensued on 20 March 2003.  Upon the pretext of a search for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), the administration sent ground forces at the head of what was officially an international coalition into Iraq on 22 March 2003.  These forces gained control of Baghdad 9 April 2003 and took the last major city (Tikrit) to fall on 13 April 2003.  United States forces occupied a capital city in chaos and placed forces throughout the country for a stay that lasted until December 2011.  United States forces eventually hunted Saddam Hussein down on 13 December 2003;   following imprisonment and trial, Saddam was executed on 30 December 2006.  

 

Americans are by tradition hesitant to change governments when facing external threats, so that the events of 9-11 probably contributed to Bush’s victory over Democratic nominee John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.  The contest was close, though.  Bush did win a small majority in the popular vote this time, but the contest for Electoral College votes was tight.  Kerry, though, ran a lackluster and unfocused campaign that could not produce a victory in the winnable state of Pennsylvania, thereby ceding the election to Bush.

 

The Bush agenda for the second term continued largely as in the first.  The commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq continued, now under conditions in which outright victory over adversaries (Taliban in Afghanistan, Sunni opponents to the Shiite regime in Iraq) was acknowledged to be impossible, and in which neither nation seemed capable of generating or supporting a capable domestic leadership.  Even the hawkish Bush administration, having adopted a “surge” strategy of major additional troop placements in 2006, when internecine turmoil in Iraq led many foreign policy analysts in the United States to criticize the Iraq commitment as wasteful and faulty, set a timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq.  But the presence of the United States in Afghanistan continued unabated and actually increased during the early years of the Obama administration.

 

After President Bush successfully oversaw the passage of No Child Left Behind legislation in 2002, his distraction with matters pertinent to 9-11 made pressing forward with any other major domestic programs very difficult.  In 2005, early therefore in his second presidential term, Hurricane Katrina hit with a vengeance along the Gulf coast, especially wreaking damage on the culturally proud

city of New Orleans.  While many efforts were made by federal, state, and city officials to deal with the disaster that caused almost 2,000 deaths, many analysts and affected citizens thought that the initial response was too slow and that efforts in the days immediately following the full-force strike lacked adequate attention to detail and a sense of the gravity of the crisis.  News that people were still stranded and dying many days after disaster struck was received by many as a message that the Bush administration lacked the sufficiency of compassion and intensity of action needed to save people who were stranded in grave predicaments.

 

The 9-11 incident and the entanglements in Afghanistan and Iraq;  along with the Katrina crisis and perceived inadequacy of the presidential response;  formed in the public consciousness a sense that George W. Bush lacked the knowledge base, objective judgment, and administrative skill required in a president.  A precipitous stock market decline during 2007-2008;  and a nationwide economic crisis traceable to ill-considered loans extended by financial institutions to unqualified borrowers;  contributed to the sense that the Bush administration was inadequate to the economic and security concerns of the nation.

 

In this context, Republican John McCain faced a difficult task as he took on Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.  McCain secured the nomination as someone who had frequently distanced himself from Bush’s foreign and domestic policies, but the electorate still associated the Republican candidate with a disparaged president from his own party;  and McCain himself often seemed awkward and not sufficiently presidential and charismatic  to match the great appeal of Barack Obama.  As a young African American candidate who offered the appealing campaign theme of “Yes We Can!” Obama seemed to many people to be the right person to shake the nation out of its doldrums and get the country moving forward toward recovery of spirit and prosperity.  Many people looked beyond ideology to vote for Obama on the basis of his energy, style, oratory, demeanor, and sheer star quality.  He won the presidential contest decisively.

 

And Obama hit the ground running with regard to policy.  His chief domestic objective was the achievement of universal health care.  An avowed advocate of a single payer, entirely government run system, Obama knew that this was not politically attainable in the United States, even though this was the system that had worked most efficiently across the globe (e. g., Germany, France, Great Britain, Canada, the Scandinavian countries, many nations of Southeast and East Asia).  So Obama had his team go to work on a system that left Medicare in place and expanded Medicaid to cover additional people in a broadened definition of low income, thereby incorporating and working his innovations upon the two federal government programs that had been in operation from the days of the Lyndon Johnson presidency. 

 

Then Obama and his advisers worked into their health care program mandates that everyone have health insurance, through one’s workplace if offered, and through personal options if not.  The personal options came in the form of health care exchanges, on which were listed the available private insurance providers for a given state.  These insurance companies listed their prices, health care facilities, and covered items on the exchange along with competing companies, so that the purchaser could make an objective, informed decision.  Every state had to have an exchange, either run by the state or by the federal government.  Federal subsidies were provided on a sliding income scale.  Monetary penalties were established for not getting health care coverage in one of the available ways. In this way, the objective of 100% participation and universal coverage became viable goals.

 

Two very appealing aspects of the program were the extension of coverage to young people in a household up to the age of 25, and the prohibition on denial of coverage because of previous medical conditions.  But there was a great deal of opposition to such dramatically new approaches to health care in the United States.  The vote in Congress, then controlled by Democrats, fell entirely along party lines.  Obama had himself worked hard to get bipartisan participation but in the end had to settle for pushing the legislation through with the required votes from his own party.  The legislation, named the Affordable Health Care Act, passed and went into effect in 2011.  Legal challenges were posed, with two going all the way to the Supreme Court, but the new health care law from the Obama administration survived the Supreme Court decisions.  As of 2015, grumbling continues among Republicans and conservative groups, but the facts indicate great improvement in the percentage of people covered, coverage for those who have had chronic or preexisting conditions, and lower costs for most (but not all) people.  

 

During his first term in office, Obama also pushed through an economic stimulus package that injected federal dollars into the economy through spending for roads, bridges, and other public works;  funds to save Ford Motor Company from collapse;  and a similar bailout for financial services companies that had made grave misjudgments in lending money to high-risk clients but were judged by the Obama administrations as too big to fail.  The latter decision was especially controversial, inasmuch as the aid seemed to reward profligacy;  the Obama administration countered that the bailout came with penalties for any further high-risk lending, citing the practical impact that failure would otherwise have on people whose life savings were bound up in the companies.  

 

By the time of the 2012 presidential election, the economy was slowly reviving.  The stock market in particular was registering strong gains.  Unemployment, though, proved to necessitate a longer wait for recovery of acceptable rates;  in 2012, unemployment still hovered at about 8%, and job growth was sluggish.  The Republican candidate Mitt Romney seemed to make inroads into the popular and Electoral College tallies after Obama gave what was perceived by many as a lackluster performance in the first debate;  but Obama’s performance took on more energy and persuasiveness in the second and third debates.  Several gaffs on Romney’s part created the public perception of a candidate who callously considered the needs and even eschewed the political support of people of low income and those who accessed public services such as food stamps and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).  By November 2012, Obama’s poll numbers had risen steadily;  the sitting president commanded the popular vote and won a decisive Electoral College victory.

 

During the early months of Obama’s second term as president, he superintended a withdrawal of troops from Iraq and set a timetable for withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.  Within a few months of the Iraq withdrawal, though, internecine conflicts between Sunnis and Shiites resumed and turned very violent.  Then the group known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria;  also recognized by the name ISIL [Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant]) went on the offensive in West Asia and North Africa, gaining control of territory on the border of Syria and Iraq.  In an enormously complicated situation, the Obama administration found itself working with Syrian President Assad and Iranian President against the common threat of ISIS/ ISIL, even though Assad had committed acts of violence against those among his own people who opposed the dictatorial regime;  and the Iranian leader presided over a leadership that frequently voiced antipathy for the United States and continued to develop atomic weapons.

 

By 2015, the United States and Iranian governments seemed to be seizing the opportunity presented by the common threat of ISIS/ ISIL to forge a new agreement for the suspension of Iranian atomic weapons development in exchange for U. S. lifting of economic sanctions.  Any cooperation with Assad, though, became enormously difficult as hordes of refugees fled Syria in such numbers as to cause a backlash against immigrants in those European nations where Syrians and others sought safe havens.

 

Thus, international terrorism had by the second decade of the 21st century come to pose a problem at least as grave and seemingly intractable as that presented by the perceived Soviet threat in the Cold War.  In 2015, the Obama administration was considering some level of reentry into Iraq to stabilize that nation in the context of the ISIS/ ISIL threat;  and although most American troops had been withdrawn from Afghanistan, the United States kept advisers in the nation, continued to conduct surveillance operations, and maintained a low number of soldiers in the event of a crisis demanding more direct military action.  Over the course of about ten years, the United States has lost a total of 6,677 lives in Iraq and Afghanistan:  losses in the former have been 4,448;  in the latter, losses have been 2,229. 

 

The economy continued to improve during Obama’s second term in office.  The unemployment rate declined to about 6.5%, with steady monthly job gains.  Growth in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) proceeded at an annual rate of about 2.2% on average.  All of these figures presented vast improvements over those inherited by Obama upon taking office, but they did not satisfy critics either on the right or the left.  Obama, whose party had lost control of Congress in the 2014 elections, also incurred criticism for making generous use of executive action to create an easier path to citizenship for the children of immigrants who had entered the United States illegally, to recognize marriage as legal for homosexuals, and other administrative maneuvers that did not absolutely require the approval or legislative initiative of Congress.

 

As the presidential election of 2016 approached, Hillary Clinton seemed to have the inside track on the Democratic nomination but faced a serious challenge from avowed Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont.  On the Republican side, Jeb Bush raised a great deal of money from establishment types within his party, Chris Christie contended for that same political base, Scott Walker of Wisconsin had a conservative message of some resonance, and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz also looked for votes among those farthest on the Republican right;  but Donald Trump and Ben Carson were attracting strong support from those disgruntled with more conventional candidates, and Carly Fiorina was making a surge that seemed to activate excitement among both the establishment and disgruntled Republican constituencies.

 

For his part Obama seemed to have weathered some low points in approval ratings during 2013-2014 to rise again in the estimation of voters.  The years of his presidency had certainly been eventful, as he oversaw the inauguration of a bold new health care plan, a broadening definition of the institution of marriage to include those of the same sex, belated but definite advances along the path of citizenship for children of illegal immigrants, a dramatically improved economy, and great efforts to wend a governmental policy through hugely complicated and terror-laden foreign scenes.

 

The United States has lost 6,677 in Iraq (4,448) and Afghanistan (2,229).  United States young people are still giving their lives in Afghanistan.  The Obama administration pulled troops out of Iraq but is now considering sending some limited number of troops back into Baghdad as the city and nation continue to be riven with internecine conflicts, and under conditions whereby the Sunni Muslim group, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria[ISIS] is a threat to Iraq and all other nations of West Asia and North Africa.

 

In the course of the years since 1982, women have in fact begun to serve in combat roles in the military and to assume professional positions at rates equal to and even exceeding men, although feminists continue to assert that there remains a glass ceiling in corporate America that prevents women from attaining the highest level positions on a par with men. 

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