AP U.S. History 8.15: Continuity and Change in Period 8

National identity is how a people understands who they are as a nation: what they stand for, and what their country is for. After 1945 the United States answered an uncertain world by taking the lead, and that leadership became part of how Americans saw themselves.

On March 12, 1947, President Harry Truman told Congress that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Policymakers fought a cold war with the Soviet Union to limit communism's military power and influence, build a free-market world economy and an international security system. In 1961 Kennedy pledged to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe" for liberty.

Leadership also brought argument at home, about the power of the federal government and how to pursue its goals while protecting civil liberties. The Red Scare was one such debate; Vietnam was another. In 1964 Congress gave the president broad power to widen the war, and in January 1971 it repealed that resolution to limit President Nixon's power to continue it.

Sources: Truman Doctrine; Kennedy's inaugural; Tonkin Gulf Resolution (all National Archives).

Civil rights activists and political leaders sought to fulfill the promises of Reconstruction, and they won real legal and political victories. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education that the separate but equal doctrine "has no place in the field of public education." The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 followed.

Progress toward racial equality was slow. The Voting Rights Act was signed 95 years after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, and a decade after Brown most Black children in the South still attended segregated schools. Yet once the act passed, change came fast: by the end of 1966 only four of 13 southern states had fewer than half of their African American citizens registered to vote.

Responding to social conditions and to the African American movement, other movements organized, which the course framework lists: feminists and LGBTQ+ activists, and Latino, American Indian and Asian American movements that continued older struggles. An environmental movement grew out of pollution and accidents. In 1971 the Twenty-sixth Amendment gave the vote to citizens eighteen years of age or older, pressed partly because young men could be drafted for Vietnam before they could vote.

Sources: Brown v. Board of Education; Voting Rights Act; Amendment XXVI (all National Archives).

Liberalism shaped postwar politics and court decisions. Its high point was Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. In 1965 he said: "In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty."

Then it came under attack from two sides. From the left, critics said liberal leaders did too little to change racial and economic inequality and waged an immoral war in Vietnam. From the right, a resurgent conservative movement, first seen nationally in Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, challenged liberal laws and court decisions and sought to limit the federal government.

Events in the 1970s shook trust further. In 1973 an Arab oil embargo brought gas shortages, and years of rising prices and unemployment followed. On August 9, 1974, President Nixon resigned in the Watergate scandal. Nixon had already said in 1969, while promising to keep pressing forward at home: "But we are approaching the limits of what government alone can do." In 1977 Jimmy Carter said Americans had learned that "even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems."

Sources: Johnson, 1965, Nixon, 1969 and Carter, 1977 (Avalon Project); Watergate and the Constitution (National Archives).

Rapid economic and social change made many Americans optimistic after the war. Federal spending, the baby boom and new technology drove growth, and Nixon could say in 1969: "We have shared our wealth more broadly than ever." The baby boom, the move to the suburbs and the Sun Belt, and after 1965 new immigrants from around the world also changed who Americans were and where they lived.

But new social developments, together with Cold War fears, changed American culture and set off political and moral debates that sharply divided the nation: over civil rights, the war, the counterculture, and what the country should value. Nixon described both sides in one sentence: "We have found ourselves rich in goods, but ragged in spirit; reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth."

A complex argument does not stop at one side. It can corroborate a claim with more evidence, qualify it by showing where it holds and where it does not, or modify it by changing the claim to fit evidence that challenges it.

Source: Nixon's first inaugural address (Avalon Project).