USA (National Flag)
The flag was officially introduced in 1960. The first United States flag from
1775 was the then British trunk flag; however, the red field was split into 13
red and white stripes, one for each of the original states of the Union. In
1777, Union Jack in the corner was replaced by a blue field with thirteen white
stars. Thus, the first Stars and Stripes was created. It was the first
time stars were seen in a national flag. In 1795 it was decided that the number
of stars and stripes should correspond to the number of states. Since 1818, only
the number of stars has changed and one went back to the 13 stripes. The flag
currently has 50 stars.
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The history of the United States
The British colonies
The British colonies on the North American continent were founded over a long
period from 1607 (Virginia) to 1732 (Georgia). Mutual communication between
them was limited, but differences in climate, economy, and population involved
significant contradictions. To the north of New England,
viz. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and later New
Hampshire and Maine, a Protestant English population, in addition to corn,
cultivated the common northern European crops in English-style villages. Along
the coast, trade and crafts, fishing and shipbuilding thrived. In the Middle
Colonies extensive New York and Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware,
populated by many Dutch, Scottish-Irish and Germans, were dominated by family
farming. With centers in New York and Philadelphia, significant commercial
interests developed. To the south in the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, North
Carolina and South Carolina and Georgia, the population was characterized by
many Scots and especially by a large African touch. Production was
export-oriented with tobacco, cotton and rice as the main goods (see triangle
trade).

Also in terms of religion and political culture, there were big
differences. In New England, the colonists sought to maintain far-reaching local
self-determination, which resulted in city meetings. The Puritan religion was
influential and was assured by priests whom the colonies themselves educated
at Harvard and Yale universities. In the Middle Colonies, the British Crown
dominated. Many Protestant currents were represented along with the Anglican
Church, and the result was widespread tolerance. To the south, the political
structures of the plantation owners, in Maryland, were marked by a strong
Catholic touch.
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Individually, one colony resembled its neighboring colony, but when it came
to the extremes, such as Connecticut to South Carolina, there were few
similarities. The similarities were, firstly, the language, which was
English. In addition, there were the political institutions, which from the
1720's were streamlined according to English models.
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The American Revolution
The independence of the United States was not a "natural"
development. Research in recent decades has strongly emphasized that the key to
the revolution cannot be found in notions of a distinct "national identity", but
must be sought in the colonists' strong sense of a position as British
equals. Differences between the colonies, as well as similarities that bound
them to the mother country, made it a late and sudden demand that one should
abandon negotiation and seek a total secession from the British Crown. Both
south and north of the United States were British possessions, namely the West
Indies and Canada, who did not want to join the United States.
The prelude to the revolution lay in the Franco-Indian War 1754-1763. The
war, which brought colonists and the British government into closer contact than
at any time before, ended with the conquest of Canada. London embarked on a
reorganization of the colonies, which immediately brought Parliament into
conflict with leading circles in America. The British Parliament did not seize
the opportunity to play the colonies against each other; seen from London, the
American colonies looked like a whole that could be suspected of secession
dreams. The colonists, for their part, insisted on fighting for their rights as
British citizens, not as Americans.
In North America, a number of tax orders and customs laws from 1765 were met
with demonstrations, a boycott of English goods and a growing awareness of the
need to coordinate reluctance (see Stamp Act). The long crisis raised a new
generation of young, ambitious and talented politicians who were to dominate
American politics until the 1820's. The same colonies, which in 1754 at a
congress in Albany had rejected all talk of closer co-operation, convened a new
congress in 1774, and again the following year a congress
(see Continental Congress), when acts of war had taken place at Lexington and
Concord in Massachusetts. Congress appointed George Washington from Virginia to
Commander-in-Chief of an army that barely existed yet.
However, the initiative for a final break with Britain did not come until
about six months later. It was expressed by a newly arrived English
writer, Thomas Paine, who in a pamphlet, Common Sense of January 1776,
demanded full independence. A few months later, the demand came up at the
Philadelphia Congress, which on July 4 decided to cut all ties to the British
Empire with the Declaration of Independence, which was essentially written
by Thomas Jefferson. The following year, the Confederate Articles of
Association, the first constitution of the United States, were presented, but
it was not until 1781 that the last colony ratified the treaty.
The war, the War of Independence, with Britain became long and
bloody. The American retaliation against British world power consisted of
organizing the Continental Army under Washington's command and in local militias
or Home Guard, and as envoy to Paris, Benjamin Franklin secured significant
economic and military support from France. After a scorching defeat
in Yorktown, Virginia in 1781, the British Parliament decided to begin peace
talks, which ended with the Paris Peace of 1783, in which Britain recognized the
independence of the United States.
The constitutional struggle
Although the revolution did not have its origins in popular forces, it came
to mobilize ordinary citizens to an unprecedented extent. The new group of
leading revolutionary politicians discovered that many of the counters that
separated citizens from politicians had been broken down. Respect for the
authorities was undermined, and James Madison, a prominent Virginia politician,
believed that the republic was threatened by democratic chaos.
Presidents |
1 |
1789-97 |
George Washington (F) |
2 |
1797-1801 |
John Adams (F) |
3 |
1801-1809 |
Thomas Jefferson (A) |
4 |
1809-1817 |
James Madison (A) |
5 |
1817-1825 |
James Monroe (A) |
6 |
1825-1829 |
John Quincy Adams (A) |
7 |
1829-1837 |
Andrew Jackson (D) |
8 |
1837-1841 |
Martin Van Buren (D) |
9 |
1841 |
William Henry Harrison (W) |
10 |
1841-1845 |
John Tyler (W) |
11 |
1845-1849 |
James K. Polk (D) |
12 |
1849-1850 |
Zachary Taylor (W) |
13 |
1850-1853 |
Millard Fillmore (W) |
14 |
1853-1857 |
Franklin Pierce (D) |
15 |
1857-1861 |
James Buchanan (D) |
16 |
1861-1865 |
Abraham Lincoln (R) |
17 |
1865-1869 |
Andrew Johnson (R) |
18 |
1869-1877 |
Ulysses S. Grant (R) |
19 |
1877-1881 |
Rutherford B. Hayes (R) |
20 |
1881 |
James A. Garfield (R) |
21 |
1881-1885 |
Chester A. Arthur (R) |
22 |
1885-1889 |
Grover Cleveland (D) |
23 |
1889-1893 |
Benjamin Harrison (R) |
24 |
1893-1897 |
Grover Cleveland (D) |
25 |
1897-1901 |
William McKinley (R) |
26 |
1901-1909 |
Theodore Roosevelt (R) |
27 |
1909-1913 |
William Howard Taft (R) |
28 |
1913-1921 |
Woodrow Wilson (D) |
29 |
1921-1923 |
Warren G. Harding (R) |
30 |
1923-1929 |
Calvin Coolidge (R) |
31 |
1929-1933 |
Herbert Hoover (R) |
32 |
1933-1945 |
Franklin D. Roosevelt (D) |
33 |
1945-1953 |
Harry S. Truman (D) |
34 |
1953-1961 |
Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) |
35 |
1961-1963 |
John F. Kennedy (D) |
36 |
1963-1969 |
Lyndon B. Johnson (D) |
37 |
1969-1974 |
Richard M. Nixon (R) |
38 |
1974-1977 |
Gerald Ford (R) |
39 |
1977-1981 |
Jimmy Carter (D) |
40 |
1981-1989 |
Ronald Reagan (R) |
41 |
1989-1993 |
George Bush (R) |
42 |
1993-2001 |
Bill Clinton (D) |
43 |
2001-2009 |
George W. Bush (R) |
44 |
2009-2017 |
Barack Obama (D) |
45 |
2017- |
Donald J. Trump (R) |
The Confederate articles did not describe the United States as a nation, but
as a "friendship alliance" of independent states, each with extensive
autonomy. The articles prescribed a legislative assembly that was to act as an
executive at the same time. It had no independent tax authority and no authority
to compel the individual state to comply with the decisions that had to be made
by consensus. Economic difficulties after the end of the war caused the alliance
to crack. A minor uprising of indebted farmers in Massachusetts (see Shay's
uprising) seemed to threaten political stability; in particular, among the
affluent groups, there were fears that the legislative assemblies of individual
states would experiment with legislation that could threaten private property
rights. In 1787, a Philadelphia assembly was convened to strengthen the
government. When the assembly finally became quorate, it decided on its own to
abandon a constitutional revision and instead write a completely new draft
constitution. Leading figures were James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, who
had served as adjutant to Washington.
The draft constitution laid the foundations for a stronger central power, now
modeled on the British model, with a lower house of elected representatives
(House of Representatives) and an upper house (Senate), appointed by
individual legislative assemblies. The executive power lay with a president, who
was originally elected indirectly by electors in each state. Finally, a Supreme
Court was created, the role of which was only defined over the coming
decades. The unifying idea was to preserve the popular element, but at the same
time split the "majority" so that it could not simultaneously control the entire
government structure. The principle was the separation of powers through a
threefold division of power, "checks and balances", combined with the division
of power between the federal government and the individual states.
The proposal triggered a constitutional struggle involving broad
groups. Proponents of the new proposal called themselves federalists, while
opponents who simply wanted a revision of the existing constitution came to be
called anti-federalists. The essential problem of giving authority to the new
constitution at the expense of the old constitution was solved by prescribing
that the proposal should be adopted by the people themselves, namely, through
elected assemblies in each state. Once nine states had adopted the proposal, it
went into effect. It happened in 1788 with a narrow majority in crucial states
like New York and Virginia. In April 1789, George Washington was installed as
the first president of the United States. During the constitutional struggle, a
promise was made for a special safeguard of the rights of individual states,Bill
of Rights, which was added to the Constitution in 1791.
Alexander Hamilton came as Treasury Secretary in the Washington Government
1789-1797 to exert great influence on the shaping of the new political system in
the wake of the constitutional struggle. Hamilton argued that a stronger state
power could be built on an economic basis in the form of a common market, which
would gradually create a comprehensive exchange of goods between states and
regions. The federal government should concentrate on fostering prosperity,
supporting the building of a national transportation system, encouraging
regional specialization, securing new industry through tariff walls, and
guaranteeing a stable monetary system through a central bank. Securing the value
of money meant that the new state could from the beginning be supported by the
most affluent groups.
The Early Republic, 1800-1830
The result was a state power which surprised European observers by its
moderate office and in particular by the almost religious worship which was
quickly attached to the "Constitution", the early code word for state power. The
American central power survived, not least because it made every effort not to
come into conflict with the individual states. To replace the passionate debate
of the revolution and the constitutional struggle, the Constitution turned the
political discussion towards the practically feasible; questions that could be
put in relation to economic advantages and disadvantages, ie. converted into
dollars was easier to compromise. Even the issue of slavery was predominantly
discussed in Congress not as a moral principle, but as a question of the
inviolability of property rights.
It was thus economic rather than political vitality that came to characterize
the republic. The experiences of the revolution, the discovery of popular
political creativity, manifested themselves on the fringes of the political
system, for example in the form of self-organized settler communities in the
west, in the movement for the abolition of slavery, in numerous local reform
movements, in the creation of peasant associations and in a labor movement from
the 1820's. until the Depression in the late 1830's. In contrast, the political
parties, which gained national character from the late 1820's, quickly became
part of the constitutional system.
The Democratic Party, organized by President Andrew Jackson 1829-1837, was
loosely tied to principles such as local self-government, which had been taken
over by the anti-federalists. The Federalists, who wanted a stronger central
power, remained in the Whig Party, which was replaced by the Republican
Party after an explosion as a result of the slavery issue.until 1854. Until
slavery began to evoke irreconcilable passion in the Southern States in the
1850's, organized politics in each state was a reflection of the balance of power
between competing groups, who mastered the line-up procedure and could mobilize
broad crowds on election day with party and colors, horn music and processions.
. After the election, the victorious party was able to expand its position of
power by supporting economic projects that came to shape the development of the
individual states. Political influence could easily be translated into economic
benefits, just as a position of economic power was seldom without secure access
to political decisions when there was calm and peace after an election.
The Republic in Growing
The growth potential of the republic had many sources of energy that mutually
influenced each other. A strong population increase was offset by huge land
expansions, and a transport revolution was offset by a series of technical
breakthroughs in early industry and by stronger regional specialization of
agriculture. Compared to the old world, the United States stood as a dynamic
society, a maelstrom of enterprise and with a population that was self-assured
and without the social respect and reverence for established institutions that
formed a central part of European political culture.
Behind the cliché about the United States as the land of opportunity hid a
significant political insight. Politics in the United States was not about
securing property rights, but about expanding it and using it as an instrument
of government. While agricultural areas in the north and west have long
maintained a more even social distribution, urban development and the steady
growth of immigration meant a strong social polarization, often supported by
ethnic prejudices. In the big cities that sprouted on the east coast and in the
northwestern United States, large fortunes were created. One percent of the
population is estimated to have owned half of the values in the cities
approximately 1850. The vast majority of cities owned little or nothing. American
democracy, however, was not stimulated by notions of redistribution of the goods
of society, but by ideas of political ligation,
Where state power in Europe seemed to stand above civil society and suppress
it, state power in America was at the disposal of civil society, ie. the
strongest groups that could exert continuous influence. As late as the 1830's,
the Frenchman Alexis Tocqueville couldin enthusiastic terms describe local
associations that worked for specific common purposes, eg bridge building or
school teaching. From approximately By 1850, it was clear that the strongest political
factor in the future would be organizations based on a lasting private purpose,
namely economic accumulation of power. The new corporations, ie. large firms,
such as the railways, could organize tens of thousands of workers over a vast
area, the older, spontaneous, purpose-bound, and voluntary associations were far
superior. The state that consolidated, therefore, often had a surprisingly
private imprint.
Population growth was formidable by European standards. As a result of lower
child mortality, longer life expectancy, and continued immigration, the
population increased by up to 30 percent every decade; from approximately 4 mio. in
1790 to approximately 23 mio. in 1850 and approximately 76 million in 1900. In the first
half of the 19th century, immigration was dominated by English, Irish and
Germans. Scandinavian immigration to the Midwest picked up speed after 1862,
when the Homestead Act offered free land; it was overtaken from the 1880's by
southern and eastern European immigration, which sought almost exclusively for
the cities.
The United States of the Revolution was closely tied to the coastline in
terms of transportation. The inner continent was opened in a series of
phases. At the conclusion of the peace in Paris, the territory of the United
States was expanded by approximately 70 percent, taking over the area south and west
of the Great Lakes. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which doubled U.S. land,
gave the United States control of the Mississippi River throughout its extent. A
few years later, steam-powered riverboats made their entrance, and soon the
entire north-south stretch, from the Great Lakes to New Orleans, was open as an
alternative to coastal traffic. In 1825, the Eriekanalen was completed, which
connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie; thereby, the United States was also
bound together from east to west. Other canals followed, but were soon overtaken
by the railway construction, which had an almost explosive growth, from just
over a few hundred kilometers in 1833 to 20,000 km in 1850 and approximately 60,000 km
in 1860. An area as large as Louisiana was conquered from Mexico 1845-1848, and
at the same time the Oregon Territory was given in a treaty with Great
Britain; in 1867 Alaska was acquired by a trade with the Russian emperor. In
1869, it succeeded in completing the railroad connection all the way across the
American continent.
Internal colonization and civil war
An empire was created with modest European casualties. The bloodiest chapters
dealt with internal colonization, which was about Indians and African Americans
culminating in the American Civil War of 1861-65. From the beginning, the
American tradition of war had the character of a people's war, not between
trained soldiers, but between sections of the population fighting for total
social domination. Since colonial times, the form of struggle was often directed
at the civilian population. During and after the revolution,
approximately 60,000-80,000 loyalists displaced, and their property confiscated; the
majority sought refuge in Canada.
The wars against the Indians were marked by long-term pressure on the eastern
tribes, who were forced westward and therefore came in opposition to new Native
American groups. Great cultural, linguistic and geographical spread between the
many tribes and a mutual distrust, which could be sharpened by means of forced
relocations, made an overall defense impossible. The Revolutionary War and the
American-English War1812-14 involved a number of tribes on the British side and
thus gave the expulsion of Indians a certain patriotic tinge. Andrew Jackson had
gained a national reputation as an irreconcilable enemy of the Indians, and as
president (1829-1837) he initiated ethnic cleansing of Indians in the Southern
States. Relocations to inhospitable areas, scattered Native American ambushes,
and subsequent massacres of Native American settlements continued during and
after the Civil War, until the native population approximately 1900 was close to
extinction.
The contrast with the indigenous people gave the white population a certain
common character, while slavery by virtue of its concentration in the Southern
States was able to threaten the life of the republic. First of all, the issue of
slavery had to be encapsulated in mutual agreements. The Constitution of 1787
had secured the South the right to import slaves until 1808, and also had the
Confederacy had an over-representation in the House of Representatives, as the
slaves were counted in the census as 3/5 white. However,
the hope that slavery would abolish itself as economically unprofitable was
undermined by the invention of the cotton gin, a simple machine that
could remove the seed pods from the cotton. American cotton production became
the major supplier to the English textile industry. Slavery thus not only became
a good business, but stabilized the culture and social structure of the Southern
States and was supplemented in the 19th century by a comprehensive ideological
defense, while plantation owners fantasized about imitating low-lying notions of
honor and defending (white) women's virtues.
Both territorial and economic expansion exacerbated the issue of slavery. The
accession of new states threatened to upset the balance in the Senate between
free states and slave states. In 1820, the so-called Missouri Compromise
was concluded, which meant that a new free state had to be matched by the
accession of a slave state. Slavery, in turn, could be ruled out in the
territory north of an extended border between Missouri and Arkansas. The
agreement came under pressure after the great conquests in the south and
southwest of the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. In addition, the transverse
continental lines of the transportation system bound the Northern and Central
States closer to the Western states and threatened to isolate the Southern
States.
However, it was the federal Supreme Court that dropped a bomb during
the Missouri compromise. The court declared in 1857 in the Dred Scott case that
the constitution did not allow the restriction of the right to property (namely,
to slaves) in territorial areas not yet occupied as states. The decision split
the Democratic Party in the Northern States, so that the new Republican Party
won the presidency in 1860. Even before Abraham Lincoln took office, South
Carolina withdrew from the Union. A few months later, seven southern states
formed the Confederate States of America with Jefferson Davis as president. Then
the federal Fort Sumter in Charlestonsport was bombed by southern state troops,
civil war broke out (see also American Civil War), and four more
states, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, joined the
Confederacy.
The Civil War was waged by the Northern States as a struggle for the
preservation of the Union and by the Southern States as a struggle for the right
of individual states to self-determination. The war was closely followed in
Europe and was seen as a battle between two social systems, an aristocratic and
authoritarian system and a popular form of government based on the majority. Was
loyalty to the "Constitution", a political constitution with abstract ideas,
capable of making ordinary citizens risk their lives? From the beginning, it
looked as if the Northern States had to fight a war of aggression, while the
Southern States could concentrate on defense. The picture changed with a series
of defeats for Lincoln, who instead took advantage of the population and
industrial superiority of the Northern States. The war became a social and
economic struggle of exhaustion, which forced the Southern States to climb and
attack to cover up internal divisions. When the Southern States offensive was
repulsed byAntietam in 1862, Lincoln from 1863 could proclaim the liberation of
slaves in the Southern States.
The release of the slaves and the adoption of the 14th Constitutional
Amendment (1868), which gave African Americans equal political rights, did not
solve the accumulated damage that centuries of slavery had inflicted on American
society. After a few years of more radical attempts to restructure the social
and political conditions in the South, however, the whole issue was driven out
of federal politics and left to the individual Southern states, which from 1877
to the early 1890's deprived blacks of the right to vote. The Supreme Court even
accepted racial segregation as a principle in 1896 (see Plessy versus Ferguson
case).
From union to world power, 1865-1920
The period was dominated by the Republican Party, which could claim to have
saved the Union, liberated the slaves and ensured industrial progress. The
Democratic Party became a regional party, which, however, transformed the
Southern states into an area with a one-party system that could keep poor whites
at bay by guaranteeing that blacks were without social and political
influence. Federal government was essentially reduced to assisting the large
corporations, corporations that built networks that, in scope and efficiency,
came to overshadow the postal service, the only nationwide public organization.
The large corporations and trust formations such as John D.
Rockefeller's Standard Oil and JP Morgan's US Steel Corporation already
accounted for approximately 1900 for approximately half of industrial production. They
controlled a large proportion of the smaller suppliers and performed many
functions that were governmental in Europe: the disciplined workers, trained
immigrants, controlled the local wage level, created welfare systems for the
employees and expanded the higher education system with special emphasis on
science and technology. Financial capital ensured on several occasions the
economic stability through rapid intervention in economic crises. When the
Danish journalist Henrik Cavling visited the United States shortly before the
turn of the century, it struck him that the president sat rather isolated inThe
White House with a few individual secretaries; he had plenty of time to
talk. The first man in the steel industry, Andrew Carnegie, on the other hand,
was speeding up and surrounded himself with the symbols of power and authority
that belonged to a prince. By virtue of its wealth and influence, Carnegie was
able to pursue an independent cultural policy, which laid the foundation
for the public libraries.
Popular politics found expression on the edge of the state system through a
series of movements whose energy was sought to be contained by the parties. The
most important were the populist movement, the workers' movement and the
progressive movement. The populists originated in cooperative movements in the
Southern and Midwest in the 1880's. They formed a People's Party, which demanded
regulation of the corporations, political control of the financial capital and
direct election of the senators. In 1896, the party supported Democratic
candidate William Jennings Bryan, who lost the election, but populist ideas
played a role in federal politics until World War I. The American labor movement
formed the 1886 AFL, American Federation of Labor, which organized skilled
workers. But many unskilled people, supported by large immigrant groups,
organized themselves more militantly, and the 1890's were marked by bloody labor
struggles. The Socialist Party of America, led by Eugene Debs, became a factor
in American urban politics until World War I. The progressive movement, which
is particularly associated with the Republican Theodore Roosevelt (President
1901-1909) and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson(President 1913-1921), had its roots
among more affluent farmers and in the middle class of the cities, among
functionaries and among the higher educated. The movement took over part of the
populist program, but wanted to build administration and politics on the new
political science rather than on popular currents. Many progressives moved
towards a modern social liberalism.
The progressive movement placed its trust in a continuous and competent
bureaucracy combined with a stronger foreign policy marking of US
interests. Ever since the days of George Washington, the United States had
espoused an principle of isolation, but had nevertheless become involved in the
European Napoleonic Wars as an opponent of Britain. Until about 1900, the Monroe
Doctrine of 1823 was hailed. This doctrine marked distance from the European
great power rivalry, but at the same time maintained the Western Hemisphere as
an American sphere of influence. It was not until 1898 that this principle was
broken in the Spanish-American War, which gave the United States control
of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines., where the United States soon found
itself in a bloody showdown with Philippine nationalism. With numerous
interventions in the Caribbean, including the purchase of the Panama
Canal project in 1903 and its completion in 1914, the United States now marked
itself as an international superpower. Although President Woodrow Wilson tried
to keep the United States neutral during World War I, widespread sympathy for
the Allies soon brought the United States into hostile relations
with Germany. The United States' entry into the war on April 2, 1917, and the
rapid equipment and shipment of significant troop forces had a decisive
influence on the outcome of the war. After the war, Wilson was a unifying figure
at the Versailles Conference, and his proposal for the formation of the League
of Nations was adopted.
The post-war period, 1920-1929
Participation in World War I gave a foretaste of America's international
impact. However, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, in particular
President Woodrow Wilson's proposal for a League of Nations, which would oblige
the United States to guarantee the borders of the peace treaty. It was thus
clear that the US Constitution was not suitable for a comprehensive and
permanent foreign policy engagement. The composition of the Congress reflected
local circumstances, which could hardly be reconciled in a long-term policy once
the first patriotic intoxication of enthusiasm had subsided. The question,
therefore, was whether the Constitution was flexible enough to accommodate a
new, strong presidency with control over foreign policy.
The main headline of 1920's politics was nostalgic, a demand to return to
normalcy, Back to normalcy. After a few years, it turned out to have
an ironic tone, because the government apparatus was shaken by a series of
corruption scandals, which were to become a recurring pattern towards the end of
the century. In fact, the normal had been given new and wide limits. Normality
in the intense competition of the 20th century for the exploitation of
organizational and technological resources became identical with a state power
in a continuous crisis and war preparedness. Gradually, the constitutional
interpretation changed. The primary purpose of the Constitution was no longer to
set limits on governmental power, but to ensure the conditions for effective
decisions.
Depression and the New Deal, 1929-1941
The stock market crash on Wall Street in October 1929 halved the value of the
leading stocks. A few years later, the value had dropped to a quarter. There
followed an endless reduction in production and an unemployment rate of about a
quarter of the workforce. Wages were halved. For the time being, the crisis was
peculiar because it apparently did not spring from scarcity, but from surplus
production. Unlike Europe, where the rulers for centuries had preached austerity
and scarcity to the many, the American elite had since 1789 built its political
special position on continued economic prosperity for broad groups. From here
were only the blacks, where economic hopelessness had been the lot of life for
generations. Therefore, there were no public support schemes that could mitigate
some of the financial shock.
In the 1932 election, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won, a patrician from
one of New York's oldest families, over Republican Herbert Hoover, who was made
responsible for the sorrow that was spreading among the population. In 1921,
Roosevelt had interrupted his political career due to polio. At his inauguration
in the midst of a banking crisis that threatened to destroy the entire financial
system, he stated: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself". The next day
he declared a kind of financial emergency and closed the banks on his own. With
a typical stroke of indomitable optimism, it was called "banking holiday" with
an assurance that healthy banks would reopen soon. When it happened a little
over a week later, confidence in the system was restored and deposits exceeded
account closures. In the following years, a number of reforms
followed, including a federal guarantee for ordinary small savers. Here, as in
many other legislative matters, Roosevelt emerged as the one who provided the
average American with the same federal privileges that one of the fathers of the
Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, had once secured for the upper class, who in
the following years referred to Roosevelt as "the person in The White House ",
while ordinary people called him FDR.
The collective term for the reforms was New Deal. The political message was
that most Americans at least had a share in government power - not in a divided
legislature or conservative Supreme Court, but rather in the
presidency. Roosevelt did not encourage democratic rethinking, but his example
transformed the presidency into a kind of popularly elected kingdom. The FDR was
elected president four times in a row. In the following years, he expanded the
administrative apparatus, coordinated federal regulatory bodies, and built
welfare functions into economic policy. In the years leading up to and during
World War II, military functions expanded.
From March to June 1933, the first hundred days, Congress passed
everything Roosevelt proposed, almost without debate. In addition to a wide
range of emergency assistance programs that met immediate needs, legislation was
created that helped ordinary homeowners who were in need of the term. The
Tennessee Valley Authority was a large-scale embankment and electrification
project under federal control, followed in 1935 by federal technical assistance
to small farms in the form of cheap electricity. Public Works was created
millions of unemployed, and a forest improvement program dedicated 2 1/2mio. young
men for extended periods. Later followed a labor market pension, which laid the
foundation for the American welfare state. Two programs were to prove
particularly controversial because they involved the federal state directly in
the decision-making processes of capitalism. One was the AAA (Agricultural
Adjustment Administration), which was to limit overproduction and thus
counteract falling prices in agriculture, the other was the NRA (National
Recovery Administration), which was to try the same in industrial production and
at the same time ensure the workers' right to collective agreements. Both
programs quickly proved to be of greatest benefit to the better-off farms and
the strongest corporations. However, the Conservative Supreme Court declared
them unconstitutional in 1935 before the administrative failure was clear.
In the 1936 election, Roosevelt thus faced a more united opposition from the
right. But his popular support was also threatened by a number of movements
that, with flourishing rhetoric and simple proposals, sought to exploit the new
means of political communication, radio, which the FDR itself mastered with its
fireplace passers-by. However, it succeeded in securing the support of the trade
union movement through the Wagner Act (see National Labor Relations Board)),
which guaranteed collective bargaining rights. Following his re-election, which
brought together farmers, workers and ethnic groups, including African-American
voters in the North States behind the Democratic Party, Roosevelt sought to
neutralize the Supreme Court by proposing an increase in the number of
judges. Simultaneously with a severe economic downturn, this brought him into
strong headwinds in Congress. Within a short time, however, a number of judges
withdrew, and in the following years Roosevelt gave the Supreme Court a liberal
composition. New Deal's economic policy, however, was not secured by Congress or
by the Supreme Court, but by the rising foreign policy tensions that
necessitated a vigorous rearmament in the late 1930's.
New Deal in War
Strong isolationist currents in Congress limited Roosevelt's foreign policy
to reciprocal trade agreements, and it was not until October 1937 that he began
to shape public opinion by warning against the dictators
of Germany and Italy. After the outbreak of war in Europe, in March 1941 he
secured the Western powers the opportunity to borrow or rent American weapons
(see Lend-Lease Act). The Japanese expansion in China and Indochina weakened
the domestic isolationists and enabled an oil blockade against Japan. On
December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. Navy at anchor in Pearl Harborin
Hawaii. When Hitler declared war on the United States immediately after,
Roosevelt stood with the best opportunities to unite the nation and give the
fight against the most dangerous opponent, Germany, a strategic first priority.
The rapid mobilization of America's enormous resources changed the political
landscape in Washington, DC. retrieved from the executive offices of the large
groups. The result was a gigantic planned economy experiment that tied the
military and large-scale industry together as the state's power base. Large
federal investments in science and technology, eg in the development of nuclear
weapons, marked a new role for scientific education and research under the
auspices of the government. The organized trade union movement became a
reluctant co-player, who soon found himself outmaneuvered with orders for wage
restraint and the abolition of the right to strike.
The equipment of approximately 15 mio. soldiers created entirely new industries and
great demand for labor. Two groups, women and African American workers, who had
played a marginal role in the New Deal programs in the 1930's, now gained a
foothold in the labor market. approximately 1.2 million black farm workers flocked
from the South to the industrial centers of the northeastern and western United
States, and under threat of launching a March to Washingtonthey
enforced a ban on racial discrimination in industries that worked for the
government. Just over 900,000 blacks came during the war in uniform and began to
be confronted with ingrained discrimination in the armed forces. The federal
bureaucracy tripled to 3.4 million. salaried employees. At the same time,
however, the political balance in Congress swung to the right, and Roosevelt won
a more modest election victory in 1944.
The United States waged World War II as an industrial war of attrition that,
through extensive bombardment of areas behind the front, was to weaken
opponents' production capacity and supply lines. This strategy, which can be
traced back to the American Civil War (1861-1865), inflicted heavy losses on the
German and Japanese civilian populations before the land troops were
deployed. American troops landed in Morocco in November 1942, in Sicily in July
1943, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Roosevelt's favorite general, led the
Invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. The Japanese connecting lines by sea were
far more vulnerable to attack than the European railway network, and after the
Japanese advance had stopped at the Battle of Midwayin 1942, the U.S. Navy
secured in combat from island to island in the western Pacific a number of
airfields from which the Japanese mainland could soon be bombed. The
technological superiority of the United States forced Japan to surrender after
the use of two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. August 6
and 9, 1945.
Roosevelt's successors, 1945-1968
Roosevelt's death in April 1945 gave Vice President Harry S. Truman the
enormous responsibility of ending a war effort with which he had only limited
experience. Already at the Potsdam Conference in July and August 1945, it was
clear that confrontation rather than cooperation would shape post-war relations
with the USSR. The concept of the Cold War became a common term for containment,
i.e. a political containment of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and
after 1949 of China. The tense situation narrowed the gap between the two major
parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. New Deals' combination of
regulation, welfare, and military readiness to pursue global security interests
required strong federal state power. Both Truman's presidency 1945-1953 and the
Republican, former General Eisenhowers (1953-1961) consolidated the framework
laid out by Roosevelt. Presidents John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) and Lyndon B.
Johnson (1963-1969) each sought in their own way to expand the New Deal
framework.
Roosevelt's plan for a supranational organization, the United Nations, which
combined a General Assembly of private nations with a strong executive
consisting of great powers (the Security Council), was quickly weakened by the
ideological and military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet
Union. With the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, which promised military
and economic support to European countries considered threatened by the USSR,
Truman and later Eisenhower sought to pursue Roosevelt's plans in an alternative
form. Without leaving the UN, the United States built a number of military
organizations, NATO (1949) for Western Europe, SEATO(1954-1977) for Southeast
Asia and the OAS (1948) for states in North, South and Central America,
alliances that were essentially under the control of the President. These
alliances, which committed the United States to security policy guarantees for
large parts of the globe, were combined with the breaking down of trade barriers
and guarantees for US corporations. The policy of containment united the free
world under the military, economic, and ideological leadership of the United
States.
The construction of a foreign policy treaty system, dominated by the
presidency with its unifying diplomatic and military functions, had far-reaching
consequences for the traditional federal state and its relations with the
Länder. The southern states, which maintained sharp racial segregation, backed
by intimidation and terror, became an obvious burden for a superpower that
fought for human rights and freedom elsewhere in the world. A number of cultural
and social norms kept the region in economic stagnation. Here, the Federal
Supreme Court, rather than the President or Congress, where the Southern states
could systematically block racial legislation, came to play a crucial
role. Preliminary steps for racial integration were taken during World War II
and followed by Truman's integration of the armed forces.
Under the chairmanship of Earl Warren, Eisenhower's newly appointed Supreme
Court president, the court declared in 1954 that racial segregation in the
school system was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ordered the presidency, if
necessary, by force to enforce profound changes in the Southern States. The
legal basis for this overthrow of the federal system was a change in the
understanding of the first ten constitutional amendments in the light of the
14th Constitutional Amendment, which after the Civil War guaranteed all citizens
regardless of race equal legal conditions and equal political conditions. The
Federal Constitution thus became the protection of citizens against
discrimination in the Länder. The Supreme Court's protection of the individual
was extended in several directions, eg to legal certainty for the accused
(Miranda vs. Arizona, 1966, see Miranda warning), the prohibition of prayer in
public schools (1963) and the right of women to abortion (Roe vs. Wade, 1973)
as an extension of the right to privacy (Griswold vs. Connecticut, 1965).
The New Deal experience of a broader popular reform program, which was
partially overridden by military mobilization, was repeated twice. Truman's
domestic policy program, the Fair Deal, which was to ensure full employment,
public health insurance and greater federal aid for school and education, was
overthrown by the Korean War (1950-1953). Eisenhower's successor, President John
F. Kennedy (1961-1963) of the Democratic Party, launched the New Frontier,
which had both a domestic and a foreign policy side. The United States supported
a failed counter-revolution in Cuba, later the confrontation with the USSR
followed during the Cuba crisis, and finally began a space race that in 1969
brought the first man to the Moon. Following the assassination of Kennedy in
1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969) launched the Great Society
program, which initiated significant expansions of the New Deal framework for
social policy, including health care reform for the elderly and a war on
poverty, along with equal rights legislation, which finally opened the
polling stations in the South for African American citizens. However, Johnson's
social reform programs were soon politically engulfed and economically exploited
by the Vietnam War (1964-1975).
Against this background, new political movements emerged on the fringes of or
outside the political party system. The labor movement, which had played an
active role in the 1930's, was stifled by the Taft-Hartley Labor Relations
Act (1947), which introduced federal regulation of the labor movement. The two
movements that had the greatest impact were based on protest rather than
reform. They came from the least favored group, namely black Americans, and from
the most favored group, young students, who, by virtue of the
technologicalization and economic development of society, were destined to
occupy privileged positions as middle leaders in the new world power.
There was a significant correlation between the two movements. Many students
who in 1964 demonstrated for Free speech at Berkeley University in San
Francisco had participated in the work to combat racial oppression in the
Southern States. Students who staged sit-in strikes in protest of the Vietnam
War had learned from black college students who, in 1960 in Greensboro, North
Carolina, had refused to move from the cafeteria counter before being
served. The whole form of action, civil disobedience, whose idea was openly
challenging power and authorities in the name of political rights, was inspired
by black culture of resistance, whose best-known advocate was Martin Luther
King. The protest movements reflected a democratization that recalled the
revolution's struggle against British state power. Protest was a project that
opened the political space for new actors, new forms of action and new ways of
experiencing politics.
The State System in Crisis, 1968-1980
1968 came to stand as a dramatic opposite to 1929. Where the economic
collapse of 1929 triggered a political crisis, the crisis of 1968 was triggered
by a military foreplay, a large-scale attack on U.S. bases throughout South
Vietnam. The attack, which was largely filmed and televised worldwide, turned
World War II image coverage upside down. Ordinary American soldiers no longer
appeared as liberators, but as oppressors in a distant land with a foreign
culture that fought with deathly contempt for the enormous technological
superiority of the United States.
The entire military-industrial and high-tech complex and its close connection
with the universities, for example through research projects and the recruitment
of reserve officers, were drawn into the political critique of the Vietnam
War. African-American relations were also linked to US repression of third-world
national self-determination. Massive riots at many universities were followed by
bloody ghetto uprisings when Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4,
1968. Shortly afterwards, Robert F. Kennedy, who was critical of a continuation
of the Vietnam War, was assassinated like his brother five years earlier. During
the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, a police showdown with protesters in
the streets was broadcast alongside clips from the congressional hearings.
The election brought Republican Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon to
power. Nixon, along with California Gov. Ronald Reagan, realized that the
polarization of American politics could be used to consolidate control of the
Southern States and to cut into the workers' voices in the cities of the
Northern States. The government sought an active policy of confrontation with
the students of the higher education institutions, who in the spring of 1970
protested against the expansion of the Vietnam War with invasion of Cambodia and
in 1971 with the invasion of Laos.
1968-1980 was the crisis year of the presidency, marked by a systematic
popular humiliation of incumbent presidents. Since the days of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, a sitting president had seemed certain of re-election. Johnson,
however, was forced to give up defending his Vietnam policy in 1968. Nixon was
re-elected by a large majority in 1972, but had already compromised deeply
during the election campaign. In August 1974, he resigned after the
extensive Watergate case that exposed political corruption and cynicism in the
White House of unprecedented proportions. Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, was
ousted by voters in 1976, and Democrat Jimmy Carter was humiliated in 1980 by
Republican Ronald Reagan., a pattern that could be interpreted as a ritual
sacrifice of the republic's highest symbol of power. In addition, there was a
large trade deficit, high inflation, unemployment of up to 10 percent, rising
social spending and a large budget deficit. A nuclear accident on Three Mile
Island called into question the entire high-tech apparatus, a humiliating
hostage affair in Tehran that stretched from November 1979 to January 1981
created uncertainty among conservatives as to whether the United States had the
political backbone to meet its international obligations.
The Reagan Revolution, 1981-1989
The crisis was presented systematically and urgently through the media as a
matter of saving not democracy, not even a popular form of government, but an
active state. Republican Ronald Reagan led his election campaign in 1980 as a
matter of relieving the state of the many obligations imposed on it by welfare
programs, labor market regulation, and environmental legislation. The economic
problems were due to over-taxation and public spending. Reagan argued that a
stronger state power could be built on free initiative and a government kept on
short leash. "The government," he argued, "is not part of the solution, but part
of the problem" for the United States.
With this, Reagan and his successor, George Bush, introduced a new form of
conservatism that quickly gained ground not only in the Republican and
Democratic Party, but also in the news media that brought together the political
news media in the 1980's and 1990's and - interpretation on fewer and fewer
hands. Historically, conservatism had been skeptical of dramatic societal
changes that threatened inherited privileges, religious beliefs, habits, and
reverence for established institutions; reaganism proved capable of combining
nostalgic references to a pre-industrial America with a confession to intensive
and capital-intensive technological change processes.
In both domestic and foreign policy, it looked as if the state was in the
process of strengthening its power of action by electing new allies, such as the
higher income groups instead of the lower ones, business leaders instead of
trade unions and technological progress instead of broad education reforms.. A new
federalism aimed to leave many social programs to the individual states
while linking large corporations and strong national interest groups closer to
the state. The outward symbol of this was the creation of thousands of
representations and lobbying firms in Washington, DC The purpose of this was to
put influential firms and groups in more personal contact with government
officials and members of Congress. Where the liberal culture of the United
States had previously placed the emphasis on open and publicfor action,
the new practice can be described as an increasing confidence in during action
in informal networks, possibly. supplemented with the support of PR agencies,
which proved able to raise waves in the opinion polls. Rules for supporting
parties and candidates were changed in 1974 due to the illegalities of the Nixon
administration. The new rules enabled a more systematic and cash investment in
election campaigns. In reality, therefore, it was not necessarily the state
power that chose new allies, but the strongest and best organized groups in
civil society that chose a new state.
Such a pattern could also be observed in US foreign policy, where rebuilding
military prestige and capabilities became a major concern after the end of the
Vietnam War in 1975. The Reagan administration, like Nixon, was prepared to cut
ties with burdensome client states. The decision to send troops to Lebanon in
1983 to stabilize the situation was quickly reversed after a terrorist attack
that killed 260 marines. Instead, an overwhelming force was sent to Grenada, a
small Caribbean island whose government was suspected of being under Cuban
influence. As made clear during the Iran-contra affair, a key word for foreign
policy planning was now credible deniability, the ability to credibly
deny a secret effort in violation of public statements and public law. The
simple ideological confrontation between freedom and tyranny that had been a
major theme during the Cold War was being replaced by far more complex and
conflicting considerations.
After Reagan
The dissolution of the Soviet Union further strengthened the role of the
military. Reagan's successor, President George Bush (1989-1993), intervened
in Panama in 1989, and the 1991 Gulf War underscored the United States' ability
to unite both European and Arab countries against Iraq, which had invaded the
oil-rich Kuwait in 1990. The result was a triumph for high-tech
warfare. Despite the victory over Iraq, Bush lost the 1992 election to the
Democratic governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who made the Bush years'
weakening of the economy the main theme of the election. The election result did
not reflect a shift in the political climate, but, as in 1912, the presence of a
third candidate, the independent H. Ross Perot, which secured 19 percent of the
vote, most presumably sourced from the Republican Party. Clinton was a new
Democrat who had both media coverage and an organization that had learned a
lot from Republicans' use of new election campaign techniques, media control (spin)
and campaign fundraising among business interests. Clinton himself and his vice
president, Al Gore, stood politically close to the heaviest interest groups,
while Clinton's wife, Hillary Clinton, marked a closer connection to grassroots
movements and organized minority groups with roots back in the 1960's.
Historical overview |
ca. 60,000-35,000 fvt |
the ancestors of the Indians immigrated from Northeast
Asia |
approx. 700 fvt-500 evt |
Adena and Hopewell cultures prevalent in eastern and midwestern
North America |
approx. 300 fvt-1350 evt |
The Hohokam culture in the southwest is developing an irrigation
farm; The Mogollon culture prevalent in the mountainous region of
present-day New Mexico and Arizona |
approx. 100 fvt-1300 evt |
Anasazikulturen; agricultural culture and later urban culture in
southwestern North America; hopi and the pueblo indians are considered
their descendants today |
approx. 1000 |
Leif the Happy arrives from Greenland to Newfoundland |
1500's |
Spain establishes itself in Mexico and Central America |
17th century |
the southwestern parts of North America come under Spanish
rule; English and French colonization in the eastern part of North
America |
1607 |
in Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent British colony is
established in North America |
1754-1763 |
The Franco-Indian War; British rule in North America expanded with
the French colonies east of the Mississippi and Canada |
1775-1783 |
The American Revolution; Britain recognized the independence of the
United States at the Peace of Paris in 1783 |
1776 |
declaration of independence of the 13 British colonies; the
following year, the Confederate Articles, the first constitution of the
United States, are drafted |
1789 |
the current constitution is created; George Washington is installed
as the first president of the United States |
1791 |
The Bill of Rights is added to the Constitution |
1803 |
with the Louisiana purchase from France, US territory doubled |
1804 |
slavery is abolished in the Northern States |
1812-1814 |
The American-English War |
1819 |
The United States buys Florida from Spain |
1820 |
The Missouri compromise is adopted |
1823 |
The monroe doctrine is formulated; The United States declares North
and South America its sphere of influence |
1845 |
Texas is incorporated as the 28th state |
1846-1848 |
The Mexican-American War; Mexico
cedes California, Arizona and Nevada and most of New Mexico to the
United States |
1861-1865 |
The American Civil War; 1863 Lincoln proclaims the release of slaves
in the Southern States; Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 |
1862 |
The Homestead Act is passed |
1867 |
The United States buys Alaska from Russia |
1898 |
The Spanish-American War; The United States acquires
the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico; Cuba comes under US domination |
1900 |
Hawaii becomes American territory |
1917 |
The USA buys the Danish West Indies for DKK 25 million. dollars; The
United States enters World War I. |
1929 |
the stock market crash usher in the depression of the 1930's |
1933 |
The New Deal reform program is launched |
1941 |
The Lend-Lease Act is adopted; The United States renounces its
neutrality; The United States enters World War II after Japan's attack
on Pearl Harbor on December 7 |
1945 |
US atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki; The United States
becomes a founding member of the United Nations |
1947 |
The Truman doctrine is formulated; The Marshall Plan is published as
an economic reconstruction program for Europe |
1949 |
The United States is participating in the creation of NATO |
1950-1953 |
Korean War; The United States is formally leading the UN operation
against North Korea |
1954 |
The Supreme Court declares racial segregation in the school system
unconstitutional |
1962 |
The Cuban Missile Crisis |
1963 |
on November 22, John F. Kennedy is shot in Dallas, Texas |
1964 |
The Great Society Reform Program Launches; The United States
launches hostilities in Vietnam following the Tonkin Bay Resolution |
1968 |
Martin Luther King is shot on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee; on
June 5, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles |
1969 |
The United States completes its first manned lunar landing |
1970-1971 |
The United States expands the Vietnam War by
invading Cambodia and Laos |
1973 |
for the United States, the Vietnam War ends in January with the
peace agreement in Paris; two months later, the last American soldier
leaves Vietnam |
1974 |
President Richard M. Nixon resigns as a result of the Watergate
scandal |
1983 |
The United States invades Grenada |
1986 |
The Iran-contra affair |
1987 |
The United States and the Soviet Union sign the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty |
1989 |
The United States invades Panama |
1991 |
The United States is leading the international forces in the Gulf
War |
1998 |
President Bill Clinton is acquitted in the federal lawsuit against
him |
1999 |
The United States is taking part in the NATO bombing of Kosovo |
2000 |
In the presidential election on November 7, 2000, for the first time
since 1888, a president was nominated, Republican George W. Bush, who
had received fewer votes than his opponent, Democrat Al Gore. The reason
for this was the United States' special electoral system |
2001 |
terrorist attacks on September 11 at the World Trade Center in New
York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. A US-led coalition attacks
Afghanistan and forces the Taliban regime out of power |
2003 |
The United States is invading Iraq |
2008 |
Barack Obama is the first African-American to win a US presidential
election |
2010 |
the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") health reform is implemented |
2016 |
building king and reality TV star Donald Trump wins presidential
election |
Clinton was also a strong presidential candidate in 1996, but as head of
government, he often confused traditional Democratic electorate with his attacks
on welfare legislation, while welding his opponents together. Led by the
religious Republican right, Clinton was portrayed as a diabolical symbol of
immorality and pleasure-seeking, an embodiment of the 1960's in which the people
had betrayed state power. Clinton's opponents even found it difficult to forgive
him for his long and steady economic progress, which coincided with the economic
downturn of economic competitors such as Germany and Japan. Unemployment fell
sharply, and for the first time in a generation, it led to a surplus in the
state budget and the settlement of the huge government debt that had been
accumulated under Reagan.
Clinton's presidency convincingly demonstrated that the state power planned
by Nixon, introduced by Reagan and consolidated by Bush, could now also exist
under a Democratic president. Clinton pursued a foreign policy that continued a
high level of preparedness and large investments in new military technology. He
continued the bombing of Iraq and hesitated to involve US troops in long-term
engagements. He quickly withdrew from Somalia in 1993, but expanded NATO and
tied US troops in Bosnia in 1996 and Kosovo in 1999.
Domestic policy was marked by bitterness that was even capable of paralyzing
government. Clinton's most important reform plan was a proposal for health
insurance that would guarantee medical care to all citizens by combining private
health insurance with federal price controls. Although the major insurance
companies initially supported the idea, a counter-agitation soon began, which
animated Republican core interests. The result was a humiliating defeat,
recorded in the 1994 midterm elections, when Republicans gained a majority in
both houses of Congress through a comprehensive privatization program, Contract
with America.
The second episode followed around the turn of the year 1995. The Republican
majority, disciplined by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt
Gingrich (b. 1943), felt strong enough to refuse the adoption of the 1996 state
budget, an unprecedented event. Gingrich proclaimed a temporary closure of
the government, a telling contrast to Franklin Roosevelt's bank holiday some
60 years earlier. Budget balance became a conservative watchword for
cutting public social benefits that the New Deal had institutionalized.
The third paralysis took the form of interrogation by the president for lying
about his relationship with a secretary, Monica Lewinsky (b. 1973). The case,
which predictably ended with the president's acquittal, took place shortly after
the 1998 midterm elections, when Republicans, despite minor setbacks, retained
the majority in Congress. All three events, however, went far beyond party
political screenings. They were led by a Republican right wing that described
itself as a revolution aimed at the New Deal policy's involvement of broad
groups - the poor, minorities and education seekers.
The new state, whose main pillars were a competitive economy, a strong
military and a centralized media structure, stood at the turn of the millennium
with undisputed global leadership. The United States rightly saw itself as the
most important defender of liberal governance in the 20th century and a free
market against totalitarian regimes. However, the new basis of power did not
hold much room for popular participation, and the representative political
system changed from election campaigns with intensive use of cheap or voluntary
labor to capital-intensive media campaigns. Despite easier access to election
registration and despite large investments in television ads in the 1990's, only
approximately half of the voters it worthwhile to participate in the presidential
election, and just over 1/3 to participate in the
midterm elections.
Terror and war
Though despised and demonized by his political opponents, after eight years
in the presidency, Bill Clinton was able to leave the White House with good
opinion polls. The successor, George W. Bush, who in one of the most
controversial elections in American history had defeated Clinton's vice
president, Al Gore, had presented himself to voters as a center-right Republican
politician. However, it soon became apparent that the new president was
ideologically on the right wing of his party. Bush put together a government
dominated by former directors, several of whom - like the president himself -
came from the oil industry. Extensive tax cuts, increased energy supply, easing
of environmental legislation and other state control of business and a school
reform were at the top of the domestic policy agenda, while the construction of
a so-called missile shield, SDI, and a restriction of US international
obligations dominated the government's foreign policy. The latter objective
manifested itself in rejection of a number of international conventions on
climate and arms control. As relations with a number of traditional allies,
including the other NATO countries, became more tense, the United States forged
stronger ties with new strategic partners, primarily Russia. Following a
unilateral US denunciation of the ABM Treaty in December 2001, the Presidents of
the two countries agreed in May 2002 on a major reduction in nuclear arsenals.
On September 11, 2001, the United States was hit by the world's bloodiest
terrorist act to date. It suddenly changed the political agenda in the United
States. The Bush administration now made the fight against international
terrorism and the strengthening of national security its main political
objectives. The defense budget, which was originally supposed to have been cut,
was instead greatly increased. The military part of the fight against terrorism
began the following month, when the United States, along with a number of
allies, attacked targets in Afghanistan, where the fundamentalist Taliban regime
housed the al-Qaeda network. See also Afghanistan.
Following the defeat of the Taliban regime, the US government turned its
attention to Iraq, which it accused of continuing to manufacture weapons of mass
destruction and complicity in terrorism. The attempt to create broad
international support for a possible military attacks on the country did not
succeed, however, although a number of countries,
including Britain, Spain, Poland and Denmark, backed the hard US line against
Iraq and the possibility of a US-British attack.
The revelations of serious negligence on the part of the FBI and
the CIA leading up to the terrorist attack contributed to President Bush in the
summer of 2002 presenting plans for the largest restructuring of the federal
bureaucracy since the beginning of the Cold War. A large number of public
authorities with approximately 170,000 employees would in future work under a
new Ministry of Security, Department of Homeland Security. However, this did
not apply to the CIA and the FBI, which should have increased powers of
surveillance and interception.
The post-2001 economic recession and the financial scandals of some of the
country's largest companies were supplemented in the public debate by cases from
President and Vice President Dick Cheney's past as business leaders. Although
President Bush in the summer of 2002 continued to have strong support in the
polls, the economic downturn and a heated debate about ethics among the leaders
of the major US corporations began to erode popularity.
After a very active effort by President Bush, in November 2002, his party,
the Republican Party, succeeded in winning a majority in both houses of
Congress. The US economy remained weak, which would normally call for a decline
in the president's party, but the "war on terror" remained the dominant theme on
the political agenda, and George W. Bush effectively used his status as "war
president" for to strengthen his party. The conquest of Congress, in turn, paved
the way for the president's conservative reforms, including several major tax
cuts.
In foreign policy, the desire to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq
remained a key goal of the Bush administration. Despite serious divisions
between the United States and a number of its traditional allies in Europe, and
despite a lack of mandate from the UN Security Council, US-led forces attacked
Iraq on March 20, 2003. On May 1, the president declared the actual fighting
over.
However, securing peace in Iraq should prove far more difficult. The ensuing
chaos, continued American losses, and the fact that no weapons of mass
destruction were found in the country gradually undermined support for the war
among the American people. Three years later, there were still about 150,000
American soldiers in Iraq, the violence had not yet subsided, and the danger of
a real civil war between the country's various ethnic and religious groups was
imminent.
When the Americans went to the presidential election in November 2004, the
political fronts had been pulled up hard. President Bush's Democratic
counterpart was Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. Questions about the role
of religion in political life, the country's economic course, environmental
issues, and not least the role and reputation of the United States in the
international community, gave both the major parties and their voters a sense
that much was at stake. Never before have so many Americans voted in an
election.
In the end, the dominant questions about the conduct of national security
President George W. Bush secured a narrow victory and thus four more years in
the White House. He saw the victory as a mandate for a number of major domestic
policy reforms, first and foremost a partial privatization of the National
Pension (Social Security). Opposition to this reform, however, proved to be
massive. The defeat was the beginning of a long period of burdensome political
cases, including abuse of office among some of the president's closest
associates and the NSA's intelligence services.illegal wiretapping of US
citizens. At the same time, President Bush had to see a steadily declining curve
in his polls. Among the events that eroded the popularity the most was the
federal authorities' fumbling handling of the violent consequences of
Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.
In the autumn of 2008, it became clear that the United States was also in a
serious economic crisis. Falling house prices and bad loans led to a financial
crisis, in which several of the big banks on Wall Street succumbed and the state
had to step in with a subsidy of 700 billion. dollars to save the banking
sector. Many companies went bankrupt and unemployment began to rise
sharply. Serious questions have been asked about the economic policy pursued so
far. The crisis intensified dissatisfaction with the Bush administration, and in
the November 2008 election, Democratic candidate Barack Obama won convincingly
over Republican candidate John McCain.. Obama thus became the first African
American to win a US presidential election. At his inauguration in January 2008,
Obama faced colossal challenges: two unfinished wars and the most serious
economic crisis since World War II.
The Obama years
After his inauguration, President Obama passed legislation that would further
stimulate the troubled US economy and save jobs, among other things. in the
hard-pressed car industry. Here alone, public loans (all of which were later
repaid) managed to save about 1.5 million jobs. However, getting the US economy
back on track was a long tough move. By the time of Obama's inauguration, the
United States had lost about 800,000 jobs a month, and by the time this negative
spiral was reversed, about 8 million Americans had lost their jobs. Many also
had to see their savings shrink, and millions had to admit that their house was
worth less than the debt they had in it. Therefore, it also aroused particular
anger among many that the financial sector, where the crisis had begun, got out
of it the fastest with the help of the federal government. As developments
reversed, the United States experienced 83 months of uninterrupted economic
growth under President Obama. It was the longest period of growth so far in the
history of the nation, although growth was modest. For the majority of
Americans, it was not until the last few years of Obama's tenure that their real
wages rose sharply again.
The Obama years were - as in previous years - marked by a strong political
polarization. Despite President Obama expressing a desire to bring the parties
together, the Republican opposition became rather radicalized after his
inauguration. A particularly marked new phenomenon on the right wing was the
so-called Tea Party movement, who protested against what it considered excessive
state interference in the economy. The movement went especially after
center-right Republicans in Congress, thus helping to push the party further to
the right. One of the consequences was a series of confrontations between the
president and Republicans in Congress that refused to raise the so-called debt
ceiling so that the United States could pay its creditors unless they in turn
received sharp cuts in a number of public spending. This unusual political
gambling because of money that Congress itself had granted and used resulted,
among other things, in downgrading the creditworthiness of the United States.
Despite the Republican leader in the Senate declaring that his primary
political goal was to prevent President Obama's re-election, he nevertheless
defeated Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in November 2012.
However, the battle between the president and the Republican opposition in
Congress continued unabated.. In October 2013, the federal government had to
partially shut down for nearly two weeks when Republicans refused to raise the
debt ceiling and allocate funds for its continued operation. However, the
blackmail of the president failed, and Republicans subsequently had to accept
some tax increases for the richest Americans.
Among Republicans, the Tea Party movement remained a political factor, but
also on the left, the financial crisis created a new political movement in the
Obama years. It called itself Occupy Wall Street and claimed to
represent "the 99 percent" of Americans against the one richest percent who in
those years accounted for most of the prosperity increase. When the declared
Democratic Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders up for the 2016 presidential
election successfully challenged Hillary Clinton, who was otherwise a clear
favorite to become the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, it was largely
the energy that the Occupy Wall Street movement had created that he channeled
into the election campaign. In particular, many young progressive voters felt
that Hillary Clinton, as a former New York senator, was too center-right and too
close to Wall Street, and they wanted to push the party to the left.
As for President Obama's domestic policy program, despite fierce political
opposition, the president has succeeded in creating significant political
results. The most important milestone remained The Affordable Care Act, adopted
in 2010, and quickly known as "Obamacare". Conservative opposition to the law
continued throughout Obama's years as president, and even after he left the
White House on January 20, 2017. Many Republican politicians made the promise of
abolishing "Obamacare" their top priority. As many as 60 times Republicans in
the House of Representatives voted for the abolition of the law, but without
success. Not even after Republicans won a slim majority in the Senate in the
2014 midterm elections did they succeed in repealing the law. The law's order
that all citizens must buy health insurance if they do not have it, but in
return can not be rejected by the insurance companies and can also receive
subsidies from the state, was also tried along the way by the Supreme Court. In
June 2015, the latter ruled that the law was in accordance with the
Constitution.
The right to health insurance was not the only area in which a Supreme Court
ruling became crucial. Also in June 2015, a ruling by the Supreme Court secured
the constitutional right of homosexuals to marry in all 50 states. Three other
issues that left a marked mark on the public debate in the Obama years were
immigration, free access to firearms, and the challenge of global climate
change. None of these problems were new. In both parties, there were politicians
who believed that the illegal immigrants, many of whom had lived most of their
lives in the United States, should have a path to legal status, but the idea
also spawned fierce opposition. The debate over possible restrictions on access
to firearms - or at least greater control over who owned them - was brought up
several times by tragic mass shootings, in several cases committed by the
mentally ill. A large majority of the American people supported better
registration of weapons or restrictions on access to certain types of weapons
and ammunition, but opponents of such restrictions were well-organized and
managed, to President Obama's great frustration, to curb all such measures.
As for climate and the environment, it proved impossible for President Obama
to get legislation passed in Congress. In return, he succeeded in implementing
comprehensive environmental regulation by means of presidential decrees
(executive orders), as well as by having the Ministry of the Environment
(Environmental Protection Agency) tighten the environmental requirements for the
individual states. President Obama also made extensive use of the opportunity to
conserve large areas of nature and support the development and spread of
renewable energy. At the same time, new major discoveries of natural gas helped
reduce US dependence on oil. The president could also take some of the credit
for the international climate agreement, of which both the United States and the
world's second largest economy, China, co - signed in December 2015.
Conflicts between national security and individual freedoms, including
privacy, also left a clear mark on the public debate in the Obama years - not
least when a former employee of one of the US security services, Edward
Snowden, revealed in June 2013 that the government collected comprehensive data
on ordinary American telephone conversations. Other documents published
by WikiLeaks also came to dominate the debate - not least during the 2016
presidential campaign, where thousands of pages from, among others, the
Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's campaign leader were published -
allegedly with the help of Russia, which intervened in the election campaign.
Barack Obama had taken over the presidency in 2009 with promises to end US
engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was the intention of the Obama
administration to use more of its foreign policy resources in the Pacific, which
also accounted for an increasing share of U.S. trade, and fewer economic and
military in the Middle East. It turned out to be unexpectedly
difficult. Admittedly, the United States withdrew its combat troops from Iraq in
December 2011, and efforts in Afghanistan were sharply downplayed, but this led
to new conflicts and security threats, of which the emergence of Islamic State
(ISIS) was the largest.
An important symbolic victory in the United States' "war on terror" took
place with the killing of American elite troops on Osama bin Laden on May 2,
2011. Efforts against suspected terrorists were increasingly carried out with
drones, so-called drones. Drone attacks were carried out in Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Yemen. However, the attacks were criticized for also causing
civilian casualties and helped stimulate anti-American sentiment in the
countries affected.
The NATO intervention that in 2011 removed Muammar Gaddafifrom power in
Libya, got far from the aftermath that President Obama and the leaders of the
other participating countries had expected. The US president considered it a
serious foreign policy mistake that the aftermath had not been better
prepared. It was also a contributing factor to his hesitation as the devastating
human costs of the civil war in Syria in the summer of 2013 prompted many to
urge the US government to intervene militarily. The direct cause was the use of
chemical weapons by the Syrian government, and President Obama himself had
declared the year before that such use constituted a "red line" which, if
crossed, would trigger a US military response. The president hesitated, also
because he could not get support from Congress or from the United States' close
ally Britain.
The US international role also became a major theme during the long election
campaign leading up to the 2016 presidential election. In perhaps the most
surprising development in any US election campaign, businessman and reality
star Donald J. Trumpthe presidential candidate of the Republican Party. The
Democratic Party's candidate was former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of
State Hillary R. Clinton. While representing a view of the United States 'role
as a leading power in a world order characterized by liberal international
organizations, Donald Trump advocated a foreign policy that narrowed the United
States' international role and defined its economic and security interests more
narrowly, including: through increased protectionism. Trump reused the
isolationist slogan from before the United States entered World War II: "America
First."
Hillary Clinton was the big favorite to win the presidential election on
November 8, 2016, but the most unusual election campaign in American history
also ended in the most surprising election result: Donald J. Trump became the
45th president of the United States. Admittedly, Hillary Clinton got 3.1
million. more votes than him, but Trump won a majority of the so-called
electoral votes that decide U.S. presidential elections (304 against 232). Every
change of president offers both new opportunities and unexpected problems, but
with Donald J. Trump in the White House, the United States moved even more than
in previous changes of power into unknown waters.
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