1955
Salk polio vaccine approved
On the tenth anniversary of FDR's death, a University of Michigan panel announced that Jonas Salk's injectable polio vaccine was safe and effective. Church bells rang across America. A disease that had paralyzed tens of thousands of children every summer was about to disappear. Salk refused to patent the vaccine; he said it belonged to the people.
Bandung Conference
Twenty-nine newly independent Asian and African nations met in the Indonesian city of Bandung and declared themselves a non-aligned force in world politics, rejecting both Cold War blocs. Nehru, Sukarno, Nasser, and Zhou Enlai dominated the speeches. The Third World had discovered itself as an idea and a voting bloc at the UN.
Warsaw Pact founded
In response to West German rearmament and NATO, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites signed a mutual defense pact in Warsaw. The two blocs were now formally arrayed against each other. The Cold War had its symmetry. It would last until the pact dissolved in 1991 along with the empire behind it.
Rosa Parks refuses to move
On a Montgomery bus, a forty-two-year-old seamstress and NAACP secretary refused to give up her seat to a white man and was arrested. A young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. led the bus boycott that followed. Three hundred and eighty-one days of walking later, segregated buses in Montgomery were gone.
Warsaw Pact signed
Eight Communist states of Eastern Europe signed the Warsaw Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, the Soviet answer to NATO. The pact formalized the military dimension of the Iron Curtain. It would be invoked to justify the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The two blocs were now properly armed and aimed.
Disneyland opens
Walt Disney opened his theme park in Anaheim, California, on a stiflingly hot July day. Asphalt was still wet, rides broke down, a plumbers' strike had left workers to choose between drinking fountains and flushing toilets. None of it mattered. Disneyland would define a new kind of branded leisure space and change American family vacations.