How The Cold War Affected American Society

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Though the cold war brought about McCarthyism and unnecessary fear to the American people, I believe the cold war affected American society in a more positive than negative way. During the cold war, Brown vs. the Board of Education took place which lead to the desegregation of all public schools ,this also lead to the undoing of the separate but equal doctrine. Ten years later in 1964 President LBJ signed the civil rights act. This leads me to believe, unlike wars prior where the United States went to war and came home to a nation that was “working toward civil rights for all its citizens”, the cold war cataclysmic in shaping why civil rights for all American citizens weren’t only crucial but a necessity for America to be America-the poster boy(girl) for democracy. The cold war was mainly a battle between American democracy and Soviet communism. This created a competition of …show more content…

President Truman took note of this and stated that “if the United States were to offer the ‘peoples of the world’ a ‘choice of freedom or enslavement’ it must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy”. In the early 1950s, this new view brought about: fair employment commissions which brought about more job opportunities for minorities, it also lead to laws banning discrimination and to top it off more African Americans were registering to vote! This attempt at equality didn’t stop with just African Americans; many women also saw the cold war as time that gave them a sense self-worth and freedom. Similar to WWII, women were once again in the workforce while the men were off to war, but this time many women were keeping their jobs even after the war was over. This was a fairly new practice in American society where the woman was usually just a