| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill) (1944) | In 1944, the federal government made unprecedented educational opportunities available to World War II veterans. It subsidized veterans so they could continue their formal education, learn new trades, or start new businesses. It also contained pension, hospitalization, and other benefits. |
| Baby Boom | Post-World War II Americans idealized the family. After the war, marriage and birth rates rose precipitously and the divorce rate dropped between 1942 and 1950. |
| Suburban Growth | Low interest rates on mortgages that were government-insured and tax duductible made the move from the city to the suburb affordable for almost any family. In a single generation the majority of middle-class Americans became suburbanites. |
| Sunbelt | A trend wherein people moved from the northern and eastern states to the south and southwest region from Virginia to California. |
| Harry Truman | Missouri Senator was elected vice president in 1944. He succeeded to the presidency when Roosevelt died in 1945 and was involved in many key decisions ending World War II and in the early Cold War. It was his decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. He was elected president again in 1948 and decided to send troops to Korea in 1950. |
| Employment Act of 1946 | Started because of the flood of available workers after WWII. Established the Council of Economic Advisors. declared that the government was committed to maintaining maximum employment. |
| Council of Economic Advisers | A board of three professional economists was established in 1946 to advise the president on economic policy. |
| Inflation; Strikes | Rose by almost 25% in the first year and a half of peace; Workers and unions wanted wages to catch up after years of wage controls. |
| Committee in Civil Rights | Truman used his executive powers to establish this. He was the first modern president to use the powers of his office to challenge racial discrimination. |
| Twenty-Second Amendment | It limited the number of terms that a president may serve to two. Was brought on by FDR's 4-term presidency. |
| Taft-Hartley Act (1947) | The anti-union act outlawed the closed shop and secondary boycotts. It also authorized the president to seek injunctions to prevent strikes that posed a threat to national security. |
| Progressive Party | The popular name of the "People's Party," formed in the 1890's as a coalition of Midwest farm groups, socialists, and labor organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor. It attacked monopolies, and wanted other reforms, such as bimetallism, transportation regulation, the 8-hour work day, and income tax. |
| Henry Wallace | Former vice-president under Roosevelt, he ran for president with the Progressive Party, a branch of the Democrats who opposed the Cold War and the policy of containment. He lost but became secretary of commerce under Truman. |
| Dixiecrats | Were conservative southern Democrats who objected to President Truman's strong push for civil-rights legislation. Southern Democrats who broke from the party in 1948 over the issue of civil rights and ran a presidential ticket as the States' Rights Democrats. |
| J. Strom Thurmond | South Carolinian who was the presidential candidate of the States' Rights (Dixicrat) party in 1948. |
| Thomas Dewey | A successful governor of New York, was the Republican candidate for president in 1944, when he lost to Roosevelt, and in 1948, when he lost to Truman. |
| Fair Deal | A program for expanded economic opportunity and civil rights proposed by President Truman in 1949. Truman's policy agenda -- he raised the minimum wage from 65 to 75 cents an hour, expanded Social Security benefits to cover 10 million more people, and provided government funding for 100,000 low-income public housing units and for urban renewal. |
| Cold War | Between late 1940s and 1991--intense rivalry between Communist empire of the Soviet Union and leading Western democracy the United States. |
| Soviet Union | Communist empire. |
| United Nations | Created to provide representation to all member nations. |
| World Bank | Initial purpose was to fund rebuilding of a war-torn world. Soviets declined to participate because they viewed it as an instrument of capitalism. |
| Communist Satellites | Nations under the control of a great power. |
| Iron Curtain | British Prime Minister Winston Churchill coined this term to refer to the "boundary" that divided Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe from Western European nations not under Soviet domination. |
| Winston Churchill | He was the prime minister of Britain from 1940 to 1945. He was one of the Big Three Allied leaders along with Roosevelt and Stalin. His eloquent statesmanship and steady leadership inspired the British people during the dark days of World War II. |
| George Kennan | Foreign Service officer he was the key idea man behind the containment doctrine. His knowledge of Soviet history led him to conclude that the Soviets saw capitalist-communist conflict as inevitable. The only way to deal with that mentality, he concluded, was for the United States to contain communism by resisting Soviet aggression and expansion wherever it might occur. |
| Dean Acheson | Undersecretary of state and an expert on Soviet affairs. |
| Containment Policy | Truman decided to adopted this which was meant to "contain" Soviet aggression. |
| Truman Doctrine | Stated that the U.S. would support any nation threatened by Communism. |
| Marshall Plan | Introduced by Secretary of State George G. Marshall in 1947, he proposed massive and systematic American economic aid to Europe to revitalize the European economies after WWII and help prevent the spread of Communism. |
| Berlin Airlift | Truman ordered U.S. planes to fly in supplies to the people of West Berlin. |
| East Germany | German Democratic Republic--Soviet Satellite. |
| West Germany | Federal Republic of Germany--A U.S. ally. |
| North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) | Chartered April, 1949. The 11 member nations agreed to fight for each other if attacked. It is an international military force for enforcing its charter. |
| National Security Act (1947) | Provided for a centralized Department of Defense, creation of National Security Council (NSC) and created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). |
| Arms Race | Scientists in the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in an intense competition to develop superior weapons system. |
| NSC-68 | This policy statement committed the United States to a military approach to the Cold War. |
| U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty | Peace treaty in which Japan agreed to surrender it's claims to Korea and islands in the Pacific. |
| Douglas MacArthur | Commanded Allied troops in the Pacific during World War II. He was forced to surrender the Philippines in 1941 and was thereafter obsessed with its recapture, which he accomplished in 1944. He later commanded the American occupation of Japan and United Nations troops in the Korean War. |
| Chinese Civil War | Remewed war between Chiang's Nationalists and the Chinese Communists led by Mao Zedong. |
| Chiang Kai-shek | He was the leader of the noncommunist nationalist government in China in the 1940s. His government was corrupt and unpopular and was overthrown in 1949 by communist rebels led by Mao Tse-tung. |
| Taiwan | The only refuge for Chiang and the Nationalists was the island once under Japanese rule also called Formosa. |
| Mao Zedong | The leader of the communist movement in China in the 1940s. His Red Army overthrew the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949 and established the People's Republic of China. |
| People's Republic of China | Mao Zedong's regime in Beijing. |
| Joseph Stalin | He was premier of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953. He was one of the Big Three in the Allied coalition with Churchill and Roosevelt during World War II. |
| Kim II Sung | North Korean Communist leader. |
| Syngman Rhee | South Korean conservative nationalist leader. |
| Korean War | In the war between North Korea and South Korea (1950-1953), the People's Republic of China fought on the side of North Korea and the United States and other nations fought on the side of South Korea under the auspices of the United Nations. |
| U.N. Police Action | Congress supported the use of U.S. troops in the Korean crisis but failed to declare war, accepting Truman's characterization of U.S. intervention as this term. |
| 38th Parallel | Korea was was divided at this spot into North Korea and South Korea. |
| Dennis et al. Vs. United States | 1951 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Smith Act. |
| Smith Act (1940) | Required fingerprinting and registering of all aliens in the U.S. and made it a crime to teach or advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. |
| McCarran Internal Security Act (1950) | Communists to register and prohibited them from working for the government. Truman described it as a long step toward totalitarianism. Was a response to the onset of the Korean war. |
| House Un-American Activities Committee | Committee in the House of Representatives founded on a temporary basis in 1938 to monitor activities of foreign agents. Made a standing committee in 1945. During World War II it investigated pro-fascist groups, but after the war it turned to investigating alleged communists. From 1947-1949, it conducted a series of sensational investigations into supposed communist infiltration of the U.S. government and Hollywood film industry. |
| Alger Hiss | A former State Department official who was accused of being a Communist spy and was convicted of perjury. |
| Whittaker Chambers | A confessed Communist, who became a star witness for the Un-American Activities Committee in 1948. |
| Rosenberg Case | Klaus Fuchs, a British scientist, who had worked on the Manhattan Project, admitted giving A-bomb secrets to the Russians. An FBI investigation traced another spy ring to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. After a controversal trial in 1951, the Rosenbergs were found guilty of treason and executed for the crime in 1953. |
| Joseph McCarthy | In the early 1950s, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted a witch-hunt of government employees that he charged with being communists or communist sympathizers. His unscrupulous tactics have been labeled "McCarthyism"--smearing someone's reputation by telling a "big lie" about them. |
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