AP Success - AP US History: DBQ Cold War and United State Society

Question 1

Essay
Evaluate the extent to which the Cold War led to changes in United States society in the period from 1945 to 1980.
When the sages and the scientists, the philosophers and the statesman, have all exhausted their studies of atomic energy, one solution and only one solution will remain--the substitution of decency and reason and brotherhood for the rule of force in the government of man…
That is the great task for you teachers of religious faith. This is a supreme opportunity for the Church to continue to fulfill its mission on earth. The Protestant Church, the Catholic Church, and the Jewish Synagogue-bound together in the American unity of brotherhood--must provide the shock forces to accomplish this moral and spiritual awakening. No other agency can do it. Unless it is done, we are headed for the disaster we would deserve. Oh for an Isaiah or a Saint Paul to reawaken this sick world to its moral responsibilities! I may be facing that Isaiah or that Saint Paul right now. I hope it is true.
Harry Truman, “Address in Columbus at a Conference of the Federal Council of Churches,” 6 March, 1946.
It has not been the less fortunate, or members of minority groups who have been traitorous to this Nation, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest Nation on earth has had to offer . . . the finest homes, the finest college education and the finest jobs in government we can give. 
I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department. . .
As you know, very recently the Secretary of State proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes—being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust—high treason. . .
Joseph McCarthy, “Enemies from Within” speech, 9 February, 1950.
There was a turtle by the name of Bert
and Bert the turtle was very alert;
when danger threatened him he never got hurt
he knew just what to do ... 
5
He'd duck! [gasp]
And cover!
Duck! [gasp]
And cover!
(male) He did what we all must learn to do
10
(male) You (female) And you (male) And you (deeper male) And you!
[bang, gasp] Duck, and cover!
Theme from Duck and Cover, United States civil defense film, 1952.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Dwight Eisenhower, “Cross of Iron” speech, 16 April, 1953.
Protect your family with an All Purpose Fallout Shelter!
In Your Basement
Preparedness is today’s greatest form of true life insurance! Leading scientists agree every dwelling should have a nuclear fallout shelter, such as ours, conforming to the recommendations of the Office of Defense and Civilian Mobilization. 
Scientists say 9 out of 10 persons without shelters would perish in the event of a direct nuclear attack, and, 8 out of 10 persons would be saved in the security of a fallout shelter. 
Our fallout shelter serves as a dual purpose, too. It offers complete protection from severe storms and tornadoes. 
Newspaper advertisement, 1950s.
Now the sun has come to earth
Shrouded in a mushroom cloud of death
Death comes in a blinding flash
Of hellish heat and leaves a smear of ash
5
And the sun has come to earth
 
Now the sun has disappeared
All is darkness, anger, pain and fear
Twisted sightless wrecks of men
10
Go groping on their knees and cry in pain
And the sun has disappeared
Lyrics by Paul Simon, “The Sun is Burning,” recorded 1964.
Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Speech at Riverside Church, New York City, 4 April, 1967.

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