26.1: Global Insecurities at War’s End

• The Soviet Union has been committed to restoring its 1941 borders from the earliest days of fighting Hitler.

  • In July 1945, Stalin not only regained but also extended the territory of the Potsdam conference, annexed Eastern Poland with Western approval, and without it, the small Baltic nations.

• Americans had good grounds for trusting their prospects for reconstruction.

  • In contrast to Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, the US not only escaped the war, but also prospered.

• In 1944 the Allies worked on the United Nations (UN) as the global organisation, which could arbitrate disputes among member countries and stop aggressors, if necessary by force, at the Dumbarton Oaks in Washington and again in April 19 45 in San Francisco.

26.2: The Policy of Containment

• Many Americans believed that the Soviet Union and the United States had Franklin D. Roosevelt lived, they could have alleviated tensions.

  • The Diplomatic talent and expertise of his successor were sorely lacking.

  • Truman liked to talk hard and act defiantly with machine politicians, rather than polished New Dealers.

• Considered by numerous historians as the most successful US diplomatic venture after the war, the Marshall Plan enhance the climate for a sustainable capitalist economy of Western Europe.

• The Berlin blockade gave the Truman administration both a crisis and a chance.

  • The United States started an unprecedented 24-hour airlift with the assistance of the Royal Air Force.

  • "Operation Vittles" supplied West Berliners with almost 2 million tons of supply

• The policy of containment depended on America's capability to back up its military commitments, and Truman put his belief in the US monopoly on nuclear weapons.

26.3: Cold War Liberalism

• In a year's term Harry Truman's polls were one of the lowest polls of any president in the 20th century.

• The President signed Executive Order 9835 in two weeks after the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine on March 21, 1947, which establishes a civilian loyalty program for all employees of the federal government.

• Harry Truman had considered "crackpots and the lunatic fringe" by some of Roosevelt's advisers.

  • By 1946, he forced many of the remaining social planetarians who had worked for more than a decade in the Washington office.

• Another product of the National Security Act was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

  • The new CIA, which is established in the Wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), is a permanent operation dedicated to the collection in the world of security political, military and economic information.

• South led filibusters killed all of them, while congressional, conservative committees took over their national health insurance initiatives, federal education aid, and Taft- Hartley's repeal or amendment

26.4: The Cold War at Home

• In October 1947 the House of Communists and the Hollywood Film Industries (HUAC), a permanent standing committee since 1945, initiated hearings.

• Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, from Wisconsin announced in an awesome Lincoln Day speech delivered by the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, on 9 February 1950 that the US has been banned by the traitorous actions of men in the U.S.

• Shortly after the end of World War II anxiety became apparent in American popular culture even before the growth of anti-Communism

• The Cold War has affected all regions of the US, but none has had such a direct effect than the West.

  • Defense spending in the Second World War has spurred the western economies to move people massively to the west who want jobs during the war

26.5: Stalemate for the Democrats

• The People's Republic of China was proclaimed by Mao on 1 October 1949 and an alliance was signed in February 1950.

• The Allies split Korean peninsula, surrendered by Japan, in the 38th parallel at the end of the Second World War.

  • While every Korean hoped to unite their nation under a separate government, the North-South line became more severe.

• The conflict in Korea had serious consequences for the use of executive power.

  • In 1948 and 1950 in Korea, Truman unilaterally instituted a draft peacetime order without a declaration of war, he had bypassed the bomb of thermonuclear hydrogen (or H), which had been first fully tested in November 1952.

• The 1952 electoral campaign was dominated by Korea.

  • Since taking office in 1945, Truman had been wavering in popularity continually, but in the early 1950s, soon after fired MacArthur, it fell to an all time bass.