Mission: Lesson 1
A Very Dirty Cup of Coffee: American Cold War Intervention in Central America
Topic
Cold War, American Imperialism and Interventionist Policies, Oligarchies and Military Juntas
1. Explore the ramifications of American imperialist intervention
2. Examine key documents to make an argument about this intervention
3. Engage in historical analysis to make a defensible historical argument
Objectives
U.S. History and World History
On level through Advanced Placement and the International Baccalaureate
Grade
How did American imperialist actions in Central America destabilize the region and create significant lasting consequences?
Essential Question
Overview
The basis of this lesson relates to information found in Chapter 2: Coffee Waves, Chapter 3: Book Store, Chapter 1: El Movimiento en La Mision, Chapter 5: Adobe Books, from "Coffee Country" the CMM The Mission Walk. This lesson plan provides students an opportunity to examine key documents illustrating the effects of American imperialist and interventionist policies in Central America.
In 1823 President James Monroe issued the Monroe Doctrine announcing the protectionist stance the United States would hereinto take over the entirety of the Western Hemisphere.
While unable to adequately enforce this control in 1823, this ambitious statement provided prophetic as the stature and power of the United States dramatically increased throughout the nineteenth century. By the time President Theodore Roosevelt added his Corollary to the Doctrine in 1905, the United States was a true imperial state. Designed to help the American economy, interventionist policies in Central and South American came at the expense of emerging and fledgling democracies.
In El Salvador American policies proved exceptionally damaging as the growing coffee industry led to the oligarchic "Fourteen Families" to consolidate control over indigenous and local control over coffee farms by the 1860s. In 1882 Hills Bros Coffee was established on Fourth Street in San Francisco importing Salvadoran coffee beans for American consumption in league with the "Fourteen Families", and by 1926 90% of all Hills Bros Coffee came from El Salvador placing coffee as the largest industry in San Francisco. The cruelty the Families showed toward the indigenous communities ultimately resulted in a military junta and a Marxist insurgency by the 1980s. In the global Cold War quest to stop communism and protect capitalism, the United States increasingly saw the Western Hemisphere as an American sphere where there would be no tolerance for Marxism, ultimately leading to tragic consequences for El Salvador.
Hills Bros.’ famous red coffee can. Credit: Roadside Pictures under CC by 2.0
Materials
Students will need a pen and blank 8 ½ x 11 paper or the blank umbrella outline.
Key Ideas
Imperialism, Cold War, Military Juntas, Oligarchies
Assessment
Students will examine the role the United States played in destabilizing El Salvador by creating an outline/essay for a Document Based Question.
Lesson (75 Minutes Total):
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Working individually have students read through the documents for the DBQ encouraging them to annotate the documents as needed.
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Separate students into groups of five. Students will need a blank 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper or umbrella outline, a copy of the DBQ and a pen.
Students will move through several rounds in this activity.
Round 1 (5 minutes) Using the umbrella outline have each student write a thesis statement answering the question.
Round 2 (5 minutes) Have the students leave their papers on their desk but move one desk clockwise. Students should read the thesis and provide the context for the thesis in the outline.
Round 3 (5 minutes) Have students shift one desk clockwise leaving the outline. Students should read the thesis and context, and then provide the main ideas in the outline.
Round 4 (5 minutes) Have students shift one desk clockwise leaving the outline. Students should read the thesis, context, main ideas, and provide three pieces of evidence including using all seven documents for each main idea.
Round 5 (5 minutes) Stop the students. Ask what they are noticing about the outlines. Typically issues of not making their argument clearly in the thesis and/or main ideas, the difficulty of utilizing the documents, lack of a line of reasoning, etc. Ask students to keep this in mind as they attempt the activity again.
Round 6 (5 minutes) Collect the first-round outline and pass out blank outline/paper. Have students put down a thesis statement for the umbrella outline.
Round 7 (5 minutes) Have the students leave their papers on their desk but move one desk clockwise. Students should read the thesis and provide the context for the thesis in the outline.
Round 8 (5 minutes) Have students shift one desk clockwise leaving the outline. Students should read the thesis and context, and then provide the main ideas in the outline.
Round 9 (5 minutes) Have students shift one desk clockwise leaving the outline. Students should read the thesis, context, main ideas, and provide three pieces of evidence including using all seven documents for each main idea.
Round 10 (5 minutes) Collect the second-round papers and ask students to give feedback on the second attempt.
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Students should create their own umbrella outlines answering the question.
Note: The teacher may choose to assign the DBQ as an essay for homework or in another class period.
Standards:
Historical and Social Science Analysis Skills (p727-728)
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Students compare the present with the past, evaluating the consequences of past events and decisions and determining the lessons that were learned.
Students analyze how change happens at different times; understand that some aspects can change while others remain the same; and understand that change is complicated and affects not only technology and politics but also values and beliefs.
Students use a variety of maps and documents to interpret human movement, including major patterns of domestic and international migration, changing environmental preferences and settlement patterns, the frictions that develop between population groups, and the diffusion of ideas, technological innovations, and goods.
Students relate current events to the physical and human characteristics of places and regions.
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Students identify bias and prejudice in historical interpretations.
Students construct and test hypotheses; collect, evaluate, and employ information for multiple primary and secondary sources; and apply it in oral and written presentations.
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Students show the connections, casual and otherwise, between particular historical events and larger social, economic, and political trends and developments.
Students recognize the complexity of historical causes and effects, including the limitations on determining cause and effect.
Students interpret past events and issues within the context in which an event unfolded rather than soley in terms of present day norms and values.
Students understand the meaning, implication. and impact of historical events and recognize that events could have taken other directions.
Students analyze human modifications of landscapes and examine the resulting environmental policy issues.
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10.3 Students analyze the effects of the Industrial Revolution in England, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States.
5. Understand the connections among natural resources, entrepreneurship, labor, and capital in an industrial economy.
6. Analyze the emergence of capitalism as a dominant economic pattern and the responses to it, including Utopianism, Social Democracy, Socialism, and Communism.
10.4 Students analyze patterns of global change in the era of New Imperialism in at least two of the following regions or countries: Africa, Southeast Asia, China, India, Latin America, and the Philippines.
1. Describe the rise of industrial economies and their link to imperialism and colonialism (e.g., the role played by national security and strategic advantage; moral issues raised by the search for national hegemony, Social Darwinism, and the missionary impulse; material issues such as land, resources, and technology)
2. Discuss the locations of the colonial rule of such nations as England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and the United States.
3. Explain imperialism from the perspective of the colonizers and the colonized and the varied immediate and long-term responses by the people under colonial rule.
4. Describe the independence struggles of the colonized regions of the world, including the roles of leaders, such as Sun Yat-sen in China, and the roles of ideology and religion.
10.10 Students analyze instances of nation-building in the contemporary world in at least two of the following regions or countries: the Middle East, Africa, Mexico and other parts of Latin America, and China.
1. Understand the challenges in the regions, including their geopolitical, cultural, military, and economic significance and the international relationships in which they are involved.
2. Describe the recent history of the regions, including political divisions and systems, key leaders, religious issues, natural features, resources, and population patterns.
3. Discuss the important trends in the regions today and whether they appear to serve the cause of individual freedom and democracy.
10.11 Students analyze the integration of countries into the world economy and the information, technological, and communications revolutions (e.g., television, satellites, computers).
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11.4 Students trace the rise of the United States to its role as a world power in the twentieth century.
4. Explain Theodore Roosevelt’s Big Stick diplomacy, William Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy, and Woodrow Wilson’s Moral Diplomacy, drawing on relevant speeches
11.8 Students analyze the economic boom and social transformation of post World War II America
4. Analyze new federal government spending on defense, welfare, interest on the national debt, and federal and state spending on education, including the California Master Plan.
7. Describe the effects on society and the economy of technological developments since 1915, including the computer revolution, changes in communication, advances in medicine, and improvements in agricultural technology.
11.9 Students analyze U.S. foreign policy since World War II.
3. Trace the origins and geopolitical consequences (foreign and domestic) of the Cold
War and containment policy, including the following:
● The era of Mcarthyism, instances of domestic Communism (e.g., Alger Hiss) and blacklisting
● The Truman Doctrine
● The Berlin Blockade
● The Korean War
● The Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis
● Atomic testing the American West, the “mutual assured destruction” doctrine, and disarmament policies
● The Vietnam War
● Latin American policy
4.List the effects of foreign policy on domestic policies and vice versa (e.g., protests during the war in Vietnam, the “nuclear freeze” movement).
5. Analyze the role of the Reagan administration and other factors in the victory of the West in the Cold War.
11.11 Students analyze the major social problems and domestic policy issues in contemporary American society.
7. Explain how the federal, state, and local governments have responded to demographic and social changes such as population shifts to the suburbs, racial concentrations in the cities, Frostbelt-to-Sunbelt migration, international migration, decline of family farms, increases in out-of-wedlock- births, and drug use.
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Principles of American Democracy
12.1 Students explain the fundamental principles and moral values of American democracy as expressed in the U.S. Constitution and other essential documents of American democracy.
2. Discuss the character of American democracy and its promise and perils as articulated by Alexis de Tocqueville.
3. Explain how the U.S. Constitution reflects a balance between the classical republican concern with promotion of the public good and the classical liberal concern with protecting individual rights; and discuss how the basic premises of liberal concern with protecting individual rights; and discuss how the basic premises of liberal constitutionalism and democracy are joined in the Declaration of Independence as "self-evident truths."
6. Understand that the Bill of Rights limits the powers of the federal government and state governments.
12.2 Students evaluate and take and defend positions on the scope and limits of rights and obligations as democratic citizens, the relationships among them, and how they are secured.
1. Discuss the meaning and importance of each of the rights guaranteed under the Bill of Rights and how each is secured (e.g., freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, petition, privacy).
3. Discuss the individual's legal obligations to obey the law, serve as a juror, and pay taxes.
4. Understand the obligations of civic-mindness, including voting, being informed on civic issues, volunteering and performing public service, and serving in the military or alternative service.
5. Describe the reciprocity between rights and obligations; that is, why enjoyment o one's rights entails respect for the rights of others.
12.3 Students evaluate and take and defend positions on what the fundamental values and principles of civil society are (i.e., the autonomous sphere of voluntary personal, social. and economic relations that are not part of government), their interdependence, and the meaning and importance of those values and principles for a free society.
1. Explain how civil society provides opportunities for individuals to associate for social culture, religious, economic, and political purposes.
1. Explain how civil society makes it possible for people, individually or in association with others, to bring their influence to bear on government in ways other than voting and elections.
2. Compare the relationship of government and civil society in constitutional democracies to the relationship of government and civil society in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
12.7 Students analyze and compare the powers and procedures of the national, state, tribal, and local governments.
1. Explain how conflicts between levels of government and branches of government are resolved.
2. Identify the major responsibilities and sources of revenue for state and local governments.
3. Discuss reserved powers and concurrent powers of state governments.
5. Explain how public policy is formed, including the setting of the public agenda and implementation of it through regulations and executive orders.
6. Compare the processes of lawmaking at each of the three levels of government, including the role of lobbying and the media.
7. Identify the organization and jurisdiction of federal, state, and local (e.g., California) courts and the interrelationships among them.
8. Understand the scope of presidential power and decision making through examination of case studies such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, passage of Great Society legislation, War Powers Act, Gulf War, and Bosnia
12.8 Students evaluate and take and defend positions on the influence o the media on American political lifeе.
1. Discuss the meaning and importance of a free and responsible press.
2. Describe the roles of broadcast, print, and electronic media, including the Internet, as means of communication in American politics.
3. Explain how public officials use the media to communicate with the citizenry and to shape public opinion.
12.9 Students analyze the origins, characteristics, and development of different political systems across time, with emphasis on the quest for political democracy, its advances, and its obstacles.
5. Identify the forms of illegitimate power that twentieth-century African, Asian, and Latin American dictators used to gain and hold office and the conditions and interests that supported them.
6. Identify the ideologies, causes, stages, and outcomes of major Mexican, Central American, and South American revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
7. Describe the ideologies that give rise to Communism, methods of maintaining control, and the movements to overthrow such governments in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, including the roles of individuals (e.g., Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel).
8. Identify the successes of relatively new democracies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the ideas, leaders, and general societal conditions that have launched and sustained, or failed to sustain, them.
12.10 Students formulate questions about and defend their analyses of tensions within our constitutional democracy and the importance to maintaining a balance between the following concepts: majority rule and individual rights; liberty and equality; state and national authority in a federal system: civil disobedience and the rule to law: freedom of the press and the right to a fair trial; the relationship of religion and government.
Principles of Economics
12.2 Students analyze the elements of America’s market economy in a global setting.
7. Analyze how domestic and international competition in a market economy affects goods and services produced and the quality, quantity, and price of those products.
8. Explain the role of profit as the incentive to entrepreneurs in a market economy.
9. Describe the functions of the financial markets.
10. Discuss the economic principles that guide the location of agricultural production and industry and the spatial distribution of transportation and retail facilities.
12.3 Students analyze the influence of the federal government on the American economy.
2. Identify the factors that may cause the costs of government actions to outweigh the benefits.
12.4 Students analyze the elements of the U.S. labor market in a global setting.
4. Explain the effects of international mobility of capital and labor on the U.S. economy.
12.5 Students analyze issues of international trade and explain how the U.S. economy affects, and is affected by, economic forces beyond the United States’ borders.
1. Identify the gains in consumption and production efficiency from trade, with emphasis on the main products and changing geographic patterns of the twentieth-century trade among countries in the Western Hemisphere.
3. Understand the changing role of international political borders and territorial sovereignty in a global economy.