As compared to its huge and sometimes catastrophic impact on the home fronts of the other major combatants, World War II had smaller, generally salutary, but nonetheless significant effects on the American home front. Most obviously, MOBILIZATION returned the ECONOMY to full-production, full-employment prosperity after the long decade of the Great Depression. To manage the war effort, GOVERNMENT grew much larger and more expensive. More than 30 million people—nearly one out of every four—took part in the massive wartime MIGRATION, and the SuNBELT and metropolitan areas saw their populations surge. Women and African Americans gained new opportunities, as Americans joined in common cause to defeat the Axis and win the war. In significant ways, the United States at 1945 looked and felt different—and better—from the way it had just five years earlier.
But there was another side to the home front experience. Migrants often were greeted with suspicion and even hostility in their new communities, and prejudice and discrimination continued to affect American life. People complained about shortages of some consumer goods and other apparent sacrifices, and many turned to the BLACK MARKET for items they wanted. Wartime censorship and other government actions sometimes eroded CIVIL liberties. Old attitudes and values shaped both home front life and hopes for the future, and wartime change often essentially continued prewar trends. Some things scarcely changed at all. Not just the complicated military and diplomatic history of the war but also the fascinating, kaleidoscopic home front experience has contributed to the variety of interpretations of World War II.
Mobilization for war was the fundamental fact and factor on the home front. Producing the war goods and military force that made the United States the “arsenal of democracy” galvanized the nation’s economy and society and brought a dual victory—over the Great Depression as well as over the Axis. As late as 1940, UNEMPLOYMENT stood at a depression-level 14.6 percent; by 1944, it had shrunk to a remarkable 1.2 percent. The gross national product and national income more than doubled in those same four years. After a somewhat stumbling start, the mobilization effort worked well and inflation was brought under control. Despite wartime shortages and RATIONING, spending on consumer goods rose, as did living standards.
Mobilization opened new opportunities and experiences, and, with them, heightened aspirations and expectations for millions of Americans. In the 1930s, the pressing national issue had been how to find jobs for all the nation’s workers; on the home front, it was how to find workers for all the jobs that needed doing, especially with 16 million men joining the armed forces. As a result, BusINEss, encouraged by government, eventually turned to other sources of workers—including young people, the elderly, and especially women and African Americans, who gained access to a greater range and higher level of jobs than before. For the first time, married women and women over 35 outnumbered the unmarried and under-35 women in the workforce. Young men (and women) joining the armed forces gained experience, training, and broadened perspectives, and in the postwar period benefited from the GI Bill of Rights. Organized labor grew in numbers and influence.
Mobilizing industry and the armed forces sent GIs, defense workers, and their families to military bases and war plants around the country, but particularly in the Sunbelt states along the Pacific, Gulf, and Atlantic coasts. Cities, and especially their suburbs, grew rapidly, while the long-term depopulation of rural America accelerated. By the end of the war, one-tenth of the nation’s population had moved permanently to a different state. For African Americans, moving out of the rural SoUTH to cities in the North and on the West Coast had especially important longterm consequences. And unlike the dispirited travels of the depression decade, wartime migration and the crowded public transportation facilities of the war years were marked by a bustling excitement and vitality, if often by understandable apprehension as well. Marriage and birth rates picked up early in the war—partly out of hopes that husbands and fathers would be deferred from the military draft by Selective Service—and set the stage for the great postwar baby boom.
Wartime changes often came with old constraints, however. Despite Executive Order 8802 that created the Fair Employment Practices Committee, the defense industry did not begin to hire blacks in significant numbers or in better jobs until the middle of the war. The somewhat misleading symbol of Rosie the Riveter notwithstanding, women were sometimes reluctant to enter the workforce, encountered prejudice and limited opportunity, and made their most lasting employment increases in white-collar clerical and secretarial work. Prosperity raised income and living standards, but there was virtually no change in the distribution of wealth or economic power—though it often felt that way because national income was so much higher and so many more people were doing better.
Mobilization also brought social strains and even conflict. Arriving migrants were often greeted with some apprehension and distaste, because they seemed to tax community resources and challenge community standards. Worrisome misbehavior by some young people made juvenile delinquency a concern. Divorce rates increased toward the end of the war, reflecting hurried, inappropriate marriages and sometimes wartime tensions in marriage and eamily liee. Italian Americans were treated with distrust early in the war, and ANTI-Semitism sometimes flared on the home front. Gays and lesbians faced new discrimination in the military. Mexican Americans encountered prejudice as they took part in the migration to urban areas, and in Los Angeles in 1943 Mexican American zooT-suiT-ERs were the target of ugly rioting. In Detroit, New York, and elsewhere race riots involving African Americans also broke out in the summer of 1943. And the relocation oe Japanese Americans and their incarceration constituted by far the worst violation of civil liberties during the war.
Social change and home front life had positive and uplifting sides, too, of course. The war ultimately hastened the assimilation of Italian Americans and other white ethnic groups into the mainstream of American society. African Americans pursued what some black newspapers called the “Double V” campaign—victory at home over Jim Crow as well as abroad over the Axis—and laid crucial groundwork for the postwar Civil Rights movement. Many women, in the workplace or (with husbands away) at home had new experiences and autonomy.
Shortages and rationing of consumer goods, especially of gasoline and meat, may have rankled and led to violations of policy, but most people went along. Indeed, they often found common cause in the grumbling and limited sacrifice as well as in efforts on production lines, military units, and wartime communities. Home front Americans pitched in with such diverse activities as civil defense efforts, scrap drives, victory gardens, and war bonds sales. From the first shocking news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, moreover, Americans were sure of their cause and confident of victory. The complaints about home front disruptions and the frustrations with the rocky beginning of mobilization did not in any serious way impair home front morale.
Americans on the home front also found time to enjoy themselves, engaging in recreation, watching sports events, going to the movies, listening to music at home and at live performances, and enjoying radio and other aspects of popular culture. Spared the often devastating impact of war on home fronts of their British and especially Russian allies and of their German and Japanese foes, home front Americans often did have a “good war,” despite some sacrifices and real anxieties about family and friends in the armed forces. Tens of millions found solace and reassurance in religion. Although worries existed about the postwar economy, the new jobs, training, experiences, and higher living standards of the war years restored confidence and optimism to Americans and raised hopes for the future. Many would later look back to the wartime experience as the best years of their lives.
In addition to its economic and social impact, wartime mobilization also had important consequences for American government. To acquire and allocate the material, manpower, and money required for the war effort greatly increased the power, size, and cost of the federal government—far beyond the growth in the New Deal years of the 1930s. Staffing the mobilization agencies quadrupled the number of civilian federal employees to nearly 4 million. Paying for the gigantic war effort increased the expenses of the government from $9 billion to almost $98 billion between 1939 and 1945. In addition to drafting men for the wartime military, the government conscripted money to help meet wartime costs—and wartime taxation, especially the Revenue Act oe 1942, greatly expanded the reach of the income tax and produced the withholding tax system. The number of taxable individual incomes soared from 4 million in 1939 to nearly 43 million by war’s end.
The mobilization effort had important consequences for the political economy. Not only did the government’s size, power, and costs grow, but so too did its scope—in underwriting science and technology, for example, especially through the Office of Scientific Research AND Development. Because there were not enough experienced bureaucrats to manage economic mobilization, dollar-A-YEAR men and other businessmen came to Washington to head or serve on key agencies, and in the process helped to increase the economic and political power of big business. Some scholars see World War II as the crucial period for the development of the so-called military-industrial complex—or the military-industrial-scientific complex. Organized labor and big agriculture also gained new power during the war, as the modern political economy of big government, big business, big labor, and big farming took clearer shape.
Wartime government spending had important consequences for fiscal policy. From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, the government spent about $300 billion—twice as much as in all its previous history, from 1789 down to 1941. Despite the increase in taxes, current revenues paid for less than half of the costs of mobilization. The rest the government funded by borrowing. The massive deficits not only paid for the war but underwrote full-production, full-employment prosperity and thus confirmed the central argument of Keynesianism that government deficit spending could produce growth and prosperity. Together with the much enlarged tax structure of the war years, this provided the basis for postwar fiscal policy. It also helped consummate a shift in liberalism toward Keynesian fiscal policy.
Despite the large impact of the war on the nation’s economy, society, and government, politics changed surprisingly little from 1940 to 1945. Indeed, unlike even Great Britain, which called off elections for the duration, the normal rhythms—and the fierce partisanship—of American politics continued. President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term in the election of 1940, and then a fourth in the election of 1944. Voting patterns closely resembled those of the previous decade, and depression-era party images and issues continued to shape voter preferences, with the Democratic Party still seen as the party of prosperity and economic security. But, particularly in the congressional elections of 1942, the Republican Party regained some of the strength lost in the 1930s—partly because of unhappiness with shortages, rationing, and the Office of Price Administration. In Congress, the conservative coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats that had emerged in the late 1930s grew stronger still and prevented any expansion of liberal reform.
As victory in the war came in sight by 1944, Americans began to look ahead to the postwar era. postwar planning revealed the emphasis on full employment and postwar prosperity evident in public opinion polls, while advertising showed visions of the good life of abundance that people wanted. Polls and ads also demonstrated the emphasis on marriage and family that would characterize the postwar decades. Apprehension—what some called “depression psychosis”—nonetheless persisted about what would happen to the economy once the stimulus of war mobilization was gone.
The end of the war in August 1945 brought jubilant V-J Day celebrations, but also concern about the challenges at home and abroad. Reconversion and demobilization went generally effectively, however, and despite early problems and disruptions, prosperity continued. The nation shifted more easily into the postwar period than many had feared during the war. Postwar America would be different from prewar America, different because of World War II and its impact on the home front. But along with those differences were powerful continuities in social, political, and economic patterns and in the nation’s bedrock values and attitudes.
See also politics in the Roosevelt era; women’s status and rights.
Further reading: Mark Jonathan Harris, Franklin Mitchel, and Steven Schechter, The Homefron-t: America during World War II (New York: Putnam, 1984); John W. Jeffries, Wartime America: The World War II Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); Richard R. Lingeman, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? The American Home Front, I94I-I945 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970); Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, I94I-I945 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972); Allan M. Winkler, Home Front U. S.A.: America during World War II, 2d ed. (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2000).
World History
