U.S. home front mobilization: industrial production, rationing of scarce goods, massive internal migrations (1 gen 1942 anni – 1 gen 1945 anni)

Descrizione:

war powers act:The law that gave President Roosevelt unprecedented control over all aspects of the war effort during World War II.


revenue act: A 1942 act that expanded the number of people paying income taxes from 3.9 million to 42.6 million. These taxes on personal incomes and business profits paid half the cost of World War II.

Fighting a global war required a massive expansion of federal power. Reorganizing industrial production, raising an army, and assembling the necessary workforce required far more authority than even the largest New Deal initiatives. The War Powers Act, passed in December 1941, gave President Roosevelt unprecedented control over all aspects of the war effort. This law marked the beginning of what some historians call the imperial presidency: the far-reaching use (and sometimes abuse) of executive authority during the second half of the twentieth century.


Defense mobilization, not the New Deal of the 1930s, ended the Great Depression. Between 1940 and 1945, the annual gross national product doubled, and after-tax profits of American businesses nearly doubled as well (see “America in the World”). Federal spending on war production powered this advance. By late 1943, two-thirds of the economy was directly involved in the war effort, and war-related production jumped from just 2 percent of GNP to 40 percent (Figure 23.1). Federal spending drove the surging economy, underwritten by tax increases and bond issues. The Revenue Act of 1942 expanded the number of people paying income taxes from 3.9 million to 42.6 million. Taxes on personal incomes and business profits paid half the cost of the war. The government borrowed the rest, both from wealthy Americans and ordinary citizens alike, who invested in popular treasury bonds (known as “war bonds”).

Government military spending was about 3 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the 1920s and 1930s, but it ballooned to more than 25 percent during World War II, to 13 percent during the Korean War, and to nearly 10 percent during the Vietnam War. Federal government spending for civilian purposes doubled during the New Deal and has remained at about 17 to 20 percent of GDP ever since.

The war effort required far-reaching cooperation between government and private business. Over the course of American involvement in the war, the number of civilians employed by the government increased almost fourfold, to 3.8 million — a far higher rate of growth than that during the New Deal. The powerful War Production Board (WPB) awarded defense contracts; allocated scarce resources such as rubber, copper, and oil; and persuaded businesses to convert to military production. For example, the WPB encouraged Ford and General Motors to build tanks rather than cars by granting generous tax advantages for re-equipping existing factories and building new ones. In other instances, the board approved “cost-plus” contracts, which guaranteed corporations a profit and allowed them to keep new steel mills, factories, and shipyards after the war. Government subsidies for defense industries would intensify during the Cold War, and the corporate beneficiaries would form the core of what became known as the “military-industrial complex”

To secure maximum production, the WPB preferred to deal with large-scale businesses. The nation’s fifty-six largest corporations received three-fourths of the war contracts; the top ten received one-third. The best-known war contractor was industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. His construction company had already won prewar government contracts to build roads in California and played a leading role in the massive Hoover and Grand Coulee dam projects. Once the war effort began, Kaiser went from government construction work to navy shipbuilding. At his shipyard in Richmond, California, he revolutionized naval construction by applying Henry Ford’s techniques of mass production. To meet wartime production schedules, Kaiser broke the work process down into small, specialized tasks that newly trained workers could handle and perform quickly. Soon, each of his work crews was building a “Liberty Ship” every two weeks, each one capable of carrying 10,000 tons of cargo.

The press dubbed Kaiser the “Miracle Man,” but his success derived from close ties to federal agencies as much as industrial wizardry. The government financed the great dams that he built during the depression, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a holdover from the Hoover era, lent him $300 million to build shipyards and manufacturing plants during the war. Kaiser was not alone in this productive partnership. Working together, American business and government turned out a prodigious supply of military hardware: 86,000 tanks; 296,000 airplanes; 15 million rifles and machine guns; 64,000 landing craft; and 6,500 cargo ships and naval vessels. The American way of war, wrote the Scottish historian D. W. Brogan in 1944, was “mechanized like the American farm and kitchen.” America’s industrial might, as much as or more than its troops, proved the decisive factor in the war.

All of that war production required a huge workforce, to produce, operate, and manage. The government mobilized tens of millions of soldiers, civilians, and workers — coordinated on an unprecedented scale. During World War II, the armed forces of the United States enlisted more than sixteen million men and women, more than in any other conflict. They came from every region and economic station: black sharecroppers from Alabama; white farmers from the Midwest; the sons and daughters of European, Mexican, and Caribbean immigrants; Native men from Navajo and Choctaw reservations and other tribal communities; women from every state in the nation; even Hollywood celebrities. From urban, rural, and suburban areas, from working-class and middle-class backgrounds — they all served in the military.


Workers leaving the Pennsylvania shipyards in Beaumont, Texas, at the height of wartime industrial production in 1943. Across the country, cities like Beaumont became boomtowns overnight, as workers poured into suddenly roaring factories brought back to life from the Great Depression by the demands of fighting a global war.


In contrast to its otherwise democratic character, the American army segregated the nearly one million African Americans in uniform. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil rights groups protested that a “Jim Crow army cannot fight for a free world,” but the military continued to separate black soldiers and assign them menial duties. The poet Langston Hughes observed an irony: “We are elevator boys, janitors, red caps, maids — a race in uniform.” But the military uniform, Hughes implied, did not suit African Americans in the eyes of whites. Native Americans and Mexican Americans, on the other hand, were never officially segregated; they rubbed elbows with the sons of European immigrants and native-born soldiers from all regions of the country.


code talkers: Native American soldiers trained to use native languages to send messages in battle during World War II. The messages they sent gave the Allies great advantage in several battles.

Among the most instrumental soldiers were the Native American “ code talkers.” In the Pacific theater, native Navajo speakers served as radio men, transmitting orders in a code based on the Navajo language. At the battle of Iwo Jima — one of the war’s fiercest — Navajo code talkers, working around the clock, sent and received more than eight hundred messages without error. In the European theater, Comanche, Choctaw, and Cherokee speakers transmitted crucial orders. No Axis nation ever broke these Native American codes.

Approximately 350,000 American women enlisted in the military. About 140,000 served in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), and 100,000 served in the navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). One-third of the nation’s registered nurses, almost 75,000 overall, volunteered for military duty. In addition, about 1,000 Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) ferried planes and supplies in noncombat areas. However, military leadership did sharply limit the contributions of women to the war effort. Female officers could not command men, and WACs and WAVES were barred from combat duty, although nurses of both sexes served close to the front lines. Most of the jobs that women did in the military — clerical work, communications, and health care — resembled women’s jobs in civilian life.

Historians still debate how to characterize the World War II American military. As an army of “citizen-soldiers,” it represented a wide cross section of society. Military service provided a sense of purpose for a generation raised in economic depression. The armed forces also worked to bring the children of immigrants further into mainstream American life. But the tensions and contradictions of American society also expressed themselves in the military. The draft revealed appalling levels of health, fitness, and education among millions of Americans, spurring calls for improved literacy and nutrition. Female participation in the war effort revealed deep anxieties about the threat to “womanhood” allegedly posed by service. The racial inequalities of civilian life were re-created in the barracks. Even as it united under a common cause, the American military reflected the strengths and weaknesses of a diverse, fractious society.

As millions of working-age citizens joined the military, the nation faced a critical labor shortage. Women and African Americans answered the call, joining the industrial workforce in roles unavailable to them before the conflict. Unions, benefitting from the demand for labor, negotiated higher wages and improved working conditions. By 1943, the war economy was at full speed, and the breadlines and double-digit unemployment of the 1930s were a memory.

Government officials and corporate recruiters urged women to take jobs in defense industries, creating a new image of working women. “Longing won’t bring him back sooner … get a war job!” one poster urged, while artist Norman Rockwell’s famous “Rosie the Riveter” illustration beckoned from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. The government directed its publicity at housewives, but many women in low-paying jobs as domestic servants or secretaries switched to higher-paying work in the defense industry. Suddenly, the nation’s factories were full of women working as airplane riveters, ship welders, and drill-press operators (see “Firsthand Accounts”). Women made up 36 percent of the labor force in 1945, compared with just 24 percent at the beginning of the war.


Women workers install fixtures and assemblies to a tail fuselage of a B-17 bomber at the Douglas Aircraft Company plant in Long Beach, California. To entice women to become war workers, the War Manpower Commission created the image of “Rosie the Riveter,” later immortalized in posters and by a Norman Rockwell illustration on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. A popular 1943 song celebrating Rosie went: “Rosie’s got a boyfriend, Charlie / Charlie, he’s a marine / Rosie is protecting Charlie / Working overtime on the riveting machine.”


Wartime work was a bittersweet opportunity, marked by familiar constraints. Female workers often faced sexual harassment on the job and usually received lower wages than men did. In shipyards, women at the top of the pay scale earned $7 a day, whereas top men made as much as $22. The majority of women labored in low-wage service jobs. Child care was often unavailable, despite the largest government-sponsored child-care program in history — the scale of demand overwhelmed the federal program. When the men returned from war, Rosie the Riveter was usually out of a job. Government propaganda switched to encouraging women back into the home — where, it was implied, their true calling lay in raising families. But many married women refused, or could not afford, to stay home. Women’s participation in the paid labor force rebounded to wartime levels by the late 1940s and continued to rise for the rest of the century, bringing major changes in family life


During the war, unions extended gains made during the New Deal and solidified their position as a powerful voice for American workers. By 1945, almost 15 million workers belonged to a union, up from 9 million in 1939. Representatives of the major unions made a no-strike pledge for the duration of the war, and Roosevelt rewarded them by creating the National War Labor Board (NWLB). Composed of representatives of labor, management, and the public, the NWLB established wages, hours, and working conditions; it also had the authority to seize manufacturing plants that did not comply.

Despite these protections, unions still faced impatience from a sometimes hostile Congress that was eager to avoid industrial shutdowns during the war. In 1943, more than half a million United Mine Workers walked out, despite the no-strike pledge. The miners sought a pay hike higher than that recommended by the NWLB. Congress responded by passing (over Roosevelt’s veto) the Smith-Connally Labor Act of 1943, which allowed the president to prohibit strikes in defense industries and forbade political contributions by unions. Although organized labor would emerge from World War II more powerful than ever, its business and corporate opponents were also bolstered by the booming war economy.

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