A Nation Transformed: The United States in World War II, 1939-1946

Just as the Depression of the 1930s had intensified antagonisms within the United States, so too had it bred international conflict. Industrialized nations, including the United States, responded to the widespread decline in consumer buying power by shutting foreign competitors out of their markets and scrambling for additional customers abroad. Such concerns were particularly strong in Germany, Japan, and Italy, whose domestic markets and resources were relatively limited. The militaristic leaders of those countries believed that the existing world order served solely to maintain the international supremacy of Great Britain, France, and the United States. Despite the expansionist policies of Japan and Germany, most Americans remained isolationist, hoping to avoid another world war. But Roosevelt and other American leaders turned their attention to the international situation and away from New Deal reform.

In East Asia, the Depression had sharply reduced exports and generated mass unemployment. Japan’s authoritarian government moved to eliminate the Asian colonies, of both Europe and the United States, and to create instead an empire—the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere”—that was intended to ensure Japan’s access to vital raw materials. In 1931, the Japanese Imperial Army took over Manchuria and then gradually extended control over all of northern China. Although the League of Nations condemned the invasion, it imposed no sanctions. In 1937, full-scale war broke out between Japan and China. That year, the Japanese captured the Chinese capital of Nanking, slaughtering close to 300,000 civilians. A civil war between Chinese Communists, led by Mao Zedong, and Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang Kai-shek’s) nationalists crippled the Chinese resistance movement.

As the Far Eastern conflict spread, racial animosity and racist imagery quickly surfaced. The Japanese saw the Chinese as an inferior people on whom the Imperial Army could impose their will, and they viewed the United States and Great Britain as decadent and materialistic colonial powers whose strength would crumble when confronted by the pure spirit of Japan. Racial stereotypes also blinded American officials. They often sentimentalized the Chinese as an inherently peaceful peasant people who needed U.S. beneficence to achieve their destiny. In contrast, the Japanese were characterized as a “yellow peril,” a devious, rodentlike race that was threatening to bring economic ruin to the West with exports of “cheap Jap goods.”

The success of Japan’s aggressive actions encouraged European dictators, especially in Italy and Germany, where fascist leaders dreamed of new empires. In Italy, Benito Mussolini’s followers had seized power in 1922, ruthlessly suppressing labor unions, parliamentary government, and civil liberties. Mussolini’s brand of fascism resembled other authoritarian, right-wing, nationalist movements, all of which opposed liberalism, socialism, and Communism. He appealed to Italian nationalism, trumpeting complaints about Italy’s unfair treatment under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and reminding Italians of their humiliating defeat by Abyssinia (now called Ethiopia) in 1896—the first time Africans had turned back European imperialists. An aroused Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, arraying airplanes, machine guns, and poison gas against the poorly organized riflemen of one of the few independent states left in Africa. When Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations, the international body condemned Mussolini’s act of aggression, but Italy’s subjugation of Ethiopia continued apace.

The rise of the German version of fascism—National Socialism, or Nazism—worried Americans more than any other overseas development. Americans had strong cultural ties to Germany, whose scientific, literary, and musical traditions were influential throughout the Western world. And although Germany’s Weimar Republic (the democratic state that was established after the first World War) had become politically unstable by the 1930s, it still seemed to embody much that was cosmopolitan, modern, and democratic in twentieth-century art and culture. Given the advanced character of German science and technology and Germany’s enormous economic power, Americans viewed the rise of Nazism with great alarm.

Like the Italian fascists, the Nazis repudiated both the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and also democracy, in all its forms. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, elected chancellor in 1933, quickly seized dictatorial powers, taking the title of Der Führer (the leader), proclaiming a thousand-year Reich (empire), and outlawing all other political parties. Americans were appalled at Hitler’s brutal destruction of Germany’s democratic institutions, and they recognized that his systematic and aggressive anti-Semitism marked the Nazi regime as something genuinely new and dangerous. When the Nazis burned nearly two hundred synagogues and looted thousands of Jewish shops on November 9–10, 1938, which became known as Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), a shocked President Roosevelt confided that he “could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth-century civilization.”

Although many people in the West sympathized at first with Hitler’s efforts to revise the punitive Versailles Treaty, sympathy soon turned to alarm as it became clear that the Nazis sought to unite all the Germans in Europe in a single German fatherland. In 1933, Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations and began secretly rearming Germany, in violation of the Versailles Treaty. In August 1936, he dispatched part of Germany’s new air force to aid Spain’s General Francisco Franco and his fascist forces in their attack on that country’s democratically elected government. A series of pacts in late 1936 and 1937 united Japan, Italy, and Germany in an alliance that would become known as the Axis, ostensibly to protect themselves against the Soviet Union.

The leaders of Britain and France, hoping to avoid another bloody war, sought to appease the German dictator. In the spring of 1936, when Hitler violated the Versailles Treaty by sending the German army into the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone in western Germany, neither Britain nor France attempted to force him to withdraw. Within two years, Germany had annexed Austria and then demanded that Czechoslovakia surrender the German-speaking border area known as the Sudetenland. Again, British and French leaders capitulated, agreeing at a conference held in Munich in September 1938 to Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland. But British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s proclamation that the Munich agreement guaranteed “peace for our time” soon came to seem nothing more than shortsighted and cowardly appeasement that fed the dictator’s aggressive appetite. By March 1939, Germany had gobbled up all of Czechoslovakia.

Within a year, the Nazis and the Soviets signed a “nonaggression” pact, opening the door to a violent partition of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union. Many people were stunned by the opportunistic agreement between bitter ideological foes—each of whom saw short-term advantages in a peace treaty. Nine days after signing the pact, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Unable to ignore the attack on their Polish ally, Great Britain and France finally declared war on Germany. World War II had begun.

Germany proved stronger, and the “Allies” (the term for the nations that fought Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II) weaker, than most observers expected. Poland surrendered within a month, and the next spring, German troops swept through Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In mid-June 1940, the French army collapsed, and the Germans marched into Paris. Hitler continued his offensive, launching a bombing attack on London. In 1940 and 1941, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria joined the Axis alliance, and German troops moved into Yugoslavia and Greece. Finally, on June 22, 1941, Hitler broke his nonaggression pact with Josef Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. The huge German army pushed to the gates of Moscow and Leningrad. Within three months, the Nazis had killed or captured more than three million people inside the Soviet borders.

President Roosevelt condemned foreign aggression and prepared for war even while the United States remained steadfastly isolationist through much of the 1930s. Fueling this self-contradictory stance was a highly publicized Senate investigation that uncovered evidence that Wall Street bankers, corporate munitions makers, and other “merchants of death” had led America into the Great War and then reaped huge profits from the conflict. Fear of engagements abroad proved so potent that Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts, mandating an arms embargo against both the victim and aggressor in any military conflict and establishing a “cash-and-carry” trading policy that deprived belligerents of access to American credit, ships, and military goods.

Late in the 1930s, however, the powerful isolationist current gradually ebbed as Americans came to appreciate the threat posed by the rise of fascism abroad. Chinese Americans spearheaded a boycott of Japanese goods; Jews and civil libertarians urged a similar ban on German products. Liberals and leftists who were sympathetic to the Spanish Republic attacked U.S. neutrality laws, which prevented the Spanish Loyalists from securing the military supplies they needed to fend off the fascists in that nation’s civil war. Some American radicals supported the Spanish Republican cause directly by enlisting in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which fought alongside 35,000 antifascists from fifty-two countries in what some later saw as a dress rehearsal for World War II.

This shift in the public’s mood, especially among supporters of the New Deal, enabled Roosevelt to align the nation’s diplomacy more closely with that of Britain, France, and China. When Japan renewed its assault on China in 1937, Roosevelt told an audience in Chicago that the United States must help the international community to “quarantine” aggressors and prevent the contagion of war from spreading. After war broke out in Europe in 1939, Roosevelt began mobilizing public opinion against the Neutrality Acts and even urged “measures short of war” to bolster England, France, and other Allied powers that were engaged in the conflict.

The Nazi conquest of Western Europe in the spring of 1940 pushed the United States toward active engagement in the war. Congress reacted by tripling the War Department’s budget, enacting the nation’s first peacetime draft, and agreeing in March 1941 to lend or lease war material to enemies of the Axis nations (chiefly Great Britain and later the Soviet Union). Through the lend-lease program, Roosevelt declared, the United States would become “a great arsenal of democracy.” White House officials recognized that a Nazi-dominated Europe, combined with Japanese supremacy in East Asia, would permanently bar U.S. trade and business from much of the globe. Most American policymakers saw a world of open capitalist markets as synonymous with U.S. interests.

In August 1941, President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration of war aims. British and U.S. military officers and war production officials began to coordinate their strategy and planning. In return for this virtual co-belligerency on the part of the United States, Churchill agreed to an increase in U.S. trade and investment in the British empire. The U.S. Navy was soon patrolling the North Atlantic, an action that was just short of outright naval warfare against Germany.

Meanwhile, Japan’s invasion of the French colonies in Indochina provoked Congress to freeze all Japanese assets in the United States. Great Britain and Holland followed suit, preventing Japan from purchasing oil, steel, and other essential materials. Between August and November 1941, U.S. and Japanese diplomats exchanged a series of fruitless peace proposals. When their talks collapsed, Secretary of State Cordell Hull declared, “I have washed my hands of the Japanese situation, and it is now in the hands of . . . the Army and Navy.”

A bitter political and ideological debate accompanied the nation’s shift from isolationism to rearmament. Even after the fall of France in June 1940, not all Americans shared Roosevelt’s predisposition toward intervention in the war. For example, Irish Americans, who hated British imperialism, were leery of an alliance with Britain, and many German Americans were reluctant to go to war against their homeland. A revitalized isolationist movement developed around the America First Committee, led by Sears Roebuck Chairman Robert Wood, aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh, and numerous political and business leaders, most from the Midwest. Although well represented in the Republican Party, the isolationists could find no presidential candidate in 1940. Instead, the GOP nominated Wendell Willkie, a Wall Street utilities executive who was aligned with the internationalist wing of the Republican Party. Willkie’s positions differed little from those Roosevelt held in 1940: he would keep the country out of war but would extend generous assistance to the Allies. A magnetic figure, Willkie tried to convince voters that giving the president an unprecedented third term would threaten the nation’s democratic traditions. But he was no match for Roosevelt, who won reelection with 55 percent of the popular vote.

The isolationists’ political defeat underscored their weaknesses. Many isolationists seemed oblivious to the danger of fascism and thought that German domination of Europe was inevitable. Anti-Semitism also tinged isolationist sentiment, even in the face of Hitler’s increasingly murderous policies. Charles Lindbergh undercut the isolationists’ credibility when he asserted that Jews were among the most active of American groups pressing for the United States to enter the war. Conservative isolationists called the New Deal the “Jew Deal.”

Leftist alternatives to internationalism collapsed just as quickly. In the months following Germany’s invasion of France, most American trade unionists came to support Roosevelt’s program of active U.S. involvement in the conflict. When labor leader John L. Lewis denounced Roosevelt and endorsed Willkie during the 1940 campaign, few workers followed his lead, prompting Lewis to resign as president of the CIO. Unionists such as Philip Murray, the new CIO chief, and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union saw U.S. participation in the war as politically advantageous to labor. Roosevelt, recognizing Hillman as an ally and a sympathetic spokesman in the labor movement, appointed him to important defense mobilization posts. American Communists also lined up behind U.S. intervention. They did so, however, only after alienating many former allies by a rapid about-face, first arguing that the war was merely one of imperialist rivalry and then, after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, declaring the conflict a great crusade against fascism.

With the approach of war, the era of New Deal social reform came to an end. Roosevelt focused increasingly on the international situation and directed his special adviser and campaign organizer Thomas Corcoran to “cut out this New Deal stuff. It’s tough to win a war.” In July 1940, Roosevelt filled several influential government posts with conservative advocates of intervention, including Henry Stimson, who had served in President Hoover’s cabinet, and Frank Knox, Alfred Landon’s running mate in 1936. These men recognized the impossibility of repealing the New Deal and rolling back labor’s victories. They aimed instead to block a new round of social reforms and to restore to big business much of its pre–New Deal power and prestige.

Nevertheless, labor leaders managed to take advantage of the defense employment boom to rebuild and expand the industrial union movement. Between June 1940 and December 1941, the unions launched a wave of strikes that boosted wages and enrolled a million and a half new members. Many of these work stoppages won union recognition from the nation’s most reactionary employers. The most dramatic occurred at the Ford Motor Company, the only large automaker that had successfully resisted the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) organizing drive in 1937. On April 1, 1941, tens of thousands of Ford workers walked out of the gigantic River Rouge complex. Using their own automobiles as a barricade, the strikers formed a mobile picket line that stretched for miles around the Dearborn, Michigan, plant. Within a few weeks, more than 100,000 new workers joined the UAW, under a union shop contract that overnight turned the pioneer auto firm into a bastion of militant unionism.

Despite the UAW’s victory, the organizing drive of 1940 and 1941 foundered on the shoals of national politics. In January 1941, Roosevelt declared, “whatever stands in the way of speed and efficiency in defense preparations must give way to the national need.” Defense contractors, congressional conservatives, and the military soon demanded an end to industrial disputes. To arbitrate and stop new disputes, the White House set up a National Defense Mediation Board, which included representatives of organized labor, management, and the government. The CIO agreed to cooperate, and its president, Philip Murray, became one of the board’s members even as he warned that the government would soon “find its attention directed against labor in order to maintain the status quo as much as possible.”

A California aircraft strike in June 1941 demonstrated the extent to which the federal government would use the defense emergency to throw its weight against union militancy and political radicalism. Government authorities did not seek to smash trade unionism outright, only to tame and contain it. The North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California, which supplied vitally needed training planes to the Army Air Corps paid low wages and earned enormous profits. When a strike erupted in early June, Sidney Hillman and the National Defense Mediation Board joined with the army’s top brass to persuade UAW officials to declare the strike a “wildcat,” or unauthorized, work stoppage, motivated by Communist opposition to the war. When strike leaders, a few of whom were indeed Communists, resisted orders from UAW officials to return to work, President Roosevelt dispatched 2,500 active-duty troops to disperse the pickets and occupy the factory. Within a few days, the strike had been broken, but the army also pressured the Mediation Board to give workers a big raise, thus helping national UAW leaders to reclaim the loyalty of the workforce. When the plant finally boosted wages in July 1941, a UAW paper greeted news of the award with the triumphant headline “Responsible Unionism Wins at Inglewood.”

The United States was well on its way toward full wartime mobilization by December 7, 1941. The decision to enter the war was made final when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the U.S. forces in Hawaii and the Philippines. At Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes sank or disabled several of the heaviest ships in the U.S. Pacific fleet, killing 2,400 soldiers and sailors. The next day, Great Britain and the United States declared war on Japan, and Germany declared war on the United States. The Japanese attack—“a date which will live in infamy,” Roosevelt called it—swept away nearly all popular resistance to U.S. involvement in the war. American soldiers faced brutal warfare in the Pacific and European fronts that, for many, would shape the rest of their lives. Life in uniform broadened the horizons of almost all soldiers, acquainting millions of provincial Americans with men and women from a kaleidoscope of alien cultures and religions. The draft was egalitarian, touching men from all classes and regions. “The first time I ever heard a New England accent,” a Midwesterner recalled, “was at Fort Benning.” For many white youths, military service helped to reduce the ethnic and regional differences that had long divided the working class.

Over the next six months, the Allies took a terrible beating in the Pacific. By May 1942, Japan had seized Indonesia, Indochina, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma, and most of eastern China. Americans were horrified when they learned three years later of a brutal “death march,” in which thousands of American and Filipino prisoners of war perished on a long trek out of the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. “If you fell out to the side,” recalled Anton Bilek, then a twenty-two-year-old soldier from Illinois, “you were either shot by the guards or you were bayoneted and left there.” Most Americans came to hate the Japanese with a passion that was not equally directed at their German or Italian enemies. U.S. propaganda portrayed the Japanese as subhuman apes, insects, rats, and reptiles; Japanese propaganda, in turn, depicted Western leaders as devils, demons, and ogres.

In the Pacific, U.S. strategists successfully contained the Japanese naval advance. Early in May 1942, relying on a handful of aircraft carriers. Americans turned back the Japanese fleet in the Battle of the Coral Sea. In June, during a four-day carrier battle near Midway Island, the United States regained control of the central Pacific. By mid-1943, the Americans, aided by Australians and New Zealanders, had halted the Japanese advance and regained the initiative in the Pacific war. Under General Douglas MacArthur, the army leapfrogged from the Solomon Islands to New Guinea and on to the Philippines, where they landed in late 1944. Meanwhile, a huge naval force under the command of Admiral Chester Nimitz used amphibious assault tactics to fight its way through the central Pacific, from Tarawa to the Marianas. Such advances were bathed in blood, with high casualties among the Americans and an even higher toll among the Japanese, who often refused to surrender.

Determined as Americans were to “Remember Pearl Harbor,” the Pacific Theater took second place to Europe, both as a battleground and as a strategic priority. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the fighting in Europe. Facing almost two hundred German divisions along a huge front, Soviet soldiers and civilians halted, drove back, and then encircled 330,000 troops of the German Sixth Army in the four-month-long Battle of Stalingrad. When the Germans finally surrendered to the Red Army in January 1943, cold, hunger, and constant fighting had decimated their numbers. The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point in the titanic conflict that engulfed all of Europe, where military and civilian deaths rose to nearly forty million, including six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. The Soviet Union alone lost twenty-seven million people during the war—the most casualties suffered by any nation.

For British and American planners, debate over a “second front” proved the major strategic issue of the first half of the war. Stalin was desperate for an British-American invasion of France to divert some of Hitler’s forces away from the Eastern (“first”) Front. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov raised the issue repeatedly; he reportedly knew only four English words: yes, no, and second front. But Winston Churchill and the British high command feared enormous battlefield losses in an early invasion across the English Channel. In 1942 and 1943, therefore, the Western allies concentrated their forces on Hitler’s Mediterranean periphery, where they confronted only twenty German divisions. Between October 1942 and September 1943, British and U.S. forces regained control of North Africa, conquered Sicily, and slowly fought their way up the Italian peninsula toward Rome.

In lieu of a second front, the British and Americans launched an aerial bombardment of German industry. Flying out of air bases in England, thousands of B-17s, Lancasters, and other four-engine bombers pounded aircraft factories, munitions plants, railroad centers, and oil refineries in Central Europe. Air combat gripped the imagination of both military planners and the public, for it promised to substitute technology and skill for the blood and mud of ground fighting. But the campaign failed. Clouds, wind, darkness, and enemy fighters made a mockery of “precision bombing,” so the Germans pushed their aircraft and tank output to new heights in 1943 and 1944. In response, the Allies resorted to area bombing, including tightly packed working-class neighborhoods, an approach that some Americans condemned as a terror tactic.

Until the final year of the war, only a small fraction of the sixteen million Americans who served in the armed forces actually saw combat. For most soldiers and sailors, their primary duties entailed training and supplying a vast and complex organization. GIs (so called because their clothing and supplies were “government issue”) learned to march, shoot, drive a truck, repair a radio, type, and keep accurate records. Those who were sent to the front entered a nightmarish world of violence and death. Soldiers in World War II possessed far greater firepower than ever before, so it was the first war in which combat deaths outnumbered fatalities from disease or accident. Most of the 405,000 deaths suffered by U.S. forces came in the war’s final year, when American armies spearheaded the assault against well-entrenched German and Japanese forces. From the foxholes, war correspondent Ernie Pyle reported, “We see from the worm’s-eye view, and our segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don’t want to die . . . of shocked men wandering back down the hill from battle . . . of smelly bed rolls and C rations . . . and of graves and graves and graves.”

Soldiers often formed intense emotional attachments to their unit and to each other. “The reason you storm the beaches is not patriotism or bravery,” one ex-GI explained. “It’s that sense of not wanting to fail your buddies. That’s sort of a special sense of kinship.” Such camaraderie became the basis for lifelong friendships and for the veterans’ organizations and unit reunions that proved so popular after the war.

Life in the armed services also had a long-lasting impact on America’s LGBTQ+ population. Many who first expressed their sexual orientation during the war later became pioneers in the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Far from home, many LGBTQ+ people felt less social pressure to conform to heterosexual social norms. The military’s need for soldiers tended to make it more tolerant, albeit silently, of the queer men and women in its ranks. Nevertheless, when the military discovered their sexual orientation, LGBTQ+ individuals received stigmatizing “blue discharges,” which denied them GI benefits, adversely affected their employment prospects, and jeopardized their reputation in their hometowns. The military also launched investigations into women suspected of having sex with other women, which coincided, at the end of the war, with the military’s decision to discourage female enlistments.

Patterns of discrimination also confronted Black soldiers. In 1940, African Americans were excluded from the U.S. Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, and the Army Air Corps. In the U.S. Navy, African American sailors at first served only in the ship’s mess, although by the spring of 1942, they were allowed to perform general labor. The army accepted African Americans—more than 700,000 of them by 1944, including 4,000 women in the Women’s Army Corps—only on a segregated basis. The new recruits trained in segregated camps such as Camp Shenango in Pennsylvania, where Dempsy Travis was sent: “The troop train was Jim Crow. They had a car for Black soldiers and a car for whites. [At the camp] they went to their part and sent us to the ghetto. It seems the army always arranged to have Black soldiers back up against the woods someplace. Isolated.” The military largely restricted African American GIs to duty in transportation, construction, and other support units. As one ex-sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps recalled bitterly, “We serviced the service. We handled food, clothing, equipage. We loaded ammunition, too. We were really stevedores and servants.”

The military’s rising need for manpower eventually lowered some racial barriers. The all-Black 99th Fighter Squadron known as the Tuskegee Airmen won accolades in Italy early in 1944 when its crack pilots shot down twelve German fighters on two successive days. Another racial barrier fell January 1945, after the Germans smashed through the Allied lines in Belgium, killing or capturing thousands of Americans at the Battle of the Bulge. The 2,500 African Americans who volunteered to replace those who had been lost fought side by side with white troops to repel the final Nazi counteroffensive.

The military experience of Mexican Americans contrasted sharply with that of Black Americans, in large part because the army never officially segregated Latinx soldiers. Nearly three million Latinx people lived in the United States at the outbreak of the war. Most resided in California, Texas, and the Southwest. About 350,000 went into the armed forces, nearly all of them as draftees. Combat units welcomed most Mexican Americans, and the army encouraged publicity about their outstanding records under fire. Most often assigned to the infantry, Mexican American soldiers suffered casualties that were disproportionate to their numbers in the general population.

Native Americans could not vote in three states, but they could be—and were—drafted. Many resisted the draft, but about 25,000 Native Americans served in the military, among them were 300 Diné (Navajo) “code talkers” who baffled Japanese electronic eavesdroppers by transmitting radio messages in their Native language, Diné Bizaad ('People's language').They confused some Americans as well: fellow marines temporarily took a few Dinés as prisoners, thinking they were Japanese spies.

What can we learn from a soldier’s World War II drawings?

World War II ended the Depression with a massive dose of government-stimulated demand, doubling the gross national product within four years. At the peak of the war, the military commanded about 47 percent of all production and services. But because of chronic shortages in machinery, raw materials, and labor, the government could not let the cost and pace of either military or civilian production be determined by the free market. Government officials concluded that the whole economy would have to be centrally planned, with controls placed on the distribution and cost of virtually everything, from steel and machine tools to chickens, chocolate, and clothing. The war brought an enormous industrial boom; unemployment, which had been 14 percent in 1940, virtually disappeared by early 1943. World War II era arms production factories were gigantic, which helped to make a higher proportion of Americans blue-collar industrial workers than at any other time in U.S. history. The war also changed the relationship between labor and capital, both at the workplace and in the corridors of power in Washington.

Roosevelt assigned the primary responsibility for mobilizing industry to the military and to corporate executives. The armed services set overall production requirements, and executives took the key posts in the mobilization agencies in Washington, D.C., serving as “dollar-a-year-men” while remaining on their company payrolls. They established what Sears vice president Donald Nelson, who became chairman of the War Production Board, called “a set of rules under which the game could be played the way industry said it had to be played.” The government suspended antitrust laws, paid most of the cost of constructing new defense plants, and lent much of the rest at low interest rates. Cost-plus contracts guaranteed a profit on the production of military goods.

To fight inflation, other government agencies regulated wages, prices, and the kinds of jobs people could take. Following Pearl Harbor, the president set up the War Labor Board to arbitrate labor-management disputes and set wage rates for all workers. The Office of Price Administration began the complicated and controversial task of setting price ceilings for almost all consumer goods and of distributing ration books for items that were in short supply. Finally, the Selective Service and the War Manpower Commission determined who would serve in the military, whose work was vital to the war production effort, and when a worker could transfer from one job to another. These federal agencies were highly political institutions. By the end of the war, labor, capital, consumers, and government policymakers disagreed constantly over the administration and enforcement of programs and policies.

Government planning of this sort fostered further concentration of the U.S. economy. In 1940, the top one hundred companies turned out 30 percent of the nation’s total manufactured goods. By the end of the war, the same one hundred companies held 70 percent of all civilian and military manufacturing contracts. Executives used their connections to key military procurement officers to obtain prime contracts as well as the material and labor needed to meet production requirements. Coca-Cola accompanied the troops overseas, where bottling plants followed the battle lines; a piece of Wrigley gum went into each soldier’s K-rations or field meals. Small businesses were pushed aside; if they went under, one War Production Board official explained, they could blame “the process of natural selection in the business world.”

Not unexpectedly, military officials and dollar-a-year men came to have similar political and economic visions. Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, the chief of supply for the U.S. Army, established an elite school at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where business leaders attended seminars and classes on the military’s new role in U.S. economic life. General Electric’s president, Charles E. Wilson, the powerful second in command of the War Production Board, proposed that business executives receive reserve commissions so that close cooperation between defense contractors and the military might continue after the war ended. This relationship came to be known as the military-industrial complex.

World War II was a metal-turning, engine-building, multiyear conflict that required an enormous amount of manual labor. In the aircraft industry, for example, 100,000 Americans worked at the Douglas Aviation plants in El Segundo and Long Beach, California; 50,000 at a Curtiss-Wright plant in New Jersey; and 40,000 at Ford’s bomber plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Forty-three percent of all nonagricultural workers became blue-collar workers, the highest proportion in U.S. history.

The war proved especially beneficial to the American West, whose Pacific ports, favorable climate, and huge federal landholdings, suitable for testing new airplanes and weapons, attracted military procurement contracts. The big winner was California, which received one-eighth of all war orders. Aircraft worker Don McFadden remembered that Los Angeles “was just like a beehive. . . . The defense plants were moving full-time. . . . Downtown movies were staying open twenty-four hours a day.” The University of California, California Institute of Technology, and Stanford University became key links in the military’s weapons development program. “It was as if someone had tilted the country,” noted one observer. “People, money, and soldiers all spilled west.”

Full employment had a radical impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. Fifteen million workers—one-third of the prewar workforce—used their new labor power to change and upgrade their jobs. Some shifted from one factory department or office to another; at least four million—triple the prewar total—crossed state lines to find better jobs. The rural South experienced the largest exodus, California and Michigan the greatest influx. As factory work, especially in defense facilities, grew in prestige and earning power, office and service employment declined in status and pay. “For the majority of workers the war was an experience of opportunity rather than limitation,” observed Katherine Archibald of her fellow shipyard workers in Oakland, California. “It was like a social,” Peggy Terry of Paducah, Kentucky, said, remembering her first months in a defense plant. “Now we’d have money to buy shoes and a dress and pay rent and get some food on the table. We were just happy to have work.”

Most servicemen and urban workers enjoyed an unprecedented rise in their standard of living. Between 1939 and 1945, real (controlled for inflation) wages grew 27 percent. Indeed, the wages of those at the bottom of the social scale grew more rapidly than did the highly taxed incomes of those at the top; the war generated the most progressive redistribution of American wealth in the twentieth century. The military provided medical and educational benefits for a substantial portion of the male population, while a larger proportion of the working class could afford to take advantage of schools, hospitals, and clinics. Life expectancy, after remaining stagnant for a decade, increased by three years for the white population and five years for African Americans. Infant mortality declined by more than one-third between 1939 and 1945.

White workers from immigrant backgrounds gained an added benefit. Unlike the anti-immigrant Americanization campaigns of World War I, the propaganda that was used in this war attempted to unify the American people around a vision of cultural pluralism that included white ethnics. The Detroit News praised the nearly spotless attendance records of six workers at GM’s Ternstedt Division in Detroit, whose names were Kowalski, Netowski, Bugai, Lugari, Bauer, and Pavolik. “Look at the names . . . the sort of names one finds on an All-American football team . . . and at Ternstedt’s, management and workers alike are hailing them as the plant’s All-American production team.” In many factories and mills, new opportunities for promotion, combined with vigilance by the industrial unions, enabled “ethnics” to break into the skilled trades or the ranks of first-line supervisors. These wartime developments accelerated the decline of immigrant working-class institutions, such as foreign-language radio programs and newspapers and immigrant fraternal organizations, that had begun in the previous decade.

At the outset of the conflict, most labor leaders had quickly agreed to a no-strike pledge. The resulting decline in shop floor strife pleased the Roosevelt administration and business leaders alike. But patriotic unionism created other problems. In arbitrating the wages of millions of workers, the War Labor Board gave priority to increasing production and resisting inflation, not raising wages or settling workers’ grievances. Even some employers recognized the dilemma this created for trade union leaders. If unions could not strike or bargain for higher wages, then why should workers join them?

The War Labor Board therefore put in place a “maintenance of membership” policy, which virtually mandated that any employee at a unionized workplace must join and pay dues to the union. Thus, the expansion of war production led automatically to an expansion of union membership, which jumped from fewer than ten million to nearly fifteen million. An organizer in the electrical industry recalled: “We’d circulate membership cards in front of the management. . . . I remember a two-year period, 1942–43, where we went through some sixty-six or sixty-eight plants, organized them, and held elections. We lost one!”

But the growth of unions hardly eliminated workers’ grievances. Foremen and managers often took advantage of labor’s no-strike pledge to regain some of the power unions had wrested from them in the turbulent prewar years. And the wartime demand for more and more production also generated conflicts over speed-ups and safety. Edward Osberg, who made airplane engines for Chrysler during the war, remembered, “whenever engineers and general superintendents devised a new process to make something faster or better, they went ahead and did it. They didn’t care if it killed someone or if the fumes and dust were dangerous.” Workers challenged management over the right to set production standards and piece rates, assign work, and discipline employees. Unauthorized strikes over such issues mounted steadily from 1942 until the end of the war. Government officials denounced these stoppages as “unpatriotic,” but rank-and-file pressures kept many unions in turmoil.

The largest wartime labor confrontation took place in the coal industry. John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, never thought the War Labor Board’s wage freeze equitable, and during 1942, he came under increasing pressure from dissatisfied miners to obtain pay increases for them. To force the War Labor Board to reconsider, Lewis called 500,000 miners out on strike four times in 1943 alone. These strikes generated a storm of protest. All the major newspapers denounced Lewis, and public opinion polls condemned the strikes. In June 1943, Congress passed (over Roosevelt’s veto) the Smith-Connally War Labor Disputes Act, which gave the president the power to seize strikebound mines and factories. The legislation made it a crime to advocate wartime work stoppages and prohibited unions from using membership dues money to contribute to electoral campaigns. This bill was the first antiunion measure passed by Congress since the early 1930s, and it foreshadowed the more conservative legislative climate of the postwar years.

But that did not stop Lewis. On November 1, 1943, the miners struck again. Roosevelt seized the coal mines and threatened to end the miners’ draft deferments. At the same time, however, the president understood that the nation and the war effort ran on coal and that, as Lewis had always maintained, “bayonets cannot mine coal.” Roosevelt ordered Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to negotiate a contract that was acceptable to the miners, even though it punched a big hole through the wartime wage ceiling.

During World War II, those who had long been on the margins of American life had their best opportunity in years to become first-class citizens. Full employment gave them the chance to improve their livelihoods, while the ideology that sustained the war effort—antifascist, inclusive and democratic—legitimized the economic and civic aspirations that were held by African Americans, Latinx workers, and those women who wanted to participate more fully in the world of work and politics. Yet limits on pluralism and tolerance persisted for many, especially for Japanese Americans.

The wartime mobilization transformed the roles women held in the workplace. Shortly after the nation entered the war, the War Manpower Commission mounted a special campaign to recruit women, especially married housewives, into the defense industries. Government propaganda sounded a patriotic—if hardly feminist—trumpet: women workers were backing their men at the front, not pioneering a pathway out of the kitchen. As Glamour Girls of ’43, a government-produced newsreel, announced, “Instead of cutting the lines of a dress, this woman cuts the pattern of aircraft parts. Instead of baking a cake, this woman is ‘cooking’ gears to reduce the tension in the gears after use.”

Work in a factory was an enormous transition from the kitchen, one that enhanced the self-confidence and expanded the horizons of millions of American women. War worker Delle Hahne remembered a meal at a friend’s house at which “his mother and grand-mother talk[ed] about which drill would bite into a piece of metal at the factory. . .My God, this was Sunday dinner in Middle America . . . it was a marvelous thing.” Soon a popular song was being heard frequently on the radio, celebrating a young defense factory worker named “Rosie the Riveter,” who could “do more than a male can do.” The number of working women rose from eleven million to nearly twenty million during the war. In 1940, one of every twenty production workers in the auto industry was a woman; by 1944, the number of women had grown to one in five. In a dramatic—and in some cases bitterly resisted—move, African American women, who had been confined largely to agricultural labor and domestic work before the war, entered higher-paying and more dignified factory, clerical, and sales jobs.

The growth of female employment during the war did not generate a radical transformation in the way most Americans defined the rights and proper role of women. Many male workers were profoundly prejudiced against working women, greeting them with a barrage of hisses and whistles as they made their way through formerly all-male workplaces. And most employers, unions, and government officials agreed that “Rosie” would be “the Riveter” only for the duration of the war, after which she would gratefully turn over her job to a returning veteran. Virtually all factories segregated jobs by sex and denied women workers specialized training. Although the War Labor Board insisted on “equal pay for equal work,” employers frequently assigned women to inspection or small assembly jobs or simply reclassified jobs to escape equal pay provisions. Most women remained segregated in a low-wage ghetto.

A large proportion of the female workforce was married with children. Working wives and mothers therefore bore a double burden of homework and wage work. Housing was cramped, and rationed foods were often more difficult to prepare. The government did build hundreds of child-care facilities during the war—far more than ever before—and more than 50,000 children attended such centers by 1943. But federal day-care programs were inadequate, and many women refused to use them because of their high cost, low quality, and restricted hours. By 1944, social agencies and mass media blamed working mothers for a new social phenomenon, the “juvenile delinquency” of unsupervised children.

By war’s end, women made up 20 percent of all unionists, but the response of organized labor to their needs was mixed. Trade unions staunchly supported equal pay for equal work, if only to protect male members who might otherwise lose their jobs or their high pay to the tide of women workers. But most unions provided little or no support for the idea of maternity leave or government-funded child care. A 1944 UAW conference of women workers endorsed such demands, but as Millie Jeffrey, the first head of the auto union’s Women’s Bureau, recalled, “The policies of the UAW were always very good. Getting them implemented was another story.” When the automakers began to fire women workers at the end of the war, unions such as the UAW raised few objections—perhaps not surprisingly, given the union’s overwhelmingly male leadership.

Although a widespread women’s movement failed to materialize during the war years, the early 1940s did see the flowering of the modern civil rights movement. For the first time since Reconstruction, African Americans possessed the collective resources to inaugurate a nationwide liberation movement. Almost 10 percent of the southern Black population moved to northern cities during the war, while an approximately equal number migrated from farm to city within the South. The number of African Americans who held industrial jobs almost doubled, and earnings—although still below par—soared from 40 percent of the average white wage in 1939 to nearly 60 percent after the war. This movement of Black southerners from rural marginality to urban empowerment, one of the most important social and political transformations in American history, accelerated dramatically during World War II and continued for decades afterward.

African Americans joined together in unprecedented fashion to make their aspirations known. Membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) increased nearly tenfold during World War II, and with the CIO, the NAACP campaigned against Southern state poll taxes, which discouraged voting by poor people of all races. Under the leadership of a talented legal team led by Charles Houston, dean of Howard University Law School, and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP won a crucial Supreme Court decision in 1944 that outlawed “whites-only” primaries. (Because victory in the Democratic primary was equivalent to winning elections in the one-party South, these primaries effectively disenfranchised African Americans.) Well-organized voter registration campaigns encouraged Black people to vote, even in the South, where the proportion of African Americans who were registered to vote jumped from 3 percent to 12 percent during the war years.

The egalitarian and democratic values for which the United States claimed to be fighting legitimized African American demands for a better life and equal citizenship. African Americans worked and fought under the popular “Double V” symbol, which stood for victory over fascism abroad and over discrimination at home. And the government took notice. In 1943, the War Labor Board ordered an end to wage differentials based on race, explaining that “whether as vigorous fighting men or for production of food and munitions, America needs the Negro.” Removal of racial barriers at home, the board added, “is a test of our sincerity in the cause for which we are fighting.”

The CIO’s wartime organizing efforts also transformed African Americans’ consciousness. Despite continuing racism among white workers and corporate managers, the CIO’s campaign to organize a multiracial workforce into plantwide industrial unions gave Black workers enormous leverage to press their grievances. Calling the CIO a “lamp of democracy,” an NAACP journalist wrote, “The South has not known such a force since the historic Union Leagues in the great days of the Reconstruction era.”

Although wartime conditions made African American advancement possible, it required forceful and well-organized protests by Black workers to persuade unions and the federal government to root out discrimination in jobs, housing, and politics. The first, and in many ways the most dramatic, protest movement began in 1940, when A. Philip Randolph and other leaders of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters announced plans for a march on Washington to win African Americans access to good jobs in the new defense plants. Randolph wanted thousands of African Americans to descend on the still-segregated capital city in July 1941 unless the federal government took vigorous steps to end racial discrimination in war industries and in the military. The prospect of such a peaceful march frightened even the Roosevelt administration liberals, so just one week before the assemblage, the President issued Executive Order 8802, creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) and directing government agencies, job-training programs, and contractors to end racial and religious discrimination. In return for this remarkable advance, Randolph canceled the march.

The FEPC had far-reaching implications because it opened hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs to African American war workers. As the Urban League’s Lester Granger put it, “Employment is a civil right.” But the FEPC was pitifully weak as a legal and administrative entity. FEPC officials could do nothing to modify segregation in the armed forces; and in the South, federal policy was little more than a legal fiction. In Baltimore, the Maryland State Employment Service systematically discriminated against African Americans who sought work. “Even if you had a graduate degree in electronics,” remembered Alexander Allen, who worked for the Baltimore Urban League, “you would still be sent to the Black entrance (for common labor and unskilled work).”

In the North, however, the federal government acted more forcefully, especially if war-related production or services were at stake. Well-publicized FEPC hearings legitimized racial progressivism and engendered a new sense of citizenship, which soon turned into a wave of direct, forceful action by Black workers and their allies. “I am for this thing called Rights,” a disgruntled woman wrote to the FEPC. Another asked President Roosevelt to help her find a job because “we are citizens and we pay taxes.” Government action soon followed. In Philadelphia, which was second only to Detroit as a center of defense manufacture, the FEPC and the War Manpower Commission ordered the city’s transit system to promote eight African Americans to positions as streetcar drivers. When the system’s white employees responded with a protest strike in 1944, the federal government sent in 8,000 armed soldiers to end the stoppage. Afterward, Philadelphia employers opened more good jobs to the city’s African Americans.

Detroit was an even more impressive center of rights-conscious activism. African American workers at Chrysler, Ford, and other companies staged their own work stoppages to protest racial discrimination on the job. African American women, who had long been excluded from factory work, occupied the personnel office at Ford’s new Willow Run factory in 1942, leading to the opening of hundreds of war plant jobs to women who had been maids and domestics. Racial conflicts over housing became equally tense. When African Americans moved into Detroit’s federally financed Sojourner Truth housing project early in 1942, a crowd of rock-throwing, working-class white people blocked the way. City and federal officials caved into the pressure, barring occupancy by African Americans, but a coalition of Black civic groups and CIO activists forced Detroit officials to reverse themselves again, this time opening the apartments to Black and white occupants alike. CIO and NAACP leaders told a rally the next year that “full and equal participation of all citizens is fair, just, and necessary for victory and an enduring peace.”

Such assertiveness generated white resistance. Southern segregationists such as Mississippi’s Democratic senator James Eastland denounced the FEPC as a “Communist program for racial amalgamation.” And white resistance often exploded in urban factories and neighborhoods where the two races competed for jobs, housing, and political power. As Black workers broke out of their job ghettos and moved into formerly all-white departments, a spectacular wave of racist strikes shut down scores of factories and shipyards. In many factories and mills, newly empowered white workers came to see the seniority system and the local union leader as protectors of their racially exclusive job rights, which they defended with almost as much steadfastness as they did their segregated neighborhoods. Racial violence peaked in 1943, with 250 incidents in forty-seven cities. The worst riot erupted in Detroit, where a fight at the Belle Isle amusement park ignited thirty hours of violence and left 25 Black people and 9 white people dead and almost 700 seriously injured.

Race riots flared in wartime Los Angeles, too, but with a difference: this time the violence targeted Mexican American males. Resentment against Mexican Americans—especially those who defied mainstream society by wearing the distinctive, loose-fitting “zoot suits” favored by young Chicanos—mushroomed as discriminatory barriers to employment fell. In June 1943, local newspapers played up a story about Mexican youths who had been arrested for assaulting a group of white sailors. In response, thousands of marines, sailors, soldiers, and civilians visited a reign of terror on Mexican American neighborhoods in Los Angeles, beating up young zoot-suiters, stripping off their clothes, and cutting their long hair. More than 100 people were injured in the riots, which inspired anti-Mexican activity in seven other cities as well. Only when the Mexican ambassador interceded—and fear grew that the Axis countries would make effective propaganda of the riots—did the U.S. government declare downtown Los Angeles off-limits to naval personnel.

How did local and national organizations use the election of 1946 to fight back against Mississippi’s systemic denial of Black voting rights?

Although World War II enlarged the compass and definition of American citizenship, American pluralism and tolerance had distinct limits. While the United States was fighting anti-Semitic Nazi Germany on the battlefield, perceptible anti-Semitism existed at home. As millions of Jews perished in concentration camps in Europe, the U.S. State Department and other government officials opened America’s doors to only a handful of refugees. In 1939, the ship St. Louis, filled with more than 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, sailed from one closed U.S. port to another, seeking to disembark its desperate passengers. But U.S. immigration laws were harshly enforced, forcing the ship to return to Europe where most of the passengers ended up in Nazi death camps.

Conscientious objectors to the draft—especially Jehovah’s Witnesses—had an extremely difficult time in World War II. At least 6,000 objectors went to prison, sentenced to an average of five years; beatings by guards and other prisoners were common. Many Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refused to salute the flag because of their religious beliefs, were kept in solitary confinement for months, often on rations of bread and water.

But U.S. treatment of Japanese Americans proved to be the government’s most egregious wartime abridgment of civil liberties. While the U.S. government detained some German Americans and Italian Americans and confiscated their property, all Americans of Japanese descent were presumed to be disloyal simply by virtue of their national origin. General John L. DeWitt, chief of the West Coast Defense Command, charged that “the Japanese race is an enemy race. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.”

Starting in March 1942, the government rounded up all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, citizens and noncitizens alike, transporting them to specially constructed “relocation” camps. In California, nativists and racists who had long resented successful Japanese American merchants, fishermen, and fruit and vegetable farmers supported the detention campaign By the end of 1942, the U.S. government forced more than 100,000 Japanese to abandon their jobs, businesses, and homes for a life in one of ten camps scattered throughout the West. Conditions in the remote and desolate detention camps were spare at best, deplorable at worst. Families crowded into long, wooden barracks with a minimal amount of privacy and furnished only with cots, blankets, and bare light bulbs. Internees had to fend for themselves, making their own furniture and tending their own meager vegetable gardens.

Japanese Americans, like other first- and second-generation Americans, were overwhelmingly loyal to the United States. But among a sizable minority, detention bred precisely the hostility and resistance that government officials feared. In 1943, more than one out of every four Japanese American males born in the United States refused to pledge “unqualified allegiance” to the nation. Still, when the military drafted young Japanese American internees in 1944, only a minority resisted. Some 3,600 of these young Americans served in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in the U.S. Army. In 1945, the 442nd helped to liberate the Nazis’ infamous Dachau concentration camp, even as the parents of many of these same soldiers lived behind barbed wire.

The Supreme Court affirmed the legality of Japanese American internment in 1943 (Hirabayashi v. United States) and again in 1944 (Korematsu v. United States). By the time of the second decision, a few justices had doubts about the detention policy. The internment order, Justice Frank Murphy wrote in a dissenting opinion, went “over the brink of constitutional power” and into “the ugly abyss of racism.” But only in 1988, after decades of legal action and public protest, did the U.S. government finally offer the surviving detainees modest financial restitution and a formal apology.

Chinese Americans, who had often been lumped together with other Asians, worried that anti-Japanese hatred would be directed at them. They put up signs in their stores explaining that “This is a Chinese shop” and even wore buttons proclaiming “I am Chinese.” Many Chinese Americans also proved their patriotism by joining the military. Charlie Leong, a resident of San Francisco’s large Chinatown, later recalled that “to men of my generation, World War II was the most important historic event of our times. For the first time we felt we could make it in American society.” Almost one-quarter of all Chinese adult males were drafted or enlisted.

Many other Chinese men and women broke out of their employment ghetto in laundries and restaurants as labor shortages opened up new opportunities. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Chinese Americans filled 15 percent of the shipyard jobs. A further breakthrough came in 1943, when Congress finally repealed the hated Chinese Exclusion Act. Although the new law set a token immigration quota of only 105 people per year, it allowed Chinese permanent residents to apply for citizenship. Asian Indians, who had also been excluded, sought similar naturalization rights, finally securing them in 1947.

American arms production far outstripped that of any other nation, and by 1944, the United States was producing nearly half of all the world’s goods. In the same year, American armies, for the first time, confronted large numbers of German and Japanese troops. Hundreds of thousands clashed in northern France and the Philippines. With a continuous supply of American-made planes, tanks, ships, and guns, the Allied war effort soon ground down the German, Italian, and Japanese forces. The defeat of Hitler in Europe and the use of atomic weapons against Japan ended the war but raised questions about how the United States would transition to a peacetime economy.

On June 6, 1944 (D-Day), the long-awaited British-American invasion of Western Europe began. In the largest amphibious landing in military history, 150,000 troops jumped from their boats onto the beaches of Normandy in France. Reinforcements soon swelled Allied ranks to two million, who served under the overall command of an American general, Dwight Eisenhower. By September, the Allies had retaken most of France and Belgium; by the fall, they were fighting just inside German territory. But in December, the German army staged a desperate counterattack—the Battle of the Bulge—pushing deep into Belgium and France. The fierceness of the attack surprised U.S. strategists, and German soldiers initially outgunned and outmanned several U.S. infantry divisions. But in the largest single battle ever fought by the U.S. Army, more than 100,000 defiant soldiers halted the German offensive and made an Allied victory in the spring all but inevitable.

Eisenhower’s army crossed the Rhine in March 1945 and soon encountered horrifying evidence that the Nazis had been starving and executing millions of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians, and German political opponents in a string of concentration camps that stretched from Buchenwald in Germany to Auschwitz in Poland. “As we entered the camp, the living skeletons still able to walk crowded around us,” recalled J. D. Pletcher a captain in the 71st Division Headquarters of his encounter with Dachau. “It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every inmate was insane with hunger.” Much later, the world would discover that the leaders of the Roosevelt administration had known about the genocide but had done little to stop the slaughter.

Roosevelt, whose physical condition had deteriorated rapidly following his reelection to a fourth term in November 1944, died on April 12, 1945. Vice President Harry Truman, a former senator from Missouri, later said that he felt as if “the moon and all the planets” had fallen on his ill-prepared shoulders. Truman had spent his youth as a dirt farmer and unsuccessful investor and businessman. In the 1920s and 1930s, he served as the protégé of Tom Pendergast, Kansas City’s powerful political boss. Truman won national stature early in the war when he presided over a Senate investigation into corruption and inefficiency in the mobilization effort. In 1944, when Roosevelt allowed Democratic conservatives to cut the liberal Henry Wallace from the ticket, Truman proved to be the perfect compromise candidate for vice president.

Truman had none of Roosevelt’s great self-confidence; nor did he inspire the same public loyalty or hatred as had the man who had been elected four times to the White House. But in foreign affairs, Truman did not deviate from Roosevelt’s strategy: the war would be concluded with an unconditional surrender, in both Europe and the Far East. In the days after Truman took office, the mighty Soviet, American, and British armies blasted their way into the heart of Germany. On April 30, with Soviet troops encircling Berlin, Hitler committed suicide. In the next few days, American troops swept through Munich and on into Czechoslovakia, the Soviets captured Berlin, the British took Hamburg, and German troops finally gave up fighting in Italy. On May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally. The war in Europe was over.

In Asia, the Allies generally avoided direct confrontation with the main body of the Japanese army on the mainland. Instead, U.S. forces closed in on Japan by island-hopping across the Pacific. Savage hand-to-hand combat on the islands of Tarawa, Saipan, and Guam allowed the United States to put long-range B-29 bombers within striking distance of the Japanese home islands by 1944. In October of that year, American troops began the reconquest of the Philippines with a devastating defeat of the Japanese Navy at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The next spring, after ferocious fighting, the United States took the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, near the Japanese homeland. In early May 1945, British, Indian, and Nationalist Chinese troops retook Burma in South Asia. The Japanese army remained in control of Korea, Manchuria, and much of China and Southeast Asia. But massive and continuous bombing raids on Japanese civilian and military targets terrorized and demoralized Japan’s population, smashed its industry, and further isolated its forces on the Asian mainland from those on the home islands.

After Germany surrendered in May, British and American intelligence agencies expected that Japan would also stop fighting—especially if the Soviet Union entered the war in the Far East. Therefore, Great Britain and the United States pushed for the earliest possible Soviet attack on Japanese-held Manchuria. Stalin agreed to open hostilities against Japan on or about August 8, three months after Germany’s surrender. “Fini Japs when that comes about,” President Truman wrote in his diary.

But Truman did not wait for a Soviet declaration of war. On August 6 and 8, U.S. planes dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Hiroshima blast leveled nearly five square miles and instantly burned to death nearly 80,000 people. Tens of thousands more died soon afterward from injuries, burns, and radiation. In Nagasaki, where poor visibility reduced the accuracy of the bombing, about one and a half square miles were destroyed; 35,000 people were killed immediately, and another 60,000 were injured. In less than a week, Japan agreed to surrender. The war in Asia formally ended on September 2, 1945 (V-J Day).

Americans soon learned that the atomic bombs that had been dropped on Japan were the products of an enormous wartime mobilization of scientific talent and engineering skill called the Manhattan Project. The project inaugurated not just a new age of weaponry, but an era of bureaucratically organized and government-funded big science. News reports of the enormous effort that had been required to build the bomb raised the prestige of atomic physicists, radar engineers, military planners, and other technical experts to extraordinary heights. Vannevar Bush, an architect of the Manhattan Project, declared science “the endless frontier,” the quest that would sustain American power, purpose, and democracy now that the era of westward pioneer migrations was over.

President Truman persuaded most Americans that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been necessary to compel Japan’s surrender without the enormous loss of life that would have resulted if Allied forces had invaded Japan. After the devastating bombing raids by both sides on civilian targets, two more bombs, even though they were atomic bombs, did not seem particularly excessive to some Americans. “We’re sitting on the pier in Seattle,” one GI remembered, “sharpening our bayonets, when Harry [Truman] dropped that beautiful bomb. The greatest thing that ever happened.”

But others raised pointed questions about Truman’s decision. Why was Truman in such a rush? The Americans had no major military operations planned until November 1945, and in any case, the projected full-scale invasion of Japan was not to occur before spring 1946. Why couldn’t Truman have waited for the Soviet Union to enter the war or explore the peace feelers that a divided Japanese government had begun to send during the summer of 1945? Such questions led General Eisenhower to conclude, “it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Admiral William Leahy, head of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, concurred: “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

Why, then, did the United States drop the atomic bombs? It was less for military than for political reasons, it seems, because these weapons offered the United States a means not only to win the war against Japan, but also to give American diplomacy the upper hand over the Soviets. By 1945, a fundamental conflict over the shape of the postwar world had begun to divide the Soviets and their western allies. When Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, the leaders of the “Grand Alliance,” met together for the last time in February 1945 at the Russian resort city of Yalta, those tensions started coming to a head. The leaders did reach agreements on contentious issues such as the military division of Germany and plans for a new international organization (the United Nations), but the fate of Eastern Europe, now occupied by the Red Army, remained unresolved. Roosevelt won a fence-straddling compromise between Stalin and Churchill that gave the Soviets part of eastern Poland and promised free elections to determine the economic character—Communist or capitalist—of a postwar Polish state. Stalin interpreted the agreement as tacit Western acceptance that Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe would fall within the Soviet sphere of influence.

But in July, when Truman met at Potsdam, Germany, with Stalin and the new British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, to complete the work begun in Yalta, the end of the Pacific war was in sight, and jockeying for postwar position replaced wartime cooperation. Truman later described the conference as a “brawl.” As World War II wound down, a new conflict loomed on the horizon: a Cold War that would pit the United States and Western Europe against the Soviet Union. In that context, the United States viewed the atomic bomb as a diplomatic weapon. Just before the first atomic test in July 1945, Truman noted that “if it explodes, as I think it will, I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys”—and he meant the Soviets, not the Japanese. The White House wanted to ensure America’s supremacy in postwar Asia and curb Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes later recalled the hope, widely shared in Washington at the time, that the bomb’s use would enable the United States “to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”

On the home front, Americans celebrated the end of the war but also searched for signs that the United States could avoid a postwar depression and sustain the wartime prosperity that had pulled so many people out of poverty and fear. In 1944, President Roosevelt had outlined a “second bill of rights” that included the right to a job, medical care, education, housing, food, clothing, and recreation, and Congress had passed the G.I. Bill of Rights to provide returning veterans with access to education and job training. But the transition to a peacetime economy would take place in an atmosphere charged with the fearful memories of an earlier peace: the economic collapse after World War I, the bitter industrial conflicts that followed, and the bread lines and Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. World War II generated millions of new jobs, but what would happen when the defense plants shut down and twelve million GIs came home? Could a free-market economy successfully reemploy these workers, keep inflation under control, and raise the real incomes of a vastly expanded labor force?

Most business leaders wanted to dismantle wartime controls as soon as possible and undercut the public support that had sustained New Deal liberalism. While their companies had profited handsomely from the wartime alliance with the government, U.S. capitalists had little interest in the state-sponsored economic planning and labor-management collaboration they saw in postwar Western Europe. They remained intensely suspicious of the kind of New Deal social engineering that organized labor favored, and they wanted to be free of government or union interference in determining wages and prices. As GM’s Alfred P. Sloan put it, “It took fourteen years to rid this country of prohibition. It is going to take a good while to rid the country of the New Deal, but sooner or later the ax falls and we get a change.”

Unions, together with their liberal and consumer allies, put forth their own ambitious postwar planning agenda. Few labor leaders, especially in the CIO, believed that the welfare of the working class would be advanced only, or even primarily, by postwar collective bargaining. Instead, they hoped that labor would continue to exert an influence on economic and business decisions, both public and private. Thus, in the early years of the war, the CIO’s Philip Murray had urged the creation of a series of industry councils that would fuse economic and political bargaining—”a program for democratic economic planning and for participation by the people in the key decision of the big corporations.” Labor played a key role in reelecting Roosevelt to a fourth term in 1944, and nine months later, liberals and progressives in the United States took heart from the smashing victory of the Labour Party in Great Britain’s first postwar election. As one observer put it, “Union leaders no longer regard themselves as a force merely reacting to managerial decision . . . but as a force which itself can influence the whole range of industrial economic activity.”

The UAW’s Walter Reuther embodied this ambition. A trade unionist who was equally at ease among the shop floor militants of Detroit and the policymaking bureaucrats of Washington, Reuther called on the government to convert taxpayer-financed war plants to the mass production of badly needed housing and railroad equipment. Most strikingly, he demanded a 30 percent increase in autoworkers’ wages, which would just about make up for the income those workers lost when the postwar workweek shrank to forty hours. But Reuther did not limit his argument to a narrow consideration of wages. A believer in Keynesian economics, he wanted to boost working-class “purchasing power.” He challenged management to keep car prices at prewar levels to stave off an inflationary surge, raise working-class living standards, and win labor support from middle-class consumers. Reuther demanded that General Motors “open the books” to show that its profits and productivity made an inflation-proof wage increase possible.

Few issues were more contentious than the Office of Price Administration (OPA), whose fate was central to an orderly and progressive conversion of the war economy to a peacetime footing. In 1945, this popular and effective government agency helped to sustain working-class living standards by enforcing price and quality standards for hundreds of different hard-to-find products. Bolstered by the voluntary efforts of almost 300,000 OPA “price checkers,” the agency’s leverage over business pricing policies gave millions of consumers a stake in the outcome of the labor-liberal effort to sustain a postwar New Deal. OPA chief Chester Bowles, a spirited liberal, called the agency’s housewife volunteers “as American as baseball,” even as some merchants denounced them as a “kitchen Gestapo” that diligently enforced government price controls.

These tensions erupted in a massive postwar strike wave. Beginning late in the fall of 1945, a five-month wave of strikes, the largest such action since 1919, put three million workers on the street. These stoppages had a twofold purpose: to win substantial wage increases that would set the pattern for all American workers in the postwar years and to preserve government-mandated price ceilings so that inflation would not erode working-class living standards. Strikes shut down the steel, electrical, oil, coal, and meatpacking industries. Union efforts to stop production went largely uncontested, so most of the strikes were peaceful and effective. When the police did intervene against the unions, labor responded with mass picket lines or with a general strike of the sort that brought commerce to a complete halt in Stamford and Hartford, Connecticut; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Houston, Texas; Rochester, New York; Camden, New Jersey; and Oakland, California.

The wave of strikes in 1945 and 1946 marked the height of union strength and social solidarity during the twentieth century. It was the final episode in the great cycle of industrial confrontations that had begun with the railroad strikes of the 1870s and erupted again every decade, reminding the nation of the seemingly insolvable conflict between labor and capital. Union workers claimed, and much of the public agreed, that their struggle embodied the hopes and aspirations of all Americans. The assertion extended even to military veterans and active service personnel. After V-J Day, U.S. troops in Asia organized a “bring the troops home” movement, demanding rapid demobilization of U.S. troops from North China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Savvy unionists and radicals in uniform led this effort, which often resembled a labor protest. In December 1945, when 4,000 troops marched on an army headquarters depot in Manila, their commander quipped, “You men forget you’re not working for General Motors. You’re still in the Army.”

The big strikes of early 1946 were as much political as economic contests. Although presidential fact-finding boards in both the auto and steel industries had recommended substantial wage hikes with no corresponding rise in OPA price guidelines, corporate leaders remained intransigent, vowing that “until [the Office of Price Administration] authorizes fair prices, nothing can be settled through collective bargaining.” In the end, President Truman caved in, announcing that in return for a wage increase of about eighteen cents per hour, he would allow the steel corporations to raise the price of steel five dollars a ton.

Labor leaders soon concluded that the political winds had shifted against them and they would have to settle for Truman’s offer. Indeed, the great strikes of 1946 proved a costly victory for organized labor. True, every major corporation agreed to negotiate with the union that represented its employees, thus demonstrating the permanence of the industrial unions that had been built during the 1930s and expanded during the war. But businessmen also insisted that postwar contracts include a “management security” clause giving them more power to set production standards and to limit the authority of shop stewards and union officials. More important, the wage increases that had been won during the walkouts evaporated quickly under the galloping inflation that was let loose when government price controls were lifted in the summer and fall of 1946.

With inflation running at more than 12 percent, most of the big unions had to return to the bargaining table for another round of wage hikes in 1946. Although the unions reached settlements without strikes, most manufacturers again raised their prices, blaming “Big Labor” for the inflationary spiral that gripped the economy. Middle-class consumers and industrial workers alike turned against the unions, and the entire country soon grew hostile toward the labor movement. The incapacity of either the Truman administration or the unions to stop the inflationary surge discredited the Rooseveltian state and demoralized millions of working-class voters. Responding to the Republican campaign slogan, “Had Enough?,” voters in 1946 deprived the Democrats of control of Congress for the first time since 1930. Democrats sustained their greatest losses in the industrial regions stretching from Connecticut to Illinois—precisely the area with a heavy urban-labor constituency.

With the end of World War II, the New Deal also ended and, with it, the cycle of union growth and working-class recomposition that had transformed the structure of American society. The labor movement was now an established part of the American political and social order. And the federal government continued to exercise far greater power than it had a generation earlier. But perhaps the most profound transformation of all was the evolution of the United States into the preeminent global power, with immense influence over the economic and political affairs of a world that was divided along economic and ideological lines. Within that context, America would have to confront a host of issues that had been raised, but not always resolved, by the Depression, the New Deal, and World War II. For the next half-century, the nation would puzzle over the extent to which the government should regulate the economy, expand the welfare state, restrain union growth, endorse the nascent civil rights insurgency, and recognize the claims made by the still small movement for women’s equality.