HIS Learning Unit 7 (Chapter 22)

V-E Day

For victory in Europe, came the formal end to the war against Germany.

Zoot Suit Riots

Of 1943, in which club-wielding sailors and policemen attacked Mexican-American youths wearing flamboyant clothing on the streets of Los Angeles, illustrated the limits of wartime tolerance.

Good Neighbor Policy

Offered a belated recognition of the sovereignty of America's neighbors.

The Servicemen's Readjustment Act/GI Bill of Rights

Was one of the farthest-reaching pieces of social legislation in American history Aimed at rewarding members of the armed forces for their service and preventing the widespread unemployment and economic disruption that had followed WWI, it profoundly shaped postwar society

Bretton Woods Conference

Also created two American-dominated financial institutions.

Potsdam Conference

The Allied leaders established a military admiration for Germany and agreed to place top Nazi leaders on trial for war crimes.

Holocaust

The horrifying culmination of the Nazi belief that Germans constituted a "master race" destined to rule the world.

Lend-Lease Act

Urged onto Congress by FDR, this authorized military aid so long as countries promised somehow to return it all after the war

The End of the War (pg. 704)

-as 1945 opened, Allied victory was assured -in December 1944, Hitler launched a surprise counterattack in France that pushed Allied forces back fifty miles, creating a large bulge in their lines -the largest single battle ever fought by the US Army, the Battle of the Bulge produced more than 70,000 American casualties, but by early 1945 the assault had failed -in March, American troops crossed the Rhine River and entered the industrial heartland of Germany -Hitler took his own life, and shortly afterward Soviet forces occupied Berlin. -in the Pacific, American forces moved even closer to Japan

The War in Europe (pg. 683)

-the "Grand Alliance" of WWII in Europe brought together the US, GB, and the Soviet Union, each led by an iron-willed, larger than life figure: Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. -the grand alliance was united in determination to defeat Nazi Germany, and they differed in long-range goals -Stalin was set on establishing enough control over eastern Europe that his country would never again be invaded from the west -Churchill hoped to ensure that the british empire emerged intact from the war -FDR, like Woodrow Wilson, hoped to establish a new international order so that world wars would never again take place -bearing the brunt of the fighting after hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin demanded an early Allied attack across the English channel to confront German forces in occupied France and relieve pressure on his beleaguered army -churchill's strategy was to attack the "soft underbelly" of Axis power through Allied operations in the Mediterranean, starting with an invasion of North Africa -Churchill's approach prevailed, and the cross-channel invasion did not come until 1944 -by the Spring of 1943, the Allies also gained the upper hand in the Atlantic, as British and American destroyers and planes devastated the German submarine fleet -in July 1943 American and British forces invaded Sicily, beginning the liberation of Italy -a popular uprising in Rome overthrew the Mussolini government, whereupon Germany occupied most of the country. Fighting there raged throughout 1944 -the major involvement of American troops in Europe did not begin until June 6, 1944 -the crucial fighting in Europe, however, took place on the eastern front, the scene of an epic struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union -more than 3 million German soldiers took part in the 1941 invasion -after sweeping through western Russia, German armies in August 1942 launched a siege of Stalingrad, a city located deep inside Russia on the Volga River...this proved to be a catastrophic mistake. -bolstered by an influx of military supplies from the US, the Russians surrounded the German troops and forced them to surrender in January 1943. Stalingrad marked the turning point of the European war -of 13.6 million German casualties in WWII, 10 million came on the Russian front -Millions of Poles and at least 20 million Russians, probably many more, perished--not only soldiers but civilian victims of starvation, disease, and massacres by German soldiers. -After Hitler's armies had penetrated eastern Europe in 1941, moreover, he embarked on the "final solution"--the mass extermination of "undesirable" peoples--Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, and Jews -by 1945, 6 million Jewish men, women, and children had died in Nazi death camps

Planning the Postwar World (pg. 707)

-Churchill, FDR, and Soviet chief Joseph Stalin met at Tehran, Iran in 1943 and at Yalta in the southern Soviet Union early in 1945 to hammer out agreements -the final "Big Three" conference took place at Potsdam, near Berlin in July 1945 and it involved Stalin, Truman, and Churchill (replaced midway in the talks by Clement Attlee, who became prime minister when his Labour Party swept the British elections.) -relations among the three Allies were uneasy, since each wanted to maximize their postwar powers -neither Britain nor the US trusted Stalin -but since Stalin's troops had won the war on the eastern front, it was difficult to resist his demand that eastern Europe become a Soviet sphere of influence

"The Most Terrible Weapon" (pg. 705)

-FDR defeated Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of New York, to win an unprecedented 4th term in 1944 -FDR did not live to see the Allied victory, he had a stroke on April 12, 1945 -to his successor, Harry S. Truman fell one of the most momentous decisions ever confronted by an American president--whether to use the atomic bomb against Japan...who did not know about the bomb until he became president -then, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson informed him that the US had secretly developed "the most terrible weapon ever known in human history." -the bomb was a practical realization of the theory of relativity, a rethinking of the laws of physics developed early in the 20th century by the German scientist Albert Einstein -energy and matter, Einstein shower, were two forms of the same phenomenon -by using certain forms of uranium, or the man-made plutonium, scientists could create an atomic reaction that transformed part of the mass into energy--or it could be used to explode something

Labor in Wartime (pg. 688)

-during the war labor entered a three-sided arrangement with government and business that allowed union membership to soar to unprecedented levels -in order to secure industrial peace and stabilize war production, the federal government forced reluctant employers to recognize unions -in 1944 when Montgomery Ward, the large mail-order company, defied a pro-union order, the army seized its headquarters and physically evicted its president. for their part, union leaders agreed not to strike -by 1945 union membership stood at nearly 15 million, one-third of the non-farm labor force and the highest proportion in American history -Congress continued to be dominated by a conservative alliance of Republicans and southern Democrats -despite the "no strike" pledge, 1943 and 1944 witnessed numerous brief walkouts in which workers protested the increasing speed of assembly-line production and the disparity between wages frozen by government order and expanding corporate profits

Good Neighbors (pg. 678)

-international relations played a minor role in public affairs -in 1933 FDR, hoping to stimulate American trade, he exchanged ambassadors with the Soviet Union whose government his Republican predecessors had stubbornly refused to recognize -FDR formalized a policy initiated by Hoover by which the US repudiated the right to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of Latin American countries -but the US lent its support to dictators like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo Molina in the Dominican Republic, and Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch," FDR said of Somoza

An American Dilemma (pg. 703)

-no event reflected the new concern with the status of black Americans more than the publications of the 1944 An American Dilemma written by the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal. the book offered an uncompromising portrait of how deeply racism was entrenched in law, politics, economics, and social behavior. but Myrdal combined this sobering analysis with admiration for what he called the American Creed--belief in equality, justice, equal opportunity, and freedom. he concluded that "there is bound to be a redefinition of the Negro's status as a result of this War." -Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois had said much the same thing. -Myrtles book identified a serious national problem and seemed to offer an almost painless path to peaceful change, in which the federal government would take the lead in outlawing discrimination

The Dawn of the Atomic Age (pg. 705)

-on August 6, 1945 an American plane dropped an atomic bomb that detonated over Hiroshima, Japan--a target chosen because almost alone among major Japanese cities, it had not yet suffered damage -of the city's population, 280,000 civilians and 40,000 soldiers, about 70,000 died immediately -because of atomic radiation, the death toll rose to 140,000 by the end of the year -on August 9m the US exploded a second bomb over Nagasaki, killing 70,000 people -on the same day, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria and within the week Japan surrendered -because of the enormous cost in civilian lives--more than twice America's military fatalities in the entire Pacific war--the use of the bomb remains controversial -An American invasion on Japan might have costed more than 250,000 lives -Japan's economy had been crippled and its fleet destroyed, and it would now have to fight the Soviet Union as well as the US had the US not shot the bomb

The American Dilemma (pg. 693)

-the struggle against Nazi tyranny and its theory of a master race discredited ethnic and racial inequality -What set the US apart from its wartime foes, the government insisted, was not only dedication to the ideals of the Four Freedoms but also the principle that Americans of all races, religions, and national origins could enjoy those freedoms equally -by the end of the war, the new immigrant groups had been fully accepted as loyal ethnic Americans, rather than members of distinct and inferior "races" -the contradiction between the principle of equal freedom and the actual status of blacks had come to the forefront of national life

Second Great Migration

About 700,000 black migrants poured out of the South on what they called "liberty trains," seeking jobs in the industrial heartland

Japanese-American Internment (pg. 698)

-inspired by exaggerated fears of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast and pressured by whites who saw an opportunity to gain possession of Japanese-American property, the military persuaded FDR to issue Executive Order 9066. -Promulgated in February 1942, this ordered the relocation of all persons of Japanese descent from the West Coast -that spring and summer, authorities removed more than 110,000 men, women, and children--nearly 2/3 of them American citizens--to camps far from their homes -the order did not apply to persons of Japanese descent living in Hawaii, where they made up nearly 40% of the population -depites Hawaii's vulnerability, its economy could not function without Japanese-American labor -the internees were subjected to a quasi-military discipline in the camps -living in former horse stables, makeshift shacks, or barracks behind barbed-wire fences, they were awakened for roll call at 6:45 each morning and ate their meals in giant mess halls -the internees did their best to create an atmosphere of home, decorating their accommodations with pictures, flowers, and curtains, planting vegetable gardens, and setting up activities like sports clubs and art classes for themselves -japanese-american internment revealed how easily war can undermine basic freedoms---there were no court hearings, no due process, and no writs of habeas corpus -one searches the wartime record in vain for public protests among non-Japanese against the gravest violation of civil liberties since the end of slavery -the government established a loyalty oath program, expecting Japanese-Americans to swear allegiance to the government that had imprisoned them and to enlist in the army. Some young men refused, and about 200 were sent to prison for resisting the draft...but 20,000 Japanese-Americans joined the armed forces from the camps, along with another 13,000 from Hawaii -In 1944, Sono Isato danced the role of an American beauty queen in the musical On the Town on Broadway, and her brother fought for the US Army in the Pacific theater, while the government interned her for acknowledging the injustice done to Japanese-Americans followed the end of the war. -in 1988, Congress apologized for internment and provided $20,000 in compensation to each surviving victim

Bracero Program

Under the Bracero Program agreed to by the Mexican and American governments in 1942 (the name derives from brazo, the Spanish word for arm), tens of thousands of contract workers crossed into the US to take up jobs as domestic and agricultural workers

Toward Intervention (pg. 681)

-FDR viewed Hitler as a mad gangster whose victories posed a direct threat to the US, but most Americans wished to stay out of the conflict -Congress in 1940 agreed to allow the sale of arms to Britain on a "cash and carry" basis--that is, they had to be paid in cash and transported in British ships.....it also approved plans for military rearmament -opponents of involvement in Europe organized the America First Committee, with hundreds of thousands of members and a leadership that included such well-known figures as Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and Charles A. Lindbergh -in 1940, breaking with a tradition that dated back to George Washington, Roosevelt announced his candidacy for a third term as president....the international situation was too dangerous and domestic recovery too fragile, he insisted, for him to leave office -Republicans chose as his opponent a political amateur, Wall Street businessman and lawyer Wendell Willkie -Willkie, who endorsed New Deal social legislation, captured more votes than FDR's previous opponents...but FDR still won with a decisive victory -soon after his reelection, FDR in December 1940 announced that the US would become the "arsenal of democracy," providing Britain and China with military supplies in their fight against Germany and Japan -During 1941 the US became close allies with those fighting Germany and Japan -under the law's provisions, the US funneled billions of dollars worth of arms to Britain and China, as well as the Soviet Union, after Hitler renounced his nonaggression pact and invaded that country in June 1941. -FDR also froze Japanese assets in the US, halting virtually all trade between the countries, including the sale of oil vital to Japan

Blacks and the War (pg. 700)

-Nazi Germany cited American practices as proof of its own race policies. -Washington remained a segregated city -The Red Cross refused to mix blood from blacks and whites in its blood banks (thereby, critics charged, in effect accepting Nazi race theories) -Charles Drew, the black scientist who pioneered the techniques of storing and shipping blood plasma--a development of immense importance to the treatment of wounded soldiers--protested bitterly against this policy, pointing out that it has no scientific basis. -the war spurred a movement of black population from the rural South to the cities of the North and West that dwarfed the Great Migration of WWI and the 1920s. -blacks encountered violent hostility -in 1943, a fight at a Detroit city park spiraled into a race riot that left 34 persons dead, and a "hate strike" of 20,000 workers protested the upgrading of black employees in a plant manufacturing aircraft engines

Yalta and Bretton Woods (pg. 707)

-Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan later in 1945 and to allow "free and unfettered elections" in Poland, but he was intent on establishing communism in eastern Europe -Yalta saw the high-water mark of wartime American-Soviet cooperation, but it planted seeds of conflict since the participants soon disagreed over the fate of eastern Europe -tension between Britain and the US existed since Churchill rejected American pressure to place India and other British colonies on the road to independence. He concluded private deals with Stalin to divide southern and eastern Europe into British and Soviet spheres of influence -Britain also resisted, unsuccessfully, American efforts to reshape and dominate the postwar economic order -a meeting of representatives of 45 nations at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 replaced the British pound with the dollar as the main currency for international transactions -the World Bank would provide money to developing countries and to help rebuild Europe -the International Monetary Fund would work to prevent governments from devaluing their currencies to gain and advantage in international trade, as many had done during the Depression -both of these institutions, American leaders believed, would encourage free trade and the growth of the world economy, an emphasis that remains central to American foreign policy to this day

The Road to Serfdom (pg. 693)

-The Road to Serfdom (1944) a surprise best-seller by Friedrich A. Hayek, a previously obscure Austrian-born economist, claimed that even the best-intentioned government efforts to direct the economy posed a threat to individual liberty -Hayek offered a new intellectual justification for opponents of active government -in a complex economy, he insisted, no single person or group of experts could possibly possess enough knowledge to direct economic activity intelligently -a free market, he wrote, mobilizes the fragmented and partial knowledge scattered throughout society far more effectively than a planned economy -by equating fascism, socialism, and the New Deal and by identifying economic planning with a loss of freedom, he helped lay the foundation for the rise of modern conservatism and a revival of laissez-faire economic thought -as the war drew to a close, the stage was set for a renewed battle over the government's proper role in society and the economy, and the social conditions of american freedom

Patriotic Assimilation (pg. 694)

-WWII created a vast melting pot, especially for European immigrants and their children -what one historian has called their "patriotic assimilation" differed sharply from the forced Americanization of WWI -horrified by the uses to which the Nazis put the idea of inborn racial difference, biological and social scientists abandoned belief in a link among race, culture, and intelligence, an idea only recently central to their disciplines -Ruth Benedict's Races and Racism (1942) described racism as "a travesty of scientific knowledge." -by the wars end, racism and nativism had been stripped of intellectual respectability, at least outside the South, and were viewed as psychological disorders -many business and government circles still excluded Jews -along with the fact that early reports of the Holocaust were too terrible to be believed, anti-Semitism contributed to the government's unwillingness to allow more than a handful of European Jews (21,000 during the course of the war) to find refuge in the US -FDR himself learning during the war of the extent of Hitler's "final solution" to the Jewish presence in Europe, but he failed to authorize airstrikes that might have destroyed German death camps

The War in the Pacific (pg. 682)

-WWII has been dubbed a "gross national product war," meaning that its outcome turned on which coalition of combatants could outproduce the other -Japan in early 1942 conaquered Burma (Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand) as well as Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), whose extensive oil fields could replace supplies from the US. Japan also took over Guam, the Philippines, and other Pacific islands -at Bataan, in the Philippines, the Japanese forced surrender in American military history. thousands perished on the ensuring "death march" to a prisoner-of-war camp. at the same time, German submarines sank hundreds of Allied merchant and naval vessels during the Battle of the Atlantic -in May 1942, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, the American navy turned back a Japanese fleet intent on attacking Australia -the following month, it inflicted devastating losses on the Japanese navy in the Battle of Midway Island -American codebreakers had managed to decipher the Japanese communications code, so the navy was forewarned about the timing of the assault at Midway and prepared an ambush for the attacking fleet....within the battle four Japanese aircraft carriers were destroyed -Midway was the turning point of the Pacific naval war -the victories there and in the Coral Sea allowed American forces to launch the bloody campaigns that one by one drove the Japanese from fortified islands like Guadalcanal and the Solomons in the western Pacific and brought American troops ever closer to Japan

Peace, but Not Harmony (pg. 708)

-WWII redistributed world power -Japan and Germany, the two dominant military powers in their regions before the war, were utterly defeated -Britain and France, though won, were weakened -the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe created a division soon to be solidified in the Cold War -the dropping of the atomic bombs left a worldwide legacy of fear -the Four Freedoms speech had been intended primarily to highlight the differences between Anglo-American ideals and Nazism

The Nature of the War (pg. 706)

-all wars inflict suffering on non-combatants -of the estimated 50 million persons who perished during WWII (including 400,000 American soldiers), perhaps 20 million were civilians -Germany had killed millions of "inferior races" -the Allies carried out deadly air assaults on civilian populations -early in 1945, the firebombing of Dresden killed some 100,000 people, mostly women, children, and elderly men. -on March 9, nearly the same number died in an inferno caused by the bombing of Tokyo -4 years of war propaganda had dehumanized the Japanese in Americans' eyes and few people criticized Truman's decision in 1945. The public doubts began to surface, especially after John Hersey published Hiroshima (1946), a graphic account of the horrors suffered by the civilian population -General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who thought the use of the bomb unnecessary, later wrote "I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."

Business and the War (pg. 687)

-americans marveled the achievements of wartime manufacturing -thousands of aircraft, 100,000 armored vehicles, and 2.5 million trucks rolled off American assembly lines, and entirely new products like synthetic rubber replaced natural resources now controlled by Japan -government-sponsored scientific research perfected inventions like radar, jet engines, and early computers that helped to win the war and would have a large impact on postwar life. -federal funds reinvigorated established manufacturing areas and created entirely new industrial centers -WWII saw the West Coast emerge as a focus of military-industrial production -the government invested billions into the shipyards of Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco and in the steel plants and aircraft factories of southern California -by the end of the war, California had received 1/10 of all federal spending -nearly 2 million Americans moved to California for jobs in defense-related industries and millions more passed through for military training and embarkation to the Pacific war -in the South, the combination of rural out-migration and government investment in a military-related factories and shipyards hastened a shift from agricultural to industrial employment -the South remained very poor when the war ended, most of its rural population still lived in small wooden shacks with no indoor plumbing

Blacks and Military Service (pg. 701)

-at the beginning of WWII blacks were not allowed in the air force and marines -the army restricted the number of black enlistees and contained only five black officers, three of them chaplains -the navy accepted blacks only as waiters and cooks -during the war, more than 1 million blacks served in the armed forces in segregated units usually confined to construction, transport, and other noncombat tasks -black soldiers sometimes had to give up their seats on railroad cars to accommodate Nazi POWs -the GI Bill contained no racial differentiation in offering benefits like health care, college tuition assistance, job training, and loans to start a business or purchase a farm....but local authorities who administered its provisions allowed southern black veterans to use its education benefits only at segregated colleges, limited their job training to unskilled work and low-wage service jobs, and restricted loans for farm purchase to white veterans

Mobilizing the War (pg. 686)

-by the end of WWII, some 50 million men had registered for the draft and 10 million had been inducted into the military -the army exemplified how the war united American society in new ways -military service threw together Americans from every region and walk of life, and almost every racial and ethnic background...although African-Americans still served in segregated units -the federal government ended voluntary enlistment in 1942, relying entirely on the draft for manpower -by contrast, in the decades following the vietnam war, the armed forces have been composed entirely of volunteers and the military included very few men and women from middle and upper-class backgrounds -WWII transformed the role of the national government -FDR created federal agencies like the War Production Board, the War Manpower Commission, and the Office of Price Administration to regulate the allocation of labor, control the shipping industry, establish manufacturing quotas, and fix wages, prices, and rents -the number of federal workers rose from 1 million to 4 million, helping to push the unemployment rate down from 14% in 1940 to 2% three years later -the government built housing for war workers and forced civilian industries to retool for war production -Michigan's auto factories now turned out trucks, tanks, and jeeps for the army -the gross national product rose from $91 billion to $214 billion during the war, and the federal government's expenditures amounted to twice the combined total of the previous 150 years -the government marketed billions of dollars worth of war bonds, increased taxes, and began the practice of withholding income tax directly from weekly paychecks

The Double-V (pg. 702)

-during the war, NAACP membership grew from 50,000 to nearly 500,000 -the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded by an interracial group of pacifists in 1942, held sit-ins in northern cities to integrate restaurants and theaters. -in February that year, the Pittsburgh Courier coined the phrase that came to symbolize black attitudes during the war---the double-v. -Victory over Japan and Germany, it insisted, must be accompanied by victory over segregation at home...black newspapers pointed out the gap between ideals and reality -surveying wartime public opinion, a political scientist concluded that "symbols of national solidarity" had very different meanings to white and black Americans -to blacks freedom from fear meant among other things, an end to lynching, and freedom from want included doing away with "discrimination in gettings jobs"

Women at Work (pg. 690)

-during the war, the nation engaged in an unprecedented mobilization of "womanpower" to fill industrial jobs vacated by men -hollywood films glorified the independent woman, the private advertising celebrated the achievements of Rosie the Riveter, the female industrial laborer depicted as muscular and self-reliant in Norman Rockwell's famous magazine cover. -with 15 million men in the armed forces, women in 1944 made up more than 1/3 of the civilian work force, and 350,000 served in auxiliary military units -on the West Coast, 1/3 of the workers in aircraft manufacturing and shipbuilding were women -for the first time in history, married women in their 30s outnumbered the young and single among female workers -women forced unions like the United Auto Workers to confront issues like equal pay for equal work, maternity leave, and child-care facilities for working mothers -having enjoyed what one wartime worker called "a taste of freedom" doing "mens" jobs for mens wages and sometimes engaging in sexual activity while unmarried, many women hoped to remain in the labor force once peace returned -"we as a nation" proclaimed one magazine article, "must change our basic attitude toward the work of women" -the government, employers, and unions depicted work as a temporary necessity, not an expansion of women's freedom -when the war ended, most female workers lost their jobs -despite the upsurge in the number of working women, the advertisers' "world of tomorrow" rested on a vision of family-centered prosperity -men in the army assumed women would return home and go back to traditional family life

The United Nations (pg. 708)

-early in the war, the Allies also agreed to establish a successor to the League of Nations -in a 1944 conference at Dumbarton Oaks, near Washington DC, they developed the structure of the UN. -There would be a General Assembly--essentially a forum for discussion where each member enjoyed an equal voice---and a Security Council responsible for maintaining world peace -along with six rotating members, the Council would have five permanent ones--Britain, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the US--each with the power to veto resolutions -in June 1945, representatives of 51 countries met in San Francisco to adopt the UN Charter, which outlawed force or the threat of force as a means of settling international disputes -in July, the US Senate endorsed the charter -in contrast to the bitter dispute over membership in the League of Nations after WWI, only two members of the US Senate voted against joining the UN

"The Way of Life of Free Men" (pg. 692)

-even as Congress moved to dismantle parts of the New Deal, liberal Democrats and their left-wing allies unveiled plans for a postwar economic policy that would allow all Americans to enjoy freedom from want -in 1942 and 1943, the reports of the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) offered a blueprint for a peacetime economy based on full employment, an expanded welfare state, and a widely shared American standard of living -the board called for a "new bill of rights" that would include all Americans in an expanded Social Security system and guarantee access to education, health care, adequate housing, and jobs for able-bodied adults -the NRPB's plan for a "full-employment economy" with a "fair distribution of income," said The Nation, embodied "the way of life of free men" -mindful that public opinion polls showed a large majority of Americans favoring a guarantee of employment for those who could not find work, the president in 1944 called for an "Economic Bill of Rights" -the OG Bill of Rights restricted the power of government in the name of liberty and FDR proposed to expand its power in order to secure full employment, an adequate income, medical care, education, and a decent home for all Americans -already ill and preoccupied with the war, FDR only spoke occasionally of the Economic Bill of Rights during the 1944 presidential campaign -the replacement of Vice President Henry Wallace by Harry S. Truman, then a little-known senator from Missouri, suggested that the president did not intend to do battle with Congress over social policy -Congress did not enact the Economic Bill of Rights, but in 1944 it extended to the millions of returning veterans an array of benefits, including unemployment pay, scholarships for further education, low-cost mortgage loans, pensions, and job training -by 1946 more than 1 million veterans were attending college under its provisions, making up half of total college enrollment -almost 4 million would receive home mortgages, spurring the postwar suburban housing boom

Isolationism (pg. 679)

-hitler had a surprising amount of supporters within the US -obsessed with the threat of communism, some Americans approved of his expansion of German power as a counterweight to the Soviet Union -businessmen did not wish to give up profitable overseas markets -henry ford did business with Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s...and trade with Japan also continued, including shipments of American trucks and aircraft and considerable amounts of oil -ethnic allegiances reinforced Americans' traditional reluctance to enter foreign conflicts -many Americans of Germany and Italian descent celebrated the expansion of national power in their countries of origin, even as they disdained their dictatorial governments -irish-american remained strongly anti-briish

Black Internationalism (pg. 704)

-in the 19th century, black radicals like David Walker and Martin Delany had sought to link the fate of blacks with that of peoples of African descent in other parts of the world, especially the Caribbean and Africa -at the home of George Padmore, a West Indian labor organizer and editor living in London, black American leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson came into contact with future leaders of African independence movements such as Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), and Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria). -through these gatherings, Du Bois, Robeson, and others developed an outlook that linked the plight of black Americans with that of people of color worldwide -WWII stimulated among blacks an even greater awareness of the links between racism in the US and colonialism abroad

War in Europe (pg. 680)

-in the Munich agreement of 1938, Britain and France had caved in to Hitler's aggression. -in 1939, the Soviet Union proposed an international agreement to oppose further German demands for territory -Britain and France, who distrusted Stalin and saw Germany as a bulwark against the spread of communist influence in Europe, refused. -Stalin then signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler, his former sworn enemy -on September 1, immediately after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Germany invaded Poland, which caused Britain and France, who had pledged to protect Poland against aggression, declared war. -within a year, the Nazi blitzkrieg (lightning war) had overrun Poland and much of Scandinavia, Belgium, and the Netherlands -on June 14, 1940, German troops occupied Paris. Hitler now dominated nearly all of Europe, as well as North Africa -In September 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan created a military alliance known as the Axis -for one critical year, Britain stood alone in fighting against Germany -in the Battle of Britain of 1940-1941, German planes launched devastating attacks on London and other cities -the Royal Air Force eventually turned back the air assault

Asian-Americans in Wartime (pg. 698)

-more than 50,000--the children and grandchildren of immigrants from China, Japan, and Korea, and the Philippeans--fought in the army, mostly in all-asian units -with China an ally in the Pacific war, Congress in 1943 ended decades of complete exclusion by establishing a nationality quota for Chinese immigrants----the annual limit of 105 hardly suggested a desire for a large-scale influx -the image of Chinese as gallant fighters defending their country against Japanese aggression called into question long-standing racial stereotypes -Japanese propaganda depicted Americans as self-indulgent people contaminated by ethnic and racial diversity as opposed to the racially "pure" Japanese -in the US, long-standing prejudices and the attack on Pearl Harbor combined to produce a strong hatred for Japan -Government propaganda and war films portrayed the Japanese foe as rats, dogs, gorillas, and snakes--beastial and subhuman -they blamed Japanese aggression on a violent racial or national character, not, as in the case of Germany and Italy, on tyrannical rulers -about 70% of Japanese-Americans in the continental US lived in California, where they dominated vegetable farming in the LA area -1/3 were first generation immigrants, or issei, but a substantial majority were nisei--American born, and therefore citizens -most only spoke English and had never been to Japan, and had to combat prevailing prejudice -the government bent over backwards to include German-Americans and Italian-Americans in the war effort -it ordered the arrest of only a handful of the more than 800,000 German and Italian nationals in the US when the war began, but it viewed every person of Japanese ethnicity as a potential spy

The Road to War (pg. 679)

-ominous(unpleasant) developments in Asia and Europe overshadowed events in Latin America. -by the mid 1930's it seemed clear that the rule of law was disintegrating in international relations and that war was on the horizon -in 1931, seeking to expand its military and economic power in Asia, Japan invaded Manchuria, a province of northern China. Six years later, its troops moved farther into China. When the Japanese overran the city of Nanjing, they massacred an estimated 300,000 Chinese prisoners of war and civilians -after brutally consolidating his rule in Germany, Adolf Hitler embarked on a campaign to control the entire continent. in 1936, he sent troops to occupy the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone between France and Germany established after WWI -the failure of Britain, France, and the US to oppose this action convinced Hitler that the democracies could not muster the will to halt his aggressive plans -Italian leader Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, a movement similar to Hitler's Nazism, invaded and conquered Ethiopia. As part of a campaign to unite all Europeans of German origin in a single empire, Hitler in 1938 annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, an ethnically German part of Czechoslovakia. He them shortly thereafter took over the whole country -Germany's campaign accelerated and the Nazies began stripping Jews of citizenship and began deporting them to concentration camps -But Roosevelt had little choice but to follow the policy of "appeasement" adopted by Britain and France, which hoped that agreeing to Hitler's demands would prevent war

Fighting for the Four Freedoms (pg. 688)

-previous conflicts such as the Mexican War and WWI had deeply divided American society -in contrast, WWII came to be remembered as the Good War, a time of national unity in pursuit of indisputable noble goals -by 1940, "To sell goods, we must sell words" had become a motto of advertisers....foremost among the words that helped to "sell" WWII was "freedom" -in 1941 the administration celebrated with considerable fanfare the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights -FDR described their protections against tyrannical government as defining characteristics of American life, central to the rights of "free men and free women" -the "most ambiguous" of the Four Freedoms, Fortune magazine remarked, was freedom from want. -yet this "great inspiring phrase" as a Pennsylvania steelworker put it in a letter to the president, seemed to strike the deepest chord in a nation just emerging from the Depression -FDR initially meant it to refer to the elimination of barriers to international trade, but he quickly came to link freedom from want to an economic goal more relevant to the average citizen--protecting the future "standard of living of the American worker and farmer" by guaranteeing that the depression would not resume after the war. This, he declared, would bring "real freedom for the common man."

Indians During the War (pg. 695)

-some 25,000 served in the army (including the famous Navajo "code-talkers," who transmitted messages in their complex native language, which the Japanese could not decipher -insisting that the US lacked the authority to draft Indian men into the army, the Iroquois issued their own declaration of war against the Axis powers -tens of thousands of Indians left reservations for jobs in war industries -exposed for the first time to urban life and industrial society, many chose not to return to the reservations after the war ended -some indians took advantage of the GI Bill to attend college after the war, an opportunity that had been available to very few indians previously

The Bracero Program (pg. 694)

-southern blacks were still trapped in a rigid system of segregation, Asians could not emigrate to the US or become naturalized citizens, and most American indians still lived on reservations in dismal poverty -initially designed as a temporary response to the wartime labor shortage, the program lasted until 1964, during that period, more than 4.5 million Mexicans entered the US under labor contracts while a slightly larger number were arrested for illegal entry by the Border Patrol -hundreds of thousands of men and women emerged from ethnic neighborhoods, or barrios, to work in defense industries and serve in the army where Mexicans, unlike blacks, were allowed to fight alongside whites -For Mexican-American women, the war offered new opportunities for public participation and higher incomes -"Rosita the Riveter" took her place alongside "Rosie" in the West Coast's multiethnic war production factories -contact with other groups led many to learn English and sparked a rise in interethnic marriages -Mexican-Americans brought complaints of discrimination before the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to fight the practice in the Southwest of confining them to the lowest-paid or paying them lower wages than white workers doing the same jobs -about half a million Mexican-American men and women served in the armed forces

The War and Race (pg. 702)

-the NAACP and American Jewish Congress cooperated closely in advocating laws to ban discrimination in employment and housing -despite considerable resistance from rank-and-file white workers, CIO unions, especially those with strong left-liberal and communist influence, made significant efforts to organize black workers and win them access to skilled positions -blacks in the military alarmed southern politicians -the "war emergency" insisted Governor Frank Dixon of Alabama, "should not be used as a pretext to bring about the abolition of the color line." -even as the war gave birth to the modern civil rights movement, it also planted the seeds for the South's "Massive Resistance" to desegregation during the 1950s. -progress was measurable -the National War Labor Board banned racial wage differentials -in Smith v. Allwright (1944), the Supreme Court outlawed all-white primaries, one of the mechanisms by which southern states deprived blacks of political rights -in the same year, the navy began assigning small numbers of black sailors to previously all-white ships -in the final months of the war, it ended segregation altogether and the army established a few combat units that included both whites and blacks

Toward an American Century (pg. 691)

-the prospect of an affluent future provided a point of unity between New Dealers and conservatives, business and labor---and the promise of prosperity to some extent united two of the most celebrated blueprints for the postwar world -one was the American Century, the publisher Henry Luce's 1941 effort to mobilize the American people both for the coming war and for an era of postwar world leadership. Americans, Luce's book insisted, must embrace the role history had thrust on them as the "dominant power in the world" after the war, American power and American values would underpin a previously unimaginable prosperity--"the abundant life" Luce called it--produced by "free economic enterprise" -Luce's essay anticipated important aspects of the postwar world, but its bombastic rhetoric and a title easily interpreted as a call for an American imperialism aroused immediate opposition among liberals and the left -Henry Wallace offered the response in "The Price of Free World Victory," an address delivered in May 1942 to the Free World Association -Wallace, secretary of agriculture during the 1930s, had replaced Vice President John Nance Garner as FDR's running mate in 1940 -in contrast to Luce's American Century, a world of business dominance no less than of American power, Wallace predicted that the war would usher in a "century of the common man" -governments acting to "humanize" capitalism and redistribute economic resources would eliminate hunger, illiteracy, and poverty -Luce and Wallace had one thing in common--a new conception of America's role in the world, tied to continued international involvement, the promise of economic abundance, and the idea that the American experience should serve as a model for all other nations

Birth of the Civil Rights Movement (pg. 701)

-the war years witnessed the birth of the civil rights movement -angry about the almost complete exclusion of blacks from jobs in the rapidly expanding war industries (of 100,000 aircraft workers in 1940, fewer than 300 were black), the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph in July 1941 called for a March on Washington -his demands included access to defense employment, an end to segregation, and a national anti lynching law -the prospect of thousands of angry blacks descending on Washington remarked one official, "scared the government half to death" -to persuade Randolph to call off the march, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which banned discrimination in defense jobs and established a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to monitor compliance -the first federal agency since Reconstruction to campaign for equal opportunity for black Americans, the FEPC played an important role in obtaining jobs for black workers in industrial plants and shipyards -by 1944 more than 1 million blacks, 300,000 of them women, held manufacturing jobs -"My sister always said that Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks' kitchen," recalled one black woman

The Fifth Freedom (pg. 689)

-under the watchful eye of the War Advertising Council, private companies joined in the campaign to promote wartime patriotism, while positioning themselves and their brand names for the postwar world -alongside advertisements urging Americans to purchase war bonds, guard against revealing military secrets, and grow "victory gardens: to allow food to be sent to the army, the war witnessed a burst of messages marketing advertisers' definition of freedom -with direct criticism to FDR, it was suggested he overlooked a fifth freedom -the National Association of Manufacturers and individual companies bombarded Americans with press releases, radio programs, and advertisements attributing the amazing feats of wartime product to "free enterprise." -with the memory of the Depression still very much alive, businessmen predicted a postwar world filled with consumer goods, with "freedom of choice" among abundant possibilities assured if only private enterprise were liberated from government controls

Pearl Harbor (pg. 681)

-unter November 1941, the administrations attention focused on Europe -but at the end of the month, intercepted Japanese messages revealed that an assault in the Pacific was imminent...although no one knew where it would come -On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes launched from aircraft carriers bombed the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the first attack by a foreign power on American soil since the War of 1812. -Japan launched the attack in hope of crippling American naval power in the Pacific -Japan sought out to East Asia for supplies such as oil and other resources that were no longer supplied by the US...Japan had hoped that destroying the American fleet would establish Japan for years to come as the dominant power of the region -Pearl Harbor was a complete surprise, and within a few hours more than 2,000 American servicemen were killed and 187 aircraft and 18 naval vessels, including 8 battleships, had been destroyed or damaged -Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who saw the president after the attack, remarked that he seemed calm--"his terrible moral problem had been resolved." Terming December 7 "a date which will live in infamy," Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan -The combined vote in Congress was 477 in favor and 1 against--pacifist Jeanette Rankin of Montana, who had voted against American entry into WWI -the next day, Germany declared war on the US, and it was then that the US finally joined the largest war in human history

Fighting for the Four Freedoms (pg. 677)

-wartime mobilization expanded the size and scope of government and energized the economy -the gross national product more than doubled and unemployment disappeared as war production finally conquered the Depression -the labor demand sent millions of women into the workforce and sent a tide of migrants from rural America to the industrial cities of the North and West, permanently altering the nation's social geography -government military spending sparked the economic development of the South and West, laying the foundation for the rise of the modern Sunbelt -the war created a close link between big business and a militarized federal government--a "military industrial complex," as Dwight D. Eisenhower would later call it--that long survived the end of fighting -redrew boundaries of nationalism -government now saw immigrants and their children as loyal Americans -with the US at war with Japan, the government removed more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes and confined them to internment camps -as a means of generating support for the struggle, the Four Freedoms provided a crucial language of national unity.

Manhattan Project

A top-secret program in which American scientists developed an atomic bomb during WWII. The weapon was successfully tested in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. Authorized by FDR in 1940.

Neutrality Acts

Beginning in 1935, lawmakers passed a series of Neutrality Acts that banned travel on belligerents' ships and the sale of arms to countries at war. Congress hoped these policies would allow the US to avoid the conflicts over freedom of the seas that had contributed to involvement in WWI.

Four Freedoms

By far the most popular works of art produced during World War II were paintings of the Four Freedoms by the magazine illustrator Norman Rockwell. In his State of the Union Address, delivered before Congress on January 6, 1941, President Roosevelt spoke eloquently of a future world order founded on the "essential human freedoms": freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The Four Freedoms became Roosevelt's favorite statement of Allied aims. They embodied, Roosevelt declared in a 1942 radio address, the "rights of men of every creed and every race, wherever they live," and made clear "the crucial difference between ourselves and the enemies we face today."

Yalta Conference

FDR and Churchill entered only a mild protest against Soviet plans to retain control of Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and a large part of eastern Poland, in effect restoring Russia's pre-WWI western borders..

Korematsu v. United States

In 1944, the Supreme Court denied the appeal of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American citizen who had been arrested for refusing to present himself for internment. Speaking for a 6-3 majority, Justice Hugo Black, usually an avid defender of civil liberties, upheld the legality of the internment policy, insisting that an order applying only to persons of Japanese descent was not based on race. The Court has never overturned the Korematsu decision. As Justice Robert H. Jackson warned in his dissent, it "lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim" of national security.

D-Day

Nearly 200,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers under the command of General Dwight. D. Eisenhower landed in Normandy in northwestern Europe. More than a million troops followed them ashore in the next few weeks, in the most massive sealand operation in history. After fierce fighting, German armies retreated eastward. By August, Paris had been liberated.

Isolationism

The 1930s version of Americans' long-standing desire to avoid foreign entanglements--and dominated Congress