World War II: Mobilization in two minutes
- Mobilization ended the Depression: the War Production Board converted factories to war goods, federal spending grew about tenfold, and unemployment fell from about 15 percent (1940) to about 1 percent (1944).
- Higher taxes, including withholding from 1943, and war bonds paid for the war, while the Office of Price Administration froze prices and rationed gasoline, meat and sugar.
- Nearly five million more women went to work, many in war plants, but they earned less than men, and employers laid off many when the war ended.
- A. Philip Randolph's planned March on Washington won Executive Order 8802 (June 1941), which banned discrimination in defense industries; the Double V campaign linked victory abroad to equality at home.
- War jobs drew African Americans north and west, the Bracero Program (1942) brought Mexican workers, and in 1943 a race riot hit Detroit and servicemen attacked Mexican Americans in Los Angeles.
- Under Executive Order 9066 (February 1942), the government sent about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them citizens, to camps, and Korematsu v. United States (1944) upheld the removal order.
- On the exam: Topic 7.12 tests continuity and change in the war's effects on the economy, women, minorities and civil liberties; compare it with World War I and the New Deal.
Topic 7.12 key terms
- Segregation
The separation of Black and white Americans in jobs, schools, housing and public places. Laws required it across the South; custom enforced it in much of the rest of the country.
- Double V campaign
A 1942 campaign launched by the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading Black newspaper. It called for victory over the Axis abroad and over racial discrimination at home, and tied the fight for civil rights to the war effort.
- Mobilization
Organizing a nation's people, factories and money for war. After Pearl Harbor, U.S. war production took millions of jobless workers back to work and helped end the Great Depression.
- Home front
Civilian life during a war: the factories, farms, families and government agencies that produced and paid for the fighting.
- War Production Board (1942)
The federal agency that ran war industry. It set production priorities, assigned scarce raw materials and halted civilian goods.
- Cost-plus contract
A government contract that paid a firm's costs plus a fixed fee as profit, so the company carried little risk.
- Arsenal of democracy (1940)
Roosevelt's December 1940 phrase for America's role: it would make the weapons Britain and its allies needed, even before it entered the war.
- Manhattan Project (1942–45)
The secret federal program that built the first atomic bombs, with research and production sites at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Hanford.
- Office of Price Administration (OPA)
The wartime agency that froze prices and rents and rationed scarce goods, such as gasoline and meat, to fight inflation.
- Black market
Illegal buying and selling of rationed or price-controlled goods, usually above the legal price.
- Withholding
Income tax taken straight out of each paycheck before the worker sees it. It began in July 1943; some textbooks say 1944.
- Office of War Information (OWI)
The wartime agency that used posters, radio shows and photographs to keep Americans working, saving and buying war bonds.
- Smith–Connally Act (1943)
A wartime law, passed over Roosevelt's veto, that let the government seize war plants shut by strikes and required a cooling-off period before a strike.
- Rosie the Riveter
The symbol of the millions of women who took factory and shipyard jobs in World War II. The name comes from a 1942 song, and the image was attached to a wartime poster decades later.
- Second Great Migration
The movement of millions of Black Americans from the South to cities in the North and West, from about 1940 to 1970. War jobs drew the first big wave.
- Auxiliary local
A second-class branch of a union, set up for workers the main local would not admit. Black members paid dues but had no vote and little say over their jobs.
- Magnuson Act (1943)
The law that repealed the Chinese Exclusion Acts in December 1943. It let Chinese immigrants become citizens but set a quota of only 105 new immigrants a year.
- For the duration
Wartime shorthand for 'until the war ends.' Many war jobs, and many of the rules that opened them, were promised only for that long.
- Executive Order 8802 (1941) and the FEPC
Roosevelt's 1941 order banning racial discrimination in defense industries and government. It created the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to investigate complaints.
- Hate strike
A walkout by white workers to protest working beside, or under, Black workers.
- Smith v. Allwright (1944)
Supreme Court ruling that excluding Black voters from party primaries violated the Constitution.
- Executive Order 9066 (1942)
President Roosevelt's order letting the military set up zones from which “any or all persons” could be excluded. It named no group, but the Army used it to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast.
- Internment
The forced removal and confinement of Japanese Americans during the war. Most were U.S. citizens, so the government's own 1983 commission and many historians now also call it “incarceration.”
- Issei and Nisei
Issei were the immigrants from Japan, barred by law from becoming citizens. Nisei were their children, born in the United States and citizens by birth.
- Korematsu v. United States (1944)
The Supreme Court upheld, 6–3, the conviction of a U.S. citizen who refused to obey the exclusion order. In 1983 a federal court overturned Korematsu's conviction.
- Ex parte Endo (1944)
The Supreme Court ruled on the same day as Korematsu that the government could not keep holding a citizen it conceded was loyal. Mitsuye Endo, a Nisei from Sacramento, had challenged her confinement in court.
- Repatriation (1930s)
The removal of people of Mexican descent from the United States to Mexico during the Great Depression, by deportation or by pressure to leave. Many of those who went were U.S. citizens.
- Bracero Program (1942–1964)
A U.S.–Mexico agreement that brought Mexican men to work on U.S. farms and railroads on short contracts. Bracero comes from brazo, Spanish for arm: a man who works with his arms.
- Sleepy Lagoon case (1942)
A Los Angeles case in which police rounded up hundreds of young Mexican Americans after a man was found dying near a reservoir; 17 were convicted. An appeals court threw out the convictions in 1944.
- Zoot Suit Riots (1943)
Six days of attacks in June 1943 in which U.S. servicemen beat young Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and tore off their zoot suits. The police arrested mostly the victims.
- Last hired, first fired
The usual order of layoffs: the newest workers go first. Women and Black workers had been hired last in the war boom, so many lost their jobs first.
- The Good War
The nickname many Americans later gave World War II. Unity behind its democratic ideals helped that generation remember it as a just, shared cause. The home front also held segregation, riots and internment.
- Wartime solidarity
Fighting or working side by side softened prejudices based on nationality, ethnicity and religion, and the wartime migrations opened many Americans' eyes to racial discrimination. Other prejudices hardened.
- March on Washington (1963)
The August 28, 1963 rally at the Lincoln Memorial for jobs and freedom. About 200,000 people came, and Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. A. Philip Randolph, who had planned a march in 1941, directed it.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Half American
January 1942 → 1944
Key terms: Segregation, Double V campaign, Mobilization, Home front
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
Key terms: War Production Board (1942), Cost-plus contract, Arsenal of democracy (1940), Manhattan Project (1942–45)
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
Key terms: Office of Price Administration (OPA), Black market, Withholding, Office of War Information (OWI), Smith–Connally Act (1943)
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
Key terms: Rosie the Riveter, Second Great Migration, Auxiliary local, Magnuson Act (1943), For the duration
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
Key terms: Executive Order 8802 (1941) and the FEPC, Second Great Migration, Hate strike, Double V campaign, Smith v. Allwright (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
Key terms: Executive Order 9066 (1942), Internment, Issei and Nisei, Korematsu v. United States (1944), Ex parte Endo (1944)
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
Key terms: Repatriation (1930s), Bracero Program (1942–1964), Sleepy Lagoon case (1942), Zoot Suit Riots (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
Key terms: Last hired, first fired, The Good War, Wartime solidarity, March on Washington (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 who lived it 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.