{"id":125,"date":"2015-03-18T18:55:12","date_gmt":"2015-03-18T18:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/?p=125"},"modified":"2017-03-23T15:57:50","modified_gmt":"2017-03-23T15:57:50","slug":"origins-of-the-cold-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/2015\/03\/18\/origins-of-the-cold-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Origins of the Cold War"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/files\/2015\/03\/Potsdam.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-457 size-medium\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/files\/2015\/03\/Potsdam-240x300.jpg\" alt=\"Potsdam\" width=\"240\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a>Winston Churchill&#8217;s &#8220;Iron Curtain&#8221; speech at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946 surely\u00a0&#8220;evoked divergent reactions in America,&#8221; as H.W. Brands claims in <em>American Dreams\u00a0<\/em>(p. 32), but there can be little doubt that it struck a particular chord among key policymakers in the Truman administration, most notably with the new president himself. \u00a0Students should listen to the opening of the famous speech and try to explain why Harry Truman (on stage, far left) found it so persuasive, remembering that less than just a year earlier, Churchill, Truman and Stalin had been together at the Potsdam conference, happily shaking hands as victorious allies.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/lMt7zCaVOWU\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Churchill&#8217;s stern 1946 warning about the Soviets highlighted a growing\u00a0tension\u00a0in superpower relations, a period that\u00a0columnist Walter Lippmann described memorably as\u00a0&#8220;The Cold War.&#8221; \u00a0The US policy toward the Soviet Union which subsequently defined this Cold War period has come to be known as <strong>containment.<\/strong>\u00a0 State Department official George Kennan helped develop this\u00a0containment doctrine, principally through\u00a0two powerful documents, the so-called <a href=\"http:\/\/www2.gwu.edu\/~nsarchiv\/coldwar\/documents\/episode-1\/kennan.htm\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Long Telegram,&#8221;<\/a> and an anonymous article for the journal <em>Foreign Affairs, <\/em>titled, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foreignaffairs.com\/articles\/23331\/x\/the-sources-of-soviet-conduct\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Sources\u00a0of Soviet Conduct.&#8221;<\/a> \u00a0Here is an excerpt from the now-famous 1947 article:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>These considerations make Soviet diplomacy at once easier and more difficult to deal with than the diplomacy of individual aggressive leaders like Napoleon and Hitler. On the one hand it is more sensitive to contrary force, more ready to yield on individual sectors of the diplomatic front when that force is felt to be too strong, and thus more rational in the logic and rhetoric of power. On the other hand it cannot be easily defeated or discouraged by a single victory on the part of its opponents&#8230;.In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Students should be able to explain the significance of this passage and to articulate\u00a0how key\u00a0developments\u00a0such as the Truman Doctrine (1947), Marshall Plan (1947) and Berlin Airlift (1948) help illustrate the initial\u00a0application of containment principles. \u00a0They should also be able to describe the views of early critics of US policy. \u00a0It&#8217;s important to understand why \u00a0figures\u00a0such as Senator Robert Taft, a leading conservative, or Henry Wallace, a prominent progressive, questioned the rush toward Cold War. \u00a0Some students might also find it helpful to view some of the placemarks in the map below (under the layer from Early Cold War, 1945-62), from the US Diplomatic History course here at Dickinson:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/maps\/d\/embed?mid=zS0NgIMIUm5g.k0amRpn1viLM\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/files\/2015\/03\/Dewey-Defeats-Truman.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-444\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/files\/2015\/03\/Dewey-Defeats-Truman-294x300.jpg\" alt=\"Dewey Defeats Truman\" width=\"294\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a>When Harry Truman became president in 1945 following the death of Franklin Roosevelt, he had seemed ill-prepared for the job. \u00a0Yet according to H.W. Brands, &#8220;Truman grew into the presidency, far more quickly than most people, including himself, had considered possible&#8221; (p. 25). \u00a0That growth helps explain why Truman prevailed in the 1948 election. \u00a0He ran an aggressive campaign, calling a Republican-controlled Congress into special session, mobilizing core constituency groups within the New Deal coalition, and then conducting the last great &#8220;whistle-stop&#8221; campaign tour in American political history. \u00a0Yet perhaps more important than anything else in this complicated four-way race, Truman managed by the fall of 1948 to appear to a majority of Americans as a safe choice for a commander-in-chief. \u00a0It was a peacetime election, but the public\u00a0was still in so many ways holding onto a wartime mentality. \u00a0Arguably, nothing else better explains\u00a0Truman&#8217;s success. \u00a0At least to a majority of American voters, he appeared to be the right leader for a dangerous and fast-evolving\u00a0Cold War era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Winston Churchill&#8217;s &#8220;Iron Curtain&#8221; speech at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946 surely\u00a0&#8220;evoked divergent reactions in America,&#8221; as H.W. Brands claims in American Dreams\u00a0(p. 32), but there can be little doubt that it struck a particular chord among key policymakers in the Truman administration, most notably with the new president himself. \u00a0Students should listen to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":373,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[13155,20068],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1940s","category-cold-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-118pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}