Transcript
Half American
January 1942 → 1944
January 1942 Wichita, Kansas
James G. Thompson was twenty-six. He worked in the cafeteria of an aircraft plant. He could serve lunch to the men who built the planes. He couldn't join them on the floor.
James G. Thompson Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?
James G. Thompson Is the kind of America I know worth defending?
James G. Thompson …let we colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory.
James G. Thompson The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within.
A week later, the Pittsburgh Courier made his two V's its war slogan. Soon there were Double V bond drives, beauty pageants, even a hairstyle.
Victory abroad needed places like this. Willow Run, Michigan: a Ford bomber plant more than half a mile long.
The war would open doors that had been shut for generations. It would lock others. Thompson's question runs under all of it: can a country fight for freedom and deny it to its own people?
The Arsenal
1941–1944
In February 1942, Detroit stopped making cars. It made tanks, trucks and bombers instead.
A new War Production Board told factories what to make. It paid them with cost-plus contracts: the cost of the job, plus a guaranteed profit.
The biggest companies got the biggest contracts. The hundred largest did up to 70 percent of the war's manufacturing.
Ford's Charles Sorensen visited a San Diego plant hoping to build one B-24 a day. That night he sketched a plant that could build one an hour.
Ford built it on farmland west of Detroit. It fell far behind, and critics called it “Willit Run?”
By 1943, forty-two thousand people worked here, about a third of them women. Thousands came up from Kentucky and Tennessee. Forty-two thousand people. You met four.
In 1940, about one American worker in seven had no job. By 1944, about one in eighty. War spending did what the New Deal had not.
Federal spending grew about tenfold. The national debt grew five times over.
By 1944, American war production was twice that of Germany, Italy and Japan combined. Ships carried it to Britain, the Soviet Union and millions of American troops.
Scientists were mobilized too. They developed radar and mass-produced penicillin. And one project was so secret it built towns that weren't on any map.
At Oak Ridge, young women from small towns and farms watched dials all day. They weren't told they were helping build an atomic bomb.
Make It Do
1942–1945
Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do. Or do without.
By 1943, the war had come to Main Street. Roosevelt had told them where the front was.
Franklin D. Roosevelt That front is right here at home, in our daily lives, and in our daily tasks.
Washington took him at his word.
The Office of Price Administration froze prices and rents. It rationed tires, sugar, coffee, gasoline, meat and shoes. Where the book said no, the black market said yes.
No cuffs on trousers, to save cloth. In January 1943, the government banned sliced bread. Seven weeks later, it gave up.
Kitchen fat went back to the butcher, to be made into explosives.
Taxing the rich couldn't cover the war. So most working Americans paid income tax for the first time. The Treasury enlisted Donald Duck to explain it. About sixty million people watched.
War bonds let Americans lend their savings: $18.75 bought a bond worth $25 in ten years.
Unions promised not to strike. Wages froze while profits climbed. In 1943, John L. Lewis's miners struck anyway.
Congress passed the Smith–Connally Act over Roosevelt's veto. It let the government seize war plants shut by strikes.
It seized companies too. Montgomery Ward's chairman defied the War Labor Board, so two soldiers carried him out of his office.
Rosie, and Everyone Else
1942–1945
Nearly five million more women went to work during the war. Many had been maids or waitresses. Now they welded, riveted and ran cranes.
They earned more than they ever had, and still less than men. For many Black women, it was the first way out of domestic service.
You know this poster. It hung for two weeks, in one company's plants. No one called her Rosie until the 1980s.
At one minute past midnight, a Richmond, California, shipyard laid the keel of a Liberty ship: the Robert E. Peary.
Four days, fifteen hours and twenty-nine minutes later, she slid into the bay.
Richmond's population nearly quadrupled in three years. Its Black population went from 270 to about ten thousand.
The shipbuilders' union took Black workers' dues but kept them in separate locals, with no real vote. Welder Joseph James sued. In 1944, he won.
At Marinship, Jade Snow Wong started as a typist. Her report on why workers missed shifts won a contest. The prize was launching a ship.
In December 1943, Congress ended Chinese exclusion, because China was an ally. The new quota: 105 people a year.
Women even got a professional baseball league, if they went to charm school and played in skirts. Black women weren't allowed to play.
Almost every one of these jobs came with the same three words: for the duration.
Double V
1941–1944
In 1941, defense plants hired on federal money. Many turned Black workers away. One aircraft maker said Black workers would be considered only as janitors.
A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a march.
A. Philip Randolph To this end, we propose that ten thousand Negroes MARCH ON WASHINGTON
A. Philip Randolph FOR JOBS IN NATIONAL DEFENSE AND EQUAL INTEGRATION IN THE FIGHTING FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES.
Roosevelt wanted the march stopped. Randolph wanted an order. On June 25, 1941, he got one: Executive Order 8802. It said:
there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.
It set up a Fair Employment Practice Committee. Randolph called off the march. The order covered defense jobs. It left the armed forces alone.
War jobs pulled more than a million and a half Black Southerners to cities in the North and West.
In Detroit, a white mob tried to keep Black families out of a new federal housing project named for Sojourner Truth.
In June 1943, twenty-five thousand white workers walked off the job at Packard because three Black workers were promoted.
Seventeen days later, riots broke out in Detroit. In two days, thirty-four people died. Twenty-five were Black, and police killed seventeen of them.
Black Americans kept pushing. The NAACP grew about ninefold in six years. Even the auto workers' union printed the Double V logo.
In April 1944, Howard University students led by Pauli Murray sat in at a Washington cafeteria. One sign read:
That April, the Supreme Court struck down Texas's all-white primary in Smith v. Allwright. Thurgood Marshall argued it for Lonnie Smith, a Houston dentist.
The second V was moving. Slowly, and never for free.
Instructions to All Persons
December 1941–1988
On the West Coast, generals, politicians and newspapers demanded that Japanese Americans be removed. Fear of invasion was real. So was the prejudice: for decades, the law had barred Japanese immigrants from citizenship.
On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It let the Army clear “any or all persons” from military areas. It named no group. The Army used it on one.
On March 24, the first order went up on Bainbridge Island, across the water from Seattle. Families had six days. The island's newspaper, the Bainbridge Review, protested:
Walter C. Woodward …this high-handed, much-too-short evacuation order…
They were allowed to take what they could carry.
About 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were sent to camps in deserts and swamps. About two in three were American citizens. In Hawaii, where more than a third of the people were Japanese American, there was no mass removal.
A federal commission later found not one documented act of espionage or sabotage by a West Coast Japanese American.
Fred Korematsu, a welder in Oakland, refused to go. He was arrested and convicted. In 1944 the Supreme Court upheld his conviction, six to three.
Justice Hugo Black wrote for the majority.
Justice Hugo L. Black Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race.
Justice Robert Jackson dissented.
Justice Robert H. Jackson The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.
The same day, in Mitsuye Endo's case, the Court ruled the government couldn't hold a citizen it agreed was loyal. Within a year, most of the camps had closed.
In 1988, Congress passed a formal apology and $20,000 for each survivor still living.
Strangers in Our Fields
1929–1943
In the 1930s, officials pushed at least 400,000 people of Mexican descent to leave for Mexico. Many were American citizens.
In 1942 the United States asked Mexico for workers again. The first 1,500 braceros stepped off a train in Stockton, California, on September 29.
The contract promised fair wages, decent housing and no discrimination. Ten percent of each man's pay went into savings, payable in Mexico. Many never saw it.
In 1943 Mexico barred Texas from the program, because of how Texas treated Mexicans. The ban lasted until 1947.
Push workers out when jobs were scarce. Invite them back when they weren't. Don't let them stay.
In Los Angeles, young Mexican Americans wore zoot suits: long coats, wide trousers, a lot of cloth. Remember the rule about cloth? Newspapers called the suits unpatriotic.
In June 1943, sailors and soldiers pulled young Mexican Americans from theaters and streetcars. They beat them and stripped them. Police arrested the victims.
A Mexican American youth council wired President Roosevelt.
On June 8 the military declared Los Angeles off limits to its men. The attacks stopped.
More than 300,000 Mexican Americans served in the armed forces in the war.
For the Duration
June 1945 → 1963
On June 28, 1945, a tractor towed the last B-24 out of Willow Run. Ford's plant had built 8,685 of them.
Within months, the duration ended. Employers laid off millions of war workers. Women and Black workers were often the first to go.
The first V came in 1945. The war ended the Depression and left the country richer than it had ever been.
The second V was started, not finished.
Americans would remember this as “the Good War.” The people in this film knew it was more complicated.
They had learned how to fight for it. In 1963, A. Philip Randolph finally held his march on Washington.
James G. Thompson I love America and am willing to die for the America I know will someday become a reality.