| A | B |
|---|
| baby boom | Markedly higher birth rate in the years following World War II; led to the biggest demographic "bubble'' in American history. |
| Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill) | Act of 1944, also known as the "GI Bill of Rights,'' which provided money for education and other benefits to military personnel returning from World War II. |
| Employment Act of 1946 | Act which set up a three-member Council of Economic Advisers to make appraisals of the economy with regard to employment levels and advise the president in an annual economic report, while a new congressional Joint Committee on the Economic Report would propose legislation. |
| Atomic Energy Commission | Created in 1946 to supervise peacetime uses of atomic energy. |
| Taft-Hartley Act | Passed over President Harry Truman's veto, the 1947 law contained a number of provisions to control labor unions, including the banning of closed shops. |
| Operation Dixie | CIO's largely ineffective post-World War II campaign to unionize southern workers. |
| National Security Act | Act of 1947 that authorized the reorganization of government to coordinate military branches and security agencies; created the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Military Establishment (later renamed the Department of Defense). |
| United Nations | Organization of nations to maintain world peace, established in 1945 and headquartered in New York. |
| iron curtain | Term coined by Winston Churchill to describe the cold war divide between western Europe and the Soviet Union's eastern European satellites. |
| containment | General U.S. strategy in the cold war that called for containing Soviet expansion; originally devised in 1947 by U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan. |
| George F. Kennan | Diplomat who authored the anonymous 1947 Foreign Affairs article that introduced the theory of containment. |
| Truman Doctrine | President Harry S. Truman's program of post-World War II aid to European countries-particularly Greece and Turkey-in danger of being undermined by communism. |
| cold war | Term for tensions, 1945-89, between the Soviet Union and the United States, the two major world powers after World War II. |
| George C. Marshall | Army general during World War II who orchestrated the Allied victories over Germany and Japan, and later Secretary of State who developed the Marshall Plan in 1947, a program of massive aid for the reconstruction of Europe. |
| Marshall Plan | U.S. program for the reconstruction of post-World War II Europe through massive aid to former enemy nations as well as allies; proposed by General George C. Marshall in 1947. |
| Berlin Airlift | Allied air forces flew food, medicine, coal, and equipment into Berlin to counteract the Russian blockade of the city from June 1948 to May 1949. |
| North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) | (NATO) Defensive alliance founded in 1949 by ten western European nations, the United States, and Canada to deter Soviet expansion in Europe. |
| Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) | Committee established by the Franklin Roosevelt administration in 1941 that offered willing employers the chance to say they were following government policy in giving jobs to black citizens; the FEPC's authority was chiefly moral, since it had no power to enforce directives. |
| Jackie Robinson | Army veteran who joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and became the first black player in major league baseball. |
| Americans for Democratic Action | Democratic faction, formed in 1947, that criticized President Truman but also took a firm anti-Communist stance. |
| Henry A. Wallace | Secretary of Commerce under President Truman who was fired in 1946 over a disagreement in foreign policy; ran for president against Truman in 1948 on the Progressive party ticket. |
| J. Strom Thurmond | South Carolina governor who ran for president against Truman in 1948 on the Dixiecrat ticket. |
| Dixiecrat party | Also known as the States Rights Party, a group of Deep South delegates who walked out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention in protest of the party's support for civil rights legislation. |
| Progressive party | Created when former president Theodore Roosevelt broke away from the Republican party to run for president again in 1912; the party supported progressive reforms similar to the Democrats but stopped short of seeking to eliminate trusts. |
| Fair Deal | Domestic reform proposals of the second Truman administration (1949-53); included civil rights legislation and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, but only extensions of some New Deal programs were enacted. |
| Point Four | A plan for technical assistance to underdeveloped parts of the world that was the fourth part of President Truman's anti-Communist foreign policy, which included the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and NATO; it was never put into effect. |
| NSC-68 | A top secret document produced by the National Security Council that called for rebuilding conventional military forces to provide options other than nuclear war. |
| Douglas MacArthur | Popular general who aggressively directed American forces during the Korean War and clashed with President Truman, who removed him from command in 1951. |
| Inchon | Port city for Seoul, Korea, where General MacArthur landed a American force to the North Korean rear on September 15, 1950, a brilliant ploy that pushed the North Koreans back across the border. |
| Second Red Scare | Post-World War II Red Scare focused on the fear of Communists in U.S. government positions; peaked during the Korean War and declined soon thereafter, when the U.S. Senate censured Joseph McCarthy, who had been a major instigator of the hysteria. |
| House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) | Formed in 1938 to investigate subversives in the government; best-known investigations were of Hollywood notables and of former State Department official Alger Hiss, who was accused in 1948 of espionage and Communist party membership. |
| Alger Hiss | President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served in several government departments; Hiss was accused by Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet agent, of leaking secret government documents and was convicted of perjury in 1950. |
| Whittaker Chambers | A former Soviet agent who accused Alger Hiss in 1948 of giving him secret government documents; later become an editor of Time magazine. |
| Richard Nixon | California congressman who rose to national prominence for pursuing the case against Alger Hiss and exploiting an anti-Communist stance to win election to the Senate in 1950; later elected president in 1969. |
| Julius and Ethel Rosenberg | Couple convicted of transmitting atomic secrets to the Russians and executed on June 19, 1953. |
| Joseph R. McCarthy | Republican senator from Wisconsin who accusing the State Department of being infested with Communists and was a major instigator of the Red Scare, McCarthy was later censured by the Senate. |
| McCarran Internal Security Act | 1950 Act passed over President Harry S. Truman's veto which required registration of American Communist party members, denied them passports, and allowed them to be detained as suspected subversives. |
| Servicemen's Readjustment Act | (1944) The "GI Bill of Rights'' provided money for education and other benefits to military personnel returning from World War II. |
| Veterans Administration | A new government agency that was part the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the GI Bill of Rights. |
| baby boom | Markedly higher birth rate in the years following World War II; led to the biggest demographic "bubble" in American history. |
| Sunbelt | An arc of states in the South, the Southwest, and the West, that stretched from the Carolinas down through Texas and into California that experienced population growth in urban areas. |
| William Levitt | A brassy New York developer who led the suburban revolution and with his brother made a fortune during the depression by building houses. |
| Levittown | Low-cost, mass-produced development of suburban tract housing built by William Levitt on Long Island in 1947. |
| white flight | When some white residents, eager to maintain residential segregation, moved out to the suburbs when African Americans migrated to the cities of the North and Midwest after World War II. |
| white collar | This category of worker who earned a salary rather than an hourly-wage, outnumbered blue-collar workers for the first time in American history by the mid-50's. |
| "In God We Trust" | A phrase that Congress made mandatory on all American currency in 1954, inspired by Eisenhower's patriotic crusade to bring Americans back to God. |
| Norman Vincent Peale | Reverend who perfected "feel good" theology whose book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) was a phenomenal best-seller throughout the 50's. |
| "positive thinking" | Phrase used by Norman Vincent Peale that refers to avoiding negative, depressing thoughts in favor of thoughts that reaffirm faith and goodwill, in an effort to achieve personal happiness. |
| neo-orthodoxy | Movement in the religious community that argued that the gospel of "good news" was just a way of sociability or "belonging," rather than a way of reorienting life toward God. |
| Reinhold Niebuhr | A preacher-professor at New York's Union Theological Seminary, whose neo-orthodox views lambasted the "undue complacency and conformity" that had settled over American life in the postwar era. |
| John Kenneth Galbraith | An economist who attacked the prevailing notion that sustained economic growth would solve America's chronic social problems. |
| the affluent society (The Affluent Society) | A book written by John Kenneth Galbraith that criticized post-war American life and warned that the public sector was starved for funds and public enterprises were everywhere deteriorating. |
| David Riesman | A social critic who identified a fundamental shift in the dominant American personality from the "inner-directed" to the "other-directed" type. |
| The Lonely Crowd | Written by David Riesman, this book was a comprehensive and provocative analysis of the docile new corporate character. |
| Benjamin Spock | Author of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, who advised parents to foster in their children qualities and skills that would enhance their chances in what Riesman called the "popularity market." |
| juvenile delinquency | Phrase that refers to criminal behavior in children or teenagers. America experienced a rash of this in the 50's that some blamed on rock 'n' roll music. |
| rock 'n' roll | A form of music that emerged during the postwar era that combined a strong beat with off-beat accents and repeated harmonic patterns to produce its distinctive sound. The electric guitar provided the basic instrument. |
| Alan Freed | A Cleveland disc jockey who coined the term "rock 'n' roll" in 1951. |
| Elvis Presley | A young white truck driver from Mississippi, raised in Memphis, Tennessee, who experimented with "rockabilly" music, gospel, country-and-western, and R and B rhythms. He released a smash hit "Heartbreak Hotel" in 1956 and, over the next two years, emerged as the most popular musical entertainer in American history. |
| Arthur Miller | A playwright of the postwar period who reinforced David Riesman's image of modern American society as a "lonely crowd" of individuals without internal values, hollow at the core, groping for a sense of belonging and affection. |
| Death of a Salesman | A play by Arthur Miller whose protagonist, Willy Loman, an aging, confused salesman in decline, has centered his life and that of his family on the notion that material success is secured through personal popularity. |
| James Jones | Author of From Here to Eternity, whose characters tended to be restless, tormented, and often socially impotent individuals who can find neither contentment nor respect in an overpowering or uninterested world. |
| From Here to Eternity | Written by James Jones, this novel was praised by critics for its disturbing portrayal of the individual's struggle for survival amid the smothering and disorienting forces of mass society. |
| Ralph Ellison | African-American writer who explored the theme of the lonely individual imprisoned in privacy. |
| Invisible Man | Kaleidoscopic novel written by Ralph Ellison that forcefully accentuated the problem of alienation by using a black narrator who is struggling to find and liberate himself in the midst of an oppressive white society. |
| Jackson Pollock | An artist who was part of a group of young painters in New York City who decided that postwar society was so chaotic that it precluded any attempt at literal representation. |
| abstract expressionism | An anarchic artistic technique that dominated the American and international art scene in the late 1940s and 1950s and included Jackson Pollack, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko. |
| Saul Bellow | Author of the Dangling Man... |
| Dangling Man | A novel by Saul Bellow (1946), in which a character concludes that the essence of life is the "desire for pure freedom." |
| the Beats | A group of young writers, poets, painters, and musicians who rebelled against the regimented horrors of war and the mundane horrors of middle-class life. |
| Allen Ginsberg | A leading member of the Beat movement whose writings featured existential mania for intense experience and frantic motion. |
| Howl | A long prose-poem by Allen Ginsberg, published in 1956, that featured an explicit sensuality as well as an impressionistic attempt to catch the color, movement, and dynamism of modern life. |
| Jack Kerouac | A key author of the Beat movement whose best selling novel, On the Road helped define the movement with it's featured frenzied prose and plotless ramblings. |
| On the Road | An autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac that portrayed the Beats'life of "bursting ecstasies" and maniacal traveling. |
| Robert A. Taft | Ohio senator and Republican candidate in the 1952 presidential election who had become the foremost spokesman for domestic conservatism and for a foreign policy that his enemies branded as isolationist. |
| isolationist | Term used to describe Taft's version of foreign policy that favored an active American role in opposing communism but opposed "entangling alliances" such as NATO. |
| Richard M. Nixon | Vice President under Eisenhower who opposed left-wing "subversives" and pursued Alger Hiss as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee. |
| Twenty-Second Amendment | (1951) Limited presidents to two full terms of office or two terms plus two years of an assumed term; passed in reaction to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's unprecedented four elected terms. |
| Adlai E. Stevenson | Governor of Illinois and Democratic candidate in the 1952 election who had led the crusade against Hitler, and opened a domestic crusade to clean up "the mess in Washington." |
| dynamic conservatism | What Eisenhower called his domestic program which meant being "conservative when it comes to money and liberal when it comes to human beings." |
| St. Lawrence Seaway | A federal construction project that opened the Great Lakes to oceangoing ships by means of locks and dredging. |
| Army-McCarthy hearings | Televised U.S. Senate hearings in 1954 on Senator Joseph McCarthy's charges of disloyalty in the Army; his tactics contributed to his censure by the Senate. |
| Julius and Ethel Rosenberg | Convicted of transmitting atomic secrets to the Russians, they went to the electric chair on June 19, 1953. |
| "security risk" | Under this edict of the anti-Communist crusade, federal workers could lose their jobs because of dubious associations or personal habits that might make them careless or vulnerable to blackmail. |
| Earl Warren | Former governor of California and appointed by Eisenhower as the chief justice of the Supreme Court. |
| John Foster Dulles | Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration who favored working toward the "liberation" of eastern Europe from Soviet domination. |
| brinksmanship | The practice of seeking advantage by creating the impression that one is willing and able to push a highly dangerous situation to the limit rather than concede. |
| massive retaliation | Phrase coined by John Foster Dulles that refers to his hostility towards the Democrat's policy of containment in the Soviet Union. |
| Third World | The developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. |
| Ho Chi Minh | A seasoned revolutionary and passionate Vietnamese nationalist obsessed by a single goal: independence for his country. |
| Dien Bien Phu | A town of northwest Vietnam near the Laos border where the French military base fell to Vietminh troops on May 7, 1954. |
| Geneva Accords | An agreement that proposed to neutralize Laos and Cambodia and to divide Vietnam at the 17th parallel. |
| Southeast Asia Treaty Organization | Pact among mostly western nations signed in 1954; designed to deter Communist expansion and cited as a justification for U.S. involvement in Vietnam . |
| Quemoy and Matsu | South China Sea islands held by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. |
| Sputnik | First artificial satellite to orbit the earth; launched October 4, 1957, by the Soviet Union. |
| missile gap | A perceived lack in American technical prowess caused by the Soviet launch of Sputnik and Sputnik II into space. |
| National Aeronautics and Space Administration | In response to the Soviet Union's launching of Sputnik, Congress created this federal agency in 1957 to coordinate research and administer the space program. |
| National Defense Education Act | (1958) Passed in reaction to America's perceived inferiority in the space race, the appropriation encouraged education in science and modern languages through student loans, university research grants, and aid to public schools. |
| Eisenhower Doctrine | The president authority of the president to extend economic and military aid to Middle East nations, and to use armed forces if necessary to assist any such nation against armed aggression from any Communist country. |
| separate but equal | Principle underlying legal racial segregation, which was upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and struck down in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). |
| Brown v. Board of Education | (1954) U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down racial segregation in public education and declared "separate but equal'' unconstitutional. |
| Citizens' Councils | Middle- and upper-class versions of the Ku Klux Klan that spread quickly across the region and eventually enrolled 250,000 members. |
| Massive Resistance | In reaction to the Brown decision of 1954, U.S. senator Harry Byrd encouraged southern states to defy federally mandated school integration. |
| Southern Manifesto | Denounced the Court's decision in the Brown case as "a clear abuse of judicial power" and was signed by 101 southern members of Congress in 1956. |
| Rosa Parks | A black seamstress who was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. |
| Montgomery bus boycott | Sparked by Rosa Parks's arrest on December 1, 1955, a successful year-long boycott protesting segregation on city buses; led by the Reverend Martin Luther King. |
| Martin Luther King, Jr. | A pastor from Montgomery Alabama who brought the civil rights movement a message of nonviolent disobedience based on the Gospels, the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and the example of Mahatma Gandhi in India. "We must use the weapon of love," |
| Southern Christian Leadership Conference | Civil rights organization founded in 1957 by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders. |
| Civil Rights Act of 1957 | First federal civil rights law since Reconstruction; established the Civil Rights Commission and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. |
| Orval Faubus | Arkansas governor who called out the National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Little Rock's Central High School under federal court order. |
