APUSH Chapter 37 Vocabulary – Flashcards
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The Checkers speech, 1952
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Nixon's speech that saved his vice-presidential candidacy in which he responded to reports of a secret "slush fund" he'd tapped with a self-pitying speech on television, during which he referred to the family cocker spaniel. This also demonstrated the political potentialities of television, which allowed politicians to speak directly to voters.
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Korean War armistice, 1952
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Finally signed 7 months after Eisenhower hinted that he might used atomic weapons, though subsequent inquiries suggested that the Chinese never understood his artfully veiled hints, and they agreed to end the war for reasons of their own, especially burdensome financial costs.
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General George Marshall
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Former army chief of staff and ex-secretary of state who McCarthy denounced as "part of a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man".
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Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954
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During which the U.S. Army fought back against McCarthy's attacks and accusations of communist activity in 35 days of televised hearings, once again displaying the political power of the new broadcast medium. McCarthy publicly cut his own throat by parading his essential meanness and irresponsibility, causing the Senate to formally condemn him for "conduct unbecoming a member".
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Jim Crow laws
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A rigid set of antiquated rules which governed all aspects of black existence from the schoolroom to the restroom and that set arrangements to keep them insulated from whites, economically inferior, and politically powerless.
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Executive Order 8802, 1941
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Signed by president Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 that prohibited racial discrimination in the national defense industry. This was the first federal action, but not law, that advocated equal opportunity and prohibited employment discrimination.
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Thurgood Marshall
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NAACP chief legal counsel who, in the case Sweatt v. Painter, wrung from the High Court a ruling that separate professional schools for blacks failed to meet the test of equality. He later became a Supreme Court justice.
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Rosa Parks, 1955
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A college-educated black seamstress who made history in Montgomery, Alabama when she boarded a bus, took a seat in the "whites only" section, and refused to give it up. Her arrest for violating Jim Crow statutes started a yearlong black boycott of city buses and served notice throughout the South that blacks would no longer submit to segregation.
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Earl Warren
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Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and a former governor of California who shocked traditionalists with his active judicial intervention in previously taboo social issues, and who courageously led the Court to address urgent issues that Congress and the president avoided. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the learned justices ruled that segregation in public schools was "inherently unequal" and thus unconstitutional.
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Little Rock Central High School, 1957
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A school in Arkansas where governor Orval Faubus mobilized the National Guard to prevent 9 black students from enrolling. Confronted with this challenge to federal authority, Eisenhower sent troops to escort the children to their classes.
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Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1957
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Formed by Martin Luther King Jr. and which aimed to mobilize the vast power of the black churches on behalf of black rights. This strategy was exceptionally shrewd because the churches were the largest and best-organized black institutions that had been allowed to flourish in a segregated society.
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Greensboro sit-ins, 1960
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When 4 black college freshmen, without detailed plan or institutional support, demanded service at a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter, and when the waitress refused to serve them they kept their seats and returned the next day with 19 classmates, then the next day 85, and by the end of the week 1000. The sit-in movement spread across the South and swelled into a wave of wade-ins, lie-ins, and pray-ins.
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Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, 1960
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Formed by southern black students to give more focus and force to these efforts. Members would eventually lose patience with the more stately tactics of the SCLC and the even more deliberate legalisms of the NAACP.
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Indian New Deal, 1934
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Set in place by commissioner John Collier in 1934 as the Indian Reorganization Act, and which encouraged tribes to establish local self-government and preserve their native traditions. Eisenhower sought to cancel the preservation policies and proposed to "terminate" the tribes as legal entities and to revert to the assimilationist goals of the Dawes Severalty Act, though when most Indians resisted, the policy was abandoned.
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Interstate Highway Act, 1956
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A $27 billion plan to build 42,000 miles of sleek, fast motorways. Laying down these modern, multilane roads created countless construction jobs, speeded the suburbanization of America, offered juicy benefits to the trucking, automobile, oil, and travel industries while at the same time robbing the railroads of business, and created problems of air quality and energy consumption.
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Merger of AFL and CIO, 1955
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Also known as the AF of L-CIO and which, at the time of the congressional investigations that produced scandalous revelations of gangsterism, fraud, and brass-knuckles tactics in American unions, had already expelled the Teamsters for choosing leaders like two-fisted James R. Hoffa, who served part of his sentence before disappearing.
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John Foster Dulles
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Incoming secretary of state who promised not merely to stem the red tide but to "roll back" its gains and "liberate captive peoples". When the new administration promised to balance the budget by cutting military spending, Dulles answered with a "policy of boldness", in which Eisenhower would build up an airfleet equipped with nuclear bombs, which would inflict destruction on the Soviets or the Chinese if they got out of hand.
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Massive retaliation
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Dulles' "policy of boldness" doctrine, which would be inflicted on the Chinese or the Soviets by an airfleet of superbombers equipped with nuclear bombs. However, it was revealed that America's nuclear sledgehammer was too heavy a weapon to wield in such a relatively minor crisis, and Eisenhower discovered that the hardware necessary was staggeringly expensive.
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Geneva Summit, 1955
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A conference which produced little progress on the burning issues but bred a conciliatory "spirit of Geneva" that caused a modest blush of optimism to pass over the face of the Western world. Hopes rose further when Soviet Communist party boss Khrushchev publicly denounced the bloody excesses of Joseph Stalin.
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Hungarian uprising, 1956
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When the Hungarians rose up against their Soviet masters but felt badly betrayed when America turned a deaf ear to their desperate appeals for aid. The crushing of this uprising revealed that America's nuclear sledgehammer was too heavy a weapon to wield in such a relatively minor crisis.
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Dien Bien Phu, 1954
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A fortress in the northwestern corner of Vietnam in which a key French garrison was hopelessly trapped. The new "policy of boldness" was put to the test, and Dulles, Nixon, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff favored intervention, but Eisenhower held back, and the fortress fell to the nationalists.
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Geneva Conference on Indo-China, 1954
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A multinational conference which roughly halved Vietnam at the 17th parallel, an arrangement which the victorious Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh in the north consented to on the assurance that Vietnam-wide elections would be held within 2 years.
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Ngo Dinh Diem
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The leader of a pro-Western government in Southern Vietnam which was soon entrenched at Saigon, and to which Eisenhower promised economic and military aid provided that his regime undertook certain social reforms.
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Warsaw Pact, 1955
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Signed by the Eastern European countries and the Soviets during the same year West Germany was welcomed into the NATO fold, and which created a red military counterweight to the newly bolstered NATO forces in the West.
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Shah of Iran, 1953
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Installed as a kind of dictator in a coup engineered with the help of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in response to the growing resistance of the government of Iran towards Western companies that controlled Iranian petroleum. Though the coup was successful in the short run, a bitter legacy of resentment was left among Iranians.
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Suez Crisis, 1956
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During which President Nasser of Egypt was seeking funds to build a dam on the upper Nile for irrigation and America and Britain offered financial help, but when Nasser began to flirt openly with the communist camp, Dulles swiftly withdrew the offer, and Nasser regained face by nationalizing the Suez Canal, owned by British and French stockholders. When Eisenhower refused to supply the French and British with oil for their joint assault on Egypt, the allies withdrew their troops and a U.N. police force was sent to maintain order.
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Eisenhower Doctrine, 1957
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Set in place by the U.S. president and Congress and which pledged U.S. military and economic aid to Middle Eastern nations threatened by communist aggression, though the real threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East was in fact nationalism, as Nasser's wild popularity among the masses of all Arab countries demonstrated.
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OPEC, 1960
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An organization that formed when Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran joined with Venezuela, and in the next 20 years its stranglehold on the Western economies would tighten to a degree that even Nasser couldn't have imagined (short for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries).
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Sputnik, 1957
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A pair of satellites launched by the Soviet Union, the first of which was launched in October and weighed 184 pounds, and a month later the Soviets topped their own ace by sending aloft a larger satellite weighing 1120 pounds and carrying a dog.
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Missile gap
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The Cold War term used in America for the perceived superiority of the number and power of Soviet missiles compared to that of the U.S. This raised some sobering military questions and launched a period of "rocket fever" throughout the nation.
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NASA
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Established by Eisenhower and was sponsored billions of dollars devoted to missile development (short for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration).
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National Defense and Education Act, 1958
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Authorized $887 million in loans to needy college students and in grants for the improvement of teaching the sciences and languages in response to Congress' rejection of demands for federal scholarships.
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The Kitchen Debate
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During which Nixon had engaged in a finger-pointing spat with Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959, from which he had gained particular notice.
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Nixon-Kennedy Debates, 1960
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In which Nixon met Kennedy in 4 so-called debates and they crossed words before audiences estimated at 60 million or more, and while nobody "won" the debates, Kennedy held his own and didn't suffer by comparison with the more "experienced" Nixon. These debates once again demonstrated the importance of image over substance in the television age.
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Betty Friedan
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A feminist who published The Feminine Mystique, a runaway bestseller and a classic of feminist protest literature that launched the modern women's movement. She spoke in rousing accents to millions of able, educated women who applauded her indictment of the boredom of suburban housewifery.
