Thematic Essay Practice – Turning Points
US History/Napp Name: ______
From the June 2006 New York States Regents/ U.S. History Government
THEMATIC ESSAY QUESTION
Directions: Write a well-organized essay that includes an introduction, several paragraphs addressing the task below, and a conclusion.
Theme: Turning Points
Task:
Some suggestions you might wish to consider include the signing of the Declaration of Independence (1776), end of Reconstruction (1877), Henry Ford’s use of the assembly line (1913), United States entry into World War I (1917), Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964), and the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989).
Gathering the Facts:
1- Signing the Declaration of Independence (1776)
· “Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, the Declaration of Independence is at once the nation’s most cherished symbol of liberty and Jefferson’s most enduring monument.
· Here, in exalted and unforgettable phrases, Jefferson expressed the convictions in the minds and hearts of the American people.
· The political philosophy of the Declaration was not new; its ideals of individual liberty had already been expressed by John Locke and the Continental philosophers.
· What Jefferson did was to summarize this philosophy in ‘self-evident truths’ and set forth a list of grievances against the King in order to justify before the world the breaking of ties between the colonies and the mother country.” ~ archives.gov
· “By issuing the Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the 13 American colonies severed their political connections to Great Britain.
· The Declaration summarized the colonists’ motivations for seeking their independence.
· By declaring themselves an independent nation, the American colonists were able to conclude an official alliance with the government of France and obtain French assistance in the war against Great Britain.” ~ history.state.gov
2- End of Reconstruction (1877)
· “President Hayes kept his campaign promise to remove federal troops from the South, ending the period known as Reconstruction.
· The order was given on May 1st, 1877.
· The decision to end Reconstruction and return the rule to Southerners, soon resulted in the disenfranchisement of the Blacks in the South.
· President Hayes promised to withdraw federal troops from the South if he became President.
· He kept his promise, thus ending the Era of Reconstruction in the South.
· The end of Reconstruction returned control of the government in the South to the white southerners who promptly disenfranchised African-Americans.
· In 1882, ex-slave Frederick Douglass probably put it best when he wrote: ‘Though slavery was abolished, the wrongs of my people were not ended. Though they were slaves, they were not yet quite free. No man can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon the thoughts, feeling, and actions of others, and who has himself no means in his own hands for guarding, protecting, defending, and maintaining that liberty. Yet the Negro after his emancipation was precisely in this state of destitution. He was free from the individual master but the slave of society. He had neither money, property, nor friends. He was free from the old plantation, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave to the rains of summer and the frost of winter. He was in a word, literally tuned loose, naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky.’
· It was not until the late 1960's that African-Americans in the South would achieve the legal rights, and not until the 1980’s that they would regain the political power they had obtained under Reconstruction.” ~historycentral.com
3- Henry Ford’s Use of the Assembly Line (1913)
· “In 1907, Henry Ford announced his goal for the Ford Motor Company: to create ‘a motor car for the great multitude.’
· At that time, automobiles were expensive, custom-made machines.
· Ford’s engineers took the first step towards this goal by designing the Model T, a simple, sturdy car, offering no factory options – not even a choice of color.
· The Model T, first produced in 1908, kept the same design until the last one – number 15,000,000 – rolled off the line in 1927.
· From the start, the Model T was less expensive than most other cars, but it was still not attainable for the ‘multitude.’
· Ford realized he’d need a more efficient way to produce the car in order to lower the price.
· He and his team looked at other industries and found four principles that would further their goal: interchangeable parts, continuous flow, division of labor, and reducing wasted effort.
· Using interchangeable parts meant making the individual pieces of the car the same every time.
· That way any valve would fit any engine, any steering wheel would fit any chassis.
· This meant improving the machinery and cutting tools used to make the parts.
· But once the machines were adjusted, a low-skilled laborer could operate them, replacing the skilled craftsperson who formerly made the parts by hand.
· To improve the flow of the work, it needed to be arranged so that as one task was finished, another began, with minimum time spent in set-up.
· Ford was inspired by the meat-packing houses of Chicago and a grain mill conveyor belt he had seen.
· If he brought the work to the workers, they spent less time moving about.
· Then he divided the labor by breaking the assembly of the Model T into 84 distinct steps.
· Each worker was trained to do just one of these steps.
· Ford called in Frederick Taylor, the creator of ‘scientific management,’ to do time and motion studies to determine the exact speed at which the work should proceed and the exact motions workers should use to accomplish their tasks.
· Ford put these principles into play gradually over five years, fine-tuning and testing as he went along.
· In 1913, they came together in the first moving assembly line ever used for large-scale manufacturing.
· Ford produced cars at a record-breaking rate.
· That meant he could lower the price and still make a good profit by selling more cars.
· Ford had another notion, rather original in its time: the workers were also potential consumers!
· In 1914, Ford workers’ wages were raised to $5 a day – an excellent wage – and they soon proved him right by buying their own Model Ts.
· Ford was called ‘a traitor to his class’ by other industrialists and professionals, but he held firm in believing that well-paid workers would put up with dull work, be loyal, and buy his cars.
· Ford’s manufacturing principles were adopted by countless other industries.
· Henry Ford went beyond his 1907 goal of making cars affordable for all; he changed the habits of a nation, and shaped its very character.” ~ pbs.org
4- United States entry into World War I (1917)
· “On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany.
· Wilson cited Germany’s violation of its pledge to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and its attempts to entice Mexico into an alliance against the United States, as his reasons for declaring war.
· On April 4, 1917, the U.S. Senate voted in support of the measure to declare war on Germany. The House concurred two days later. The United States later declared war on Austria-Hungary on December 7, 1917.
· Germany’s resumption of submarine attacks on passenger and merchant ships in 1917 was the primary motivation behind Wilson’s decision to lead the United States into World War I.” ~ history.state.gov
5- Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954)
· “Brown v. Board of Education (1954), now acknowledged as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century, unanimously held that the racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
· In 1954, large portions of the United States had racially segregated schools, made legal by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that segregated public facilities were constitutional so long as the black and white facilities were equal to each other.
· However, by the mid-twentieth century, civil rights groups set up legal and political, challenges to racial segregation.
· Brown v. Board of Education was filed against the Topeka, Kansas school board by representative-plaintiff Oliver Brown, parent of one of the children denied access to Topeka’s white schools.
· Brown claimed that Topeka’s racial segregation violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause because the city’s black and white schools were not equal to each other and never could be.
· The federal district court dismissed his claim, ruling that the segregated public schools were ‘substantially’ equal enough to be constitutional under the Plessy doctrine.
· Brown appealed to the Supreme Court, which consolidated and then reviewed all the school segregation actions together.
· Thurgood Marshall, who would in 1967 be appointed the first black justice of the Court, was chief counsel for the plaintiffs.
· Thanks to the astute leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court spoke in a unanimous decision written by Warren himself.
· The decision held that racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that ‘no state shall make or enforce any law which shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’
· Public education in the 20th century, said the Court, had become an essential component of a citizen’s public life, forming the basis of democratic citizenship, normal socialization, and professional training.
· In this context, any child denied a good education would be unlikely to succeed in life.
· Where a state, therefore, has undertaken to provide universal education, such education becomes a right that must be afforded equally to both blacks and whites.
· Were the black and white schools "substantially" equal to each other, as the lower courts had found? After reviewing psychological studies showing black girls in segregated schools had low racial self-esteem, the Court concluded that separating children on the basis of race creates dangerous inferiority complexes that may adversely affect black children’s ability to learn.
· The Court concluded that, even if the tangible facilities were equal between the black and white schools, racial segregation in schools is ‘inherently unequal’ and is thus always unconstitutional.
· At least in the context of public schools, Plessy v. Ferguson was overruled.
· In the Brown II case a decided year later, the Court ordered the states to integrate their schools ‘with all deliberate speed.’”
6- Passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964)
· “The United States Congress overwhelming approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Lyndon B. Johnson nearly unlimited powers to oppose ‘communist aggression’ in Southeast Asia.
· The resolution marked the beginning of an expanded military role for the United States in the Cold War battlefields of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
· By 1964, America’s ally, South Vietnam, was in serious danger of falling to a communist insurgency.
· The insurgents, aided by communist North Vietnam, controlled large areas of South Vietnam, and no amount of U.S. military aid and training seemed able to save the southern regime.
· During the presidencies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, hundreds – and then thousands – of U.S. military advisers had been sent to South Vietnam to train that nation’s military forces.
· In addition, hundreds of millions of dollars in military and economic assistance had been given to South Vietnam.
· The administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson made the decision that only direct U.S. military intervention in the conflict could turn the tide.
· However, Johnson was campaigning in the presidential election of 1964 as the ‘responsible’ candidate who would not send American troops to fight and die in Asia.
· In early August, a series of events occurred that allowed Johnson to appear statesmanlike while simultaneously expanding the U.S. role in Vietnam.
· On August 2, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.
· Johnson responded by sending in another destroyer.
· On August 4, the two destroyers reported that they were under attack.
· This time, Johnson authorized retaliatory air attacks against North Vietnam.
· He also asked Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
· This resolution declared, ‘The United States regards as vital to its national interest and to world peace the maintenance of international peace and security in Southeast Asia.’
· It also gave Johnson the right to ‘take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.’
· The House passed the resolution by a unanimous vote; the vote in the Senate was 88 to 2.
· Johnson's popularity soared in response to his ‘restrained’ handling of the crisis.
· The Johnson administration went on to use the resolution as a pretext to begin heavy bombing of North Vietnam in early 1965 and to introduce U.S. combat troops in March 1965.
· Thus began a nearly eight-year war in which over 58,000 U.S. troops died. In a wider sense, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution can be considered America’s Cold War policy toward all of Southeast Asia at the time.” ~ history.com
7- The Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989)
· “On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist Party announced a change in his city’s relations with the West.
· Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country’s borders.
· East and West Berliners flocked to the wall, drinking beer and champagne and chanting ‘Tor auf!’ (‘Open the gate!’).