Summary / Riassunto - These Truths: A History of the United States, Sintesi del corso di Storia Angloamericana

Scarica Summary / Riassunto - These Truths: A History of the United States e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Storia Angloamericana solo su Docsity! These Truths – Jill Lepore The newspaper that published the constitution also published an essay titled The Federalist No. 1 by young lawyer Alexander Hamilton, who argued that the US was an experiment in the science of politics, marking a new era in the history of government. This American experiment rested on three political ideas or these truths, as Thomas Jefferson called them: political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable, Jefferson wrote in 1776 in a draft of the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin then corrected the expression, suggesting these truths to be self-evident. Franklin was implying that those political ideas were not God-given, a matter of religion (as Jefferson’s expression suggested), but were laws of nature, empirical and observable. Similarly to B. Franklin, Thomas Paine highlighted in Common Sense (1776) the importance of empiricism and its impact on politics: I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense. Declaring independence was itself an argument that required historical evidence. That’s why most of the Declaration of Independence is a list of historical claims. 1.The nature of the past In 1492, Christopher Columbus, after crossing the Pacific Ocean, landed on an island called Haiti but that Columbus called Hispaniola (the little Spanish island) because he thought it had no name. He called the natives Indians because he initially believed to have sailed to the Indies. There were about 3 million of them; 50 years later, there were only 500. About 20,000 years ago, humans migrated from Asia into the Americas when the northwestern tip of North America and the northeastern tip of Asia (what is now Russia and Alaska) were still attached. Cahokia was the biggest pre-Columbian North American city, in the center of a maize culture across the Mississippi River, in modern Missouri. Also the Aztecs, Incas, and Maya, vast and ancient civilizations, built monumental cities. Outside of those places, most people lived in smaller settlements and gathered and hunted for their food. They kept pigs and chickens but not bigger animals. They spoke hundreds of languages and practiced many different faiths. Most had no written form of language. Before 1492, Europe suffered from scarcity and famine. After 1492, vast wealth carried to Europe from the Americas, through the extraction by the forced labor of Africans and the governments’ new powers that contributed to the rise of nation-states. Nation-state: political community, governed by laws, that, at least theoretically, unites a people who share a common ancestry. The US declared its independence in 1776; it was a state, but what made it a nation? Its people clearly didn’t share a common ancestry. Historian Bancroft believed in manifest destiny, the idea that the US was fated to cross the continent, from east to west. He also wanted to celebrate the US, not as a branch of England, but as a pluralist and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world. Landed in Haiti, insisting that the natives were savages who could not rightfully own anything, Columbus claimed possession of their land. But he did not consider such land to be a new world; he thought that he’d found a new route to the old world. It was Amerigo Vespucci, who crossed the ocean in 1503, to report the discovery of a new world; the new continent was named after him, America. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a decree with which he divided rights to lands in the Western Hemisphere to Spain and Portugal. Spanish conquistadores first set foot on the North American mainland in 1513; in a matter of decades, New Spain became Mexico and a territory that stretched from Florida to California. Spanish, unlike later English colonizers, did not travel to the Americas in families: they came as armies of single men. In New Spain, the mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indigenous women, known as mestizos, outnumbered Native Americans. Taking possession of the Americas gave Europeans a surplus of land; it ended famine and led to four centuries of unprecedented economic growth. The European extraction of the wealth of the Americas made possible the rise of capitalism: new forms of trade, investment, and profit. The wealth of the Americas flowed to Europe by the forced labor of Africans. European colonies in the Americas: • Spain → Saint Augustine, Florida, Santa Fe, New Mexico • France → Québec City • Netherlands → New Amsterdam (modern NYC) The English came late: their first American colonies were founded in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 and in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. The English were far more invested in the East Asian colonies. It was only under Queen Elizabeth I that the English started to venture in North America, primarily to challenge the Spanish expansion: the Queen issued a license to Sir Raleigh, granting him right to land in Newfoundland, Terranova (Canada). In 1585 Raleigh’s fleet ended up landing further south, on an island on the Outer Banks (North Carolina), which was unfit to build a colony. In this period of explorations, an idea was born: there existed in the world a people who lived in a state of nature preceding the institutions and laws. Locke wrote in the beginning all the world was America. 2. The rulers and the ruled Unlike the Spanish, who set out to conquer, the English were determined to settle. In 1606, King James I of England issued a charter to grant to both the Virginia Company and the Plymouth Company the right to establish permanent settlements in North America, which he claimed as his property since those lands were not possessed by any Christian people. England would’ve established a different kind of settlement compared to Spain or France. Colonists would be free men, not vassals of the king: they would be his subjects but would rule themselves. Over the course of the 17th and early 18th centuries, the English established more than two dozen colonies, founding an empire of coastal settlements. John Locke argued that all men were born into a state of equality and Thomas Paine’s plain truth of all men being originally equals disproved the idea that God had granted to one person the right to rule over all others. I. To settle in the new colony, the Virginia Company rounded men eager to make their own fortunes, including John Smith who became the first governor of the colony founded in Jamestown, Virginia. The colonists subjected the natives and raided native villages to steal their food. In 1622, the natives rose up in rebellion and killed hundreds of Englishmen (Virginia massacre). The colony recovered and its economy thrived with a new crop, tobacco. In 1619, they founded the first self- governing body and brought 20 Africans in Virginia, the first slaves in British America. In 1620, the Mayflower sailed from Great Britain, carrying dissenters from the Church of England, the pilgrims. In 1610, the pilgrims had left England for Holland, where they’d settled in Leiden, a town known for religious toleration. Then, they decided to set sail for Virginia; however, the ship went off its course and landed further north, in Cape Cod (Massachusetts). They signed a documented, called the Mayflower Compact, which laid the foundations for the Plymouth Colony. Many Englishmen fled the country and settled in New England. One of these was John Winthrop, a Puritan who joined a new expedition to found a colony in Massachusetts Bay, where he founded several Puritan communities. 1 million Europeans migrated to British America and 2.5 million Africans were carried there by force, despite once condemning the Portuguese for trading Africans. But when English settlers in Barbados began planting sugar reconsidered that because it required a lot of work. Under Roman law, all men are born free and can only be made slaves by the law of nations, under certain narrow conditions, for instance, when they sell themselves as payment of debt. However, laws governing slavery had disappeared from English common law, therefore colonial assemblies adopted new practices with which they attempted to establish a divide between “blacks” and “whites.” The American colonies grew, and the colonists came to see themselves as the people, too. Most colonies established assemblies, popularly elected legislatures, and made their own laws. The restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, with the coronation of Charles II, represented a commitment to religious toleration. This spirit extended across the ocean. The colonies of New York and New Jersey became religious asylums for Quakers, Presbyterians, and Jews. Locke was a political philosopher serving also as colonial lawmaker. He became the secretary of the colony of Carolina. Consistent with his argument in his Letters concerning toleration, the Constitution of Carolina established freedom of religious expression and that the paganism of the natives was not sufficient grounds to take their lands. In the Two treatises on civil government, Locke attempted to explain how governments come to exist. He began by imagining a state of nature, a condition before government, as a state of perfect freedom and equality. Then men created civil society and governments for the sake of order and the protection of their property. Locke argued that kings like Powhatan had no sovereignty because they did not cultivate the land. Therefore, they had no property and, thus, no government at all. All men are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations. To introduce slavery in the Carolinas, then, it had to be established an institution inconsistent with each idea Locke had about civil society. So, despite the assertion of a natural right to liberty, the right of one man to own another was not only possible, but lawful, in America. The only way to justify this contradiction would be to develop an ideology of race. The revolution in America began with Indians waging wars and slaves waging rebellions: • King Philip’s War (1675) → a federation of New England Algonquians attacked the towns in New England to expel the foreigners from their lands. The chief Metacom was killed and his son enslaved. • Bacon’s Rebellion → a white colonist named Nathaniel Bacon led 500 poor white men and slaves to Jamestown that was burnt down. Poor Englishmen had very little political power since property requirements allowed for the right to vote. After the rebellion, free white men were granted the right to vote, whereas Black slaves were denied any form of liberty. This rebellion exacerbated the racial division. • Stone Rebellion (1739) → in South Carolina slaves killed their white masters, hoping to make their way to Spanish Florida, where the Spanish had promised fugitive slaves their freedom. As a result, the South Carolina legislature restricted slaves’ movement. Word of rebellions spread thanks to the growing literacy of the colonists who had begun to print their own newspapers. In 1639, the first printing press arrived in Britain’s colonies in Boston. 1690: first newspaper in British America, still in Boston. Newspapers began questioning authority, and in order to restore the supply of food to the West Indies. British army captured Charleston, in South Carolina, the largest city in the South. The last major land battle was held in Yorktown, Virginia, which was occupied by British naval forces. After a Franco-American army, led by George Washington and Marquis de Lafayette, bombarded Yorktown, the British surrendered in 1781. However, the war ended in 1782 in the West Indies, at the Battle of the Saintes, when the British defeated a French and Spanish invasion of Jamaica, an outcome that testified to the empire’s priorities: Britain kept the Caribbean but gave up America. In 1783, peace negotiations were held in Paris. An American delegation with Benjamin Franklin (ambassador in France), John Jay and John Adams, secured the Treaty of Paris, with which Britain agreed to recognize the independence and sovereignty of the US; in turns, Americans agreed to make good on debts to British creditors. The terms of the peace treaty cut the number of African slaves in Britain’s empire in half, which meant that the antislavery movement in England gained a more attentive audience. Quite the reverse applied in the US. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, slave owners in states like South Carolina gained political power, while slave owners in the West Indies lost it. The American Revolution contributed to the questioning of slavery that was felt far more deeply in the British Empire than in the US. Since their cause was defeated, Loyalists were no longer welcome in the US and sought to move elsewhere in the British Empire. Many of them went to Britain and Canada, to the West Indies and India, to help building the British Empire. None were more desperate to escape the US than the ex-slaves. 4. The Constitution of a nation The constitutional convention convened in Philadelphia from May 14 to September 17, 1787. James Madison kept a diary of the deliberations for himself and for Thomas Jefferson, who was not present since he was an ambassador in Paris. His work would have become an important account of how a constitution had come to be written. The Constitution of the US was not the first written constitution in the history of the world. 11 of the 13 states devised constitutions in 1776 or 1777, after Congress declared independence from England. Many state constitutions included a Declaration of Rights. The Articles of Confederation had plenty shortcomings. They weren’t ratified by the states until 1781 because of the states’ competing claims to western land; still after the Articles were adopted, those claims remained largely unresolved. Efforts to revise the Articles proved fruitless, so the new nation was riddled, as a result, with 13 different currencies and 13 separate navies. Congress lacked the authority to raise money, which it needed both to make good on its debts and to pay for troops. When the states defaulted on those debts, in turn Great Britain threatened to default on a commitment, made under the terms of the peace, to surrender its northwestern forts. Congress tried to revise the Articles so as to grant itself authority to collect taxes on imports. This led to a debate about how to calculate each state’s tax burden: by the number of inhabitants or by the value of land. The value of land was difficult to calculate; population seemed both easier to calculate for purposes not only of taxation but also of representation. For the purposes of taxation, each slave would count for 3/5 of a free man. This ratio was arbitrary and the amendment, ultimately, never approved, but the ratio would have been implemented later, determining the course of American elections for 7 decades. Congress was unable to pay its creditors; the continental government was nearly bankrupt. In Massachusetts in 1786, veteran Daniel Shays led an armed protest of farmers and veterans in opposition to the government's increased efforts to collect taxes and seize properties to extinguish the state’s war debt (Shays’ Rebellion). As an effort to restore order, Hamilton scheduled for a meeting in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation. No one said anything about drafting a constitution. The convention met in Philadelphia starting from May 25 until September 17, 1787, with 55 delegates sent from 12 states (Rhode Island refused to send a delegation) and G. Washington as its elected president. Delegates were sworn to secrecy to allow for a full and frank discussion during deliberations. The first problem to address was the Congress’ debt, its lack of cash, its inability to raise taxes and to suppress popular revolt. The Constitution also discussed the Revolution’s promise of representation. In devising the new national government, the delegates rejected a proposal that the state legislators, rather than the people, elect members of Congress. Voting requirements were left to the states. The Constitution required congressmen to be paid, so that the office would not be limited to wealthy men. It required only a short residency for immigrants before they, too, became eligible to run for office. Slavery had become an even bigger issue after the end of the war, when the largest importation of African slaves to the Americas in history took place: a million people over a decade. Since Britain closed its markets to American trade, a slave trade grew within the US. In Philadelphia, in the wealth slaves were represented as property and in the population as people. The most difficult question at the convention concerned representation. The congress adopted two measures: • The Northwest Ordinance → the Union would expand in the northwest territory with the admission of new states, rather than with the expansion of existing states; any new state north of the Ohio River would be without slavery, while those south of the Ohio would continue slavery. • Connecticut Compromise → equal representation in the Senate, with two senators for each state, and proportionate representation in the House of Representatives, with one representative for every 30,000 people. And, for purposes of representation, each slave would count as three-fifths of a person. A federal census, conducted every ten years, was instituted to make the count. Consequence: grant slave states far greater representation than free states; if not for the three-fifths rule, the representatives of free states would have outnumbered representatives of slave states. Congress should be prohibited from interfering with the slave trade up to 1808. Nowhere do the words “slave” or “slavery” appear in the final document. George Mason proposed adding a bill of rights, but his proposal was struck down. On September 17, 1787, the draft was finished; the day after the convention adjourned, the Constitution was printed in newspapers. The Declaration of Independence had been signed by members of the Continental Congress; it had never been put to a popular vote. The Articles of Confederation had been ratified not by the people but by the state legislatures. Except for Massachusetts and New Hampshire constitutions, no constitution, no written system of government, had ever before been submitted to the people for their approval. The debate over ratifying the Constitution produced some of the most heated political debates in American history; the arguments of those in favor of ratification were displayed in a collection of essays known as The Federalist Papers, published by Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison. The debate established the structure of the nation’s two-party system. Against the Federalists stood the Anti-Federalists, who opposed ratification, because they argued that the Constitution amounted to a conspiracy against their liberties, also because it lacked a bill of rights; they believed that a republic had to be small and homogeneous, while the US was too big for this form of government; the Constitution was willfully made to be incomprehensible to the understanding of the plain man. The ratification of the key states of New York and Virginia (both extremely populous and powerful) secured the success of the Federalists, even if with a narrow margin. In the first presidential election, Washington run unopposed and was unanimously elected. Inauguration day took place on April 30 and Washington took an oath of office on the Bible to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the US. Then, he delivered a speech written by Hamilton, even though the constitution does not call for an inaugural address. But nearly everything Washington did set a precedent for his successors. The constitution doesn’t say much about the duties of the president. Article 2, section 2 provides that the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the US. The constitution doesn’t call for a cabinet. Nevertheless, the first congress established several departments, to which Washington appointed secretaries: Department of State (Jefferson); Department of the Treasury (Hamilton), Department of War (Henry Knox). For what concerns the national judiciary, art. 3: the judicial power shall be vested in one Supreme Court, but the details were left to Congress. 1789, Washington signed the Judiciary Act, which established the number of justices, 6; defined the authority of the court, which was narrow; and created the office of attorney general, to which Washington appointed Randolph. Under the Constitution, the power of the Supreme Court is quite limited. Madison presented a list of 12 amendments, 10 of the 12 amendments were approved by the necessary three-quarters of the states; these became the Bill of Rights, which takes the form of a list of powers denied to the Congress as a guarantee of the rights of citizens from the interference of the federal government. 1st amendment: freedom of religion and separation of church and state. Art. 6 of the Constitution: forbids a religious test as a requirement for holding a governmental position. In a time when nearly every English colony in North America had been settled with an established religion, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution instituted a secular government. During Washington’s first term, the dispute between those in favor of a strong federal government and those who favor the states took the form of a debate over the economic plan put forward by Hamilton. Much of this debate concerned debt. Until government debts were paid, the US would have no lenders and no foreign investors and would be effectively unable to participate in world trade. Hamilton proposed that the federal government not only pay off the debts incurred by the Continental Congress but also assume responsibility for the debts incurred by the states, so he urged the establishment of a national bank and of a national currency. However, the Constitution does not grant to Congress the power to establish a national bank, and, since the 10th amendment says that all powers not granted to Congress are held by either the states or by the people, Congress cannot establish a national bank. Hamilton believed that the future of the US lay in manufacturing, freeing Americans of their dependence on imported goods, and spurring financial speculation, which would stimulate the economy. Washington agreed with Hamilton’s plan and considered that establishing a national bank fell under the art. 1, granting to Congress the power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper, thus establishing a precedent for interpreting the Constitution broadly. Jefferson argued that Hamilton’s economic plan emphasized manufacturing over agriculture and therefore seemed disadvantageous to the southern states; that it was unconstitutional, since it didn’t provide for the authority to establish a national bank; that States that had already paid off their war debts would be burdened from the states that had not yet paid their war debt; and that speculation was dangerous. This last suspicion became reality in 1792, with the first financial panic and first stock market crash in the new nation’s history (Panic of 1792). Hamilton was able to manage the financial crisis by honoring the nation’s debt and discharging private banks under the first bankruptcy law, passed in 1800. In 1791, Thomas Paine published in England the first part of Rights of Man in support of the French Revolution. He then fled to France where he wrote the second part. Paine stayed in Paris during the Reign of Terror and objected to the beheading of King Louis XVI, for which he was put in jail. While in prison, he wrote The Age of Reason. The revolutionary spirit caught up in Haiti, then known as Saint-Dominigue, France’s most vital colony as the world’s leading producer of sugar and coffee. There, in 1791 a slave rebellion surged. It became a war for independence, the second in the Western world. American owners of slaves were terrified by the events unfolding in Haiti, so the US helped French planters on the island to suppress the insurrection. Jefferson called the Haitians cannibals and warned Madison: we have to fear it. The American two-party system, the nation’s enduring source of political stability, was forged in the nation’s newspapers. Newspapers had shaped the ratification debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, and by 1791 newspapers were beginning to shape the first party system, a contest between Federalists and the Democratic-Republican Party, known as Jeffersonians or Republicans. Jefferson and Madison, who founded the Democratic-Republican Party, believed that the fate of the Republic rested in the hands of farmers; Hamilton and the Federalist Party believed that the fate of the Republic rested in the development of industry. Each party boasted its own newspapers, which back then were far more interested in staging a battle of opinions rather than in establishing facts. George Washington set another precedent by announcing he would not run for a third presidential term. By way of farewell, he addressed the American people through a letter published in newspapers, which became known as Washington’s Farewell Address, consisting of a series of warnings about the danger of disunion. Before his death (1799) he set out in his will that his slaves to be emancipated. 5. A democracy of numbers In 1787, while federalists and anti-federalists were fighting over the proposed Constitution, John Adams, minister to Britain and Thomas Jefferson, minister to France, staged an epistolary debate about the Constitution. Adams worried that the Constitution gave the legislature too much power, Jefferson feared the same about the presidency. In 1796, their debate helped establish the nation’s first stable political parties. The two men next faced off in an election which led to a constitutional crisis. Adams ran as a Federalist and Jefferson as a Republican. Adams was a founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he’d written a three-volume Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the US, explaining the fragile balance between an aristocracy of the rich and a democracy of the poor, a balance that could only be struck by a well-engineered constitution. Jefferson, president of the American Philosophical Society, placed his faith in the rule of the majority. The Senate was elected indirectly: U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures. But, for the office of the presidency, indirect election presented a problem: having Congress choose the president violated the principle of the separation of powers. Compromise chosen = the people elect delegates to an Electoral College, a body that would do the actual electing. The number of delegates to the Electoral College would be determined not by a state’s population but by the number of its representatives in the House. The size of a state’s representation was determined by the rule of representation, 1 member of Congress for every 40.000 people, with people who were enslaved counting as 3/5 of other people. The 3/5 clause not only granted slave-owning states a disproportionate representation in Congress but amplified their votes in the Electoral College. In 1796 Adams won the elections. During Adams’s stormy administration, the distance between the two parties widened. While the US was engaged in an undeclared war with France, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, granting to the president the power to imprison noncitizens he deemed dangerous and to punish printers who opposed his administration. Jefferson and Madison believed that this law violated the Constitution. Thus, they came up with another form of judicial review: the states could decide on the constitutionality of federal laws. The divide between the parties marked a hardening of views on slavery. During the Haitian revolution, Jefferson, favoring France, wanted, at most, a remote relationship with an island of freed slaves. But the Adams administration, favoring England, wanted to renew trade with the Caribbean Island and to recognize its independence. Meanwhile, Africans in America found inspiration in news of events in Haiti. In 1800, a blacksmith named Gabriel, known as the American Toussaint, led a slave rebellion in Virginia, marching under the slogan Death or Liberty. The rebellion failed. In 1800, Federalists and Republicans in Congress held a meeting to decide on their party’s presidential nominee. The Republicans settled on Jefferson, the Federalists on Adams. The campaigning took place in the newspapers. Out of a total U.S. population of 5.23 million, only about 600,000 people were eligible to vote. In no state did voters cast ballots for presidential candidates: instead, they voted for legislators, or they voted for delegates. In 1801 Jefferson was elected president. His inauguration marked the first peaceful transfer of power between political opponents in the new nation. However, before leaving the presidency, Adams appointed to the office of chief justice the Virginian John Marshall, who was Jefferson’s cousin and also one of his fiercest political rivals. A corrupt or too powerful judiciary had been one of the abuses that led to the Revolution. This changed with John Marshall. In 1801, the court still lacked a building of its own. Marshall decided that the deliberations of the Supreme Court ought to be cloaked in secrecy. He also urged the justices to issue unanimous decisions and to destroy all evidence of disagreement. He also granted to the 1833 with the object to lay before the public, at a price within the means of everyone, all the news of the day. It was sold to anyone who had a ready penny, and it marked the triumph of facts over opinion in American journalism. Jackson extended the powers of the presidency; he was the first to veto laws passed by Congress. He implemented the policy of Indian removal, which applied only to the South. But the religious revival interfered with removal. Evangelicals began attempting to convert the Cherokee tribe, declaring a mission to make the whole tribe English in their language, civilized in their habits, and Christian in their religion. The Cherokee decided to proclaim their political equality and declare their independence as a nation. For centuries, Europeans had based their claims to lands in the New World on arguments that native peoples had no sovereignty over the land they inhabited because they had no religion, or no government, or no system of writing. The Cherokees challenged each of these arguments. A Cherokee man named Sequoyah invented a written form of the Cherokee language. In 1825, the Cherokee Nation began printing The Phoenix, in both English and in Cherokee. The discovery of gold on Cherokee land doomed the Cherokee cause. Jackson declared Indian removal one of his priorities and argued that the establishment of the Cherokee Nation violated the Constitution: no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State (without that state’s approval). The Cherokees argued that the state of Georgia had no jurisdiction over them, and the case went to the Supreme Court. In the case Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Marshall elaborated: “The Cherokee Nation is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.” Jackson ignored the Supreme Court. On the forced march westward, one in four Cherokees died, of starvation or exhaustion, on what came to be called the Trail of Tears. The US government resettled south-eastern Indians to lands west of the Mississippi and acquired more than a hundred million acres of land to the east. Vice president John C. Calhoun led South Carolina’s attempt to nullify a tariff established by Congress. Although the tariff cut the duty on imports in half, it still worried southerners, who argued that it put the interest of northern manufacturers above southern agriculturalists. The South provided 2/3 of American exports (all cotton) and consumed only 1/10 of its imports, leading its politicians to oppose the tariff by endorsing a position that came to be called “free trade.” To protest the tariff, Calhoun developed a theory of constitutional interpretation under which he argued that states had the right to declare federal laws null and void. This crisis was less a debate about the tariff than it was a debate about the limits of states’ rights and about the question of slavery. Calhoun became the leader of the proslavery movement. The practice of nominating a presidential candidate at a national party convention was born in this period because Jackson wanted to get rid of his vice president. Fleeing worsening economic conditions in the East, Americans moved westward. To survey land and supervise settlement, Congress chartered the General Land Office. American settlers crossed the border into Mexico, which had won independence from Spain in 1821. John Quincy Adams tried to negotiate a new boundary; the Mexican government needed the money, but it wouldn’t sell its own land. The Mexican territories of Coahuila and Texas proved attractive to American settlers in search of new lands for planting cotton. At the time, Texas included much of what later became Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Americans in Texas rebelled against Mexican rule, waging a war under the command of Sam Houston. In 1836, Texas declared its independence. When Houston sent a proposal to Congress requesting annexation, the measure failed because Jackson feared annexation would provoke a war with Mexico, which did not recognize Texas’s independence. Also, if Texas were admitted to the Union, it would enter as a slave state. The Congress was flooded with thousands of abolitionist petitions. Southern slave owners, a tiny minority of Americans, deployed the rhetoric of states’ rights to free trade (trade free from federal government regulation), but in fact they desperately needed and relied on the power of the federal government to defend and extend the institution of slavery. Jackson didn’t want to run for a third term, but he was determined to choose his successor: Van Buren, who took office in 1837. The nation’s financial system fell apart in the worst financial disaster in American history, second only to the crash of 1929. The Panic of 1837 ended only after a seven-year-long depression, known as the hungry forties. The fall was the result of Jackson’s decision of unregulated banking industry. In 1841, Congress passed a federal law offering bankruptcy protection to everyone. Van Buren didn’t stand much of a chance at re-election. Voters blamed him for the misery caused by Jackson. The Whigs argued that the Democrats, the so-called party of the people, had in fact failed the people. For their presidential candidate, the Whigs nominated William Henry Harrison. Harrison’s campaign biographer tried to present the wealthy Harrison as a humble farmer who had never been rich even though it wasn’t true. Neither the Whigs nor the Democrats offered a plausible solution to the problem of slavery. This led to the founding of new parties, including the evangelical Liberty Party (1839) which pledged to abolish slavery. While Democrats banned women from their rallies, Whigs welcomed them. Women brought into the parties a political style they’d perfected first as abolitionists and then as prohibitionists: the moral crusade. Harrison won but he died of pneumonia right after. His vice president and successor became John Tyler. 7. Of ships and shipwrecks The House passed a resolution (1845) in favor of annexation, having devised a compromise under which the eastern portion of Texas would enter the Union as a slave state, but not the western portion. Far from settling the issue of whether the Constitution did or did not sanction slavery, Garrison would call the Constitution a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. In 1846, when the US faced war with Mexico, no American president made that reach for empire with more bluster and determination than James K. Polk, who wanted to acquire first Oregon, then Florida and Cuba. Britain, Russia, Spain, and Mexico had all made claims to the Oregon Territory. During a skirmish, Mexican forces killed 11 U.S. soldiers. Polk asked Congress to declare war. In Congress, House member Abraham Lincoln introduced the spot resolutions, demanding to know the exact spot where American blood was first shed on American soil. He earned the nickname Spotty Lincoln. US forces led by General Scott invaded Mexico City and occupied the city. Mexican nationals who remained in that territory were given the choice to cross the new border back into Mexico and retain their Mexican citizenship or to become American citizens on an equality with that of the inhabitants of the other territories of the US. Many Mexicans chose to remain, largely in Texas and California, where, although promised political equality, they faced a growing racial animosity and economic losses. The war ended in 1848, with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the US. In gaining territory from Mexico, the US grew by 64 %. The women’s rights movement was born during the revolutionary year of 1848, a presidential election year. Democrats struggled to name a replacement. Senator Lewis Cass, who served as Jackson’s Secretary of War, prevailed at the Democratic party’s nominating convention. The Whig Party courted two generals, Taylor and Scott. The rise of Cass and Taylor left Democrats and Whigs who opposed the extension of slavery into the territories without a candidate. At a convention held in Buffalo in 1848, they formed the Free-Soil Party. “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men!” The battle, for Free-Soilers, was between free labor (the producing classes) and the slave power (American aristocrats). The Free-Soil Party enjoyed its strongest support in two middle classes: laboring men in eastern cities and farming men in western territories. Free-Soilers believed in improvement through the hard work of the laboring man. The Free-Soil Party had also drawn the support of women, who previously campaigned on behalf of the Whig Party. Married Women’s Property Act - under most existing state laws, married women could not own property or make contracts; anything they owned became their husbands upon marriage; the New York law allowed women separate use of their separate property. The discovery of gold in California led to a gold rush. Migrants came from the east, from Mexico, and even from Chile and China. 1849, California constitutional convention: neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in the State. A resolution to prohibit free Black people from settling in the state was defeated. Admitting California as a free state would have toppled the precarious balance between slave and free states. Congress seemed at an impasse. To appease Free-Soilers, California would be admitted as a free state; the slave trade would be abolished in Washington, DC; and Texas would yield to New Mexico a disputed patch of territory, in exchange for $10 million. To appease those who favored slavery, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah would be organized without mention of slavery, leaving the question to be settled by the inhabitants themselves. The Fugitive Slave Law (1850) required citizens to turn in runaway slaves and denied fugitives the right to a jury trial. The law marked the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population. Slave catchers hunted down and captured former slaves and returned them to their owners for a fee. Little stopped them from seizing individuals who had been born free, or who had been legally emancipated, and selling them to the South. The Kansas-Nebraska Act opened to slavery land that had previously been closed to it. For northerners, this was an outrageous betrayal of the Constitution. This controversy made the Democratic Party a party of slavery. This Act drew Abraham Lincoln out of his law practice and back into politics. He began meditating on the institution of slavery and, like a lawyer preparing for court, weighing possible arguments with which to defeat those who defended the institution. Lincoln found a political home in the Republican Party, founded in 1854, in Wisconsin, by 54 citizens determined to defeat the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Their new party drew a coalition of former Free-Soilers, Whigs, and northern Democrats who opposed slavery. Democratic Party = party of slavery; Republican Party = party of reform. 9. Of citizens, persons and people No clear definition of citizen was provided by the Constitution. Art. II Constitution: No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President. In The Federalist, Madison wrote that people running for Congress didn’t have to meet property requirements, didn’t have to be born in the US and couldn’t be subjected to religious tests -> same logic applied to citizenship: the door to the US was meant to be opened, no federal law restricted immigration before 1880. Nonetheless, many customs restricted citizenship. Passports: issued not only by Federation, but also by States and cities. Anti-passport / certificate of non-citizenship / slave pass = document for slaves attesting their condition. The definition “free persons of color” appears. Passports are not considered a proof of citizenship. 1856 Lincoln’s secretary of state Seward said no person is free to go abroad without a passport, to prevent men to avoid military service. Capitalism produced inequalities, shaking the foundation of the Republic, and corporations started to be considered as “persons” under the law. After Civil War, US passport office required many details and physical description to issue passports: citizenship was defined, described, measured and documented. The modern administrative state was born. National Convention of Colored Men (1864) called for full citizenship for Black men (not women) and the possibility to settle on lands granted by Homestead Act -> up to 160 acres of unappropriated public lands were available to individuals who would farm them for five years and pay a small fee. Lincoln proposed 10 percent plan, allowing a state to reenter the Union when 10% of its voters had taken an oath of allegiance. It was rejected and supplanted by the Wade-Davis Bill, which required a majority of voters to swear that they had never supported the Confederacy. When Lincoln died, Johnson changed route, by protecting the South and bringing it back to the Union and leaving citizenship issues to the states. Some states had black codes, laws that effectively continued slavery. Ku Klux Klan (1866) = organization of Confederate veterans who dressed in white robes, as the ghosts of the Confederate dead. Civil Rights Act (1866) = first federal definition of citizenship and right to equal protection. Indigenous people: not taxed, not considered. When southern states gained seats in congress, ex slaves voted for Republicans in order to make sure they keep their right to vote. 14th amendment: definition of citizenship guaranteeing its privileges and immunities and insuring equal protection and due process to all citizens. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony fought for black and women’s right, after the Emancipation Proclamation. Republicans didn’t want to grant women the right to vote, because they weren’t sure women would vote for them, while Black people surely voted for them. Every former rebel state was readmitted to the union only prior the ratification of the 14th Amendment. Under the Reconstruction Act, ex confederates could not vote, while ex slaves could; most ex- confederates were Democrats, most slaves Republicans. 1868 Congress tries impeachment for the first time on President Johnson for violating Tenure of Office Act but was saved for one vote. At the elections that year, Johnson lost the Democratic nomination, while Ulysses Grant, a civil war hero, won the Republican one. New departure plan: Black and white women tried to gain the right to vote by exercising it. Chinese immigrants, who arrived in the US following the 1850s gold rush, were seen as an inferior race. Even though the 14th Amendment did not discriminate by race and there was an agreement between China and US about treating Chinese immigrants like citizens, they were not 100% citizens. The 15th amendment, while guaranteeing the right of vote regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude, did not state specifically about immigrant or women conditions. Republicans abandoned the fight for civil rights and Democrats took control of the South, allowing segregation in public spaces (Jim Crow laws) and KKK terrorism. Mary Lease, who lost half of her family in the Civil War, made speeches against Democrats, starting the populist movement. When the South seceded, opposition in congress disappeared, so Republicans had free hand to expand in the West. New territories were brought into the Union in 1861-64: Dakota, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Montana. The semi-arid land was difficult to cultivate. Instead of the small family farms dreamed by Jefferson, large scale beef-cattle business grew. The best lands were used for railroads construction, forcing native peoples off their territories. The West transformation fueled the economy, but also produced instability. Money lost value, gold standard was established, the federal government under Grant was notorious for corruption and bribery. The Panic of 1873 was blamed on the Cook Brothers: Jay invested a lot of money in the National Pacific Railway and Henry, in charge of the Freedmen’s Saving Bank, illegally invested its money. The railway was supposed to cross Sioux lands, who started fighting back. Investors in Jay’s project pulled out; thus, the brothers went bankrupt, causing a nationwide depression. Capitalism had allowed the beginning of the Gilded Age, but only for rich people. The populist revolt led by farmers called for cooperative farming, regulation of banks and railroads and an end to corporate monopolies (1874, Farmers’ Declaration of Independence). The Knights of Labor crusaded against the kings of industry, but also against the new peasants, the Chinese immigrants. Congress passed its first immigration law, Chinese Exclusion Act, barring immigrants from China from entering the US. The Farmer Alliance excluded Chinese and Black people, who founded the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. Native Americans were confined in domestic dependent nations (reservations). Massacres ended with the surrender of Geronimo of the Chiricahua Apache in 1886. Dawes Severalty Act (1887) gave the government the authority to divide Indigenous lands into allotments and guaranteed citizenship to Indigenous people who agreed to live in them, renouncing to tribal membership. Native peoples were forced into assimilation. Populism gave space to farmers’ and laborers’ grievances, but it was a movement created by women. The Prohibition Party was the first in favor of women suffrage. Rejected by the major parties, populists and suffragettes turned to third parties. The Union Labor Party was funded. Difficulties of workers grew, so did Labor party. They did not oppose capitalism, but monopolism. They were racists and nativists: the proposal of the Australian secret ballot discriminated Black men and immigrants. Ex confederate states were happy to adopt this ballot. In Mississippi there was the understanding clause: oral exam on the This campaign made Roosevelt win 27% of the popular vote and allowed Wilson to gain the White House (first Southern president elected since Civil War). WWI marked the end of Europe’s reign as the center of the Western World, that place would be held by the US. WWI steered the course of American politics: the brutality of the conflict undercut Progressivism, suppressed socialism and produced anticolonialism. It fueled fundamentalism, which began with a rejection of Darwinism. Germany was the enemy, the same Germany whose model of education had secularized American universities, where eugenics (selective breeding) was now being taught, sustaining the need of eliminating people deemed unfit to reproduce on the basis of their intelligence, criminality or background. American universities were breeding eugenicists. In 1916, Madison Grant, activist of the Progressive Era, identified northern Europeans as genetically superior to southern Europeans. In 1916, Wilson campaigned for reelection by pledging to keep the US out of the war. Wilson needed women support because the women who could vote tended to favour peace. Wilson gained a narrow victory thanks to female voters. In 1917, Wilson released an intercepted telegram from the German minister Zimmermann to the German ambassador in Mexico in which Zimmermann asked Mexico to enter the war as Germany’s ally, promising to help regain for Mexico the lost territories of New Mexico, Arizona and Texas should the US declare war on Germany. German U-Boot sank three American ships. Wilson asked the Congress to declare war. The Congress declared war, but Wilson’s claim was that the US had to fight not to make the world democratic, but to establish the conditions of stability in which democracy was possible. The war required a massive mobilization: all Americans between 18 and 45 had to register to the draft. In order to shore up popular support, Wilson established a propaganda department, the Committee on Public Information. To suppress dissent, the Congress passed a Sedition Act, permitting imprisonment for anyone who deemed a threat to publishing false, scandalous or malicious writing against the government of the US. Lippmann, writing for the New Republic, argued for the US to enter the war. He was then recruited to a secret intelligence organization called Inquiry, whose objective was to imagine the terms of the peace by redrawing the map of Europe. Lippmann drafted a report called the war aims and peace terms it suggests which became Wilson’s Fourteen Points, calling for a liberal peace that included free trade, freedom of the seas, arms reduction, self-determination of colonized people and a League of Nations. To fund the war, Wilson raised taxes. However, it wasn’t enough, so the federal government began to sell war bonds. As the war drew to a close, Europe was deeply in debt to Americans. The war left European economies in ruins, America’s thriving. The Armistice was signed in 1918, when Germany agreed to terms of surrender tied to Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Wilson left a lasting legacy: his rhetoric of self-determination contributed to a wave of popular protests in the Middle East and Asia, including a revolution in Egypt in 1919 (emergence of anticolonial nationalism). the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, by seven votes. 1920, 19th amendment: women have the right to vote. This was possible thanks to a change of style of party politics, which shifted from the public to the private, domesticated politics of mass advertising. In the presidential election, the Republican Warren G. Harding easily triumphed. Between 1922 and 1928, industrial production rose by 70%, gross national product by almost 40%. Secretary of commerce was Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer and organizational genius which made a fortune in Australia and China and became a millionaire. Hoover was an efficiency expert, during his tenure the department’s budget grew to almost six times its previous size. American economy was the largest in the world and by 1929 it produced the 42% of the world’s output. Before the war, the industrial world followed a policy of open borders. After the war, the US became the center of the global trade and began soon closing its borders both to people and goods. Harding raised taxes on export and placed restrictions on immigration. European countries, devastated by the war, were unable to send excess workers across the Atlantic and unable to sell their manufactured good. They were left unable to repay to America their debts. In retaliation, European countries raised tariffs too. 1924 Immigration Act, divided in Asian Exclusion Part, banning immigrants from anywhere in Asia, and National Origins Act, restricting the annual number of European immigrants to 150,000 and established a quota by which the number of new arrivals was made proportional to their representation in the existing population. The purpose of the quota system was to curb the admission of southern and eastern Europeans. The immigration restriction institutionalized new forms of race-based discrimination and introduced a new legal category: the “illegal alien”. Europeans deemed white could enter the US as legal aliens, with the possibility to become naturalized citizens. Asians, deemed nonwhite, could not immigrate in the US legally and were excluded from citizenship on racial grounds. Even if the immigration from the Mexican border was rising, the Immigration Act did not restrict it. Before 1919, Mexicans could work in the US without the need to apply for entry but access to citizenship was denied for them, only Mexican children born on the American soil had to be considered an American citizen. After the formation of the US Border Patrol in 1924, soldiers armed points of entry and deportation of “illegal aliens” (undocumented immigrant). The new regime of immigration restriction extended the black-and-white racial ideology of Jim Crow to new the immigrants. This ideology drew support from a second Ku Klux Klan that emerged in 1915. 11. A constitution of the air Herbert Hoover was called the master of emergences for his relief work in Europe during the war and the flood in Mississippi in 1927. Hoover had convened a series of annual radio conferences at the White House between 1922 and 1925. Hoover understood that the future of radio was in broadcasting: transmitting a message to receivers scattered across great distances. He rightly anticipated that radio would radically transform the nature of political communication: radio would make it possible for political candidates and officeholders to speak to voters without the bother and expense of traveling to meet them. The chaos of the early airwaves convinced him that the government had to regulate the airwaves by issuing licenses to frequencies. Hoover pressed for passage of the Federal Radio Act in 1927, sometimes called the Constitution of the Air. At the end of the 20s, the nation’s optimism appeared boundless. “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land” Hoover said in 1928, accepting the Republican nomination. Hoover became president and the closing average of the stock market was three times what it had been in 1918. New York Times: the modern technical mind was for the first time at the head of government. Hoover made install a telephone in Oval Office and reorganized the federal government. Shares on the New York Stock Exchange had begun to fall. Darkness had already fallen on Europe in 1928, because of the political settlement that had ended the WWI. Stocks lost nearly 40% of their value. When the Depression began, Hoover did very little except to wait for a recovery and attempt to reassure a panicked public. He believed in charity, but he did not believe in government relief, arguing that if the USA were to provide, the nation would be plunged into socialism and collectivism. Hoover reacted by severing the USA from Europe: the 1930 Tariff Act. Other nations, retaliating, soon passed their own trade restrictions. World trade shrank severely. To protect American wheat farmers, the tariff on imported grain had been increased by almost 50%. American farmers found themselves able to sell only about 10% of their crops. Foreign debtors, unable to sell their goods in the USA, proved unable to pay back their debts to American creditors. American banks failed, the unemployment rate climbed, and national income decreased in half. Factories closed; farms were abandoned. After the stock market crash, voters rejected both Hoover’s leadership and that of his party. In the 1930 midterm elections, Republican lost 52 seats in the House. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was appointed by Wilson as assistant secretary of the navy; it seemed his political career could stop because he lost both of his legs. In his wife Eleonore’s opinion, paralysis taught him what suffering meant; it made his voice warmer. FDR was a great radio broadcaster as governor of New York. The state’s newspapers were predominantly Republican: to bypass them, FDR delivered a monthly radio address, reaching voters directly. In 1932, he was nominated at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. In his acceptance speech, he promised to Americans a new deal. Republicans said that, while listening to FDR, they found themselves agreeing with him, even when they didn’t. The new deal shares the same Christian ethics. The speeches FDR delivered on stages all over the country were the first presidential campaign speeches recorded on film and screened in movie theatres and newsreels. Most Americans had only heard national political candidates shouting; hearing FDR speak quietly and calmly, earned him Americans’ dedicated affection. Roosevelt defeated Hoover, simply because the public blamed Hoover for Depression. The Democratic and the Republican Parties rearranged themselves around the New Deal coalition, which brought together blue-collar workers, southern farmers, racial minorities, liberal intellectuals, and even industrialists and women. FDR’s ascension marked the rise of modern liberalism. Eleanor married FDR in 1905. When she found out he had an affair with her secretary, FDR refused to agree a divorce, fearing it would end his career in politics. When Franklin was with polio in 1921, she began speaking in public, inspiring many women to the stage for the first time. She became a major figure in American politics. The Democratic and Republican parties had then begun recruiting women too. Eleanor became the leader of the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Party. She was one of the two most powerful women in American politics. She used her position to advance causes she cared about: women’s rights and civil rights. She went on a national tour, wrote a regular newspaper column, and delivered a series of 13 nationwide radio broadcasts. She reached rural women, who had few ties to the national culture expect by radio. When women had to choose a party for the first time, more of them became Democrats than Republicans. She wrote a book, up to the woman (1933), in which she argued that only women could lead the nation out of the Depression by frugality, hard work, common sense, and civic participation. The great nation will endure, as it has endured, FDR said in his inaugural address, attempting to reassure a troubled nation. Many Americans believed that the economic crisis was so dire as to require the new president to assume the powers of a dictator in order to avoid congressional obstructionism. FDR was the hope of democratic government, and his New Deal the last best hope for a liberal order. Keynes wrote him: if you fail, rational change will be prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out. If you succeed, new methods will be tried everywhere, and we may date the first chapter of a new economic era. FDR received thousands of letters from the public. FDR would read them to learn what people were thinking. Radio produced the rise of the term fan mail. FDR assembled an altogether unordinary adviser, a brain trust that included Frances Perkins as his Secretary of Labor, the first female member of a presidential cabinet. He began by shutting down the nation’s banks. The rate of bank and business failures reached the highest point in history. Millions of Americans had lost every penny. Emergency Banking Act - banks would be opened once they’d been found to be sound. FDR spoke on the radio in what was called the fireside chat, explaining his banking plan reassurance: when you deposit money in a bank, the bank does not put the money into a safe deposit vault. Roosevelt’s ability to take such measures was greatly strengthened by the popular endorsement he was able to secure by way of the radio. Roosevelt worked with the Federal Communication Commission to block newspaper publishers from owning radio stations. Roosevelt’s agenda rested on the Keynesian belief that the remedy for depression was government spending. FDR’s banking reforms included: - Emergency Banking Act. - Glass-Steagall Act: established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. - Securing thousands of infrastructure projects, from repairing roads to building dams. - Agricultural Adjustment Act addressed the problems faced by farms: better and fairer distribution of resources like land, power, and water on a national scale. - National Labor Relations Act: granted to workers the right to organize and established the Works Project Administration, to hire millions of people who built roads and schools and hospitals, as well as artists and writers. It established pensions, assistance for fatherless families, and unemployment relief. Early results were promising, but the Depression continued. The reforms had limits. FDR: the Federal Government has no intention to force a system of relief which is repugnant to American ideals of individual self-reliance. New Deal relief programs often specifically excluded Black people. Reverend Earl Little (Malcom X’s father) was killed. The insurance company denied his widow Louise Norton and his 8 children his life insurance. Malcom, one of his children, was moved into foster care and then a juvenile home. He changed his name in Malcom X. Due to massive unemployment, people had more time to listen to the radio, at a time when radio broadcasts dramatized the suffering of the poor to a national audience. If the Depression created a new compassion for the poor, it also produced a generation of politicians committed to the idea that government can relieve suffering and regulate the economy. In 1937, former Texas schoolteacher Lyndon Johnson was elected to Congress, where he worked to obtain federal funds for his district for projects like the construction of dams to improve farmland. Johnson fought for the Bankhead- Jones Act, to help tenant farmers buy land and fought to have rural electrification placed in the hands not of power companies but farmers cooperatives. Americans began hunting for apologists for fascism and communism. During the Depression, 75.000 Americans had joined the Communist party. In 1938, Martin Dies Jr convened the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate suspected communists inaugurating a campaign of harassment and intimidation waged by FBI. Dies blamed writers employed by the Works Progress Administration of spreading hidden communist messages. Meanwhile, a new kind of conservatism was growing, consisting of businessmen who opposed government regulation of the economy and of Americans who objected to government interference in their lives. The Du Pont brothers began fighting for the question tied to the arms and in 1934 Merchants of Death came out, a bestseller that blamed arms manufacturers for the WWI and led to a congressional investigation. The National Rifle Association had been founded in 1871 by a former reporter from the NY Times, as a sporting and hunting association; most of its business consisted of sponsoring target-shooting competitions. NRA supported firearms regulation, the 1934 and 1938 Federal Firearms Act taxed the private ownership of automatic weapons, mandated licensing for handgun dealers, introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers, required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon, and created a licensing system for dealers. The regulation of munitions manufacturing was more promoted by conservatives who were isolationists. They thought that the ability to manufacture weapons should be restricted to the government. According to Du Ponts, handing the manufacturing of weapons over the government represented the worst possible instance of laissez-faire economics yielding to a planned economy. The National Association of Manufacturers used radio advertisement to argue that peace and prosperity were best assured by the leadership of businessmen and a free market. The Du Ponts gathered fellow businessmen of General Motors in NY, where they founded a property-holders association to oppose the New Deal. Nock was concerned with the rise of mass democracy and mass culture as the cause of the decline of Western civilization, believing that radical egalitarianism had produced a world of mediocrity and blindness. American conservative intellectuals were opposed to socialism; they were isolationists; many tended to be anti-Semitic. Campaigns, Inc., the first political consulting firm in the world, was founded by Whitaker and Baxter in California in 1933. Critics called it the Lie Factory. Large corporations hire advertising firms to make themselves look better and to advance pro-business legislation. Political consulting’s origins in the strategy of terror - Europe’s inner front, where he called propaganda the invisible front as it divided the population. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt established a new government information agency: the Office of facts and figures; he appointed the poet MacLeish to be the head of it. The poet believed that the real battle was the battle for public opinion. He hoped not to produce propaganda but to inform and educate the public about the dangers of it. He explained to Americans how the Nazi strategy of terror had worked in France with the aim to defeat the Nazi propaganda, which was effectively being used as a weapon and a form of government. Against the Nazi strategy of terror, MacLeish proposed an American strategy: the strategy of truth. Later, FDR replaced MacLeish's Office of Facts with the Office of War Information, headed by E. Davis who was more open to methods of mass advertising. Roosevelt invited Chruchill at the White House on Christmas 1941. The two came up with a new international organization, the United Nations. On January 1, 1942, the US, GB, China, and the USSR adopted a Declaration by the United Nations. 26 Nations adhered and they all subscribed to the common program of purposes and principles of the Atlantic Charter. The big 4 also agreed to a military strategy to defeat Germany. The State Department formed a secret Advisory Committee on Post-War Foreign Policy. Willkie, former opponent of FDR in his third presidential campaign, put effort into convincing the Republicans to abandon isolationism. He convinced the Republican Party to pass a resolution declaring that our nation has an obligation to assist in bringing about comity, cooperation, and understanding among nations. Roosevelt asked Willkie to undertake a world tour to publicize the idea of a United Nations. Willkie managed to raise a lot of public support on this matter. In 1942, the US defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Hawaiian island of Midway and in the Solomon Islands. Back home the police imprisoned people of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens. The photographer Lange thought that the US was entering a period of fascism and that democracy was ending. She became iconic for the photographs, one of them depicted the forced Japanese Americans relocation in California. Hirabayashi was a Quaker who refused to abide by the curfew, he turned himself in to the FBI but sought legal remedy, arguing that the executive order was unconstitutional because it discriminates against citizens of Japanese ancestry. Chief Justice Stone said that, in time of war, such discriminations which are relevant to measures for our national defense and for the successful prosecution of the war were constitutional. Frank Murphy (democratic politician and jurist): to say that any group cannot be assimilated is to admit that the great American experiment has failed; it bears a resemblance to the treatment accorded to members of the Jewish race in Europe. Desperate attempts of escaping this cruel curfew were made by Japanese Americans by getting plastic surgery to mask their identity. Black people were segregated during the WWII. Pauli Murray was arrested for refusing to give up a seat on a bus. Her reaction was to protest injustice peacefully. She managed to study Law and fought against separate facilities. Civil rights activist Randolph called for a Negro March on Washington with the slogan: we loyal Negro American citizens demand our right to work and fight for our country. FDR signed Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in defense industries. Randolph agreed to call off the march, but protests continued. The debate about the incompatibility of democracy and racism reached a new audience in 1944 with the publication of An American Dilemma, by Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal: America is again in a life-and-death struggle for liberty and equality, and the American Negro is again watching for signs of what war and victory will mean in terms of opportunity and rights for him in his native land. To the white American, too, the Negro problem has taken on a significance greater than it has ever had since the Civil War. The African American sociologist Cayton wrote in The Nation: there must be achieved in America and in the world a moral order which will include the American Negro and all other oppressed peoples. The present war must be considered as one phase of a larger struggle to achieve this new moral order. In 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin (the big three) met in Tehran to plan the campaign against Germany and to focus on postwar international cooperation. FDR announced his plan for a second Bill of Rights as the first one was not sufficient to assure equality. The new Bill included: the right to a useful and remunerative job, to a decent home, adequate medical care and good education. The attention shifted from winning the war to ensuring adequate rights. Meanwhile liberals were losing power while conservatism had gained strength. June 6, 1944: the Allies invaded France with the determination to liberate a devastated and terrorized Europe. One million men landed on the Normandy coast. The Allies defeated German forces and pushed them from the west while Soviets pushed from the east. In the Pacific the US defeated the Japanese in the Battle of the Philippine Sea and began bombing the Japanese islands. As victory in Europe neared, delegates from 44 Allied nations met in July 1944, at Bretton Woods, to plan a postwar order that could avoid the fatal mistakes of the last peace. The Bretton Woods Conference committed itself to open markets and free trade, the IMF was founded and allowed for a fixed rate of currency exchange. Hayek (Austrian born political scientist) published The Road to Serfdom, a work that established the framework of modern economic conservatism. He was critical of Keynesian economics; he warned that people had become slaves. Hayek influenced policy when he met in Switzerland with other economists to discuss how to prevent Western democracies from falling into a new kind of serfdom. Instead of arguing against monopolies and for the restraint of capitalism, many abandoned their interest in economic reform and followed the lead of African Americans in a fight for rights, and especially for racial justice. In 1945 FDR and Churchill took a long and dangerous journey to reach Crimea to meet with Stalin. Stalin had a good reputation and appeared on the cover of Time. The agreement in Yalta didn’t stop Stalin from taking over Eastern Europe. Still, FDR got from Stalin more that any American president could ever get. FDR hoped to agree on a plan for how to win the war and divide up Germany in a way that both Churchill and Stalin agreed in exchange for Stalin’s agreement to enter the war with Japan. To secure Stalin’s support, FDR betrayed the principles of the Atlantic Charter in granting to Stalin territories in China, at the time an American ally. The big three agreed to a division of Germany into zones of occupation and to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Even before Germany and Japan surrendered, Stalin had already begun to betray the pledges made at Yalta. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage. CBS reporter Murrow delivered on radio description of a Nazi concentration camp to reach the American public. His reports helped turn the American opinion in favor of entering the war. In Europe, American forces fighting Germany from the west and Soviet forces driving from the east met on the Elbe River. Italian partisans caught up with Mussolini. Hitler, in a bunker in Berlin, committed suicide, and Germany surrendered. Stalin begun pressing his claims to influence over the territory Hitler had so brutally conquered. On June 25, Truman attended the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco. Delegates from 50 nations signed a charter. That summer, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered and WWII had ended. 13. A world of knowledge August 6, 1945, marks the beginning of the atomic age with the bombings on Hiroshima. Americans were worried about how the war ended since they had no knowledge of the two atomic bombs until they fell. The Manhattan project was classified, even President Truman didn’t know about it until FDR’s death. One year after the bombings, the New York Times introduced the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. During the war, the interest of the Allied military in computers was to break codes and to calculate weapon trajectories. At the University of Pennsylvania, a physicist and an electrical engineer was tasked with calculating firing-angle settings for artillery. To achieve that, they used an analog computer invented in 1931 by FDR’s electrical engineer Vannevar Bush. 1945: ENIAC receives its first assignment - calculating the force of atomic reactions in order to devise a hydrogen bomb. After the war, scientists were calling for international cooperation and for a means by which atomic war could be averted. Instead, their work was resulted into the Cold War. The decision to display ENIAC to the public came at a moment when the nation was engaged in a debate about the role of the federal government in supporting scientific research. During the war, at the urging of Vannevar Bush, FDR created the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bush submitted to Truman a report called Science, the endless frontier. At Bush’s urging, Congress debated a bill to establish a new federal agency, the National Science Foundation. Critics said the bill tied university research to the military and to business interests. Democratic senator Kilgore introduced a rival bill that extended the antimonopoly principles of the New Deal to science, tied university research to government planning, and included in the new foundation a division of social science. The origins of postwar prosperity lay in the last legislative act of the New Deal. In 1944, FDR signed the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, better known as the G.I. Bill of Rights. It created a veterans- only welfare state; it extended to the 16 million Americans who served in the war a series of benefits, including a free, four-year college education, zero-down-payment low-interest loans for homes and businesses, and a readjustment benefit of $20 a week for up to allow returning veterans to find work. The cost of the G.I. Bill constituted 15% of the federal budget. But, with rising tax revenues, the G.I. Bill paid for itself. It created a new middle class. That growth was achieved, in part, by consumer spending, as factories outfitted for wartime production were converted to manufacture consumer goods. The New Deal’s inattention to racial discrimination became the business of the postwar civil rights movement, as new forms of discrimination and the persistence of Jim Crow laws and even of lynching contributed to a new depth of discontent. Truman established a commission on civil rights. To secure these rights, its 1947 report, pointed that the federal government does more than prevent the abuse of rights but also secures rights. Truman made national health insurance his first domestic policy priority. He asked Congress to pass the Fair Deal: universal medical insurance. The midterm elections during Truman’s first term were tied to heightening tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. Nixon in California ran for office in 1946. In Massachusetts, a veteran of the war in the Pacific, John F. Kennedy, ran for a House seat. A conviction grew that the Soviet regime was ideologically and militarily relentless. George Kennan, an American diplomat in Moscow, reported that the Soviets were resolute in their determination to battle the West in an epic confrontation between capitalism and communism. This rhetoric infused domestic politics. Republicans characterized the 1946 midterm elections as involving a stark choice: Americanism vs. Communism. On foreign policy, Truman began to move to the right and pledged that the US would aid any besieged democracy. 1947, Truman Doctrine: the US would support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. Truman urged passage of the Marshall Plan, which provided billions of dollars in aid for rebuilding Western Europe. Instead of a welfare state, the US built a national security state. The Allied victory was followed by the fight to contain communism, unprecedented military spending, and a new military bureaucracy. The US committed itself to military supremacy in peacetime, not only through weapons manufacture and an expanded military but through new institutions. The committees on military and naval affairs combined to become the Armed Services Committee. The National Security Act established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency; it created the position of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and made the War Department, in a building of its own, into the Department of Defense. In 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security Act, over Truman’s veto, requiring communists to register with the attorney general and establishing a loyalty board to review federal employees. The crusade, at once against communists and homosexuals, was also a campaign against intellectuals in the federal government, derided as eggheads. The term, inspired by the balding Democrat Adlai Stevenson, was coined to describe a person of spurious intellectual pretensions, fundamentally superficial, over-emotional and feminine in reactions to any problems. The term connoted a vague homosexuality. One congressman described leftover New Dealers as messing into everybody’s personal affairs and lives. Democrats failed to defeat this McCarthyism, which was part of a rising tide of American conservatism. Its leading thinkers were refugees from fascist or communist regimes. 1952: General Eisenhower is elected president, through the first coverage of a presidential election by television. Eisenhower’s politics was moderate. He described himself as a dynamic conservative: conservative when it comes to money and liberal when it comes to human beings. He proved a disappointment to conservatives. From the start, he had his doubts about the nature of the Cold War. Eisenhower was the child of pacifists who considered war a sin. After the war, church membership grew thanks to the Southern Baptists, like Billy Graham, who asserted a growing influence on American politics. The Republican Party, influenced by conservative suburban housewives, began to move to the right. The Democratic Party, stirred by the struggle for civil rights, began moving to the left. Marshall argued hundreds of cases across the South as part of a strategy to end Jim Crow, aiming to bring a challenge to segregation in the nation’s public schools to the Supreme Court. 1954 Brown v. Board of Education: Supreme Court bans segregation in nation’s schools. December 1955: M. L. King’s march in Montgomery. 1957 Civil Rights Act: established a Civil Rights Commission to hear complaints but granted it no authority to do anything about them. 14. Rights and wrongs Nixon went to Moscow in 1959 to open an exhibition. The US and the URSS had agreed to stage a proxy battle of the merits of capitalism and communism. The Russians put a space satellite on display alongside a gallery that housed a model Soviet apartment. The US answered with electric coffeepots, offering visitors a tour of American consumer goods. Nixon cut the ribbon to open the American exhibition alongside Khrushchev. At the height of the Cold War, more Americans were earning more and buying more than before. The growing power of the state made possible unprecedent economic growth and a wide distribution of goods and opportunities. Such a high standard of living, so widely distributed, had never been seen before. In a 1960 study called The American Voter, the political scientist Converse divided the American electorate into political elites and the mass public. Political elites are exceptionally well informed, follow politics closely and adhere to a coherent set of political beliefs. The mass public has only a scant knowledge of politics, resulting in a very loose and unconstrained attachment to any set of political beliefs. Between 1968 e 1972 both economics inequality and political polarization began to rise. By 1974 liberalism had begun its long decline and conservatism its long ascent. The country was on the way to becoming nearly as divided, and as unequal, as it had been before the Civil War. The prosperous society was a purposeless one. After Nixon came back from Moscow, the Eisenhower administration announced a new resolve: to discover a national purpose. Black college students in 1960 made the civil rights the nation’s purpose. Ella Baker, director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, civil rights org., had been campaign to win equal pay for Black teachers. Eisenhower’s commissioners reported that discrimination on the basis of race must be recognized as morally wrong, democratically wasteful and in many respects dangerous; called for federal actions support voting rights. The DNC turned to data science to predict the consequences of different approaches to the issues by undertaking the computational simulation of elections. The DNC hired Simulmatics Corporation; a company that used high speed computation and a simulation model developed out of historical data, aimed to both advance the measurement of public opinion and the forecasting of elections. It conducted a study on the Negro vote in the North. Civil rights were not among Kennedy's priorities as a member of the Senate. But the protests altered his course. Kennedy decided to run as a civil rights candidate, and chose Johnson for his running mate, hoping that the Texan could handle the southerners. Simulmatics also ran simulations on different ways Kennedy might talk about his Catholicism. Nixon won the Republican nomination. Nixon and Kennedy met in a CBS television studio in Chicago, but Nixon was sick and heralded the beginning of a new era of peace and progress, driven by a conservative revolution. The atrocities waged in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, were blamed in liberalism, which had taught Americans to trust too much the government. Nixon announced his resignation, speaking into television cameras from his desk at the White House. He talked about his foreign policy achievements: he opened diplomatic relations with China, ended the war in Vietnam, improved US relations in the Middle East, negotiated arms limitation agreements with the Soviet Union. But he said nearly nothing about the turbulent conditions in the US. 15. Battle lines Betty Ford was the wife of President Gerald Ford. She was very active in social policy, with particular regard to women’s rights. Roe v. Wade (1973): the Constitution protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. The National Organization for Women (1966) made the ERA and the legalization of abortion their main priorities. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA): a proposed amendment to the Constitution designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex. The first version of ERA was proposed in 1923. In 1980 the leadership of the two parties place legalized abortion on their platforms, Republicans against and Democrats in favor. By the 1990s, abortion had become a partisan issue. People defined the divisions over gun control and abortion as a war of ideology, about our way of life. Social issues became partisan issues thanks to the work of political strategies and political consultants. By 1970 the Lie Factor had begun manufacturing public opinion and inciting outrage. The more emotional the issue, the likelier voters were to turn up at the polls. Planned Parenthood: the birth control organization founded by Margaret Sanger in 1916. In the 20s, its leaders had been more Republican than Democrat. By the 50s, many were conservatives. In campaigning for the legalization of contraception, Planned Parenthood enjoyed the broad support of both doctors and clergymen. 1960 the ethics of family planning: family planning is fulfilling the will of God by allowing married couples to enjoy intercourse for the sake of love. Efforts to legalize abortion were begun in the 60s, not by women’s rights activists, but by the doctors, lawyers, and clergymen who ran Planned Parenthood. In 1965, former presidents Eisenhower and Truman, Republican and Democrat, together served as cochairmen of a Planned Parenthood committee. Discrimination by sex was like discrimination by race. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965): the Constitution protects the liberty of married couples to buy and use contraceptives without government restriction. The Supreme Court highlighted that Connecticut’s Comstock law, which prohibited any form of contraceptives, violated the right to marital privacy. In 1972 the notion of marital privacy has also been extended to individuals: it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear a child. Nixon asked Congress to increase federal funding for family planning. Legislators began to lift restrictions on abortion. Three women’s movement who had different agendas with regard to ERA and abortion:  Radical women’s movement: it fought for liberation from the bondage of womanhood and femininity. It had been influenced by the Black Power movement, with its hate for liberalism and its emphasis on separatism and pride.  Liberal women’s movement: it drew inspiration and borrowed tactics from the suffrage, abolition, and pre-Black Power civil rights movements. They wanted to pass laws, amend the Constitution, win court cases, and get women elected to office. One important representative of this movement is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was elected to the Supreme Court and began arguing equal rights cases.  Conservative women’s movement: it is a form of anti-feminism, a reaction to the lifting of bans on contraception and the liberalization of abortion laws. For them books, magazines and movies were corrupting young women with wrong ideas. Nixon speechwriter Buchanan told the president that abortion was a rising issue for Catholics and suggested to take a stand against abortion for reelection. Nixon stated his personal belief in the sanctity of human life, including the life of the yet unborn. Nevertheless, behind doors Nixon supported abortion to a certain degree, for him it is necessary in situations such as rape or relations between Black people and whites. Betty Ford expressed her support to abortion in public. She also raised awareness on breast cancer and, after being diagnosed with it, she encouraged women to get tested. Phyllis Schlafly, conservative activist, was the strongest female voice against abortion and ERA. After Watergate, the American electorate was becoming more and more polarized, with less trust in the government. The 1973 OPEC oil crisis worsen the situation. It created a situation of stagflation (slow economic growth, high unemployment, and rising inflation). After the 70s the growing economic inequality became a stable characteristics of US economy. Due to the decreasing family incomes, married women started to work outside of the house and to demand for government-supported childcare. Schlafly tied ERA to anticommunism: Soviet women had equal rights, which meant a mother being forced to put her baby in a state-operated nursery or kindergarten so she can join the labor force. Until the 50s, the Republican Party was not against abortion and the ERA. The National Women's Conference (1977 Houston) represents a turning point for the political history of feminism. The three Fist Ladies Johnson, Carter, and Ford participated in this event. The conference’s two most controversial proposals were a call for government funding for abortion and an endorsement of equal rights for lesbians and gay men. Some people were hostile to the idea of tying together the fight for women’s rights with the homosexual rights movement. Schlafly used this divisions to further strengthen her conservative position. With the conference, liberal feminists lost the support of women that were against abortion and those that were against homosexual rights. All these women were welcomed by Schlafly under a single campaign against ERA, abortion and homosexual rights. Coit v. Green 1971: racially segregated private schools were not eligible for tax-exempt status. Thus, private religious schools no longer provided a refuge for whites opposed to integration. Unable to defeat mandatory desegregation, whites in many cities either sent their children to private schools or left for the suburbs. Ronald Reagan, a Republican who lost his first run to the precedency against Ford, served as president from 1981 to 1989 thanks to the support of Schlafly, the evangelicals and a large conservative coalition. He also obtained the support of the Southern Baptist Convention when Falwell took over the leadership and passed a resolution against ERA, abortion and homosexuality. Falwell was a conservative pastor that did everything in his power to push the Southern Baptist towards a conservative route. Women and moderates in the GOP party fought back against Reagan nomination. For them the conservative movement was waging war against women. When Republicans became more conservative, political polarization surged. Pro-life Democrats and pro- choice Republicans were purged from their parties. The ERA’s last chance at ratification expired in 1982. Schlafly’s last public act was in 2016 to endorse Donald J. Trump as the nation’s next president. Reagan started his presidency with a speech: the government is not the solution to our problem; the government is the problem. Reagan’s economic thinking had been influenced by the writing of Friedman, an opponent of Keynesianism. In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman argued that personal freedom can only be assured by the free market system. Friedman supported the call for tax cuts made by conservatives. The tax revolt started in 1978, when California passed Proposition 13, a measure that cut the state’s property tax and weakened the state’s public education system. This was the result of a movement that demanded for a decrease of state presence and of taxes. Conservatives and Friedman claimed that reducing the tax rate would promote economic growth. Even if Friedman influenced Reagan economic view, the bible of the Reagan revolution was Wealth and Poverty, a book published in 1981 by George Gilder, a former speechwriter for the president Nixon. Sexual Suicide (1973), Gilder argues that the liberation of women would violate what he called the sexual constitution, the unwritten arrangement that, through sex, binds men to women, who take care of their children for them. Wealth and Poverty served as a bridge between the conservative critique of feminism and the conservative embrace of supply side economics. Working women posed a problem not only for the traditional family but for economic growth; by raising family incomes, they contributed to the high inflation. Reagan made tax cuts the centerpiece of his campaign. More than a million poor people lost food stamp benefits, while military spending vastly expanded. During Reagan’s 8 years in office, the national debt tripled. In 1981 John Hinckley Jr, the mentally ill son of the president of a Denver oil company shot Reagan. He fired 6 shots hitting not only the president but also a police officer, a Secret Service agent, and the White House press secretary. Reagan survived. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. When Reagan recovered, he maintained his opposition to legislation that might have banned semiautomatic weapons or prevented their purchase by people with a history of mental illness. This event reopened the debate over gun possession. The National Rifle Association had fought for gun safety measures in the 20s and 30s and supported a ban on mail-order gun sale after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 1968 Gun Control Act, passed after the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and MLK. In this debate the Second Amendment had never received any attention. This began to change in the 60s, thanks to the Black nationalists. Malcolm X: article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun. This argument animated the founding of the Black Panther Party. Gun rights became a conservative political movement, a rights fight for white men. In the 60s, the gun debate took place in the shadow of the Black Power movement, in the 70s it took place in the shadow of a growing White Power movement, which was born as a reaction to the civil right movement and immigration waves. Johnson’s 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act replaced the old quota system with a new system that did not discriminate on the basis of race or national origins. The new quota system mandated an equivalence: quotas from any country, anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere, were the same: 20,000 per country. Instead of setting racial and national-origins preferences, the legislation established preferences based on family and occupation. Under the new system, the number of legal immigrants from non-European countries rose, but the number of legal immigrants from Mexico fell. However, the scale of Mexican immigration remained the same because people kept on entering the country illegally. The US- Mexican border had become a military zone. The gun rights movement was tightly bound to anti- immigrant animus. This is when the NRA shifted from a sporting and hunting association into a powerhouse political interest group to express hostility against immigration. In 1980, NRA endorsed, for the first time in their history, Reagan as a presidential candidate. For a long time, conservatives had trouble winning elections; they blamed the role played by a liberal press. Liberals had won their greatest victories in the courts, and it seemed that the best way to win political victories appeared to be by changing the courts, and even constitutional interpretation itself. As a reaction, the founding of the Federalist Society (1982) developed a new mode of constitutional interpretation, known as originalism. The second amendment was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection. The NRA supported this interpretation. Originalism was an answer to the Supreme Court’s privacy-based decisions about contraception and abortion. It flowered in law schools thanks to Republicans such as George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Liberals were strongly against Originalism. Originalism made the gun debate irrational and polarized. The NRA’s interpretation of the second amendment prevailed. Chief Justice Warren Burger called the new interpretation of the second amendment one of the greatest pieces of fraud on the American public by special interest groups. Guns became for conservatives what abortion became for liberals: an emotionally charged matter of a constitutionally guaranteed, individual right with which party operatives could reliably get voters to the polls because. By the 1980s, fear of a nuclear holocaust had merged with a rising concern about global environmental catastrophe. While nuclear weapons research was usually classified; environmental research was not, thus, the environmental movement exploded. Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and expanded the Clean Air Act. The liberals’ call for a weapon freeze reached Congress but Reagan steered the nation in a different direction. In 1983, he announced a Strategic Defense Initiative, a plan to defend the US from nuclear attack with a network of satellite-based missiles. Climate change manifested itself as another kind of partisan division: conservatives rejected the science of climate change and added environmental science to the list of institutions (like the press and the courts) that could not be trusted because of their liberal bias. A 1959 amendment to the Fairness Doctrine had required broadcasters to provide varying opinions on the paramount issues facing the American people because regarding public controversies the public must have a chance to hear both sides. Conservatism was disadvantaged under a regime that valued fairness. Dismantling the Fairness Doctrine became a priority of the Reagan administration. By 1984, the Soviet economy collapsed. That year, when Reagan ran for reelection, the American economy had finally improved. The fall of communism liberated Eastern Europe and unleashed an unregulated capitalism that would eventually threaten America’s place in that order. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet empire had collapsed. By 1992 the Cold War was over. Conservatives moved from an anticommunism ideology and leaned more to an ideology based on opposition to liberalism. The new democratic president Bill Clinton (from 1993 to 2001) and his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton became the new targets of republicans and conservatives. Hillary proved to be an easy target for the Christian Right’s pro-family crusade. She would remain a target for decades, not only during her husband’s presidency but through her later career in the Senate and as secretary of state, and especially during the 2016 campaign against Donald Trump. Hillary Rodham was born in Chicago in 1947. She started out as a Republican. Like many feminists, she began to drift away from the Republican Party when the party began to abandon its support of equal rights for women. The Democratic Party that Hillary Rodham joined in 1972 was undergoing a transformation, too. While the Republican Party was courting blue-collar white men, especially men who’d lost their manufacturing jobs, the Democratic Party began abandoning blue-collar union workers, especially white men, in favor of a coalition of women, minorities, and knowledge workers. The Democratic Party supported the high-tech industry because after the war, knowledge workers had become the fastest growing occupational sector. As a reaction to the rise of this new high-tech industry, Stewart Brand created The Whole Earth Catalog, an American counterculture magazine focused on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, and holism. By the 90s, wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would lead a Democratic Party that had restructured itself around their priorities. When Bill Clinton entered the White House, he represented a bridge between the Old Democrats and the New Democrats. A white southerner from a humble background, he appealed to the party’s old base. An Ivy League–educated progressive with a strong record on civil rights, he appealed to the party’s new base. Clinton won the 1992 election with the lowest popular approval. His presidency was a constellation of sexual assault and misconduct allegations and two famous cheating scandals, one with Gennifer Flowers, former State of Arkansas employee, and another one with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern. One of Bill Clinton’s priorities was to change the national health care system. He handed this job to Hillary Clinton, assigning her to head the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, which proposed employer-paid health care. The Republicans stopped the proposal. In 1993, Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. Then, Clinton administration started to slowly move to the right by introducing measures that represented a continuation of Reagan and Bush work. He took up the war on drugs waged by Nixon. In 1994, he signed a new crime bill that lengthened mandatory sentencing and started an era of mass incarceration that mainly targeted people of color. Clinton abolished Aid for Families with Dependent Children. Welfare was abandoned. Terrorism respected no borders and recognized no laws. In 1980, bin Laden had joined a resistance movement against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, building a network of supporters. In 1988, bin Laden formed al Qaeda. He described his movement in religious terms, as a form of political incitement. He called for a jihad against Americans, who had been accused of undermining the Muslim faith by causing wars between Muslims. The CIA formed a special unit to work against Al Qaeda and bin Laden in 1996, by which time bin Laden had declared war on the US and found refuge with the Taliban. After 9/11, the Bush administration demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden, but the Taliban refused. In October 2001, the US began a war in Afghanistan. It became the longest war in American history. The Bush administration saw the war on terror as an opportunity to strike against hostile regimes all over the world, on the grounds that they harbored terrorists. Between 1998 and 2011, military spending doubled. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush described Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the new axis. Bush was careful not to denounce Islam itself, steering clear of inciting still more hatred. In 2003, another US-led coalition invaded Iraq, with the aim of eradicating both Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. The US position as the leader of a liberal world order entered a period of crisis when, pursuing its war on terror, the country flouted the Geneva Conventions, international law and human rights through the torture of suspected terrorists and their imprisonment without trial. In October 2001, Bush signed the Patriot Act, granting the federal government new powers to conduct surveillance and collect intelligence to investigate and prevent terrorist acts. Bush then signed a military order concerning the detention, treatment and trial of certain non-citizens in the war against terrorism. Suspected terrorists who were not American citizens were to be detained at an appropriate location designated by the Secretary of Defense and were to be tried and sentenced by military commissions. The ordinary rules of military law and US law would not apply. Suspected terrorists were to be imprisoned without charge, denied knowledge of the evidence against them, and, if tried, sentenced by courts following no established rules. The White House reacted to terrorism, an abandonment of the law of war, with torture, an abandonment of the rule of law. During Bush’s two terms in office, income inequality widened, and polarization worsened. His presidency ended with a global economic collapse. Barack Obama’s father was Barack Hussein Obama and his mother Stanley Ann Dunham. The two parents met at the University of Hawaii. She soon got pregnant, thus, they married in 1961. At that time, in 21 states that marriage would have been illegal, as a violation of miscegenation laws. In August 1961, Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu. After graduating from Columbia, he worked as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, planting roots in a city that had just elected its first Black mayor. He began dating an ambitious young lawyer named Michelle Robinson, descended from ancestors who were slaves. At Harvard Law School, he worked as a research assistant for Laurence Tribe, who’d been looking for common ground between what appeared to be incommensurable arguments. This would become Obama’s signature move: reconciling seemingly irreconcilable differences. At the University of Chicago Law School, Obama taught a seminar on race and law. Obama, as a professor, cultivated the values of engaged, open- minded debate. In 1996, the professor sought a seat in the state senate. He brought together the language of the nation’s founding with the language of its religious traditions. Elected to the US senate, where he became its only Black member, he was tapped to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He wrote a speech that drew as much on the Bible as on the Declaration of Independence. Part preacher, part courtroom lawyer, he electrified the crowd. Obama ran for the Democratic nomination in 2008 with a slogan adapted from the 1972 United Farm Workers campaign, Sì, se puede: Yes, we can. In a heated race against Hillary Clinton, he benefited from having opposed the Iraq War, which Clinton, then in the Senate, had voted to authorize. In an age of extremes, Obama projected reasonableness and equanimity. In a time of war and economic decline, he projected the optimism of Reagan and held the political commitments of FDR. Obama’s candidacy changed the nature of campaigning. Turnout in 2008 was the highest since 1968. Against the much-admired Republican senator from Arizona, John McCain, Obama won. He also defeated McCain on social media. Obama’s campaign had 23 times as many followers as McCain on Twitter. To address the global financial crisis of the time, Obama asked Congress to approve a stimulus program of $800 billion that reporters named the New New Deal. But Obama was different from FDR. He did not prosecute the people whose wrongdoing had held to the financial crisis. His economic program rescued the banks, but not the people who lost their savings. Obama’s biggest initiative was the Affordable Health Care Act. Opponents of Obama’s economic and healthcare plan called for a new Tea Party to resist the tyranny of the federal government. Tea Partiers across the country held rallies, waving copies of the Constitution and dressed up as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin. They wanted, in words that would become Trump’s slogan, to make America great again. With the Tea Party, the conservative media and the conservative movement merged: the Tea Party was a political product manufactured by Fox News. The movement was overwhelmingly white. Bernie Sanders, born in Brooklyn in 1941, had been a civil rights and anti-war activist. Then, he moved to Vermont where he became mayor of Burlington. Later, he went to Washington as the only socialist member of Congress. In 2010, with the passage of the healthcare reform, Democrats agreed to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, and Sanders was one of the few members of Congress to object. By 2011, Sanders was no longer a lone voice in the wilderness. Protests against tuition hikes and budget cuts had been staged all over the country. This Occupy movement was not a coming together of a representative array of working people. It was overwhelmingly and notably urban and white, and most protesters were students or people with jobs. It also had no real leadership and lacked achievable policy goals. But it did propel Sanders to national prominence and established the foundation for a movement that would lead him to one of the most remarkable progressive presidential campaigns since Theodore Roosevelt. The Tea Party on the right and Occupy on the left together offered an assault to Washington. 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commision: restriction on spending by political action committees is unconstitutional. By 2014, the court would grant corporations First Amendment rights to freedom of religious expression. Corporations owned by people who objected to contraception on religious grounds were allowed to refuse to provide insurance coverage for birth control to their employees. Well known in the world of professional wrestling, Trump brought to politics the tactics of the arena and melodrama from reality television. He called for Obama to release his birth certificate. In 2012, in an atmosphere of racial incitement, a man from Orlando, Florida called 911 to report seeing a real suspicious guy. This guy was an unarmed 17-year-old boy, Trayvon Martin who was then shot by the man. The day after, a 17-year-old boy entered a High School in Cleveland and started firing, killing 3 people and injuring 2. By then, the US had the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world and highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy. By 2012, 49 states had passed laws allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons outside their homes for personal protection. In 2005, Florida passed a stand your ground law, exonerating from prosecution citizens who use deadly force when confronted by an assailant, even if they could have safely retreated. More states followed. Carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense became an act of citizenship, not a failure of civil society. Obama won re-election in 2012, even as Democrats lost control of the Senate. Weeks later in Connecticut, a mentally ill 24-year-old shot his mother and then went to his former elementary school and shot and killed 6 teachers and 20 children. The Obama administration had no success getting gun safety measures through a Republican Congress, which defended the right to bear arms at all costs, calling the massacre of little children the price of freedom. Obama’s second term was marked by battles over budgets and the dilemma of the Middle East. In 2011, US forces had found and killed bin Laden, and Obama withdrew the last American troops from Iraq. Yet Obama foreign policy looked weak. Islamic militants attacked US government facilities in Libia in 2012. With ISIS in Iraq, America’s nation-building project in the Middle East had failed. Obama’s administration stepped up surveillance through a secret program run by the National Security Agency, prosecuted whistleblowers who leaked documents that revealed US abuses in the Middle East and used drones to commit assassinations. With a massive defense budget, the federal government proved unmovable on tax policy. A movement to fight gun violence began during Obama’s second term; but it wasn’t a gun control movement, it was a movement for racial justice. In 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement was born. BLM called urgent attention to state-sanctioned violence against African Americans, in forms that included police brutality, racially discriminatory sentencing laws, and mass incarceration. The gay rights movement, the LGBT movement, won signal victories. The case Obergefell v. Hodges consolidated the petition of four couples who had sought relief from state same-sex marriage bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. The Supreme Court declared state bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. The election of 2016 was a product of technological disruption: the most significant form of political communication during the campaign was Donald Trump’s Twitter account. 17 candidates were up for the Republican nomination. Fox News decided to use polls to determine who participated in the primary debates, and where each candidate would stand on the stage, and how much camera time each candidate would get. Polls admitted Trump into the debates, polls placed him at center stage, and polls declared him winner. Efforts to call attention to the weakness of the polls were unsuccessful. Every major polling organization miscalled the 2016 election, predicting a win for Hillary Clinton. It had been a narrow contest, but the Democratic Committee underestimated Trump’s competition. Paul Horner, an aspiring comedian, wrote fake pro-Trump news for profit, and was amazed to find that Trump staff reposted his stories on social media. A great deal of reposting was done not by people but by robots. On Facebook, it was very likely that a fake news was reposted as real. During a congressional investigation, Facebook would admit that a Kremlin-linked misinformation organization, the Internet Research Agency, whose objective was to divide Americans and interfere with the election, had bought inflammatory political ads from Facebook that had been seen by more than 126 million Americans. Facebook had provided the private data of 87 million users to Cambridge Analytica, a data firm retained by the Trump Campaign.