Contextual Essay

Any inquiry into the effects of World War II wartime mobilization on the American home front should likely begin with a general outline of the major events and developments in this arena. As Alan Milward’s War, Economy, and Society, 1939-1945, and Gerald Nash’s The Great Depression and World War II: Organizing America, 1933-1945 illustrate , in World War II, the United States appears to have made a strategic decision to fight a war of production. Speaking to Congress in 1942, President Roosevelt asked not for an advantage in this regard but for a “crushing superiority.” America would aid its allies and, beginning in 1942, vanquish its enemies, by producing a vastly greater number of planes, boats, and weapons. It would also make available a decisive quantity of productive labor and what the military termed POL supplies: Petroleum, Oil, and Lubricants. Indeed, with respect to the latter category, as Daniel Yergin notes in The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, between 1941 and 1945 the United States and its wartime allies consumed 7 billion barrels of oil, 6 billion of which came from U.S. production. “This is a war of engines and octanes,” Joseph Stalin declared at a wartime banquet for Winston Churchill. “I drink to the American auto industry and the American oil industry.” (Yergin, p. 382)

The 1946 retrospective produced by the Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War: Development and Administration of the War Program, describes the altered administrative apparatus by which the federal government accomplished these feats. The wartime creation of the National War Labor Board, the War Manpower Commission, the War Production Board, and the Office of Price Administration suggested that if the federal government was not interested in directing the wartime economy, it certainly hoped to exert great influence upon it. Eliot Janeway’s The Struggle for Survival: A Chronicle of Economic Mobilization in World War II outlines the ways in which this motivation and these bureaucracies shaped economic policy. Rationing, price control, extensive subsidy, and attempts to mitigate labor strife marked the new approach, but so did an only slightly more subtle transformation in business-government cooperation, race relations, and the place of women in the American workplace.

As Janeway and Milward imply, the United States, during this period, also appeared to accept the basic tenets of the Keynesian economic revolution that it had otherwise been slow to embrace. The budget-balancing exercise of 1937-38 was quickly forgotten and would not be repeated until several years after the war. With President Roosevelt leading the way—much as Keynes had advised—the White House and many of its political allies dropped all references to “economic royalists,” and large-scale American businesses came in for a much more charitable and patient treatment. “Businessmen,” Keynes had reminded Roosevelt, “have a different set of delusions from politicians; and need, therefore, different handling. . . . If you work them into the surly, obstinate, terrified mood, of which domestic animals, wrongly handled, are so capable, the nation’s burdens will not get carried to market; and in the end public opinion will veer their way.” (John Maynard Keynes to Franklin Roosevelt, 1 February 1938 in Zinn p. 408) That these enterprises could be induced to invest and produce and assist the American war effort was the principal object of such change; that they be encouraged to pass on a substantial part of their potentially enormous profits to both workers and consumers was nearly as significant. The relatively new minimum wage law, tentative support for burgeoning unionization, extensive government outlays for industrial labor, and the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943—which introduced wage withholding and a broader and more progressive tax code—combined to insure that the federal government’s deficit spending would encourage the redistribution and consumption that Keynes had declared insufficient in the 1930s.

As Nelson Lichtenstein’s Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II makes clear, the war presented American workers with both gains and losses. No-strike pledges and wage and price controls, which tended to control wages better than prices, placed American labor unions in a precarious wartime position. Nevertheless, the 1942 NWLB “maintenance of membership” ruling preserved closed shops and led to vast increases in the numbers of unionized employees in the United States (up by 50 percent from 1940 to 1945), allowing labor’s gains to outpace its setbacks. The wartime spending power of American workers proceeded apace. Corporate profits, meanwhile, increased at an even faster rate, rising in 1945 to levels twice that of 1940.

With great financial rewards for businesses participating in the mobilization effort, this new economic regime would ask, prod, and sometimes require these corporations to change their management practices. As Bruce Catton’s The Warlords of Washington and I.F. Stone’s The War Years, 1939-1945 make clear, however, many U.S. businesses cooperated in this scheme only reluctantly. Outright disobedience was not uncommon, corporate “sit-down strikes” hampered both the war effort and economic recovery, and the spirit of anti-New Deal business organizations, such as the American Liberty League, lived on. Attorney General Francis Biddle’s April 1944 eviction of Montgomery Ward president Sewell Avery, a Liberty League member who had refused to honor the “maintenance-of-membership” rule, reminded millions of Americans of this lingering insubordination. The introduction of a massive corporate tax cut in 1940, in the form of an accelerated depreciation allowance, indicated that ample supply-side incentives would also likely form a not insignificant part of the new order. In the end, however, it was a corporate liberalism, geared to what some came to call “commercial Keynesianism,” that emerged as the driving force of the post-war American economy.

As striking as this general change in political economy was a geographic makeover, induced by the federal commitment to focus war contracts on the areas of greatest need and with the greatest potential for new, transformative economic networks. As Bruce Schulman illustrates in From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980, the American South was designated as the chief beneficiary of this commitment. Called “the nation’s number one economic problem” by Roosevelt in 1938, and targeted by the federally commissioned Report on Economic Conditions of the South, published in August of that same year, the South was championed by the Roosevelt administration as the ideal region for federally sponsored economic development. Rebuffed during the waning days of the New Deal amid a maelstrom of reaction and the “Roosevelt recession,” President Roosevelt could not deliver on this proposal, however, until the onset of war and the rise of extensive wartime contracting made it, once again, politically feasible. While some of these specially targeted contracts were let many months before American entry into the war, such as that for the Corpus Christi, Texas, Naval Air Station, the attack on Pearl Harbor transformed tentative beginnings into an extensive undertaking. While Schulman’s study highlights the extent of this initiative throughout the South, Jerry Strahan’s Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats that Won World War II offers a detailed analysis of how this happened in one specific southern locale (New Orleans).

Close attention to this issue also underscores the need to examine similar developments in the American West, a section of the country that was less poor but just as ripe for wartime regional planning. Mark Foster’s Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West, and Marilyn S. Johnson’s The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay During World War II, illustrate the extent to which American war contracts magnified earlier development efforts there, altering a region’s social and economic character in the process.

The wartime mobilization of America’s human resources also portended great changes in the nation’s prevailing gender and race relations. Despite the internment of Japanese Americans, the halting progress against racial discrimination in U.S. war plants, and the few lasting opportunities for the social and economic advancement of American women, the nation’s homefront during World War II proved to be the site of great social movement and reform. As John Morton Blum’s V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II recounts, President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, issued on June 25, 1941 after much prodding from African-American labor leader A. Philip Randolph, did much to launch a new era in American race relations. Prohibiting racial discrimination in defense plants and federal agencies, the order was issued at a time of tremendous job growth; it raised the hopes of millions as a result and led to a massive black exodus from the South, a migration in which tens of thousands of southern blacks streamed into Detroit, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area alone. One should recall, of course, that the full employment of the period and the demand for a “crushing” advantage in war production had also encouraged a renewed assault upon prevailing sexual stereotypes and discrimination. While few among the approximately 6 million women who joined the American workforce during World War II would achieve genuine or lasting social advancement because of their wartime employment, as Susan Hartmann notes in The Homefront and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s, such participation undoubtedly helped prepare American men and women for the revolution in gender relations that would begin to emerge gradually over the next generation.

Bibliography:

Blum, John Morton, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).

Bureau of the Budget, The United States at War: Development and Administration of the War Program by the Federal Government (Washington, D.C.: U.S.G.P.O., 1946).

Catton, Bruce, The Warlords of Washington (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948).

Foster, Mark S., Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989).

Hartmann, Susan M., The Homefront and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1982).

Janeway, Eliot, The Struggle for Survival: A Chronicle of Economic Mobilization in World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951).

Johnson, Marilyn S., The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),

Lichtenstein, Nelson, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Milward, Alan, War, Economy, and Society, 1939-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

Nash, Gerald, The Great Depression and World War II: Organizing America, 1933-1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979)

Schulman, Bruce J., From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Stone, I.F., The War Years, 1939-1945: A Non-Conformist History of Our Times (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988).

Strahan, Jerry E., Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats That Won World War II (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994).

Yergin, Daniel, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Touchstone, 1993).

Zinn, Howard, ed., New Deal Thought (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).