The Impact of War on US Society.

For the American people, the experience of war between 1941 and 1945 was different from all the other nations invoked.  Outside the USA, the wax brought mass destruction, massive casualties and serious economic hardship.  Millions of people in Europe and the Far East suffered bombings, food shortages and rationing, and occupation by foreign armies.  Millions died and millions became refugees.  None of this happened to the American people.  For many Americans, military or civilian, the Second World War was a 'good War’. 

In the USA.  there was relatively little rationing and the lights were never switched off.  There was full employment and living standards went up, not down.  Compared with other countries, and compared with their own experiences of the depression years of the 1930s, most Americans found life comfortable in wartime.  Cultural life and popular entertainment were thriving.  There was a strong sense of national unity and little criticism of the government. 

However, casualty levels among American troops were not insignificant.  Almost half a million people died far from home and many more were wounded.  However, total American military casualties were immeasurably lower than those of Japan, Germany or the Soviet Union.  No American cities experienced anything like the firestorms that destroyed Hamburg in 1943 or Tokyo in 1945. 

The first and perhaps most important impact of the war was to bring about the total mobilisation of the American economy.  It is often claimed that it was not the New Deal that pulled the USA out of the Great Depression; it was the war that kick-started real economic recovery.  In 1940.  unemployment still stood at nearly 8 million.  In the war years there was tut! employment - and even sonic severe labour shortages certain areas of the economy, especially agriculture. 

The needs of the armed forces took over the US economy.  Millions of new jobs were created.  both because of increased production and to fill jobs left by workers called up to the armed forces.  The motor industry switched from cars to the production of trucks and tanks Mass production methods were maximised, with new techniques: requiring huge factories and a larger, less-skilled workforce.  By the middle of the war aircraft were being produced at the rate of 1,000 a day.  There were government controls on prices and wages.  In 1942, the War Production Board (WPB) was set up by Roosevelt to supervise the allocation of key resources such as petrol, rubber and steel. 

One effect of this was to strengthen the influence of the trades union organisations.  The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and, even more so.  the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) grew much stronger.  The federal government put pressure on employers to recognise unions - an issue that had caused considerable industrial unrest in the 1940s The CIO committed itself to a no-strike policy and accepted government arbitration of wage disputes This produced moderate pay rises and increased fringe benefits.  The leadership of the CIO became more centralised and had more influence on government. 

There was much more social mobility.  Being drafted into the armed forces meant many young men left their home districts for the first time.  Large numbers of agricultural workers, including African-Americans, moved to the clues to take up factory jobs.  Many women were employed in the munitions industry and parts of the economy that were previously 'men only'.  By 1943, 36 per cent of the workforce was female.  This social mobility raised awareness of race and gender discrimination.  The biggest CIO union, the United Auto Workers (UAW) had to deal with several 'hate strikes' by white workers in Detroit.  There were similar problems in other industries, such as transport and steel.  The federal government made some rather tame efforts to deal with the problem by setting up the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC).  Some CIO unions attempted to limn discrimination against African-American and female workers. 

The idea of the 'good war’ and the image of the whole nation pulling together reflected the success of a sustained official propaganda effort.  Government agencies promoted effective poster campaigns – about Rosie the Riveter, for example – to encourage women workers in munitions factories; or about the need to buy war bonds;, or the need to conserve vital resources.  The propaganda images reflected real life to a large extent.  Civilian consumption went up by more than 20 per cent.  Although there was rationing.  people had plenty of food and the gap between rich and poor narrowed.  For many Americans, wartime life was a big improvement on life in the 1930s. 

There was a surge in mass entertainment.  Radio was common in almost every home, providing immediate and extensive news coverage of the war and light relief through music and comedy programmes.  Cinemas were packed.  After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood films did a huge amount to raise morale and enlist public support for the war effort.  The Office of War Information (0WI) was set up by the federal government in 1942 as a propaganda agency to coordinate film coverage of the war.  There were many war documentaries, such as Why We Fight (a series of films directed by Frank Capra) and john Huston's The Battle of Midway (1942).  Hollywood stars like Clark Gable, Henry Fonda and lames Stewart became high-profile recruits to the armed forces. 

Feature films reinforced patriotic messages.  Several action films dealt with the battles in the Pacific.  Mrs Miniver (1942), with Greer Carson starring as a heroic English housewife coping with the tragedies of bombed-out Britain, gave American audiences a favourable picture of Britain at war.  Casablanca (1942), with Humphrey Bogart outwitting a Vichy police chief and his Nazi allies, was a big hit when it was released.  Even films not directly about the war, such as Meet Me in St Louis (1944), a happy family film starring the young Judy Garland, helped to influence the national mood of togetherness.  Radio and popular music also had a big influence. 

When Americans looked back at the war after it was over, their memories were shaped as much by these celluloid images as by memories of real-life events. 

The rosy national myths about the war obviously covered up some unpleasant realities.  Few people heard anything about huge strikes in factories or the serious racial tensions in some units of the armed forces.  Beneath the surface.  there was a black market, profiteering and pockets of criminal activity.  The treatment of Japanese-Americans was often extremely unpleasant.  They were well established by 1941 – about half the population of Hawaii and 1 per cent or the population of California.  They had often suffered from discrimination before and the Immigration Acts of 1924 and 1927 had been deliberately framed to cut back on Japanese immigrants.  After Pearl Harbor, there were scare stones about the attackers having been assisted be Japanese-Americans.  Many of them were rounded up and sent to temporary internment camps.  A permanent camp was set up at Manzanar in California. 

Conditions were bad and this led to riots.  One Supreme Court justice expressed his concerns: 'The government's policy bears a melancholy resemblance to the treatment of the Jewish race in Germany'.  That view might seem a bit extreme (although at that time, of course, Justice Murphy knew nothing about the death camps and the Holocaust), but many Americans were troubled by the way the treatment of Japanese-Americans conflicted with the national myth about all kinds of people becoming Americans in the 'melting pot' of integration and the togetherness of the common war effort.  Congress tried to ease the nation's guilty conscience in 1948 by awarding nearly $40 million in compensation.  but this was only 10 per cent of what had been lost.  Much later, in 1944.  further legislation provided additional compensation and a belated apology. 

The war and African-Americans

When the war began there was still a lot of discrimination, official as well as unofficial.  'We have not had a Negro worker in 25 years,' said a spokesman for the Standard Steel Corporation of Kansas City, 'and we are not going to start now’.  Trades unions continued to bar African-Americans from membership.  In the armed forces.  African-Americans served mostly in segregated units and were rarely used as combat soldiers. 

During the war there was a huge increase in the membership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Committee of Racal Equality (CORE), formed in 1942.  Randolph's success in pressuring Roosevelt started a process that ensured the impact of the Second World War on the lives of African-Americans would be very different from that of the First World War in 1917-18. 

The impact of the SecondWorld War undoubtedly led to advances for African-Americans, but there were also severe racial tensions.  There were disturbances in 1942 in Texas, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles and many other cities.  In 1943, a terrible race riot in Detroit saw more than 100,000 people involved in street violence and 34 were killed.  There were racial clashes at army training camps and among US soldiers serving overseas, including a serious riot at Banter Bridge in Lancashire.  Army leaders became so concerned that the army commissioned the famous Hollywood director, Frank Capra, to make The Negro Soldier (1944), a film intended to reduce prejudices. 

It is difficult to assess the extent of social change during and because of the Second World War Although extensive shifts took place, they often proved temporary and did not fundamentally change attitudes.  Most women workers, for example.  left their wartime robs voluntarily in 1945 and were happy to resume traditional roles.  The efforts of the unions to keep women's pay rates high during the war did not reflect a commitment to gender equality; they were mostly aimed at protecting the pay rates of the men who would return to those jobs after the war.