Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (64 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
So if the estimates of an invasion’s costs and ending the war quickly were not the only considerations, why did the United States use these terrible weapons?
What history has confirmed is that the men who made the bomb really didn’t understand how horrifying its capabilities were. Of course they understood the destructive power of the bomb, but radiation’s dangers were far less understood. As author Peter Wyden tells it in
Day One
, his compelling account of the making and dropping of the bomb, scientists involved in creating what they called “the gadget” believed that anyone who might be killed by radiation would die from falling bricks first.
But apart from this scientific shortfall, was there another strategic element to the decision? Many modern historians unhesitatingly answer yes. By late 1945 it was clear to Truman and other American leaders that victory over Germany and Japan would not mean peace. Stalin’s intention to create a buffer of Socialist states surrounding the Soviet Union and under the control of the Red Army was already apparent. Atomic muscle-flexing may have been the overriding consideration in Truman’s decision.
The age of nuclear saber rattling did not begin with the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, but with the Potsdam meeting, where Stalin and Truman began the deadly dance around the issue of atomic weaponry. Truman was unaware that Stalin, through the efforts of scientist-spy Klaus Fuchs, who was working at Los Alamos and passing secrets to the Soviets, knew as much about the atomic bomb as the president himself—if not more.
Some historians have pointed to the second attack on Nagasaki as further proof of this atomic “big stick” theory. Having demonstrated the thirteen-kiloton bomb at Hiroshima, Truman still wanted to show off a large bomb used against Nagasaki to send a clear message to the Soviets: We have it and we’re not afraid to use it.
If Truman viewed these bombs as a message to the Soviets, that message, and the frightful nuclear buildup on both sides in the postwar years, dictated American and Soviet policies in the coming decades of Cold War confrontation.
Must Read:
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes;
Truman
by David McCullough.
Chapter Seven
Commies, Containment, and Cold War
America in the Fifties
Why were the Rosenbergs executed for espionage?
What were the results of the Korean War?
What was Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson doing in Iran?
What was
Brown v. Board of Education
?
Why did the arrest of a woman named Rosa Parks change American life?
Why did President Eisenhower send the Army into Little Rock, Arkansas?
How did a doll in stiletto heels and a Chicago publisher change America?
W
hat we think of as the fifties really began in 1945. The war was over. The boys came home. America was triumphant, now first among nations. “The American Century” proclaimed earlier by
Time
magazine’s publisher Henry Luce, seemed to be fully under way.
It was time to enjoy Uncle Miltie, Lucy, and daring novels like
Forever Amber
and
Peyton Place.
Most people fondly recall the postwar era as a respite of prosperity and social normality, a comfortable time. For eight of those years, Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), the gentle-faced golfer whom America called Ike, held office, a comforting president. His campaign buttons simply read “I Like Ike,” and that said it all. With his wife, Mamie, as first lady, it was like having everyone’s favorite aunt and uncle sitting in the White House.
America started to watch television—more than 4 million sets were sold in 1950—and listen to the comfortable sound of Perry Como. There was no hip-swiveling jailhouse rocker on the scene. Yet.
America moved to the comfortable suburbs; 13 million new homes went up between 1948 and 1958, many of them in the cookie-cutter fashion pioneered by developer William J. Levitt’s phenomenally successful Levittown, Long Island. (In Levittown, there were no separate drinking fountains for blacks as there were in southern states. But they weren’t necessary. In Levittown, no blacks needed apply. The houses were for whites only from the beginning.) Coming back from the Big War and later the Korean conflict, former GIs wasted no time, and America’s maternity wards were overflowing—76.4 million “baby boomers” were born between 1946 and 1964. The country was reading Dr. Spock’s
Baby and Child Care
and Norman Vincent Peale’s
The Power of Positive Thinking.
But not everything was rosy—even though America saw Red wherever it looked. There were Commies everywhere. In Eastern Europe and Asia. In the State Department and the Army. They seemed to be under every rock. Even in Hollywood!
There was also a generation of young writers looking at the underside of this dream, straining against the new American dream and its conformist constraints. In his first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
(1948), Norman Mailer (1923–2007) presented a different and uncomfortable picture of the American GI in combat. A short-story writer named J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) would capture the alienation of youth forever in his novel
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951). In several novels of the period, including
The Adventures of Augie March
(1953), Saul Bellow (1915–2005) would also express the angst of a generation. By 1955 with
On the Road,
Jack Kerouac (1922–69) would help lead a generation of “beats” who broke the era’s social restraints, becoming self-proclaimed outcasts from a nation that prized stability and “normality” above all. Books like David Riesman’s
The Lonely Crowd
(1950) and William Whyte’s
The Organization Man
(1956) also examined this peculiar American need to conform, an American characteristic that Tocqueville had perceptively brought to light more than a hundred years earlier.
Any dreams for an era of postwar cooperation between the two new giants of the world, the United States and the Soviet Union, quickly evaporated. The map of Europe had been redrawn, and in Churchill’s ominous phrase, an Iron Curtain had descended across Eastern Europe as the Soviets under Stalin established a ring of Socialist states around its flanks. The future would bring a string of flare-ups as the two nations contended for power and influence.
In 1947, when it appeared that Greece and Turkey were the next targets for Communist takeovers, and the British informed President Truman that they would be unable to defend the existing governments, Truman asked Congress for aid to both countries. In what became known as the Truman Doctrine, the president told Congress, “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”
With $400 million worth of American advisers and military aid, the Greek and Turkish governments prevailed. But instead of installing representative government in the so-called cradle of democracy, Athens came under the rule of an oppressive, right-wing military regime, as did Turkey. But that was less important to political leaders of the United States at the time than that both countries remain aligned with the United States.
The philosophy behind the Truman Doctrine came from a State Department official named George F. Kennan. Writing under the pseudonym X in the influential journal
Foreign Affairs,
Kennan introduced the pivotal concept of “containment,” which essentially meant using American power to counter Soviet pressure wherever it developed. Containment of the Communist threat would color every foreign policy decision in America for decades to come, as well as help bring about the great domestic fear of Communism that swept the country during the 1950s. In addition to the Truman Doctrine, containment also led to the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 to defend Western Europe against Soviet bloc attack, and the Marshall Plan to address the serious economic crisis in postwar Europe.
Must Read:
Truman
by David McCullough.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
SECRETARY OF STATE GEORGE C. MARSHALL’S
Harvard commencement address justifying the European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan (June 5, 1947):
The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help, or face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character.
. . . Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.
Conceived by Undersecretary of State Will Clayton and first proposed by Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893–1971), the Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, pumped more than $12 billion into selected war-torn European countries during the next four years. (The countries participating were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, West Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey.) It provided the economic side of Truman’s policy of containment by removing the economic dislocation that might have fostered Communism in Western Europe. It also set up a Displaced Persons Plan under which some 300,000 Europeans, many of them Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, were granted American citizenship. By most accounts, the Marshall Plan was the most successful undertaking of the United States in the postwar era and is often cited as the most compelling argument in favor of foreign aid.
To some contemporary critics on the left, the Marshall Plan was not simply pure American altruism—the goodhearted generosity of America’s best intentions. To them, it was an extension of a capitalist plan for American economic domination, a calculated Cold War ploy to rebuild European capitalism. Or, to put it simply, if there were no Europe to sell to, who would buy all those products the American industrial machine was turning out?
By any measure, the Marshall Plan must be considered an enormously successful undertaking that helped return a devastated Europe to health, allowing free market democracies to flourish while Eastern Europe, hunkered down under repressive Soviet-controlled regimes, stagnated socially and economically.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
JACKIE ROBINSON
to his wife, in 1947:
If you come down to Ebbets Field today, you won’t have any trouble recognizing me. My number’s forty-two.
When Jackie Robinson (1919–72) said that to his wife, it was on the day he became the first black man to play modern major league baseball. Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers that year and was named Rookie of the Year. In 1949, he won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award.
Although he started as a first baseman, Robinson gained his greatest fame playing second base. An outstanding hitter, Robinson finished with a .311 lifetime batting average and was also a superior runner and base stealer. He played all ten years of his major league career with the Dodgers and was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.
But the simple numbers of sports statistics and achievements do not tell his story. Born in Cairo, Georgia, Jack Roosevelt Robinson starred in four sports at the University of California at Los Angeles. Robinson served during World War II, and in 1945 joined the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League. In 1946, he played minor league baseball for the Montreal Royals. And then Branch Rickey of the Dodgers made the decision to bring Robinson to the big leagues.
When Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, it was one more crack in the foundation of American racism and segregation. Jackie Robinson helped America take one more crucial step in breaking down the racial barriers that had divided America. And he would pay a heavy price for his bold move. For much of his career, he regularly received death threats and heard poisonous insults. And not just from the stands in some Deep South backwater, but from the opposing dugout in places like Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love and birthplace of America’s freedom. Robinson later recounted hearing the opposing Phillies players scream at him:
