ASSIGNMENT 6

Arman Vatanpur

RIGHT REVELATION

Nationally as well as internationally, the early

1960s brought a breath of fresh, warming air into

Cold War culture. The Cuban missile crisis of

1962, which took the United States and the Soviet

Union to the brink of nuclear war, left in its wake

an easing of Cold War tensions. When the Soviet

Union and China broke their communist alliance

and a bloc of nations emerged that were com

mitted to neither the Americans nor the Soviets,

the threat of a climactic nu clear confrontation

lessened.

RIGHT REVELUTION

As the Cold War began to thaw, the chilling at

mosphere of political conformity that had

pervaded the McCarthy era began to dissipate,

opening up room for liberals and radicals to

express their views can dimly on domestic

issues. During the Cold War, opponents of

segregation had

argued that America s racial divide undermined

its position as a model for the "Free World."

With John F. Kennedys election as president in

1960, there was a clear mandate for reform.

RIGHT REVOLUTION

The young president took the reins of government away from

anoldergeneration of wartime leaders like Dwight Eisenhower.

Kennedy's idealistic rhetoric and his ambitious plans for legislation

to end dis crimination and provide federal aid to education seemed

to prefigure a new- activist spirit in domestic politics.

The idealism and the unprecedented

prosperity of the years flanking 1960

bred "revolutions of rising expectations"

among groups previously left on the

margins of American society. The two

most important social movements of the

post-World War II era, the civil rights and

women's rights crusades, began as equal-

rights movements but evolved into more

multifaceted causes. Both were built

upon a history of discrimination and

protest in the United States.

RIGHT REVOLUTION

Both movements, he notes, were inspired

by the surge of anticolonial protests among

people of color following World War II,

especially by the philosophy of nonviolent

resistance that Mahatma Gandhi had used

to lead India to independence from British

con trol. In the second essay, Olive Banks

finds many parallels between the American

and British feminist movements, ranging

from their common roots in women's

greater participation in the paid work force

to their similar evolution toward radical

feminism.

RIGHT REVOLUTION

The world war II begins in 1939 in

Europe and expanded to America at

the 1941 proved a decisive turning

point for United States and indeed

for the whole world.

The WWII changed America from

a nation of provincial innocents,

ignorance of the great world into a

nation that would often have bear

the burdens of rescuing that world.

WORLD WAR II

WORLD WAR II

During the 1930s, Adolf Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles

and boldly reasserted Germany's military power. The Nazi leader

took Germany out of the League of Nations; formed an alliance

with Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini; and began a series

ofterrztorial seizures that culminated with the invasion of Poland

in 1939, which plunged Europe into war. Throughout these events

the United States stood on the sidelines, and President Roosevelt

declared the nation neutral at the outset of World War II. But after

France fell to the German onslaught in June 1940, Roosevelt

resolved to save England at all costs. Isolationists in Congress had

passed Neutrality Acts in the mid-1930s that restricted American

trade with belligerents. Now Roosevelt convinced Congress to

permit the sale of arms to England on a "cash-and-carry" basis. He

arranged to transfer fifty destroyers to Great Britain in exchange

for long-term leases on several British bases in the Americas.

WORLD WAR II

It is a commonplace that if Britain and America had stood

up to the dictators in the 1930s the Second World War

would never have happened. Winston Churchill dubbed it

"the unnecessary war," and the first volume of his war

memoirs took as its theme "how the English-speaking

peoples, through their wisdom, carelessness and good

nature, allowed the wicked to rearm." With hindsight it is

easy to castigate the leaders of both countries for their

blindness to the dangers that threatened them and for a

complacency that at times seems almost supine. It is

harder to step back, to see the threats as they saw them at

the time, and to understand the constraints that made

effective Anglo-American cooperation so difficult.

WORLD WAR II

Trade was a major issue. America was becoming increasingly irritated by

British discrimination against U.S. products. In 1937, 16 percent of all the

goods America exported went to Britain, making her America's most

valuable trading partner, but their importance to Britain, who was

expanding her trade with the empire, was declining. By 1937 only 11

percent of British imports came from America, whereas 39 percent came

from the empire. Roosevelt's secretary o f state, Cordell Hull, was alarmed

at the effects of this trend on American farmers and manufacturers. He put

the blame on Britain's policy of Imperial Preference, which imposed lower

tariffs on imports from the empire than on those from other nations. Hull

felt the discrimination was unfair and was convinced that trade barriers

and economic nationalism were the root causes of war. The British took a

different view. Building up the empire's trade seemed the best way out of

the depression, and they were not willing to reduce Imperial Preferences

until America offered drastic cuts in its own tariffs. Negotiations on

lowering trade barriers between the two dragged on from 1934 to 1938.

WORLD WAR II

On the night of August 31. 1939. Hitler invaded Poland, ignoring Britain's

ultimatum, and three days later Britain and France declared war. Unlike

Wilson in 1914, Roosevelt at once made clear that American sympathies lay

with the Allies.

For seven months after war was declared there was little fighting. Poland

was swiftly dismembered by Germany and Russia, with whom Hitler had

signed a nonaggression pact. There then followed the period of inactivity

known as the phony war.

Despite their Confucian overtones, the family metaphor and proper-place

philoso phy bore close resemblance to Western thinking on issues of race

and power. The

Japanese took as much pleasure as any white Westerner in categorizing the

weaker peo ples of Asia as "children." In their private reports and directives,

they made clear that "proper place" meant a division of labor in Asia in

which the Yamato race would con trol the economic, financial, and strategic

reins o f power . . . and thereby "hold the key to the very existence of all the

races of East Asia." . . . For other Asians the real mean ing of Japan's racial

rhetoric was obvious. "Leading race" meant master race, "proper place"

meant inferior place, "family" meant patriarchal oppression.