history at miami university home front u.s.a. · 2015-09-15 · ... pathways to the present. ......

The American History Series

Allan M. Winkler

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arlan Davidson

Harlan Davidson, Inc.Wheeling, Illinois 60090-6000www.harlandavidson.com

Allan M. Winkler is Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Ohio. He has also taught at Yale University and the Uni-versity of Oregon and, for one year each, at the University of Helsinki in Finland, the Uni-versity of Amsterdam in The Netherlands, and the Univer-sity of Nairobi in Kenya. A prize-winning teacher, he is author of ten books of his own, which include Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Making of Modern America, and To Everything There is a Season: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song, and co-author of the college textbook The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society and the high school textbook America: Pathways to the Present.

Home Front U.S.A.

T H I R D E D I T I O N

America during World War II

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The American History Series


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Allan M. WinklerMiaMi University

Home Front U.S.A. America during World War IIThird EdiTion

H a r l a n D a v i D s o n , i n c .W H e e l i n g , i l l i n o i s 6 0 0 9 0


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Copyright 2012harlan davidson, inc.All rights reserved.

Except as permitted under United States copyright law, no part of this publica-tion may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or any retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher. Address inquiries to harlan davidson, inc., 773 Glenn Avenue, Wheeling, illinois 60090.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Winkler, Allan M., 1945-home front U.S.A. : America during World War ii / Allan M. Winkler. 3rd ed. p. cm. (The American history series)includes bibliographical references and index.iSBn 978-0-88295-286-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. United Stateshistory19331945. 2. World War, 19391945United States. i. Title.E806.W55 2012973.917dc23 2011039510

Cover: Women shipfitters worked on board the USS NEREUS, and are shown as they neared completion of a portion of the engine room floor. US Navy Yard, Mare island, CA, ca. 1943. National Archives ARC 296892

Manufactured in the United States of America15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5 VP


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For henry r. Winkler


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ACknoWLeDgmenTS

Like its predecessors published in 1986 and 2000, this third edi-tion of Home Front U.S.A. draws both on secondary literature and primary research, including a wide range of new accounts that have appeared in the last dozen years.

In writing the first edition, I benefited enormously from the in-fluence of John Morton Blum, my adviser in graduate school. He interested me in the war. Perhaps even more important, he showed me how history could and should be written. At the same time, i appreciated the perceptive criticisms of richard Polenberg and James T. Patterson, who commented extensively on an early draft of that first edition.

In preparing the second edition, I found myself indebted to John W. Jeffries, a fellow student in that first seminar I took with John Blum and a friend ever since. his work was particularly useful to me in the revision process and forced me to rethink some of my own assumptions and arguments. i also relied on conversations with roger daniels, a colleague and friend who worked nearby, about the war and the process of writing history in general. Their work continues to inform this third edition.

Finally, i want to thank my father, henry r. Winkler, to whom this edition, like the first and second, is dedicated. His wartime experiences became part of my emerging historical consciousness. over the years i have appreciated both his professional example and his personal support.

Allan M. Winkleroxford, ohio


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ConTenTS

Acknowledgments / viiPreface to the Third Edition / xi

P r o l o g u E / 1

C H A P T E r o N E : The Arsenal of Democracy 7

The President and Mobilization / 7Industrial Mobilization / 12Mobilization and the Business Community / 16Mobilization and the Workforce / 20Mobilization and Money / 25Conclusion / 28

C H A P T E r T w o : American Society at War 30

Mood and Morale / 31Campaigns and Popular Culture / 37Shortages and Controls / 43Wartime Dislocations / 49Conclusion / 55


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C o n t e n t s

C H A P T E r T H r E E : Outsiders and Ethnic Groups 56

Women and the War / 57African Americans and the Struggle for Equality / 65Latinos at War / 76American Indians and the War / 80Italian Americans under Attack / 82Chinese Americans in the Conflict / 83Japanese Americans: Civilian Casualties of War / 84American Jews and the War / 88Conclusion / 90

C H A P T E r f o u r : The Politics of War 91

The Elections of 1940 and 1942 / 92The Election of 1944 / 96The Impact of the Conservative Coalition / 100Executive Leadership and Expansion / 105Harry S. Truman / 108Conclusion / 110

Epilogue / 111Bibliographical Essay / 116Index / 131Illustrations and Photographs follow page 90


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preface to the third edition

As a young boy growing up in the 1950s, i was well aware of World War II. My father served in the Pacific with the U.S. Navy as a Japanese-language officer who translated captured documents, inter-rogated prisoners of war, and dealt with other intelligence issues. he went into nagasaki after the second atomic bomb devastated that city, and he returned homelaying eyes on me for the first time when i was a year oldwith a sense of the awful destruction that now threatened the world.

On his return, he never glorified the war or the part he played in it. Some veterans joined service organizations like the American Legion, but he just wanted to get on with his life, finish graduate school, and begin an academic career. i do, however, remember a razor-sharp Japanese sword hidden away in the attic of our house. And i remember him talking from time to time about the nazi atrocities in Germany and the horrifying impact of the hiroshima and nagasaki bombs.

ironically, i did not learn much more about the war until i served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines in the late 1960s. Stationed in Ormoc City, Leyte, where some fierce fighting had taken place less than twenty-five years earlier. I found out for the first time what World War II combat had been like from talking to people there who had fought in the conflict. I returned home in 1969 eager to learn more.

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xii P r e f a c e t o t H e t H i r D e D i t i o n

At that point, i knew virtually nothing about the American World War ii home front. history courses had not yet come to terms with the recent past, and there was not a lot of scholarship about what civilian life had been like in the United States while soldiers were overseas. i didnt really give the domestic side of the war much thought until i entered graduate school at Yale to study for a Ph.d. There I was fortunate enough to work with John Morton Blum, who was in the midst of writing what became V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (1976). he taught a year-long class on the war my first year, and it shaped my subsequent academic career. John wanted us to follow our own inclinations as we chose seminar paper topics, but he also was interested in how our work might inform his own book. i wrote about a nasty strike by transit workers in Philadelphia that stemmed from racial ten-sions resulting from upgrading black workers to better positions demanded by the war effort. That paper turned out well, appeared in the Journal of American History, and launched a lifelong interest in the many aspects of World War ii.

other work followed. My doctoral dissertation on American propaganda during the conflict became my first book: The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 19421945. Then came the request of John Hope Franklin to write a book on the home front for The American History Series, which John Hope and A. S. Eisendstadt edited for harlan davidson, inc. i leapt at the opportu-nity and Home Front U.S.A. published in 1986, was the result. More than a dozen years later, the publisher Andrew davidson requested an updated edition, which gave me an opportunity to incorporate a profusion of new scholarship, restructure the format somewhat, and interrogate the notion of the good war. That revision appeared in 2000, and now, another dozen years later, i present the updated third edition.

in this edition, the basic framework remains the same, but i have amplified those areas that struck me as I reflected on the overall narrative. At the same time, i have updated descriptions and in-terpretations in the light of new scholarship on the war that, to my great pleasure, continues to appear in abundance.

Allan M. Winkleroxford, ohio


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prologue

Participation in World War II had a profound influence on the United States. Although no fighting took place on the American mainland, the war engulfed the nation and became the focus of all its activity between 1942 and 1945. it demanded intense military and diplomat-ic efforts, at unprecedented levels, to coordinate strategy and tactics with other members of the Grand Alliance. it required a monumental productive effort to provide the materials necessary to fight. And it resulted in a meaningful reorientation of social patterns at home.

The United States became a major force in the war. Although its entrance into the struggle came latemore than two years after hostilities beganAmerica had been increasingly committed to the Allied cause even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in december 1941 elicited a declaration of war. United States naval convoys had already been protecting shipments of military and eco-nomic aid for the beleaguered overseas democracies, exports that American factories had been working hard to produce. While the nations formal entrance into hostilities merely ratified a process al-ready underway, active involvement gave the United States a vested interest in the outcome of the conflict and validated the enormous effort being undertaken by the American people.

in making that ultimately successful effort, American society changed. ravaged by the Great depression, the United States re-mained troubled as that difficult decade came to an end. The war brought a resurgence of optimism after the enormous hardships of

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history at miami university home front u.s.a. · 2015-09-15 · ... pathways to the present. ......

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