History USA

• McCarthyism 


  A witch-hunt for communists in the federal and state government in the 50s
• The Red Scare 


  intense fear of communism and other politically radical ideas
• Senator Joe McCarthy 


  Republican senator who falsely accused many Americans for being communist
• Tydings Committee 


  investigated McCarthy’s claim that 200 state department employees were communist. found these accusations to be false
• julius and Ethel Rosenberg 


  arrested in the summer of 1953 and executed in 1953, they were convicted of conspiring to commit espionage by passing plans for the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union
• committee on government operations and subcommittee on investigations 


  McCarthy began hearings on Communist infiltration but did not uncover anything
• writes banned by the state department “communist”


  400 writes
• Eisenhower‘s response to McCarthy 


  he refused to “get down into the gutter with that guy”
• army - McCarthy hearings 


  the trials in which Senator McCarthy accused the U.S army of harbouring possible communists. these trials were one of the first televised trials in America, and helped show America Senator McCarthy’s irresponsibility and meanness
• 1954 response of the senate to McCarthy 


  they censured him
• Impact of McCarthyism on US foreign policy

  • McCarthyism set the tone for US foreign policy for the next 30 years.
  • Heightening the fear of communism clouded much of American thinking on US foreign policy
  • Both Democrats and Republicans agreed that anti communism should be the main focus of US foreign policy
• Anti-war movement

  This was a protest movement that grew, especially on college campuses, during the Vietnam War
• “living room” war

  All US citizens witness the horror of war on tv
• teach in

  informal lecture on topic of public interest
• location of the first teach in

  university of Michigan in 1965
• reasons for the anti war movement

  1. The war was taking money from Johnson’s Great Society Program
  2. Believed the war was a civil war and the US should not intervene
  3. War was morally wrong
  4. Fear if the draft
  5. US tactics were cruel (saturation bombing and napalm( jelly like substance that burns skin))
• Protestors placard slogan

  “STOP KILLING: WAR ON POVERTY, NOT ON PEOPLE”.
• credibility gap 


  public no longer believed what the government was saying about war
• what was Johnson’s approval rating

  26%
• chant at LBJ protests

  “hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
• eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy 


  two prominent Democrats who openly opposed Johnson’s handling of the war
• Walter Cronkite 


  a newscaster who was known for his objectivity and trustworthiness, who said that the war in Vietnam would end in stalemate.

  Johnson knew that if even Cronkite didn’t support him, nobody in the Middle America supported him
• Vietnamization

  Nixon’s policy in Vietnam, getting SC to take more responsibility for the war
• 1969 anti war protest in Washington

  300,000 protestors marched past the White House each carrying the name of a dead soldier or destroyed Vietnamese village
• most serious incident in the anti war movement

  at a student demonstration in Kent State University, Ohio, National Guardsmen killed 4 students and injured 8
• pentagon papers 1971


  showed the federal government deceived the public about the war in Vietnam
• when did the us withdraw from Vietnam

  1973
• impact of race relations on perception of the Us

  US presidents were worried about the image that bad race relations gave them abroad. the US claimed to be the ”Land of the Free”, yet basic Americans were treated an inferior