9.6: US Industry and the Home Front

Keynesian Economics

In modern warfare, national economies are equally if not more important than national militaries. The war effort converted American factories to wartime production, restored America’s economy to full employment, armed the Allies and American forces, pulled America out of the Great Depression, and ushered in an era of unparalleled economic prosperity. Roosevelt’s New Deal had ameliorated the worst of the Depression, but the economy was only limping forward. When Europe fell into war, Americans were glad to sell the Allies arms and supplies, and then Pearl Harbor changed everything. The United States drafted the economy into war service. The “sleeping giant” mobilized its unrivaled economic capacity to wage worldwide war. Government agencies such as the War Production Board and the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion managed production for the war effort and economic output exploded. An economy that had been unable to provide work for a quarter of the workforce less than a decade earlier now struggled to fill vacant positions.​ Many women stepped up to fill factory positions, leading to the popularized image of Rosie the Riveter. Thousands left the countryside to take up work in cities, including another great migration of Black Southerners, accelerating the speed of urbanization.

​Although Franklin Roosevelt had already embraced the ideas of economist John Maynard Keynes on using deficit spending to jump-start the economy, the war wiped away any resistance among conservatives. Government spending during the four years of war doubled the total amount of federal spending from all previous years of American history up to that point. The federal budget deficit soared, but just as Keynes had predicted, the government’s massive intervention annihilated unemployment and propelled growth. The economy that came out of the war looked nothing like the one that had begun it.​

​Military production came at the expense of the civilian consumer economy. Appliance and automobile manufacturers converted their plants to produce weapons and war vehicles. Consumer choice was sacrificed to patriotic duty. Every American received rationing cards for goods such as gasoline, coffee, meat, cheese, butter, processed foods, firewood, and sugar. New house building was shut down and cities became overcrowded, but the wartime economy boomed. The Roosevelt administration urged citizens to save their earnings or buy war bonds to prevent inflation. Bond drives headlined by Hollywood celebrities were hugely successful in funding the war effort, but they also helped tame inflation as well. So too did high tax rates after the federal government raised income taxes and boosted the top marginal tax rate to 94 percent.

Rosie the Riveter

President Roosevelt and his administration encouraged all able-bodied American men and women to help the war effort. He considered the role of women in the war critical for American victory, and the public expected women to free men for active military service. While most women opted to remain at home or volunteer with charitable organizations, many went to work or put on a military uniform. World War II brought unprecedented labor opportunities for American women. Industrial labor, normally dominated by men, shifted to women for the duration of wartime mobilization. The image of Rosie the Riveter inscribed with the phrase “We Can Do It!” encouraged female factory labor during the war, and the ballooning government employed over a million women in administrative jobs at the local, state, and national levels (see Figure 9.6.1).

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Rosie the Riveter, National Museum of American History, in the Public Domain.

For women who chose not to work in factories or government service, many volunteer opportunities presented themselves. The American Red Cross, the largest charitable organization in the nation, encouraged women to volunteer with local city chapters. Millions of women organized community social events for families, packed and shipped almost half a million tons of medical supplies, and prepared twenty-seven million care packages for American and other Allied prisoners of war. The American Red Cross required all female volunteers to certify as nurse’s aides, providing an extra benefit and work opportunity for hospital staffs that suffered severe personnel losses.​ Military service was another option for women who wanted to join the war effort. Over 350,000 women served in several all-female units of the military branches. The Army and Navy Nurse Corps Reserves, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, the Navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, the Coast Guard’s SPARs (named for the Coast Guard motto, Semper Paratus, “Always Ready”), and Marine Corps units gave women the opportunity to serve as either commissioned officers or enlisted members at military bases at home and abroad. The Nurse Corps Reserves commissioned 105,000 army and navy nurses recruited by the American Red Cross. Military nurses worked at base hospitals, mobile medical units, and onboard hospital ships.​ However, despite all the wartime and postwar celebration of Rosie the Riveter, when the war ended millions of men returned home expecting their jobs back. Some women gladly left their jobs once the need had diminished, but many fought against a return to domesticity after finding satisfaction and fulfillment in the workforce. Many former military women faced difficulty obtaining veteran’s benefits during their transition to civilian life. The nation that called for assistance to millions of women during the four-year crisis seemed unprepared to accommodate their postwar needs and demands. Many women who had answered the call refused to step back into the shadows and pushed forward, igniting a struggle that eventually became the Women’s Movement.

Double V for Victory

In early 1941, months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest black trade union in the nation, had made headlines by threatening President Roosevelt with a march on Washington, D.C. In this “crisis of democracy,” Randolph said, defense industries refused to hire African Americans and the armed forces remained segregated. In exchange for Randolph calling off the march, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning racial and religious discrimination in defense industries and establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee to monitor defense industry hiring practices. While the armed forces would not desegregated until just after the war, the order showed that the federal government could stand against discrimination. The black workforce in defense industries rose from 3 percent in 1942 to 9 percent in 1945.​ More than one million African Americans fought in the war. Most blacks served in segregated, non combat units led by white officers. The number of black officers increased from five in 1940 to over seven thousand by 1945. An all-black fighter and bomber squadron, known as the Tuskegee Airmen, completed more than 1,500 missions and earned several hundred merits and medals. Black pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group painted the tails of their P-47 Thunderbolts red, and many bomber crews specifically requested the “Red Tail Angels” as escorts. Near the end of the war, the army and navy began integrating some of their units and facilities, before the U.S. government finally ordered the full integration of its armed forces in 1948.​

While some black Americans served in the armed forces, others on the home front became riveters and welders, rationed food and gasoline, and bought victory bonds. Many black Americans saw the war as an opportunity not only to serve their country but to improve it. The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black newspaper, spearheaded the “Double V” campaign. It called on African Americans to fight and win two wars: victory against Nazi racism abroad and victory over racial inequality at home. To achieve double victory and “real democracy,” the Courier encouraged its readers to enlist in the armed forces or volunteer on the home front, and fight against racial segregation and discrimination. During the war, membership in the NAACP jumped tenfold, from fifty thousand to five hundred thousand. The Congress of Racial Equality, formed in 1942, proposed nonviolent direct action to achieve desegregation. Between 1940 and 1950, 1.5 million southern blacks also demonstrated their opposition to racism and violence by migrating out of the Jim Crow South to the North and West. Racial tensions often followed migrants to their new homes. While systems of racial inequality were less entrenched in nonSouthern cities, newly arrived Black Southerners  found themselves alienated and relegated to poorer neighborhoods. In 1943 a series of riots erupted across American cities. The bloodiest race riot occurred in Detroit and resulted in the death of twenty-five blacks and nine whites. Still, the war ignited in African Americans an urgency for equality that they would carry with them into the subsequent years.​

American Concentration Camps 

Many Americans had to navigate American prejudice, and America’s entry into the war left foreign nationals from the enemy nations in a precarious position. The Federal Bureau of Investigation targeted many on suspicions of disloyalty for detainment, hearings, and internment under the Alien Enemy Act. Those sentenced to internment were sent to government camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. Early internment was based on determinations of probable cause. Then, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of any persons from “exclusion zones”, ultimately placing a third of the country at the discretion of military commanders.

Thirty thousand Japanese Americans fought for the United States in World War II, but wartime anti-Japanese sentiment built on long-standing prejudices was at an all time high. Under Roosevelt’s order, both immigrants and American citizens of Japanese descent were rounded up and placed in prison camps under the custody of the War Relocation Authority. They lost jobs, businesses, farms and homes. Over ten thousand German nationals and a smaller number of Italian nationals were interned at various times in the United States during World War II, but American policies disproportionately targeted Japanese-descended populations where individuals did not receive personalized reviews prior to their internment. Out of the 110,000 Japanese interned, 70,000 were American citizens.​ In a 1982 report, a congressional commission concluded that the causes of Japanese internment had been “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Although the exclusion orders were found to have been constitutionally permissible based on claims of national security, they were later judged unjust, even by the military and judicial leaders. In 1988, President Reagan signed an act that formally apologized for internment and provided reparations to surviving internees.

The actions are regrettable with the hindsight of historical perspective, as is American inaction when we view the horrors of the Holocaust. Initially, American officials had expressed little official concern for Nazi persecutions. As the first signs of trouble became clear in the late 1930s, the State Department and most U.S. embassies did little to aid European Jews. President Roosevelt publicly spoke out against persecution and even withdrew the U.S. ambassador to Germany after Kristallnacht, the pogrom against German Jews in 1938 that had caused even former German Kaiser Wilhelm II to say, “For the first time, I am ashamed to be German.” Roosevelt pushed for the 1938 Evian Conference in France, where international leaders discussed the Jewish refugee problem and worked to expand Jewish immigration quotas, but the conference came to nothing, and the United States turned away countless Jewish refugees who requested asylum. In 1939, the German ship St. Louis, carrying over nine hundred Jewish refugees, could not find a country that would take them. Passengers were not granted visas under the U.S. quota system. The ship cabled Roosevelt for special permission, but the president said nothing and the St. Louis was forced to return to Europe. Hundreds of its passengers would perish in the Holocaust.​

Anti-Semitism still permeated the United States. Even if Roosevelt wanted to do more, he decided the political price for increasing immigration quotas was too high. After Kristallnacht, in 1939, Congress debated a bill to allow twenty thousand German-Jewish children into the United States. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed the measure, but the president remained publicly silent. The bipartisan bill was introduced by a Democratic senator and a Republican representative and supported by religious and labor groups but was opposed by nationalist organizations. It never came to a vote in the Senate because it was blocked by a North Carolina Democrat whose support Roosevelt needed on military spending bills. The president, anxious to protect the New Deal and his rearmament programs, was unwilling to expend political capital to save foreign children that leaders of his own party had little interest in protecting.

The United Nations

Since the Atlantic Charter was signed, the Allies increasingly worked together to form what Roosevelt started calling the United Nations.  In addition to distributing aid, the Allies began to create a series of agreements to resolve disputes, arbitrate war and to coordinate international finance and healthcare once the war was won. While both the U.S.A and U.S.S.R. were at polar opposites of the economic-political spectrum, and possessed the two largest armies ever assembled by humanity, they nevertheless worked together in building the foundations of the geo-political world order that remains the basis for life into the 21st Century. At home and abroad, the United States wanted a postwar order that would guarantee global peace and domestic prosperity. Although the alliance of convenience with Stalin’s Soviet Union would rapidly collapse, Americans nevertheless looked for the means to ensure postwar stability and economic security for returning veterans. The inability of the League of Nations to stop German, Italian, and Japanese aggressions caused many to question whether any global organization could effectively ensure world peace. Skeptics included Franklin Roosevelt, who, as Woodrow Wilson’s undersecretary of the navy, had witnessed the rejection by the American people.

In 1941, Roosevelt believed postwar security could best be maintained by an informal agreement between what he termed the Four Policemen: The United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. Others, including Roosevelt’s secretary of state Cordell Hull and British prime minister Winston Churchill, convinced the president to push for a new global organization. As the war ran its course, both Roosevelt and the American public came around to the idea of the United Nations. Pollster George Gallup noted a “profound change” in American attitudes. In 1937 30% of Americans polled supported the idea of an international organization, as war broke out in Europe that number increased to 50%. By the end of the war in 1945, 81 percent of Americans favored the idea.​ Franklin Roosevelt had always supported the idea of universal human rights. In January 1941, he described Four Freedoms that all of the world’s citizens should enjoy: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter with Churchill, reinforcing those ideas and adding the right of self-determination and promising some sort of economic and political cooperation to ensure a future peaceful world. At Tehran in 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill convinced Stalin to send a Soviet delegation to a conference in August 1944, where they agreed on the basic structure of the new organization. It would have a Security Council consisting of the original Four Policemen and France, who would consult on how best to keep the peace and when to deploy the military power of the assembled nations. In a shift from the unarmed diplomacy of the League of Nations, this  new international body would have an armed force. The plan was a hybrid between Roosevelt’s policemen idea and a global organization of equal representation. The Soviets expressed concern over how this new United Nations would function, but the powers agreed to meet again in San Francisco between April and June 1945 for further negotiations that led to the creation of the UN Charter.

The G.I. Bill

Anticipating victory in World War II, American leaders not only planned the postwar global order, but  also a national vision for the returning servicemen. American politicians and business leaders wanted to avoid another economic depression by gradually easing returning veterans back into the civilian economy. The brainchild of William Atherton, the head of the American Legion, the G.I. Bill won support from progressives and conservatives alike. Passed in 1944, the G.I. Bill was a multibillion-dollar entitlement program that rewarded honorably discharged veterans with a range of important benefits.​ Faced with the prospect of over fifteen million members of the armed services (including approximately 350,000 women) suddenly returning to civilian life, the G.I. Bill offered a variety of incentives to slow their return to the civilian workforce as well as reward their service with public benefits. The legislation offered a year’s worth of unemployment income for veterans unable to secure work. About half of American veterans (eight million) received a total of $4 billion in unemployment benefits over the life of the bill. The G.I. Bill also made a college education a reality for many. The Veterans Administration (V.A.) paid educational expenses including tuition, fees, supplies, and even stipends for living expenses, sparking a boom in higher education. Enrollments at accredited colleges, universities, technical, and professional schools spiked from 1.5 million in 1940 to 3.6 million in 1960. The VA disbursed over $14 billion in educational aid in just over a decade.

Furthermore, the G.I. Bill encouraged home ownership. Roughly 40 percent of Americans owned homes in 1945, but that figure climbed to 60 percent a decade after the close of the war. Because the bill did away with down payment requirements, veterans could obtain home loans for as little as $1 down. Close to four million veterans purchased homes through the G.I. Bill, sparking a construction bonanza that propelled postwar growth. In addition, the V.A. helped nearly two hundred thousand veterans buy farms and offered thousands more guaranteed financing for small businesses. The effects of the G.I. Bill were significant and long-lasting, producing the prosperous image of the 1950s and furthering the ideal of the “American dream”. It helped sustain the great postwar economic boom and established the hallmarks of American middle-class life.

A Tale of Two Centuries?

World War II refashioned every corner of the globe and drew an isolationist United States back to the international theater of political consequences in an increasingly interconnected network of geographical hubs…any of which can cause a butterfly-effect-like chain reaction that will change the “rules of the game” for the rest of the connected community. As America was unavoidably drawn into the most international and total of wars ever fought, the new nation in turn reinvented the rules for the rest of the global players. 1945 becomes THE YEAR of global revolution! There have been almost universally recognized “years of revolution prior and since 1945 (1630, 1789, 1848, 1919, 1969, 1989), but none have rivaled the end of the Second World War. Our current international financial, political, and business structures were put in place at the end of the war and direct our current markets/futures as of 2022. The world we still inherit in the 21st Century is the same one the Baby Boomers were born into. Americans born between the end of WWII (1943-1945) and the dawn of the New Age Revolution (1963 is the general cutoff), were educated in thoroughly Amero-centric understanding of a power-war-world order…where the “American Dream” becomes the international goal for the “standard of living”. In the 21st Century it would require 5 Earths to support every global inhabitant to exist on the “American Standard of Living”, even though the United States equates for only 4.5 % of the planet’s population.  What does that mean for OUR future as a global population? Perhaps, if America really was the only “superpower” at the end of WWII we would have had more amiable circumstances to pursue a Global New Deal, but by 1945 it was becoming clear that there would be no future world order that did not include the Soviet Union. The Cold War was beginning before the Second World War was even over, and the Americans positioned accordingly: with an aggressive, expansionist program determined to beat out the communist threat at every turn. 

Review Questions

• Describe the experiences of women and African Americans during the war.
• How did racism and prejudice affect the U.S. response to the Jewish refugee problem and Japanese internment?