Lecture Notes for Liberty Decal

What follows is the notes I lectured from during the course of this semester, for weeks two through six. These notes are far from perfect. At points, it will be impossible to get anything at all from what I wrote. Some notes reminded me what I wanted to say, but fail to have much value of their own.

The American Revolution

A War Between the States

Populism, Progressivism, and a War to End all Wars

The Swinging 20s, the New Deal, and Another War to End All Wars

The Cold War Years (only from Johnson to Reagan)

 

The American Revolution

-Tense and uneasy relationships
-Culminate in 1760
End of French power
Causes of Conflict
-Conflicts among colonies – Green Mountain Boys over land in VT
-Trade becoming very important for Britain
1700-1775 Population went from 1/4 million to 2.5 million

Economic regulation in the past

-Navigation Acts (1660-1696)
-Molasses Act (1733)
-Wool Act (1699), Hat Act (1732), Iron Acts (1750, 57)

-Political traditions

-Mixed and balanced government
-Glorious Revolution (1688-1689)
-The benefits did not translate for the colonies
-British crown had royal veto and privy council over colonial acts
-colonies didn’t have patronage and as much corruption
– colonists were used to getting what they wanted
-Salutary Neglect

-George III – wanted to restore constitutionalbalance, fight the Whig oligarchy

-French-Indian War – started by GW in 1754 finding French fortification in Pittsburg

-Ended with Treaty of Paris 1763

-Led to a debt that went from 73 m pounds to 140 m pounds

-Quartering Act (1765)
-Restraining Act (1767) – governors had to ignore legislation made by legislatures unfriendly to QA
-Proclamation of 1763 disenfranchised Catholics, unbalanced political structures, regulated Indian trade, ignored the land claims of groups such as Ohio Company

-Shit hits the fan

-Hovering Act (1763) – can search boats hovering near the water
-Sugar Act (Revenue Act) ’64 – meant to reform the Molasses Act (MA cost 7,000 pounds to administer, only pulled in $1600) – lowered duty from 6¢ to 3¢
-Currency Act (1764) – bars use of colonial currency for taxes
-Stamp Act (1765) – newspapers, pamphlets, legal papers, dice, playing cards, college degrees; doubled taxes on non-English languages, soon Repealed
-Revenue Act 66 – lowered from 3¢ to 1¢
-Townsend Duties (1767)
-Lord North repeals all of these taxes – accept on tea
-Liberty riots
-Writs of Assistance (1761) – open-ended search warrants
-Lockean view of voluntary social contract at stake
-Conspiracy against American liberty
-standing armies
-restrictions on religious freedom
-independent judiciary
-bureacracy, high taxes

-Shit hits fan again:

-Stamp Act Congress – nine colonies
-Stamp Act riots
-Sons of Liberty
-Stamp act repealed, declaratory act passed by Rockinghamites
-Boston Massacre – 5 hecklers killed in Boston. The first was Crispus Attucks. Soldiers defended by John Adams
-Tea Act (1773) – to bail out East India Tea company
-30-60 dressed as Mohawk Idians dropped 10,000 pounds of tea
-Intolerable Acts (1774) – closed town port; customs officials; Mass had to compensate company for tea
Masachusetts Government Act – subvert Mass govt.
-Quartering Act
-Response – 1st Continental Congress, Galloway Plan, Suffolk resolves
-Committees of Correspondence
-people used to rising up (Paxton Boys (PA), 1750s and 1760s; NC Regulators 1766 1771)
-Lexington and Concord 1755

Declaration of Independence

-Common Sense 1776
-how does the philosophy of freedom relate to all this?
-25,674 casualties, war ends 1781
-Loyalists paid punitive fines, more taxes; suffered property seizure disenfranchisement, banishing, execution
Constitution – the Bill of Rights
-Articles of Confederation – 1781

-problems:

-mixed and balanced government
-imperium in imperio
-1786 Shays Revellion – Mass had terrible tax policies, 80% of its prisoners tax evaders, Daniel Shays arrested

-Federalist Papers – Jay, Madison, Hamilton
-the Antifederalists
-1787 Constitutional convention

Edmund Randolph (VA plan)

-bicameral legislature, executive, chief judiciary

-can call armed forces against the states

-state officials bound by constitution

William Patterson (NJ Plan)

-slightly modified Articles
-tax states
-troops to enforce state laws

Virginia plan used as basis:

-supremacy clause and necessary and proper clause adopted unanimously

-S.C. wanted a supermajority protection against taxation, but settled on the Fugitive Slave Law

-Federalist Papers

-Republics can be small – Madison in Federalist 10.

Madison also began to argue that the citizens didn’t give sovereignty to fedgov ,only limited powers

1789 – the Bill of Rights

1791 – it’s ratified

1791 – National bank set up in Hamilton’s name

-Antifederalists

-Patrick Henry + Thomas Paine

A Revolution in Liberty

-Gordon Wood’s contagion of liberty: Religious freedom, women, slavery

-thousands freed during war

-slave trade

-Early problems –

-1794 – Whisky Rebellion

-1798 Alien and Sedition Acts

-Virginia and Kentucky Resolution

-Supreme Court:

Marbury v. Madison (1803) McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)

-Jacksonian vs. Whig mentality

-Trail of Tears

-Constitution still kept slavery and tariffs intact, and the nature of the relationship between states and federal government wasn’t completely solved. This would culminate in the bloodiest conflict in the history of our country, the War Between the States

The War Between the States

American Revolution and Constitution

1775 – Quakers Anti-slavery society

1777 – Vermont bans it

1787 – Northwest Ordinance

"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free" - Jefferson

3/5 clause and Article IV sec 2

French West Indes and Haitian insurrections (1804)

States Rights

-VA and Kentucky Resolutions

-Compact Theory

-1828 – South Carolina nullifies

Liberty and Slavery

-Abolitionism – Wiliam Lloyd Garrison – Liberator 1831 (p. 20)

-"a covenant with death and an agreement with hell"

-1833 American anti-slavery society

-Frederick Douglass

West Indes – 1833

France and Denmark – 1844

-Fireeaters – "positive good" "liberty is an evil"

-1844 Churches split on slavery issue

-slave states get worse

Slavery connected to other issues:

-mail restrictions

-gag rule

-mobs destroying printing presses

-Liberty Party – James Birney – 1840 and 1844

Politics

Whigs and Democrats

Free Soil Ideology

The American System

Politics

-Missouri Compromise – admit MO, admit Maine, south of border – Henry Clay

-Texas and Oregon

-Mexican War – new territories – David Wilmot (1846)

"Popular sovereignty" – Dem 1848 candidate Lewis Cass

1848 – Free Soil Party Martin Van Buren

1850 – (Taylor) California is free; Utah and New Mexico are popular sovereignty; Texas got some money; slave trade banned in DC; fugitive slave law was strengthened

1854- Kansas Nebraska and Stephen Douglas

Republican Party forms Whig Party falls apart

John C. Fremont – slavery and polygamy: "twin relics of barbarism"

Buchanan – Fremont – Fillmore

Kansas Nebraska Act 1854

Dred Scott: 1857

1859: John Brown’s raid

Losses of Life and Liberty During the Civil War

Clement L. Vallandigham

Was it Worth it?

Populism, Progressivism, a War to End all Wars

the 1890s

Late 1880s – Grover Cleveland

1888 – Cleveland loses to Harrison Benjamin Harrison

1892 – Grover Cleveland reelected

Government responds to populism:

Grover Cleveland:

Progressivism

Their First Success: 1898 – The Spanish American War

William Howard Taft:

Foreign Policy Legacy:

Woodrow Wilson: (beating FDR new nationalism, his new freedom succeeds)

World War I

Costs of World War I – Lives

Costs of World War I – Govt. Growth

Costs of World War I – Diplomatic Changes

The 20s, the New Deal, and World War II

The 1920s

-Harding James Cox, Debs

-1920-1921 Deflation: Price Index fell by over 2%

-Harding, Coolidge, Andrew Mellon

-America got rich throughout the 1920s

-It was great:

-Problems:

Market: 1927 boom, 1928 boom (Montgomery $117-440)

Herbert Hoover

-Black Tuesday – October 29, 1929 – 16 Million shares dropped.

$40 billion lost in stock market that year

-The Depression: 25% unemployment –

-Mellon wanted to liquidate everything

-convinced employers not to lower real wages; they hired fewer people

-Glass-Stegall Act – gave more lending power to the Federal Reserve

-Reconstruction Finance Corporation

-The Bonus Army

-FDR/Hoover election

-1933: The Nation: "Wanted: A Mussolini"

"We must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline."…"I shall ask the Congress for…broad executive power to wage war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."

-Brain Trust: socialists, semi-fascists (Hugh Johnson), labor union types, antitrusters (Felix Frankfurter),

First Hundred Days:

-Civilian Conservation Corps – useless work, had to be white

-Federal Emergency Relief Administration - $500 million direct relief. Terminated because corruption.

-Truth in Security Act

-Tennessee Valley Authority

-Public Works Administration - $4 billion

-(Raising Prices was behind the theories)

Gold Standard

AAA: Secretary of Agric could control production, acreage, marketing, licencing

NRA:

Schecter v. U.S. – NRA unconstitutional (FDR: worst opinion since Dred Scott)

U.S. v. Butler (1936) – AAA unconstitutional

1934 Firearms Act

1935 Revenue Act – raised taxes

Court Packing Scheme

1937 Marihuana Tax Act

Roosevelt Depression of 1937

-Fair Labor Standards Act – national minimum wage

-United States Housing Authority

Diplomacy

-Naval Treaties: Five Power Treaty, Four Power Treaty, Nine Power Treaty

-Kellogg-Briand Pact: 60 countries agreed not to go to war

-Hoover and FDR pulled troops out of Latin America

-lower tariffs, U.S. recognized USSR

-Stalin rising in USSR after Lenin died in 1924

-Mussolini rising in Italy

-Weimar inflation: 1913 13 marks for a pair of shoes; 1932 32 trillion marks. Hitler takes over.

-Militarists take over in Japan – the Japanese had begun taking colonies in the Pacific, because Europe was and restricting their trade.

-October 29, 1940, FDR: "I have said this before and I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."

-most Americans didn’t want to go to war.

- Japanese had conquered French Indochina, was in China

-Nazis had taken over most of Europe, not Britian, into Russia

December 7, 1941, Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, killing 2403 and wounding 1100 more.

-September 1938 – the French and British, meeting with Hitler at Munich, capitulated of his annexation of Czechoslavakia

-August 23, 1939 – Nazi Soviet Pact

-Germany invaded Poland on September 1

-Britian declared war on Germany on September 3

-Russia invaded Poland on September 17

-Germany, Italy, Japan signed a triparte alliance in September 1940

-December 1940 – Germany proceeded to attack Russia

-March 1941 – United States gives money to USSR in form of Lend Lease

-Japan:

  1. "frozen all Japanese assets in the United States
  2. imposed an oil embargo on Japan in the midst of Japan’s war against China;

(3) sent "Flying Tigers" to attack Japanese forces in China

(4) submitted a peace proposal to Japanese diplomats shortly before Pearl Harbor "

-On Nov. 26, 1941, Secretary of War Stimson wrote in his diary, "The question was how we should maneuver them into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."

-December 4, 1941 – Chicago Tribune exposes plans for U.S. to get in war

-Commander Slocum commanded Kemp Tolley to take a Filipino crew, arm it on the Lanikai, and be ready in the Pacific.

-December 7, 1941

-Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short humiliated.

May 8 – Europe war ends

-1/5 homes in Germany destroyed. 2.5 million homes in Japan destroyed.

-French suffered worse bombing from allies than damage from Nazis

-$350 billion out of world’s 4 trillion

-socialism in a pure form, the government owned the means of production

-War Powers Acts, December 18 and March 27

-Emergency Price Control Act of 1942 –

-Economic Stabilization Act – "to aid in the

-War Production Board – Donald M. Nelson

-Priority inflation

-War Labor Disputes Act

-1943 – United Mine Workers – Roosevelt seized the mines and threatened to draft the miners

-government took over Montgomery Ward, even without war jurisdiction

-1943-1945 FDR wanted to conscript workers for factory jobs

-Income Taxes (1940 –1945):

Low Bracket – 4.4% - 23% $4,000-2,000

High Bracket – 81.1% - 94% $5,000,000-$200,000

Only in 1980s did top bracket go down much past 70%

-1943 – Income Tax Withholding


Civil Liberties

-Began drafting soldiers before the United States entered the war (august 1941 it was extended by a vote of 203 to 202)

-(16 million soldiers/ten million conscripts)

-110,000 Japanese interned, in spite of J. Edgar Hoover’s insistence not to.

-Supreme Court "it is not for any court to sit in review of the wisdom of their action or substitute its judgment for theirs."

 

 

FDR: It is not a sacrifice for any man, old or youn, to be in the Army or the Navy of the United States. Rather it is a privilege. It is not a sacrifice for the industrialist or th wage-earner, the farmer of the shopkeeper, the trainman or the doctor, to pay more taxes, to buy more bonds, to forego extra profits, to work longer or harder at the task for which he is best fitted. Rather it is a privilege. It is not a sacrifice to do without the many things to which we are accustomed if the national defense calls for doing without.


Allied Atrocities

Dresden – Feb 13,14 1945, 25,000 Germans died, Stalin’s idea.

-Tokyo – March 1945 – 100,000 Japanese in Tokyo

August 6 Hiroshima – 140,000

Nagasaki – 70,000. Radiation brought it up to 140,000.
Truman: "The greatest thing in history."

*Other leaders weren't so happy about Hiroshima and Nagasaki

April 12 – Truman is president

Diplomatic Costs: Yalta and the United Nations

Feb 4, 1945

"Stalin as the mighty leader of a mighty country, which had taken the full shock of the German war machine, had broken its back and driven the tyrants from her soil."-Churchill

FDR about Stalin and Churchill’s goals: "every man, woman and child on this earth the possibility of security and well-being."

1943, to Bill Bullet, US Ambassador"I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins, Roosevelt's confidant and personal envoy to Stalin] says he's not and that he doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige — he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.." – FDR (after Stalin had annexed half of Poland , Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia)

Operation Keelhaul:

Churchill proposed:

Romania 90% USSR 10% British

Bulgaria: 75% USSR 25% British [Stalin wanted 90%]

Greece: 10% USSR, 90% British

Yugoslavia and Hungary: 50% 50%

The United Nations

The Cold War Years

Lyndon Johnson

– worked under Roosevelt as state director of National Youth Organization in Texas

-Brown and Root fraud

-scandal involving Robert Baker getting contracts for vending machine company

-used IRS against others trying to investigate him

-"I don’t want loyalty, I want loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses."

-most peacetime spending of any president

-The civil rights act (1964)

-Voting Rights Act (1965)

-24th amendment (1964)

-Medicare and Medicaid (1965)

-Older American’s Act (1965)

-Omnibus Housing Act (1968)

-Urban Development Act (1968)

-Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Act (1966)

March 16, 1964: "for the first time in history, it is possible to conquer poverty." Declared an "unconditional war on poverty"

Equal Opportunity Act (1964)

-Regional Development Act (1965)

-Head Start Act (1965)

-Higher Education Act (1965)

-Clean Water Restoration Act (1966)

-HUD

-Dept of Transportation

-NEA, NEH, Corporation for Public Broadcasting

Federal Spending On:

Education $2.3 to $10.8 billion

Health $4.1 to $13.9 billion

Disadvantaged $12.5 to $24.6

Deficit Spending:

-$25.1 billion in 1968

-raises taxes, last surplus in 1969

Vietnam:

Vietnam (Indochina) had been a French colony, occupied by Japan in 1941. FDR offered it to China. Chiang Kai-shek didn’t want it. Office of Strategic Services (later the CIA) installed Ho Chi Minh (August Revolution)

And then the U.S. supported the French who created Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos

-Russia and China armed Ho.

Johnson, August 2, 1964 – Gulf of Tonkin Resolution when Maddox was sunk

-Ran on peace platform,

 

-By 1953-1954: America paid 80% of French War Effort

8,762,000 fought in Vietnam

2,000,000 drafted

44,244 U.S. deaths in Vietnam

$106.8 billion

Nixon:

Vietnam:

$25 billion to $3 billion

troops, 550,000 to 24,000

1970 – wanted to extend draft extensions for Cambodia

Favored hand gun ban

Created the EPA

Wage and Price Contrils

Removed Gold Standard

Watergate:

Egil Krough, G. Gordon Liddy,

the plumbers broke into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist office September 3, 1971

May and June 1972 – broke into Democratic Party Headquarters

G. Gordon sentenced to 20 years

Nixon’s tapes

Archibald Cox – prosecutor

August 9, 1974 and Ford became president

Ford

Nov 7, the War Powers Resolution

Energy Policy and Conservation Act

Energy Conservation and Production Act

SALT talks

Carter

Dept of Education,

Dept of Energy

Reagan

Inspired by Thatcher

To Paul Volcker, chairman of the FED: "Why do we need a Federal Reserve at all?"

1984 Gridiron Dinner: "I’m not worried about the deficit – It’s big enough to take care of itself."

Samuel K. Doe: Chairman Mao

"It gives me great pleasure to welcome Prime Minister Lee and Mrs Lee of Singapore." "Good to see you again, Paul."

Economic Recovery Tax Act og 1981 – brought high tax rate to 50%

Tax Reform Act of 1986

By 1982 the average pensioner was collecting (in real terms) five times in benefits what he paid in taxes.

Reagan’s scheme: supposed to result in $28 billion surplus in 1986. Instead, deficit of $1,193 deficit

Farm loans, international travel restrictions, export controls