The National Spirit and Market Revolution

    QUESTION:

Historians have traditionally labeled the period after the War of 1812 the “Era of Good Feelings.” Evaluate the accuracy of this label, considering the emergence of nationalism and sectionalism.

        The label for the period after the War of 1812, The Era of Good Feelings, was true in considering to certain aspects of America. Even though there were some major problems, the Era of Good Feelings applied to the strong sense of nationalism. Evidently the issues on the tariff, foreign policy, political parties, slavery and national bank represented a greater national gap.

When Monroe became president the nation’s expectations were very high. After defeated the British in two major wars, American was slowly but surely becoming a strong power. America reached a high, socially and people became more dedicated to keep the union.

            There was a sense of separation between the north and south but Monroe and John Quincy Adams made it evident that there wasnt separation because Monroe won all electoral votes except for one. The only distinction was the North hated slavery and the abolitionists began to become stronger. South supported slavery and while new states were being added they wanted them to allow slavery as well. This also became a problem but was settled by the Missouri Compromise, which made it a slave state but all states above the 36 30 line. Thomas Jefferson saw this as a problem stating that “a geographical line coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry possessions of men will never be obliterated and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. The industrial economy of the North and the agrarian economy of the South was difference between the two. The main problem created by this tension was the economic policies of the nation and as John Randolph pointed out to the Congress in 1816. The Bank of U.S. was now functioning with the loans of British investors.
      During the early 1800's France and Britain were at war and for many years America remained neutral. But, Great Britain began seizing American ships and impressing the Americans into the British Navy. In addition, Great Britain was supplying the Native Americans in North America with guns and, as a result America declared war on Britain in 1812. The phrase "Era of Good Feelings" was used to describe the administrations of Munroe in 1816 but the validity of this phrase is questioned. Many people might believe that the period after the war of 1812 was an "Era of Good Feelings" because of the nation's gain of nationalism and expansion of the country, but it was not because of growing sectionalism and state issues. After the War of 1812, America gained a pride from winning the war known as nationalism. This pride caused them to feel inferior to other countries such as Great Britain.

       This is pointed out in Document H when it is mentioned that Munroe was not willing to be subordinate to Great Britain. Another example of this would be the Monroe Doctrine that was a warning to the European states to stay out of the Western Hemisphere or else they would have to deal with America. Moreover, Document C shows the country celebrating the Fourth of July in a happy spirit. In addition, during the War of 1812, Americans defeated many Native Americans in the west which opened up land for the Americans leading to the Westward Expansion seen in Document E. This expansion was essential because southerners needed more land to grow cotton and tobacco and it also helped citizens with economic difficulties from the Embargo Act that put a tax on goods from Great Britain before the war. Furthermore, with the creation of the American System by Henry Clay, revenues from the tariffs went towards building roads and canals that were needed by the country stated by John Calhoun in Document B.

The Thawing of the Cold War

         QUESTION:     

Compare and contrast the Cold War foreign policies of TWO of the following presidents.

Harry Truman (1945–1953)

Dwight Eisenhower (1953–1961)

Richard Nixon (1969–1974)

           Right after World War II the US and the USSR started having ideological and political disputes over territories and communism. This became a full blown Cold War when Berlin was blockaded by the Soviets, but was aided by America with an airlift. As Winston Churchill said “an iron curtain had descended between the East and the West, communist and non-communist. Both Dwight D Eisenhower and Richard Nixon had different ways of dealing with the pose threat in America. Eisenhower had a policy of brinkmanship, while Richard Nixon believed in a state of detente. However, both believed that communism should be contained and that the United States must come out of the war as a victor.

              When Eisenhower became president, he had a specific policy to follow. Brinkmanship was the iea of constantly putting the enemy on edge. The use or possession of nuclear weapons would serve as both a threat an a  deterrent to the enemy. This was also known as “Mutually Assured Destruction”. In addition, under Eisenhower, America was spurred on an arms race, especially when the Soviets launchedSputnik. From then on, America raced to build weapons, and further technology in order to go into space. Ultimately, this was achieved in Kennedy’s presidency, where the Apollo Project sent man to the moon. Under Eisenhower, the US was constantly competing with the USSR to ensure that it would always have the upper hand. Falling behind would only mean failure an potentially destruction.

             Nixon’s approach to the Civil War was very different. Instead of threatening constantly, he decided on diplomacy.Nixon broke barriers when he went to China in what is known as the ping-pong diplomacy. The fact that Nixon went to China shows his willingness to compromise, since the United States hadn’t even recognized China because of its communist ideology. The visit was also a brilliant idea because it put the Russians in a bad spot; the USSR and China were not very fond of each other, so also having good relations with China also meant having good negotiations with the Soviets. Nixon and the leader of Russia, worked out an arguement called the SALT I treaty. This limited the amount of nuclear arms on both side, which ended tensions considerably and put the two superpowers at a detente. In other words, the United States and the Soviet Union coexisted and somewhat peacefully; although underlying tensions did exist, the surface was calm. Nixon’s diplomatic approach was suitable for the time.

            Although both presidents had their differences in foreign policy, they were quite similar in that both believed in the stop of communism. Eisenhower, a war general, had little qualms about containing communism for the purpose of covert operation. Nixon, too, was not afraid to use force. Having been a member of the anti-communist HUAC, he strongly believed in stopping it.Though Nixon had stated that America was beginning “Vietnamization”, or the gradual replacement of American troops with South Vietnam ones, he actually increased military presence to the many wars and secret attacks, Congress did pass the War Powers Act to limit the president, but Nixon still pushed for a no anti-communist agenda

Vietnam Blog

DANIEL ELLSBERG

Ellsberg's primary responsibility for the Defense Department was to craft secret plans to escalate the war in Vietnam—plans he says he personally regarded as "wrongheaded and dangerous" and hoped would never be carried out. Nevertheless, when President Lyndon Johnson chose to ramp up American involvement in the conflict in 1965, Ellsberg moved to Vietnam to work out of the American Embassy in Saigon evaluating pacification efforts along the front lines. He eventually left Vietnam in June 1967 after contracting hepatitis.

When the Times was slapped with an injunction ordering a stop to publication, Ellsberg provided the Pentagon Papers to the Washington Post and then to 15 other newspapers. The case, entitled New York Times Co. v. The United States, ultimately went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which on June 30, 1971 issued a landmark 6-3 decision authorizing the newspapers to print the Pentagon Papers without risk of government censure.

Not specifically because Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers—which covered only the period up to 1968 and therefore did not implicate the Nixon administration—but rather because they feared, incorrectly, that Ellsberg possessed documents concerning Nixon's secret plans to escalate the Vietnam War including contingency plans involving the use of nuclear weapons, Nixon and Kissinger embarked on a fanatical campaign to discredit him. An FBI agent named G. Gordon Liddy and a CIA operative named Howard Hunt—a duo dubbed "the Plumbers" wiretapped Ellsberg's phone and broke into the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, searching for materials with which to blackmail Ellsberg. Similar "dirty tricks" by "the Plumbers" eventually led to Nixon's downfall in the Watergate scandal.

For leaking the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was charged with theft, conspiracy and violations of the Espionage Act, but his case was dismissed as a mistrial when evidence surfaced about the government-ordered wiretappings and break-ins.

THE MY LAI MASSACRE

On this day in 1968, a platoon of American soldiers brutally kill between 200 and 500 unarmed civilians at My Lai, one of a cluster of small villages located near the northern coast of South Vietnam.During the Vietnam War, U.S. troops frequently bombed and shelled the province of Quang Ngai, believing it to be a stronghold for forces of the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, or Viet Cong (VC).

In March 1968, a platoon of soldiers called Charlie Company received word that Viet Cong guerrillas had taken cover in the Quang Ngai village of Son My. Led by Lieutenant William L. Calley, the platoon entered one of the village's four hamlets, My Lai 4, on a search-and-destroy mission on the morning of March 16. Instead of guerrilla fighters, they found unarmed villagers, most of them women, children and old men.

The soldiers had been advised before the attack by army command that all who were found in My Lai could be considered VC or active VC sympathizers, and told to destroy the village. Still, they acted with extraordinary brutality, raping and torturing villagers before killing them and dragging dozens of people, including young children and babies, into a ditch and executing them with automatic weapons.

              The massacre reportedly ended when an Army helicopter pilot, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, landed his aircraft between the soldiers and the retreating villagers and threatened to open fire if they continued their attacks.The events at My Lai were covered up by high-ranking army officers until the following March, when one soldier, Ron Ridenhour, heard of the incident secondhand and wrote about it in a letter to President Richard Nixon, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and various congressmen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHk4TGWx0ZM

Ronald Reagan

Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan ordered American troops to invade Grenada and liberate the island from its ruling Marxist dictator. By itself this would have been an insignificant military action: Grenada is a tiny island of little geopolitical significance. But in reality the liberation of Grenada was a historic event, because it signaled the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine and inaugurated a sequence of events that brought down the Soviet empire itself.

The Brezhnev Doctrine stated simply that once a country went Communist, it would stay Communist. In other words, the Soviet empire would continue to advance and gain territory, but it would never lose any to the capitalist West. In 1980, when Reagan was elected president, the Brezhnev Doctrine was a frightening reality. Between 1974 and 1980, while the United States wallowed in post-Vietnam angst, 10 countries had fallen into the Soviet orbit: South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada and Afghanistan. Never had the Soviets lost an inch of real estate to the West.

REAGAN POLITICAL CARTOONS

Art Wood, an award-winning political cartoonist himself, collected more than 16,000 political cartoons by hundreds of the leading creators of the 'ungentlemanly art,' a phrase that is commonly used to describe this type of graphic satire. He used the word “illustration” to describe the enormous talent and craft that went into a work of art produced to capture a moment in time. From the nineteenth century's Gilded Age to recent times, political illustrations have appeared in magazines, editorial pages, opinion pages, and even on the front pages of American newspapers. These visual editorials reflect multiple viewpoints conveyed by a wide variety of artistic approaches, including the classic cross hatching techniques of Harper's Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast, the sweeping brush work of Ding Darling, the rich crayon line work of Rube Goldberg and Bill Mauldin, and the painterly styles of contemporary cartoonists Paul Conrad and Patrick Oliphant. The broad spectrum of political perspectives informs our understanding not only of the past but also of the presen

t.

Conrad also did some notable cartoons on Ronald Reagan.  In fact, he first took after Reagan in the 1960s when Reagan was governor of California.  Conrad’s cartoons often had Reagan in over his head, and he sometimes cast him as a clown.  Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler reportedly received a number of early-morning calls from Reagan or Nancy complaining of Conrad’s portrayals.  But after Reagan became President, Conrad continued his lampooning.  He once had president shown as “Reagan Hood,” stealing from the poor to give to the rich.  Another, shown at left, had Ronald and Nancy Reagan in a send up of Grant Wood’s classic American Gothic pose, made during the 1980s farm crisis when thousands of farm families were losing their farms to foreclosures, and as some charged, to Reagan policies.  Conrad also skewered Reagan’s foreign policies; one cartoon had the president in a bathtub playing with warships and a rubber duck.  In 1993, Conrad accepted a buyout from the Los Angeles Times,  but he continued to draw syndicated cartoons for more than 15 years.

South Carolina has become a primary election state in recent years and, in 1980, a sputtering Ronald Reagan presidential campaign was being bested by George Bush in the early going. Many South Carolinians supported Texan John Connally, but Carroll Campbell signed on to chair the Reagan campaign in the state and helped deliver a major primary victory to Reagan. Most of these cartoons had a big impact on the lives of the presidents themselves.

Dorothea LangePoor mother and children, Oklahoma, 1936

Poor mother and children during the Great Depression. Elm Grove, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, USA.Gordon and many others have pointed out that Lange's documentary photography was, to a large extent, portrait photography.  She treated the poor with as much respect as she had her rich clients, during her years as a successful portrait photographer in San Francisco.  And she found the beauty in them, just as she had with the rich.

This photo forces us to remember that people retain their full humanity, even in the midst of misery.  We need to see both of these photos (and to remember the father's tender gesture of washing his child's face) before we can even begin to understand this young mother and her children.

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) has been called America's greatest documentary photographer. She is best known for her chronicles of the Great Depression and for her photographs of migratory farm workers. Below are 42 pre-World War II photographs she created for the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA) investigating living conditions of farm workers and their families in Western states such as California. Most of the workers had come west to escape the Dust Bowl, the lengthy drought which devastated millions of acres of farmland in Midwestern states such as Oklahoma.

WWI: Italy

In the years that led up to World War One, Italy had sided with Germany and Hungary in the Triple Alliance. Italy should have joined in the sides of these two nations when war broke out in August 1914. Italy's experience in World War One was disastrous and ended with the insult of a reward at the Versailles Settlement in 1919. What Italy did was wait and see how the war progressed. On April 26th 1915, Itally came into the war on the side of Britain, France and Russia. Many socialists had supported the government ‘s stand in keeping Italy out of the war in 1914. The nationalists, however, were horrified. To start with, Mussolini was against the war.

In 1915, Italy had signed the secret Treaty of London. In this treaty Britain had offered Italy large sections of territory in the Adriatic Sea region. Such an offer was too tempting for Italy to refuse. Britain and France wanted Italy to join in on their side so that a new front could open up t the south of the Western Front. The plan was to split still further the Central Powers so that its power on the Western and Eastern Fronts was weakened. The part Italy had to play in it required military success. This was never forthcoming. Between 1915 and 1917, Italian troops only got 10 miles inside Austrian territory. But in October 1917 came the disaster of Caporetto. In this battle, in fact a series of battles, the Italians had to fight the whole Austrian Army and 7 divisions of German troops. The Italian Army lost 300,000 men. Though the Italians had a victory at Vittorio Veneto in 1918, the psychological impact of Caporetto was huge. The retreat brought shame and humiliation to Italy.

By the end of the war in 1918, 600,000 Italians were dead, 950,000 were wounded and 250,000 were crippled for life. The war cost more than the government had spent in the previous 50 years – and Italy had only been in the war three years. By 1918, the country was hit by very high inflation and unemployment was high. But at least Italy had been on the winning side and could expect just rewards at Versailles. The Italians did not get what they felt had been promised at the Treaty of London and that caused resentment especially at the losses Italy had endured fighting for the Allies. The government came over as weak and lacking pride in Italy. For nationalists, the failure of the government to stand up to the "Big Three" at Versailles was unforgivable.