Understanding America Today - Essay Example

Our country faces a clear direction of having to redefine our role in the world today, and to come to a full understanding of the way that America has developed as a nation through the events of the Great Depression era and our rise to power as a nuclear country during the bombing of Japan during World War II, we must first understand how these two historical events in the story of America affected and influenced our modern economic and warfare policies. During each of these events, America had to redefine its role in the international policy landscape to ensure the survival of the American way of life. How America survived and evolved into America that it is today stems directly from the impact of those 2 events.
To begin with, the Great Depression that lasted from 1929 to the beginning of the 1940s shows us the resilience of Americans in the face of adversity. Facing our modern-day recession shows us that as a nation, America learned its lesson for a time before chucking those lessons out the door during the affluent 80s - the early 00s. Just as before the first round of financial depression, America had just elected a charismatic leader to the White House who promised to fix the problems left by his predecessor. However, he failed to do so and the American people were left to pay the price. I find it quite disturbing that America seems to have a pattern of allowing history to repeat itself. As one will recall from our lessons in this class, America was enjoying one of its longest and largest economic growth spurts before the depression came along. This is a typical scenario that was again played out before the 21st-century era of the American depression, only this time, both the stock market and banking system collapsed.
With more than 15 million Americans out of work, the government chose to pull the country out of the depression era by introducing European-style social and economic reforms The New Deal allowed the government to have a more direct hand in the social and economic business of the American people. By adopting a policy of moderate currency inflation the federal government managed to jumpstart the economy and offer relief to some debtors by creating credit facilities that dealt with industry and agriculture. Banks were severely monitored and controlled so that they would not make the mistake of increasing their already existing bad loans.
While The New Deal ushered in a new era of social, political, and economic stability for the government, the events happening overseas in Europe and Asia were slowly beginning to rear their ugly head about the existence of America as a pacifist country. The American economy was at its peak when it became directly involved in the European and Asian wars of World War II. Although the United States of America managed to survive the economic effects of the war through the act of selling bonds, rationing, and other cost-saving measures at home, the country was slowly emerging as the de-facto leader in terms of international relations.
The defeat of Hitler during the European War by the Allied Forces allowed their scientists to come and work for the Americans who were still dealing with the war in the Asia Pacific at the time. Since the nuclear bombs were a Nazi brainchild, these scientists who worked on the project simply handed over their research, results, and expertise to their new masters, who in this case, turned out to be the Americans. We helped them fine-tune the weapon of mass destruction without really having a real reason to use it in the Asia Pacific war.
There is a historical belief that Japan was close to surrendering and had already lost the war by the time the U.S. forces had decided to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A decision that the government made, according to historical documents, on the fact that by being the first to use a nuclear weapon, the United States will have the upper hand in the nuclear arms race and shall therefore be able to set the rules by which the nuclear arms race was to be played out. That was truly the main reason for the American maintenance of nuclear weapons even after the events of World War II.
These 2 aforementioned historical events had a clear and long-term effect on the American psyche. Both events provoked Americans to believe in their strength as a nation on a level stronger than that of the ordinary citizen. Read More