America 250 All-In-One For Dummies Cheat Sheet

The America 250 All-In-One For Dummies Cheat Sheet offers a look at some past and present issues that the U.S. faced or is still facing. Specifically, find out about the Watergate scandal that rocked America in the 1970s, the homegrown terrorism that began in the 1990s, and some challenges of immigration throughout America’s 250 years. On a brighter note, see the significant civil liberties guaranteed to citizens by the U.S. Constitution in the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments).

How the Watergate scandal ended Nixon’s presidency

Richard M. Nixon, the 37th president of the U.S., easily won reelection in 1972 and was able to successfully veto bills that challenged his authority in a number of areas. He took advantage of this situation to greatly expand the White House’s power and cloak its actions from public scrutiny. And then an ex-FBI agent named James McCord wrote a letter to a judge, and the wheels of the Nixon White House began to come off in what would become known as the Watergate scandal.

In a nutshell, here’s what happened in one of the greatest presidential scandals in U.S. history:

• On June 17, 1972, McCord and four other men working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP (really), broke into the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the Watergate, a hotel office building in Washington, D.C. They got caught going through files and trying to plant listening devices. Five days later, Nixon denied any knowledge of it or that his administration played any role in it.
• The burglars went to trial in 1973 and either pleaded guilty or were convicted. Before sentencing, McCord wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica, contending that high Republican and White House officials knew about the break-in and had paid the defendants to keep quiet or lie during the trial.
• Investigation of McCord’s charges spread to a special Senate committee. John Dean, a White House lawyer, told the committee McCord was telling the truth and that Nixon had known of the effort to cover up White House involvement.
• Eventually, all sorts of damaging stuff began to surface, including evidence that key documents linking Nixon to the coverup of the break-in had been destroyed, that the Nixon reelection committee had run a “dirty tricks” campaign against the Democrats, and that the administration had illegally wiretapped the phones of “enemies,” such as journalists who had been critical of Nixon.
• In March 1974, former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell and six top Nixon aides were indicted by a federal grand jury for trying to block the investigation. They were eventually convicted.
• While Nixon continued to deny any involvement, it was revealed that he routinely made secret tapes of conversations in his office. Nixon refused to turn over the tapes at first, and when he did agree (after firing a special prosecutor he had appointed to look into the mess and seeing his new attorney general resign in protest), some turned out to be missing or destroyed. (They were also full of profanity, which greatly surprised people who had a much different perception of Nixon.)
• In the summer of 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment against the president for obstructing justice.

The tapes clearly showed that Nixon had been part of the coverup. On August 8, 1974, he submitted a one-sentence letter of resignation and then went on television and said, “I have always tried to do what is best for the nation.” He was the first U.S. president to quit the job.

Facing homegrown terrorism in the U.S.

For most of the 20th century, terrorism — using violent acts to achieve political gains — was something most Americans regarded as a foreign problem. But in the 1990s, a series of events brought it closer to home. Some domestic terrorism stemmed from small-but-fervent groups or individuals who believed the U.S. government was part of various international conspiracies bent on world domination. By 1997, right-wing paramilitary or survivalist groups had developed in every state. Some were led by Vietnam-era vets who felt betrayed by the government, others by religious fanatics, and still others by white supremacists.

A list of some homegrown terrorism and surrounding events include

• The FBI action at Ruby Ridge. A survivalist group formed in Idaho at Ruby Ridge, about 40 miles from the Canadian border. On August 21, 1992, U.S. marshals were watching a white supremacist named Randy Weaver when shots were fired. A marshal and Weaver’s 14-year-old son were killed. The next day, an FBI sniper killed Weaver’s wife and wounded another man. At a subsequent trial, Weaver and another defendant were acquitted of all but one minor charge, and the government agreed to pay $3.1 million to the Weaver family for the incident. “Ruby Ridge” became a rallying cry for militia groups of all types.
• Taking down a cult in Waco. By his own admission, Vernon Wayne Howell had an unhappy childhood, and by the time he was 22, he was still seeking somewhere to belong. In 1981, he chose the Branch Davidians, a religious sect that, in 1935, had settled about 10 miles outside of Waco, Texas. By 1990, Howell had changed his name to David Koresh and was head of the cult. Koresh called himself “the Messiah” and took multiple wives from among his followers.
• On February 28, 1993, federal agents looking for illegal weapons and explosives began a gunfight and 51-day siege of the compound. After negotiations with Koresh stalled, federal agents attacked the compound and fired tear gas inside. A fire broke out and spread rapidly. When it was over, at least 82 people were dead, including Koresh and 17 children.  
• Bombings that rocked the nation. Not all the mayhem of the 1990s involved the U.S. government. Acts of bombing by terrorists — groups or individuals — took place with unnerving frequency.  
• On February 26, 1993, a 1,210-pound bomb packed in a van rocked the World Trade Center building in New York City. The bomb killed six people. Members of a radical Islamic group were arrested and convicted.
• On April 19, 1995, the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Building, a federal office complex in Oklahoma City, was blasted by a powerful bomb that rained down concrete and glass for blocks around. A total of 168 people were killed, including 19 children who had been at the building’s daycare center. A Gulf War veteran, Timothy McVeigh and his friend Terry Nichols believed that the U.S. government had become part of an international totalitarian conspiracy and decided to do something about it (by bombing the complex). They were arrested shortly after the bombing, tried, and convicted. McVeigh was sentenced to death; Nichols to life in prison). At the time, the Oklahoma City bombing was America’s worst act of terrorism, and it stunned the nation. “This is why we live in Oklahoma,” exclaimed a disbelieving woman. “Things like this don’t happen here.”

Immigration as a continuous U.S. concern

By the middle of the 19th century, the population of the U.S. was much greater than when the century started. The country’s population in 1860 was 31.4 million, four times more than it had been in 1810. Of the world’s predominantly white nations, only France, Russia, and Austria had larger populations.

Many of the new Americans were born elsewhere. The number of immigrants to America in 1830 was about 25,000. In 1855, the number was closer to 450,000. They came from as close as Mexico and Canada to as far away as China and Japan. When they got here, they tended to stay with their fellow expatriates, where the language, food, and culture were more familiar, creating mini-nations. They also increasingly stayed in cities, even if they had come from a farm background. In 1840, 10 Americans lived on farms compared to every 1 who lived in a town. By 1850, that ratio was 5 to 1, and many of the new city dwellers were from foreign shores.

They just kept coming

The parts of the cities where immigrants dwelled were generally dark, smelly, filthy, and violent. Many of the immigrants were so appalled that reality didn’t match their glittering visions of America that they went back home. Because of the glut of people wanting any kind of a job when they got here, wages in the largest cities were pitifully low.  

And still, they came — from 600,000 immigrants in the 1830s to 1.7 million in the 1840s to 2.6 million in the 1850s. More than 70 percent of the immigrants between 1840 and 1860 were from just two areas in Europe: Ireland and the German states. For the Irish, it was come to America or starve because a fungus had all but wiped out Ireland’s potato crop in 1845, and there was a widespread famine. Almost as many Germans as Irish came during this period, though they were more likely to spread out. The Germans also came because of food shortages or other tough economic conditions in their homeland.

The welcome mat began to fray

During the first two decades of the 20th century, the U.S. admitted 14.5 million immigrants, and concerns about the mass migration and its effects on the country began to change America’s formerly open attitude about immigration. In 1924, Congress created the U.S. Border Patrol within the immigration service and the increased activity related to deportation led to the creation of the Immigration Board of Review (now known as the Executive Office of Immigration Review). From the 1960s to the 1990s, Congress enacted several laws that dealt with immigration issues such as abolishing nation origin quotas, prioritizing family reunification and skilled workers, dealing with refugees, hiring (or not) of undocumented workers, and so on.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and you find that immigration (and related problems) continue to this day and can be a prominent issue in presidential elections. In the 2024 election, surveys found that American voters were most concerned with the issues of illegal immigration and inflation, and in 2024, President Biden had a tough time making a case for reelection because of areas. When it came to immigration, border encounters (when U.S. agents or officers encountered people trying to enter the country without permission) jumped from about 400,000 in the last year of the prior administration’s term to almost 2 million in 2023. Biden’s immigration policies were often criticized as lacking teeth, and his inability to push a bipartisan immigration reform package through Congress didn’t help his image on the issue.

Acknowledging the Bill of Rights

Constitutions are documents that discuss the distribution of power among a country’s political structures and basic individual rights. The newly ratified U.S. Constitution had ignored discussing civil liberties. To get states to ratify the Constitution, the Founding Fathers promised to add a Bill of Rights. Therefore, one of the first acts of Congress and the new President George Washington was to add a Bill of Rights, which comprises the first ten amendments to the Constitution, added by 1791. Without a Bill of Rights, freedoms in the U.S. could be severely limited.

The U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights contains the most important civil liberties granted to U.S. citizens. Here is the list and synopsis of the amendments in the Bill of Rights:

Bill of Rights: Amendments and the civil liberties they guarantee

After the addition of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the Congress has added 17 more amendments for a total of 27 that have been ratified by three-fourths of the states.