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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.


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.


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.


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.


o The Truman administration responded

quickly to the invasion.

o On June 27, 1950, the president

appealed to the United Nations to

intervene.


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.


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.


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.”


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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?


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.


o Searching for someone to blame many

people were attracted to the idea of

Communist conspiracy within American

borders.


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).


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.


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).


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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.

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