The Nation 1954

Joseph Welch asks Senator Joseph McCarthy "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

Live televised Senate US Army McCarthy hearings ends with the US Senate censuring Senator Joseph McCarthy and his rabid little sidekick Roy Cohn for "conduct that tends to bring Senate into dishonor and disrepute" in their slander campaign against the US Army. The end of Joe McCarthy.

Puerto Rican nationalists Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irving Flores Rodríguez unfurled a Puerto Rican flag in the spectator gallery of the United States House of Representatives and open fire with automatic pistols. Five House members were wounded. The attackers were sentenced to 70 years after President Eisenhower commuted the death penalty. In 1979 after 25 years in prison President Jimmy Carter freed them. Puerto Rican Nationalists Launch Assault on US Congress

Brown Vs.Topeka Board of Education. The Supreme Court unanimously rules that the "separate but equal" decision in Plessy Vs Ferguson is unconstitutional. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren lobbied hard and won all justices to his side in this the most important Supreme Court case of the 20th Century. NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall argued and won for Brown. School integration began in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland as White Citizen Councils began organizing in the South. Brown vs Education.

With the Red Scare in ascendance President Eisenhower signs order adding the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, outlaws the Communist Party, and the father of the A bomb Robert Oppenheimer is accused of being a communist. The lynching of Robert Oppenheimer

John Foster Dulles
"In an icy conference room in West Berlin one day last February, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov sang an old, sour song. After nine years of delay and diatribe, the Soviet Union still refused to sign a peace treaty ending the occupation of Austria. As Molotov droned on, a tall man slouched low in a chair, whittling on a pencil, calmly watching the shavings drop to the floor. When the Russian had finished, John Foster Dulles blew the dust from his pocketknife, snapped it shut and shoved it into his pocket. Then the U.S. Secretary of State leaned forward." John Foster Dulles Time Man of the year

The World 1954

Revolutionary General Gamel Abdul Nasser succeeded in ousting Britain from its 72 year rule of Egypt to become Premier to bring Egypt toward democracy and out of poverty. Gamel Abdul Nasser

France sends 20,000 soldiers to Algeria and its long colonial war in North Africa begins. The war that lasted until Algeria gained independence in 1962 caused so much strife in France that the government failed in 1958 and Charles De Gaulle came back to power. The Algerian War

Nobel prizes 1954

Physics – Max Born, Walther Bothe
Chemistry – Linus Carl Pauling
Medicine – John Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller, Frederick Chapman Robbins
Literature – Ernest Hemingway
Peace – The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The Class of 1954