Please be seated quietly, copy down today's agenda.
Phones that are out will be confiscated - don't let this be you! Open notebook Cold War / Vietnam test Mon. ____________________________________________
Fri. May 17, today's agenda:
Cold War / Vietnam overview & review
How did Vietnam affect your family?
(Time permitting)
These notes are posted to the blog for your review http://paiushistory.blogspot.com/
Homework: for best test scores, this weekend review these and other notes posted on blog
USSR: communist dictatorship, controls Eastern Europe,
heavily armed, including nuclear weapons; suspicious and hostile to W.Europe and the US
"Iron Curtain"
Western Europe: U.S.armies, friendly allied democracies, free market economies, also
heavily armed, including nuclear weapons;
suspicious and hostile towards Russia
Cold War Europe:
post WWII 1945 until 1990
After WWII, with US protection and financial help, Western Europe quickly regained and exceeded it's prosperity.
Meanwhile in Russia and Eastern Europe, state-run socialism brought lop-sided shortages.
People stood in line for food, shoes, everything.
(And the secret police watched everybody.)
In the late 1940s and early 1950s US President Truman was ... concerned... that Russia would try and expand its territory and expand communism.
In 1946-47, what did Truman persuade the US to commit to do about the USSR and communism?
Contain Russian ambition! Stop communism from
s-p-r-e-a-d-i-n-g
Contain it everywhere!
The Russians and the Americans were hostile and suspicious, but by 1950
both countries had nuclear weapons. We buillt more and more of them, each side looking for advantage: but we both knew we couldn't survive this kind of fight:
As an American politician in the late 40s and early 50s, what else might Truman be concerned about?
The Red Scare!
The Russians had the bomb for real,
and there were real Russian spies in the US:
Americans were terrified. They built bomb shelters, practiced air-raid drills, and they
saw communists everywhere - under the bed...
Innocent people were accused of being communists; many lost their reputations, jobs, friends.
What about freedom of speech? Freedom of association? Freedom to criticize the government?
Here's a question:
do you think I would be allowed to talk to you like this during the Red Scare?
Would I get a job as a teacher?
What might I have to sign to get that job?
During the War on Terror, have you seen
anything like the Red Scare?
Maybe you have a friend named Suriya, or Muhammad? What's the War on Terror like
for them?
When communists tried to take over in Korea
(1950 - 1953)
Truman took a stand, and commited the US to stop them.
The war ended in stalemate,�where it sits today
33,686 US dead. 1,000,000 Korean dead, north and south. Containment.
What did America learn - or think they learned - in Korea?
When the Vietnamese communist Ho Chi Minh, whose guerrillas had fought the Japanese in WWII, sent a telegram to President Truman, what did he want?
How did Truman respond?
Between 1945 - 1965 the US gov't
committed millions of dollars, first to prop up the French, then to prop up a series of anti-communist governments in South Vietnam.
What did we achieve?
Ho Chi Minh,
N.Vietnamese communists.
(Dictatorship)
Many pro-US governments,
none effective.
Dictatorships.
By the mid-60s, the US was through fooling around. Troop levels were increased dramatically to try and end the war quickly. But it was a different kind of war...
Vietnam was jungles and mountains, and tanks didn't work well there...
and it was hard to tell who the bad guys were... mistakes were made...
Young Americans who were being drafted and sent to Vietnam, questioned what we were doing there?
They asked, "Where's the containment? Where's the democracy?"
They got angry. They protested. Then they got beat up by policemen, and got even angrier.
Question: how might a young man show his disapproval of the war?
Long hair! Fights erupted over the dinner table. Older Americans considered long hair outrageous and disrespectful. Young people tended to agree: that was the idea.
I saw this poster on many college dorm room walls in the late 60s and early 70s.
This was popular on college dorm room walls also. The quote is from Mark Twain.
Student protests were often met by police or even National Guard violence. In 1970, five students were shot dead at Kent State University in Ohio. 30 PSU students were hospitalized in protests. If you were a student that day at Kent State, how might this make you feel about the war?
Kent State student shot by Nat'l Guard, May 1970
When enough parents of draftees and college protesters got angry, America's policy makers read the writing on the wall. President Nixon drew down troop levels sharply in the early 1970s.
Nixon was a Cold Warrior all of his career. What could compel him to change US policy?
Congress. Congress responds to the voting public, and Congress has to approve the President's budget. No money = no war.
As late as 1975, Nixon's successor, President Gerald Ford asked Congress for money to continue to prop up the latest South Vietnamese government. Congress flatly refused.
In April of 1975, the last US troops were helicoptering out of Saigon, as Ho Chi Minh's forces were arriving. The war was over.
But did we learn anything?
Vietnam War Memorial, Washington DC
"Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her (America's) heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all."
- President John Q. Adams, 1821
By 1989 and 1990, the peoples of Eastern Europe:
Poles, Czechs, East Germans, Bulgarians, Hungarians,
Romanians, and even Russians
had enough also…
They were sick and tired of dictatorships,secret police,
nuclear threat, and shortages of everything.
In spontaneous acts of massive civil disobedience
- completely peaceful -
they spilled out into the streets
and demanded change and democracy.
What did their governments do?
Dissolved. Almost literally evaporated.
The secret police threw away their unifoms and ran. Or melted into the crowds.
The world – including the US –
was astounded at how quickly
and peacefully it all happened.
The Cold War (1946-1990) was over.
Just as in the pro-democracy movements in the Phillipines and South Africa in the 1980s,
young people played a large important role in the fall of communism.
Here young Germans in Berlin take time out of their busy lives to destroy a piece of one of the most feared Cold War artifacts: their own little piece of the Iron Curtain, the Wall that had seperated communist East Berlin from democratic West Berlin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmRPP2WXX0U