[BLANK_AUDIO] Hi, welcome back.

Make yourself comfortable. At the beginning of this week, I want to

take on a topic that's come up a lot in the discussion threads, practically since
the beginning
of the course. You've all heard phrases like, history
will judge, the judgment of history, the verdict of
history. And one of the most pleasurable activities
of historians is to step back and hand out
judgments about heroes and villains and wise
people and foolish people. We all do that. But a lot of you have already noticed
that I don't do very much of that in this
course. That doesn't mean that I don't have a
moral sensibility, or that I'm not appalled by some of the
things that we're describing. But what I want to do, first of all, is
concentrate on giving you a foundation, arming you with information about the most
important things that happened, what
happened, concentrating on things that really seem
to be shaping the flow of world history, and then delving into why those things
happen, as best we can. We can then look in judgment on, well,
here are the choices available to them, the facts available to
them, the values available to them. And here's how they appraised, weighed
those things, and made the calls they did. And we can see that they should've made
different calls, even in the context of their time, they
should've made different calls. There were other people pointing in a
different direction that were ignored. But mainly what I want to do is arm you,
so that you can engage in those sort of interpretive exercises and make up
judgments for
yourself as to who you think are heroes and who
you think are fools. Okay, with that out of the way, let's turn
to the first topic for this week: The Age of
the Americans. The United States of America, indeed the
fate of North America, had been important in
world history, like the fate of the Indian subcontinent
or northeast Asia or other key areas that are shaping the flow of world
history. And we've dealt with them. We are now entering a period in which the
United States of America takes on an especially important, even central role,
in shaping the flow of world history during a particular
period. It had become more and more important even
by the 1920s, I eluded to this earlier. Although, a lot of that importance was
commercial and cultural.
Beginning in the 1940s, though, the Americans become exceptionally
important and remain so for some time. In understanding why the United States
plays such an important part in world history during the second half of
the 20th century, a really formative period is between
about 1940 and the mid-1950s. What are my bookends here? 1940, after the fall of
France, the
American government declares a national emergency and begins mobilizing on a vast
scale to participate in global war. That fall of France and the decision by
the United States that it needed to get ready to play a very
large role, though it takes them a year and a half to
fully get involved in the war,
that bookend in 1940 is important. You can pick 1954 as another bookend. Some of
you might prefer another one. By the mid-1950s, the United States has
decided that it's going to have a global strategy of containing
communism all over the world. And by this point, in the mid-1950s, the United
States has done some things in its
domestic politics, above all in its own civil rights issues,
that I think set itself up to play a more important
role in the world. Frankly, I think the United States Supreme Court's decision
outlawing segregation in
the public schools, the Brown v Board of Education decision of
1954, is actually an important pivotal historical moment, as
the United States begins a second reconstruction of the southern part of its
own country. Let's talk first about the dimension of
America as a world power. Yes, America had been an important power,
one of the world powers, especially beginning
by 1898-1900. And that remains true in the 1920s and even in the 1930s. America's
one of the world
powers but by no means a dominant one. But during the 1940s and thereafter, the
United States more and more emerges as a lead world power.
In some cases, the lead world power. With that went the evolution of a national
security state. This whole term so familiar to Americans,
national security, this is a new phrase. National security is a phrase that people
don't use until the 1940s. And they are using it in 1940s to try to
capture the notion that security is about more than the size
of the army and the navy. It had to embrace the preparation of the
whole state. After World War II, actually, the United
States begins rapidly demobilizing its military, strongly tempted to simply
revert to the way it had been before the 1940s. And then the rise of the Cold War
with the
Soviet Union and some of the events I'll talk about in
other presentations this week propelled the United States back
into getting ready to wage world war. The result of that is that the �40s and
�50s are the formative period for the creation of the
institutions that define the American national security
state. Here's President Truman signing an especially important piece of
legislation, an amendment to the National Security Act of 1947, in a
ceremony in 1949. This is the act that creates the American
Department of Defense. And indeed this period, the �40s and early
�50s, see not only the creation of a Department of Defense
that takes the place of the old War Department, which ran the Army and
the Navy Department, but it also sees the creation of things
like: an independent armed force called the Air Force, that used to
be part of the Army; a White House organized body that's
designed to combine all the different agencies
that contribute to national power and make decisions
among them; in the 1940s, there was a significant expansion of the military
organization
into a committee system, very much influenced by British
examples, that becomes more and more important during the
1950s and then takes on an even greater role
beginning with legislation in the 1980s; and then a significant expansion of the
American intelligence community. The creation, in 1947, of something called a
Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA,
that actually becomes much larger and more important in
the 1950s, for reasons we'll see in a minute. Similarly, created in 1952, is
another
large intelligence agency, the National Security Agency, devoted to
capturing signals and electronic intelligence of many kinds. These are agencies
that employ tens of thousands of people, spending billions of
dollars. This is not an exhaustive list by any
means. But it begins to give you some sense of
how in the �40s and �50s, these defining institutions of a
large part of the American government come into
existence. As these new institutions are being built
up, the United States increasingly sees its mission as the defense of
frontiers to try and limit the spread of communism, frontiers in both Europe and
Asia that
will be focal points for the attention of the
United States government. But in analyzing the rise of America to this important
role in world history, if
we just focus on these national security
changes, we're going to miss a big part of the story. Another key part of the story
is actually
the rising role of the United States as a kind of economic model, an
organizing state for the world. The United States becomes the largest example of
the practice of Social
Democracy, as I've been defining that term, beginning
in the 1930s and onward. It becomes the exemplar of big business, big unions, and a
big government managing
and umpiring the relationship among them
and doing more. The United States is the leading spokes-country for international
cooperation and free trade. Some irony here, the United States had
been a habitually protectionist country from the late 1800s on really
into the 1930s. Britain had been the free trade country. Britain had abandoned the
doctrines of
free trade at the beginning of the 1930s. After the end of World War II, it was the
United States now, that played the role of calling for free trade as an organizing
principle to have a vital world economy and extolling the virtues of international
cooperation in managing any number of
institutions that could make economic exchange work. Yet a third dimension, that
has to be
stressed, is the domestic transformation of the United
States. If the United States did not get its own house more in order, it could
hardly have played such a large role in the politics and
culture of the world. For instance, an often overlooked point is the
integration of the American South into the national
economy. It's hard for us to remember this now. But in the 1920s and even well into
the
1930s, frankly the American South was regarded as the substantially
unreconstructed, backward, backwater of American society.
Weaker education, oppression of the Negroes, a kind of a benighted, dark,
and colorful place, fit for the fiction of William Faulkner but hardly
for imitation in the rest of the country. Its industries: weak. Its economic
growth: modest. Its laborers: mainly black, trapped in an almost a sort of serfdom,
sharecropping on their tenant plots. All this begins to change, especially
during the 1910s and �20s, as African Americans are
increasingly able to free themselves from this kind of peonage in the South
and begin migrating in large numbers to the cities and
factories of the North. Places like Chicago. But there's an enormous change in the
1930s and 1940s with the institutions of Roosevelt's New
Deal, the institutions and opportunities created by the war, that
allow Southern businesses to begin growing and fully participating in the national
labor market and the national capital
markets. It's not a very well understood story, though we see the results of it all
around
us in the enormous growth of cities like
Atlanta or cities like Houston. Look at what's happening in Houston in the 1940s
and 1950s.
By the way, Houston is my hometown, but you can see it goes from a city of
less than 400,000 people in 1940 to nearly a million by 1960, and by 1970,
it'll have more than tripled in population and be one of the largest
cities in the United States. Why? It's turned from a city that's just a
center for selling and trading the cotton that's
grown in East Texas, to a city that's now the center of a global oil industry, oil
and
petrochemicals. Industry, finance, engineering. Supplying both the nation and the
world. There are similar stories that could be told of several cities in the
American
South. So, the integration of the South into the
national economy is a huge story in America's
domestic transformation. Another part of that story is the whole
rise of the western United States, the rise of
California. Today California has a population of 34 million people and an economy
that would,
if it was counted as a country, be one of the
largest economies in the world. But back in 1930, the population of California was
relatively modest and
mainly agricultural. Of course, all that has changed, a lot of it as a result of
American
defense works and defense industry. It's interesting just to notice the
changing distribution of the population within the
United States. Thanks to this chart, put together by the
United States Census Bureau, we can chart what happens between, say, 1790 and 1900.
Looking at the situation in 1900, you see how important the agricultural Midwest
is.
The grainery of the world. The West is still a very thinly populated
part of the country. Run that forward 30 years, we begin to see some changes, but
they're not dramatic changes, as of say about
1930. But then, look at what happens between
1930 and the present day. You see the continuing significance of the
South, as one of the larger and more dynamic parts of
the American population. But then you also see the rise of the
West, with the vast majority of this population
concentrated in California, Oregon, and Washington
state. There are all sorts of ways to try to map the rise of California, I like
this
particular image. This is from 1956.
It's the newly constructed amusement park at Disneyland,
to the east of Los Angeles. Or the lights of Los Angeles in the early
1950s, now a sprawling metropolis. Another critical dimension to the United
States being able to attain whatever stature it gained in
the mid-20th century was the fact that the United States
finally and more decisively took on the legacy of African
slavery inside the country. This large population of African Americans
who still, in the aftermath of the American Civil
War, though they'd been freed from slavery, had
been kept in a state of profound legal discrimination and systematic oppression.
That begins to change in the 1940s. This is not a coincidence.
If you ask yourself why the 1940s? Why the 1950s? Why then did a second
reconstruction of
the American South begin? You can't separate that from what's going on in world
history, from the stance the Americans had been talking in
World War II. They had just mobilized the whole country,
passionately, to destroy a tyranny based on racial
prejudice. That had to bounce back in all kinds of
ways, in the way Americans then viewed the heritage of racial prejudice inside
their
own country. And you can see at the edges, the erosion of the old established
American positions
on race. The integration of the United States Armed
Forces, for the first time, in 1948. Key court decisions. Black Americans keep
pushing for their
freedom. Increasingly, they are seeing some of the major power sources in the
country are
going to make another try at helping them break
through and gain a new era of freedom. In that story, I do think the decision of
the U.S. Supreme Court in the Brown case is a kind
of landmark. You can see the top headline here in the
New York Times announcing the decision, a nine
to nothing decision. One thing I also like in this story
though, if you look down here at the very bottom, this story right here is saying
that the
American Broadcasting Network, the Voice of
America, that provides news in 34 languages all over the world, is
flashing this court ruling within the hour of its
delivery. Court decisions like these, of course
didn't end the process, they reopened it, and the struggle would
go on for decades afterwards. For instance, one of the immediate events
that followed, in 1955, was a boycott of the segregated bus system
in Alabama, in Montgomery, Alabama, by black Americans who simply
refused to ride the city buses and provide financial support for a bus system that
treated them as second class
citizens. The boycott was triggered when this young
women, named Rosa Parks, simply refused to give up her bus seat to whites as the
bus
driver insisted that she do. She becomes then, a leader in that bus
boycott. In this photograph, she's joined by an active local reverend
in Montgomery, a man who is becoming increasingly known
for his oratorical skills: his name is Martin Luther King, Jr. As we reflect on the
role of the United States in world history in the second half
of the 20th century, what I don't want you to do
is to think of this as an inexorable and
inevitable rise, something that was bound to happen. When you delve into the
details of each of
these individual stories, the national security story, the
economic story, the civil rights story, the details show that none of these things,
it seems to me, were foregone conclusions. Maybe integration of the South into the
national economy was, but I'm not even sure about
that. In each of these stories, there's a complex, twisty narrative
involving bureaucratic rivalries, clashing beliefs, circumstances that are
creating opportunities for large change, but then key choices that are being made
as to how to pick up those opportunities. We'll touch, occasionally, in succeeding
segments on what some of those contingent choices
were. We won't have time in this course to delve more deeply into all these
crosscurrents of American history. But the purpose of this presentation is
just to notice the significance of the United States now
in world history and to just reflect a little bit on what
had to happen in the United States for it to play this
kind of role. In the next presentation, we'll talk about
a critical catalyst in the outside world that pushed
America back into getting ready for world war.