Bill Stonebarger's Blog

By this time I realize some of my readers may tire a bit at these long emails, and perhaps even of my personal introductions. As defense I cite one my favorite authors of old, Henry David Thoreau, who apologized in the first chapter of Walden. “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.”

So it goes. The 50s, 60s and 70s were tumultuous decades for the country and for me personally. Marriage, children, a teaching career in New York city, summers directing a progressive camp in New England (where Pete Seeger was a sometime visitor), moving back to the Midwest (Wisconsin instead of Ohio), involvement with the human potential movement, encounter groups, founding a summer theater, divorce, re-marriage, and finally leaving teaching and launching my own small educational media company, Hawkhill.

Like Thoreau I have to confess I was never much of an activist either, more an “inspector of snowstorms” as he once described his talent. I also agreed with Thoreau about other life choices. “As for Doing Good,” wrote Thoreau, ”that is one of the professions which are full … If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”

Anyway and all the while, especially in the 70s and 80s, I was ever so slowly moving from a left-liberal perspective to a more right-leaning libertarian one, where I began to see more clearly the benefits of freedom and the shortcomings of socialism and its many offshoots.

Part 5: Khrushchev to Nixon

Stalin died in 1953 and was replaced by the pudgy, gloomy and ineffective Georgy Malenkov, who was in turn replaced in 1955 by the flamboyant risk-taker Nikita Khrushchev. In 1956 Khrushchev shocked the Soviet Union (and later the world) by making a speech in the Kremlin denouncing crimes of Stalin. When contents of the speech leaked to the world press it caused a major tremor in the communist world and shook the confidence of many western party members and fellow travelers.

President Truman did not run for re-election and was replaced by General Dwight Eisenhower who served two terms from 1953 to 1961. During the Eisenhower years there was an epidemic of fear in this country over a so-called “missile gap.” By the mid-1950s the Soviet Union was seen to be aggressively adventurous with its new nuclear arsenal and potentially a deadly threat to America. The new Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, once vowed to “bury us” though he later claimed he meant this in an economic, not a military way. When Khrushchev visited America in 1964 he was royally entertained by some capitalist industrial leaders. He was snubbed, however, by trade union members due to his harsh suppression of trade unions in the Soviet bloc.

Some citizens in cities and suburbs built bomb shelters in their back yards that they hoped would protect them when Russian missiles with nuclear warheads reined down from the skies. Some schools had “A-bomb” drills. Hollywood produced a string of movies like Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb that stoked the fear. The supposed missile gap was intensified by the launching of the first earth satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union in 1957.

Senator John F. Kennedy ran for President to succeed Eisenhower with a campaign built around this supposed missile gap between the US and Russia. “The nation was losing the satellite-missile race with the Soviet Union,” claimed the Senator, “because of … complacent miscalculations, penny-pinching, budget cutbacks, incredibly confused mismanagement, and wasteful rivalries and jealousies.”

After Kennedy was elected president in 1961 one of his first challenges was how to deal with the first communist government in the western hemisphere in Cuba led by Fidel Castro. Kennedy reluctantly supported an Eisenhower-planned invasion of Cuba by Cuban dissidents trained by our CIA. This invasion, labeled the “Bay of Pigs” failed when Kennedy declined to support it with air cover.

A year later in 1962 the missile gap came to a head when Khrushchev installed Russian nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. By now the policy of “containment” of communism had been augmented by a policy of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). That policy, adopted on both sides, said that any use of nuclear weapons by one side would assure use by the other side and thus both sides would be destroyed. MAD would, the theory went, make any hot war unlikely since for both sides it would be equivalent to national suicide.

When new US satellite photos revealed the secret missile sites in Cuba, President Kennedy addressed the nation in a speech directly aimed at Khrushchev demanding that the Russians remove the missiles immediately. Kennedy ordered the U.S. Navy to intercept any Russian ships headed to Cuba and to forcibly remove any missile parts. Many of his advisors recommended an invasion of Cuba to make sure the missiles (and Castro and his government) were removed.

It was perhaps the tensest time in the Cold War and many people in both countries were terrified that a devastating war might break out at any time. 21^st Century archives show that Castro himself was indeed urging the Russians to fire nuclear-armed missiles at the U.S. should the U.S. make any move to invade his country.

Khrushchev, however, (despite Castro’s angry objection) backed down, ordered his supply ships to return to Russia and then took the missiles out of Cuba on the assurance from Kennedy that we would not invade Cuba, as well as a secret concession that we would remove some of our missiles from Turkey. The world breathed a sign of relief that this time at least MAD was avoided.

The cold war did become a hot war again in 1963, however, when President Kennedy ordered 16,000 American military advisors into Vietnam to support and advise the South Vietnam government under attack by a communist-led insurgency (we called them the Viet Cong) which was supported, supplied and eventually joined by regular army troops from communist North Vietnam. A few months after these first American troop advisors arrived in South Vietnam Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

When the new U.S. President, Lyndon Johnson, took office South Vietnam was on the verge of being overrun by the insurgent Viet Cong as well as regular army communist troops from North Vietnam. Johnson had to decide whether to commit substantial forces to Vietnam as Truman did in Korea or to withdraw. He chose the first option on the same “domino” theory that Truman had used in Korea. This time the war became a long-running major disaster for the United States.

In the early years of the Vietnam War there was strong if not unanimous support in the United States Congress as well as the citizenry. As in Korea the U.S. military slowed and then stopped the aggressive communist forces from inside and outside South Vietnam. As the war dragged on without decision year after year, and a military draft brought many new inductees to Vietnam (most from poorer families since college students could and did get deferments), protests against the war gained strength in Congress and on the streets.

When the North Vietnamese staged their biggest offensive of the war in 1968 (called the Tet Offensive) they were soundly defeated by the US and South Korean armies. However, the very size of the offensive coupled with misleading reports on television news in this country served to further inflame protesters in American cities and especially on college campuses. Chants of “Hey, Hey, LBJ/How many kids have you killed today?” and tragic incidents like the killing of a student protester by National Guard troops on a college campus in Ohio led to a virtual “war at home.”

Hoping to cool the protests and end the war Johnson declined to run for a second term. Protests continued however and became ever stronger and more violent after the election of Richard Nixon. Nixon curtailed the draft and tried to shift troops home and make the war a strictly Vietnamese affair. In this process, though, he also secretly expanded the war by authorizing the bombing of Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos.

After 8 years of war in which more than 55,000 American troops lost their lives President Nixon, along with his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, finally arranged an armistice with the North Vietnamese in 1974. After the armistice all the U.S. troops came home and Congress refused to support the South Vietnam government with any further aid, military or economic. Without our support South Vietnam soon fell to the North Vietnamese who sent their troops into Saigon in 1976, forced an emergency evacuation of our embassy after which they proceeded to establish a full fledged communist dictatorship on the Vietnam peninsula that still exists today.

It was a humiliating defeat for the United States and the Vietnam War left a bitter legacy that has still not completely dissipated in the 21^st century.

Stay tuned for Part 6: Détente

In the meantime please check out our unprecedented 2010 sale. 70% discount on all DVD programs and 90% discount on all VHS video tapes. See our web site: www.hawkhill.com

Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President

In my day Antioch College, from which I graduated in 1950, was always on the left side of the political spectrum. In the decades since that time the College moved steadily to the far-left end of the spectrum. So far left in fact that it lost most of its student body as well as most of its financial support. As a result the College actually went defunct in 2008. (I understand it hopes to be reborn again in 2012.) The experience of the college, in an odd reversed way, mirrors my own intellectual and political experience in the decades since 1950.

Like most of my fellow Antioch graduates I was not a communist, but I did think that capitalism was suspect. Profit was a bit of a dirty word and capitalism was often considered synonymous with greed. Socialism was much cooler. And the Soviet Union, if I thought about it all, was probably not all that bad either. After all, considering the way we treated Negroes and women, and the depth of poverty still prevalent in our country, we in the Unites States did not have that much to be proud of. As I remember it, some of our professors at Antioch in those days were talking about the evils of corporate capitalism and the “fascist” tilt of both democratic and republican political parties in much the same way that many leftists do today. Some professors went so far as to suggest we should consider seceding from the U.S. and form social-democratic utopian cells that somehow would protect us from the ravages of corporate tyranny.

In the first presidential election in my coming of age I voted for Harry Truman, but I was tempted to vote for the far-left candidate and fellow-traveler Henry Wallace. He was the favorite of many professors and fellow Antiochians. I emphatically did not trust “anti-communists” like the congressmen on the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) who voted to investigate Antioch the year after I graduated. And of course, I was appalled at the soon-to-be-infamous Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy. In short I guess I was in those days a (weak) fellow-traveler, a “controllable Marxist.”

Since those days, as many of you know, I have changed my views considerably and now believe that free-market capitalism is essential to democracy (though not sufficient). While greed may not be a praiseworthy virtue, a healthy self-interest, free trade, diversity of talents (and rewards) and strong profits are all good things for the individual and for the society.

It seems to me now that while social-democrats do have some good ideas, we need to be careful to keep a balance and not slide into a state where citizens become overly dependent on government largess and control. Yes, we need good government and yes government can do good things for people (like the GI Bill of Rights, social security, public schools,  and civil rights legislation), but if we go too far in a socialist direction we risk losing the creative spark and dynamic economic growth that comes from competitive enterprise and vigorous competition in ideas, in science, in technology, in the arts, in communication and in religion.

Finally, I confess now that in my younger years I was very naive about that criminally- extreme version of socialism—Marxist-Leninist communism. History has clearly demonstrated how tragically disastrous that system has been wherever and whenever it has come to power.

With that personal background, here is Part 4 of WHAT’S TO BE DONE?

Part 4: Controllable Marxists:

The U.S. response to the Berlin blockade and the Korean invasion were clear-cut and successful. The U.S. responses to the Soviet use of “controllable Marxists” inside the western world were muddied, controversial and not always so successful. During the 2^nd World War the Soviets were successful in repelling and destroying Hitler’s armies. They were successful also in planting spies in the US and British governments and defense industries, notably the Manhattan Project (the multi-billion dollar effort to create and deliver an atomic bomb for use in the war).

At the end of the war the US had a monopoly on atomic bomb technology. However, it turned out later that Soviet spies stole important secrets of the atomic bomb that made it easier for the Soviets to build their first nuclear weapons in 1949.

Two cases, in particular, became national scandals in the early 1950s.

Klaus Fuchs, an important British scientist working on the Manhattan Project in New Mexico confessed to stealing secrets about the detonation details of the atomic bomb and passing them along to Soviet agents in the U.S. including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The FBI intercepted some of the communications and prosecutors brought Fuchs and the Rosenbergs to trial in 1952. Fuchs pleaded guilty and in consideration of his aiding the prosecution received a sentence of 10 years in prison.

In a much publicized (and much criticized) trial both Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted of espionage and sentenced to death. Both were executed though many experts think the evidence was much stronger against Julius than it was against his wife Ethel. The presiding judge in Boston, Irving Kaufman, wrote that: “I consider your crime worse than murder. … I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.”

In another widely publicized and controversial trial, Alger Hiss, a senior US State Department official and important advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt during the war, was accused in 1948 of being a secret agent of the Soviet Union. He denied the accusation but was subsequently convicted of perjury in 1950 and sentenced to 5 years in prison. Hiss had many supporters in high places including Dean Acheson, Secretary of State under Harry Truman. His trial and conviction were divisive and controversial. As were a series of highly emotional hearings and investigations of communist activities in both the US Senate and House of Representatives.

In the late 40s and early 50s the House Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC) conducted widely publicized hearings on communism in the government, in academia and in Hollywood. These HUAC hearings ruined some careers in Hollywood when executives in the movie industry started a “blacklist” of writers, actors, directors and movie technicians who were suspected of being communists or of being sympathetic to communist activities. Some on the blacklist were active party members. Most, however, were fellow travelers, “controllable Marxists.”

Looking beyond Hollywood, the list of famous fellow travelers in the 20^th century is long, surprising and sobering. It includes well-known playwrights like Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw and Clifford Odets, writers liked Dalton Trumbo, Howard Fast, Ernest Hemingway and Howard Zinn, actors like Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson and Edward G. Robinson, folk singers like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, journalists like I.F. Stone, Edgar Snow and William Shirer, philosophers like Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, scientists like Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Linus Pauling, musicians like Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, capitalists like Cyrus Eaton, Frederick Vanderbilt Field and George Soros, union leaders like Sidney Hillman, Saul Alinsky and Harry Bridges, diplomats like Joseph Davies and Alger Hiss, even a former vice-president, Henry Wallace–as well as hundreds of thousands of other intellectuals, college professors, union leaders, businessmen and socially prominent leaders.

Many of these fellow travelers (in only a few cases were they dedicated party members) got their start in the 1930s depression when it did seem to many citizens in the West that capitalism was on its death bed and that communism was the best hope for the future.

Joseph Davies, for instance, the American ambassador to Moscow during the height of Stalin’s reign of terror in the late 1930s, said of the sadistic dictator, “If Stalin had been born in America, my guess is that Stalin would have gone into public life because of his sympathy for the underprivileged and his desire to bring about a better life for the masses.”

The famous Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White went into rhapsodies of praise for the greater freedom for artists under Stalin. “This freedom to experiment—and the opportunity to experiment without worrying about the rent and the grocery bill,” she wrote, “points up, more sharply than anything else I can think of, the tremendous difference between the opportunities of the artist under a system like that in the Soviet Union and the situation here in America.”

Of course there are other explanations for the fellow-traveler naive support of communist goals and activities.

(1) The Marxist vision had strong appeal for many intellectuals in its quasi-religious hope of utopian bliss in the future. Many fellow travelers believed it was more than a hope– it was a sure thing, scientifically certified and inevitable! All this in contrast to what many saw as the exploitation, hypocrisy and misery they felt was brought on by capitalism in the depression years.

(2) It was and is easy to confuse support for communism with support for democratic social progress. Not all of the ideas of Marx and other reformers and revolutionaries of the 19^th and 20^th centuries led to tyranny and brutality. Only some branches of Marxist theory—Marxist-Leninism–led to totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Other Marxist-influenced offshoots combined forces, often with religious activists, to pioneer social-democratic reform movements that are still active in improving capitalist and democratic states today.

In both the 19^th and the 20^th centuries, for instance, socialist and social democratic parties and movements made significant progressive changes in the industrialized democratic countries of Western Europe and North America. Union leaders like Samuel Gompers, politicians like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, African-American leaders like Martin Luther King brought ideas to democratic practice some of which were originally championed by Marxist thinkers. Ideas like universal suffrage, progressive taxation, free education, unemployment insurance, social security, civil rights laws, women’s liberation and indeed much of the modern welfare state.

In the U.S. Senate too there was a communist scare in the 1950s. A Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, got international fame (or infamy depending on your point of view) for his charge in a West Virginia speech that “I have in my hand the names of 205 (or 76, there was no written record at the speech and the number is in dispute) State Department officials who belong to the Communist Party of America.”

It turned out that his supposed list was for the most part imaginary. Even though there were indeed some communist members and many fellow-travelers in government, business, unions, academia and intellectual circles, his reckless, exaggerated and unsubstantiated charges were eventually to bring his downfall when he accused the Army of being heavily infiltrated with communist saboteurs.

As a young college graduate and teacher in the McCarthy days, like pretty much all of my friends and colleagues I was solidly anti-McCarthy. I could see that many of his accusations were based on flimsy or non-existent evidence and that they were harming innocent people. Looking back today, however, I have to admit that yes, McCarthy was an obnoxious personality who drank too much and made way too many unfounded accusations. However, I also have to admit that he was onto something real and we may find history is kinder to him than to some of his more harsh attackers like the left-wing journalist I.F. Stone or the fellow traveling playwright Lillian Hellman.

Recently translated and decoded secret Soviet transcripts, for instance, have produced solid evidence that journalist I.F. Stone may well have been a paid secret Soviet agent all the while he was leading the pack in denouncing McCarthy.

Lillian Hellman (like only too many other fellow travelers of the 30s and 40s) consistently and openly praised Stalin and even supported his “show trials” in the 1930s that did not stop at ruining a few reputations but sent most of Stalin’s revolutionary Bolshevik colleagues to a quick death (along with 3 or 4 million other unfortunates) on no evidence. Fellow writer Mary McCarthy said of Hellman’s prose: “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”

Stay alert for Part 5: Khrushchev to Nixon

Note to teachers in secondary and college classrooms: please consider the new program CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY, reviewed below in School Library Journal. It is fast becoming one of our best selling programs.

Capitalism and Democracy (Democracy: The Basics Series). DVD. 50 min with tchr’s. guide, quiz. Hawkhill Assocs. 2008, 2009 release. ISBN 1-55979-222-1. $109.

Gr 9 Up—While many individuals may assume that capitalism and democracy are only possible when mated with each other, this well-crafted program presents a comprehensive examination of the relationship between the two theories. Consisting of two distinct divisions, the nicely paced and superbly narrated film reviews the historical development of both the economic theory of capitalism and the governmental concept of democracy and explains how capitalism and democracy are connected today. The historical account begins at the earliest stages of human society and smoothly progresses to today’s complex world with hints at what might occur in the future throughout the world. A rich variety of artwork, video, and photographs help illustrate the connections between capitalism and democracy and enhance the impact of the presentation. New terms are subtitled as they are introduced. There are two interactive review tools for post-viewing use. The guided questions option reviews key points to generate discussion, while the mastery quizzes focus on essential topics and themes from the program. While most teachers will find these assessment devices lacking in substance, their inclusion is a nice bonus. A valuable resource.—Dwain Thomas, formerly Lake Park High School, Roselle, IL

Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill Owner/President

P.S. Once again please consider our 2010 sale. 70% discount on all DVD programs (including the one reviewed above), 90% discount on all VHS video tapes. See: www.hawkhill.com

In 1949 I was a student at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I was supported in my college education by the GI Bill, having served two years in the U.S. Navy after high school. Antioch was then a small liberal arts college with a strong liberal bent and a broad but comprehensive curriculum. Some of my classmates, who later became famous, were Coretta Scott (later-to-be Coretta Scott King), Rod Serling (TV writer/producer of the popular  “Twilight Zone” in the 50s and 60s), Leon Higginbotham (civil rights lawyer and U.S. District Court judge in Washington, DC) and Cliff Geertz (philosophy major at Antioch who later became a world-famous anthropologist).

Antioch was a marvel to me in those days. It was the first time in my life that I found ideas could be interesting. For the first time I began to read serious books, think, and discuss big ideas. We had books and radio but no television, cell phones, computers. video games or Internet searches. Like most liberal college students in those post-war days I was a firm believer in democracy but I was not so sure of capitalism. I did know there was a communist challenge from the Soviet Union, but the challenge seemed remote. They were, after all, our allies in WW2 and whatever their shortcomings, the challenge they presented seemed tame compared to our recent war with Hitler and Hirohito. Like most of my classmates at Antioch I knew that U.S. democracy needed some progressive fixes, especially in its treatment of people we called “negroes.” I also knew that women were still being treated too often as second-class citizens and that we should do something about this. However, I have to admit that I was not much of an activist, being more interested in poetry, philosophy and girls than in money, protests or politics.

In 1949 the Berlin air-lift crises had just past, Stalin was still alive and the U.S. President was Harry Truman. One year later the Cold War became a hot war in Korea and then the communist challenge did become more relevant. All this and more in Part 3 of my new program WHAT’S TO BE DONE?

Part 3: The Cold War: Truman, Stalin, Berlin and Korea

In the Second World War from 1939 to 1945 the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and democratic countries of Western Europe were allied with the totalitarian Soviet Union in a desperate war of survival against aggressive fascist totalitarian empires of Germany, Italy and Japan. The allies were uncomfortable bedfellows—democracies allied with a totalitarian power—and almost immediately after the war ended, another war began between the former allies. It was called the Cold War.

Great as the sacrifices and hardships of the western democracies were in this Second World War, the Soviet Union (due at least partly to its scorched-earth and human-wave battle policies) suffered far more homeland destruction and far more civilian and soldier casualties. The Soviets, for instance, lost eight times as many soldiers and civilians as the Germans did. Whatever the cost, they deserve a major portion of the credit for destroying Hitler’s armies.

Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator, had been in power since a few years after the death of Lenin in 1923. He was a small man, only 5’6” tall. Many people, including Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as well as British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, thought “Uncle Joe” had considerable personal charm. He wrote poetry, loved music and literature. When it came to raw power and cold-blooded cruelty, however, he had no match in all of world history.

Stalin met with President Roosevelt in conferences before the war in Europe ended and later with President Truman after the war ended. At both Yalta and Potsdam conferences he demanded a free hand in territories occupied by the Red Army in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Korean peninsula. And he got it. Countries like Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and North Korea were soon dominated by communist governments either put in place by the occupying Soviet army, or by local communist parties allied to the Soviet Union in ideology and practice.

Germany was in almost total ruin, its major cities and most of its industrial might destroyed. Germany’s former capital city, Berlin, was divided into a free sector occupied by the western democracies and an eastern sector occupied by the Soviet army.

The United States, except for Pearl Harbor, had not had any war destruction at home and at the end of the war was by default the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world.

Just two years after the war ended in March 1947 the first major cold war action happened. Greece and Turkey were on the fringes of the free democratic world of Western Europe and Eastern Asia. Both were threatened with communist takeovers by local communist insurgents being helped by the Soviet Union. President Truman asked Congress for $400 million in aid for the two countries. “It must be the policy of the United States,” he argued in what became known as the Truman Doctrine, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” In this case the U.S. aid did effectively help stop communists from taking control in Greece and Turkey. (Both of these countries remain free-market democracies today in the 21^st century.)

Remembering the bitterness and disastrous mistakes the victorious allies made following the First World War, under the leadership of President Harry Truman and his visionary Secretary of State, General George Marshall, a “Marshall Plan” was proposed and enacted in Congress in 1948. It was put into effect with amazing speed to help Western Europe rebuild their war-devastated cities and economies and in the case of Germany and Italy to rapidly form new democratic governments. Never before had a conquering power been so magnanimous, so effective and so wise.

Japan was occupied by U.S. troops. The Japanese were allowed to keep the Emperor as a figure-head but General Douglas MacArthur was given power to run the country, to rebuild its cities and factories and to install a new democratic constitution that included a provision for total permanent disarmament.

The U.S. offered to extend the Marshall Plan to Eastern Europe and to the Soviet Union itself. Stalin, however, firmly rejected this aid and instead adopted a policy of revenge and reparation. He proceeded to strip much of eastern Germany and other allies of Germany of their factories and stored wealth. He then installed communist dictatorships to govern the defeated populations.

The cold war heated up in divided Berlin in the summer of 1948. Berlin was an island in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany so that the western free part of the city was completely surrounded and at the mercy of communist military forces. The Soviets considered this free zone of Berlin a thorn in their side and decided to apply pressure to force the westerners out. They blocked off all roads, canals and rail links to the free zones of Berlin, gambling that the French, British and American occupying forces would be forced to leave when West Berlin citizens could not get food, coal and other vital supplies to survive coming winter months.

President Truman was faced with a hard choice. Should he challenge the blockade at the risk of war or should he order his troops out? Very soon he found a way to avoid direct military action and to keep freedom alive in Berlin. He ordered the U.S. Air Force to conduct 24-hour a day air lifts to supply needed food, supplies and coal to West Berlin. After many tense weeks and difficult technical problems, his strategy worked. The Soviets lifted the blockade in the late spring of 1949 and West Berlin survived as an island of freedom in a sea of coercion.

Truman’s response to the Berlin blockade as well as most other US actions in the cold war were based on a strategy called “containment.” In 1946 George Kennan, a top advisor to our ambassador in Moscow, sent a famous long cable that outlined this strategy.

According to Kennan the Soviets perceived themselves to be in a state of perpetual war with capitalism. The brutal war with Hitler had severely weakened their military and economic power, however. As a result in the immediate post-war period they were not likely to be as militarily aggressive as Hitler and Hirohito had been. The Soviets, however, would use “controllable Marxists” in the capitalist world as allies wherever and whenever they could. To survive this perpetual war, Kennan advised, the U.S. should be prepared to confront the Soviets with threatened force that would “contain” Soviet ambitions but would avoid all-out war or aggressive roll-back of Communist gains.

To implement this strategy in Europe the western democracies in 1948 formed NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). The first head of NATO admitted that the purpose was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” The success of the Marshall Plan soon made the third goal unnecessary. By 1955 West Germany had recovered enough to establish its own stable democratic government and was admitted into NATO. The communist countries countered NATO in 1955 with a Warsaw Pact.

Early along the cold war became a hot war on the eastern frontier, though not one directly involving the Soviet army. Japan had occupied and made Korea a part of the Japanese Empire in 1911. After Japan surrendered to end the 2^nd World War in 1945, the Korean peninsula was occupied by Soviet armies in the north and U.S. armies in the south. The occupying armies set the 38^th Parallel as an arbitrary dividing line between Soviet-dominated North Korea and U.S.-dominated South Korea.

Both newly-established Korean states wanted to unify Korea and both states asked the superpowers for help in invading their neighbor. The U.S. under newly re-elected President Truman refused South Korea’s request for help. Instead the US withdrew its troops. Sensing an opening, Stalin, the Soviet dictator (along with Mao Zedong, dictator of Communist China) gave the green light to the North Korean communist dictator, Kim Il-sung, to launch a military invasion in 1950 with the goal of uniting North and South Korea under one rule, a communist one.

Caught by surprise, Truman petitioned the new United Nations Security Council to condemn the invasion and to authorize military force to repel it. (The Soviet Union had a veto power on the Council but could not vote due to a self-imposed embargo of the Council at that time). Truman’s petition was adopted and soon United Nations troops (mostly American) under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur came back to South Korea to help the South Korean army defend their country.

“Communism was acting in Korea,” said Truman, “just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. … If the Communists were permitted to force their way into the Republic of Korea without opposition from the free world, no small nation would have the courage to resist threat and aggression by stronger Communist neighbors.”

Initially North Korea with a much larger and more heavily equipped army was dominant and would have easily defeated South Korea’s smaller ill-equipped army. Once MacArthur’s troops got to Korea they slowed the communist advance and then surprised the enemy with a daring behind-the-lines landing at Incheon. After a series of bloody battles the United Nation troops advanced almost to the Yalu River border with China.

Alarmed by the US advance, Mao Zedong ordered a tsunami wave of Chinese Communist troops (the number of troops is still in dispute–some authorities claim it was as many as 3 million men) to intervene and drive the US forces back The UN forces controlled the air but the Chinese troops with their overwhelming manpower advantage drove the UN forces back, at one point capturing Seoul, the South Korean capitol city. China suffered huge casualties in this offensive. Some experts put the figure as high as a million men killed-in-action.

MacArthur requested permission to recruit soldiers from Chiang-Kai-Shek’s army in Taiwan and to bomb targets over the border in China, even at one point threatening an atomic bomb attack. Truman, worried about a possible global war with China and/or the Soviet Union, refused. When MacArthur made public statements threatening to extend the war to China, Truman in a courageous but unpopular decision relieved the general of his command.

Eventually the war ended in a stalemate with an armistice that divided Korea again at the 38^th parallel, just where it was before the war began (and where it still is today.). This sometimes “forgotten” war (Truman called it a “police action,” not a war) cost the US over 50,000 lives and set a pattern that was repeated 20 years later in Southeast Asia when a communist North Vietnam attacked U.S. supported South Vietnam.

Stay alert for Part 4: Controllable Marxists

In the meantime consider previewing the program reviewed below.

The Industrial Revolution, Capitalism and the United States of America. (Democracy in World History Series). video or DVD. color. 32 min. (closed captioned). with tchr’s. guide. Hawkhill Assocs. 2006. video, ISBN 1-559-79-173-X: $89; DVD, ISBN 1-55979-174-8: $109.

Gr 7 Up–The third title in this six-part series covers the time period from America’s struggle for independence through the start of the 20th century, emphasizing economic transformations throughout the world. It utilizes photos, live-action video, and crisp graphics. The first portion of this well-paced and richly narrated program focuses on the uniqueness of the philosophical, political, social, and economic bases of the United States in that time period. In another testament to “it’s all about timing,” the simultaneous emergence of free-market capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Northern England supported the struggle of our budding nation. Our Civil War is seen from an economic perspective and is shown to be emblematic of other struggles around the world as capitalism and industrialism clashed with the historic forces of authoritarianism and an agriculture-based economy of unshared wealth. These conflicts were, as we know now, just the first of many more to follow as the 20th century unfolded. The DVD version includes an interactive component of guided post-viewing questions (incorrect responses result in references to particular portions of the program where the correct answer may be found). A mastery quiz is included on the DVD as well as in printed format in the supplemental materials accompanying this potentially valuable title.–Dwain Thomas, Lake Park High School, Roselle, IL

Bill Stonebarger, Hawkhill

And don’t forget our huge 2010 sale where you buy any DVD in our catalog at a 70% discount. Any VHS in our catalog at a 90% discount!

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