CHAPTER THEME In 1939, only 21 years after the end of World War I, the world was once more engulfed in global war. The war took an enormous human toll. The United States suffered 405,000 deaths in World War II, 292,000 in battle. In addition, 671,000 suffered nonmortal wounds. The American death toll was four times that of World War I and two-thirds that of the Civil War. For the other belligerents, the tolls were much higher. All told, perhaps 40 million people died in World War II.
America’s primary economic goal was to supply sufficient arms to her own military forces and to those of her allies to overwhelm the Axis (Germany, Japan, and their allies), to become, as President Roosevelt put it, the “Arsenal of Democracy.” This goal was achieved with astonishing speed. In a few short years, the factories of the United States were turning out more weapons than any other nation and more than all the Axis powers combined, even though the Axis had begun converting to a war footing years before the United States.
In the short run, the war effort alleviated the need for many of the New Deal’s emergency measures. Work relief was no longer necessary because the nation’s factories were humming at full capacity; emergency funds were no longer needed to bail out firms faced with bankruptcy because profits were surging. In the long run, the war effort reinforced the restructuring of the economy that had taken place in the 1930s. The war also had a major impact on the way people thought about the economy. The association of large federal deficits and low unemployment convinced many economists and the public at large that Keynes’s cure for unemployment was effective. The government’s management of the mobilization, moreover, convinced some economists and members of the public at large that the federal government had the ability to successfully plan the economy as a whole.
World History
