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C HAPTER 22 1931 Japan invades Manchuria 1933 United States officially recognizes the Soviet Union 1935– Neutrality Acts passed by 1939 Congress 1937 Sino-Japanese War begins 1938 Munich agreement 1939 Germany invades Poland 1940 Draft established 1941 Four Freedoms speech Lend-Lease Act Atlantic Charter Executive Order 8802 Henry Luce’s The American Century Pearl Harbor attacked 1942 Office of War Information established Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) formed Executive Order 9066 Battle of Midway Island Wendell Willkie’s One World 1943 Zoot suit riots Congress lifts Chinese Exclusion Act Detroit race riot 1944 D-Day Smith v. Allwright Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom Bretton Woods conference Korematsu v. United States GI Bill of Rights Battle of the Bulge 1945 Yalta conference Roosevelt dies; Harry Truman becomes president V-E Day (May) Atomic bombs dropped on Japan V-J Day (September) Fighting for the Four Freedoms: World War II, 1941–1945 FIGHTING WORLD WAR II THE AMERICAN DILEMMA Good Neighbors The Road to War Isolationism War in Europe Toward Intervention Pearl Harbor The War in the Pacific The War in Europe Patriotic Assimilation The Bracero Program Mexican-American Rights Indians during the War Asian-Americans in Wartime Japanese-American Internment Blacks and the War Blacks and Military Service Birth of the Civil Rights Movement The Double-V What the Negro Wants An American Dilemma Black Internationalism THE HOME FRONT Mobilizing for War Business and the War Labor in Wartime Fighting for the Four Freedoms Freedom from Want The Office of War Information The Fifth Freedom Women at War Women at Work VISIONS OF POSTWAR FREEDOM Toward an American Century “The Way of Life of Free Men” An Economic Bill of Rights The Road to Serfdom THE END OF THE WAR “The Most Terrible Weapon” The Dawn of the Atomic Age The Nature of the War Planning the Postwar World Yalta and Bretton Woods The United Nations Peace, but not Harmony One of the patriotic war posters issued by the Office of War Information during World War II, linking modern-day soldiers with patriots of the American Revolution as fighters for freedom, a major theme of government efforts to mobilize support for the war. The caption on the original poster states: “Americans will always fight for liberty.” F OCUS Q UESTIONS • What steps led to American participation in World War II? • How did the United States mobilize economic resources and promote popular support for the war effort? • What visions of America’s postwar role began to emerge during the war? • How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad during World War II? • How did the end of the war begin to shape the postwar world? ©lB y far the most popular works of art produced during World War II were paintings of the Four Freedoms by the magazine illustrator Norman Rockwell. In his State of the Union Address, delivered before Congress on January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt spoke eloquently of a future world order founded on the “essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The Four Freedoms became Roosevelt’s favorite statement of Allied aims. At various times, he compared them with the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta, and the Emancipation Proclamation. They embodied, Roosevelt declared in a 1942 radio address, the “rights of men of every creed and every race, wherever they live,” and made clear “the crucial difference between ourselves and the enemies we face today.” Rockwell’s paintings succeeded in linking the Four Freedoms with the defense of traditional American values. “Words like freedom or liberty,” declared one wartime advertisement, “draw close to us only when we break them down into the homely fragments of daily life.” This insight helps to explain Rockwell’s astonishing popularity. Born in New York City in 1894, Rockwell had lived in the New York area until 1939, when he and his family moved to Arlington, Vermont, where they could enjoy, as he put it, “the clean, simple country life, as opposed to the complicated world of the city.” Drawing on the lives of his Vermont neighbors, Rockwell translated the Four Freedoms into images of real people situated in small-town America. Each of the paintings focuses on an instantly recognizable situation. An ordinary citizen rises to speak at a town meeting; members of different religious groups are seen at prayer; a family enjoys a Thanksgiving dinner; a mother and father stand over a sleeping child. The Four Freedoms paintings first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post early in 1943. Letters of praise poured in to the magazine’s editors. The government produced and sold millions of reprints. The paintings toured the country as the centerpiece of the Four Freedoms Show, which included theatrical presentations, parades, and other events aimed at persuading Americans to purchase war bonds. By the end of its tour, the Four Freedoms Show had raised $133 million. Even as Rockwell invoked images of small-town life to rally Americans to the war effort, however, the country experienced changes as deep as at any time in its history. Many of the economic trends and social movements that we associate with the last half of the twentieth century had their roots in the war years. As during World War I, but on a far larger scale, wartime mobilization expanded the size and scope of government and energized the economy. The gross national product more than doubled and unemployment disappeared as war production finally W h a t s t e p s l e d t o A m e r i c a n p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n Wo r l d Wa r I I ? 905 conquered the Depression. The demand for labor drew millions of women into the workforce and sent a tide of migrants from rural America to the industrial cities of the North and West, permanently altering the nation’s social geography. Some 30 million Americans moved during the war, half going into military service and half taking up new jobs. World War II gave the country a new and lasting international role and greatly strengthened the idea that American security was global in scope and could only be protected by the worldwide triumph of core American values. Government military spending sparked the economic development of the South and West, laying the foundation for the rise of the modern Sunbelt. The war created a close link between big business and a militarized federal government—a “military-industrial complex,” as President Dwight D. Eisenhower would later call it—that long survived the end of fighting. World War II also redrew the boundaries of American nationality. In contrast to World War I, the government recognized the “new A draft of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech of 1941 shows how he added the words “everywhere in the world,” (8 and 13 lines down) indicating that the Four Freedoms should be truly international ideals. 906 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms The immensely popular Office of War Information poster reproducing Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the Four Freedoms, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s shorthand for American purposes in World War II. FIGHTING WORLD WAR II immigrants” of the early twentieth century and their children as loyal Americans. Black Americans’ second-class status assumed, for the first time since Reconstruction, a prominent place on the nation’s political agenda. But toleration had its limits. With the United States at war with Japan, the federal government removed more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, the majority of them American citizens, from their homes and placed them in internment camps. As a means of generating support for the struggle, the Four Freedoms provided a crucial language of national unity. But this unity obscured divisions within American society that the war in some ways intensified, divisions reflected in debates over freedom. While some Americans looked forward to a worldwide New Deal, others envisioned “free enterprise” replacing government intervention in the economy. The war gave birth to the modern civil rights movement but strengthened the commitment of many white Americans to maintain the existing racial order. The movement of women into the labor force challenged traditional gender relations, but most men and not a few women longed for the restoration of family life with a male breadwinner and a wife responsible for the home. Even Rockwell’s popular paintings suggested some of the ambiguities within the idea of freedom. With the exception of Freedom of Speech, which depicts civic democracy in action, the paintings emphasized private situations. The message seemed to be that Americans were fighting to preserve freedoms enjoyed individually or within the family rather than in the larger public world. This emphasis on freedom as an element of private life would become more and more prominent in postwar America. F I G H T I N G W O R L D WA R I I GOOD NEIGHBORS During the 1930s, with Americans preoccupied by the economic crisis, international relations played only a minor role in public affairs. From the outset of his administration, nonetheless, FDR embarked on a number of departures in foreign policy. In 1933, hoping to stimulate American trade, he exchanged ambassadors with the Soviet Union, whose government his Republican predecessors had stubbornly refused to recognize. Roosevelt also formalized a policy initiated by Herbert Hoover by which the United States repudiated the right to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of Latin American countries. This Good Neighbor Policy, as it was called, had mixed results. During the 1930s, the United States withdrew its W h a t s t e p s l e d t o A m e r i c a n p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n Wo r l d Wa r I I ? 907 troops from Haiti and Nicaragua. FDR accepted Cuba’s repeal of the Platt Amendment (discussed in Chapter 17), which had authorized American military interventions on that island. These steps offered a belated recognition of the sovereignty of America’s neighbors. But while Roosevelt condemned “economic royalists” (wealthy businessmen) at home, like previous presidents he felt comfortable dealing with undemocratic governments friendly to American business interests abroad. The United States lent its support to dictators like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic, and Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,” FDR said of Somoza. However, as the international crisis deepened in the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration took steps to counter German influence in Latin America by expanding hemispheric trade and promoting respect for American culture. Nelson Rockefeller, the head of an office that hoped to expand cultural relations in the hemisphere, sent the artists of the American Ballet Caravan and the NBC Symphony Orchestra on Latin American tours. This was a far different approach to relations with Central and South America than the military interventions of the first decades of the century. THE ROAD TO WAR Ominous developments in Asia and Europe quickly overshadowed events in Latin America. By the mid-1930s, it seemed clear that the rule of law was disintegrating in international relations and that war was on the horizon. In 1931, seeking to expand its military and economic power in Asia, Japan invaded Manchuria, a province of northern China. Six years later, its troops moved farther into China. When the Japanese overran the city of Nanjing, they massacred an estimated 300,000 Chinese prisoners of war and civilians. An aggressive power threatened Europe as well. After brutally consolidating his rule in Germany, Adolf Hitler embarked on a campaign to control the entire continent. In violation of the Versailles Treaty, he feverishly pursued German rearmament. In 1936, he sent troops to occupy the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone between France and Germany established after World War I. The failure of Britain, France, and the United States to oppose this action convinced Hitler that the democracies could not muster the will to halt his aggressive plans. Italian leader Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, a movement similar to Hitler’s Nazism, invaded and conquered Ethiopia. When General Francisco Franco in 1936 led an uprising against the democratically elected government of Spain, Hitler poured in arms, seeing the conflict as a testing ground for new weaponry. In 1939, Franco emerged victorious from a bitter civil war, establishing yet another fascist government in Europe. As part of a campaign to unite all Europeans of German origin in a single empire, Hitler in 1938 annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, an ethnically German part of Czechoslovakia. Shortly thereafter, he gobbled up all of that country. As the 1930s progressed, Roosevelt became more and more alarmed at Hitler’s aggression as well as his accelerating campaign against Germany’s Jews, whom the Nazis stripped of citizenship and property and began to deport to concentration camps. In a 1937 speech in Chicago, FDR called for international action to “quarantine” aggressors. But no further steps followed. Roosevelt had little choice but to follow the policy of “appeasement” This Hand Guides the Reich, a Nazi propaganda poster from 1930s Germany. The bottom text reads: “German youth follow it in the ranks of Hitler Youth.” 908 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms FIGHTING WORLD WAR II adopted by Britain and France, who hoped that agreeing to Hitler’s demands would prevent war. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich conference of 1938, which awarded Hitler the Sudetenland, proclaiming that he had guaranteed “peace in our time.” ISOLATIONISM In a 1940 cartoon, war clouds engulf Europe, while Uncle Sam observes that the Atlantic Ocean no longer seems to shield the United States from involvement. To most Americans, the threat arising from Japanese and German aggression seemed very distant. Moreover, Hitler had more than a few admirers in the United States. Obsessed with the threat of communism, some Americans approved his expansion of German power as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. Businessmen did not wish to give up profitable overseas markets. Henry Ford did business with Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s. Indeed, Ford plants there employed slave labor provided by the German government. Trade with Japan also continued, including shipments of American trucks and aircraft and considerable amounts of oil. Until 1941, 80 percent of Japan’s oil supply came from the United States. Many Americans remained convinced that involvement in World War I had been a mistake. Senate hearings in 1934–1935 headed by Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota revealed that international bankers and arms exporters had pressed the Wilson administration to enter that war and had profited handsomely from it. Pacifism spread on college campuses, where tens of thousands of students took part in a “strike for peace” in 1935. Ethnic allegiances reinforced Americans’ traditional reluctance to enter foreign conflicts. Many Americans of German and Italian descent celebrated the expansion of national power in their countries of origin, even when they disdained their dictatorial governments. Irish-Americans remained strongly anti-British. Isolationism—the 1930s version of Americans’ long-standing desire to avoid foreign entanglements—dominated Congress. Beginning in 1935, lawmakers passed a series of Neutrality Acts that banned travel on belligerents’ ships and the sale of arms to countries at war. These policies, Congress hoped, would allow the United States to avoid the conflicts over freedom of the seas that had contributed to involvement in World War I. Despite the fact that the Spanish Civil War pitted a democratic government against an aspiring fascist dictator, the Western democracies, including the United States, imposed an embargo on arms shipments to both sides. Some 3,000 Americans volunteered to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on the side of the Spanish republic. But with Germany supplying the forces of Franco, the decision by democratic countries to abide by the arms embargo contributed substantially to his victory. WAR IN EUROPE In the Munich agreement of 1938, Britain and France had caved in to Hitler’s aggression. In 1939, the Soviet Union proposed an international agreement to oppose further German demands for territory. Britain and W h a t s t e p s l e d t o A m e r i c a n p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n Wo r l d Wa r I I ? France, who distrusted Stalin and saw Germany as a bulwark against the spread of communist influence in Europe, refused. Stalin then astonished the world by signing a nonaggression pact with Hitler, his former sworn enemy. On September 1, immediately after the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pact, Germany invaded Poland. This time, Britain and France, who had pledged to protect Poland against aggression, declared war. But Germany appeared unstoppable. Within a year, the Nazi blitzkrieg (lightning war) had overrun Poland and much of Scandinavia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. On June 14, 1940, German troops occupied Paris. Hitler now dominated nearly all of Europe, as well as North Africa. In September 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan created a military alliance known as the Axis. For one critical year, Britain stood virtually alone in fighting Germany. Winston Churchill, who became prime minister in 1940, vowed to resist a threatened Nazi invasion. In the Battle of Britain of 1940–1941, the German air force launched devastating attacks on London and other cities. The Royal Air Force eventually turned back the air assault. But Churchill pointedly called on the “new world, with all its power and might,” to step forward to rescue the old. TOWARD INTERVENTION Roosevelt viewed Hitler as a mad gangster whose victories posed a direct threat to the United States. But most Americans remained desperate to remain out of the conflict. “What worries me, especially,” FDR wrote to Kansas editor William Allen White, “is that public opinion over here is patting itself on the back every morning and thanking God for the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.” After a tumultuous debate, Congress in 1940 agreed to allow the sale of arms to Britain on a “cash and carry” basis—that is, they had to be paid for in cash and transported in British ships. It also approved plans for military rearmament. But with a presidential election looming, Roosevelt was reluctant to go further. Opponents of involvement in Europe organized the America First Committee, with hundreds of thousands of members and a leadership that included well-known figures like Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and Charles A. Lindbergh. In 1940, breaking with a tradition that dated back to George Washington, Roosevelt announced his candidacy for a third term as president. The international situation was too dangerous and domestic recovery too fragile, he insisted, for him to leave office. Republicans chose as his opponent a political amateur, Wall Street businessman and lawyer Wendell Willkie. Differences between the candidates were far more muted than in 1936. Both supported the law, enacted in September 1940, that established the nation’s first peacetime draft. Willkie endorsed New Deal social legislation. He captured more votes than Roosevelt’s previous opponents, but FDR still emerged with a decisive victory. During 1941, the United States became more and more closely allied with those fighting Germany and Japan. America, FDR declared, would be the “great arsenal of democracy.” But with Britain virtually bankrupt, it could no longer pay for supplies. At Roosevelt’s urging, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, which authorized military aid so long as countries promised somehow to return it all after the war. Under the law’s provisions, the United States funneled billions of dollars worth of arms to Britain and 909 A newsreel theater in New York’s Times Square announces Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Europe in the spring of 1940. 910 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms FIGHTING WORLD WAR II China, as well as the Soviet Union, after Hitler renounced his nonaggression pact and invaded that country in June 1941. FDR also froze Japanese assets in the United States, halting virtually all trade between the countries, including the sale of oil vital to Japan. Those who believed that the United States must intervene to stem the rising tide of fascism tried to awaken a reluctant country to prepare for war. Interventionists popularized slogans that would become central to wartime mobilization. In June 1941, refugees from Germany and the occupied countries of Europe joined with Americans to form the Free World Association, which sought to bring the United States into the war against Hitler. The same year saw the formation of Freedom House. With a prestigious membership that included university presidents, ministers, businessmen, and labor leaders, Freedom House described the war raging in Europe as an ideological struggle between dictatorship and the “free world.” In October 1941, it sponsored a “Fight for Freedom” rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, complete with a patriotic variety show entitled “It’s Fun to Be Free.” The rally ended by demanding an immediate declaration of war against Germany. Walt Disney’s program cover for the October 1941 “Fight for Freedom” rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, which demanded American intervention in the European war. The battleships West Virginia and Tennessee in flames during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Both were repaired and later took part in the Pacific war. PEARL HARBOR Until November 1941, the administration’s attention focused on Europe. But at the end of that month, intercepted Japanese messages revealed that an assault in the Pacific was imminent. No one, however, knew where it would come. On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes, launched from aircraft carriers, bombed the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the first attack by a foreign power on American soil since the War of 1812. Pearl Harbor was a complete and devastating surprise. In a few hours, more than 2,000 American servicemen were killed, and 187 aircraft and 18 naval vessels, including 8 battleships, had been destroyed or damaged. By a stroke of fortune, no aircraft carriers—which would prove decisive in the Pacific war— happened to be docked at Pearl Harbor on December 7. W h a t s t e p s l e d t o A m e r i c a n p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n Wo r l d Wa r I I ? 911 Some of the 13,000 American troops forced to surrender to the Japanese on Corregidor Island in the Philippines in May 1942. To this day, conspiracy theories abound suggesting that FDR knew of the attack and did nothing to prevent it so as to bring the United States into the war. No credible evidence supports this charge. Indeed, with the country drawing ever closer to intervention in Europe, Roosevelt hoped to keep the peace in the Pacific. But Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who saw the president after the attack, remarked that he seemed calm—“his terrible moral problem had been resolved.” Terming December 7 “a date which will live in infamy,” Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan. The combined vote in Congress was 477 in favor and 1 against— pacifist Jeanette Rankin of Montana, who had also voted against American entry into World War I. The next day, Germany declared war on the United States. America had finally joined the largest war in human history. THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC World War II has been called a “gross national product war,” meaning that its outcome turned on which coalition of combatants could outproduce the other. In retrospect, it appears inevitable that the entry of the United States, with its superior industrial might, would ensure the defeat of the Axis powers. But the first few months of American involvement witnessed an unbroken string of military disasters. Having earlier occupied substantial portions of French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Members of the U.S. Marine Corps, Navy, and Coast Guard taking part in an amphibious assault during the “island hopping” campaign in the Pacific theater of World War II. Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms 912 WORLD WAR II IN THE FIGHTING WORLD WAR II PACIFIC, 1941–1945 SOVIET UNION Sa kh al i n Is la n d At tu Pa c i fi c Ocean Peking JAPAN KOREA CHINA Nanking Shanghai Chungking Canton BURMA Hong Kong THAILAND FRENCH Manila Bangkok INDOCHINA Tokyo Hiroshima August 6, 1945 Nagasaki August 9, 1945 PHILIPPINES Leyte Gulf October 23–26, 1944 Ca rollin in e Caro I s lan la n ddss Su m Borne o at ra DUTCH EAST INDIES N ew New Gu i n ea Port Moresby I nd ia n Oc ea n 750 H Haawaiia wa iia n I ssll and s ( U.S.) U. S. ) Mars h al l Is la n ds Guam July 21, 1944 Singapore 750 Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941 Mari M ari an ana I s la nnddss MALAYA Java Midway June 3–6, 1942 Formosa Saigon 0 ) Ku ril ri l IIss la l ann ds ds Vladivostock 0 la n Is .S. MANCHURIA MONGOLIA Rangoon Ki s ka Aleutia (U nds 1500 miles 1500 kilometers Although the Japanese navy never fully recovered from its defeats at the Coral Sea and Midway in 1942, it took three more years for American forces to near the Japanese homeland. Gi lbert I s lan la ndd s So lom aonn I s lan la ndd s Guadalcanal August 1942–February 1943 Coral Sea May 7–8, 1942 AUSTRALIA Coral Sea Major battle Atomic bomb Extent of Japanese control Allied forces Cambodia), Japan in early 1942 conquered Burma (Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand). Japan also took control of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), whose extensive oil fields could replace supplies from the United States. And it occupied Guam, the Philippines, and other Pacific islands. At Bataan, in the Philippines, the Japanese forced 78,000 American and Filipino troops to lay down their arms—the largest surrender in American military history. Thousands perished on the ensuing “death march” to a prisoner-of-war camp, and thousands more died of disease and starvation after they arrived. At the same time, German submarines sank hundreds of Allied merchant and naval vessels during the Battle of the Atlantic. Soon, however, the tide of battle began to turn. In May 1942, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the American navy turned back a Japanese fleet intent on attacking Australia. The following month, it inflicted devastating losses on the Japanese navy in the Battle of Midway Island. These victories allowed American forces to launch the bloody campaigns that one by one drove the W h a t s t e p s l e d t o A m e r i c a n p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n Wo r l d Wa r I I ? 913 Japanese from fortified islands like Guadalcanal and the Solomons in the western Pacific and brought American troops ever closer to Japan. THE WAR IN EUROPE In November 1942, British and American forces invaded North Africa and by May 1943 forced the surrender of the German army commanded by General Erwin Rommel. By the spring of 1943, the Allies also gained the upper hand in the Atlantic, as British and American destroyers and planes devastated the German submarine fleet. But even though Roosevelt was committed to liberating Europe from Nazi control, American troops did not immediately become involved on the European continent. As late as the end of 1944, more American military personnel were deployed in the Pacific than against Germany. In July 1943, American and British forces invaded Sicily, beginning the liberation of Italy. A popular uprising in Rome overthrew the Mussolini government, whereupon Germany occupied most of the country. Fighting there raged throughout 1944. The major involvement of American troops in Europe did not begin until June 6, 1944. On that date, known as D-Day, nearly 200,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower landed in Normandy in northwestern France. More than a million troops followed them ashore in the next few weeks, in the most massive sea–land operation in history. After fierce fighting, German armies retreated eastward. By August, Paris had been liberated. The crucial fighting in Europe, however, took place on the eastern front, the scene of an epic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million German soldiers took part in the 1941 invasion. After sweeping through western Russia, German armies in August 1942 launched a siege of Stalingrad, a city located deep inside Russia on the Volga River. This proved to be a catastrophic mistake. Bolstered by an influx of military supplies from the United States, the Russians surrounded the German troops and forced them to surrender. Some 800,000 Germans and 1.2 million Russians perished in the fighting. The German surrender at Stalingrad in January 1943 marked the turning point of the European war. Combined with a Russian victory at Kursk six months later in the greatest tank battle in history, the campaign in the east devastated Hitler’s forces and sent surviving units on a long retreat back toward Germany. Of 13.6 million German casualties in World War II, 10 million came on the Russian front. They represented only part of the war’s vast toll in human lives. Millions of Poles and at least 20 million Russians, probably many more, perished—not only soldiers but civilian victims of starvation, disease, Ben Hurwitz, a soldier from New York City who fought in North Africa and Italy during World War II, made numerous sketches of his experiences. Here American troops pass a wrecked German tank in southern Italy in June 1944. 914 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms WORLD WAR II IN EUROPE, FIGHTING WORLD WAR II 1942–1945 D-DAY London GREAT BRITAIN Major battles Allied offensives Allied countries Neutral countries Axis countries Extent of Axis control Vichy France (controlled by Axis) Calais n el Assembly Area ish EnglCherbourg Ch an Le Havre Rouen Caen FINLAND SWEDEN FRANCE 194 4 NORWAY ESTONIA IRELAND DENMARK GREAT NETHERLANDS BRITAIN London D-Day June 1944 LUXEMBOURG 1945 BELGIUM 1944 Paris FRANCE Berlin ALGERIA 19 4 5 4 194 1 94 3 Kasserine Pass February 1943 Me d i TUNISIA terran 0 250 4 194 ROMANIA ean Sea 1942 FRENCH NORTH AFRICA (Vichy France) 500 miles Stalingrad August 1942– February 1943 TURKEY SYRIA (Fr.) 3 250 Kursk July 1943 3 194 1 9 44 ALBANIA (It.) GREECE 194 0 SOVIET UNION BULGARIA Rome 3 194 MOROCCO ITALY 1942 1943 Moscow YUGOSLAVIA SPAIN 1942 Algiers Oran Warsaw 1944 AUSTRIA HUNGARY 1944 1 9 44 Casablanca 1945 4 194 Battle of the Bulge POLAND December 1944 1945 19 45 CZECHOSLOVAKIA Vichy SPANISH MOROCCO LATVIA LITHUANIA EAST PRUSSIA GERMANY SWITZERLAND PORTUGAL 194 4 Leningrad LIBYA (Italy) IRAQ LEBANON (Br.) (Fr.) PALESTINE El Alamein (Br.) October– November 1942 TRANSJORDAN (Br.) SAUDI ARABIA EGYPT 500 kilometers Most of the land fighting in Europe during World War II took place on the eastern front between the German and Soviet armies. and massacres by German soldiers. After his armies had penetrated eastern Europe in 1941, moreover, Hitler embarked on the “final solution”—the mass extermination of “undesirable” peoples—Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, and, above all, Jews. By 1945, 6 million Jewish men, women, and children had died in Nazi death camps. What came to be called the Holocaust W h a t s t e p s l e d t o A m e r i c a n p a r t i c i p a t i o n i n Wo r l d Wa r I I ? 915 was the horrifying culmination of the Nazi belief that Germans constituted a “master race” destined to rule the world. THE HOME FRONT MOBILIZING FOR WAR At home, World War II transformed the role of the national government. FDR created federal agencies like the War Production Board, the War Manpower Commission, and the Office of Price Administration to regulate the allocation of labor, control the shipping industry, establish manufacturing quotas, and fix wages, prices, and rents. The number of federal workers rose from 1 million to 4 million, part of a tremendous growth in new jobs that pushed the unemployment rate down from 14 percent in 1940 to 2 percent three years later. The government built housing for war workers and forced civilian industries to retool for war production. Michigan’s auto factories now turned out trucks, tanks, and jeeps for the army. By 1944, American factories produced a ship every day and a plane every five minutes. The gross national product rose from $91 billion to $214 billion during the war, and the federal government’s expenditures amounted to twice the combined total of the previous 150 years. The government marketed billions of dollars worth of war bonds, increased taxes, and began the practice of withholding income tax directly from weekly paychecks. Before the war, only the 4 million wealthiest Americans paid income taxes; by 1945, more than 40 million did so. The government, one historian writes, moved during the war from “class taxation” to “mass taxation.” Prisoners at a German concentration camp liberated by Allied troops in 1945. A list of jobs available in Detroit in July 1941 illustrates how war-related production ended the Great Depression even before the United States entered the conflict. 916 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms BUSINESS M-5 tanks on the assembly line at a Detroit Cadillac plant, in a 1942 photograph. During the war, General Motors and other automakers produced vehicles for the armed forces rather than cars for consumers. THE HOME FRONT AND THE WAR The relationship between the federal government and big business changed dramatically from the days of the Second New Deal. “If you are going to go to war in a capitalist country,” observed Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “you had better let business make money out of the process.” As corporate executives flooded into federal agencies concerned with war production, Roosevelt offered incentives to spur production—low-interest loans, tax concessions, and contracts with guaranteed profits. The great bulk of federal spending went to the largest corporations, furthering the long-term trend toward economic concentration. By the end of the war, the 200 biggest industrial companies accounted for almost half of all corporate assets in the United States. Americans marveled at the achievements of wartime manufacturing. Thousands of aircraft, 100,000 armored vehicles, and 2.5 million trucks rolled off American assembly lines, and entirely new products like synthetic rubber replaced natural resources now controlled by Japan. Government-sponsored scientific research perfected inventions like radar, jet engines, and early computers that helped to win the war and would have a large impact on postwar life. These accomplishments not only made it possible to win a two-front war but also helped to restore the reputation of business and businessmen, which had reached a low point during the Depression. Federal funds reinvigorated established manufacturing areas and created entirely new industrial centers. World War II saw the West Coast emerge as a focus of military-industrial production. The government invested billions of dollars in the shipyards of Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco and in the steel plants and aircraft factories of southern California. By the war’s end, California had received one-tenth of all federal spending, and Los Angeles had become the nation’s second largest manufacturing center. Nearly 2 million Americans moved to California for jobs in defense-related industries, and millions more passed through for military training and embarkation to the Pacific war. In the South, the combination of rural out-migration and government investment in military-related factories and shipyards hastened a shift from agricultural to industrial employment. During the war, southern per capita income rose from 60 percent to 70 percent of the national average. But the South remained very poor when the war ended. Much of its rural population still lived in small wooden shacks with no indoor plumbing. The region had only two cities— Houston and New Orleans—with populations exceeding 500,000. Despite the expansion of war production, the South’s How did the United States mobilize economic resources and promote popular support for the war effort? WARTIME ARMY Airfields, bases, and stations Army camps, forts, and posts Naval bases AND NAVY BASES AND 0 0 economy still relied on agriculture and extractive industries—mining, lumber, oil—or manufacturing linked to farming, like the production of cotton textiles. LABOR IN AIRFIELDS 250 250 WARTIME Organized labor repeatedly described World War II as a crusade for freedom that would expand economic and political democracy at home and abroad and win for unions a major voice in politics and industrial management. During the war, labor entered a three-sided arrangement with government and business that allowed union membership to soar to unprecedented levels. In order to secure industrial peace and stabilize war production, the federal government forced reluctant employers to recognize unions. In 1944, when Montgomery Ward, the large mail-order company, defied a pro-union order, the army seized its headquarters and physically evicted its president. For their part, union leaders agreed not to strike and conceded employers’ right to “managerial prerogatives” and a “fair profit.” Despite the gains produced by labor militancy during the 1930s, unions only became firmly established in many sectors of the economy during 917 500 miles 500 kilometers As this map indicates, the military and naval facilities built by the federal government during World War II were concentrated in the South and West, sparking the economic development of these regions. 918 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms Table 22.1 LABOR UNION MEMBERSHIP Year Number of Members 1933 2,857,000 1934 3,728,000 1935 3,753,000 1936 4,107,000 1937 5,780,000 1938 8,265,000 1939 8,980,000 1940 8,944,000 1941 10,489,000 1942 10,762,000 1943 13,642,000 1944 14,621,000 1945 14,796,000 World War II. By 1945, union membership stood at nearly 15 million, onethird of the non-farm labor force and the highest proportion in American history. But if labor became a partner in government, it was very much a junior partner. The decline of the New Deal, already evident in the late 1930s, proceeded during the war. Congress continued to be dominated by a conservative alliance of Republicans and southern Democrats. They left intact core New Deal programs like Social Security but eliminated agencies thought to be controlled by leftists, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, National Youth Administration, and Works Progress Administration. Congress rejected Roosevelt’s call for a cap on personal incomes and set taxes on corporate profits at a level far lower than FDR requested. Despite the “no-strike” pledge, 1943 and 1944 witnessed numerous brief walkouts in which workers protested the increasing speed of assembly-line production and the disparity between wages frozen by government order and expanding corporate profits. FIGHTING FOR THE FOUR FREEDOMS Previous conflicts, including the Mexican War and World War I, had deeply divided American society. In contrast, World War II came to be remembered as the Good War, a time of national unity in pursuit of indisputably noble goals. But all wars require the mobilization of patriotic public opinion. By 1940, “To sell goods, we must sell words” had become a motto of advertisers. Foremost among the words that helped to “sell” World War II was “freedom.” Talk of freedom pervaded wartime America. To Roosevelt, the Four Freedoms expressed deeply held American values worthy of being spread worldwide. Freedom from fear meant not only a longing for peace but a more general desire for security in a world that appeared to be out of control. Freedom of speech and religion scarcely required detailed explanation. But their prominent place among the Four Freedoms accelerated the process by which First Amendment protections of free expression moved to the center of Americans’ definition of liberty. In 1941, the administration celebrated with considerable fanfare the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution). FDR described their protections against tyrannical government as defining characteristics of American life, central to the rights of “free men and free women.” In 1943, the Supreme Court reversed a 1940 ruling and, on First Amendment grounds, upheld the right of Jehovah’s Witnesses to refuse to salute the American flag in public schools. The decision stood in sharp contrast to the coercive patriotism of World War I, and it affirmed the sanctity of individual conscience as a bedrock of freedom, even in times of crisis. The justices contrasted the American system of constitutional protection for unpopular minorities with Nazi tyranny. FREEDOM In this recruitment poster for the Boy Scouts, a svelte Miss Liberty prominently displays the Bill of Rights, widely celebrated during World War II as the centerpiece of American freedom. THE HOME FRONT FROM WANT The “most ambiguous” of the Four Freedoms, Fortune magazine remarked, was freedom from want. Yet this “great inspiring phrase,” as a Pennsylvania steelworker put it in a letter to the president, seemed to strike the deepest chord in a nation just emerging from the Depression. Roosevelt initially meant it to refer to the elimination of barriers to international trade. But he ! VISIONS OF FREEDOM Patriotic Fan. This fan, marketed to women during World War II, illustrates how freedom and patriotism were closely linked. At the far left and right, owners are instructed in ways to help win the war and preserve American freedom. The five middle panels suggest some of the era’s definitions of freedom: freedom “to listen” (presumably without government censorship); selfgovernment; freedom of assembly; the right to choose one’s work; and freedom “to play.” QUESTIONS 1. Compare the elements of freedom depicted on the fan with the Four Freedoms of President Roosevelt. 2. What aspects of freedom are not depicted in the fan? 919 920 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms THE HOME FRONT quickly came to link freedom from want to an economic goal more relevant to the average citizen—protecting the future “standard of living of the American worker and farmer” by guaranteeing that the Depression would not resume after the war. This, he declared, would bring “real freedom for the common man.” When Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the Four Freedoms first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, each was accompanied by a brief essay. Three of these essays, by the celebrated authors Stephen Vincent Benét, Booth Tarkington, and Will Durant, emphasized that the values Rockwell depicted were essentially American and the opposite of those of the Axis powers. For Freedom from Want, the editors chose an unknown Filipino poet, Carlos Bulosan, who had emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen. Bulosan’s essay showed how the Four Freedoms could inspire hopes for a better future as well as nostalgia for Rockwell’s imagined small-town past. Bulosan wrote of those Americans still outside the social mainstream— migrant workers, cannery laborers, black victims of segregation—for whom freedom meant having enough to eat, sending their children to school, and being able to “share the promise and fruits of American life.” THE OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION The history of the Office of War Information (OWI), created in 1942 to mobilize public opinion, illustrates how the political divisions generated by the New Deal affected efforts to promote the Four Freedoms. The liberal Democrats who dominated the OWI’s writing staff sought to make the conflict “a ‘people’s war’ for freedom.” The OWI feared that Americans had only a vague understanding of the war’s purposes and that the populace seemed more fervently committed to paying back the Japanese for their attack on Pearl Harbor than ridding the world of fascism. They utilized radio, film, the press, and other media to give the conflict an ideological meaning, while seeking to avoid the nationalist hysteria of World War I. Wartime mobilization drew on deep-seated American traditions. The portrait of the United States holding aloft the torch of liberty in a world overrun by oppression reached back at least as far as the American Revolution. The description of a world half slave and half free recalled the Great Emancipator. But critics charged that the OWI seemed most interested in promoting the definition of freedom Roosevelt had emphasized during the 1930s. One of its first pamphlets listed as elements of freedom the right to a job at fair pay and to adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Concerned that the OWI was devoting as much time to promoting New Deal social programs as to the war effort, Congress eliminated most of its funding. THE In this patriotic war poster issued by the Office of War Information, the words of Abraham Lincoln are linked to the struggle against Nazi tyranny. FIFTH FREEDOM After Congress curtailed the OWI, the “selling of America” became overwhelmingly a private affair. Under the watchful eye of the War Advertising Council, private companies joined in the campaign to promote wartime patriotism, while positioning themselves and their brand names for the postwar world. Alongside advertisements urging Americans to purchase war bonds, guard against revealing military secrets, and grow “victory gardens” to allow food to be sent to the army, the war witnessed a burst of How did the United States mobilize economic resources and promote popular support for the war effort? 921 In this advertisement by the Liberty Motors and Engineering Corporation, published in the February 1944 issue of Fortune, Uncle Sam offers the Fifth Freedom—“free enterprise”—to wardevastated Europe. To spread its message, the company offered free enlargements of its ad. messages marketing advertisers’ definition of freedom. Without directly criticizing Roosevelt, they repeatedly suggested that he had overlooked a fifth freedom. The National Association of Manufacturers and individual companies bombarded Americans with press releases, radio programs, and advertisements attributing the amazing feats of wartime production to “free enterprise.” Americans on the home front enjoyed a prosperity many could scarcely remember. Despite the rationing of scarce consumer items like coffee, meat, and gasoline, consumers found more goods available in 1944 than when the war began. With the memory of the Depression still very much alive, businessmen predicted a postwar world filled with consumer goods, with “freedom of choice” among abundant possibilities assured if only private enterprise were liberated from government controls. One advertisement for Royal typewriters, entitled “What This War Is All About,” explained that victory would “hasten the day when you . . . can once more walk into any store in the land and buy anything you want.” Certainly, ads suggested, the war did not imply any alteration in American institutions. “I’m fighting for freedom,” said a soldier in an ad by the Nash-Kelvinator Corporation. “So don’t anybody tell me I’ll find America changed.” WOMEN AT WAR During the war, the nation engaged in an unprecedented mobilization of “womanpower” to fill industrial jobs vacated by men. OWI publications encouraged women to go to work, Hollywood films glorified the independent woman, and private advertising celebrated the achievements of Rosie the Riveter, the female industrial laborer depicted as muscular and selfreliant in Norman Rockwell’s famous magazine cover. With 15 million men in the armed forces, women in 1944 made up more than one-third of the civilian labor force, and 350,000 served in auxiliary military units. 922 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms THE HOME FRONT A female lathe operator in a Texas plant that produced transport planes. Even though most women workers still labored in clerical and service jobs, new opportunities suddenly opened in industrial, professional, and government positions previously restricted to men. On the West Coast, one-third of the workers in aircraft manufacturing and shipbuilding were women. For the first time in history, married women in their thirties outnumbered the young and single among female workers. Women forced unions like the United Auto Workers to confront issues like equal pay for equal work, maternity leave, and childcare facilities for working mothers. Defense companies sponsored swing bands and dances to boost worker morale and arranged dates between male and female workers. Having enjoyed what one wartime worker called “a taste of freedom”—doing “men’s” jobs for men’s wages and, sometimes, engaging in sexual activity while unmarried—many women hoped to remain in the labor force once peace returned. WOMEN This print, part of the America in the War exhibition shown simultaneously in twenty-six American museums in 1943, offers a stylized image of women workers assembling shells in a factory while men march off to war. AT WORK “We as a nation,” proclaimed one magazine article, “must change our basic attitude toward the work of women.” But change proved difficult. The government, employers, and unions depicted work as a temporary necessity, not an expansion of women’s freedom. Advertisements assured women laboring in factories that they, too, were “fighting for freedom.” But their language spoke of sacrifice and military victory, not rights, independence, or self-determination. One union publication even declared, “There should be a law requiring the women who have taken over men’s jobs to be laid off after the war.” When the war ended, most female war workers, especially those in better-paying industrial employment, did indeed lose their jobs. Despite the upsurge in the number of working women, the advertisers’ “world of tomorrow” rested on a vision of family-centered prosperity. Like How did the United States mobilize economic resources and promote popular support for the war effort? 923 Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings, these wartime discussions of freedom simultaneously looked forward to a day of material abundance and back to a time when the family stood as the bedrock of society. The “American way of life” celebrated during the war centered on the woman with “a husband to meet every night at the door,” and a home stocked with household appliances and consumer goods. Advertisements portrayed working women dreaming of their boyfriends in the army and emphasized that with the proper makeup, women could labor in a factory and remain attractive to men. Men in the army seem to have assumed that they would return home to resume traditional family life. In one wartime radio program, a young man described his goal for peacetime: “Havin’ a home and some kids, and breathin’ fresh air out in the suburbs . . . livin’ and workin’ decent, like free people.” V I S I O N S O F P O S T WA R F R E E D O M TOWARD AN AMERICAN CENTURY The prospect of an affluent future provided a point of unity between New Dealers and conservatives, business and labor. And the promise of prosperity to some extent united two of the most celebrated blueprints for the postwar world. One was The American Century, publisher Henry Luce’s 1941 effort to mobilize the American people both for the coming war and for an era of postwar world leadership. Americans, Luce’s book insisted, must embrace the role history had thrust upon them as the “dominant power in the world.” They must seize the opportunity to share with “all peoples” their “magnificent industrial products” and the “great American ideals,” foremost among which stood “love of freedom.” After the war, American power and American values would underpin a previously unimaginable prosperity—“the abundant life,” Luce called it—produced by “free economic enterprise.” The idea of an American mission to spread democracy and freedom goes back to the Revolution. But traditionally, it had envisioned the country as an example, not an active agent imposing the American model throughout the globe. Luce’s essay anticipated important aspects of the postwar world. But its bombastic rhetoric and a title easily interpreted as a call for an American imperialism aroused immediate opposition among liberals and the left. Henry Wallace offered their response in “The Price of Free World Victory,” an address delivered in May 1942 to the Free World Association. Wallace, secretary of agriculture during the 1930s and one of the more liberal New Dealers, had replaced Vice President John Nance Garner as Roosevelt’s running mate in 1940. In contrast to Luce’s American Century, a world of business dominance no less than of American power, Wallace predicted that the war would usher in a “century of the common man.” The “march of freedom,” said Wallace, would continue in the postwar world. That world, however, would be marked by international cooperation, not any single power’s rule. Governments acting to “humanize” capitalism and redistribute economic resources would eliminate hunger, illiteracy, and poverty. Luce and Wallace both spoke the language of freedom. Luce offered a confident vision of worldwide free enterprise, while Wallace anticipated a Unlike the lathe operator on the previous page, the woman operating industrial machinery on the cover of the September 1942 issue of McCall’s magazine remains glamorous, with makeup in place and hair unruffled. 924 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms VISIONS OF POSTWAR FREEDOM global New Deal. But they had one thing in common—a new conception of America’s role in the world, tied to continued international involvement, the promise of economic abundance, and the idea that the American experience should serve as a model for all other nations. Neither took into account the ideas that other countries might have developed as to how to proceed once the war had ended. “THE Despite the new independence enjoyed by millions of women, propaganda posters during World War II emphasized the male-dominated family as an essential element of American freedom. WAY OF LIFE OF FREE MEN ” Even as Congress moved to dismantle parts of the New Deal, liberal Democrats and their left-wing allies unveiled plans for a postwar economic policy that would allow all Americans to enjoy freedom from want. In 1942 and 1943, the reports of the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) offered a blueprint for a peacetime economy based on full employment, an expanded welfare state, and a widely shared American standard of living. Economic security and full employment were the Board’s watchwords. It called for a “new bill of rights” that would include all Americans in an expanded Social Security system and guarantee access to education, health care, adequate housing, and jobs for able-bodied adults. Labor and farm organizations, church and civil rights groups, and liberal New Dealers hailed the reports as offering a “vision of freedom” for the postwar world. The NRPB’s plan for a “full-employment economy” with a “fair distribution of income,” said The Nation, embodied “the way of life of free men.” The reports continued a shift in liberals’ outlook that dated from the late 1930s. Rather than seeking to reform the institutions of capitalism, liberals would henceforth rely on government spending to secure full employment, social welfare, and mass consumption, while leaving the operation of the economy in private hands. The reports appeared to reflect the views of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who, as noted in the previous chapter, had identified government spending as the best way to promote economic growth, even if it caused budget deficits. The war had, in effect, ended the Depression by implementing a military version of Keynesianism. In calling for massive spending on job creation and public works— urban redevelopment, rural electrification, an overhaul of the transportation system, and the like—the NRPB proposed the continuation of Keynesian spending in peacetime. But this went so far beyond what Congress was willing to support that it eliminated the NRPB’s funding. AN ECONOMIC BILL OF RIGHTS Roosevelt had not publicized or promoted the NRPB reports of 1942 and 1943. Yet mindful that public-opinion polls showed a large majority of Americans favoring a guarantee of employment for those who could not find work, the president in 1944 called for an “Economic Bill of Rights.” The original Bill of Rights restricted the power of government in the name of liberty. FDR proposed to expand its power in order to secure full employment, an adequate income, medical care, education, and a decent home for all Americans. “True individual freedom,” he declared, “cannot exist without economic security and independence.” Already ill and preoccupied with the war, Roosevelt spoke only occasionally of the Economic Bill of Rights during the 1944 presidential campaign. What visions of America’s postwar role began to emerge during the war? The replacement of Vice President Henry Wallace by Harry S. Truman, then a little-known senator from Missouri, suggested that the president did not intend to do battle with Congress over social policy. Congress did not enact the Economic Bill of Rights. But in 1944, it extended to the millions of returning veterans an array of benefits, including unemployment pay, scholarships for further education, low-cost mortgage loans, pensions, and job training. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, or GI Bill of Rights, was one of the most farreaching pieces of social legislation in American history. Aimed at rewarding members of the armed forces for their service and preventing the widespread unemployment and economic disruption that had followed World War I, it profoundly shaped postwar society. By 1946, more than 1 million veterans were attending college under its provisions, making up half of total college enrollment. Almost 4 million would receive home mortgages, spurring the postwar suburban housing boom. During 1945, unions, civil rights organizations, and religious groups urged Congress to enact the Full Employment Bill, which tried to do for the entire economy what the GI Bill promised veterans. The measure established a “right to employment” for all Americans and required the federal government to increase its level of spending to create enough jobs in case the economy failed to do so. The target of an intense business lobbying campaign, the bill only passed in 1946 with the word “Full” removed from its title and after its commitment to governmental job creation had been eliminated. But as the war drew to a close, most Americans embraced the idea that the government must continue to play a major role in maintaining employment and a high standard of living. THE ROAD TO SERFDOM The failure of the Full Employment Bill confirmed the political stalemate that had begun with the elections of 1938. It also revealed the renewed intellectual respectability of fears that economic planning represented a threat to liberty. When the New Republic spoke of full employment as the “road to freedom,” it subtly acknowledged the impact of The Road to Serfdom (1944), a surprise best-seller by Friedrich A. Hayek, a previously obscure Austrian-born economist. Hayek claimed that even the best-intentioned government efforts to direct the economy posed a threat to individual liberty. He offered a simple message—“planning leads to dictatorship.” Coming at a time when the miracles of war production had reinvigorated belief in the virtues of capitalism, and with the confrontation with Nazism highlighting the danger of merging economic and political power, Hayek offered a new intellectual justification for opponents of active 925 Ben Shahn’s poster, Our Friend, for the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ political action committee, urges workers to vote for FDR during his campaign for a fourth term. 926 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms THE AMERICAN DILEMMA government. In a complex economy, he insisted, no single person or group of experts could possibly possess enough knowledge to direct economic activity intelligently. A free market, he wrote, mobilizes the fragmented and partial knowledge scattered throughout society far more effectively than a planned economy. Unlike many of his disciples, Hayek was not a doctrinaire advocate of laissez-faire. His book endorsed measures that later conservatives would denounce as forms of socialism—minimum wage and maximum hours laws, antitrust enforcement, and a social safety net guaranteeing all citizens a basic minimum of food, shelter, and clothing. Hayek, moreover, criticized traditional conservatives for fondness for social hierarchy and authoritarian government. “I am not a conservative,” he would later write. But by equating fascism, socialism, and the New Deal and by identifying economic planning with a loss of freedom, he helped lay the foundation for the rise of modern conservatism and a revival of laissez-faire economic thought. As the war drew to a close, the stage was set for a renewed battle over the government’s proper role in society and the economy, and the social conditions of American freedom. THE AMERICAN DILEMMA Arthur Poinier’s cartoon for the Detroit Free Press, June 19, 1941, illustrates how, during World War II, white ethnics (of British, German, Irish, French, Polish, Italian and Scandinanvian descent) were incorporated within the boundaries of American freedom. The unprecedented attention to freedom as the defining characteristic of American life had implications that went far beyond wartime mobilization. World War II reshaped Americans’ understanding of themselves as a people. The struggle against Nazi tyranny and its theory of a master race discredited ethnic and racial inequality. Originally promoted by religious and ethnic minorities in the 1920s and the Popular Front in the 1930s, a pluralist vision of American society now became part of official rhetoric. What set the United States apart from its wartime foes, the government insisted, was not only dedication to the ideals of the Four Freedoms but also the principle that Americans of all races, religions, and national origins could enjoy those freedoms equally. Racism was the enemy’s philosophy; Americanism rested on toleration of diversity and equality for all. By the end of the war, the new immigrant groups had been fully accepted as loyal ethnic Americans, rather than members of distinct and inferior “races.” And the contradiction between the principle of equal freedom and the actual status of blacks had come to the forefront of national life. PATRIOTIC ASSIMILATION Among other things, World War II created a vast melting pot, especially for European immigrants and their children. Millions of Americans moved out of urban ethnic neighborhoods and isolated rural enclaves into the army and industrial plants where they came into contact with people of very different backgrounds. What one historian has called their “patriotic assimilation” differed sharply from the forced Americanization of World War I. While the Wilson administration had established How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad d u r i n g Wo r l d Wa r I I ? Anglo-Saxon culture as a national norm, Roosevelt promoted pluralism as the only source of harmony in a diverse society. The American way of life, wrote the novelist Pearl Buck in an OWI pamphlet, rested on brotherhood—the principle that “persons of many lands can live together . . . and if they believe in freedom they can become a united people.” Government and private agencies eagerly promoted equality as the definition of Americanism and a counterpoint to Nazism. Officials rewrote history to establish racial and ethnic tolerance as the American way. To be an American, FDR declared, had always been a “matter of mind and heart,” and “never . . . a matter of race or ancestry”—a statement more effective in mobilizing support for the war than in accurately describing the nation’s past. Mindful of the intolerance spawned by World War I, the OWI highlighted nearly every group’s contributions to American life and celebrated the strength of a people united in respect for diversity. One OWI pamphlet described prejudice as a foreign import rather than a homegrown product and declared bigots more dangerous than spies—they were “fighting for the enemy.” Horrified by the uses to which the Nazis put the idea of inborn racial difference, biological and social scientists abandoned belief in a link among race, culture, and intelligence, an idea only recently central to their disciplines. Ruth Benedict’s Races and Racism (1942) described racism as “a travesty of scientific knowledge.” In the same year, Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race became a best-seller. By the war’s end, racism and nativism had been stripped of intellectual respectability, at least outside the South, and were viewed as psychological disorders. Hollywood, too, did its part, portraying fighting units whose members, representing various regional, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, put aside group loyalties and prejudices for the common cause. Air Force featured a bomber crew that included an Anglo-Saxon officer, a Jewish sergeant, and a Polish-American gunner. In the film Bataan, the ethnically balanced platoon included a black soldier, even though the real army was racially segregated. The war’s most popular motion picture, This Is the Army, starring, among others, future president Ronald Reagan, offered a vision of postwar society that celebrated the ethnic diversity of the American people. Intolerance, of course, hardly disappeared from American life. One correspondent complained to Norman Rockwell that he included too many “foreign-looking” faces in his Freedom of Worship painting. Many business and government circles still excluded Jews. Along with the fact that early reports of the Holocaust were too terrible to be believed, anti-Semitism contributed to the government’s unwillingness to allow more than a handful of European Jews (21,000 during the course of the war) to find refuge in the United States. Roosevelt himself learned during the war of the extent of Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jewish presence in Europe. But he failed to authorize air strikes that might have destroyed German death camps. Nonetheless, the war made millions of ethnic Americans, especially the children of the new immigrants, feel fully American for the first time. During the war, one New York “ethnic” recalled, “the Italo-Americans stopped being Italo and started becoming Americans.” But the event that inspired this comment, the Harlem race riot of 1943, suggested that patriotic assimilation stopped at the color line. 927 928 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms THE THE AMERICAN DILEMMA BRACERO PROGRAM The war had a far more ambiguous meaning for non-white groups than for whites. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, racial barriers remained deeply entrenched in American life. Southern blacks were still trapped in a rigid system of segregation. Asians could not emigrate to the United States or become naturalized citizens. As noted in the previous chapter, more than 400,000 Mexican-Americans had been “voluntarily” repatriated by local authorities in the Southwest during the Depression. Most American Indians still lived on reservations, in dismal poverty. The war set in motion changes that would reverberate in the postwar years. Under the bracero program agreed to by the Mexican and American governments in 1942 (the name derives from brazo, the Spanish word for arm), tens of thousands of contract laborers crossed into the United States to take up jobs as domestic and agricultural workers. Initially designed as a temporary response to the wartime labor shortage, the program lasted until 1964. During the period of the bracero program, more than 4.5 million Mexicans entered the United States under government labor contracts (while a slightly larger number were arrested for illegal entry by the Border Patrol). Braceros were supposed to receive decent housing and wages. But since they could not become citizens and could be deported at any time, they found it almost impossible to form unions or secure better working conditions. Although the bracero program reinforced the status of immigrants from Mexico as an unskilled labor force, wartime employment opened new opportunities for second-generation Mexican-Americans. Hundreds of thousands of men and women emerged from ethnic neighborhoods, or barrios, to work in defense industries and serve in the army (where, unlike blacks, they fought alongside whites). A new “Chicano” culture—a fusion of Mexican heritage and American experience—was being born. Contact with other groups led many to learn English and sparked a rise in interethnic marriages. MEXICAN -AMERICAN RIGHTS The “zoot suit” riots of 1943, in which club-wielding sailors and policemen attacked Mexican-American youths wearing flamboyant clothing on the streets of Los Angeles, illustrated the limits of wartime tolerance. “Our Latin American boys,” complained one activist, “are not segregated at the front line. . . . They are dying that democracy may live.” Yet when they return home, the activist continued, “they are not considered good enough to go into a café.” But the contrast between the war’s rhetoric of freedom and pluralism and the reality of continued discrimination inspired a heightened consciousness of civil rights. For example, Mexican-Americans brought complaints of discrimination before the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to fight the practice in the Southwest of confining them to the lowest-paid work or paying them lower wages than white workers doing the same jobs. Perhaps half a million Mexican-American men and women served in the armed forces. And with discrimination against Mexicans an increasing embarrassment in view of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, Texas (the state with the largest population of Mexican descent) in 1943 How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad d u r i n g Wo r l d Wa r I I ? 929 unanimously passed the oddly named Caucasian Race—Equal Privileges resolution. It stated that since “all the nations of the North and South American continents” were united in the struggle against Nazism, “all persons of the Caucasian race” were entitled to equal treatment in places of public accommodation. Since Texas law had long defined Mexicans as white, the measure applied to them while not challenging the segregation of blacks. The resolution lacked an enforcement mechanism. Indeed, because of continued discrimination in Texas, the Mexican government for a time prohibited the state from receiving laborers under the bracero program. INDIANS DURING THE WAR The war also brought many American Indians closer to the mainstream of American life. Some 25,000 served in the army (including the famous Navajo “code-talkers,” who transmitted messages in their complex native language, which the Japanese could not decipher). Insisting that the United States lacked the authority to draft Indian men into the army, the Iroquois issued their own declaration of war against the Axis powers. Tens of thousands of Indians left reservations for jobs in war industries. Exposed for the first time to urban life and industrial society, many chose not to return to the reservations after the war ended (indeed, the reservations did not share in wartime prosperity). Some Indian veterans took advantage of the GI Bill to attend college after the war, an opportunity that had been available to very few Indians previously. ASIAN -AMERICANS IN WARTIME Asian-Americans’ war experience was paradoxical. More than 50,000— the children of immigrants from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines—fought in the army, mostly in all-Asian units. With China an ally in the Pacific war, Congress in 1943 ended decades of complete exclusion by establishing a nationality quota for Chinese immigrants. The annual limit of 105 hardly suggested a desire for a large-scale influx. But the image of the Chinese as gallant fighters defending their country against Japanese aggression called into question long-standing racial stereotypes. As in the case of Mexican-Americans, large numbers of Chinese-Americans moved out of ethnic ghettos to work alongside whites in jobs on the home front. The experience of Japanese-Americans was far different. Many Americans viewed the war against Germany as an ideological struggle. But both sides saw the Pacific war as a race war. Japanese propaganda depicted Americans as a self-indulgent people contaminated by ethnic and racial diversity as opposed to the racially “pure” Japanese. In the United States, long-standing prejudices and the shocking attack on Pearl Harbor combined to produce an unprecedented hatred of Japan. “In all our history,” according to one historian, “no foe has been detested as were the Japanese.” Government propaganda and war films portrayed the Japanese foe as rats, dogs, gorillas, and snakes—bestial and subhuman. They blamed Japanese aggression on a violent racial or national character, not, as in the case of Germany and Italy, on tyrannical rulers. On the one-year anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, the cover of Collier’s magazine depicts Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo as a vampire bat—one of many wartime images that sought to dehumanize the Pacific foe. 930 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms THE AMERICAN DILEMMA About 70 percent of Japanese-Americans in the continental United States lived in California, where they dominated vegetable farming in the Los Angeles area. One-third were first-generation immigrants, or issei, but a substantial majority were nisei—American-born, and therefore citizens. Many of the latter spoke only English, had never been to Japan, and had tried to assimilate despite prevailing prejudice. But the Japanese-American community could not remain unaffected by the rising tide of hatred. The government bent over backward to include German-Americans and Italian-Americans in the war effort. It ordered the arrest of only a handful of the more than 800,000 German and Italian nationals in the United States when the war began. But it viewed every person of Japanese ethnicity as a potential spy. JAPANESE In this 1942 photograph by Dorothea Lange, members of a Japanese-American family await relocation to an internment camp. -AMERICAN INTERNMENT California, as discussed in Chapter 19, had a long history of hostility toward the Japanese. Now, inspired by exaggerated fears of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast and pressured by whites who saw an opportunity to gain possession of Japanese-American property, the military persuaded FDR to issue Executive Order 9066. Promulgated in February 1942, this ordered the expulsion of all persons of Japanese descent from the West Coast. That spring and summer, authorities removed more than 110,000 men, women, and children—nearly two-thirds of them American citizens—to internment camps far from their homes. The order did not apply to persons of Japanese descent living in Hawaii, where they represented nearly 40 percent of the population. Despite Hawaii’s vulnerability, its economy could not function without Japanese-American labor. But the treatment of mainland Japanese-Americans provided ammunition for Japan’s claim that its aggressions in Asia were intended to defend the rights of non-white peoples against colonial rule and a racist United States. The internees were subjected to a quasi-military discipline in the camps. Living in former horse stables, makeshift shacks, or barracks behind barbed wire fences, they were awakened for roll call at 6:45 each morning and ate their meals (which rarely included the Japanese cooking to which they were accustomed) in giant mess halls. Armed guards patrolled the camps, and searchlights shone all night. Privacy was difficult to come by, and medical facilities were often nonexistent. Nonetheless, the internees did their best to create an atmosphere of home, decorating their accommodations with pictures, flowers, and curtains, planting vegetable gardens, and setting up activities like sports clubs and art classes for themselves. Internment revealed how easily war can undermine basic freedoms. There were no court hearings, no due process, and no writs of habeas corpus. One searches the wartime record in vain for public protests among non-Japanese against the gravest violation of civil liberties since the end of slavery. The press supported the policy almost unanimously. In Congress, only Senator Robert Taft of Ohio spoke out against it. Groups publicly committed to fighting discrimination, from the Communist Party to the NAACP and the American Jewish Committee, either defended the policy or remained silent. The courts refused to intervene. In 1944, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court denied the appeal of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad d u r i n g Wo r l d Wa r I I ? JAPANESE-AMERICAN I N T E R N M E N T, 931 1942–1945 Seattle WASHINGTON Portland OREGON Cody IDAHO Klamath Falls Tule Lake Twin Falls 18,789 M I L I TA R Y Sacramento NEVADA Nephi Topaz 8,310 A Manzanar 10,046 Lone Pine Fresno Minidoka 9,397 Heart Mountain 10,767 MINNESOTA WISCONSIN SOUTH DAKOTA MICHIGAN WYOMING IOWA NEBRASKA UTAH CALIFORNIA ARE San Francisco NORTH DAKOTA MONTANA ILLINOIS COLORADO Lamar Amache 7,318 MISSOURI KANSAS OHIO KENTUCKY Bakersfield Los Angeles INDIANA TENNESSEE Poston 17,814 San Diego Pac i f i c Oc ean ARIZONA Gila Bend Gila River 13,348 OKLAHOMA NEW MEXICO ARKANSAS Pine Bluff Rohwer Jerome 8,475 8,497 ALABAMA MISSISSIPPI TEXAS LOUISIANA Internment camps Figures show highest number interned at each camp. Demarcates area from which Japanese-Americans were excluded MEXICO citizen who had been arrested for refusing to present himself for internment. Speaking for a 6-3 majority, Justice Hugo Black, usually an avid defender of civil liberties, upheld the legality of the internment policy, insisting that an order applying only to persons of Japanese descent was not based on race. The Court has never overturned the Korematsu decision. As Justice Robert H. Jackson warned in his dissent, it “lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim” of national security. The government marketed war bonds to the internees. It established a loyalty oath program, expecting Japanese-Americans to swear allegiance to the government that had imprisoned them and to enlist in the army. Some young men refused, and about 200 were sent to prison for resisting the draft. “Let us out and then maybe I’ll think about risking my skin for ‘the land of the free,’” one of the resisters remarked. But 20,000 JapaneseAmericans joined the armed forces from the camps, along with another 13,000 from Hawaii. A long campaign for acknowledgment of the injustice done to Japanese-Americans followed the end of the war. In 1988, Congress Gulf of Mexico 0 0 200 200 400 miles 400 kilometers More than 100,000 JapaneseAmericans—the majority American citizens—were forcibly moved from their homes to internment camps during World War II. 932 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms THE AMERICAN DILEMMA apologized for internment and provided $20,000 in compensation to each surviving victim. President Bill Clinton subsequently awarded Fred Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom. BLACKS AND THE WAR Although the treatment of Japanese-Americans revealed the stubborn hold of racism in American life, the wartime message of freedom portended a major transformation in the status of blacks. “There never has been, there isn’t now, and there never will be,” Roosevelt declared, “any race of people on the earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men.” Yet Nazi Germany cited American practices as proof of its own race policies. Washington remained a rigidly segregated city, and the Red Cross refused to mix blood from blacks and whites in its blood banks (thereby, critics charged, in effect accepting Nazi race theories). Charles Drew, the black scientist who pioneered the techniques of storing and shipping blood plasma—a development of immense importance to the treatment of wounded soldiers—protested bitterly against this policy, pointing out that it had no scientific basis. In 1940 and 1941, even as Roosevelt called for aid to the free peoples of Europe, thirteen lynchings took place in the United States. The war spurred a movement of black population from the rural South to the cities of the North and West that dwarfed the Great Migration of World War I and the 1920s. About 700,000 black migrants poured out of the South on what they called “liberty trains,” seeking jobs in the industrial heartland. They encountered sometimes violent hostility, nowhere more so than in Detroit, where angry white residents forced authorities to evict black tenants from a new housing project. In 1943, a fight at a Detroit city park spiraled into a race riot that left thirty-four persons dead, and a “hate strike” of 20,000 workers protested the upgrading of black employees in a plant manufacturing aircraft engines. The war failed to end lynching. Isaac Simmons, a black minister, was murdered in 1944 for refusing to sell his land to a white man who believed it might contain oil. The criminals went unpunished. This took place in Liberty, Mississippi. BLACKS During World War II, Red Cross blood banks separated blood from black and white Americans—one illustration of the persistence of racial segregation. This 1943 poster by the NAACP points out that the concept of “Negro” and “white” blood has no scientific basis. AND MILITARY SERVICE When World War II began, the air force and marines had no black members. The army restricted the number of black enlistees and contained only five black officers, three of them chaplains. The navy accepted blacks only as waiters and cooks. During the war, more than 1 million blacks served in the armed forces. They did so in segregated units, largely confined to construction, transport, and other noncombat tasks. Many northern black draftees were sent to the South for military training, where they found themselves excluded from movie theaters and servicemen’s clubs on military bases and abused when they ventured into local towns. Black soldiers sometimes had to give up their seats on railroad cars to accommodate Nazi prisoners of war. “Nothing so lowers Negro morale,” wrote the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, “as the frequent preferential treatment of Axis prisoners of war in contrast with Army policy toward American troops who happen to be Negro.” How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad d u r i n g Wo r l d Wa r I I ? 933 The segregated army: recruits training with their rifles at the U.S. Marine base at Parris Island, South Carolina, in 1941. When southern black veterans returned home and sought benefits through the GI Bill, they encountered even more evidence of racial discrimination. On the surface, the GI Bill contained no racial differentiation in offering benefits like health care, college tuition assistance, job training, and loans to start a business or purchase a farm. But local authorities who administered its provisions allowed southern black veterans to use its education benefits only at segregated colleges, limited their job training to unskilled work and low-wage service jobs, and limited loans for farm purchase to white veterans. BIRTH OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT In 1942, a public opinion survey sponsored by the army’s Bureau of Intelligence found that the vast majority of white Americans were “unaware that there is any such thing as a ‘Negro problem’” and were convinced that blacks were satisfied with their social and economic conditions. They would soon discover their mistake. The war years witnessed the birth of the modern civil rights movement. Angered by the almost complete exclusion of African-Americans from jobs in the rapidly expanding war industries (of 100,000 aircraft workers in 1940, fewer than 300 were blacks), the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph in July 1941 called for a March on Washington. His demands included access to defense employment, an end to segregation, and a national antilynching law. Randolph, who as founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters had long battled racism among both employers and unions, hurled Roosevelt’s rhetoric back at the president. He declared racial discrimination “undemocratic, un-American, and pro-Hitler.” The prospect of thousands of angry blacks descending on Washington, remarked one official, “scared the government half to death.” To persuade ! VOICES OF FREEDOM From Henr y R. Luce, The American Centur y (1941) Even before the United States entered World War II, some Americans were thinking of a postwar world in which the United States would exert its influence throughout the globe. One influential call for Americans to accept the burden of world leadership was a short book by Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Life and Time magazines. must be brought about in this century. Nor need we assume that war can be abolished. . . . Large sections of the human family may be effectively organized into opposition to one another. Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space. But Freedom In the field of national policy, the fundamental trouble with America has been, and is, that whereas their nation became in the 20th Century the most requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny. . . . Justice will come near to losing all powerful and the most vital nation in the world, nevertheless Americans were unable to accommodate themselves spiritually and practically to that fact. Hence they have failed to play their part as a world power—a failure which has had disastrous consequences for themselves and for all mankind. approximately the same fundamental meanings in many lands and among many peoples. . . . As to the . . . promise of adequate production for all mankind, the “more abundant life,” be it noted And the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit. . . . Our world of 2,000,000,000 human beings is for the first time in history one world, fundamentally indivisible. . . . Our world, again for the first time in human history, is capable of producing all the material needs of the entire human family. . . . The world of the 20th Century, if it is to come to life in 934 any nobility of health and vigor, must be to a significant degree an American Century. . . . In postulating the indivisibility of the contemporary world, one does not necessarily imagine that anything like a world state—a parliament of men— meaning in the minds of men unless Justice can have that this is characteristically an American promise. . . . What we must insist on is that the abundant life is predicated on Freedom. . . . Without Freedom, there will be no abundant life. With Freedom, there can be. And finally there is the belief—shared let us remember by most men living—that the 20th Century must be to a significant degree an American Century. . . . As America enters dynamically upon the world scene, we need most of all to seek and to bring forth a vision of America as a world power and to bring forth a vision . . . which will guide us to the authentic creation of the 20th Century—our Century. F r o m C h a r l e s H . We s l e y, “ T h e N e g r o H a s a l w a y s Wa n t e d t h e Fo u r Fr e e d o m s , ” i n W h a t t h e N e g r o Wa n t s ( 1 9 4 4 ) In 1944, the University of North Carolina Press published What the Negro Wants, a book of essays by fourteen prominent black leaders. Virtually every contributor called for the right to vote in the South, the dismantling of segregation, and access to the “American standard of living.” Several essays also linked the black struggle for racial justice with movements against European imperialism in Africa and Asia. When he read the manuscript, W. T. Couch, the director of the press, was stunned. “If this is what the Negro wants,” he told the book’s editor, “nothing could be clearer than what he needs, and needs most urgently, is to revise his wants.” In this excerpt, the historian Charles H. Wesley explains that blacks are denied each of the Four Freedoms, and also illustrates how the war strengthened black internationalism. [Negroes] have wanted what other citizens of the United States have wanted. They have wanted freedom and opportunity. They have wanted the pursuit of the life vouchsafed to all citizens of the United States by our own liberty documents. They have wanted freedom of speech, [but] they were supposed to be silently acquiescent in all aspects of their life. . . . They have wanted freedom of religion, for they had been compelled to “steal away to Jesus” . . . in order to worship God as they desired. . . . They have wanted freedom from want. . . . However, the Negro has remained a marginal worker and the competition with white workers has left him in want in many localities of an economically sufficient nation. They have wanted freedom from fear. They have been cowed, browbeaten or beaten, as they have marched through the years of American life. . . . The Negro wants democracy to begin at home. . . . The future of our democratic life is insecure so long as the hatred, disdain and disparagement of Americans of African ancestry exist. . . . The Negro wants not only to win the war but also to win the peace. . . . He wants the peace to be free of race and color restrictions, of imperialism and exploitation, and inclusive of the participation of minorities all over the world in their own governments. When it is said that we are fighting for freedom, the Negro asks, “Whose freedom?” Is it the freedom of a peace to exploit, suppress, exclude, debase and restrict colored peoples in India, China, Africa, Malaya in the usual ways? . . . Will Great Britain and the United States specifically omit from the Four Freedoms their minorities and subject peoples? The Negro does not want such a peace. QUESTIONS 1. What values does Luce wish America to spread to the rest of the world? 2. Why does Wesley believe that black Americans are denied the Four Freedoms? 3. Do Luce and Wesley envision different roles for the United States in the postwar world? 935 936 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms THE AMERICAN DILEMMA Randolph to call off the march, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in defense jobs and established a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to monitor compliance. The black press hailed the order as a new Emancipation Proclamation. Essentially an investigative agency, the FEPC lacked enforcement powers. But its very existence marked a significant shift in public policy. Its hearings exposed patterns of racial exclusion so ingrained that firms at first freely admitted that their want ads asked for “colored” applicants for positions as porters and janitors and “white” ones for skilled jobs, and that they allowed black women to work only as laundresses and cooks. The first federal agency since Reconstruction to campaign for equal opportunity for black Americans, the FEPC played an important role in obtaining jobs for black workers in industrial plants and shipyards. In southern California, the aircraft manufacturer Lockheed ran special buses into black neighborhoods to bring workers to its plants. By 1944, more than 1 million blacks, 300,000 of them women, held manufacturing jobs. (“My sister always said that Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen,” recalled one black woman.) This Is the Enemy, a 1942 poster by Victor Ancona and Karl Koehler, suggests a connection between Nazism abroad and lynching at home. THE DOUBLE -V When the president “said that we should have the Four Freedoms,” a black steelworker declared, he meant to include “all races.” During the war, NAACP membership grew from 50,000 to nearly 500,000. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded by an interracial group of pacifists in 1942, held sit-ins in northern cities to integrate restaurants and theaters. After a Firestone tire factory in Memphis fired a black woman for trying to enter a city bus before white passengers had been seated, black workers at the plant went on strike until she was reinstated. In February 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier coined the phrase that came to symbolize black attitudes during the war—the “double-V.” Victory over Germany and Japan, it insisted, must be accompanied by victory over segregation at home. While the Roosevelt administration and the white press saw the war as an expression of American ideals, black newspapers pointed to the gap between those ideals and reality. Side by side with ads for war bonds, The Crisis insisted that a segregated army “cannot fight for a free world.” Surveying wartime public opinion, a political scientist concluded that “symbols of national solidarity” had very different meanings to white and black Americans. To blacks, freedom from fear meant, among other things, an end to lynching, and freedom from want included doing away with “discrimination in getting jobs.” If, in whites’ eyes, freedom was a “possession to be defended,” he observed, to blacks and other racial minorities it remained a “goal to be achieved.” “Our fight for freedom,” said a returning black veteran of the Pacific war, “begins when we get to San Francisco.” WHAT THE NEGRO WANTS During the war, a broad political coalition centered on the left but reaching well beyond it called for an end to racial inequality in America. The NAACP and American Jewish Congress cooperated closely in advocating How did American minorities face threats to their freedom at home and abroad d u r i n g Wo r l d Wa r I I ? 937 laws to ban discrimination in employment and housing. Despite considerable resistance from rank-and-file white workers, CIO unions, especially those with strong left-liberal and communist influence, made significant efforts to organize black workers and win them access to skilled positions. AFL craft unions by and large continued their long tradition of excluding black workers. But during World War II, the CIO was probably more racially integrated than any labor organization since the Knights of Labor in the 1880s. The new black militancy created a crisis for moderate white southerners. They now saw their middle ground evaporating as blacks demanded an end to segregation while southern politicians took up the cry of protecting white supremacy. The latter also spoke the language of freedom. Defenders of the racial status quo interpreted freedom to mean the right to shape their region’s institutions without outside interference. The “war emergency,” insisted Governor Frank Dixon of Alabama, “should not be used as a pretext to bring about the abolition of the color line.” Even as the war gave birth to the modern civil rights movement, it also planted the seeds for the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation during the 1950s. In the rest of the country, however, the status of black Americans assumed a place at the forefront of enlightened liberalism. Far more than in the 1930s, federal officials spoke openly of the need for a dramatic change in race relations. American democracy, noted Secretary of War Stimson, had not yet addressed “the persistent legacy of the original crime of slavery.” Progress came slowly. But the National War Labor Board banned racial wage differentials. In Smith v. Allwright (1944), the Supreme Court outlawed all-white primaries, one of the mechanisms by which southern states deprived blacks of political rights. In the same year, the navy began assigning small numbers of black sailors to previously all-white ships. In This 1943 cartoon from the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, questions whether non-white peoples will be accorded the right to choose their own government, as promised in the Atlantic Charter agreed to two years earlier by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Churchill insisted the principle only applied to Europeans. 938 Ch. 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms THE AMERICAN DILEMMA the final months of the war, it ended segregation altogether, and the army established a few combat units that included black and white soldiers. After a world tour in 1942 to rally support for the Allies, Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s opponent of 1940, published One World. It sold 1 million copies, faster than any nonfiction work in American history. Willkie’s travels persuaded him that Asia, Africa, and Latin America would play a pivotal role in the postwar era. But the book’s great surprise came in Willkie’s attack on “our imperialisms at home.” Unless the United States addressed the “mocking paradox” of racism, he insisted, its claim to world leadership would lack moral authority. “If we want to talk about freedom,” Willkie wrote, “we must mean freedom for everyone inside our frontiers.” AN World War II reinvigorated the movement for civil rights. Here African Americans attempt to register to vote in Birmingham, Alabama. AMERICAN DILEMMA No event reflected the new concern with the status of black Americans more than the publication in 1944 of An American Dilemma, a sprawling account of the country’s racial past, present, and future written by the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal. The book offered an uncompromising portrait of how deeply racism was entrenched in law, politics, economics, and social behavior. But Myrdal combined this sobering analysis with admiration for what he called the American Creed—belief in equality, justice, equal opportunity, and freedom. The war, he argued, had made Americans m...
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