Introduction to Chapter 26

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26

Cold War Politics in the Truman Years

1945–1953

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COLD WAR COMIC BOOK After World War II, fear of communism pervaded American politics and popular culture. This comic book series showed the United States winning victories over the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons.
Image Courtesy of The Advertising Archives.

CONTENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading and studying this chapter, you should be able to:

  • Explain the origins of the Cold War, and describe where and how the containment policy was implemented.

  • Describe President Truman’s Fair Deal domestic agenda, and explain its accomplishments and failures.

  • Explain why the United States went to war in Korea and how military objectives changed. Identify the war’s costs and consequences.

HEADS TURNED WHEN CONGRESSWOMAN HELEN Gahagan Douglas walked through the U.S. Capitol. She was one of only ten female representatives in the 435-seat body, and she also drew attention as an attractive former Broadway star and opera singer. Douglas served in Congress from 1945 to 1951 when the fate of the New Deal hung in the balance and the nation charted an unprecedented course in foreign policy.

Born in 1900, Helen Gahagan grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and left college early for the stage. She quickly won fame on Broadway, starring in show after show until she fell in love with one of her leading men, Melvyn Douglas. They married in 1931, and she followed him to Hollywood, where he hoped to advance his movie career and where she bore two children.

Helen Gahagan Douglas admired Franklin D. Roosevelt’s leadership during the depression, and the Douglases joined Hollywood’s liberal political circles. Douglas visited migrant camps where she saw “faces stamped with poverty and despair.” Her work on behalf of poor migrant farmworkers led her to testify before Congress and become a friend of the Roosevelts. In 1944, she won election to Congress, representing not the posh Hollywood district where she lived but a multiracial district in downtown Los Angeles, which cemented her dedication to progressive politics.

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Helen Gahagan Douglas in Congress Long accustomed as an actress to appearing before an audience, the congresswoman from California was a popular campaigner for Democratic candidates and a charismatic speaker. When soaring prices threatened ordinary Americans’ budgets in 1948, she brought a basket of groceries to the House of Representatives to plead for the continuance of government price controls.
Bettmann/Corbis.

Like many liberals, Douglas was devastated by Roosevelt’s death and unsure of his successor. “Who was Harry Truman anyway?” she asked. A compromise choice for the vice presidency, this “accidental president” lacked the charisma and political skills with which Roosevelt had transformed foreign and domestic policy, won four presidential elections, and forged a Democratic Party coalition that dominated national politics. Besides confronting domestic problems that the New Deal had not solved—how to avoid another depression without the war to fuel the economy—Truman faced new international challenges that threatened to undermine the nation’s security.

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By 1947, a new term described the hostility that had emerged between the United States and its wartime ally, the Soviet Union: Cold War. Truman and his advisers insisted that the Soviet Union posed a major threat to the United States, and they gradually shaped a policy to contain Soviet power wherever it threatened to spread. As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Douglas urged cooperation with the Soviet Union and initially opposed aid to Greece and Turkey, the first step in the new containment policy. Yet thereafter, Douglas was Truman’s loyal ally, supporting the Marshall Plan, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the war in Korea. The containment policy achieved its goals in Europe, but communism spread in Asia, and at home a wave of anti-Communist hysteria—a second Red scare—harmed many Americans and stifled dissent and debate.

Douglas’s earlier links with leftist groups and her advocacy of civil rights and social welfare programs made her and other liberals easy targets for conservative politicians exploiting the anti-Communist fervor that accompanied the Cold War. Running for the U.S. Senate in 1950, she faced Republican Richard M. Nixon, who had gained national attention for his efforts to expose Communists in government. Nixon’s campaign labeled Douglas as “pink right down to her underwear” and sent thousands of voters the anonymous message, “I think you should know Helen Douglas is a Communist.” Douglas’s political career ended in defeat, just as much of Truman’s domestic agenda fell victim to the Red scare.

CHRONOLOGY

1945
  • Roosevelt dies; Truman becomes president.

1946
  • Postwar labor unrest affects major industries.

  • President’s Committee on Civil Rights created.

  • George F. Kennan drafts containment policy.

  • United States grants independence to Philippines.

  • Employment Act passes.

  • Republicans gain control of Congress.

1947
  • National Security Act passes.

  • Truman announces Truman Doctrine.

  • United States sends aid to Greece and Turkey.

  • Truman establishes loyalty program.

  • Mendez v. Westminster decided.

1948
  • Marshall Plan approved.

  • Truman orders desegregation of military.

  • American GI Forum founded.

  • United States recognizes Israel.

  • Truman elected president.

1948–1949
  • Berlin crisis precipitates airlift drops.

1949
  • Communists take over China.

  • North Atlantic Treaty Organization formed.

  • Soviet Union explodes atomic bomb.

  • Truman approves hydrogen bomb.

1950
  • Senator Joseph McCarthy claims U.S. government harbors Communists.

  • Korean War begins.

1951
  • Truman fires General Douglas MacArthur.

  • U.S. occupation of Japan ends.

1952
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower elected president.

1953
  • Korean War ends.