Period 8: 1945–1980 unit test

Détente

Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)

Great Society

Containment

Truman Doctrine (1947)

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Roe v. Wade (1973)

Marshall Plan (1948)

GI Bill (1944)

Tet Offensive (1968)

McCarthyism

Federal-Aid Highway Act (1956)

DOCUMENT-BASED QUESTION. Evaluate the extent to which the Cold War changed American society from 1945 to 1975. The seven documents below are real primary sources, described here in our own words rather than quoted. The identifying information — author, position, document type and date — is accurate and is the basis for the sourcing point. Document 1 — Executive Order 9835, establishing the Federal Employees Loyalty Program, issued by President Harry S. Truman, March 1947. The order requires loyalty investigations of all civilian federal employees and authorizes dismissal on reasonable grounds for belief in disloyalty, including membership in organizations designated as subversive by the attorney general. It is issued nine days after Truman's request for aid to Greece and Turkey. Document 2 — NSC-68, a classified National Security Council policy paper, April 1950. The paper, drafted principally by Paul Nitze, describes the Soviet Union as animated by a design for absolute authority over the rest of the world, and recommends a rapid and sustained buildup of American and allied military strength, arguing that the necessary spending is well within the country's economic capacity. It calls for a peacetime military establishment of a size the country had never previously maintained. Document 3 — Joseph McCarthy, speech to the Ohio County Women's Republican Club, Wheeling, West Virginia, February 1950. McCarthy, a first-term senator from Wisconsin, claims to hold a list of communists working in the State Department with the knowledge of the secretary of state, and argues that American setbacks abroad are the result of treason at home rather than of Soviet strength. Document 4 — The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, formally titled the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. The legislation authorizes federal funding for some 41,000 miles of limited-access highway, with the federal government paying ninety percent of construction costs. Its stated justifications include the rapid evacuation of cities in a nuclear attack and the movement of military traffic. Document 5 — The National Defense Education Act, 1958. Passed within a year of the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the act provides federal funding for instruction in science, mathematics and foreign languages, and creates a federal student loan program — a substantial federal role in education justified explicitly on national security grounds. Document 6 — Dwight D. Eisenhower, farewell address to the nation, January 1961. Eisenhower, a career soldier and outgoing president, warns that the permanent armaments industry now employing millions is new in American experience, that its economic and political influence is felt in every statehouse and office, and that the country must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by this military-industrial complex. Document 7 — Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement, 1962. The statement, drafted principally by Tom Hayden, describes a generation raised in comfort but disturbed by the contradiction between American democratic ideals and the realities of segregation at home and the arms race abroad, and argues that the permanent war economy and anticommunism have narrowed political debate to the point that citizens no longer meaningfully govern themselves.