Questions for the final test, страница 2

By 1932 the situation became still harder. Thousand of banks and over 100000 businesses had closed down. Industrial production had fallen down by half and wage payments by 60%. Twelve million people, one out of every four of the country’s workers, were unemployed. The factories were silent, shops and banks closed. With the number of people out of work rising day by day, farmers could not sell their produce. In despair some of them banded together and paraded with the workers in angry demonstrations, demanding that President Hoover (1929-33) take strong action against depression. Hoover who strongly believed in market economy said that he could do two things to end the Depression: to balance the budget and to restore businessmen’s confidence in the future. Time and time again in the early 1930s Hoover told people that “prosperity was just around the corner”. But the factories remained closed and the breadlines grew longer.

A change took place with the election of Franklin D.Roosevelt as president in1933. Although Roosevelt was crippled by polio he was energetic and determined to care for the welfare of ordinary people. Roosevelt’s main idea was that the federal government should take the lead in the fight against the Depression. His program, which he called The New Deal 15 major, consisted of a number of legislative measures. At first Roosevelt took active steps to stabilize banking. He also put right agricultural production by paying subsidies to farmers and introduced a system of regulated prices for corn, cotton, wheat, rice and diary products. Believing that his most urgent task was to give employment to the American people, he proposed a plan for public works and relief payments to the needed citizens. Roosevelt was especially anxious about the young people. The Civilian Conservation Corps found work for many young people. Part-time employment was provided for students who were invited to build roads and construct hospitals and schools. Roosevelt’s New deal program financed the painting of murals and the staging of plays. Writers were paid to write guidebooks and ads. In 1935 the Act was passed that granted workers the right to unionize and bargain collectively. New trade unions were organized.

During his first term Franklin Roosevelt did not manage to fight unemployment and solve some other tasks completely As a result of all his measures unemployment dropped from 13 million people in 1933 to 9 million in 1936, but there were still over four million jobless people in the country and there was no real increase in the life of Afro-Americans, Indians and other minorities.

Ultimately it was the Second World War that put the American people back to work.

The Second World War and the USA

W hen the Second World War broke out in 1939 F. Roosevelt, who had been reelected for the second term, persuaded the USA Congress to approve the first peacetime military conscription act in the USA history and later to accept his Lend Lease Plan. The USA quickly became the main supplier of weapons and other goods to the countries fighting Hitler Germany. American factories began working at full swing again. The unemployment practically ended.

In 1941 after Japanese warplanes bombed, sank and badly damaged 8 American battleships in American base Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing over 2000 men, the USA declared war against Germany and Japan. They joined the countries of anti-Hitler coalition.

The USA government organized the whole American economy towards winning the war. “Old Dr. New Deal has to be replaced by Dr. Win-the-War”, said. Roosevelt. Controls on wages and prices were placed, and high income taxes were introduced. Gasoline and some foods were rationed. Factories stopped producing consumer goods such as cars and washing machines, and started making tanks, bombers and other war supplies. The USA war production became six times greater than the military output before the war. The overall effect of the war was a positive one for the economy in general and the business community in particular.

In November 1942 Combined British and American forces landed in North Africa, defeating the German general Rommel’s Africa Corps. 1943 they invaded Sicily, the mainland of Italy and months of bitter fighting freed Rome from German control.

At Tehran conference (Iran, 1943) Stalin met Roosevelt and Churchill to coordinate their military plans with the Allied cross-channel invasion. In 1944 the Allied troops opened so-called The Second Front in Europe and after hard fighting occupied France and liberated Paris. In September Allied forces crossed Germany western border. On the 25^th of April the remarkable event took place – British and American soldiers met advancing Soviet troops on the banks of the River Elbe in the middle of Germany. In five days Hitler committed a suicide. German soldiers everywhere laid down their weapons and on the 5^th of May 1945, Germany surrendered.

The final details of the war and plans for the postwar world were hammered out at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea in 1945. Russia was to become the guardian of the nations of Eastern Europe. Defeated Germany was to be divided into four zones of military occupation, and a conference was to be convened in San Francisco on April 25 to create the United Nations Organization and formulate its Charter.

Roosevelt left Yalta physically weak but pleased that he had brought Allied unity. Nine weeks after Yalta conference he had a stroke and died. His Vice President Harry Truman came into office. Truman participated with Stalin and Churchill in the final meeting at Potsdam, from which two declarations were issued. One of them confirmed the occupation zones in Germany and settled the reparation issue.

The second was an unconditional surrender ultimatum to Japan. In 1945 American bombers made devastating raids on Japanese cities. In June the island of Okinawa fell to the Americans. On August 6 an American bomber dropped an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A few days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. Both cities were devastated and nearly 2000000 civilians were killed. Even the scientists who had been working on the bomb were shocked by the result. On August 14 the Japanese government surrendered. The Second World War was over.

The Cold War and the McCarthy Witch Hunts

The Cold War was an ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States over control of the world. Americans were the only nation in the world that the Second World War had made better off. Their homes had not been bombed or their land fought over like the homes and land of the Russian people. Busy wartime factories had given them good wages. Americans became the most prosperous people in the world. But despite economic prosperity during the years under president Truman (1945-53) and then president Eisenhower (1953-61) there was a constant anxiety in America and fear of the Russian influence on the afterward world. After two unpleasant surprises – the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb and the creation of communist China – a wave of panic swept across the USA. Due to the terrible propaganda some Americans started to see communist plots everywhere. An ambitious and unscrupulous politician McCarthy tried to use these fears to win fame and power for himself. He started the campaign that came into American history with the name a “Witch Hunt” – a search for people he could blame for supposed threats to the United States. For over five years, from early 1950s till the mid 1950s McCarthy launched the serial of “hearings”, accusing a lot of people – government officials, scientists, and famous entertainers – of secretly working for the Soviet Union. He never gave proofs, but Americans were so much frightened by the threat of communism that many believed his accusations. They were afraid to give jobs or even to show friendship to anyone “suspected” in “Soviet sympathy”. In 1957 McCarthy died, but so-called McCarthyism did serious damage to the relations between the countries.

In 1961 a new President John F. Kennedy (1961-3) was elected, the most progressive president since A. Lincoln and F. Roosevelt. He was young, had a good education, energy and keen, quick wit. The unfulfilled promise of Kennedy’s thousand days in office is nearly impossible to measure. He told American people that they were facing a “new frontier” with both opportunities and problems. He announced policy of fighting poverty and giving civil rights to black people. He streamlined and pushed through the space program and new laws for pollution treatment, but his main merit was his foreign policy.

When J. Kennedy came to the office, foreign problems were numerous. Soviet Union power was growing and relations between two superpowers were as cold as ever. The incipient nations of Africa were rebellious. Fidel Castro had taken control of Cuba. Unrest was evident in all Latin America. Kennedy’s first two innovations – the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress – captured the imagination of much of the world. The Peace Corps sent thousands of young Americans abroad to assist underdeveloped countries. The Alliance for Progress was designed as a broad assault upon the economic and social problems of Latin America.

In June 1961 a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles supported by the CIA attempted an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Although the attempt was a dismal failure, the Soviet Union tried to install Soviet mediation-range ballistic missiles and bombers in Cuba. Kennedy met the Soviet Union challenge and displayed great mind in dealing with what was probably the most serious confrontation of the Cold War era. He gave the promise not to invade Cuba. The the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev also promised to recall the weapons from Cuba. The two leaders succeeded in setting up a “Hot Line” to facilitate a quick exchange of views in case of major crises, and in signing a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that halted surface atmospheric and outer space testing. While Kennedy was president he frequently said: “All I want them to say about me is what they said about John Adams, “He kept the peace”. In the speech he had intended to give in Dallas on November 22,1963, the day of his assassination, Kennedy declared: “We ask…that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of ”peace on earth, goodwill toward men”. Kennedy’s sensible policy not only reduced the tension between the two but also started the policy of so-called “détente”.

Even the long and bloody war in Vietnam (1965-73), finished by the victory of the latter, was not allowed to interfere into it. In May 1972 President Nixon flew to Moscow to sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the Soviet Union. The idea of SALT was to slow down the arms race as well as to make war between them less likely. In 1979 American Congress refused to renew the SALT agreement. Both the United States and the Soviet Union continued to develop new, more deadly nuclear missiles and in the early 1980s détente looked dead. In the middle of the 1980s American military strength was increased so much that president Reagan realized the necessity to slow down the race M. Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985 in the USSR, also believed that the huge cost of the arms race was crippling the Soviet Union economy. In 1987 Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force (INF) treaty. According to the treaty both countries agreed to destroy all their land-based medium and shorter-range nuclear missiles within 3 years. A hope was born that a new time of peaceful cooperation between the SU and the USA might be possible now. “I believe that future generations will look back to this time and see it as a turning point in world history. We are not in a cod war now” the British prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in 1988 .

Afro-Americans after the World War II

World War II paved the way for change in the he area of civil rights. In 1946 president Truman created a President’s Committee to investigate the status of civil rights in America and recommend their improvements. In 1947 the committee called for changes in lynch laws, voting laws, for elimination of discrimination in the armed forces and in the federal civil service through the creation of the Fair Employment board. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of children in public schools on the basis of race as unconstitutional.

Under President D. Eisenhower desegregation made progress. But in the Deep South resistance to elimination of segregation began even to harden. White Citizen’s groups were created, and the Ku Klux Klan was revived. In 1956 nineteen Southern senators issued a “Manifesto” against “forced integration”. Economic reprisals were taken against blacks and the progressive organizations were under constant fire. The first open official resistance occurred in Little Rock (Arkansas), when the school board approved of a plan to admit a few black students to central High all-white school. The night before the opening of the school the governor of Arkansas appeared on television to announce that he was strongly against the plan. In 1963 President Kennedy had to dispatch regular army troops to Oxford, Mississippi, to put down a riot when black James Meredith tried to be enrolled as a university student. “ It ought to be possible for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed by troops”,- the president commented.. By 1964 only 1.17% of all black students were attending schools with white pupils. Schools for black students were usually much inferior to schools in middle-class neighborhoods