The Impactful Decade Following WWII

Fulton, Missouri in America's heartland. In March of 1946, Fulton was a sleepy college town of 12,000 people about to face the biggest day in its history. Only six months after the end of World War I, one of the true giants of the 20th century arrived in President Henry Truman's home state. Truman thought it would be just wonderful if he brought the great Einstein Churchill out to Missouri to make a speech. He loved the idea of bringing the prime minister to a small college in the middle of Missouri that nobody ever heard of. Just a wonderful day to have not only the president of the United States, in town but Einstein Churchill the Lion of England and so everybody was excited it was you know the atmosphere we charge it really was but Churchill wasn't there to celebrate he had come to sound an alarm from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent Behind that curtain, after the war, the countries of Eastern Europe had been trapped under Soviet domination. I remember even feeling kind of indignant that the Russians weren't playing fair, weren't being nice. Churchill told America there was still a tyrant left in Europe, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Joseph Stalin was a real son of a bitch. There was a real brutality. When Stalin heard about Churchill's speech, he called it an act of war. It was presented as the imminent attack over America. on Russia. The United States and the Soviet Union had been allies in World War I. Now they would turn against each other. The Cold War would last for more than 40 years. Time magazine publisher Henry Luce had predicted that an American century would follow the end of World War I. And by 1946, the world was beginning to witness it. While the map of devastated Europe was redrawn at conferences, in Yalta and Potsdam, across the Atlantic, America had emerged from the conflict stronger and more prosperous than ever before. And yet America would be called on again. And in that sense, Churchill's speech was both a warning and an exhortation. If the free world needed a protector from the evils of Stalin, it would have to be the United States of America. In the fall of 1945, the Second World War, history's greatest armed conflict was over. America's sons and husbands and fathers were coming home. I flew the Burbank and my wife met me. That was great. She was beautiful as usual and... She had, she normally doesn't wear a lot of makeup, but she had makeup on. It was running down her face. Oh, it was the most thrilling, exciting time of your whole life. There's nothing compares to coming home to your loved ones. It was heaven, that was heaven. I was just a kid, I was just barely 20 I guess when I got out of service. There was that whole strangeness of having been so fully committed to the war, to danger, to whatever it was you were doing, and suddenly a kind of decompression chamber which was filled with uncertainty. Returning veterans had reasons to worry about what peace would bring. Factories that had worked around the clock during the war now had few jobs to offer. All the G.I.s were coming home. There were no jobs. And I found a job for a dollar an hour, refinishing damaged refrigerators from freight yards. Dirty, lousy job. but I took it. Even before the war ended, the government realized that the transition to civilian life would be difficult. In 1944, Congress passed the GI Bill of Rights. It guaranteed vets low-cost mortgages and higher education. Think of what that would mean. Fantastic. People would go to medical school, dental school, do anything they wanted, paid for by the government. It paid me to study the history of English poetry at Harvard, of all things, just the way it paid somebody else to study a very practical and utilitarian subject in South Dakota. It was absolutely democratic and indiscriminate in the highest sense. Peter would, after a brief lull, be swept into an American economy rich in unprecedented productivity and opportunity. We were the arsenal of democracy. All you had to do was throw a switch and go from producing tanks and airplanes and jeeps to cars and refrigerators. By 47, 48, the economy was zooming. The driving force behind the booming economy was the American consumer. There hadn't been much to buy during the war. Americans had built up their savings and now they were ready to spend. We had gathered this phenomenal strength that we didn't know we had, and we were living twice as well. Everybody was. Wages, productivity, everything had just increased in a way that no one had ever experienced. The newly vibrant economy and the need for veterans'housing would inspire one entrepreneur to transform thousands of... acres of New York potato fields into a new kind of American community. We believe that every family in the United States is entitled to decent shelter. Navy veteran Bill Levin imagined thousands of homes here. and he devised a way to build them fast. Levin's genius is that he understands that you bring the assembly line to the location, that you flatten the potato field, you mark it off, and in come the teams, slab men, tile men, window men, painting guys. They could do, I think, 18 houses in the morning, 18 in the afternoon, 180 a week, and $8,000. You could buy a great house. It was an amazing thing. And for the first time, you had this whole society moving into the middle class. The Levin approach spread across the country, making life in the suburbs affordable for millions. We got our first house, very small, 700 square foot, but we were thrilled with it. Two bedroom, one bath home. Good night. It was wonderful. My recollection of those years is sunshine. Flowers and blue water and mountains and a place where you could do almost anything you wanted no matter what. I think we were in the middle of the endless promise. It was quite wonderful. We started our family in 1950 and it was just a time when we were young and everything was before us. This sense of limitless optimism led to the most dramatic demographic change in American history, the baby boom. Between 1946 and 1952, American families added 25 million children to the population. It was a great, great era for white males, but for women I think there was really a very narrow conception of what women were made for. They were turned into breeders. Women had it tougher, gave up their careers for their husbands in order to stay home and have babies. I was raising kids and I was married to a Marxist and I was married to a fascist and neither one of them ever took out the garbage. So that it was a step back for women, I guess you'd have to say, and it wasn't much of a step forward for blacks either. Nearly a million black Americans had fought for their country in World War I. They returned home to an America that continued to discriminate against them. They had been to Europe where they were regarded as heroes. So to come back to the South... Still having to go to the back of the bus, not being able to sit downstairs in a movie theater, it was an ironic kind of return to a country for which we had risked our lives. President Truman was so angry about the treatment of black veterans that he demanded change. He sent a civil rights message to Congress, which was the first civil rights message ever sent to Congress by any president. And he'd made the decision, made the decision to order the desegregation of the armed forces and of the federal government. Very important. Something else very important. America's national sport was changed in the late 1940s. In 1947, Jackieie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, the first black man to play in Major League Baseball. Huge moment and particularly because baseball, baseball really mattered then. When we saw a black ball play, the only one step out onto the field, our hearts were with him because we wanted him to succeed. They'd call him all kinds of names, the nigger and that stuff, trying to rattle him, but Jackieie kept us cool. At the end of his rookie year, Jackieie Robinson, in one national poll, was voted the second most popular man in America. Behind only Bing Crosby. We're talking about the American dream. Best years of our lives. We want American democracy to work, and here he comes, and he's a very intelligent, proud person, and he does brilliantly. So in America, the years right after the war were a time of broken boundaries and seemingly limitless possibilities. I think the period from 1946 to the early 50s was the greatest time ever. It was like this country was being reborn in many ways. So many new developments were coming along. We felt pretty good about the good old USA. And although there were things happening all over the world that were threatening, we were, after all, number one. Churchill said that after the war that the United States commands the world, bestrides the world, I think he said, and I think we felt that. I was so proud and being an American was the best thing in the world and boy nobody could get us. We could always look the bad guys. That kind of faith, that kind of belief, that kind of security was so special. In much of the world, America was special and essential to the future of those countries devastated by war. Europe had waged suicidal war upon itself. There was England, and it was a victor, but it was exhausted. France was a victor, but it was humiliated. The Soviet Union was a victor, but it had lost 20 million people. The magnitude of Soviet losses would leave that nation determined never to be so vulnerable again. For ordinary people it was tremendous tragedy because in every Russian family there was somebody killed at the front. Officers and soldiers returned to burned-out villages. People began to dug up inside the earth little holes like foxholes and the whole family sometimes of six lived in this earth house. In the two aggressor nations which had begun the war, the future looked extremely uncertain. Germany was defeated and it was going to be cut right in half. And Japan had been just, as in Churchill's phrase, ground powder. And in that, we'd been brought kicking and screaming to the zenith of our power. With troops now stationed in 20 countries around the world, America's historic isolationism was over. 400,000 GIs were sent to occupy Japan. They were under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, one of the architects of the Japanese defeat. The Japanese were allowed to keep their emperor, Hirohito, but absolute imperial rule was over. The United States wrote a new Japanese constitution. In Japan, America was the sole occupying force. In Europe, it was America and the Soviet Union. And this ideological struggle between them would be played out on a continent beset by chaos. I made my way eventually through Mannheim where I was born. And as I made my way through Germany I realized the total destruction that had taken place in that country. Displaced persons walking all over from the east to the west, from the west to the east. Large cities bombed out, ruins. In the homeland of the once powerful and terrifying Third Reich, people now battled one another on the streets for bread. There was absolutely nothing to eat, so they rummaged in garbage cans. If I think of my father rummaging in garbage cans, it's terrible. People without jobs, people without homes, children without parents, it was a nightmare. It was hideous. And one of the coldest winters on record came down on Europe. There are a lot of children who didn't have any Christmas. We had a big Christmas party for him. I played Santa Claus. I remember bringing those little kids up and sitting with them on my lap and the happy faces and the smiles. Very rewarding. The only real force was the Allied military government. That was the power. The country had come to a standstill. It was... Total anarchy in this country. And throughout Western Europe, deprivation and devastation were causing political turmoil. In America, there was concern that this chaos would somehow encourage Western Europeans to turn to the Communists. It seemed as though in a way they had a lot of the cards. Wherever there was misery and poverty, where could people turn but to Communism? Subtitles by the Amara.org community Capitalism, don't forget, hadn't looked too good in the 30s. A lot of people had thought it was played out. There was a sense that Italy might topple the next election, even France. There was a definite momentum, it seemed to me, in favor of the Red Menace. The political leadership in the United States, for its part, saw the wisdom in getting Europe back on its feet. In an act of unprecedented generosity, America sent $13 billion in aid. The United States is the only country in the world today which has the economic power. Productivity, to phrase the needed decisions. The Marshall Plan, named after the Secretary of State, seemed the perfect merger of American ideals and good politics. America was a strong, generous country. It is fashionable to make fun of it, but it really was true. And we were rich, and we were confident, and we were sympathetic to the devastation of Europe and what we could do. The Russians were very, very harsh. Where we were sending in stuff to Western Europe, they were stripping down Eastern Europe and mailing and railroading everything back east. As the Soviets tightened their hold on the captive nations of Eastern Europe, those who could escape did. Alice Sylvester and her family had survived the Nazi death camps and made their way home to Czechoslovakia. There was a Russian doctor and he said, my child, I love my country. But the Russians are going to overtake here. So my advice to you is go, run. So my mother and I, during the night, went to the railroad station. And we got on a train, and we got out. And the next morning, they closed the borders, so the people that stayed couldn't get out. Churchill had been right. Those people now trapped behind the Iron Curtain would be subject to Soviet exploitation and repression for the next four decades. Berlin had lived through a nightmare and at the end of World War I the landscape reflected it. The fighting here had been particularly vicious. On the eastern front, the Germans had fought to the bitter end. The Soviet army had suffered half a million casualties before the German capital fell. The Russian soldiers, they were intoxicated by blood, by cruelty, and it was with the memories of what Germans did to their mothers and sisters and daughters, they wanted to do the same. There was huge loot, burning down of houses, rape. Soviet troops raped thousands of women. My mother was raped, gang raped, by the Russians and my friend, she was raped. He father was still alive. They put him in a corner and said you stand there and you count the rapes on your daughter. So all the 32 Russians raped her and The father had to count out loud, one, two, and so forth. That's why I know it was 32. The Russians were very brutal. The Germans, they sure hated the Russians though, and they had a reason. The Russians behaved themselves miserably here. Several months later the Western Allies arrived. One of the first US missions into post-war Berlin was flown by Jackie Olin Bennett. So we landed? And then the Russians started to lob shells over my head, shooting the windows out of the airport with artillery shells. Why the hell are the Russians shooting the windows out of this magnificent airport? Then I thought, this is going to be the American sector, and they don't want to leave the Americans anything. Located deep inside what was now Soviet-controlled East Germany, Berlin would be divided into Soviet, American, British, and French sectors. Stalin resented this democratic outpost in Eastern Europe. This was intended as his buffer zone against any future attack from the West. Stalin presented his image of the countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. These countries want to subjugate Russia with its immense mineral wealth. They are natural enemies of the socialist and communist state. The first face-to-face confrontation of the Cold War was in Berlin. Stalin was determined that the Western Allies should leave, and in June of 1948, he cut all the supply lines into the Allied sectors. It was very tense, and we knew that it got tenser and tenser. West Berliners had enough food to last a few weeks, enough fuel to last only days. Truman said, In meetings in the Oval Office, and he meant it, we stay in Berlin. You live with the expectation, I did, that we would be going to war with Russia. The United States were painted and depicted by official propaganda as the greatest enemy ready at any hour to drop atomic bomb on Russia. to a Third World War. There were some who were arguing we should leave. It isn't worth it. Get out. Why start a Third World War over this city? Others were saying we should send an armored division through and break through by force. President Truman chose another option. He would supply the beleaguered city by air. It was a gamble. American and British pilots who had once dropped bombs on this city would deliver supplies to Berlin hour after hour, day after day. We were so busy during the airlift. I was flying 128 hours a month. That's a lot of flying. And we were keeping people alive. They flew in food and fuel and medicine. They were the lifeline for two and a half million Berliners. After 11 months, Stalin conceded. Without saying a word, he ended the blockade in May of 1949. Three months later, Stalin would shock the West again. We knew the Soviets had the atomic bomb in 1949. It then became once again a different world. Now we could be a target of an atomic attack and did not trust the Russians. And I do remember this, that you always lived, you lived day to day with the thought that there could be a nuclear attack on us at any time. In only three years, Americans had gone from buying their first homes to building their first bomb shelters. I physically dug out an area underneath that house, right at six foot deep, so that the family could at least go there and be below ground level. The United States would suffer another shock when, on October 1, 1949, they learned that Mao Zedong's communists had defeated the American-backed nationalist forces in China. The Communists under Mao touched something very deep in the peasantry. They fought a brilliant fight. You have the Russians getting the atomic weapon. China has fallen. There's no doubt that there was a sense in many quarters That we were in a titanic struggle. The struggle erupted on June 25, 1950, when North Korea, supported by both the Soviet Union and China, attacked the South. An American-led army under the auspices of the newly formed United Nations was rushed in to resist them. The nations have now made it clear that lawless aggression will be met with force. So once again, a wartime draft interrupted American lives. Men were torn from their families and sent to the other side of the world. World War I vet Len Maffioli had been enjoying the Sun Bay, California good life. By November of 1950, he was fighting North Korean and Communist Chinese soldiers at Korea's Chosin Reservoir. The Chinese were all over us. We just mowed them down. And it was just hard to believe that they would just keep coming like that. and we had an awful lot of dead and dying. It dropped between 20 and 40 degrees below zero at times. It got so cold, the tank treads froze to the ground. I don't think anyone bled to death. The blood froze as soon as it hit the surface. We strictly weren't prepared for that bitter a winter. Hee we were just out of a war about five years, and we're starting over again in another one. Flew all my marine missions in support of the troops, close air support along the front lines, napalm, close support with bombs, rockets. In three years time we lost 53,000 Americans out there. Called a police action, of course, but it was for those involved. It was a bloody, bloody war. The fighting in the Korean War was as ferocious as any seen in World War I. But when the veterans came home, the reception they got was quite different. In Korea, you went for 12 or 13 months. And at the end of your tour, you were sent home. There were no bands to meet him, no parades or anything like this. The way the American people treated the Korean War and the returning veterans, I think it could be termed the Forgotten War. I think most Americans did not see the Korean War as a personal threat to themselves and their families. Would it affect the person in the Midwest someplace in their home and their children? No, it probably would have very little impact on them. So I don't think most Americans saw it as being as important as World War I had certainly been, and so they didn't pay that much attention to it. But Americans were forced to pay attention to a communist scare closer to home. In 1950, the fear that communists were somehow undermining America from within began to gain ground. When Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, it made it much easier for an obscure senator from Wisconsin to make some frightening allegations. Strike the word leftist, make that communist. Joseph Macarthur claimed... that communists had infiltrated the highest levels of government. Again, we have a known associate, and collaborator with communists and pro-communists, a man high in the State Department... Well, it was a very uneasy time. Macarthur on the rise... claiming that there were spies everywhere, communists everywhere. And, of course, it turns out there were spies everywhere. They were stealing atomic secrets. There was fear, there was uncertainty, insecurity. Images of communists as evil and threatening were everywhere. The most successful popular writer of that era, and, I mean, astonishingly popular, was a writer named Mike Spillane, and he had started out with sort of traditional, police detective, short, punchy, Hemingway-esque sentences, tough guys. The bullets made little purries when he went in and turned into commas as the blood welled out. I looked at her. She was taking off her clothes. Oh, Mike, I really want you. She walked toward me, her hips waving a happy hello. And with the coming of the Red Scare, he switched it over to knocking out commie heels. I looked at him and I could tell he was a rotten commie eel. Whatever the public wants, you're playing up their appetite. But what you try to do is establish that appetite for it, and then you supply it. He hit the virus. He took that virus and put it right into his books, which was a very good litmus paper of how much it worked and how nervous the country was. Nowhere was the fear more damaging than in Hollywood. We went to the movies all the time, everybody did. And we got a lot of what we felt about our country and about right and wrong. Being a good American or being honest or courageous from the movies. With so much publicity about America's dream factory coming under the influence of communist agents, the House Committee on Un-American Activities had a target. Are you a member of the Communist Party? Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? It's unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee the basic principles of Americanism. That's not the question. That's not the question. The question is, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? I'm framing my answer in the only way in which... Stand away from the stand....for Americanism for many years... Stand away from the stand. Hundreds of witnesses were called to testify on communist influence in Hollywood. They were asked not only to account for their own political activities, but to inform on their friends. It was scary. It was very, very scary. I was 19, and I took the fifth in front of the committee. Being an informer and placing your fellow actor... A fellow friend, fellow director in jeopardy, meant that that family didn't work anymore. So that taking that step was about the worst thing that you could do to anybody. The studios kept lists of so-called political undesirables and refused to hire them. They had the blacklist, the graylist, the if list, the maybe list, the they-know-who list. I mean, it was unbelievable. At the height of the Red Scare, a rumor on the street... or a mention in the gossip columns could close down a career. Lives were ruined. People were driven to suicide. People were driven out of the country. I think the results in this town were really devastating. Len Grant won an Oscar. nomination in 1951 but then after speaking out at a funeral of a friend who she said had been hounded she was blacklisted I mean I remember you know like the floor just rushing out from under me in my heart going down sick that's it that's it ms. grant didn't work in Hollywood again for 14 years army veteran Carl Reiner was working on Broadway Somebody actually came to my house, an FBI guy, and said, do you know if there are any communists in show business? And I said, oh, there must be. There must be lots of them, because they're all over the place. Do you know who the guy is? No. I said, you guys, the FBI, you'll find them. You know, I don't know. They're not going to tell me. I mean, I was being funny, but I was also scared shitless. I am not a communist and never have been a communist. Between 1947 and 1952, the loyalty of three million Americans was investigated by the FBI. I am not and never have been a communist. People from all walks of life are called before congressional committees. Baseball heroes, union leaders, school teachers, diplomats. I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party. In an atmosphere of suspicion... the Cold War set Americans against Americans. On the battlefront, it was frustrating and confusing because it asked the military not to defeat the enemy but to contain him. The concept of total victory was now overshadowed by the specter of nuclear annihilation. For Americans so accustomed to the clarity of goals in World War I, this kind of war was rather baffling. By 1951, the war in Korea had become a bloody stalemate. The commander of the UN forces, the imperious World War I hero General Douglas MacArthur, virtually killed his own son. ...demanded a free hand to go after the Chinese. MacArthur's supposed to have wanted to have used 50 atomic bombs against Korea, North Korea, and China, and to have laid down a permanent radioactive belt along the Yalu River. But President Truman... Truman would not use the bomb again, and after MacArthur criticized the president and lobbied on to expand the war into China, Truman terminated the general's command and fired him for insubordination. On April the 20th, 1951, MacArthur addressed a joint session of Congress. I now close my military career and just fade away. An old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye. MacArthur's credo of total victory had been rendered obsolete by the new technology of mutual terror. Total victory now might mean total annihilation. In November of 1952, America tested the hydrogen bomb, 1,000 times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. To develop the hydrogen bomb, scientists created a new and highly advanced calculator. They named it the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer. They called it by its acronym, MANIA. There was a World War I hero at the top of the Republican ticket in 1952. Not MacArthur, but Dwight David Eisenhower. I accept your summons. Crusade. Eisenhower, who had led the Allied invasion of Europe, promised to bring peace to Korea and to quiet the shouting at home. Ike for president, Ike for president, Ike for president, Ike for president. You like Ike, I like Ike, everybody likes Ike. General Eisenhower was the first presidential candidate to use television advertising. By 1952, Television was becoming an enormous part of our political lives. I own a 1950 Oldsmobile car. Vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon was the first to use television in another way. He wanted to deny charges that he'd taken improper political gifts. The only gift he'd accepted with the story was a dog named Checkers. You know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog. And I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're going to keep it. Richard Nixon kept his place on the Republican ticket, and a lot of people thought television made the difference. Television was also becoming a major force in American social life. It's supposed to be tight! One of the countries... Country's favorite shows was this one, Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Koka. It was a family event, and a hush came over the house when Your Show of Shows came on. Everybody gathered around the set. It lightened our lives. A marvelous diversion. The Caesar Hours were created by a group of unknown writers. Woody Allen, Men Brooks, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner. We knew we were doing something special. We all knew it. We all knew it. Television was the buzz in the streets. It seemed that everybody was watching television. My secretary came in and said, Mr. Caesar, Dr. Einstein wants to talk to you. I was so shocked I almost dropped the phone. Einstein wants to talk to me? Einstein loved your show of shows, but it was hard to me imagine. I mean, I thought he was busy on the blackboard all day, never had time to watch television. I'm going to talk to Einstein, what am I going to say to him? You know, when you made that trick, I don't think it was EMC squared. It was EM squared to the omni-18 power, not from the omni-shear. When that pressure escapes, it thrusts the object forward. The man whose name was synonymous with brain power had become just another television viewer. As the century moved into its second half, television's influence over our lives would become more profound than even a genius could have imagined. America seemed to live in television land during much of the 1950s, but there were real locations in the headlines, Little Rock and Korea. We'll look at the 50s on the next episode of The Century, America's Time. Thank you for joining us. I'm Peter Jennings.

Just a wonderful day to have not only the president of the United States, in town but Einstein Churchill the Lion of England and so everybody was excited it was you know the atmosphere we charge it really was but Churchill wasn't there to celebrate he had come to sound an alarm from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent Behind that curtain, after the war, the countries of Eastern Europe had been trapped under Soviet domination. I remember even feeling kind of indignant that the Russians weren't playing fair, weren't being nice. Churchill told America there was still a tyrant left in Europe, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Joseph Stalin was a real son of a bitch. There was a real brutality.

When Stalin heard about Churchill's speech, he called it an act of war. It was presented as the imminent attack over America. on Russia. The United States and the Soviet Union had been allies in World War I. Now they would turn against each other.

The Cold War would last for more than 40 years. Time magazine publisher Henry Luce had predicted that an American century would follow the end of World War I. And by 1946, the world was beginning to witness it. While the map of devastated Europe was redrawn at conferences, in Yalta and Potsdam, across the Atlantic, America had emerged from the conflict stronger and more prosperous than ever before.

And yet America would be called on again. And in that sense, Churchill's speech was both a warning and an exhortation. If the free world needed a protector from the evils of Stalin, it would have to be the United States of America. In the fall of 1945, the Second World War, history's greatest armed conflict was over. America's sons and husbands and fathers were coming home.

I flew the Burbank and my wife met me. That was great. She was beautiful as usual and... She had, she normally doesn't wear a lot of makeup, but she had makeup on. It was running down her face.

Oh, it was the most thrilling, exciting time of your whole life. There's nothing compares to coming home to your loved ones. It was heaven, that was heaven.

I was just a kid, I was just barely 20 I guess when I got out of service. There was that whole strangeness of having been so fully committed to the war, to danger, to whatever it was you were doing, and suddenly a kind of decompression chamber which was filled with uncertainty. Returning veterans had reasons to worry about what peace would bring.

Factories that had worked around the clock during the war now had few jobs to offer. All the G.I.s were coming home. There were no jobs. And I found a job for a dollar an hour, refinishing damaged refrigerators from freight yards.

Dirty, lousy job. but I took it. Even before the war ended, the government realized that the transition to civilian life would be difficult. In 1944, Congress passed the GI Bill of Rights. It guaranteed vets low-cost mortgages and higher education.

Think of what that would mean. Fantastic. People would go to medical school, dental school, do anything they wanted, paid for by the government.

It paid me to study the history of English poetry at Harvard, of all things, just the way it paid somebody else to study a very practical and utilitarian subject in South Dakota. It was absolutely democratic and indiscriminate in the highest sense. Peter would, after a brief lull, be swept into an American economy rich in unprecedented productivity and opportunity. We were the arsenal of democracy. All you had to do was throw a switch and go from producing tanks and airplanes and jeeps to cars and refrigerators.

By 47, 48, the economy was zooming. The driving force behind the booming economy was the American consumer. There hadn't been much to buy during the war.

Americans had built up their savings and now they were ready to spend. We had gathered this phenomenal strength that we didn't know we had, and we were living twice as well. Everybody was.

Wages, productivity, everything had just increased in a way that no one had ever experienced. The newly vibrant economy and the need for veterans'housing would inspire one entrepreneur to transform thousands of... acres of New York potato fields into a new kind of American community. We believe that every family in the United States is entitled to decent shelter. Navy veteran Bill Levin imagined thousands of homes here.

and he devised a way to build them fast. Levin's genius is that he understands that you bring the assembly line to the location, that you flatten the potato field, you mark it off, and in come the teams, slab men, tile men, window men, painting guys. They could do, I think, 18 houses in the morning, 18 in the afternoon, 180 a week, and $8,000. You could buy a great house.

It was an amazing thing. And for the first time, you had this whole society moving into the middle class. The Levin approach spread across the country, making life in the suburbs affordable for millions. We got our first house, very small, 700 square foot, but we were thrilled with it. Two bedroom, one bath home.

Good night. It was wonderful. My recollection of those years is sunshine.

Flowers and blue water and mountains and a place where you could do almost anything you wanted no matter what. I think we were in the middle of the endless promise. It was quite wonderful.

We started our family in 1950 and it was just a time when we were young and everything was before us. This sense of limitless optimism led to the most dramatic demographic change in American history, the baby boom. Between 1946 and 1952, American families added 25 million children to the population. It was a great, great era for white males, but for women I think there was really a very narrow conception of what women were made for. They were turned into breeders.

Women had it tougher, gave up their careers for their husbands in order to stay home and have babies. I was raising kids and I was married to a Marxist and I was married to a fascist and neither one of them ever took out the garbage. So that it was a step back for women, I guess you'd have to say, and it wasn't much of a step forward for blacks either.

Nearly a million black Americans had fought for their country in World War I. They returned home to an America that continued to discriminate against them. They had been to Europe where they were regarded as heroes. So to come back to the South... Still having to go to the back of the bus, not being able to sit downstairs in a movie theater, it was an ironic kind of return to a country for which we had risked our lives. President Truman was so angry about the treatment of black veterans that he demanded change.

He sent a civil rights message to Congress, which was the first civil rights message ever sent to Congress by any president. And he'd made the decision, made the decision to order the desegregation of the armed forces and of the federal government. Very important.

Something else very important. America's national sport was changed in the late 1940s. In 1947, Jackieie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, the first black man to play in Major League Baseball. Huge moment and particularly because baseball, baseball really mattered then. When we saw a black ball play, the only one step out onto the field, our hearts were with him because we wanted him to succeed.

They'd call him all kinds of names, the nigger and that stuff, trying to rattle him, but Jackieie kept us cool. At the end of his rookie year, Jackieie Robinson, in one national poll, was voted the second most popular man in America. Behind only Bing Crosby.

We're talking about the American dream. Best years of our lives. We want American democracy to work, and here he comes, and he's a very intelligent, proud person, and he does brilliantly.

So in America, the years right after the war were a time of broken boundaries and seemingly limitless possibilities. I think the period from 1946 to the early 50s was the greatest time ever. It was like this country was being reborn in many ways. So many new developments were coming along. We felt pretty good about the good old USA.

And although there were things happening all over the world that were threatening, we were, after all, number one. Churchill said that after the war that the United States commands the world, bestrides the world, I think he said, and I think we felt that. I was so proud and being an American was the best thing in the world and boy nobody could get us.

We could always look the bad guys. That kind of faith, that kind of belief, that kind of security was so special. In much of the world, America was special and essential to the future of those countries devastated by war.

Europe had waged suicidal war upon itself. There was England, and it was a victor, but it was exhausted. France was a victor, but it was humiliated. The Soviet Union was a victor, but it had lost 20 million people. The magnitude of Soviet losses would leave that nation determined never to be so vulnerable again.

For ordinary people it was tremendous tragedy because in every Russian family there was somebody killed at the front. Officers and soldiers returned to burned-out villages. People began to dug up inside the earth little holes like foxholes and the whole family sometimes of six lived in this earth house.

In the two aggressor nations which had begun the war, the future looked extremely uncertain. Germany was defeated and it was going to be cut right in half. And Japan had been just, as in Churchill's phrase, ground powder.

And in that, we'd been brought kicking and screaming to the zenith of our power. With troops now stationed in 20 countries around the world, America's historic isolationism was over. 400,000 GIs were sent to occupy Japan. They were under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, one of the architects of the Japanese defeat.

The Japanese were allowed to keep their emperor, Hirohito, but absolute imperial rule was over. The United States wrote a new Japanese constitution. In Japan, America was the sole occupying force. In Europe, it was America and the Soviet Union. And this ideological struggle between them would be played out on a continent beset by chaos.

I made my way eventually through Mannheim where I was born. And as I made my way through Germany I realized the total destruction that had taken place in that country. Displaced persons walking all over from the east to the west, from the west to the east.

Large cities bombed out, ruins. In the homeland of the once powerful and terrifying Third Reich, people now battled one another on the streets for bread. There was absolutely nothing to eat, so they rummaged in garbage cans. If I think of my father rummaging in garbage cans, it's terrible.

People without jobs, people without homes, children without parents, it was a nightmare. It was hideous. And one of the coldest winters on record came down on Europe.

There are a lot of children who didn't have any Christmas. We had a big Christmas party for him. I played Santa Claus.

I remember bringing those little kids up and sitting with them on my lap and the happy faces and the smiles. Very rewarding. The only real force was the Allied military government. That was the power. The country had come to a standstill.

It was... Total anarchy in this country. And throughout Western Europe, deprivation and devastation were causing political turmoil.

In America, there was concern that this chaos would somehow encourage Western Europeans to turn to the Communists. It seemed as though in a way they had a lot of the cards. Wherever there was misery and poverty, where could people turn but to Communism?

Subtitles by the Amara.org community Capitalism, don't forget, hadn't looked too good in the 30s. A lot of people had thought it was played out. There was a sense that Italy might topple the next election, even France. There was a definite momentum, it seemed to me, in favor of the Red Menace. The political leadership in the United States, for its part, saw the wisdom in getting Europe back on its feet.

In an act of unprecedented generosity, America sent $13 billion in aid. The United States is the only country in the world today which has the economic power. Productivity, to phrase the needed decisions. The Marshall Plan, named after the Secretary of State, seemed the perfect merger of American ideals and good politics. America was a strong, generous country.

It is fashionable to make fun of it, but it really was true. And we were rich, and we were confident, and we were sympathetic to the devastation of Europe and what we could do. The Russians were very, very harsh. Where we were sending in stuff to Western Europe, they were stripping down Eastern Europe and mailing and railroading everything back east.

As the Soviets tightened their hold on the captive nations of Eastern Europe, those who could escape did. Alice Sylvester and her family had survived the Nazi death camps and made their way home to Czechoslovakia. There was a Russian doctor and he said, my child, I love my country. But the Russians are going to overtake here.

So my advice to you is go, run. So my mother and I, during the night, went to the railroad station. And we got on a train, and we got out.

And the next morning, they closed the borders, so the people that stayed couldn't get out. Churchill had been right. Those people now trapped behind the Iron Curtain would be subject to Soviet exploitation and repression for the next four decades.

Berlin had lived through a nightmare and at the end of World War I the landscape reflected it. The fighting here had been particularly vicious. On the eastern front, the Germans had fought to the bitter end. The Soviet army had suffered half a million casualties before the German capital fell.

The Russian soldiers, they were intoxicated by blood, by cruelty, and it was with the memories of what Germans did to their mothers and sisters and daughters, they wanted to do the same. There was huge loot, burning down of houses, rape. Soviet troops raped thousands of women. My mother was raped, gang raped, by the Russians and my friend, she was raped.

He father was still alive. They put him in a corner and said you stand there and you count the rapes on your daughter. So all the 32 Russians raped her and The father had to count out loud, one, two, and so forth.

That's why I know it was 32. The Russians were very brutal. The Germans, they sure hated the Russians though, and they had a reason. The Russians behaved themselves miserably here. Several months later the Western Allies arrived. One of the first US missions into post-war Berlin was flown by Jackie Olin Bennett.

So we landed? And then the Russians started to lob shells over my head, shooting the windows out of the airport with artillery shells. Why the hell are the Russians shooting the windows out of this magnificent airport? Then I thought, this is going to be the American sector, and they don't want to leave the Americans anything.

Located deep inside what was now Soviet-controlled East Germany, Berlin would be divided into Soviet, American, British, and French sectors. Stalin resented this democratic outpost in Eastern Europe. This was intended as his buffer zone against any future attack from the West.

Stalin presented his image of the countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. These countries want to subjugate Russia with its immense mineral wealth. They are natural enemies of the socialist and communist state. The first face-to-face confrontation of the Cold War was in Berlin.

Stalin was determined that the Western Allies should leave, and in June of 1948, he cut all the supply lines into the Allied sectors. It was very tense, and we knew that it got tenser and tenser. West Berliners had enough food to last a few weeks, enough fuel to last only days. Truman said, In meetings in the Oval Office, and he meant it, we stay in Berlin.

You live with the expectation, I did, that we would be going to war with Russia. The United States were painted and depicted by official propaganda as the greatest enemy ready at any hour to drop atomic bomb on Russia. to a Third World War.

There were some who were arguing we should leave. It isn't worth it. Get out. Why start a Third World War over this city?

Others were saying we should send an armored division through and break through by force. President Truman chose another option. He would supply the beleaguered city by air. It was a gamble.

American and British pilots who had once dropped bombs on this city would deliver supplies to Berlin hour after hour, day after day. We were so busy during the airlift. I was flying 128 hours a month.

That's a lot of flying. And we were keeping people alive. They flew in food and fuel and medicine.

They were the lifeline for two and a half million Berliners. After 11 months, Stalin conceded. Without saying a word, he ended the blockade in May of 1949. Three months later, Stalin would shock the West again. We knew the Soviets had the atomic bomb in 1949. It then became once again a different world. Now we could be a target of an atomic attack and did not trust the Russians.

And I do remember this, that you always lived, you lived day to day with the thought that there could be a nuclear attack on us at any time. In only three years, Americans had gone from buying their first homes to building their first bomb shelters. I physically dug out an area underneath that house, right at six foot deep, so that the family could at least go there and be below ground level.

The United States would suffer another shock when, on October 1, 1949, they learned that Mao Zedong's communists had defeated the American-backed nationalist forces in China. The Communists under Mao touched something very deep in the peasantry. They fought a brilliant fight. You have the Russians getting the atomic weapon.

China has fallen. There's no doubt that there was a sense in many quarters That we were in a titanic struggle. The struggle erupted on June 25, 1950, when North Korea, supported by both the Soviet Union and China, attacked the South.

An American-led army under the auspices of the newly formed United Nations was rushed in to resist them. The nations have now made it clear that lawless aggression will be met with force. So once again, a wartime draft interrupted American lives. Men were torn from their families and sent to the other side of the world.

World War I vet Len Maffioli had been enjoying the Sun Bay, California good life. By November of 1950, he was fighting North Korean and Communist Chinese soldiers at Korea's Chosin Reservoir. The Chinese were all over us. We just mowed them down. And it was just hard to believe that they would just keep coming like that.

and we had an awful lot of dead and dying. It dropped between 20 and 40 degrees below zero at times. It got so cold, the tank treads froze to the ground. I don't think anyone bled to death. The blood froze as soon as it hit the surface.

We strictly weren't prepared for that bitter a winter. Hee we were just out of a war about five years, and we're starting over again in another one. Flew all my marine missions in support of the troops, close air support along the front lines, napalm, close support with bombs, rockets. In three years time we lost 53,000 Americans out there.

Called a police action, of course, but it was for those involved. It was a bloody, bloody war. The fighting in the Korean War was as ferocious as any seen in World War I. But when the veterans came home, the reception they got was quite different.

In Korea, you went for 12 or 13 months. And at the end of your tour, you were sent home. There were no bands to meet him, no parades or anything like this.

The way the American people treated the Korean War and the returning veterans, I think it could be termed the Forgotten War. I think most Americans did not see the Korean War as a personal threat to themselves and their families. Would it affect the person in the Midwest someplace in their home and their children? No, it probably would have very little impact on them. So I don't think most Americans saw it as being as important as World War I had certainly been, and so they didn't pay that much attention to it.

But Americans were forced to pay attention to a communist scare closer to home. In 1950, the fear that communists were somehow undermining America from within began to gain ground. When Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, it made it much easier for an obscure senator from Wisconsin to make some frightening allegations.

Strike the word leftist, make that communist. Joseph Macarthur claimed... that communists had infiltrated the highest levels of government. Again, we have a known associate, and collaborator with communists and pro-communists, a man high in the State Department... Well, it was a very uneasy time.

Macarthur on the rise... claiming that there were spies everywhere, communists everywhere. And, of course, it turns out there were spies everywhere. They were stealing atomic secrets. There was fear, there was uncertainty, insecurity.

Images of communists as evil and threatening were everywhere. The most successful popular writer of that era, and, I mean, astonishingly popular, was a writer named Mike Spillane, and he had started out with sort of traditional, police detective, short, punchy, Hemingway-esque sentences, tough guys. The bullets made little purries when he went in and turned into commas as the blood welled out.

I looked at her. She was taking off her clothes. Oh, Mike, I really want you.

She walked toward me, her hips waving a happy hello. And with the coming of the Red Scare, he switched it over to knocking out commie heels. I looked at him and I could tell he was a rotten commie eel. Whatever the public wants, you're playing up their appetite. But what you try to do is establish that appetite for it, and then you supply it.

He hit the virus. He took that virus and put it right into his books, which was a very good litmus paper of how much it worked and how nervous the country was. Nowhere was the fear more damaging than in Hollywood. We went to the movies all the time, everybody did.

And we got a lot of what we felt about our country and about right and wrong. Being a good American or being honest or courageous from the movies. With so much publicity about America's dream factory coming under the influence of communist agents, the House Committee on Un-American Activities had a target. Are you a member of the Communist Party?

Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? It's unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee the basic principles of Americanism. That's not the question. That's not the question.

The question is, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? I'm framing my answer in the only way in which... Stand away from the stand....for Americanism for many years... Stand away from the stand. Hundreds of witnesses were called to testify on communist influence in Hollywood.

They were asked not only to account for their own political activities, but to inform on their friends. It was scary. It was very, very scary. I was 19, and I took the fifth in front of the committee. Being an informer and placing your fellow actor...

A fellow friend, fellow director in jeopardy, meant that that family didn't work anymore. So that taking that step was about the worst thing that you could do to anybody. The studios kept lists of so-called political undesirables and refused to hire them.

They had the blacklist, the graylist, the if list, the maybe list, the they-know-who list. I mean, it was unbelievable. At the height of the Red Scare, a rumor on the street...

or a mention in the gossip columns could close down a career. Lives were ruined. People were driven to suicide. People were driven out of the country. I think the results in this town were really devastating.

Len Grant won an Oscar. nomination in 1951 but then after speaking out at a funeral of a friend who she said had been hounded she was blacklisted I mean I remember you know like the floor just rushing out from under me in my heart going down sick that's it that's it ms. grant didn't work in Hollywood again for 14 years army veteran Carl Reiner was working on Broadway Somebody actually came to my house, an FBI guy, and said, do you know if there are any communists in show business? And I said, oh, there must be. There must be lots of them, because they're all over the place. Do you know who the guy is?

No. I said, you guys, the FBI, you'll find them. You know, I don't know. They're not going to tell me. I mean, I was being funny, but I was also scared shitless.

I am not a communist and never have been a communist. Between 1947 and 1952, the loyalty of three million Americans was investigated by the FBI. I am not and never have been a communist. People from all walks of life are called before congressional committees. Baseball heroes, union leaders, school teachers, diplomats.

I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party. In an atmosphere of suspicion... the Cold War set Americans against Americans. On the battlefront, it was frustrating and confusing because it asked the military not to defeat the enemy but to contain him. The concept of total victory was now overshadowed by the specter of nuclear annihilation.

For Americans so accustomed to the clarity of goals in World War I, this kind of war was rather baffling. By 1951, the war in Korea had become a bloody stalemate. The commander of the UN forces, the imperious World War I hero General Douglas MacArthur, virtually killed his own son.

...demanded a free hand to go after the Chinese. MacArthur's supposed to have wanted to have used 50 atomic bombs against Korea, North Korea, and China, and to have laid down a permanent radioactive belt along the Yalu River. But President Truman... Truman would not use the bomb again, and after MacArthur criticized the president and lobbied on to expand the war into China, Truman terminated the general's command and fired him for insubordination.

On April the 20th, 1951, MacArthur addressed a joint session of Congress. I now close my military career and just fade away. An old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye. MacArthur's credo of total victory had been rendered obsolete by the new technology of mutual terror.

Total victory now might mean total annihilation. In November of 1952, America tested the hydrogen bomb, 1,000 times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. To develop the hydrogen bomb, scientists created a new and highly advanced calculator.

They named it the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer. They called it by its acronym, MANIA. There was a World War I hero at the top of the Republican ticket in 1952. Not MacArthur, but Dwight David Eisenhower. I accept your summons. Crusade.

Eisenhower, who had led the Allied invasion of Europe, promised to bring peace to Korea and to quiet the shouting at home. Ike for president, Ike for president, Ike for president, Ike for president. You like Ike, I like Ike, everybody likes Ike.

General Eisenhower was the first presidential candidate to use television advertising. By 1952, Television was becoming an enormous part of our political lives. I own a 1950 Oldsmobile car.

Vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon was the first to use television in another way. He wanted to deny charges that he'd taken improper political gifts. The only gift he'd accepted with the story was a dog named Checkers. You know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog.

And I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're going to keep it. Richard Nixon kept his place on the Republican ticket, and a lot of people thought television made the difference. Television was also becoming a major force in American social life. It's supposed to be tight!

One of the countries... Country's favorite shows was this one, Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Koka. It was a family event, and a hush came over the house when Your Show of Shows came on.

Everybody gathered around the set. It lightened our lives. A marvelous diversion.

The Caesar Hours were created by a group of unknown writers. Woody Allen, Men Brooks, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner. We knew we were doing something special. We all knew it. We all knew it.

Television was the buzz in the streets. It seemed that everybody was watching television. My secretary came in and said, Mr. Caesar, Dr. Einstein wants to talk to you.

I was so shocked I almost dropped the phone. Einstein wants to talk to me? Einstein loved your show of shows, but it was hard to me imagine.

I mean, I thought he was busy on the blackboard all day, never had time to watch television. I'm going to talk to Einstein, what am I going to say to him? You know, when you made that trick, I don't think it was EMC squared. It was EM squared to the omni-18 power, not from the omni-shear.

When that pressure escapes, it thrusts the object forward. The man whose name was synonymous with brain power had become just another television viewer. As the century moved into its second half, television's influence over our lives would become more profound than even a genius could have imagined. America seemed to live in television land during much of the 1950s, but there were real locations in the headlines, Little Rock and Korea.

We'll look at the 50s on the next episode of The Century, America's Time. Thank you for joining us. I'm Peter Jennings.

Transcript for:The Impactful Decade Following WWII

Transcript for:
The Impactful Decade Following WWII