Chapter 27: KOREAN WAR

Chapter 27: KOREAN WAR

Chapter 27 Objectives We will study the Korean War and its greater implications in the cold war. We will study the red scare and anti-communist hysteria during this time. We will study the Republican revival that led to Eisenhower to become president.

Mat_12:25 And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand:

THE KOREAN WAR: o On June 25, 1950, the armies of communist North Korea swept across their southern border and invaded the pro-western half of the Korean peninsula to the South. o Within days, they had occupied much of South Korea, including Seoul its capital.

THE KOREAN WAR: o Almost immediately, the United States committed to defeating the North Korean offensive. o It was the nation s first military engagement of the Cold war.

The Divided Peninsula: o Before the end of WWII both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had sent troops into Korea in an effort to weaken Japanese occupation. o Once the war was over, and the Japanese expelled, the United States and the Soviet Union each supported different governments. o The Soviets supporting the Communist regime in the North and the U.S. supporting the Western government in the South.

The Divided Peninsula: o Instead they had divided the nation along the 38th parallel thinking it was temporary. o The Russians departed in 1949 leaving behind a communist government in the north with a strong, Soviet-equipped army.

The Divided Peninsula: o The Americans left a few months later, handing control to the pro- Western government of Syngman Rhee, who was anticommunist but only nominally democratic. o Rhee had a relatively small military which he used primarily to suppress internal opposition.

The Divided Peninsula: o There was strong incentive in North Korea to reunite the country. o There was reason also to believe that the North Koreans acted without Stalin s approval, but the Soviets supported once the offensive began.

The Divided Peninsula: o The Truman administration responded quickly to the invasion. o On June 27, 1950, the president appealed to the United Nations to intervene.

The Divided Peninsula: o The Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council at the time (to protest the council s refusal to recognize the new communist government of China) and thus was unable to exercise its veto power. o As a result, the American delegates were able to win UN Agreement at a resolution calling for assistance to the South Korean government.

The Divided Peninsula: o On June 30, the United States ordered its own ground forces into Korea, and Truman appointed General Douglas MacArthur to command the overwhelmingly American UN Operations there. o The intervention in Korea was the first expression of the newly expansive American foreign policy of containment as outlined in NSC-68 but Korea went beyond containment to one of liberation.

The Divided Peninsula: o After a surprise American invasion at Inchon in September had routed the North Korean forces from the south and sent them fleeing across the 38th parallel. o Truman gave MacArthur permission to pursue the Communists into their own territory. o His aim was an American-sponsored UN resolution proclaimed in October to create a unified, independent, and democratic Korea.

The Divided Peninsula: o UN Forces began a relentless push and took Pyongyang on October 19, 1950. o Then the Chinese alarmed at American forces toward its border intervened and sent eight divisions and entered the war. o American and UN forces outnumbered retreated in the bitter winter and lost Seoul a second time.

The Divided Peninsula: o By March, the UN armies managed to regain much of the territory they had recently lost, taking back Seoul and pushing the Communist north of the 38th parallel once more. o But with that, the war degenerated into a protracted stalemate.

The Divided Peninsula: o From the start Truman was determined to avoid a direct conflict with China, which feared might lead to a new world war. o He sought negotiations and sought a diplomatic solution to avoid a wider war.

The Divided Peninsula: o General MacArthur insisted that the United States should attack China itself since the United States was fighting China. o In March 1951, MacArthur indicated his unhappiness in a public letter to House Republican leader Joseph W. Martin that concluded: There is no substitute for victory. o His position had wide popular support.

The Divided Peninsula: o The Martin letter came after nine months during which MacArthur had opposed Truman s decisions. o More than once, the president had warned the general to keep his objections to himself. o The release of the Martin letter led to MacArthur being relieved in command in 1951 which Truman felt as an intolerable insubordination.

The Divided Peninsula: o MacArthur was widely popular and the response of the American public to the dismissal of General MacArthur was one of criticism towards Truman. o He received a heroes return when he returned home. o In the meantime the stalemate continued in Korean until 1953, when an armistice was reached.

Limited Mobilization: o At home, Truman set up the Office of Defense Mobilization to fight inflation, by holding down prices and discouraging high union wage demands. o When these cautious regulatory efforts failed, the president took more drastic action.

Limited Mobilization: o When railroad workers walked off the job in 1951, Truman ordered the government to seize control of the railroads. o That helped keep the trains running but it had no effect on union demands.

Limited Mobilization: o Workers ultimately got most of what they had demanded. o In 1952, during a nationwide steel strike, Truman seized the steel mills, citing his powers as commander in chief. o But in a 6 to 3 decision the Supreme Court ruled that the president had exceeded his authority and Truman was forced to relent.

Limited Mobilization: o As the stalemate in Korea continued, 140,000 Americans were dead or wounded, and the public s frustration turned to anger. o Many began to believe that something must be deeply wrong-not only in Korea but within the United States as well. o Such fears contributed to the rise of the second major campaign of the century against domestic communism.

The Crusade Against Subversion: o Why did the American people develop a growing fear of internal communist subversion that by the early 1950s had reached the point of near hysteria?

The Crusade Against Subversion: o One factor was that Communism was not an imagined enemy in the 1950s with Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. o The setbacks in the battle against Communism, Korean stalemate, the loss of China, the Soviet development of an atomic bomb.

The Crusade Against Subversion: o Searching for someone to blame many people were attracted to the idea of Communist conspiracy within American borders.

The Crusade Against Subversion: o Much of the anticommunist furor emerged out of the Republican Party s search for an issue with which to attack the Democrats, o and out of the Democrats efforts to stifle that issue. o Beginning in 1947 (with Republicans temporarily in control of Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) held widely publicized investigations. o To prove that under Democratic rule, the government had tolerated (if not actually encouraged Communist subversion).

The Crusade Against Subversion: o The committee turned first to the move industry arguing that communists had infiltrated Hollywood. o More alarming to the public was HUAC s investigation into charges of disloyalty leveled against a former high ranking member of the State Department: Alger Hiss.

The Crusade Against Subversion: o In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a self-avowed former Communist agent who turned vehemently against the party, became an editor for Time Magazine. o Chambers told the committee that Hiss had passed classified State Department documents through him to the Soviet Union. o When Hiss sued him for slander, Chambers produced microfilms of documents called the pumpkin papers because Chambers had kept them hidden in a pumpkin in his garden).

The Crusade Against Subversion: o Hiss could not be tried for espionage because of the statute of limitations (a law that protects individuals from prosecution of most crimes after seven years have passed).

The Crusade Against Subversion: o But largely because of the relentless efforts of Richard M. Nixon, a freshman Republican congressman from California and a member of HUAC. o Hiss was convicted of perjury and served several years in prison.

The Crusade Against Subversion: o The Hiss case not only discredited a prominent young diplomat, it also cast suspicion of a generation of liberal democrats and made it possible for many Americans to believe that communists had infiltrated the government. o The Hiss investigation helped the political career of Richard Nixon.

The Federal Loyalty Program and the Rosenberg Case: o Partly to protect itself against Republican attacks, o partly to encourage support for the president s foreign policy initiatives, the Truman administration in 1947 initiated a widely publicized program to review the loyalty to federal employees.

The Federal Loyalty Program and the Rosenberg Case: o In August 1950, the president authorized sensitive agencies to fire people deemed bad security risks. o By 1951 over 2,000 government employees resigned under pressure and 212 had been dismissed. o The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, J. Edgar Hoover investigated and harassed alleged radicals.

The Federal Loyalty Program and the Rosenberg Case: o In 1950 Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, requiring all communist organizations to register with the government. o Truman vetoed the bill. o Congress easily overrode the veto.

The Federal Loyalty Program and the Rosenberg Case: o The successful Soviet detonation of a nuclear weapon in 1949 convinced many people that there had been a conspiracy to pass American atomic secrets to the Russians. o In 1950, Klaus Fuchs, a young British scientist seemed to confirm those fears when he testified that he had delivered to the Russians details of the manufacture of the bomb.

The Federal Loyalty Program and the Rosenberg Case: o The case ultimately settled on an obscure New York couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, o members of the Communist Party, whom the federal government claimed had been the masterminds of the conspiracy. o The case against them was in a large part of the testimony of David Greenglass, Ethel s brother, who was a machinists for the Manhattan Project.

The Federal Loyalty Program and the Rosenberg Case: o Greenglass admitted that he was channeling secret information to the Soviet Union through other agents. o His sister and brother-in-law had planned and orchestrated the espionage according to Greenglass. o The couple was convicted and sentenced to death and executed via electric chair.

McCarthyism: o Joseph McCarthy was a relatively undistinguished first-term Republican senator from Wisconsin when, in February 1950, he suddenly burst into national prominence. o He claimed that he had a list of 205 known Communists currently working the American State Department.

McCarthyism: o McCarthy became the chairman of a special committee that conducted highly publicized investigations but never produced conclusive evidence that any federal employee was a communist. o McCarthy was applauded for being fearless against Communists, especially among Republicans who blamed that the Democrats for twenty years for treason. o McCarthy played on the fear of communism, animosity toward the country s eastern establishment, and frustrated partisan ambitious.

The Republican Revival: o Public frustration over the stalemate in Korea and popular fears of internal subversion combined to make 1952 a bad year for the Democratic Party. o Truman whose own popularity had greatly diminished wisely did not run again.

The Republican Revival: o The party united instead behind Governor Aldai E. Stevenson of Illinois. o He was witty and intellectual but the Republicans accused him of being soft on Communism.

The Republican Revival: o Stevenson faced General Dwight D. Eisenhower, military hero, commander of NATO, president of Columbia University. o Eisenhower picked his running mate, Richard Nixon the young California Senator who had gained national prominence through his crusade against Alger Hiss.

The Republican Revival: o Eisenhower attracted support through his geniality and statesmanlike pledges while Nixon effectively exploited the issue of Communist subversion. o Nixon also had to address accusations of financial improprieties which he effectively neutralized in a famous television address, the Checkers speech.

The Republican Revival: o Eisenhower won both a popular and electorate landslide and the election of 1952 ended twenty years of Democratic government. o This ended a long period of Democratic dominance.