AP US History: DBQ Cold War and United State Society

DOCUMENT 1
If the civilized world as we know it today is to survive, the gigantic power which man has acquired through atomic energy must be matched by spiritual strength of greater magnitude. All mankind now stands in the doorway to destruction--or upon the threshold of the greatest age in history. And I prefer to face that great age. Only a high moral standard can master this new power of the universe, and develop it for the common good.

When the sages and the scientists, the philosophers and the statesman, have all exhausted their studies of atomic energy, one solution and only one solution will remain--the substitution of decency and reason and brotherhood for the rule of force in the government of man.

DOCUMENT 2
It has not been the less fortunate, or members of minority groups who have been traitorous to this Nation, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest Nation on earth has had to offer . . . the finest homes, the finest college education and the finest jobs in government we can give. 
I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department. . .
As you know, very recently the Secretary of State proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes—being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust—high treason. . .

DOCUMENT 3

There was a turtle by the name of Bert

and Bert the turtle was very alert;

when danger threatened him he never got hurt

5

he knew just what to do ... 

He'd duck! [gasp]

And cover!

Duck! [gasp]

And cover!

10

(male) He did what we all must learn to do

(male) You (female) And you (male) And you (deeper male) And you!

[bang, gasp] Duck, and cover!

DOCUMENT 4
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

DOCUMENT 5
Protect your family with an All Purpose Fallout Shelter!
In Your Basement
Preparedness is today’s greatest form of true life insurance! Leading scientists agree every dwelling should have a nuclear fallout shelter, such as ours, conforming to the recommendations of the Office of Defense and Civilian Mobilization. 
Scientists say 9 out of 10 persons without shelters would perish in the event of a direct nuclear attack, and, 8 out of 10 persons would be saved in the security of a fallout shelter. 
Our fallout shelter serves as a dual purpose, too. It offers complete protection from severe storms and tornadoes. 

DOCUMENT 6

Now the sun has come to earth

Shrouded in a mushroom cloud of death

Death comes in a blinding flash

5

Of hellish heat and leaves a smear of ash

And the sun has come to earth

Now the sun has disappeared

All is darkness, anger, pain and fear

10

Twisted sightless wrecks of men

Go groping on their knees and cry in pain

And the sun has disappeared

DOCUMENT 7
Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.