LIBERTY EQUALITY POWER - Cengage · 2011-05-18 · T he Second World War brought unprecedented...

LIBERTY,EQUALITY,

POWERA H I S T O R Y O F T H E A M E R I C A N P E O P L E

V o l u m e I I : S i n c e 1 8 6 3F i f t h E d i t i o n

John M. Murrin Princeton University, Emeritus

Paul E. Johnson University of South Carolina, Emeritus

James M. McPherson Princeton University, Emeritus

Alice FahsUniversity of California, Irvine

Gary Gerstle Vanderbilt University

Emily S. Rosenberg University of California, Irvine

Norman L. Rosenberg Macalester College

Australia • Brazil • Canada • Mexico • Singapore • SpainUnited Kingdom • United States

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Publisher: Clark Baxter Production Service: Lachina Publishing ServicesSenior Acquisitions Editor: Ashley Dodge Text Designer: Cheryl CarringtonDevelopment Editor: Margaret McAndrew Beasley Photo Manager: Sheri BlaneyAssistant Editor: Kristen Tatroe Photo Researcher: Sarah EvertsonEditorial Assistant: Ashley Spicer Cover Designer: Cheryl CarringtonAssociate Development Project Manager: Lee McCracken Cover Printer: Transcontinental—BeaucevilleSenior Marketing Manager: Janise Fry Compositor: International Typesetting and CompositionMarketing Assistant: Kathleen Tosiello Printer: Transcontinental—BeaucevilleMarketing Communications Manager: Tami Strang Cover Art: Marion Post Wolcott, Man Playing Guitar on Porch,Senior Content Project Manager: Joshua Allen Natchitoches, Louisiana. 1940. © The Ogden Museum ofSenior Art Director: Cate Rickard Barr Southern Art, University of New Orleans, Gift of thePrint/Media Buyer: Doreen Suruki Roger H. Ogden CollectionPermissions Editor: Roberta Broyer

Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People, Volume II: Since 1863, Fifth EditionJohn M. Murrin, Paul E. Johnson, James M. McPherson, Alice Fahs, Gary Gerstle,

Emily S. Rosenberg, and Norman L. Rosenberg

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America during theSecond World War

U.S. Government War PosterThe governmental agencies charged with promoting support forU.S. participation in the Second World War often employedimages from Nazi Germany as a way of dramatizing why wewere fighting to preserve “the American Way of Life.”

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The Second World War brought unprecedented destruction

to much of the globe. The United States—whose own

towns, farms, and cities would escape the impact of combat

operations—lurched toward direct engagement in this con-

flict. Mobilization for war, already underway before formal U.S. entry in

1941, first lifted the nation out of the Great Depression and, then, trans-

formed its economy. At war’s end, the military might and productive

capacity of the victorious United States—spurred by innovative tech-

nologies and new working relationships among government, business,

labor, and scientific researchers—dwarfed that of all other nations.

Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime presidency, invoking military necessity as the

justification, significantly expanded the power of the national government.

As the war proceeded, Americans came to reconsider how to under-

stand liberty and equality. Although a government-directed publicity

campaign initially stressed how wartime sacrifices would protect and pre-

serve an “American way of life,” the ongoing fight against fascist dictator-

ships overseas soon raised questions about what might—and should—

change in the United States itself. Might the nation, while striving for

military victory, also reorder its economy, rework its politics, and refash-

ion the cultural and social patterns that had shaped racial, ethnic, and

gender relationships during the 1930s? Could the interrelated tasks of

reconstructing a war-ravaged world and strengthening forces for peace

require the creation of new institutions, both at home and abroad?

THE ROAD TO WAR: AGGRESSIONAND RESPONSE

The Rise of Aggressor StatesU.S. NeutralityThe Mounting CrisisThe Outbreak of War in EuropeThe U.S. Response to War in EuropeAn “Arsenal of Democracy”Pearl Harbor

FIGHTING THE WAR IN EUROPECampaigns in North Africa and ItalyOperation OVERLORD

THE PACIFIC THEATERSeizing the Offensive in the PacificChina PolicyU.S. Strategy in the PacificA New President, the Atomic Bomb,

and Japan’s Surrender

THE WAR AT HOME: THE ECONOMYGovernment’s Role in the EconomyBusiness and FinanceThe WorkforceThe Labor FrontAssessing Economic ChangeA New Role for Government?

THE WAR AT HOME: SOCIAL ISSUESAND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Selling the War Gender IssuesRacial IssuesSocial Movements

SHAPING THE PEACE International OrganizationsSpheres of Interest and Postwar

Settlements

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788 C H A P T E R 2 6 : Am e r i c a d u r i n g t h e S e co n d Wo r l d Wa r

The Road to War:Aggression and Response

How did events in Asia and in

Europe affect debate within the United States

over whether or not to embrace more

interventionist policies overseas?

Tensions growing out of the First World War, heightenedby a worldwide economic depression, fostered interna-tional instability during the 1930s. In Japan, Italy, andGermany, economic stagnation nurtured ultranationalistpolitical movements that championed aggressive foreignpolicies. Elsewhere in Europe and in the United States,economic problems inclined governing majorities to turninward, concentrating on promoting recovery and avoid-ing foreign entanglements.

The Rise of Aggressor StatesThe first signs of another world war appeared in Asia.On September 18, 1931, Japanese military forces seizedManchuria, and Japan renamed the puppet state it createdManchukuo. This aggression by Japan violated the charterof the League of Nations, the Washington naval treaties,and the Kellogg-Briand Pact (see chapter 24). Focused ondomestic matters, nations such as the United States hesi-tated to oppose Japan’s move with military force. Instead,the Hoover-Stimson Doctrine (1931) announced a U.S.policy of “nonrecognition” toward Manchukuo, and theLeague of Nations merely condemned Japan’s move. Japansimply ignored these rhetorical rebukes.

Two ultranationalist states in Europe also soonembarked on military aggression. Adolf Hitler’s NationalSocialist (Nazi) Party, which came to power in Germanyduring 1933, announced a bold approach to addressingeconomic ills and political instability. Hitler created a one-party dictatorial state; denounced the Versailles peace set-tlement of 1919 as unfair to Germany; further blamed itsproblems on a Jewish conspiracy; claimed a genetic supe-riority for the “Aryan race” of German-speaking peoples;and promised a new Germanic empire, the Third Reich.His fascist regime also withdrew from the League ofNations in 1933 and, in a blatant violation of the Versaillestreaty, dramatically boosted Germany’s military budget.

Another, less powerful fascist government, headed byBenito Mussolini, had come to power in Italy during the1920s. As Mussolini introduced authoritarian controls overItaly’s domestic life, he launched his own military buildupand prepared for territorial expansion. Mussolini talked ofmaking the Mediterranean an Italian-dominated sea. Build-ing on earlier moves against Albania and Libya, Mussolini

sent his armies, in 1935, into Ethiopia. After a brief andbloody conflict, Mussolini converted this previously inde-pendent African kingdom into an Italian colony and, then,began forging close ties with Hitler’s regime in Germany.

U.S. NeutralityIn the United States, memories of involvement in the FirstWorld War helped justify efforts to isolate the nation from

Focus Question

C H R O N O L O G Y

1931 Japanese forces seize Manchuria

1933 Hitler takes power in Germany

1936 Spanish Civil War begins • Germany and Italy agreeto cooperate as the Axis Powers

1937 Neutrality Act broadens provisions of Neutrality Actsof 1935 and 1936 • Roosevelt makes “Quarantine”speech • Japan invades China

1938 France and Britain appease Hitler at Munich

1939 Hitler and Stalin sign Soviet–German nonaggressionpact • Hitler invades Poland; war breaks out in Europe• Congress amends Neutrality Act to assist Allies

1940 Paris falls after German blitzkreig (June) • Battle ofBritain carried to U.S. by radio broadcasts • Rooseveltmakes “destroyers-for-bases” deal with Britain• Selective Service Act passed • Roosevelt winsthird term

1941 Lend-Lease established • Roosevelt creates FairEmployment Practices Commission • Roosevelt andChurchill proclaim the Atlantic Charter • U.S.engages in undeclared naval war in North Atlantic• Congress narrowly repeals Neutrality Act• Japanese forces attack Pearl Harbor (December 7)

1942 Rio de Janeiro Conference (January) • President signsExecutive Order 9066 for internment of JapaneseAmericans (February) • General MacArthur drivenfrom Philippines (May) • U.S. victorious in Battle ofMidway (June) • German army defeated at Battle ofStalingrad (August) • Operation TORCH begins(November)

1943 Axis armies in North Africa surrender (May) • Alliesinvade Sicily (July) and Italy (September) • “Zoot suit”incidents in Los Angeles; racial violence in Detroit• Allies begin drive toward Japan through SouthPacific islands

1944 Allies land at Normandy (D-day, June 6) • Alliedarmies reach Paris (August) • Allies turn backGermans at Battle of the Bulge (September)• Roosevelt reelected to fourth term • BrettonWoods Conference creates IMF and World Bank• Dumbarton Oaks Conference establishes planfor UN

1945 U.S. firebombs Japan • Yalta Conference (February)• Roosevelt dies; Truman becomes president (April)• Germany surrenders (May) • Hiroshima and Nagasakihit with atomic bombs (August) • Japan surrenders(September) • United Nations established (December)

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T h e Ro a d t o Wa r : Ag g re s s i o n a n d Re s p o n s e 789

the foreign troubles of the 1930s. Antiwar books andmovies, such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1931),implicitly portrayed President Woodrow Wilson’s ear-lier call for making “the world safe for democracy” (seechapter 23) as part of a cynical power game directed bybusiness and governmental elites. Appeals to noble idealsmerely allowed corrupt power brokers to turn young sol-diers into cannon fodder. During the mid-1930s, a U.S.Senate committee headed by Republican Gerald P. Nye ofNorth Dakota elaborated on this view of recent history.After well-publicized hearings, the Nye Committeecharged that bankers and munitions makers, in search ofprofits, had conspired with their counterparts in Britainand France to maneuver the United States into the FirstWorld War. An influential group of historians, endorsingdifferent variations of this critique, charged Wilson withhaving ignored the U.S. national interest when plunginghis nation into the war in 1915. Twenty years later, popu-lar opinion polls suggested overwhelming opposition to asimilar U.S. involvement in the foreign conflicts of the1930s.

The U.S. Congress backed this stance with a series ofNeutrality Acts. These measures aimed at keeping theUnited States free from the kind of entangling financialrelationships that had supposedly pulled it into the FirstWorld War. Neutrality laws passed in 1935 and 1936 estab-lished an embargo on arms sales to belligerent nations,prohibited U.S. loans to any country at war, and curtailedtravel by U.S. citizens on vessels belonging to any warringpower. The “cash-and-carry” provision in the NeutralityAct of 1937 extended the earlier arms embargo to includeany foreign trade with belligerents. It did allow nations atwar to continue buying products in the United States ifthey paid in hard cash and transported goods away in theirown ships, rather than on U.S. ships.

Critics of this neutrality legislation charged thatforeswearing U.S. intervention actively aided expansionistpowers such as Nazi Germany. In March 1936, Hitler’sforces entered the Rhineland, an area of Germany fromwhich the 1919 peace settlement had barred militaryinstallations. A few months later, Hitler and Mussolinibegan assisting General Francisco Franco, a fellow fascistseeking the overthrow of Spain’s fragile Republic and therestoration of a monarchy closely tied to the CatholicChurch and the Spanish military. Franco’s opponents,including that nation’s communist movement, appealedto nonfascist nations for assistance. Only the communistSoviet Union responded.

Fearing conflict in Spain could flare into a wider war,the governments of Britain, France, and the United Statesrefused to become involved. The U.S. Congress extendedits arms embargo to include civil wars, a move thatblocked the Spanish Republic from obtaining weaponry in

the United States and implicitly benefited General Franco’salready well-armed fascist forces. As with the other piecesof neutrality legislation, President Roosevelt, who was per-sonally sympathetic to more interventionist policies,signed this measure.

The Spanish Civil War, however, helped sharpen for-eign policy debate in the United States. Conservativegroups generally hailed General Franco as a staunch anti-communist who would promote social stability and reli-gious values in Spain. In contrast, the political left saw theSpanish Republic being sacrificed to a fascist movementthat threatened to spread repression all across Europe.Cadres of Americans, including members of an “AbrahamLincoln Brigade,” crossed the Atlantic to fight alongsidethe anti-Franco forces in Spain. U.S. peace groups, whichhad generally presented a united front during the 1920s,differed over how best to avoid a wider war. Some advo-cated neutrality and isolation, but others argued that thethreat of fascism now demanded a turn toward interven-tionism, beginning in Spain.

Roosevelt’s administration did tilt in an interventionistdirection, more overtly than before. Seeking to influencedomestic debate, Roosevelt called for internationalcooperation against expansionist nations. In his contro-versial “Quarantine the Aggressors” Speech of October1937, the president suggested the possibility of Congressmodifying earlier neutrality measures. Still suspicious offoreign entanglements, a majority of legislators refusedto budge, even if this meant a victory by Franco inSpain’s civil war.

The Mounting CrisisAs Americans were weighing policies of maintaining strictneutrality against ones of opposing aggression overseas,expansionist forces in Japan seized the initiative. Duringthe summer of 1937, after an exchange of gunfire betweenJapanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridgenear Beijing, Japanese armies mounted a full scale inva-sion of China. Japan’s forces captured Shanghai, Nanjing,Shandong, and Beijing. Japan demanded that China accepteconomic and political direction from Tokyo. As the Nation-alist Chinese government of Jiang Jieshi (formally spelledChiang Kai-sheck) struggled to survive, Japan unveiledambitious plans for an East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, aself-sufficient economic zone under Japanese leadership.

This expansionist vision, which Japan promisedwould liberate Asian nations from Western colonialism,worried the Roosevelt administration and heightened ten-sions between the United States and Japan. In late 1937,Japanese planes sank the Panay, a U.S. gunboat, as it wasevacuating Americans from Nanjing. Japan’s quick apol-ogy and promise to pay for damages defused a potential

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crisis. Still, the Panay incident and Japan’s brutality inNanjing, which took the lives of perhaps 300,000 Chinesecivilians, further fueled interventionist efforts in theUnited States. President Roosevelt began consulting,secretly, with British leaders about how to respond to thethreat of war in Asia, where Britain still held valuablecolonies. In May 1938, FDR publicly announced a pro-gram of naval rearmament that went beyond treaty limitsthat Japan had already violated.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Germany continued on themarch. In March 1938, Hitler used the threat of militaryaction to engineer the annexation of Austria, a neighbor-ing nation, into the Third Reich, and he soon suggested a

similar plan for the Sudetenland, a portion of Czechoslo-vakia inhabited by 3.5 million people of German descent.French and British leaders, still hoping to avoid war, metwith Hitler in Munich in September 1938. Without con-sulting the leaders of Czechoslovakia or those of theneighboring Soviet Union, they acquiesced to Germany’spower play in the Sudetenland. In return, Hitler pledgedto seek no more territory. Hailed by Britain’s prime min-ister as a guarantee of “peace in our time,” the arrange-ment soon became a symbol of what interventionistscalled the “appeasement” of aggression.

Any hope that the Munich Conference would guaran-tee peace faded quickly. In March 1939, German troops

On July 22, 1941, Margaret Bourke-White (1904–71)rushed into the streets of Moscow, quickly assembled

her camera equipment, and captured photos of Germanbombs falling on the Soviet capital. She was the only for-eign photographer in the Soviet Union at the time, andher spectacular photos soon splashed across the pages ofLife magazine. The U.S. Army accredited her as a war cor-respondent, the first woman to be so designated. Duringthe next four years, Bourke-White photographed theEuropean Theater. She saw action in North Africa, docu-mented the Allied campaign in Italy, took aerial shotswhile flying in U.S. bombers, and crossed into Germanywith General George Patton’s troops.

Born in the Bronx, New York, Bourke-White gradu-ated from Cornell University in 1927 and quickly estab-lished her reputation in the new field of photojournal-ism. After accepting a position as associate editor ofFortune magazine in 1929, she became the first Westernphotographer to receive a visa to enter the Soviet Union.During the early 1930s, she shot 3,000 photos of Russianlife—dams, farms, factories, and people—and gained theconfidence of the Soviet government. Her book Eyes onRussia (1931) became a landmark of photojournalism.She soon joined Life magazine, which published her pic-ture of America’s Fort Peck Dam on its very first cover.On assignment from Life, she had returned to the SovietUnion to do a follow-up to her earlier work when shefound herself in the German bombing raid that beganher career as one of the world’s top war photographers.

Near the end of the Second World War, as Alliedtroops entered Germany, Bourke-White was among the

first photographers to document the Nazi death camps.Life published her photos, bringing images of the horrorsto the American public for the first time. Her book TheLiving Dead of Buchenwald became a classic. In the post-war era, Bourke-White continued to pursue internationalthemes for Life. She covered India, Pakistan, South Africa,and the Korean War. Her many pictures of India’sMahatma Gandhi, including one taken just before he wasassassinated, are among her most enduring images.

Margaret Bourke-WhiteFamed photographer pursues her high-flying career.

AMERICANS ABROADMargaret Bourke-White: Adventureas a Photojournalist

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marched into the Czechoslovakian capital of Prague;within a few months, Hitler announced the annexation ofthe rest of Czechoslovakia. Then, in an August 1939 sur-prise, he protected his eastern flank by signing a nonag-gression pact with the Soviet Union, supposedly his swornenemy. In a secret protocol, Hitler and Soviet leader JosephStalin agreed on a plan to divide up Poland, Hitler’s nexttarget, and the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia),which were long coveted by the Soviet Union.

The Outbreak of War in EuropeWhen Hitler’s armies stormed onto Polish soil on Septem-ber 1, 1939, the Second World War officially began. Britainand France, the Allies, already pledged to defend the Polishgovernment, declared war against Germany but could notmobilize in time to help Poland. Within weeks, Germany’swar machine overran that nation. Then, as a brutal cam-paign of Nazi repression wracked Poland, an eerie calm—which observers called a sitzkrieg, or “sitting war”—settledover the rest of Europe during the winter of 1939–40.

Suddenly, in April 1940, a full-scale German blitzkrieg,or “lightning war,” began. Employing massed tank forma-tions, motorized infantry and artillery, and massive airsupport, German military forces moved swiftly. They racedthrough Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium,Luxembourg, and into France. The speed of the Naziadvance shocked Allied strategists in Paris and London.Britain dramatically evacuated its troops, but not theirvaluable equipment, from the French coastal town ofDunkirk, just before it fell to a German onslaught. Early inJune, Italy joined Germany and declared war on the Allies.Later in June, German troops marched into Paris.

Hitler declared France’s western and northern regionsto be occupied German territory and installed a pro-NaziFrench government at Vichy in southern France. In an actof powerful symbolism, he staged France’s formal surren-der in the same railway car in which Germany had capitu-lated to France at the end of the First World War. GeneralCharles DeGaulle, seeking safety in London, countered byproclaiming France Libre (Free France), an anti-Nazi gov-ernment pledged to end the German occupation andtopple the Vichy regime.

After only six weeks of combat, Hitler’s military jugger-naut gave Nazi Germany control of Europe’s Atlantic coast-line. Germany’s sway extended from the North Sea south toSpain, where Franco’s fascist government remained offi-cially neutral but effectively in the camp of Germany andItaly, which after announcing their own formal alliance,became the Axis Powers. The Axis gained another member,in September 1940, when Japan joined them in signing theTripartite Pact. Britain now loomed directly in Hitler’s gunsights.

The U.S. Response to War in EuropeMeanwhile, alarmed at the Nazi surge, President Rooseveltpressured Congress to modify its neutrality legislation andcalled for other “measures short of war” to help Britainand France. Late in 1939, Congress lifted the ban on sell-ing military armaments to belligerents and authorizedarms sales to all buyers who could pay cash and use theirown ships for transport. Because its naval forces domi-nated the Atlantic sea lanes, Britain primarily benefitedfrom this revised cash-and-carry policy.

The United States took other steps toward interven-tion. Congress granted the White House’s request for newmilitary funding and for enactment of the SelectiveTraining and Service Act of 1940, the first peacetime draftin U.S. history. Worried about Britain’s precarious militaryand financial position, Roosevelt facilitated the shipmentof military supplies, sometimes claimed to be “surplus,”to Great Britain. He also added two distinguished, pro-interventionist Republicans to what now seemed a warcabinet. Henry Stimson became secretary of war andFrank Knox secretary of the navy. These appointmentsgave Roosevelt’s foreign policy a bipartisan image, if notfully bipartisan support.

Hitler focused his attention on the British Isles. FromAugust through October 1940, Germany’s air force, theLuftwaffe, conducted daily raids on Britain’s air bases andnearly knocked out its Royal Air Force (RAF). On theverge of a kayo, however, Hitler suddenly changed strategyand ordered, instead, the bombing of London and otherBritish cities—first by day and, then, by night. In additionto allowing the RAF time to recover, Hitler’s move steeledBritain’s resolve and bolstered the interventionist argu-ment in the United States. Use of German airpoweragainst British civilians, in what became known as “theBattle of Britain,” aroused sympathy in the United Statesfor their plight. U.S. radio correspondents began report-ing, nightly, during Nazi bombing raids. The dramaticradio broadcasts of CBS’s Edward R. Murrow, observedthe writer Archibald MacLeish, “skillfully burned the cityof London in our homes, and we felt the flames.”

The Roosevelt administration, in turn, inched closerto intervention. In September 1940, it announced thetransfer of 50 naval destroyers, from the era of WorldWar I, to the British navy. In exchange, Britain granted theUnited States the right to build eight naval bases in itscolonial territories in the Western Hemisphere. This“Destroyers-for-Bases” deal infuriated Roosevelt’s oppo-nents. Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana mailedout, at governmental expense, more than a million anti-interventionist postcards, a move that Secretary of WarStimson condemned as approaching “very near the line ofsubversion . . . if not treason.”

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After deciding to seek an unprecedented third term aspresident in 1940, however, Roosevelt seemed to shiftcourse. He certainly began to speak more circumspectly,dishonestly according to his critics, about intervention.With his New Deal domestic programs fading from viewand his foreign policy controversial, he appeared likely toface a strong Republican challenge. The GOP, turningaway from candidates opposed to interventionism, nomi-nated Wendell Willkie, a lawyer and business executivewith solidly pro-Allied and internationalist leanings, tooppose FDR. While generally supporting Roosevelt’s

policy toward the Allies, this former Democrat alsocharged that the president would soon carry the UnitedStates directly into battle. In response, Roosevelt courtedanti-interventionist votes by assuring “American mothers”that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreignwars.” Although the Republicans did better than they haddone in 1936, Roosevelt rather easily defeated Willkie,gaining nearly 55 percent of the popular vote, and FDR’sDemocratic Party retained control of Congress. Oncesafely reelected, Roosevelt unveiled an ambitious plan tosupport Britain’s war effort.

Germany demands annexation ofSudetenland, September 1938

Western Soviet Union andEastern Europe occupied,1941–1942

Germany effects Anschusswith Austria, March, 1938

Czechoslovakia seized, August 1939

Poland invaded,September 1939. World War II begins

Denmark and Norwayoccupied, April 1940

Belgium, the Netherlandsoccupied, May 1940

Allied evacuation fromDunkirk, May 1940

German submarine attacksin North Atlantic

Battle of BritainFall, 1940

France surrenders, June 1940,and Vichy government installed, June 1940

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Map 26.1 German Expansion at Its HeightThis map shows the expansion of German power from 1938 through 1942. Which countries fell to German control?Why might Americans have differed over whether these moves by Germany represented a strategic threat to theUnited States?

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The president’s moves continued to generate signifi-cant opposition. The America First Committee, organizedby the head of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, intensifiedits crusade against intervention. The aviator-hero CharlesA. Lindbergh, its most famous member, flew to mass ral-lies, all across the country, and joined anti-Rooseveltpoliticians, such as Senators Wheeler and Nye, indenouncing aid to the Allies.

Interventionists came to label all of their opponentsas “isolationists,” a single, derogatory term that obscuresthe diversity within the uneasy coalition opposed to U.S.engagement in the Second World War. Pacifists withinthis broad constituency opposed all wars, even thoseagainst fascist regimes, as immoral and mutually destruc-tive. Some political progressives such as Senator Wheelercondemned fascism but feared that U.S. entry into warwould lead to centralization of governmental power athome. Other anti-interventionists, such as Lindbergh,praised the fascist states as bulwarks against communism,and some even covertly shared Hitler’s anti-Semitism.Avowedly anti-Semitic and pro-fascist organizations,such as the German-American Bund, openly defendedHitler’s racial policies and denounced the “Jew Deal,” areference to the presence of Jewish advisers in PresidentRoosevelt’s inner circle. During the fall of 1941, a specialsubcommittee of the U.S. Senate began “PropagandaHearings” into whether or not the Hollywood film indus-try, with its many Jewish producers, calculatedly mademovies, such as Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), whichpromoted interventionism.

The opposition to aiding the Allies, then, did tap anti-Semitic sentiment in the United States. In 1939, congres-sional leaders had quashed the Wagner-Rogers bill, whichwould have boosted immigration quotas to admit 20,000Jewish children into the United States. Seemingly bowingto anti-Semitic prejudices, the United States adopted arestrictive refugee policy. The consequences of the U.S.stance became especially grave after June 1941, whenHitler established the death camps that would systemati-cally exterminate millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals,and anyone else whom the Nazis deemed unfit for life inthe Third Reich and its occupied territories.

Meanwhile, those who favored assisting the Alliedcause mounted a popular campaign of their own. Themost prominent group, the Committee to Defend Americaby Aiding the Allies, headed by William Allen White, awell-known Republican journalist, organized more than300 local chapters in just a few weeks during the spring of1940. These organizations, much like their opponents,gathered a diverse constituency. Interventionists agreed,however, that a fascist-dominated Europe would soonthreaten the security and safety of the United States. Isola-tionists claimed to stand for “America First,” according to

a pro-interventionist folk song, but ignored the likelihoodthat the fascists already saw “America next.”

An “Arsenal of Democracy”Franklin Roosevelt now vigorously pressed the case forstronger anti-Axis measures. Recognizing the sorry state ofBritain’s finances, the president proposed that the UnitedStates would now “lend-lease,” or loan rather than sell,munitions to the Allies. Making the United States a “greatarsenal of democracy,” FDR claimed, would “keep waraway from our country and our people.” Debate over aLend-Lease Act became bitter, and a divided Congressnarrowly passed this controversial measure, which carriedthe patriotic-sounding title of “House Resolution 1776,”on March 11, 1941. Several months later, when Germanyturned its attention away from Britain and suddenlyattacked the Soviet Union, its recent ally, in violation ofthe 1939 nonaggression pact, Roosevelt extended lend-lease assistance to Joseph Stalin’s communist government.

While proclaiming an official U.S. policy of nonbel-ligerence, Roosevelt next began coordinating his militarystrategy with that of Britain. He secretly pledged to followa Europe-first approach if the United States ever founditself fighting a two-front war against Germany and Japan,its Axis partner in Asia. Publicly, Roosevelt deployed U.S.Marines to Greenland and Iceland, a move that freed upthe British forces that had been protecting these strategic

The Fight Against InterventionismThe movement to keep the United States out of the SecondWorld War mobilized powerful personalities, impassionedrhetoric, and colorful imagery. This emblem, for example,invokes nationalistic and patriotic imagery in the cause ofavoiding, rather than engaging in, war.

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Danish possessions following Germany’s 1940 conquest ofDenmark.

In August 1941, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill,Britain’s Prime Minister, met on a ship off the coast ofCanada. They worked toward formalizing a wartimealliance and concluded their meeting by issuing an “AtlanticCharter,” which disavowed territorial expansion, endorsedprotection of human rights and self-determination, andpledged the postwar creation of a new world organizationthat would ensure “general security.” Roosevelt also agreedto Churchill’s request that the U.S. Navy provide convoys,as far as Iceland, to the ships that were carrying lend-leasesupplies to Britain. Soon, in an undeclared war in theNorth Atlantic, the U.S. Navy engaged Germany’s formi-dable “wolf packs,” groups of submarines that preyed onAllied shipping.

The White House now firmly believed that defeatingHitler would require formal U.S. entry into the war, but itlacked domestic support for making this move. Privately,the president likely hoped Germany would commit someprovocative act in the North Atlantic that would swingU.S. popular opinion decisively behind intervention. TheOctober 1941 sinking of a U.S. destroyer, the ReubenJames, did convince a majority in Congress to backRoosevelt’s calls for repealing the neutrality legislation ofthe 1930s. Still, the tone of debate became so bitter and themargin favoring repeal so slim that the White Houseacknowledged Congress would still not pass a formal dec-laration of war.

Hitler’s military strategy in Europe only complicatedRoosevelt’s course. While avoiding a repetition of theReuben James episode in the North Atlantic, Germanyfocused its military energies on the Soviet Union, thecommunist-led nation for which most Americans felt farless empathy than they did for Great Britain. As it turnedout, however, conflict with Japan, rather than with Ger-many, would bring the United States formally into theSecond World War.

Pearl HarborRelations between Japan and the United States hadsteadily worsened during the late 1930s and early 1940s.In response to Japan’s 1937 invasion of China, theUnited States extended economic credits to the belea-guered Nationalist Chinese government and curtailedsales of equipment to Japan. In 1939, the United Statesabrogated its Treaty of Commerce and Navigation withJapan, an action that meant further restrictions on U.S.exports to that island nation. A 1940 ban on the sale ofaviation fuel and high-grade scrap iron aimed at slow-ing military advances by Japan throughout much ofSoutheast Asia.

Measures of this kind failed to halt Japanese expan-sion, now aided by the conflict then engulfing Europe. TheEuropean war prevented France, the Netherlands, andGreat Britain from supporting their colonies in Asia, andmilitarists in Japan saw an opportunity to enlarge theirown East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Japanese forces thuspushed deep into French Indochina, seeking the raw mate-rials Japan could no longer buy from the United States.Military planners in Tokyo also secretly prepared plansfor attacks against Singapore, the Netherlands East Indies(later Indonesia), and the Philippines, a U.S. colonialpossession.

Roosevelt continued to maneuver. He expanded thetrade embargo against Japan, promised further assistanceto Nationalist China, and accelerated an ongoing U.S. mil-itary buildup in the Pacific. In mid-1941, the presidentplayed his most potent diplomatic card: He froze allJapanese financial assets held in the United States. Thismove effectively gave the Roosevelt administration controlover all commerce between the two countries, includingtrade in petroleum, the vital commodity that fueledJapan’s economy and its dreams for expansionism.

Japanese expansionists now squarely faced a fatefuldecision. Despite diminishing economic and militaryprospects, they refused to abandon their goal of creating anEast Asian empire. Instead, they began planning a preemp-tive attack against the United States. In light of their nation’slimited supplies of raw materials, especially oil, Japanesestrategists saw little hope for winning a prolonged war butimagined that a crippling, surprise blow might limit U.S.military capabilities and even bring economic concessionsfrom Washington. General Hideki Tojo, who became hisnation’s wartime prime minister, viewed Japanese strategyas something of a rash gamble: “Sometimes a man has tojump with his eyes closed,” Tojo remarked.

On December 7, 1941, Japanese bombers swoopeddown on U.S. naval facilities at Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii.Specially modified to operate from aircraft carriers, theplanes destroyed much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Altogether,Japan sank or severely damaged 19 ships; destroyed or dis-abled nearly 200 aircraft; and killed more than 2,200Americans. The damage might have been worse. U.S. air-craft carriers, which were out to sea at the time of the attack,avoided the Japanese bombers, which also failed to take outPearl Harbor’s fuel storage tanks and repair facilities.

Japan’s assault against Pearl Harbor brought the UnitedStates into war rather than bringing it to terms. In a dra-matic message to Congress, broadcast over radio, onDecember 8, Roosevelt decried the attack. Coining thephrase that would serve as a U.S. battle cry throughout thewar, he called December 7 “a date which will live in infamy.”

Pearl Harbor would also live on in historical debates.Roosevelt’s most implacable critics quickly began asking,

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Fi g h t i n g t h e Wa r i n Eu rop e 795

for example, why much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at PearlHarbor lay vulnerable and unprepared, rather than on astate of full alert. Could Roosevelt and his advisers reallyhave been unaware of an impending attack? U.S. intelli-gence, it would later be revealed, had broken Japan’ssecret diplomatic code—calling the decrypted messages“MAGIC”—and enjoyed some insight into Japaneseintentions. Other critics came to charge FDR with adopt-ing a series of calculated policies that were designed toprovoke Japan. Deliberately inciting a Japanese attack, inthis view, provided Roosevelt with a way of opening a“back door” through which the United States could enterthe Second World War.

Most historians, however, view the Roosevelt admin-istration as more unlucky and confused than duplicitousand devious. Its plan for deterring Japanese expansion byincreasing U.S. naval forces in the Pacific and stationingbombers in the Philippines, within striking distance ofJapan, simply failed to work. U.S. intelligence, based onintercepted messages and visual sightings, did expect amajor military move from Japan in late 1941, but onetoward Singapore or other British or Dutch possessions inAsia rather than at Pearl Harbor. Moreover, strategists inWashington, including the president, doubted that Japan’smilitary planners had the skill or daring that an attack onPearl Harbor entailed.

Pearl Harbor disarmed the noninterventionist move-ment and brought the United States, officially, into theSecond World War. On December 8, 1941, Congressdeclared war against Japan. Representative JeanetteRankin, a longtime peace activist from Montana who hadvoted against entry into the First World War, now stood asa lone dissenter. Nothing in the Tripartite Pact specifically

required Hitler, unaware of Japan’s plans for Pearl Harbor,to support his Axis ally. Roosevelt’s “date of infamy”speech never even mentioned Germany, but a presidentialradio address, delivered a day later, bluntly accused allthree Axis Powers of hatching a coordinated plan toattack the United States. Two days later, on December 11,Germany (soon joined by Italy) did declare war on theUnited States. Hitler mistakenly assumed that fightingJapan would keep the United States preoccupied in thePacific and, therefore, out of any major combat operationsacross the Atlantic Ocean. Axis strategists drasticallyunderestimated the United States’s ability to mobilizeswiftly and effectively.

Fighting the War in Europe

What military strategies did

the United States and the Allies ultimately

adopt when fighting in both the European and

Asian theaters of the Second World War?

Initially, the war went badly for the Allies. Even as Hitlertried to consolidate his grip over Western Europe, hisforces were rolling across North Africa, and his sub-marines were slashing away at Allied supply lines in theAtlantic Ocean. During the months that followed PearlHarbor, German U-boats, according to U.S. GeneralGeorge Marshall, came to “threaten our entire war effort.”U.S. officials concealed the actual toll, but German subsoperating in Atlantic waters, sometimes within sight of theU.S. shoreline, sank nearly 400 ships in less than sixmonths. In the Pacific, Japan seemed unstoppable. Its

Focus Question

Is That a War Plant?This photo from 1945 shows an aircraftplant bedecked with camouflage.

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forces overran Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and thePhilippines; then, Japan moved against the British inBurma and the Australians in New Guinea.

New governmental bureaucracies quickly guided acrash program for U.S. mobilization. Establishing militarypriorities—acquiring naval bases, securing landing rightsfor aircraft, ensuring points for radio transmission, andgaining access to raw materials for military production—became the immediate order of business. Soon thereafter,a series of governmental agencies, often staffed by peoplefrom the business world, began to direct economic deci-sion making.

At the same time, a newly formed Joint Chiefs of Staff,consisting of representatives from each of the armed ser-vices, oversaw military matters. In January 1943, after 16months of around-the-clock work, builders completed theWar Department’s Pentagon complex, a giant five-story,five-sided building that symbolized the nation’s new mili-tary might—and the new place of the military in Americanlife. Technological breakthroughs assisted the U.S. militaryeffort. In 1942, aircraft equipped with radar, a critical newtechnology developed in collaboration with Britain,proved effective against submarines. During 1943, Ger-many’s U-boat threat faded “from menace to problem,” inthe words of one U.S. naval strategist.

A highly sophisticated Allied code-breaking operationalso played a crucial role in changing the course of battle.Realizing the importance of radio communication to hiswar plans, Hitler’s scientists had integrated the complexENIGMA encryption machine, first introduced during the1920s, into Germany’s war effort. Experts initially consid-ered Germany’s ENIGMA messages immune to code-breaking efforts. The cipher keys changed daily andoffered 150 million million million ways of encoding anymessage. Then a group of Polish mathematicians, who hadescaped just before German armies subdued their country,brought key ideas for decoding ENIGMA’s secrets toBritain. Their insights contributed to a successful andsuper-secret Allied code-breaking program headquarteredat Bletchley Park in England. At its height, the BletchleyPark endeavor, not officially acknowledged until 1974,employed 4,000 people, including many from the UnitedStates.

The Allied code-breakers gradually perfected theiroperation. Decrypted German messages, called “ULTRA”for “ultra-secret,” gave the Allies a crucial militaryadvantage, beginning with the Battle of Britain and Ger-many’s campaigns in North Africa. Amazingly, Germancommanders never discovered how many of their inter-cepted and decoded radio communications reachedAllied commanders—sometimes even before makingtheir way to their intended German recipients. In thepostwar world, the code-breaking operation at Bletchley

Park would contribute to the development of computertechnology.

Campaigns in North Africa and ItalyThe Allied Powers continually clashed over military strat-egy. Although other nations, such as China, joined theAllied ranks, the United States, Great Britain, and theSoviet Union dominated. These three nations agreed onmaking Europe the primary focus of their efforts, andRoosevelt and his military strategists established a unifiedcommand with their British counterparts. The SovietUnion’s Stalin, his armies facing the bulk of Germany’sforces in Eastern Europe, called for a second front in West-ern Europe, created by an invasion across the EnglishChannel into France, to relieve pressure on the USSR.Many of Roosevelt’s advisers agreed: If German troopssucceeded in knocking the Soviet Union out of the war,Hitler could turn his full attention toward Britain.Churchill, however, urged instead the invasion of NorthAfrica, garrisoned by German forces and officially underthe colonial control of Vichy France, as a way of first nib-bling away at the edges of Nazi power—and at areas heconsidered vital to maintaining Britain’s colonial interestsin the Mediterranean.

A North African campaign against German forces,code-named TORCH, began with Anglo-American land-ings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942. Under thecommand of U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the ini-tial invasion force included 400 ships, 1,000 planes, andmore than 100,000 troops. To ease his way, Eisenhowersigned an armistice agreement with Admiral Jean Darlan,a Nazi sympathizer and the person officially in charge ofVichy France’s colonies in North Africa. This arrange-ment, which allowed Darlan and his colleagues to retaintheir political positions, outraged Eisenhower’s Free-French allies, notably General Charles De Gaulle, andmany people in the United States. When Darlan’s oppo-nents assassinated him, shortly after the beginning ofTORCH, one of Eisenhower’s aides called it an “act ofprovidence.” Even as TORCH, aided by the ULTRA inter-cepts, moved forward, Free French leaders, particularly DeGaulle, continued to nurture their resentments againsttheir U.S. Allies.

At a meeting in Casablanca, Morocco, in January1943, Roosevelt sided with Churchill. Arguing that a cross-Channel invasion of France still seemed too risky, they suc-ceeded in postponing it to some indefinite future. Roosevelthoped clear-cut Allied victories, in advance of any Channelcrossing, could bolster his own sagging political popular-ity in the United States. To assuage Stalin’s fear that Britainand the United States might sign a separate peace withHitler, Roosevelt and Churchill promised to remain at war

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until Germany agreed to an “unconditional surrender.”Continuing disagreement over the timing for opening theSecond Front in France, however, still strained relationsamong the Allies.

Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, Joseph Stalin’s RedArmy slowly turned the tide of battle with a decisive vic-tory after more than five months of bloody warfare in andaround the Soviet city of Stalingrad. Abandoning a largelydefensive response to Hitler’s offensive during the latesummer of 1942, Stalin’s forces finally counterattacked in

early 1943. They cut off and, then, ground down an entireGerman army, more than 1 million soldiers, at Stalingrad,and sent other German forces reeling backward for thefirst time during the war.

Stalin’s Allies could soon claim victories of their own.Although Hitler poured reinforcements into North Africa,he failed to stop either TORCH or a drive westward fromEgypt by British forces. Caught in between, nearly 200,000Axis troops in North Africa surrendered to the Alliesduring the spring of 1943. Later that summer, the Allies

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The opening of a second front against Germany was acontentious strategic issue among the Allies. Whilethe Soviet Union battled Germany along a 2,000-mileEastern Front, the Western Allies opted to undertakecampaigns in North Africa and Italy. The long-awaitedsecond front was finally initiated with the cross-Channel invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

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followed up the North African campaign by overrunningthe island of Sicily and then fighting their way, slowly,northward through Italy’s rugged mountains. Allied suc-cesses did boost civilian morale in the United States andBritain, but the Italian campaign also diverted badlyneeded resources away from the upcoming cross-Channelinvasion, without loosening the Nazi stranglehold overWestern Europe.

Some U.S. officials increasingly worried about thepostwar implications of the Roosevelt-Churchill strategy.Secretary of War Henry Stimson, for example, warned thatthe Allied campaigns through Africa and Italy might leavethe Soviet Union as the dominant power in most ofEurope. Unless the United States soon directly confrontedGerman might, he colorfully argued, Germany could beleft holding “the leg for Stalin to skin the deer,” making“dangerous business for us at the end of the war.” Finallyheeding such advice, Roosevelt agreed to establish a firmdate for the cross-Channel invasion the Allies had so longpromised Stalin.

Operation OVERLORDNamed Operation OVERLORD and directed by GeneralDwight Eisenhower, the invasion began on June 6, 1944,D-day. During the preceding months, Allied command-ers assembled, in England, one of the largest invasionforces in world history. German officials obviously knewabout these preparations, but a disinformation campaignand diversionary tactics fooled them into expecting theAllied landing would come at the narrowest part of theEnglish Channel rather than in the Normandy region ofFrance. A new code-breaking machine, which dramati-cally increased the number of ULTRA intercepts, allowedAllied intelligence officers to confirm that their deceptionshad worked.

After several delays, because of inhospitableweather, Allied commanders executed their daring plan.As naval gunner crews pounded the Normandy shore,three divisions of paratroopers dropped behind enemylines and disrupted German communications. Finally, atdawn on June 6, more than 4,000 Allied ships beganlanding troops and supplies. The first U.S. forces tocome ashore at Omaha Beach met especially heavyGerman fire and took enormous casualties, but waves ofinvading troops continued to land. Only three weeksafter D-day, more than a million Allied personnel con-trolled the French coast, clearing the way for the long-awaited second front.

Just as the 1943 Battle of Stalingrad had reversed thecourse of the war in the East, OVERLORD changed themomentum in the West. Within three months, U.S.,British, and Free French troops entered Paris. After

repulsing a desperate German counteroffensive in Bel-gium, at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and Jan-uary 1945, forces under Eisenhower’s command swepteastward, crossed the Rhine River, and prepared to headtoward Berlin to meet up with westward-advancing Soviettroops.

The Allies, not surprisingly, disagreed on how toorchestrate Germany’s final defeat. British strategistsurged a rapid advance, in hopes of meeting up withStalin’s troops in Berlin or even farther to the east of thatcity. General Eisenhower dissented. He favored a strategythat would produce fewer casualties among his troops andmight assuage the suspicious Soviets about the postwarintentions of their western Allies. Doubtful that his troopscould beat the Soviets into Berlin anyway, Eisenhowerdecided that any attempt to race to Berlin would under-mine chances for postwar cooperation between the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union.

Eisenhower’s view prevailed. He moved his troopscautiously along a broad front and, then, halted them atthe Elbe River, west of Berlin. This guaranteed that Soviettroops, who took staggering casualties while approachingBerlin, would enter the German capital first. AlthoughHitler took his own life in order to avoid capture, themajority of Germany’s Nazi elite and its wartime leader-ship did fall into Allied hands.

As the war in Europe drew to a close, the horrors per-petrated by the leaders of the Third Reich became fullyvisible. Hitler’s murderous campaign of extermination,now called the Holocaust, took the lives of more than5 million Jews, roughly half of Europe’s prewar populationof 10 million. The Nazis also murdered hundreds of thou-sands of other people, including gypsies, homosexuals,intellectuals, communists, the physically and mentallychallenged, and people from various other identitygroups. Only Germany’s defeat closed down Hitler’s deathcamps, but the Allies might have saved at least somepeople if they had helped them escape and emigrate.Allied leaders, however, worried about how to deal withlarge numbers of refugees and claimed they could notspare scarce ships to transport people to sanctuary. In1943, after officials in Romania proposed the evacuationof 70,000 endangered Jews from its territory, for instance,the Allies never seriously considered accepting the offer.With few places to go, people who might have been sparedwent off to Nazi death camps.

The attempt to respond to Nazi atrocities continuedfor years. In 1945 and 1946, the Allies first brought 24 ofGermany’s top officials to trial at Nuremberg for “crimesagainst humanity.” After a series of subsequent trials, morethan 10,000 former German officials stood convicted ofwar crimes. Large quantities of money, gold, and jewelrythat Nazi leaders had stolen from victims of the Holocaust

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and deposited in Swiss banks, however, remained con-cealed for more than 50 years. Not until 1997 did groupsrepresenting Holocaust survivors and the U.S. govern-ment force an investigation of the Swiss banking indus-try’s holdings of stolen “Nazi gold,” an inquiry that finallyprompted some restitution for the families who had beenvictimized.

Meanwhile, following Hitler’s suicide in April andGermany’s final surrender on May 8, 1945, the militaryfoundations for a postwar European settlement fell intoplace. Soviet armies controlled Eastern Europe; Britishand U.S. forces predominated in Italy and the rest of theMediterranean; the four European Allies divided up zonesof occupation in Germany and Austria. Allied leaders also

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Map 26.3 Allied Advances and Collapse of German PowerThis map depicts the final Allied advances and the end of the war in Germany. Through what countries did Sovietarmies advance, and how might their advance have affected the postwar situation? How was Germany divided byoccupying powers, and how might that division have affected postwar politics?View an animated version of this map or related maps at http://www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin

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turned to the task of transforming these military-pro-duced arrangements into a comprehensive postwar polit-ical settlement in Europe, even as the war in the Pacific,which had officially begun at Pearl Harbor, remained farfrom over.

The Pacific TheaterFor six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan’s forces steadilyadvanced. Singapore fell easily. Japan overwhelmed U.S.naval garrisons in the Philippines and on Guam and Wakeislands. After taking heavy casualties, Filipino and U.Sground troops surrendered at Bataan and Corregidor inthe Philippines. After a much larger Japanese fleet ravageda U.S naval contingent in the Java Sea, Japan’s naval forcesheaded southward to menace Australia and New Zealandand eastward to threaten Hawaii.

Seizing the Offensive in the PacificAs the United States rapidly built up its combat capabili-ties, military strategists adopted, of necessity, a largelydefensive strategy. Then, in May 1942, the first U.S. navalvictory, at the Battle of the Coral Sea, relieved some of theJapanese pressure on Australia. In response, Japanese navalcommanders decided to hit back hard. They amassed200 ships and 600 planes to destroy what remained of theU.S. Pacific fleet and to take Midway Island, perhaps inpreparation for an assault against Hawaii. U.S. Naval Intel-ligence, however, broke enough of the Japanese code towarn Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Surprising the Japanesearmada, U.S. planes sank four Japanese carriers anddestroyed a total of 322 planes. The Battle of Midway, inearly June 1942, preserved the presence of the U.S. Navy inthe mid-Pacific. Nimitz’s forces did suffer substantiallosses at Midway, but the far greater ones that theyinflicted prevented Japanese commanders from continuingtheir offensive in the Pacific.

Two months later, U.S. amphibious forces splashedashore at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and finallyended Japan’s threat to Australia. Although bloodyengagements in the Solomons continued for months, onboth land and sea, they ultimately achieved their majorobjective: permanently seizing the military initiative in thePacific. According to prewar plans, Europe was to havereceived the highest priority, but by 1943, the UnitedStates, now massively rearmed, could devote roughly equalresources to both theaters of the war.

Combat in the Pacific Theater became, in the historianJohn Dower’s phrase, a “war without mercy.” Battlefieldconditions reinforced racial prejudices, and the brutalityalready evident during Japan’s initial assault against China

continued. Japanese militarists expected the war wouldconfirm the superiority of the divine Yamato race. Japa-nese captors, particularly on the Asian mainland, mistreatedprisoners in almost unimaginable ways. The Japanesearmy’s infamous “Unit 731” tested bacteriological weaponsin China and conducted horrifying medical experimentson live subjects. Following the surrender of U.S. and Fil-ipino troops in 1942, Japanese commanders, in whatbecame known as the “Bataan Death March,” forced theircaptives to walk, on meager rations of food and water,more than 60 miles.

The United States exhibited its own signs of raciallybased behavior. Wartime imagery, in both the U.S. govern-ment publications and in popular culture, often portrayedall Japanese people as animalistic subhumans. On the bat-tlefield, U.S. troops could, on occasion, rival their Japaneseadversaries in disrespecting enemy dead and in killingopposing forces rather than taking prisoners. The longerthe war in the Pacific lasted, the more brutal it became.

China PolicyU.S. policy makers continued to hope that China’sNationalist government might eventually mount an effec-tive military opposition against Japan and emerge, afterthe war, to lead a strong and united nation. Neither hopeseemed realistic.

The United States tried to bolster China’s armedforces. General Joseph W. Stillwell, who had been advisingChinese commanders on military matters since theJapanese invasion of the late 1930s, continually clashedwith Jiang Jieshi. Friction between the prickly “VinegarJoe” and Jiang eventually prompted Roosevelt, whohoped the Nationalist leader could become an importantU.S. ally, to withdraw Stillwell from China. Stillwell’sdeparture, however, brought no improvement in the per-formance of Jiang’s military forces.

China’s political instability complicated matters. TheU.S. officials most attuned to Chinese politics agreed withStillwell: Incompetence and corruption riddled JiangJieshi’s Nationalist government. It could avoid engagingthe Japanese invaders but still make extravagant demandsfor U.S. military assistance. China’s ongoing civil war,which Jiang’s forces seemed to be losing, further worriedU.S. officials. A powerful communist movement, ledby Mao Zedong, clearly fought more effectively thanthe Nationalist government against China’s Japaneseinvaders, but the White House continued to envisionJiang as the future leader of a noncommunist China. Onthis crucial matter, the Nationalist leader’s powerful back-ers in the United States, members of the “China Lobby,”successfully pressured FDR and other political leaders,particularly those in the Republican Party, to support the

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Nationalist cause. Roosevelt thus insisted that NationalistChina retain its status as a full member of the AlliedPowers, and he convinced Stalin to support Jiang, ratherthan his fellow communist Mao. All the while, Japan’sadvance into Chinese territory continued.

U.S. Strategy in the PacificIn contrast to the European Theater, no unified commandguided the war in the Pacific. Consequently, makeshift,compromise military decisions actions often emerged.General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded U.S. Armyforces, insisted on an offensive launched from his head-quarters in Australia through New Guinea and the Philip-pines and on to Japan. In May 1942, Japan had humbledthe haughty and imperious MacArthur by forcing him out

of the Philippines, and he had pledged he would, one day,return in victory. He now claimed that controlling thePhilippines at war’s end would advance U.S. strategicinterests in the postwar world. Admiral Nimitz, the heroof Midway, saw strategic calculations somewhat differ-ently. He favored a direct advance toward Japan, acrossthe smaller islands of the central Pacific. Taking thisroute meant that the drive against Japan would bypassMacArthur’s beloved Philippines.

Unable to decide between the two strategies, the JointChiefs of Staff authorized both, which moved forward,amidst fierce fighting and heavy casualties. MacArthur’sforces took New Guinea, and those commanded by Nimitzliberated the Marshall Islands and the Marianas in 1943and 1944. Supporting these efforts, a Marine platoon ofNavajo Indians established a unique, highly effective radio

Farthest

Extent

ofJapanese

Con

trol, Au

gust1942

Equator0°

Aleutian Islands

Caroline Islands

Okinawa Iwo Jima

MarianasIslands

SolomonIslands

MarshallIs.

GilbertIs.

KurilIsl

ands

Attu I. Kiska I.

Midway (U.S.)

Hawaiian Is.(U.S.)

Timor

New Guinea

Guam (U.S.)

Wake I. (U.S.)

Sakhalin I.

Karafuto

Java

Formosa

BorneoCelebes

Sumatra

Beijing

Seoul

Shanghai

Tokyo

Hong Kong

Rangoon

BangkokSaigon

Singapore

Port Moresby

Hollandia

Darwin

Rabaul

Honolulu(Pearl Harbor)

DutchHarbor

Vladivostok

AUSTRALIA

SOVIETUNION

CHINA

MONGOLIA

INDIA

BURMA

THAILANDFRENCHINDOCHINA

KOREA JAPAN

PHILIPPINES

MANCHURIA(MANCHUKUO)

MALAYA

(U.S.)

DUTCH EAST INDIES

SARAWAK

BR. NORTHBORNEOBRUNEI

PACIFIC

OCEAN

SOUTHCHINA

SEA

BERING SEA

CORALSEA

INDIANOCEAN

Pearl Harbor,December 7, 1941

1

Wake Island,December 23, 1941

2

Java Sea,February–March 1942

3

Bataan Peninsula,January–April, 1942

4Corregidor,April–May, 1942

5

Coral Sea,May 7–8, 1942

6

Midway,June 3–6, 1942

7

Guadalcanal,August 1942–February 1943

8

For the first six months of the war in the Pacific, Japanese forces were victorious. Finally, at MidwayIsland and Guadalcanal, Allied forces turned the tideof the war. Still, it would require three additional years of bloody engagements, island by island, before the Allies reached Okinawa, within striking distance of Japan itself.

Japanese Empire, 1936

Allied nations

Major Japanese victories

Major Allied victories

Farthest extent of Japanesecontrol, August 1942

Neutral nations

0

500 1,000 Kilometers0

500 1,000 Miles

Map 26.4 Japanese Expansion and Early Battles in the PacificThis map shows the expansion of Japanese power prior to the Battle of Midway. What countries were in theJapanese orbit? U.S. opinion polls from the late 1930s suggest that more Americans supported strong measuresagainst this Japanese threat in Asia than against the German threat in Europe. What might be some explanationsfor this concern?

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communication system. Employing their own language inimaginative coded variations, which Japanese intelligenceofficers never cracked, the members of this Navajo SignalCorps ensured that U.S. troops could securely exchangemessages.

By late 1944, U.S. military forces finally came withinrange of Japan. The fall of Saipan meant that U.S. bomberscould easily reach Japanese targets. The capture of theislands of Iwo Jima and of Okinawa during spring 1945further shortened the distance between U.S. bases andJapan’s major population centers. The battle for Okinawa,however, also confirmed the human costs of the island-hopping strategy: 120,000 Japanese and 48,000 Americansoldiers died. After contemplating these numbers, U.S.military planners dreaded the prospect of invading Japan’shome islands.

Increasingly, reliance on airpower looked more andmore enticing. Key members of the U.S. military had longattributed almost magical qualities to aerial bombardment.Some had even insisted that the mere threat of bombingcould provide a means of deterring war as well as a way ofconducting it. Careful analyses of strategic bombing during

the Second World War, though, suggested less sanguineassessments. The Nazi bombardment during the Battle ofBritain, for example, had inflicted heavy damage but onlyappeared to strengthen civilian morale, while never givingHitler the quick victory he had expected. Subsequent Alliedbombing against Germany, including controversial cam-paigns against the civilian populations of Hamburg andDresden, produced equally mixed results. Even as the Allieswreaked havoc on German cities, they endured losses inplanes and pilots that seemed almost impossible to sustainover any length of time.

Nonetheless, U.S. strategists continued to see strategicbombing providing the crucial U.S. advantage in the Pacific.In February 1944, General Henry Harley (“Hap”) Arnolddevised a plan for firebombing major Japanese cities “notonly because they are greatly congested but because theycontain numerous war industries.” Bombers added to thehorror of war, Arnold conceded, but when used “with theproper degree of understanding” could become “the mosthumane of all weapons.” President Roosevelt endorsedArnold’s air campaign, but it proved difficult to executefrom bases in China.

Navajo Signal Corps Sending messages in their native language, which neither the Japanese nor the Germans could decipher, NavajoIndians in the Signal Corps made a unique contribution to preserving the secrecy of U.S. intelligence.

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In time, U.S. military victories opened the way for amore effective and lethal operation, run by General CurtisLeMay from Saipan in the Marianas. The blunt-talkingLeMay, whom Arnold dubbed “the Babe Ruth ofbombers,” once summarized his strategy as “bomb andburn them until they quit.” According to the official U.S.position, incendiary raids against Japanese cities consti-tuted “precision” rather than “area” bombing. In actuality,as LeMay admitted, the United States measured the suc-cess of a mission by square miles of Japanese territory leftscorched. According to a later estimate, the number ofJapan’s civilians who perished as a result of these raidsexceeded the total of its troops killed in battle. Air attackson Tokyo during the night of March 9–10, 1945, inaugu-rated the new policy. They leveled nearly one-quarter ofthe city and incinerated more than 100,000 people.

Meanwhile, as the war in the Pacific neared its end, acombined sea and air strategy emerged. The United States,under the agreement reached at the 1943 CasablancaConference, still sought Japan’s “unconditional surren-der” by blockading its seaports, bombarding its citiesfrom the air, and, perhaps, invading its home islands withU.S. combat units. Critics of the policy of unconditionalsurrender, which most Japanese assumed meant the deathof their emperor, later suggested that it may have encour-aged Japan’s government to continue fighting, even whendefeat seemed inevitable. This same stance also possiblyprevented U.S. negotiators from more vigorously pursu-ing the peace feelers sent by some Japanese leaders. Any-thing less than unconditional surrender, its proponentscounterclaimed, would have encouraged continuedJapanese resistance. Whatever the case, the United States

Tarawa,November 20, 1943

1

Kwajalein,January 31, 1944

2

Eniwetok,February 17, 1944

3

B-29 strikes against Japanfrom bases in China beginJune 14, 1944

4

Tinian,July 24, 1944

6

Guam,July 24, 1944

5

Palau,September 15, 1944

7

American landings on Leyte,October 20, 1944

8

B-29s begin air strikeson Japanese mainland,November 1944

9

Okinawaoccupied, April 1–June 21,1945

12

First atomic bomb, Hiroshima,August 6, 1945

13

Soviet Uniondeclares war on Japan,August 8, 1945

14

Second atomic bomb,Nagasaki, August 9, 1945

15

Agreement onsurrender in Korea,August 16, 1945

16Japan offers tosurrender,August 10, 1945.Japan acceptsAllied terms,August 14, 1945.U.S. occupationforces land,August 30, 1945.Japan formallysurrenders,September 2, 1945.

17

Battle of Luzon,January 9–June 30, 1945

10

Iwo Jima occupied,February 19–March 16, 1945

11

Farthest

Extent

ofJapan

eseC

ontrol, August

1942

Equator 0°

Beijing

Shanghai

Seoul

Chongqing

Tokyo

Nagasaki

HongKong

Rangoon

Bangkok

Saigon

Manila

Singapore

Port Moresby

Hollandia

Vladivostok

Hiroshima

SOVIETUNION

C H I N A

MONGOLIA

INDIA

BURMA

THAILANDFRENCHINDOCHINA

KOREA

JAPAN

PHILIPPINES

MANCHURIA(MANCHUKUO)

MALAYA

DUTCH EAST INDIES

SARAWAK

BR. NORTHBORNEOBRUNEI

Caroline Islands

MarianasIslands

SolomonIslands (U.K.)

MarshallIs.

KurilIsl

ands

New Guinea

Guam (U.S.)

Wake I. (U.S.)

Sakhalin I.

Karafuto

Java

Formosa

Borneo

Celebes

Sumatra

Timor

Luzon

PACIFIC

OCEAN

INDIAN

OCEAN

American forces (Nimitz)

American forces (MacArthur)

British forces

Soviet forces

Other Allied forces

Major Allied victories

Japanese Empire, 1936

Allied nations

Farthest extent of Japanesecontrol, August 1942

Neutral nations

0

500 1,000 Kilometers0

500 1,000 Miles

Map 26.5 Pacific Theater Offensive Strategy and Final Assault Against JapanThis map suggests the complicated nature of devising a war strategy in the vast Pacific region. What tactics did theUnited States use to advance upon and finally prevail over the island nation of Japan?

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adopted a strategy of achieving total victory throughmassive destruction.

A New President, the Atomic Bomb,and Japan’s Surrender On April 13, 1945, newspaper headlines across the coun-try announced: “PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DEAD.” Aftermore than 13 years in office, an already frail FDR suc-cumbed to a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Sorrow andshock spread through the armed forces, where manyyoung servicemen and women could effectively rememberno other president; through diplomatic conference halls,where Roosevelt’s personal magnetism had often broughtunity, if not always clarity; and among his many support-ers, for whom Roosevelt had symbolized optimism duringboth economic depression and war.

Over the years, Roosevelt also accumulated a host ofcritics and enemies. His victory over Republican ThomasE. Dewey in 1944 rested on the smallest popular-votemargin in a presidential race since 1912. The GOP, extend-ing gains it had made during the 1942 congressional elec-tions, cut further into the once-overwhelming Democraticmajorities in the Senate and House. Politically and physi-cally weakened, Roosevelt fought to retain his dominantplace in the political spotlight. Unaware of Roosevelt’s pre-carious health, both Republican and Democrats assumedFDR would lead the United States into the postwar world.

Emerging from Roosevelt’s shadow, the new presi-dent, Harry S Truman, initially seemed an unimposingpresence. Born on a farm near Independence, Missouri,Truman had served in France during the First World War;become a U.S. Senator in 1934; and suddenly surfacedas Roosevelt’s vice-presidential running mate in 1944.Roosevelt offered an upper-class image of well-practicedand worldly charm. The blunt-spoken Truman proudlypresented himself as a “little man from Missouri.” He alsoknew little about international affairs or about any informalunderstandings that Roosevelt may have made withChurchill and Stalin. During the period between Roosevelt’sFourth Inauguration in March 1945 and his death in mid-April, Truman met with FDR only three times.

Only after succeeding Roosevelt did Truman learnabout events at Los Alamos, New Mexico. There, since thelate 1930s, scientists from all across the world had beensecretly working on a new weapon. Advances in theoreti-cal physics suggested that the process of splitting atoms(fission) would release a tremendous amount of energythat could be packaged as a nuclear bomb. Fearful ofGermany’s outpacing the United States in this research,Albert Einstein, a Jewish refugee from Germany, had suc-cessfully implored Roosevelt to launch, on the basis of

recent atomic knowledge, a crash bomb-building program.The government subsequently enlisted top researchers inthe Manhattan Project, a huge, secret, military-directedoperation. On July 16, 1945, the Project tested a workableatomic device at Trinity Site, near Alamogordo, NewMexico.

Truman and his top policy makers, eager to end thewar quickly, decided to put the new weapon to immedi-ate use. Planners agreed that any ground invasion ofJapan’s home islands would cost far too much in U.S.casualties. In addition, the Soviet Union, in a joint deci-sion confirmed at a meeting of the Allies at the PotsdamConference during the summer of 1945, would soonenter the Pacific Theater. Truman hoped to limit anyadvances that Soviet troops might make in the Far Eastas a way of curtailing Stalin’s postwar influence there.Winston Churchill called the atomic bomb a “miracle ofdeliverance and a peace giver,” and Truman, who alwaysinsisted it had been dropped on primarily military tar-gets in Japan, later publicly claimed that he had never losta night’s sleep over its use.

Privately, he and other U.S. officials admitted to havinggreater qualms. Certainly, disagreement marked discus-sions over where and how to employ the new device. Acommission of atomic scientists recommended a “demon-stration” that would impress Japan with the bomb’sdestructive power without producing civilian casualties.General George C. Marshall suggested using it on purelymilitary installations or only on manufacturing sites, afterfirst warning away Japanese workers.

Ultimately, the Truman administration discardedthese options. The United States needed, according toSecretary of War Henry Stimson, to make “a profoundpsychological impression on as many inhabitants as pos-sible.” In addition, LeMay’s aerial bombardment ofJapanese cities provided a powerful prologue to a nuclearattack. Many U.S. officials came to see the targeting ofHiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese cities previouslyuntouched by U.S. fire bombing, as a small departurefrom existing policy. “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” as thetwo atomic bombs dropped on August 6 and 9, 1945 werenicknamed, could seem merely larger and more lethalincendiary devices.

Stimson and most other observers soon acknowl-edged, however, that atomic weaponry introduced a newlevel of violence to world affairs. Colonel Paul Tibbets, whopiloted the U.S. plane that dropped the first bomb onHiroshima, reported that “the shimmering city became anugly smudge . . . a pot of bubbling hot tar.” Teams of U.S.observers who entered Hiroshima and Nagasaki in theaftermath of their bombing were stunned at the instanta-neous incineration of both human beings and manmadestructures, and shocked to contemplate the longer-lasting

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horror of radiation disease. Shortly after the atomic bombsfell on Japan, Stimson reconsidered his earlier view. Hewrote Truman that atomic weaponry meant “a first step ina new control by man over the forces of nature too revolu-tionary and dangerous to fit into old concepts.” Thedestruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inaugurated the“atomic age,” one in which dreams of peace mingled withnightmares of destruction, potentially on a global scale.

During the late summer days of 1945, however,Americans who knew someone involved in the worldwidemilitary effort invariably sighed with relief. News reports ofAugust 15 heralded Japan’s defeat. Those of September 2reported its formal surrender, on “VJ Day,” aboard the bat-tleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Spontaneously, all across thenation, people flooded into the streets to celebrate the endof the Second World War.

Total War: Dresdenand Hiroshima

The effects of “total war” aregraphically illustrated in thesephotographs—of thedevastation of Dresden,Germany (top), by the BritishBomber Command and the U.S.8th Air Force on February 13and 14, 1945, and that ofHiroshima, Japan (bottom), bythe U.S. 509th Composite Groupon August 6, 1945. In the initialattack on Dresden, 786 aircraftdropped 5,824,000 pounds(2,600 long tons) of bombs onthe city, killing an estimated60,000 people and injuringanother 30,000. An area of morethan 2.5 square miles in the citycenter was demolished, andsome 37,000 buildings weredestroyed. To critics, thebombing of Dresden, a targetthat many argued was of littlestrategic value, exemplified theexcessive use of airpower.

In sobering comparison,Hiroshima was devastated byone bomb weighing only 10,000pounds (4.4 long tons)—anatomic bomb—dropped fromone aircraft. The single U-235bomb killed 68,000 peopleoutright, injured another 30,000,and left 10,000 missing. (Thesefigures do not include thosewho later developed diseasesfrom deadly gamma rays.) Thebomb obliterated almost fivesquare miles of the city’s centerand destroyed 40,653 buildings.Truman reported the strike as“an overwhelming success.”Many hailed the atomic bombas a necessary step towardmilitary victory; others worriedabout the dawn of the“nuclear age.”

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The War at Home:The Economy

How did mobilizing for war

produce political, economic, and social changes

in the United States?

Securing military victory overseas depended on reviving,and then rapidly expanding, the domestic economy of theUnited States. Prewar production brought the GreatDepression of the 1930s closer to an end, and wartime con-ditions quickly completed the recovery process. Moreover,innovations in wartime production processes promised totransform the nation’s economic structure, its corporateand financial institutions, its labor force, and, perhaps,even the relationship between the economy and thenational government.

Government’s Role in the EconomyThe federal bureaucracy grew, by one calculation, nearly400 percent during the war. New governmental planningand regulatory agencies proliferated. The powerful WarProduction Board oversaw the conversion of factories towartime production and, later, their expansion. It alsoplanned resource usage and enforced production priori-ties and schedules. The War Labor Board adjudicatedlabor–management disputes, and the War ManpowerCommission allocated workers to various industries. TheOffice of Price Administration regulated prices to controlinflation and rationed scarce commodities such as gaso-line, rubber, steel, shoes, coffee, sugar, and meat. Someobservers who wished to expand on the New Deal of the1930s imagined how the wartime system of economiccontrols might be adapted to peacetime conditions, whilemost of the Republicans and conservative Democrats inCongress looked forward to its postwar dismantlement.

From 1940 to 1945, the U.S. economy expanded rap-idly, and the gross national product (GNP) rose, year-by-year, by 15 percent or more! When Roosevelt called forthe production of 60,000 planes shortly after PearlHarbor, skeptics sneered. Within a few years, though, thenation produced nearly 300,000 planes in a number ofdifferent designs. The Maritime Commission oversawthe construction of millions of tons of new ships. A oncestagnant economy spewed out prodigious quantities ofother supplies, including 2.5 million trucks and 50 millionpairs of shoes. A worldwide war became one of “massedmachines,” the military journalist Hanson Baldwinobserved.

In the cause of increasing production, most industriesforged close relationships with governmental bureaucracies.

Washington promoted, under the acronym of R&D, acoordinated plan for scientific and technological researchand development. Greatly increased federal fundinghelped spawn new industries, such as electronics, andtransform others, such as rubber and chemicals. Eventu-ally, an Office of Scientific Research and Developmentcontracted with universities and scientists for a variety ofprojects. Support from this governmental agency helpedadapt radar and penicillin (initially British discoveries),rocket engines, and other new products for wartime use.The Manhattan Project provided the most dramaticexample of the emergence of powerful new links betweenmilitary-oriented R&D and the national government. Inaddition, this massive effort, which employed a number ofpeople who had fled Nazi tyranny during the 1930s,demonstrated how much European-trained refuges mightcontribute to scientific and technological innovation.

Business and FinanceWashington pumped billions of dollars into the wartimeeconomy. To finance the military effort, governmentspending rose from $9 billion in 1940 to $98 billion in1944. In 1941, the national debt stood at $48 billion; at theend of the war, it would reach $280 billion. As productionshifted from autos to tanks, from refrigerators to guns, thearray of new consumer goods coming into the market-place drastically shrank. In order to ensure that U.S. troopswere adequately clothed, fed, and supplied, the govern-ment also set up an elaborate system for rationing theamount of certain products—including foods, fabrics, andfuel—people could purchase. With fewer consumer prod-ucts available, people invested in war bonds, turning theirsavings into tanks and planes. Sales of war bonds to ordi-nary people provided a relatively insignificant contribu-tion to overall wartime spending, but bond drives helpedraise personal saving to record levels and gave bondhold-ers a direct stake, psychologically as well as economically,in the Allied cause.

Wartime conditions encouraged steps toward achiev-ing greater economic equality. The rationing of itemsneeded for the war effort overseas meant more equitabledistribution of scarce goods at home. Increased taxes onwealthier Americans also helped redistribute income andnarrow the gap in wealth between the very well-to-do andother people. Observers sympathetic to economic plan-ning saw war bonds, rationing, and progressive taxationencouraging a sense of shared sacrifice and helping ease atleast some of the domestic tensions evident during the1930s.

At the same time, however, the war’s emphasis on har-mony helped Republicans and conservative Democratsmake the case for sidetracking some of the earlier New

Focus Question

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T h e Wa r a t Ho m e : T h e E c o n o my 807

Deal efforts, including controversial ones aimed at directlyassisting the less affluent. The remarkable Republican surgein the off-year elections of 1942—the GOP gained 44 seatsin the House and seven in the Senate—strengthened theanti–New Deal coalition in Congress. In 1943, legislatorsabolished the job-creation programs of the Works ProgressAdministration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps(CCC), and the National Youth Administration (NYA) (seechapter 25). They also shut down the Rural ElectrificationAdministration (REA) and Farm Security Administration(FSA), agencies most active in economically depressedrural areas. Moreover, as business executives flocked intogovernment, to run the new wartime agencies, administra-tors in Washington began adopting a relatively cooperativestance toward large corporations.

Large businesses whose products seemed essential towartime victory invariably flourished, often with govern-mental assistance. What seemed essential, of course, couldbecome a matter of definition. Coca-Cola and the Wrigleychewing gum empire gained precious sugar allotments byarguing that GIs overseas needed to enjoy their products.The Kaiser Corporation, whose spectacular growth during

the 1930s had been spurred by contracts for federal damprojects, now turned to building ships, aircraft, and mili-tary vehicles, including the famous “Jeep.” By 1943, Kaisercontrolled nearly one-third of the nation’s military con-struction business, much of it taking place in SouthernCalifornia, along the coastal corridor that stretched fromSan Francisco to San Diego. Elsewhere, federal subsidiesand tax breaks enabled factories to expand and retool andcorporations to prosper. The “cost-plus” provision, builtinto military contracts, guaranteed that manufacturersdoing business with wartime Washington would gain aprofit.

The Second World War also helped boost the eco-nomic power wielded by the largest corporations. AfterRoosevelt ordered his justice department to postponeenforcement of antitrust laws, government lawyers tuckedaway long-planned legal cases, such as one against America’sgreat oil cartel. Congressional efforts to investigate possi-ble collusion in the awarding of large government con-tracts and to increase assistance to small businesses madelittle headway. The top 100 companies, which had pro-vided 30 percent of the nation’s total manufacturingoutput in 1940, contributed 70 percent by 1943. Manysmaller businesses, left to dealing in smaller niche marketsonly indirectly connected to war-related production, com-plained that Washington-based agencies short-changedthem when allocating scare resources.

The WorkforceDuring the early years of the military buildup, people whohad scrounged for jobs during the Great Depression beganto find regular work. The primary job of governmentalagencies, according to their leaders, involved obtainingemployment for the people employers seemed most likelyto hire. Thus, positions in heavy industry invariably wentto men, and most of the skilled jobs to men of Europeandescent. Initially, government-financed training centersalso concentrated on white males and did much less forwomen and, particularly in the South, workers of color. Asmilitary service depleted the ranks of white males, how-ever, other people became candidates for well-paid pro-duction jobs. In time, both private employers and publicofficials encouraged women to seek wartime work outsideof their homes; African Americans from the rural South tomove to industrial cities, including ones in the North andFar West; and Mexicans to enter the United States underthe Bracero Agreement of 1942. In response to wartimenecessities, then, the composition of the U.S. workforcechanged significantly during the early 1940s.

Filling positions never before open to them, womenbecame welders, shipbuilders, lumberjacks, and miners.Women won places in prestigious symphony orchestras,

Rita Hayworth Scraps Her BumpersMovie stars aided the war effort by promoting the sale of warbonds and urging sacrifice. Here Hayworth urges Americansto scrap their unessential car parts.

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and one Major League Baseball owner financed creation ofa separate women’s league to give new life to the nationalpastime. Many employers hired married women who,before the war, would have been lucky to obtain a positioneven in traditionally “female occupations,” such as teach-ing. Women of color moved into clerical and sales jobs,positions in which they had not previously been wel-comed. Although wartime workplaces did generallyremain segregated by sex—women usually working withother women and men alongside other men—the range ofjobs open to women expanded.

The scope of unpaid labor, primarily provided bywomen, also expanded. Volunteer activities outside thehome—such as Red Cross projects, civil defense work, andrecycling drives—claimed more of the time of women,children, and older people. Government publicationsexhorted women to expand their homemaker routines:“Work in a garden this summer.”“Save waste fats for explo-sives.” “Wear it out, use it up, make it do, or do without.”Both in the home and in the workplace, women’s respon-sibilities and workloads increased.

The new labor market improved economic prospectsfor workers of color, especially African Americans. Manymoved to labor-scarce cities in the North and West andinto jobs previously closed to them. Despite the beginningof the northward migration earlier in the twentieth cen-tury, the prewar African American population hadremained largely southern, rural, and agricultural; by the

late 1940s, a substantial percentage of African Americanslived and worked outside of the South, in urban-industrialareas of the country. Although the war hardly eliminateddiscriminatory employment practices, twice as manyAfrican Americans held skilled jobs at the end of the con-flict as at its beginning.

Washington did take some steps to address workplacediscrimination. In June 1942, under pressure from AfricanAmerican union leaders led by A. Philip Randolph of theBrotherhood of Railway Porters, President Rooseveltissued an executive order creating the Fair EmploymentPractices Commission (FEPC). FDR charged this newgovernmental agency with attacking racial discriminationin hiring decisions. In 1943, the national governmentannounced that it would not recognize as a collective bar-gaining agent any labor union that discriminated on thebasis of race. In addition, the War Labor Board moved tooutlaw the practice of paying different wages to whites andnonwhites for doing the same job.

For most of the people who found jobs, the warbrought significantly higher wages and longer work hours.Although the government tried to limit wage increasesduring the war, the need to ensure rising production totalsand the availability of overtime invariably meant largerpaychecks. During the war, average weekly earnings forindustrial workers rose nearly 70 percent. Farmers, whohad suffered through many years of low prices and over-production, doubled their incomes and then doubledthem again.

The Labor FrontThe labor union movement seemingly stood to benefitfrom the scarcity of home front workers during the waryears. Membership rolls rose by 50 percent. Althoughwomen and workers of color joined unions in unprece-dented numbers, white males, who still comprised thebulk of unionized workers, became the main beneficiariesof organized labor’s new clout.

The commitment of most labor unions to their newfemale workers remained suspect. Not a single womanserved on the executive boards of either the AmericanFederation of Labor (AFL) or the Congress of IndustrialOrganizations (CIO). The International Brotherhood ofTeamsters required its female members to accept revoca-tion of their membership when the war ended. Unions didseek contracts stipulating equal pay for men and womenwho worked in the same position, but these helped onlythose women who could find a “male job.” In addition,unions typically justified their stance on women employ-ees as a way of ensuring employers would pay a “familywage,” one on which a single male breadwinner could sup-port a spouse and children. Union leaders seemed most

Women Join the War EffortWomen employees at the Convair Company in Californiause a rivet gun and bucking bar, tools traditionally used onlyby men.

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interested in pressing for equal-pay provisions in order tomaintain wage levels in jobs that they expected men toreclaim at war’s end. It was also generally expected, whenpeace returned and employers trimmed workforces, thatreturning veterans, primarily men of European descent,would enjoy special preferences for the available job slots.

Some union leaders even resisted efforts to hirewomen and workers of color. Incorporating job-seekersfrom these groups, who were traditionally paid less thanwhite males, into the wartime workforce might, theyfeared, jeopardize the gains unions had won during thehard-fought struggles of the 1930s. Early in the war, then,many union locals in the well-paying aircraft and ship-building industries flatly refused to enroll African Ameri-cans as members. After creation of the FEPC, some unionleaders condemned governmental efforts to address racialdiscrimination as communist inspired. After greater num-bers of African Americans managed to find jobs, racial ten-sions in the workplace sometimes led to direct confronta-tions. In various parts of the country—at a defense plant inLockland, Ohio, at a transit company in Philadelphia, at a

shipbuilding company in Mobile, for instance—whiteworkers walked off the job to protest the hiring of AfricanAmericans. Management intended to use the war, protes-tors generally charged, as an excuse to erode union powerby changing the composition of the workforce.

Other forms of grassroots labor militancy, althoughmuted by a wartime no-strike pledge, persisted into the1940s. Wildcat strikes erupted among bus drivers in St.Louis, assembly-line workers in Detroit, and streetcar con-ductors in Philadelphia. In the Motor City, a disgruntledgroup of aircraft workers, angry at increasing regimenta-tion of the production process, fanned out across a factoryfloor and cut off the neck ties worn by supervisory per-sonnel. Despite the no-strike assurance, the United MineWorkers called a walkout in the bituminous coal fields in1943. A hard line by the War Labor Board against theunion’s demands only appeared to prolong the strike.Roosevelt’s secretary of interior blasted both sides in thedispute and called the walkout “a black and stupid chapterin the history of the home front.” A Congress increasinglyhostile to union interests weighed in as well. In 1943, it

Children Enlist in the War EffortThese children, flashing the “V-for-Victory” sign, stand atop a pile of scrap metal. Collecting scrap of all kinds for warproduction helped engage millions of Americans young and old on the home front.

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passed the Smith-Connally Act, which empowered thepresident to seize plants or mines if strikes interrupted warproduction. The Second World War, then, may have qui-eted but never halted labor–management conflict.

Assessing Economic ChangeOverall, the war had a substantial effect on the nation’spolitical economy. During the conflict, most workplacesbecame more inclusive, in terms of gender and race, thanever before. So did labor unions. More people entered thepaid labor force, and many earned more than rationingrestrictions on consumer goods allowed them to spend.In a remarkable reversal of conditions during the GreatDepression, savings piled up. Wartime productiondemands helped strengthen organized labor’s place in theU.S. economy. By the end of the Second World War, unionmembership stood at an all-time high.

Perhaps most significantly, the Second World Warhelped accelerate long-term changes in the institutionalscale of economic life. Big government, big business, andbig labor all grew even larger. Scientific and technologicalinnovations forged new links of mutual interest betweengovernmental agencies and large corporations, particu-larly those directly involved in military-related produc-tion. An older United States—one marked by familyfarms, family-run businesses, and small towns—did notdisappear, but urban-based, bureaucratized institutionswere increasingly coming to dominate daily life, especiallyin most areas of the nation’s burgeoning economy.

A New Role for Government?The growth of governmental power during war yearsprompted new debate over the role of government in apostwar world. During the heyday of the New Deal duringthe 1930s, a relatively broad view of governmentally guar-anteed “security” had enabled creation of programs suchas the Social Security System and of federal agencies tosecure home mortgages and personal savings accounts. Atthe same time, grassroots community-based groups, oftenworking with labor unions, had begun building a set ofcooperative social welfare and health institutions theyhoped would create a vast, nonprofit security-safety net.

Although the New Deal had begun running out ofpolitical cards even before U.S. entry into the war, Presi-dent Roosevelt and some of his advisers began to suggestnew initiatives as military victory seemed increasinglylikely. They talked of reharnessing the national govern-ment’s power behind expanded efforts to enhance securityin everyday life. Some dreamed, for example, of extendingthe government’s wartime health care and day care pro-grams into a more comprehensive social welfare system.

In 1944, FDR introduced his most ambitious domes-tic agenda in years: a “Second Bill of Rights.” He called formeasures to ensure that Americans could enjoy the rightto a wide range of substantive liberties. These were toinclude regular employment, adequate food and shelter,appropriate educational opportunities, and guaranteedhealth care. Whenever people could not otherwise obtainthese material conditions, the national government shoulduse its power to ensure their availability. Translating thisvision into reality, its proponents generally assumed,would require the national government to continue thekind of economic and social planning it was doing inwartime. The Second Bill of Rights, then, proposed thatpostwar politics and governance focus on guaranteeingindividuals and families security in their everyday lives.

The vision of providing greater security appealed tomore than hardcore New Dealers. Large insurance compa-nies and some private businesses, recognizing the popu-larity of security-focused proposals, came forward withnew private alternatives to governmental programs. Insur-ers expanded earlier efforts to market their own array ofprograms, directed toward individual policy holders, forproviding security against sickness, disability, and unex-pected death. At the same time, insurance companiesworked with some large corporations to develop groupinsurance plans as substitutes and also as supplements tothe kind of governmental programs already provided bythe New Deal and imagined in the Second Bill of Rights.

The War at Home: Social Issuesand Social MovementsThe wartime years, along with the search for military vic-tory overseas, highlighted a wide range of domestic socialissues. Many people, ordered by their military superiors orattracted by new employment possibilities, moved awayfrom the communities in which they had grown up. Mobi-lizing for military victory seemed to demand a willingnessto change. At the same time, the wartime emphasis on pre-serving traditional ideals, including liberty and equality,helped spotlight how often social conditions in everydaylife departed from idealized depictions.

Selling the WarThe effort to sell a war overseas brought new attention tosocial issues at home. During the First World War, govern-ment propagandists had portrayed a struggle to end warand bring about a more democratic and peaceful world.Fighting for such idealistic goals, however, carried far lessappeal during the 1940s. Only 20 years after Woodrow

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M U S I C A L L I N K T O T H E P A S T

Composer: Cole Porter

Title: “Don’t Fence Me In” (1944)

Performer: Bing Crosby

Harry Lillis (“Bing”) Crosby (1903–77) displayed excep-tional musical talent at an early age, but his years at

Gonzaga University during the 1920s set the stage for themultimedia stardom he would later enjoy, especiallyduring the Second World War. College broadenedCrosby’s musical tastes, deepened his cultural literacy,and provided, as a student-musician, his introduction toshow business. His academic education, at Jesuit-directed Gonzaga, also far exceeded that of most otherpop artists of his era. Dropping out of college during hissenior year and abandoning plans to become a lawyer,Crosby joined up with Paul Whiteman, who fronted a pop-ular band of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and per-formed as a member of a vocal trio called “The RhythmBoys.” Restrained by Whiteman’s preference to dumb-down jazz influences that sounded distinctively AfricanAmerican, Crosby struck out on his own in 1930.

Crosby’s way of doing a song, which came to becalled “crooning,” departed from earlier styles. It modifiedthe bombastic approaches of the blues “shouters” suchas Bessie Smith and the “belters,” including Irish tenorssuch as John McCormick and vaudevillians such as AlJolson. Crooners put over songs in a relaxed, sometimeseven conversational manner. Although Crosby was not thefirst to embrace crooning, his careful concern for intona-tion, phrasing, and pacing distinguished him from his con-temporaries and influenced subsequent vocal stylists,including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Peggy Lee. Atthe same time, Crosby seamlessly melded a wide rangeof musical influences, such as the “scat-singing” jazzvocals of Louis Armstrong, into his own singing. The bandleader and musical critic Artie Shaw later called Crosby“the first hip white person born in the United States.”

During the Second World War, Crosby’s careerreached its apogee. Crosby dominated the pop musicindustry, starred in motion pictures (winning the AcademyAward for “Best Actor” in 1944), headlined a popular pro-gram on network radio, and tirelessly toured the EuropeanTheater, entertaining U.S. troops fighting there. Accordingto close students of his more than 1,600 recordings, thisdemanding schedule took a toll on the suppleness of hisvoice. This almost daily grind, however, also extendedCrosby’s range of material and swelled his popularity.According to Yank magazine, service personnel ranked

Crosby ahead of FDR and General Dwight Eisenhower asthe person most responsible for maintaining their morale.

Crosby’s war-year recordings spanned nearly theentire range of that era’s diverse musical genres, espe-cially all those connected to the swing sound of the bigbands. Bing performed up-tempo morale boosters, senti-mental ballads, patriotic numbers, and the like; for hiswillingness to tackle novelty ditties, in German, heearned the affectionate title of “der Bingle.” BingCrosby’s most memorable and best-selling songs of thewar period—”White Christmas” (1942) and “I’ll BeHome for Christmas” (1943)—spoke to a widespreadhope that fighting the Second World War would ulti-mately allow military personnel and their families to re-embrace, during happier days to come, traditional valuesand practices.

Crosby’s version of “Don’t Fence Me In” (1944)—written by Cole Porter, one of the era’s most sophisticatedmusical talents—went in somewhat different directions. Itresembles, for instance, the sound of western-swingbands (such as that of “Bob Wills and the Texas Play-boys”). Roy Rogers, a singer-actor who starred inB-cowboy pictures, had earlier introduced the number inthe 1943 motion picture Stagedoor Canteen. Another ver-sion by The Andrews Sisters, a trio known for their upbeatenergy, had reached the charts even before Crosby, aswas the custom in that era, released a competing, ulti-mately better-selling rendition of the same song.

1. Can you hear Crosby’s recording of “Don’t Fence MeIn” display not only his crooning but also his ability toblend together, in the same number, different musicalstyles? What might some of these be?

2. Compare and contrast Crosby’s version of “Don’tFence Me In” with his iconic renderings of “WhiteChristmas” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Howdo these tunes seem to express, albeit in somewhatdifferent ways, wartime desires and hopes? Howmight “Don’t Fence Me In” suggest a popular willing-ness to consider the possibility that war might domore than simply safeguard the so-called AmericanWay of Life? In what ways, though, might the songseem entirely in sync with traditional Americanvalues?

For additional sources related to this feature, visit theLiberty, Equality, Power Web site at:

www.thomsonedu.com/history/murrin

Songs of the Second World War

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asablanca, perhaps the most popular movie everproduced by the old Hollywood studio system,

began as a rather modest wartime collaborationbetween Warner Brothers and the OWI. The studioprovided the stars, the script, and the crew. The OWIoffered guidance on how best to portray the Alliedcause. It successfully urged, for example, that the roleof “Sam,” an African American piano player andsinger, be related, more specifically than in earlierdrafts of the script, to contemporary civil-rights issues.

Released in New York City at the same time,November 1942, that Allied forces were pursuingtheir TORCH campaign in North Africa, Casablancacontains numerous references to wartime themesand events. Most powerfully and pointedly, thefilm’s own placement in cinematic time, December1941, creates numerous opportunities to dispar-age isolationism. On several occasions, dialogue inthe movie cleverly alludes to a real-life incident, theJapanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which will nothappen until after Casablanca’s own narrative timeframe ends. This technique, used in virtually everyHollywood film about familiar historical events,encourages viewers to take pride in their ability tospot historical references. Most important toCasablanca’s political agenda, these allusions to pastevents underscore its support for the necessity ofU.S. involvement in the Second World War.

More often than not, though, Casablanca works toconceal its political messages by entangling them in aset of personal dilemmas faced by its male lead, “RickBlaine,” memorably played by Humphrey Bogart.Once an antifascist activist, who had “run guns toEthiopia” and had fought fascism in Spain during the1930s, Rick now only wants to isolate himself fromlarger causes and to preside over his gambling saloonin Casablanca. Remaining aloof from global politics, hewatches refugees from fascism stream through thisNorth African city on their way, hopefully, to freedomin the United States. For mysterious reasons, how-ever, Blaine cannot or will not return home but,instead, runs “Rick’s American Café,” located at theedge of the North African frontier.

There seems little mystery, however, about theroot cause of Rick’s personal isolationism: a beautifulwoman named “Ilsa Lund,” portrayed by IngridBergman. Before the Nazis stormed into Paris in1939, Rick and Ilsa had planned to flee the citytogether, but she had left him waiting at the train sta-tion. Only when Ilsa unexpectedly resurfaces, twoyears later in Casablanca, does Rick learn why shehad abandoned him. As she was preparing to leaveParis, news arrived that her husband, an antifascist

crusader named “Victor Lazlo,” had not perished, asshe had thought, at the hands of the Nazis. Respect-ing her marriage vows, Ilsa had rushed to the injuredVictor and nursed him back to health.

Trapped in Casablanca with a now-recoveredLazlo, Ilsa presents Rick with a series of personaland political dilemmas. She pleads with him, afterher own husband’s entreaties go unheeded, to helpVictor escape to the United States, from where hecan resume his antifascist activism. As long as Lazlostays in Casablanca—nominally under the legal con-trol of Vichy France but effectively under the thumbof a murderous Nazi officer, “Major Strasser”—hispolitical reputation presumably protects him fromimmediate danger. At the same time, though,Lazlo’s continued presence in North Africa makeshim of little immediate value to the Allied cause, theone that the brooding Rick refuses to assist.Although Rick claims his noninterventionist policystems from a commitment to political neutrality,the movie makes clear that personal considerationsdominate his politics. Lazlo will only leave Casablancawith Ilsa, whom Rick suspects remains as romanti-cally attracted to him as he still is to her.

Casablanca’s script conveniently provides Rickwith the means to help Ilsa and Lazlo—or Ilsa andhimself—flee together: two blank “letters of tran-sit,” which have been hidden in Rick’s Café. Thesedocuments, according to the movie’s shaky legallogic, permit anyone, even Lazlo, to depart fromCasablanca on the next plane flight. If Rick were togive the letters to Lazlo, he stands, once again, tolose Ilsa and to compromise his noninterventionistpolitical principles. If he uses the documents to fleeCasablanca with Ilsa, he will harm the Allied causeby preventing Lazlo from actively rejoining it. WillRick, once a heroic activist, continue to remain unin-volved? Is there any way he can reconcile the con-flicting demands he now confronts?

As Casablanca constructs Rick Blaine, Bogart’scharacter can cut through all of these problemssimply by embracing the role of a lone outlaw-hero,the iconic protagonist of so many of Hollywood’swestern movies. Blaine thus abandons his earlierreluctance to take a stance—along with the marriedwoman he still loves—and takes the kind of decisive,if technically illegal, action that marks him as bothmanly and principled.

Symbolically structured as what film scholarscall a “disguised western,” Casablanca ends withRick becoming a modern, North African version of anOld West gunfighter. At the point of a pistol, Blaineforces a duplicitous Vichy police officer, “Captain

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Directed by Michael Curtiz.

Starring Humphrey Bogart (Rick Blaine), Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa Lund), Paul Henreid (Victor Lazlo),Conrad Veidt (Major Strasser), Claude Rains (Captain Renault), Dooley Wilson (Sam)

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Wilson’s “war to end all wars,” after all, the United Statesfound itself fighting a Second, and far wider, World War.Attuned to popular attitudes, the Roosevelt administra-tion called on citizens to fight more for the preservationof a vague concept called the “American Way of Life” athome than for the transformation to a more democratic,peaceful world.

The work of the illustrator Norman Rockwell and ofthe movie director Frank Capra, masters of nostalgia,exemplified wartime image-making. Rockwell produced aset of iconic paintings that visualized President Roosevelt’s“Four Freedoms”: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Wor-ship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. Using

his neighbors in Arlington, Vermont, as models, Rockwelldepicted these values as already comfortably rooted insmall-town America. Originally published in the SaturdayEvening Post magazine, Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” even-tually adorned millions of posters distributed by the gov-ernment.

Hollywood studios and directors eagerly answered thewartime call. “The American film is our most importantweapon,” proclaimed one Hollywood executive. The filmfactory produced both commercial movies with militarythemes, such as Destination Tokyo (1943), and documen-taries, such as the Why We Fight series, directed by FrankCapra. During the 1930s, Capra’s films had championed

Renault,” to sign the letters of transit over to Victorand Ilsa. Then, Rick turns his persuasive charms onIlsa, who has mistakenly come to believe he willallow her to abandon Lazlo and leave Casablancawith him. These two lovers must set aside personalfeelings, Rick implores her, and help her husbandreturn to his antifascist work. When Major Strassermakes a last-ditch effort to stop Victor and Ilsa fromboarding an outbound plane, Blaine simply guns himdown. As the movie ends, Rick plans to light out,with Captain Renault rather than Ilsa as his travelingcompanion, for the North African frontier and join aFree French brigade—and the Allied cause.

Casablanca thus frames the fictional RickBlaine’s personal and political problems as symboli-cally parallel to those that the United States and itslike-minded citizens faced before their own real-lifeentry into the Second World War. Seeing HumphreyBogart make all the “correct” decisions, presumably,will help convince Casablanca’s wartime viewers thattheir political leaders, and they, are now workingthrough the consequences of having made similarlyappropriate ones. Watching Casablanca today, per-haps, helps convince viewers that people such as thefictional Rick Blaine really did make up America’s“greatest generation.” n

One of Classical Hollywood’s most powerful motion pictures, Casablanca (1943) highlighted thepersonal and political dilemmas raised by U.S. entry into the Second World War. Here, Rick (HumphreyBogart), Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and Sam (Dooley Wilson) uneasily recall their past in pre-war Paris andponder their wartime futures.

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the decency and good sense of ordinary people (portrayedby stars such as Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck) inmovies such as Mr. Deeds Comes to Town (1936). Com-missioned by Washington to dramatize why citizensshould fight against the Axis, Capra put Rockwell-likecharacters in motion and contrasted the freedom of theirdaily routines with the tightly regimented lifestyles in themilitary-dominated dictatorships of Germany, Italy, andJapan.

Much of Hollywood followed Capra to war. Many ofits shining stars and lesser players served in combat units,while most other Hollywood personalities sold war bonds,entertained the troops, and worked on documentaries forthe Army’s Pictorial Division. Darryl F. Zanuck of Twenti-eth Century Fox filmed Allied troops in North Africa andthe Aleutian Islands, and the director-producer John Fordcrafted powerful documentaries about Pearl Harbor andthe Battle of Midway. Walt Disney’s studio devoted most

of its animation resources to the production of war-related cartoons and short features.

The advertising industry also contributed. TheRoosevelt administration encouraged it to sell his “FourFreedoms,” and most advertising professionals obliged. Intheir vision, freedom generally appeared in the form ofnew washing machines, improved kitchen appliances,streamlined automobiles, a wider range of lipstick hues,and other consumer products. Although wartime rationingprevented people from immediately acquiring these kindsof products, wartime ads promised that, once the fightingended, technological know-how would transform theUnited States into a consumer’s paradise. People couldsoon enjoy living in a bigger and better version of theprosperity-soaked world still associated, in popularmemory and culture, with the 1920s (see chapter 24).

After initially resisting the idea of establishing a spe-cific propaganda agency, Roosevelt finally did authorize,during the spring of 1942, creation of the Office of WarInformation (OWI). The OWI replaced an earlier, lessaggressive effort, located in an Office of Facts and Figures.The President charged the OWI with coordinating a fullrange of informational initiatives. Many New DealDemocrats saw the OWI catering to advertisers who pre-ferred imagery extolling the future joys of consumerismrather than those promoting broader visions of liberty andequality. Interpreting OWI-sponsored images very differ-ently, Republicans blasted the agency for cranking outcrass political appeals for causes favored by Roosevelt’sNew Dealers. While fending off its critics, the OWI set upbranch offices throughout the world, published a widelydistributed magazine called Victory, and produced hun-dreds of films, posters, and radio broadcasts.

Gender IssuesPopular portrayals of why the nation was fighting theSecond World War increasingly clashed with how wartimemobilization was changing everyday life. The gap betweenRockwell-type imagery and daily demands became read-ily apparent in the range of social issues affecting women.

The wartime United States called on women to servetheir country as more than wives and mothers. Some350,000 women volunteered for military duty duringthe war, and more than a thousand became pilots for theWomen’s Air force Service Pilots (WASPs). Not everyoneapproved of the changes. One member of Congressasked, “What has become of the manhood of America?”Most of his colleagues, however, supported creation of awoman’s corps in each branch of the military, an inno-vation proposed but never adopted during the FirstWorld War.

“Freedom of Worship” Norman Rockwell’s iconic illustrations of Franklin Roosevelt’s“Four Freedoms”—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship,Freedom from Fear, and Freedom from Want—appeared in theSaturday Evening Post magzine in early 1943. These imagesframed the Second World War as a struggle to preserve andprotect the things that Americans already enjoyed, such asworshiping together, rather than as an effort to change theworld.

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Military service by women, together with their expand-ing roles in the wartime labor market, prompted debateover the possibility of enacting new legal-constitutionalmeasures. Congress debated, without ever passing, anational equal-pay law and an Equal Rights Amendment(ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. Women’s organizationsdisagreed among themselves over how to proceed. Groupsclaiming to speak for middle-class women, for example,strongly backed the ERA, but ones representing womenwho worked outside their homes, often for low wages,opposed its passage. They saw the ERA as a potentialthreat to the constitutionality of the array of special pro-tective legislation, regulating hours and hazardous condi-tions, which reformers of the Progressive Era had strug-gled to obtain for women workers. Wartime conditions,then, helped refocus an earlier debate: Should workingwomen continue to be accorded a protected status, in viewof their vulnerability to exploitation in male-directedwork environments, or would they ultimately benefit fromgaining completely equal legal and constitutional statuswith men?

Even as wartime necessity helped alter older genderpatterns in employment, widespread imagery frequentlyworked to frame the changes as temporary. Works of pop-ular culture, for example, often portrayed the wartimeparticipation of women in the workplace as a short-termanomaly and as a temporary sacrifice intended, ultimately,to preserve and protect their “natural” sphere in the home.Moreover, most wartime imagery tended to reinforcefamiliar ideals of femininity. A typical ad suggesting that

women take on farm work declared: “A woman can doanything if she knows she looks beautiful doing it.”

In some ways, the war may have even widened thesymbolic gap between notions of femininity and mas-culinity. Male-dominated military culture seemed tofoster the glamour-girl ideal. Service publications regu-larly featured pin-up sections and encouraged servicemento decorate their wartime world—their sleeping quarters,their airplanes, even their tanks—with overt images offemale sexuality. The home front entertainment industry,led by Hollywood, promoted its glamorous female stars asanxious to “please their boys” in the military. Some of thewartime popular culture came to associate masculinitywith misogyny. Coming out of the war, the tough-guygenre, on prominent display in Hollywood’s thrillers andin the author Mickey Spillane’s series of “Mike Hammer”detective novels, portrayed female sexuality as both allur-ing and threatening to men.

Public policy making sometimes worked to reinforcegender divisions. The military assigned most of thewomen who joined the armed services to clerical andsupply jobs, usually within the United States. The govern-ment and some private employers did provide, with dif-fering degrees of enthusiasm and financial support, daycare programs for mothers working outside of theirhomes. Although the thousands of centers set up duringthe conflict provided a precedent for future policy makers,the actual number of facilities met only a fraction of thechild care need. Many centers, moreover, quickly shuttheir doors after the war’s end. Meanwhile, social scientists

Pin-up GirlsMale GIs often surrounded themselves withpin-up girls, images very different from thatof the home front “Rosie-the-Riveter.”

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often blamed mothers who worked outside of their homesduring the war years for an apparent spike in rates of juve-nile delinquency and divorce, and they pondered how newpublic policies might reverse these trends.

Racial IssuesThe Second World War affected issues related to race aswell as gender. The United States entered the global con-flict as a nation in which many areas of daily life, particu-larly in the South and Southwest, featured highly visiblesignposts of racial and ethnic separatism. Citizens ofAfrican descent constantly negotiated an elaborate systemof legalized segregation throughout southern states. Effec-tively disenfranchised politically in the South, AfricanAmericans in the rest of the country continued to experi-ment with how best to use the political power they hadgained during the 1930s. In California and throughout theSouthwest, residents who traced their ancestry back toMexico, including many who had long resided in theUnited States, continued to work on addressing a widerange of issues involving employment, education, andhousing.

After the United States formally entered the war, Pres-ident Roosevelt refused to abandon the settled policy ofracial segregation in the U.S. armed forces. Although theArmy integrated Latino and American Indian soldiers,along with those from various European ethnic groups,into its combat units, military leaders refused to do thesame for people of African and Japanese ancestry. Groupssuch as the NAACP pressed for integration, but Roosevelt’stop advisers claimed that eliminating Jim Crow in the mil-itary could interfere with the nation’s combat capabilities.The Red Cross and the U.S. Army even adopted the scien-tifically absurd practice of segregating donated blood intoseparate stores of “white” and “black” plasma.

Military officials often placed African Americans ininferior or highly dangerous support positions and initiallyexcluded most of the segregated fighting units fromcombat duty. The White House deferred to these decisions,supported by white Democrats from the South who fearedthat permitting African Americans to join the fight for free-dom abroad on an equal basis with other Americans mightencourage attempts at desegregation at home. Toward theend of the war, when troop shortages forced the govern-ment to put segregated African American units intocombat, these units invariably performed with distinction.

Wartime social tensions sometimes flared into openconflict. Within the military, for example, a 1944 explo-sion at an ammunition depot at Port Chicago, near SanFrancisco, killed 300 U.S. Navy dockworkers, all of theminadequately trained and most of African descent. When

naval officers ordered other black sailors to similar duty,some refused, citing dangerous working conditions. Theresulting court martial of 50 African Americans becamethe largest mass trial in naval history. A military courtfound all of them guilty of disobeying orders and imposedlengthy prison terms. After the war, the navy reduced thesentences and released the prisoners but refused requeststo overturn their convictions. The Port Chicago incidentremained a vivid memory among African Americans, andcivil-rights groups continually pressed for redress. Finally,in 1999, one of the convicted sailors, Freddie Meeks,received a presidential pardon.

Meanwhile, on the wartime home front, a variety ofvolatile racial issues continued to simmer. As the wartimeproduction system created more jobs, vast numbers ofpeople from the rural South, including several hundredthousand African Americans, continued to move north-ward to cities such as Los Angeles and Detroit. Thepeople already living in these areas often chafed at theinflux of newcomers, who competed with them for jobsand housing and who placed greater demands on publicservices such as transportation, education, and recre-ational facilities.

Urban housing projects sometimes became sites ofconflict. White residents of these facilities generallycharged governmental agencies, when they attempted tochallenge racial discrimination, with acting heavy-hand-edly, while persons of color criticized public officials forfailing to move aggressively enough. In Buffalo, New York,threats of violence caused officials to cancel the construc-tion of one housing project. In Detroit, in early 1942, thatcity’s mayor deployed police officers in order to preventclashes at the racially integrated Sojourner Truth site fromescalating into something more serious.

The type of social strains evident early on in Detroitbegan to flare into violence. This escalation most oftenoccurred in overcrowded urban spaces, where diversepopulations and cultures already competed and clashedwith one another. In Detroit, in June 1943, conflictbetween white and black youth at an amusement parkrapidly spiraled into a multiple-day riot. Nearly 40 people,most of them African American, lost their lives before fed-eral troops, dispatched by FDR at the request of the mayorof Detroit and the governor of Michigan, arrived in theMotor City. Critics of Detroit’s police force charged it withnot responding forcefully enough to the first disturbances,while the NAACP charged it with overreacting and withtargeting black people, 17 of whom died as a result ofdeadly force used by officers. The violence in Detroit lefthundreds injured and inflicted millions of dollars worth ofdamage to property. Federal troops remained in the cityfor six months after their initial deployment in June. The

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following month, Roosevelt sent another military forceinto New York City’s Harlem to quell disturbances there.

Clashes extended beyond those between people ofEuropean and African descent. In Los Angeles, the “ZootSuit Riots” of 1943 grew out of a complex set of socialissues that had been roiling that fast-growing metropolisover the past several years. These included competition forcontrol over contested public spaces, such as dance hallsand jazz clubs; cultural-ethnic differences in dress andentertainment styles; and ethnic bitterness, especiallygrowing out of the contentious 1942 “Sleepy Lagoon”murder case, which had produced controversial guilty ver-dicts (later reversed) against a group of Mexican Americandefendants. When social tensions finally produced vio-lence, in late May and early June of 1943, the worst inci-dents initially pitted servicemen of European descentagainst young Mexican American men who were sportingzoot suits. This flamboyant outfit, which featured over-sized coats and trousers, had come to exemplify ethnicpride and protest against wartime restrictions that seemedto fall hardest on communities of color.

For several days, increasingly larger groups of soldiersand sailors from nearby military bases entered the fray andstormed through parts of Los Angeles. Critics claimed thatthe city’s police force did little to stop roving bands of ser-vicemen, sometimes augmented by white residents of LA,who broadened their targets to include both African andMexican Americans, whether zoot-suited or not. Police,the same critics charged, seldom hesitated to crack theheads of the young men who fought back. Largely ignor-ing the greater dimensions of what was going on in theircity, members of the LA city council passed a resolutionthat made wearing a zoot suit a criminal offense. Finally,military authorities barred servicemen from coming intoLA, a move that helped restore order.

Even when wartime tensions did not produce the kindof violence seen in Detroit and Los Angeles, the SecondWorld War highlighted long-standing social issues. Formany American Indians, for instance, the wartime yearsincreased the pressures associated with longer-term pat-terns of migration and assimilation. Approximately 25,000Indian men and several hundred Indian women served inthe armed forces. Tens of thousands of other Indian menand women, many leaving their reservations for the firsttime, found wartime work in urban areas. Rapid City,South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Reservation, attractedmore than 2,000 Indians, most of whom settled in informalcamps around city. Other cities with nearby reservations—such as Gallup, New Mexico; Flagstaff, Arizona; andBillings, Montana—became magnets for those seekingwartime work. Many people moved back and forthbetween city and reservation, where economic opportuni-

ties remained limited, and tried to juggle the problemsproduced by living in two significantly different worlds.

People of Japanese descent faced a unique set of socialissues during the war. Shortly after the attack on PearlHarbor, a powerful anti-Japanese political movementclaimed to see signs of an impending sabotage campaignalong the nation’s West Coast, where most people ofJapanese descent then lived. One military report claimedthat a “large, unassimilated, tightly knit racial group,bound to an enemy nation by strong ties of race, culture,custom, and religion . . . constituted a menace” that justi-fied extraordinary action.

Lacking evidence of any significant pockets of disloy-alty, President Roosevelt nonetheless overrode objectionsfrom within his own administration and caved into polit-ical pressures. In February 1942, he issued Executive Order9066, which directed the forced relocation of first- andsecond-generation Japanese Americans (called Issei

Zoot SuitDirected by Luis Valdez and based on his earlier stage play,the motion picture Zoot Suit (1981) recalled ethnic tensionsin Los Angles during the Second World War. StarringEdward J. Olmos and Daniel Valdez, this innovative musical drama highlighted the struggles waged by Mexican Americans over space, identity, and legallyprotected rights. Zoot Suit explores, for example, how styles of masculine dress could become matters over which people would fight.

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and Nisei, respectively) and their internment in hastilyconstructed detainment camps located far away from WestCoast areas. Significantly, in Hawaii, where the presumeddanger of subversion should have been much greater, nosimilar mass internment took place. There, people ofJapanese ancestry constituted nearly 40 percent of thepopulation, and U.S. officials conceded their centrality tothe local wartime economy.

The Roosevelt administration ultimately uprootednearly 130,000 people of Japanese descent from their WestCoast homes. Native-born U.S. citizens, including manyyoung children, comprised two-thirds of the detainees.The relocation forced Japanese Americans to abandontheir possessions and businesses or to sell them for a pit-tance before being transported to flimsy barracks sur-rounded by barbed wire and under armed guard. Manyleft behind thriving agricultural enterprises that were vitalto wartime production. Civil libertarians generally con-demned the internment program as militarily unnecessaryand as unconstitutional, but a divided U.S. Supreme Courtupheld its validity in Korematsu v. U.S. (1944). The Roo-sevelt administration closed the camps even before Japan’ssurrender, and in 1988, the U.S. Congress finally officiallyapologized for the internment. It also authorized paymentof a cash indemnity to anyone who had been confined inthe internment facilities.

Social Movements The global fight against fascism proved helpful to themovements that were working for social change in America.German Nazism, with its doctrines of Aryan supremacyand racial inequality, helped expose the ugly underpin-nings of older social science research. “The Huns havewrecked the theory of the master race with which we wereso contented so long,” lamented one pro-segregationistpolitician from Alabama. At the same time, the antifascistclimate of the war years gave greater visibility to anexpanding body of alternative research that saw racial dif-ference as embedded in culture, rather than biology, andbuttressed a growing conviction that a democracy couldeliminate discrimination and bridge racial and ethnicgulfs.

The northward migration of African Americans con-tributed to efforts for social change. The nearly 750,000African Americans who relocated to northern cities beganto taste, for the first time in their lives, the real possibilityof exerting political power. They found an outspokenadvocate of civil rights within the White House. FirstLady Eleanor Roosevelt repeatedly antagonized southernDemocrats and members of her husband’s administrationby her advocacy of civil rights and her well-publicized par-ticipation in integrated social and political functions.

InternmentUniformed officials check the baggage ofpeople of Japanese descent as they arebeing evacuated to internment camps.

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Sh a p i n g t h e Pe a c e 819

The Amsterdam News, a newspaper aimed at AfricanAmericans, called for a “Double V” campaign—victoryat home as well as abroad. The labor leader A. PhilipRandolph promised to lead tens of thousands of blackworkers in a march on Washington to demand moredefense jobs and integration of the military forces. PresidentRoosevelt feared the event would embarrass his administra-tion and urged that it be canceled. Randolph’s persistenceultimately forced Roosevelt to create the Fair EmploymentPractices Commission (FEPC). If this new agency gainedlittle effective power over day-to-day events, its existencehelped advance the ideal of nondiscrimination.

Particularly in urban areas such as Detroit and NewYork City, civil-rights groups, old and new, used thewartime years to construct a wider base from which tofight for jobs and political power. Founded in 1942, theinter-racial Committee (later, Congress) on Racial Equal-ity (CORE) promised to find new, nonviolent ways ofopposing discrimination. Testing a variety of strategiesduring the war, activists from CORE, led by Bayard Rustin,staged well-organized, well-publicized sit-ins. They calledfor integrating restaurants, theaters, and other public facil-ities, especially in wartime Washington, D.C.

The global dimension of the war effort proved of par-ticular help to social movements addressing issues of impor-tance to Mexican American communities. In California andthroughout the Southwest during the war years, Latinoorganizations highlighted the irony of fighting overseason behalf of a nation that denied equality at home andchallenged the United States to live up to its democraticrhetoric. Approximately 500,000 Mexican Americansserved, often with great distinction, in the military. Notwishing to anger this constituency, the Roosevelt admin-istration, which also feared harm to its Good NeighborPolicy in Latin America, saw the 1943 zoot-suit incidentsin LA as requiring a response from Washington. Conse-quently, the president’s coordinator of Inter-Americanaffairs, Nelson Rockefeller, allocated federal money totrain Spanish-speaking workers for wartime employ-ment, to improve education for Mexican Americans, andto provide high school graduates with new opportunitiesto enter college.

Organizations such as the League of United LatinAmerican Citizens (LULAC) continually pressed forchange. Although legal precedents in California and inSouthwestern states formally classified Latinos as “white,”actual practices usually discriminated against citizens andimmigrants of Mexican descent. In Texas, Mexican Amer-ican activists, working closely with the Mexican govern-ment, mounted several drives against discrimination. InCalifornia, as the war was about to end in 1945, attorneysfor LULAC backed an ambitious effort by several familiesto mount a legal challenge, grounded in the latest social

science research, against cities in Orange County that seg-regated Mexican American children into separate andobviously unequal schools.

People of Japanese descent, despite the internment,also laid the basis for postwar campaigns to achieve greaterequality for Asian Americans. The courage and sacrifice ofJapanese American combat units, composed of volunteersfrom the stateside internment camps and from Hawaii,became legendary. Members of the 100th Battalion andthe 442nd Regimental Combat Team, segregated units,suffered stunning causalities, often while undertakingextremely dangerous combat missions in Europe. In thePacific Theater, 6,000 members of the Military IntelligenceService provided invaluable service against the sameenemy their detractors once claimed they covertly sup-ported.

Leaders of many social movements, then, came to seefighting for the American Way of Life as representing acommitment not to the past but to the future, one to bemarked by new struggles on behalf of liberty and equality.After researching his influential study of racial relations,An American Dilemma (1944), the Swedish sociologistGunnar Myrdal declared the need for “fundamentalchange.” The African American novelist Richard Wrightexpressed a similar sentiment more tersely: The UnitedStates needed to address its “white problem.”

In the face of divisive issues and new social move-ments, the OWI mounted informational campaigns thatstressed national unity and contrasted America’s “meltingpot” ethos with the obsession in Germany and Japanabout racial “purity.” Many wartime motion pictures,plays, radio dramas, and musical pieces tried to foster asense of national community by expressing pride in cul-tural diversity. As members of each of the nation’s racialand ethnic groups distinguished themselves in the military,the claim to greater equality of condition—“AmericansAll,” in the words of a wartime slogan—took on greaterforce. Governmental imagery extolling social solidarityand freedom provided another way in which the wartimeyears assisted the work of social activists.

Shaping the Peace

What major institutions and

policies did the United States and the Allies

adopt in their effort to shape the reconstruction

of the postwar world?

Even before the war ended, U.S. policy makers began con-sidering postwar peace arrangements. The Trumanadministration claimed to be building on Roosevelt’swartime conferences and agreements as it tried to shape a

Focus Question

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postwar framework for international relations. UnderTruman’s leadership, the United States worked to establishthe United Nations (UN), new international economicinstitutions, and other dispute-settling arrangements.

International OrganizationsIn the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and at a conference inMoscow in October 1943, the Allied powers pledged tocreate a replacement for the defunct League of Nations.Internationalist-minded Americans saw the new UNoffering a more realistic version of Woodrow Wilson’s ear-lier vision, one in which the United States would lead aworld body that could deter aggressor nations and pro-mote peaceful political change.

At the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington inAugust 1944 and at a subsequent meeting in San Franciscoin April 1945, the Allies worked out the UN’s organiza-tional structure. It included a General Assembly, in whicheach member nation would be represented and cast onevote. A smaller body, the Security Council, would includefive permanent members from the Allied Coalition—theUnited States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, France, andNationalist China—and six rotating members. The Secu-rity Council would assume primary responsibility fortaking action to maintain peace, but each of the perma-nent members could veto any council decision. A UN Sec-retariat, headed by a Secretary General, would handle day-to-day business, and an Economic and Social Councilwould sponsor measures to improve living conditionsthroughout the world.

The U.S. Senate, with only two dissenting votes,approved joining the UN in July 1945. This victory forinternationalism contrasted sharply with the Senate’s 1919rejection of U.S. membership in the League of Nations.Opponents of Wilson’s dream had then worried that theLeague would press internationalist policies that mightlimit the ability of the United States to pursue its ownnational interest. Following the Second World War, how-ever, a newly powerful United States appeared able todominate international organizations such as the UN. Itseemed unlikely that decisions by it or other internationalbodies could seriously hamstring U.S. foreign policy. Inaddition, most U.S. leaders now saw the lack of a coordi-nated, international response to aggression during the1930s as a major factor in the outbreak of the SecondWorld War and wished to avoid reliving the “appease-ment” policies of that era.

Eleanor Roosevelt, the former first lady and still acommitted social activist, played a prominent role in pro-moting an internationalist agenda in the postwar period.A delegate to the first meeting of the UN’s General Assem-bly, she chaired its Commission on Human Rights and

guided the drafting of a Universal Declaration of HumanRights, adopted by the UN in 1948. The document setforth “inalienable” human rights and freedoms as corner-stones of international law.

A series of postwar economic agreements also illus-trated a growing acceptance by U.S. leaders of the value ofinternational organizations. At the Bretton Woods (NewHampshire) Conference of 1944, representatives from 45nations created the International Monetary Fund (IMF),which they hoped could maintain a stable system of inter-national exchange by ensuring the conversion of eachnation’s currency into that of every other at fixed andstable rates. The U.S. dollar, pegged at a value of $32 dol-lars for an ounce of gold, would provide the linchpin.Exchange rates could be altered only with the agreementof the IMF. This financial system, according to its archi-tects, would facilitate smoothly flowing trade relationshipsand create the economic basis for preventing the kind ofpolitical instability that had paved the road to war duringthe 1930s.

Postwar U.S. planners participated in setting up otherinternational economic organizations. At the BrettonWoods conference, they established the InternationalBank for Reconstruction and Development, later renamedthe World Bank. Its creators envisioned it providing loansto war-battered countries and facilitating the resumptionof world trade. In 1948, the United States also spearheadedimplementation of the General Agreement on Tariffsand Trade (GATT). GATT established the institutionalgroundwork for subsequent meetings at which nationscould come together and negotiate nondiscriminatorytrade arrangements that would, in theory, operate freelyand fairly throughout the world. Rather than confrontingone another by raising protective tariffs or threateningmilitary action over economic disputes, GATT would sup-posedly encourage nations to resolve their differencesthrough cooperation, by engaging in a good-faith, inter-nationally supervised bargaining process.

Spheres of Interestand Postwar SettlementsDuring their wartime negotiations, Stalin, Churchill, andRoosevelt had apparently assumed that the most powerfulnations—their own—would enjoy special “spheres ofinfluence” in the postwar world. As early as January 1942,the Soviet ambassador to the United States reported toStalin that Roosevelt had tacitly assented to the Sovietsexercising effective postwar control over the Baltic states ofLithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. In 1944, Stalin andChurchill agreed, informally and secretly, that Britainwould continue to dominate Greece and that the Soviets

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Sh a p i n g t h e Pe a c e 821

could oversee Romania and Bulgaria. U.S. leaders, mean-while, assumed that Latin America would remain withintheir sphere of influence. Roosevelt sometimes seemed toimply that he accepted Stalin’s goal of having statesfriendly to the USSR on its vulnerable western border. Atthe Tehran Conference of November 1943, however, FDRalso told Stalin that U.S. voters of Eastern Europeandescent expected their homelands to be independent ofSoviet control after the war.

Historians continue to differ on precisely howRoosevelt might have intended to reconcile his contradic-tory hints about the postwar Soviet sphere of influence. Aslong as the Soviet military remained essential to Germany’sdefeat—and Roosevelt also wanted the USSR to join thewar against Japan—the ailing U.S. president struck a con-ciliatory tone with Stalin. After Roosevelt’s death, however,the powerful position gained by the Soviets in EasternEurope quickly became a focus of tensions between theUnited States and the USSR.

Early in the war, both nations did favor some planfor the dismemberment and deindustrialization of adefeated Nazi Germany. At a conference held at Yalta,Ukraine, in February 1945, the three major Alliedpowers agreed to divide Germany into four zones ofoccupation (with France’s postwar government as theother occupying force). Later, as relations among thevictors worsened, this temporary division of Germanyhardened into a Soviet-dominated zone in the East andthe other three zones to its west. The victors also dividedBerlin, the German capital, into separate zones, eventhough the city lay uneasily within the Soviet-controlledportion of Germany.

Postwar differences also involved Poland. At the YaltaConference, the Soviets agreed to hold elections in post-war Poland and to oversee creation of a government“responsible to the will of the people.” Stalin also claimed,apart from these formalities, that the other Allied leaderstacitly acknowledged that the USSR would effectivelydominate postwar Poland. Stalin apparently left Yaltaexpecting Poland would be in the USSR’s sphere of influ-ence, but many in the United States soon charged himwith bad faith for failing to hold free elections and for notrelinquishing Soviet control over Poland. Other critics,particularly powerful within Republican ranks, blamedRoosevelt and some of his key advisers for not bargainingharder or, even, for selling out to Stalin at Yalta. Observersmore sympathetic to Roosevelt’s problems with his allies,however, viewed the agreements reached at Yalta asinevitably ambiguous. With tough battles against Germanyand Japan still looming on the horizon, British and U.S.leaders seemingly chose to sacrifice clarity in hopes ofgaining further cooperation, especially on military mat-ters, from Stalin.

In Asia, military projections likewise influenced post-war settlements. At a November 1943 conference inTehran, and again at Yalta, Stalin pledged to send Soviettroops to Asia as soon as Germany surrendered. The firstU.S. atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, however, just oneday before the Soviets were to enter the Pacific Theater ofthe war, and the United States assumed total charge of theoccupation and postwar reorganization of Japan. AfterSoviet armies drove into the Korean Peninsula, the UnitedStates and the USSR divided Korea, which had been con-trolled by Japan, into separate zones of occupation. Here,as in Germany, these zones would later emerge as twoantagonistic states, one beholden to the United States andthe other to the Soviet Union (see chapter 27).

The fate of the European colonies seized by Japan inSoutheast Asia provided another contentious issue. MostU.S. officials preferred to see the former British andFrench colonies become independent nations, but theyalso worried about the left-leaning politics of many anti-colonial nationalist movements. As the Truman adminis-tration became more suspicious of the expansionist inten-tions of Stalin’s Soviet regime, it became increasinglytempting to support British and French efforts to reassem-ble their colonial empires.

The United States maintained its own sphere ofinfluence in the Pacific. In the Philippines, the Trumanadministration honored a long-standing pledge to grantindependence. A government friendly to the UnitedStates, which agreed to respect American economic inter-ests and accept U.S. military bases, took power in 1946.U.S. advisers from these bases soon began assisting thePhilippine government in its campaign against leftistrebels, the Hukbalahaps, or Huks. In 1947, the UnitedNations designated the Mariana, Caroline, and MarshallIslands as the “Trust Territories of the Pacific” and author-ized the United States to administer their affairs.

Although the nations of Latin America had been onlyindirectly involved in military conflict and peace negotia-tions, the Second World War encouraged Roosevelt tobuild on his Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s (seechapter 25). Following the German invasion of Poland in1939, Latin American leaders stood nearly united behindthe Allies. After formal U.S. entry into the war, at a con-ference in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942, every LatinAmerican country except Chile and Argentina brokediplomatic ties with the Axis governments. When navalwarfare in the Atlantic severed commercial connectionsbetween Latin America and Europe, Latin Americancountries became critical suppliers of raw materials to theUnited States.

Wartime conferences avoided making many clear-cut decisions about the Middle East, especially about thefounding of a Jewish state. The Second World War

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prompted survivors of the Holocaust and Jews fromaround the world to take direct action. Zionism, theinternational movement to found a Jewish state in Pales-tine, the ancient homeland of Jewish people, attractedthousands of Jews to the Middle East. They began effortsto carve out, against the wishes of Palestinians and otherArab people, a new Jewish state, Israel.

Conclusion

T he world landscape changed dramatically during theSecond World War. For the United States, wartime

mobilization finally ended the Great Depression andfocused most of the national government’s attention oninternational concerns. The war brought not only vic-tory over dictatorial, expansionist regimes but also leftthe United States as the world’s preeminent economicand military power.

At home, the administration of President FranklinRoosevelt—concerned with successfully prosecuting aglobal war against fascism—embraced economic planning

and assigned broad executive powers to governmentalbureaucracies. Cooperative ties among government, busi-ness, and scientific researchers gradually took shape. Thesesectors worked together to provide the seemingly miracu-lous growth in the economic productivity that ultimatelypropelled the U.S. military effort.

Even as the war overseas went on, domestic debatesover liberty and equality continued at home. ManyAmericans saw the Second World War as a struggle toprotect and preserve the liberties they already enjoyed.Others, inspired by a struggle against racism and injus-tice abroad, insisted that a war for freedom shouldinclude efforts to advance social justice at home.

News of Japan’s 1945 surrender prompted joyouscelebrations throughout the United States. Still, mostpeople seemed uncertain about postwar prospects. Inter-nationally, could the United States maintain a cooperaterelationship with its wartime Allies, especially the SovietUnion? Domestically, how would the wrenching disloca-tions of war affect both individuals and institutions? Thenation, moreover, now faced the future without thecharismatic leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Questions for Review and CriticalThinking

Review

1. How did events in Asia and in Europe affect debate within theUnited States over whether or not to embrace more interven-tionist policies overseas?

2. What military strategies did the United States and the Alliesultimately adopt when fighting in both the European andAsian Theaters of the Second World War?

3. How did mobilizing for war produce political, economic, andsocial changes in the United States?

4. What major institutions and policies did the United Statesand the Allies adopt in their effort to shape the reconstructionof the postwar world?

Critical Thinking

1. In what ways had the United States already moved, evenbefore the attack on Pearl Harbor, toward intervention in theSecond World War?

2. How did Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic policies during theSecond World War both fulfill and retreat from the aspira-tions of his New Deal?

Identifications

Review your understanding of the following key terms, people,and events for this chapter (terms are defined or described in theGlossary at the end of the book).

Suggested Readings

On the United States and the coming of World War II, see RobertDallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy,1932–1945 (1979), and Waldo H. Heinrichs, Threshold of War:Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II(1988). On the isolationist coalition, see Justus Doenecke, Storm onthe Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939–1941(2003). For the war’s military aspects, consult John Keegan, TheSecond World War (2005); Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms:A Global History of World War II (1994); and Gerald F. Linder-man, The World within War: America’s Combat Experience inWorld War II (1997). Few narrative histories can match the dra-matic sweep of Stephen Ambrose’s many works, such as D-Day:June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (1994). MichaelBeschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruc-tion of Hitler’s Germany, 1941–1945 (2002) is also highly readable.The decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan is adroitly analyzed in

Adolf HitlerfascismThird ReichNeutrality Actsbelligerentblitzkriegcash and carryLuftwaffeLend-Lease Act

Joseph Stalinwolf packsDwight D. EisenhowerNavajo Signal CorpHarry S. TrumanHiroshimaVJ Dayzoot suitsZionism

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Co n c l u s i o n 823

J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and theUse of the Atomic Bombs against Japan (2005).

David Kennedy’s The American People in World War II: Free-dom from Fear, Part II (2003) is a recent overview of the wartimeyears. See also, William L. O’Neill, A Democracy at War: American’sFight at Home and Abroad in World War II (1993), and Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (1994).The superb synthesis by John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory:Politics and American Culture during World War II (1976) may besupplemented by the essays in Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E.Hirsch, eds., The War in American Culture: Society and Con-sciousness during World War II (1996), and Thomas PatrickDoherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, andWorld War II (1993). Richard W. Steele, Free Speech and the GoodWar (1999) examines governmental efforts to regulate dissent.Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations,and the Status of Women during World War II (1981) surveyswomen’s roles during the war. Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: AMulticultural History of America in World War II (2000) is a goodsynthesis of issues related to race and ethnicity.

D O I N G H I S T O R Y O N L I N E

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

In response to the horrors of the Second World War, a world-wide movement to define and enforce international humanrights emerged. A newly organized United Nations empow-ered a Human Rights Commission to create a framework forhuman rights. For two years, a committee chaired by EleanorRoosevelt worked to draft the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights, which has since served as the basis for inter-national treaties as well as national laws regarding humanrights. Explore the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute’sWeb site for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Civil Liberties in Wartime:

Korematsu v. United States

Fred Korematsu, an American of Japanese background, wasborn in Oakland, California, and had been a law-abidingcitizen. In his early twenties, when the order to relocateJapanese Americans to internment camps was announced,he challenged the legality of the measure. The case was ulti-mately heard by the Supreme Court. In a controversial decisionin December 1944, a divided court upheld the constitution-ality of internment. Explore the selections on the Internetthat suggest some of the arguments made in both themajority and minority opinions. Nearly 45 years later, afteran examination of military records, Congress took a standon the issue. Officially apologizing for internment, Con-gress stated that it was “not justified by military necessity,and . . . not driven by analysis of military conditions.”

Visit the ThomsonNOW Web site atwww.thomsonedu.com/login/ to access primary sources

and answer questions related to these topics. Theseexercise modules allow students to e-mail their responses

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FrontmatterWinslow Homer, Sunday Morning in Virginia, 1877. CincinnatiArt Museum John J. Emery Fund. Acc.#1924.247

Chapter 17p. 510: Winslow Homer, Sunday Morning in Virginia, 1877.Cincinnati Art Museum John J. Emery Fund. Acc.#1924.247;p. 513: Courtesy Chicago Historical Society; p. 515 (left): Libraryof Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 515 (right):Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 517(top): Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division;p. 517 (bottom): Photographs and Prints Division, SchomburgCenter for Research in Black Culture, The New York PublicLibrary, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; p. 518: Library ofCongress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 519 (left): © StockMontage, Inc.; p. 519 (right): Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division; p. 521: Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division; p. 524: © CORBIS; p. 528: © CORBIS;p. 529: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 531: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 533: © The Granger Collection, New York

Chapter 18p. 538: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 546: Erwin E. Smith Collection ofthe Library of Congress on deposit at the Amon Carter Museum,Fort Worth; p. 547: TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox FilmCorp. All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection; p. 548:Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas; p. 550: Library ofCongress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 555 (top): © 2006Harvard University, Peabody Museum Photo 2004.24.30439A;p. 555 (bottom): © 2006 Harvard University, Peabody MuseumPhoto 2004.24.30440A; p. 556 (top): Smithsonian Institution,Bureau of American Ethnology; p. 556 (bottom): © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 560: © The Granger Collection, New York

Chapter 19p. 566: © 2006 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; p. 569:Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 573:© Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 574: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 576: TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Edith Minturn PhelpsStokes ( Mrs. I.N.), 1938 (38.104) Photograph © 1992 TheMetropolitan Museum of Art; p. 579: Library of Congress, Printsand Photographs Division; p. 585: North Wind Picture Archive;p. 587: The Kansas State Historical Society Topeka, Kansas; p. 590:© The Granger Collection, New York

Chapter 20p. 594: John Sloan, The City from Greenwich Village, 1922.National Gallery of Art. Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1970.I. I.;p. 597: © Lake County Museum/CORBIS p. 600: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 601: © Hulton Archive/ Getty Images; p. 604: BrownUniversity Archives; p. 607: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 608: © Museumof the City of New York/CORBIS; p. 611: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 613: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 616: A’Lelia Bundles/WalkerFamily Collection/www.madamcjwalker.com; p. 617: © CORBIS;p. 618 (top): Underwood Photo Archives; p. 618 (bottom): © The

Granger Collection, New York; p. 619: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 620: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Chapter 21p. 624: Culver Pictures; p. 627: Culver Pictures; p. 628: GeorgeBellows, “Cliff Dwellers” 1913. Oil on canvas. Los Angeles CountyMuseum of Art, Los Angeles County Fund; p. 629: ColumbiaUniversity Library; p. 630: Brown Brothers; p. 631: © CORBIS;p. 634: © Hulton Archive/Getty Images; p. 638: © CORBIS;p. 640: Wisconsin Historical Society; p. 642: 20th CenturyFox/THE KOBAL COLLECTION; p. 643: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 646: © Private Collection/© Christie’s Images/The BridgemanArt Library; p. 648: Brown Brothers; p. 649: Library of Congress,Prints and Photographs Division; p. 652: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Chapter 22p. 656: Culver Pictures; p. 659: State Historical Society ofWisconsin; p. 660: Smithsonian Institution Photo No. 85-14366;p. 662: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 663: ChicagoHistorical Society; p. 665 (left): Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division; p. 665 (top right): © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 665 (bottom right): © The Granger Collection, New York;p. 668: © CORBIS; p. 669: “A Philippine Album: American EraPhotographs” by Jonathan Best. (Bookmark, Manila 1998);p. 671: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress;

p. 672: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 676: © Underwood &Underwood/CORBIS; p. 677: North Wind Picture Archive;p. 680: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Chapter 23p. 684: © Mary Evans Picture Library/The Image Works; p. 688:Imperial War Museum, London; p. 690: Wisconsin HistoricalSociety; p. 692: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 695:© CORBIS; p. 697: Digital Image © The Museum of ModernArt/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY; p. 699 (top): NationalArchives; p. 699 (bottom): Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division; p. 700: National Archives; p. 703: ImperialWar Museum, London; p. 704: New York Times, 1919; p. 705:© Bettmann/ CORBIS; p. 707: © CORBIS; p. 710: Library ofCongress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 711: © ParamountPictures/Courtesy: Everett Collection. ; p. 712: Art © Estate of BenShahn/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Collection of WhitneyMuseum of American Art (gift of Edith and Milton Lowenthal inmemory of Juliana Force); p. 713: Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division

Chapter 24p. 716: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 721: The ArtArchive/Bodleian Library Oxford; p. 722 © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 723: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division;p. 725: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS; p. 726: © CORBIS;p. 728: © CORBIS; p. 729: Brown Brothers; p. 730: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 734 (top): Brown Brothers; p. 734 (bottom): Libraryof Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 735: © TheGranger Collection, New York; p. 738 –739: Mural: The Scopes

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Trial; Vanderbilt University Law School; Artist: J. William Myers,Nashville TN; p. 740: © John Springer Collection/CORBIS; p. 741:© National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource,NY; p. 743: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 745: Security PacificCollection/Los Angeles Public Library; p. 746: © Leonard deSelva/CORBIS; p. 747: © The Granger Collection, New York

Chapter 25p. 750: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 753: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 755: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 758: © The GrangerCollection, New York; p. 760: Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs; p. 761: FDR Library; p. 762: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 764: © Lester Lefkowitz/CORBIS; p. 766: © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 767: © The Detroit Institute of Arts, USA/The Bridgeman ArtLibrary; p. 770: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 774 (top):Photo © Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington,DC/Art Resource, NY. Art © Estate of Moses Soyer/Licensed byVAGA, New York, NY; p. 774 (bottom): AP Images; p. 775: TheMichael Barson Collection; p. 776: Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division; p. 779: Library of Congress, Prints andPhotographs Division

Chapter 26p. 786: Courtesy Northwestern University Library; p. 790:© Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 793: © The Granger Collection, NewYork; p. 795: San Diego Historical Society; p. 802: NationalArchives #127-N-69559-A; p. 805 (top): © Bettmann/CORBIS;p. 805 (bottom): © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 807: National Archives;p. 808: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 809: Library of Congress, Printsand Photographs Division; p. 813: Everett Collection;p. 814: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 815: © CORBIS;p. 817: © Universal Pictures/ Courtesy: Everett Collection;p. 818: FDR Library

Chapter 27p. 824: The Michael Barson Collection; p. 827: © The GrangerCollection, New York; p. 829: Courtesy of the George C. MarshallResearch Library, Lexington, Virginia; p. 830: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 834: Courtesy of the Truman Library; p. 839 (top):© Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 839 (bottom): Library of Congress,Prints and Photographs Division; p. 840: © SUNSET BOULE-VARD/CORBIS SYGMA; p. 846: © Margaret Bourke-White/TimeLife Pictures/Getty Images; p. 847: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 849:The Michael Barson Collection; p. 850: © Hulton Archive/GettyImages; p. 853: The Michael Barson Collection

Chapter 28p. 856: © The Granger Collection, New York; p. 859: AP Images;p. 865 (top): © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 865 (bottom): © Elliott

Erwitt/Magnum Photos, Inc.; p. 866: No credit necessary; p. 867:© Joe Munroe/Photo Researchers, Inc. ; p. 870: Library ofCongress, Prints and Photographs Division; p. 871: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 875: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 877: © Don Cravens/TimeLife Pictures/Getty Images; p. 884: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 890:© Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos, Inc. ; p. 891: AP Images/BillHudson; p. 892: WARNER BROS/THE KOBAL COLLECTION;p. 893: Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, White House, in the JohnF. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Chapter 29p. 896: © Joseph Sohm; ChromoSohm Inc./CORBIS; p. 899 (left):George Tames/ NYT Pictures; p. 899 (right): George Tames/ NYTPictures; p. 906: AP Images/Eddie Adams; p. 908: © The GrangerCollection, New York; p. 912: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 913:Everett Collection; p. 914: © Express/Express/ Getty Images/HultonArchive; p. 920: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 921: © Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 926: AP Images; p. 928: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Chapter 30p. 936: © MCA/Universal Pictures - Courtesy: Everett Collection;p. 941: © Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images; p. 942:© Bettmann/CORBIS; p. 947: © Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos, Inc.;p. 949: © Galen Rowell/CORBIS; p. 950: © Bettmann/CORBIS ;p. 955: © Owen Franken/CORBIS; p. 960: Reprinted by permis-sion of Ms. Magazine, © 1972; p. 962: © Reuters/CORBIS; p. 964:© Gary A. Conner/PhotoEdit; p. 965: © Andre Jenny/The ImageWorks; p. 967: © Ralf-Finn Hestoft/CORBIS; p. 969: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Chapter 31p. 972: © Richard T. Nowitz/CORBIS; p. 977: © RichardCummins/CORBIS; p. 980 (top): California Department ofTransportation; p. 980 (bottom left): California Department of Transportation; p. 980 (bottom right): California Departmentof Transportation; p. 982: © Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS; p. 983:© Keren Su/CORBIS; p. 988: Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox/THEKOBAL COLLECTION; p. 990: TM and Copyright © 20thCentury Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved./ The EverettCollection; p. 993: © Rebecca Cook/Reuters/CORBIS

Chapter 32p. 996: © Lee Snider/Photo Images/CORBIS; p. 1003: © Reuters/CORBIS; p. 1006: AP Images/Gary I. Rothstein; p. 1007: APImages/Pablo Martinez Monsivais; p. 1008: AP Images/DennisPaquin; p. 1010: AP Images/Khalid Mohammed; p. 1012: © TedSoqui/CORBIS; p. 1015 (top): © Smiley N. Pool/Dallas Morning News/CORBIS; p. 1015 (bottom): © Jason Reed/Reuters/CORBIS

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