World War II was an enormous conflict that had great impact on the global role of the United States and on the American home front. It has inevitably given rise to an abundance of interpretations of its events and meaning.
Some of the important interpretations and debates involve specific events and developments. Did President Franklin D. Roosevelt know about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor beforehand and welcome it as a “back door” to war? (Most scholars find little credible evidence for that view.) Was the two-pronged American campaign in the World War II Pacific theater by the U. S. Army and the U. S. Navy the wisest course of action? (Perhaps not—but it worked.) Why did the United States use the atomic bomb in August 1945? (Most scholars agree that it was for the primary purpose of bringing the war to an end as quickly as possible, though with the secondary purpose of impressing the Soviet Union and making it more cooperative after the war.) Did the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki end the war and prevent an invasion of Japan that would have cost up to a million American dead? (The conventional view has been yes, but a number of scholars suggest that there were other alternatives to invasion and that the estimate of so many American deaths is greatly inflated.)
There are many important interpretive questions. Why did Soviet-American relations sour and the Grand Alliance dissolve at the end of the war? (Most scholars point to longstanding tensions antedating the war and to wartime disagreements arising from conflicting worldviews and war aims.) Why did the United States do so little to rescue victims of the Holocaust? (There is no clear consensus, but many scholars continue to hold that evidence was more fragmentary and even more unbelievable than it now seems, although ANTI-Semitism played a role too.) What led to the relocation of Japanese Americans and their incarceration? (Historians emphasize racism as the key factor, but also point to unfounded military fears and to the small numbers and lack of political power of Japanese Americans.)
These and other questions continue to attract the attention of scholars of World War II. But beyond the interpretations of such specific issues, there are also two overriding interpretations about the meaning and significance of World War II for the United States that have come to shape general understandings of the war—and that have also provoked debate among historians. One is that it was the “Good War” that defeated the Axis, saved democracy, and brought unity, prosperity, and social advance in the United States. The other is that World War II was a watershed in history that changed the world, transformed American foreign policy, and in numerous ways made the United States a far different place from what it had been before the war.
The interpretation of World War II as the “Good War” fought and won by America’s “greatest generation” has taken firm hold as the prevailing public view of the war. Shaping the 50-year celebrations of the war from 1989 to 1995, the idea of the Good War focuses partly on the global significance of World War II, partly on the benefits it evidently brought the United States. In this analysis, the Grand Alliance against the Axis vanquished Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, liberated conquered areas from their control, and saved democracy. At home, the “Good War” unified the nation, restored prosperity, provided new opportunities, and laid groundwork for the postwar civil rights and women’s movements—and without the home front destruction and casualties of the other nations at war. In retrospect, many wartime Americans thought the war years the best and most rewarding time of their lives.
There have always been qualifications to or dissent from the idea of the Good War. But concurrently with, and partly in reaction to, the celebratory semicentennial observations of World War II, the idea of the Good War came under sharp attack from a number of scholars. They have stressed for one thing the degree to which racism and prejudice shaped the American conduct of the war—including the relocation of Japanese Americans, discrimination against and segregation of African Americans, limited chances for Mexican Americans and Native Americans, the disturbing anti-Semitism of the war years, discrimination against gays and lesbians, especially in the armed forces, and the limited and often short-lived gains for women’s status and rights.
This alternative interpretation also points out that home-front shortages, rationing, and restrictions gave rise to complaints, selfishness, favoritism, and a black market; that social tensions flared in crowded war-boom communities; that marriage and family life was disrupted; and that juvenile delinquency became a national concern. Racial violence sometimes erupted, most notably in the summer of 1943. And in this view, the American home front was marked by an illiberal, enforced conformity in which the incarceration of innocent Japanese Americans was simply the worst and most obvious violation of civil liberties. Government censorship and manipulation of war news and images shaped news media reporting and PHOTOGRAPHY and infringed upon First Amendment rights.
Even the idea of the virtuous Good War abroad against the Axis has experienced some challenge. A few Americans lamented from the beginning the alliance with the Soviet Union and the Soviets’ increased power in the world as a result of the war. More have regretted and questioned the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. Increasing evidence has surfaced about the brutal warfare on all sides, including the bombing of civilian populations, not just in the Pacific theater but also in the WORLD War II EUROPEAN THEATER. Although almost no one disputes the notion that defeating the Axis was a good thing, more accounts now point to questionable or even unworthy means toward that end.
The other prevailing interpretation of World War II is that it was a watershed event that transformed both the world and the United States. The argument is compelling with respect to America’s world role and foreign policy. Because of World War II, the United States became by far the world’s richest and most powerful nation and embarked upon a course of active leadership in world affairs, including a major role in the new United Nations.
The watershed interpretation of the WORLD War II HOME fRONT holds above all that the war ended the depression and triggered unprecedented prosperity. It also expanded the middle class, and strengthened and diversified the economies of the SOUTH and the West. It enlarged the size of organized LABOR and integrated unions into the policymaking machinery. It restructured AGRICULTURE, especially by accelerating the growth of large, mechanized, commercial agribusiness.
The war, moreover, greatly increased the size and reach of the federal GOVERNMENT—especially the PRESIDENCY—and made KEYNESIANISM central to flSCAL POLICY. Wartime SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY (underwritten by the government) produced not only such instruments of war as radar and the atomic bomb but also the computer revolution and the development of sundry wonder drugs, new insecticides, and synthetic materials.
The interpretation of World War II as a watershed in national life also focuses on the social consequences of the war. For African Americans, the war produced massive movement out of the rural South, new opportunities in industry and the armed forces, rising expectations, and the determination to use the war as a lever of social change. For women, too—for whom the abiding and partly misleading symbol is ROSIE THE Riveter—the war brought new opportunities and new roles. For white ethnic groups, the war evidently hastened inclusion into the social and economic mainstreams. Servicemen—and sometimes women—encountered extraordinary new circumstances and experiences, gained vital new training and skills, and profited from the GI Bill Of Rights. And World War II brought important demographic change. MIGRATION sped the growth of the SuNBELT states of the South and West, of metropolitan areas, and of SUBURBS. The war also affected POPULATION TRENDS by helping to launch a marriage and baby boom of great proportions and still greater implications.
Yet for all the strength of the “watershed” interpretation, which is only sketched here, there is another side, one stressing continuity as well as change and suggesting that the “watershed” interpretation oversimplifies or exaggerates the war’s impact. In important areas of American life, for example, longer historical perspective suggests that many of the changes associated with the war had long been under way. These include new roles for women, altered circumstances and civil rights activism for blacks, the rise of suburbs and the Sunbelt, the growing size and role of the federal government, the assimilation of white ethnic groups, and the global power of the United States. The war may have reinforced or accelerated such changes, but it did not necessarily produce them.
Nor did World War II complete or consummate many of the changes commonly attributed to it. The Civil Rights movement took more than a decade after 1945 to gain great momentum, the women’s movement more than two decades; and both blacks and women remained in significant ways on the margins of American society at the end of the war. Similarly, the baby boom, the mushrooming of the suburbs, the decline of small farming and of the farm population, and the impact of new technologies were more evident after than during the war.
Not all areas of American life experienced dramatic change during the war. Examinations of New England and the Midwest, for example, often show basic continuities, and important studies have recently contended that even in California the war largely reinforced longstanding patterns of population and economic growth. There was nationally no great change in the distribution of wealth and little in the distribution of power. In politics, existing party appeals, voting patterns, and domestic policy changed little during the war, despite the resurgent strength of CONSERVATISM.
One reason for the incompleteness and slowness of social change, moreover, was the continuing hold of old values, old norms, old patterns of life with respect to race, to gender, to family and community life, and to much else besides. Most wartime Americans—African Americans were an obvious exception—tended to visualize the postwar era as a more prosperous version of prewar America. The transformations that most people wanted were in personal circumstance and opportunity, not broad social patterns and norms.
Several perspectives can help in sorting through the claims and counterclaims with respect to World War II as a watershed or as the Good War. For one thing, the issues are to an important extent ones of balance and focus. One can find both change and continuity in the war years, both huge successes and troubling shortcomings.
With both the watershed and the Good War frameworks, moreover, comparative analysis can be illuminating. The World War II American home front, for example, was not so repressive or illiberal as the World War I home front or as those of other World War II belligerents. Nor did the war affect American life as it did the other nations at war.
As compared to the watershed interpretation, the idea of the Good War turns more on value judgments than on dispassionate analysis. In this respect, the two interpretive frameworks have quite different dimensions and raise different issues. In another sense, however, they are often mirror images of one another. To a significant extent the view of the war as a watershed suggests that it was a good war: It restored prosperity; it provided new opportunities; it improved the roles, status, and prospects of women, of African Americans, of the working class. By contrast, challenges to the Good War thesis are also often, implicitly at least, challenges to the notion of the war as a great divide: Longstanding prejudice limited the gains of blacks, of women, and of other groups on the margins of status and power; the already rich and powerful—not workers or unions or small business or small farmers—profited from the war.
For the nature and significance of World War II—as for virtually any important and complicated question in history—there is no single, all-purpose interpretation. For wartime America, different people, different groups, different regions, had different experiences, true for them but not necessarily representative of the whole. The war also had diverse and differential effects on the various components of American life and government. Students of the Second World War will thus continue to come to different interpretations about its meaning and impact, as well as about its leading events and personalities.
See also World War II European theater; World War II home eront; World War II Pacieic theater.
Further reading: Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); William L. O’Neill, A Democracy at
War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1993); Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
World History
