Cultural Literacy 1

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The first woman to become secretary of state. The daughter of a Czech diplomat, she was born in Czechoslovakia but fled to England with her family when the Nazis invaded in 1939. (Three of her grandparents, all Jews, died in Nazi concentration camps.) She returned to Czechoslovakia with her family after the war but fled again when the communists took power. Coming to America, she held various government posts and taught international relations before her appointment as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1993. President Bill Clinton appointed her to head the State Department in 1997.

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Madeleine Albright

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An explorer of the twentieth century; he was navigator on the first flight over the North Pole. He also made one of the first flights over the South Pole and went on several extended expeditions to Antarctica.

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Richard E. Byrd

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Chief of Oregon’s Nez Perce Indians who led his people in the 1870s on a desperate attempt to reach Canada rather than submit to forcible settlement on a reservation. Forced to surrender to U.S. troops just south of the border, he reportedly stated: “Hear me my chiefs, I am tired: My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more.”

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Chief Joseph

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A federal law that authorized federal action against segregation in public accommodations, public facilities, and employment. The law was passed during a period of great strength for the civil rights movement, and President Lyndon Johnson persuaded many reluctant members of Congress to support the law.

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Civil Rights Act of 1964

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A political leader of the early twentieth century. A Republican, he rose to prominence as governor of Massachusetts when he broke a strike by policemen in Boston, saying, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” He was elected vice president under Warren Harding and became president in 1923 when Harding died. In 1924, he was elected on his own, but he declined to seek reelection in 1928; Herbert Hoover succeeded him in 1929. __________ worked to restrain the growth of government and especially to keep it from interfering with private enterprise; he once declared that “the business of America is business.”

‡ ________ was renowned for using few words; he announced his retirement from the presidency in one sentence: “I do not choose to run for president in 1928.”

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Calvin Coolidge

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A mayor of Chicago in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. One of the last and toughest of the big-city political “bosses,” he ran a powerful political machine, repeatedly and easily gaining reelection. He was also given much of the credit for the victory of John F. Kennedy in the close presidential election of 1960; Kennedy won by only a few thousand votes in Illinois. In 1968, when demonstrators against involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War threatened to disrupt the Democratic national convention, meeting in Chicago, the Chicago police, with _______’s approval, responded with violence. An official investigation later described the response as a “police riot.” ______ died in 1976.

‡ _________’s organization also gave Chicago’s government a reputation for quick responses to problems; Chicago was called a “city that works.”

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Richard Daley

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A federal law intended to turn Native Americans into farmers and landowners by providing cooperating families with 160 acres of reservation land for farming or 320 acres for grazing. In the eyes of supporters, this law would “civilize” the Indians by weaning them from their nomadic life, by treating them as individuals rather than as members of their tribes, and by readying them for citizenship. Although generally well intentioned, the law undermined Indian culture, in part by restricting their hunting rights on former reservation lands. Much of the best reservation land eventually passed into the hands of whites.

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Dawes Act of 1887

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Nickname for United States infantry soldiers who served in World War I.

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doughboys

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Secretary of state under President Eisenhower, he was known for his moralism and militant anti-communism.

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John Foster Dulles

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A law officer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He served as the United States marshal in Dodge City, Kansas, and took part in a famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881.

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Wyatt Earp

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An educator, author, and cooking expert of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She wrote the first distinctively American cookbook, The Boston Cooking School Cook Book.

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Fannie Farmer

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Fourteen goals of the United States in the peace negotiations after World War I. President Woodrow Wilson announced the Fourteen Points to Congress in early 1918. They included public negotiations between nations, freedom of navigation, free trade, self-determination for several nations involved in the war, and the establishment of an association of nations to keep the peace. The “association of nations” Wilson mentioned became the League of Nations.

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the Fourteen Points

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An author and political activist of the twentieth century, who has worked for the extension of women’s rights. In 1963, _________ published The Feminine Mystique, a book that proved fundamental to the women’s movement of the 1960s and beyond. She was a founder of the National Organization for Women.

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Betty Friedan

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Jamaican-born black nationalist who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s to encourage self-help among blacks. Opposed to colonialism, _________ advocated black separatism and nationalism. The Black Star shipping line, which facilitated emigration of American blacks to Africa, was among his projects. He was eventually jailed for mail fraud and deported to Jamaica by the U.S. government, which feared his influence in the black community.

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Marcus Garvey

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A political leader of the twentieth century. __________ represented Arizona for over thirty years in the Senate and was a leading spokesman for American conservatism. As the Republican nominee, he lost the presidential election of 1964 to President Lyndon Johnson.

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Barry Goldwater

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A frontier settler and United States marshal of the nineteenth century, known for his pursuit of some of the worst outlaws of the old West. Like his friend Buffalo Bill Cody, he was a rider for the Pony Express in his youth.

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Wild Bill Hickok

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A judge of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Holmes served on the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932, retiring when past ninety. He was celebrated for his legal wisdom and frequently stood in the minority when the Court decided cases. He insisted on viewing the law as a social instrument rather than as a set of abstract principles. He delivered a famous opinion concerning freedom of speech, holding that it must be allowed except when it presents a “clear and present danger.”

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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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A scandal in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, which came to light when it was revealed that in the mid-1980s the United States secretly arranged arms sales to Iran in return for promises of Iranian assistance in securing the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon. Proceeds from the arms sales then were covertly and illegally funneled to the Contras, rebels fighting the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

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Iran-Contra Affair

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The 1920s in the United States, a decade marked not only by the popularity of jazz, but also by attacks on convention in many areas of American life.

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Jazz Age

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A younger brother of President John F. Kennedy, who served as attorney general during his brother’s presidency and was his brother’s closest adviser. ____________ was a champion of the civil rights movement and a foe of organized crime. He was elected to the Senate after John Kennedy’s assassination. In 1968, while running for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party, he was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, evidently because of Kennedy’s position favoring Israel.

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Robert Kennedy

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(1963) A letter that Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed to his fellow clergymen while he was in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, after a nonviolent protest against racial segregation (see also sit-ins). King defended the apparent impatience of people in the civil rights movement, maintaining that without forceful actions like his, equal rights for black people would never be gained. King upheld the general use of nonviolent civil disobedience against unjust laws, saying that human rights must take precedence over such laws. He claimed that “one who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly”; such a person, King said, is actually showing respect for law, by insisting that laws be just.

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"Letter from Birmingham Jail"

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A political leader of the 1920s and 1930s who served as governor of Louisiana and represented that state in the Senate. He promised every family enough money for a home, car, radio, pension, and college education. A demagogue, Long dominated Louisiana’s politics and pushed aside opposition. He planned to run for president but was assassinated before he could do so.
‡ Long was nicknamed the “Kingfish.”
‡ Members of Long’s family played a prominent role in Louisiana and national politics for some time.

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Huey Long

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The opposition of many white leaders in the South to the decision of the Supreme Court in Brown versus Board of Education in 1954. The Court had declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The expression massive resistance was used in a letter signed by over a hundred members of Congress, calling on southerners to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling.

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massive resistance

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A political leader of the twentieth century, who, after representing South Dakota in the Senate, lost the presidential election of 1972 to President Richard Nixon. McGovern, a liberal Democrat, was an outspoken opponent of the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War.

‡ In the election of 1972, McGovern received majorities only in Massachusetts and in the District of Columbia.

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George McGovern

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A political leader and reformer of the twentieth century. After briefly serving at Jane Addams’s Hull House, she worked in various reform activities and government positions. In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt made her the first woman to hold a cabinet position when he appointed her secretary of labor. She assisted in drafting much of the New Deal legislation, including that which created the Social Security System.

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Frances Perkins

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A case decided by the Supreme Court in the 1890s. The Court held that a state could require racial segregation in public facilities if the facilities offered the two races were equal. The Court’s requirement became known as the “separate but equal” doctrine. It was overturned by the Court in 1954 in Brown versus Board of Education.

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Plessy versus Ferguson

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A broad movement for educational reform in the twentieth century. Progressive education is principally associated with John Dewey, but it contains many different and often conflicting ideas. In general, progressive educators view existing schools as too rigid, formal, and detached from real life. They prefer informal classroom arrangements and informal relations between pupils and teachers. They also prefer that schools teach useful subjects (including occupations) and emphasize “learning by doing” rather than instruction purely from textbooks. Some place the developing personality of the child at the center of educational thinking and insist, “teach the child, not the subject.”

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progressive education

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Words attributed to William H. Vanderbilt, a railroad executive of the late nineteenth century. They were supposedly spoken to a newspaper reporter.
‡ “The public be damned” has often been recalled when business leaders have been accused of shirking responsibility toward the public.

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The public be damned

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A move by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to increase the size of the Supreme Court and then bring in several new justices who would change the balance of opinion on the Court. Roosevelt proposed to pack the Court in the 1930s, when several conservative justices were inclined to declare parts of his program, the New Deal, unconstitutional. Congress would not allow the number of justices to be increased, and Roosevelt was criticized for trying to undermine the independence of the Court.

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Roosevelt’s Court packing plan

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The founder in the 1910s and 1920s of the birth control movement (she coined the term). Sanger overcame the initial hostility of the medical profession and combated laws that in most states prohibited contraception. She later headed the Planned Parenthood Federation.

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Margaret Sanger

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A common name for the Dakota people, a tribe of Native Americans inhabiting the northern Great Plains in the nineteenth century. They were famed as warriors and frequently took up arms in the late nineteenth century to oppose the settlement of their hunting grounds and sacred places. In 1876, Sioux warriors, led by Chief Sitting Bull, and commanded in the field by Chief Crazy Horse, overwhelmed the United States cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. (See Custer’s last stand.) A group of Sioux under Chief Big Foot were massacred by United States troops at Wounded Knee in 1890.

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Sioux

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A political leader of the twentieth century, who served as governor of Illinois and as the United States ambassador to the United Nations. The Cuban missile crisis occurred during his ambassadorship. He was nominated for president twice by the Democratic party against Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1952 and 1956, and lost both times.

‡ Stevenson was known for his wit and as a “thinking” rather than a crowd-pleasing candidate.

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Adlai E. Stevenson

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A political leader of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A Republican, Taft was president between 1909 and 1913. At the beginning of his presidency, he stayed close to the policies of Theodore Roosevelt, who had been president before him. Later, however, he turned to more conservative measures, such as a high protective tariff, and he lost popularity. In foreign policy, Taft advocated dollar diplomacy. He came in third in the election of 1912, running as a Republican, behind Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. In the 1920s, Taft served as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

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William Howard Taft

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A series of major attacks by communist forces in the Vietnam War. Early in 1968, Vietnamese communist troops seized and briefly held some major cities at the time of the lunar new year, or Tet. The Tet offensive, a turning point in the war, damaged the hopes of United States officials that the combined forces of the United States and South Vietnam could win.

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Tet offensive

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A train route across the United States, finished in 1869. It was the project of two railroad companies: the Union Pacific built from the east, and the Central Pacific built from the west. The two lines met in Utah. The Central Pacific laborers were predominantly Chinese, and the Union Pacific laborers predominantly Irish. Both groups often worked under harsh conditions.

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transcontinental railroad

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A New York City political leader, known as Boss Tweed, who in the late 1860s ran a network of corrupt city officials called the Tweed Ring. Under Tweed, city officials extorted kickbacks from contractors and others doing business with the city. His name is synonymous with municipal corruption.

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William Marcy "Boss" Tweed

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A political leader of the twentieth century. As governor of Alabama in the 1960s, he resisted integration and promised to “stand at the schoolhouse door” to bar black people from admission to the University of Alabama. The National Guard eventually forced him to back down. In 1968, he was nominated for president by a third party, the American Independent party, and came in third, behind Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. In 1972, he ran for president again, but was shot and paralyzed by a would-be assassin during the campaign. Wallace presented himself as a populist (see populism), who championed poor and middle-income whites against blacks and wealthy, liberal whites. In a remarkable reversal of positions, he endorsed integration in the 1980s and was again elected governor of Alabama for four years.

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George Wallace

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A political leader and judge of the twentieth century. Warren was governor of California before being named chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1953, and he served on the Court until 1969. His time as chief justice was marked by boldness in interpreting the Constitution; the “Warren Court” often brought the Constitution to the support of the disadvantaged. (See Brown versus Board of Education and Miranda decision). Warren also led a government commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy

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Earl Warren

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Words used by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 to justify his call for a declaration of war on Germany. The words implied that Germany’s militarism threatened democracy everywhere.

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The world must be made safe for democracy

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A social reformer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She founded a settlement house, Hull House, in Chicago, and also worked for peace and for women’s rights. In 1931, she won the Nobel Prize for peace.

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Jane Addams

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The space vehicle that carried three American astronauts to the moon and back in July 1969. The vehicle consisted of a command module, which stayed in lunar orbit, and a lunar module, which carried two of the three crewmen to a safe landing on the moon.

‡ On becoming the first person to set foot on the moon, Neil Armstrong declared: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

‡ The other members of the crew were Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon, and Michael Collins.

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Apollo 11

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An important ruling on affirmative action given by the Supreme Court in 1978. Allan Bakke, a white man, was denied admission to a medical school that had admitted black candidates with weaker academic credentials. Bakke contended that he was a victim of racial discrimination. The Court ruled that Bakke had been illegally denied admission to the medical school, but also that medical schools were entitled to consider race as a factor in admissions. The Court thus upheld the general principle of affirmative action.

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Bakke decision

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An African-American educator and civil rights leader who in 1904 founded a school for girls that later became part of Bethune-Cookman College. In the late 1930s and early 1940s she held an administrative position under the New Deal. In 1949 she founded the National Council of Negro Women, which opposed the poll tax and racial discrimination and which promoted the teaching of black history in the public schools.

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Mary McLeod Bethune

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An outlaw of the late nineteenth century in New Mexico, who claimed to have killed over twenty people; he was gunned down himself at age twenty-one. His real name is uncertain.

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Billy the Kid

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A woman charged with the ax murder of her father and stepmother in the 1890s in Fall River, Massachusetts. A jury found her not guilty. The crime has never been solved.

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Lizzie Borden

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A judge of the twentieth century, he served on the Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939. Brandeis believed that economic and social facts had to take precedence over legal theory. He was the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court.

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Louis D. Brandeis