1. Use your knowledge of United States history and the excerpt below to answer parts A, B, and C.
To ensure the peaceful development of nations, free from coercion, the United States has taken a leading part in establishing the United Nations. The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members. We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. . . .
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.
Source: President Harry S. Truman, Address before Joint Session of Congress,
March 12, 1947
A) Identify and briefly explain ONE event dating from 1945–1947 that led President Harry S. Truman to take this position in 1947.
B) Briefly explain how Truman’s position in this excerpt affected ONE of the following groups of Americans:
Gays and lesbians in government
African Americans
C) Provide and briefly discuss ONE example of an American military intervention from the 1950s to 1980s that resulted from Truman’s position in this excerpt.
2. Use your knowledge of United States history and the excerpt below to answer parts A, B, and C.
“Negroes are dirty,” say the whites, but in nearly all restaurants I saw Negro waiters and cooks. “They’re lazy”: I noticed that it is the Negro who does the hardest manual work. They are said to be uncultivated and are therefore denied access to culture. As George Bernard Shaw said, “The haughty American nation makes the Negro shine its shoes, and then demonstrates his physical and mental inferiority by the fact that he is a shoe-cleaner.” . . .
What is known as integration in the South is the ability of a Negro to enter a shop and buy a record, or the fact that, of ten thousand students enrolled in a university, two of them are Negroes. “A miracle!” they cry. Real integration, however, does not exist, not even in the North, and by real integration I mean interracial communication, complete equality in the strict sense of the word.
Source: Hailou Wolde-Giorghis, “My Encounters with Racism in the United States,” 1966
A) Identify and briefly explain ONE way that the situation described in this excerpt contradicted the liberal ideal that dominated American society in the 1940s and 1950s.
B) Provide and briefly discuss ONE example of the ways that African Americans organized in the 1950s and 1960s to challenge the racist attitudes and practices described above.
C) Provide and briefly discuss ONE example from the years 1965–1980 of another group of Americans who built on the work of African Americans and organized to challenge its own inequality.
3. In the decades following World War II, the prosperous American economy was driven in part by the new middle class and its participation in mass consumption. Use your knowledge of United States history to answer parts A, B, and C.
A) Briefly explain how ONE of the factors below related to postwar prosperity:
Suburbanization
The baby boom
Domesticity
B) Provide and briefly explain ONE example of a negative impact of postwar prosperity and mass consumption that emerged in this period.
C) Identify and briefly explain ONE of the factors that contributed to the erosion of American prosperity in the 1970s and 1980s.
4. Question 4 is based on the following two passages.
“The stabilization of economic life has given some business circles . . . a clearer sense of their responsibility to the general welfare. Indeed, the very withering away of capitalist motivation . . . has . . . liberat[ed] . . . [business interests] from the tyranny of the profit motive. The modern American capitalist . . . has come to share many values with the American liberal: beliefs in personal integrity, political freedom, and equality of opportunity. This process is reflected in . . . the proposals of some of the more forward-looking Republican politicians [which] consist of . . . accepting the New Deal. . . . Businessmen have essential contributions to make as individuals and as producers of goods—but not, in the judgment of the American people, as the ultimate makers of public policy.”
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, 1949
“In conservatives’ eyes . . . the period from 1933 to 1980 was a trying time of displacement, marginalization, and struggle. It was a time when they had to adjust to their new position as simultaneous insiders and outsiders to the realms as this power. Eventually . . . their posture as outsiders enabled them to build a self-conscious movement to develop a critique of liberal elites. The world of the New Deal state, thus, first marginalized, then reshuffled, and eventually reinvigorated American conservatism. By the 1960s conservatives had organized a cohesive movement with institutions, networks and a broad grassroots following. This movement, combined with growing opportunities, eventually enabled conservatives to obtain a central position in the halls of national power once more.”
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, 2001
Based on the two interpretations above of the long-term impact of the New Deal on American politics, complete parts A, B, and C.
A) Explain a specific piece of evidence from the period 1945–1980 that supports the first author.
B) Explain a specific piece of evidence from the period 1945–1980 that supports the second author.
C) Account for the differences between the two authors’ arguments.