Chapter 12
Arsenal of Democracy

The United States is like a giant boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.

—British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey to Winston Churchill¹

Winning the war is a matter of oil, bullets and beans.

—Admiral Chester Nimitz²

In 1940 in the New Republic, John Maynard Keynes wrote: “It seems politically impossible for a capitalistic democracy to organize expenditures on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment which would prove my case—except in war conditions.”³ That grand experiment took place in the United States, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the formal entry of the United States into World War II.

In December 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told journalists that “Dr. New Deal” had given way to “Dr. Win the War.” Earlier, on December 29, 1940, almost a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States directly into the war, Roosevelt in a radio address to the American people called for the United States to mobilize its industrial power to aid the British and other victims of Axis imperialism: “American industrial genius, unmatched throughout all the world in the solution of production problems, has been called upon to bring its resources and its talents into action. Manufacturers of watches, of farm implements, of Linotypes and cash registers and automobiles, and sewing machines and lawn mowers and locomotives, are now making fuses and bomb packing crates and telescope mounts and shells and pistols and tanks.”

The president continued: “But all of our present efforts are not enough. We must have more ships, more guns, more planes—more of everything. . . . I want to make it clear that it is the purpose of the nation to build now with all possible speed every machine, every arsenal, every factory that we need to manufacture our defense material. . . . We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”⁴

PREPAREDNESS

Even before the United States entered the war, the country rapidly expanded and reoriented the economy toward war production. In June 1939, Congress passed the Strategic Materials Act, to stockpile critical materials. In August, the War Resources Board was created.

In September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany following the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland. At the time, unemployment in the United States averaged 17 percent and only 1.4 percent of GNP was devoted to military expenditure.⁵ Late in 1939, Congress amended the Neutrality Acts to permit the shipment of arms and other aid to Britain and France. Roosevelt asked Congress for a two-ocean navy and billions more for national defense.

Defense spending increased again following Germany’s invasion of France in May 1940. In June 1940, as Hitler’s armies overran France, the federal government drew up a National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel, many of whom worked on the Manhattan Project, which will be described in chapter 15. In August 1940, the Defense Plant Corporation, funded by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), was created to build defense factories and other facilities. In September 1940, Congress created the first peacetime draft in American history with the Selective Service Act. Also in September 1940, the destroyers-for-bases agreement provided Britain with fifty obsolete US destroyers, in return for ninety-nine-year leases by the United States of specified British military bases around the world.

The Roosevelt administration hoped that the Axis powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy could be defeated without direct US participation in the war by a combination of American aid and economic warfare. On March 11, 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, which permitted the president to send arms or supplies to aid in the defense of any country that he deemed was “vital to the defense of the United States.” Under the lend-lease program, the United States provided $50 billion in aid, much of it in the form of weapons, tanks, locomotives, and other supplies, to its allies Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and China. Two-thirds of lend-lease aid went to Britain and its empire.

Another form of economic aid took the form of international cartels sponsored by the US government. During World War II, the United States engaged in dozens of commodity agreements in industries like coffee, sugar, and wheat, designed to stabilize prices. Most of these were with commodity-exporting Latin American nations whom the United States wanted as allies. In the words of one scholar, “By 1945, much of U.S. foreign trade ran through what were in effect government-controlled cartels.”⁶

By the final quarter of 1941, 16 percent of US GNP was being spent on defense—the equivalent of the highest levels during the Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam.⁷ The United States hoped to thwart Japan’s attempt to consolidate its empire in China without war by starving Japan of crucial war matériel. On October 16, 1940, Roosevelt imposed an embargo on scrap iron and steel exports to countries other than Britain and nations in the Western Hemisphere. This was followed on July 26, 1941, by a US embargo, joined by Britain and the Netherlands, on oil exports to Japan.

Japan faced a choice between abandoning its imperialism or attempting to seize oil and other resources in the British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia and neighboring countries. Choosing to persist, Japan hoped to buy time to consolidate its position in Asia by crippling as much of the US Navy as it could, as it had done in May 1904, when it destroyed much of the Russian fleet in the Russo-Japanese War.

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. On December 11, Germany declared war on the United States.

DRAFTING THE ECONOMY

When World War II began in 1939, the United States was unprepared, with an army of 200,000, a navy of 125,000 and a Marine Corps of 20,000. In 1939 and 1940, American soldiers used trucks to simulate tanks and broomsticks to imitate rifles.⁸

Because of failures of mobilization during World War I, the United States had been forced to rely on munitions supplied by Britain and France. General John J. Pershing complained: “It seems, ‘odd’ that with American genius for manufacturing from iron and steel, we should find ourselves after a year and a half of war almost without these mechanical contrivances which had exercised such a great influence on the western front in reducing infantry losses.”⁹ Following World War I, Congress charged the military with responsibility for ensuring that such a debacle did not occur again. As World War II approached, however, mobilization plans were abandoned and the Roosevelt administration improvised. After several abortive efforts, the administration settled on the Office of War Mobilization in May 1943. Donald Nelson, formerly the chief merchandising executive of Sears, the world’s biggest distribution firm at the time, was appointed by FDR as chairman of the War Production Board in January 1942.

To the disappointment of many on the political Left who wanted a socialized defense sector, the Roosevelt administration chose to mobilize private corporations to produce war matériel, as the Wilson administration had done during World War I. Before the war, the United States had produced 78 percent of the world’s cars and 64 percent of the world’s trucks and buses.¹⁰ After Pearl Harbor, civilian automobile production halted and automobile factories were modified to produce tanks, planes, jeeps, and other vehicles. The Ford Motor Company, for example, made bombers at its eighty-acre Willow Run site outside Detroit as well as tanks instead of cars. Charles Lindbergh described Willow Run as the “Grand Canyon of the mechanized world.”¹¹

Academic American economists played a role in shaping American strategy during the war. In 1942, American policymakers engaged in a secret debate about the feasibility of a US-British invasion of German-occupied Europe in 1943. In a classified report for the War Production Board, two economists, Robert Nathan and Simon Kuznets, concluded that it would not be possible to produce the necessary matériel until 1944 at the earliest. The army’s chief military supply officer, General Brehon Somervell, was furious. He denounced “this board of ‘economists and statisticians’ . . . without any responsibility or knowledge of production.” He called for the suppression of the report, which should “be carefully hidden from the eyes of all thoughtful men.” But the argument of Nathan and Kuznets prevailed, and D-Day was a success in 1944 instead of a disaster in 1943.¹²

STATE CAPITALISM

The United States used state capitalism as well as private capitalism to mobilize the economy for war. The federal government expanded manufacturing capacity both directly, by building factories and war housing, and indirectly, by means of loans and tax breaks to private companies.

The purpose of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which itself had been modeled on the War Finance Corporation of World War I, changed from recapitalizing banks and businesses and funding public works projects to funding the expansion of industry for military purposes. The RFC created and funded a number of wartime agencies, including the Defense Supplies Corporation, the Defense Plant Corporation, the Metals Reserve Company, the Petroleum Reserve Corporation, the Rubber Development Corporation, the Rubber Reserve Company, and the US Commercial Company.

The government invested heavily in aluminum production. Before the war, Alcoa had been the only major producer of aluminum, which was used in airplanes. The federal government built new plants and brought Reynolds Metals Company into the industry. The Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams generated electricity used to make aluminum for aircraft production and other military uses.

When the war ended, the federal government owned more than half of the country’s aluminum-production capacity. The government turned some of its facilities over to Alcoa’s competitors Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation and Reynolds Metal Company.

SYNTHETIC RUBBER

After the Manhattan Project, to be described in chapter 15, the greatest crash program undertaken by the federal government during World War II was the effort to produce synthetic rubber. In 1942, Japan’s conquest of much of Southeast Asia cut the United States off from its major suppliers of natural rubber, leaving it with an eighteen-month supply. Without rubber, the United States could not run its civilian economy, much less mount a successful global war effort.

At the beginning of 1942, only one small synthetic rubber plant existed in the United States and only 540,000 tons had been stockpiled. In September 1942, a committee headed by Bernard Baruch declared the existence of a synthetic-rubber shortage emergency.

The federal government rapidly built synthetic-rubber factories, which were leased to private operators by the Defense Plant Corporation. The factories generated 8,383 long tons in 1941; 22,434 in 1942; 231,722 in 1942; and 753,111 in 1944.¹³

Three-fourths of the synthetic rubber manufactured in the United States during World War II was buna rubber, which derived its name from the chemicals in its makeup: bu from butadiene and na from natrium (sodium). Buna rubber was first synthesized in Germany in the 1930s. The circumstances by which the United States obtained it gave rise to a conspiracy theory about the alleged collaboration between Rockefeller oil interests and Hitler which, like other conspiracy theories, refuses to die.

In 1929, IG Farben, one of Germany’s industrial firms, developed a process to create oil from coal. In order to obtain access to the patents for this process and other innovations, Standard Oil of New Jersey created two joint ventures with IG Farben, called the Standard/IG Company and the Joint American Study Company (Jasco), in which Standard owned 80 percent of the stock and IG Farben 20 percent. Jasco ended up owning the patent rights to the process for artificial synthesis of buna rubber.

Between the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and the US entry in 1941 following Pearl Harbor, Standard and a number of other American firms with similar joint ventures, foreign subsidiaries, or membership in international cartels in particular industries found themselves in a difficult situation. The US government was officially neutral and could not abrogate the contracts without in effect declaring war on Germany, something it was unwilling to do, while it was difficult for the companies to disentangle themselves. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, followed by Germany’s declaration of war against the United States on December 11, solved the problem. The US Alien Property Custodian seized the American assets of IG Farben, including not only its stock in Jasco but also IG Farben’s two important American subsidiaries, General Aniline and its marketing company General Dyestuffs, which controlled 40 percent of the American dyestuffs market.

IG Farben’s buna rubber was easier to make than neoprene, another kind of synthetic rubber developed by DuPont. Immediately following the Pearl Harbor attack, Standard Oil in December 1941 put its buna rubber technology patents into a pool to help American rubber production.

The matter should have ended there. But Thurman Arnold, the Justice Department’s chief antitrust lawyer, chose this moment to sue Standard for its ties to IG Farben. Protesting its innocence, Standard reluctantly settled with the Justice Department, only to find itself subjected to trial in public opinion. Before Senator Harry Truman’s committee overseeing wartime mobilization, Arnold blamed Standard Oil for the rubber shortage in the United States: “We believe that the cartel arrangements with Germany . . . are the principal cause of the present shortage of synthetic rubber.”¹⁴ Arnold’s charges, recycled by journalists and historians, became the basis of enduring conspiracy theories about sinister ties between Hitler’s Germany and Standard Oil, which had long been demonized in the press by Ida Tarbell and others.

The truth was quite different. From 1939 onward, Standard had sought to develop synthetic rubber, but the quality was low and the price was high, compared to natural rubber. In 1940, before the United States entered the war, Standard Oil appealed to the government to build synthetic-rubber plants. The Roosevelt administration rejected the idea, on the assumption that there would be uninterrupted access to the natural rubber supplies of Asia.

The shortage of artificial rubber in the United States was the fault of the government, not of private industry. On coming to power in Germany in 1933, Hitler ordered a four-year plan to make Germany self-sufficient in food and chemicals, in preparation for the war of conquest he already planned. The Nazi regime forced German industry to use artificial rubber, despite its cost and low quality. As a result the German military machine was well supplied with artificial rubber when Hitler launched his war.

Wearying of Arnold’s antibusiness crusade in the middle of a world war in which American success depended on government-business collaboration, President Roosevelt removed him from the Justice Department by “kicking him upstairs” to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. After two years Arnold resigned to found the Washington law firm known today as Arnold and Porter.

INNOVATION FOR VICTORY

In 1947, twice as many Americans worked in industrial-research centers as in 1940.¹⁵ Among the breakthroughs that resulted from wartime research, in addition to nuclear energy, were jet engines, radar, computers, synthetic rubber, and a range of new drugs: penicillin, synthetic quinine, and sulfa drugs.

A massive government R&D and production effort was devoted to penicillin. In 1928, Alexander Fleming had discovered that penicillin could kill bacteria. During World War II, the US government coordinated efforts by universities, the Department of Agriculture, and nearly two dozen pharmaceutical companies to devise technologies for the mass production of the drug.¹⁶

Catalytic cracking is the process of creating high-octane fuel from petroleum feedstocks. During the war, the oil industry drew on the research into catalytic cracking of Eugene Houdry, a French engineer who immigrated to the United States in 1930 and patented the catalytic converter that is used in most automobiles today. At Baton Rouge, Standard Oil built the first full-scale operational catalytic cracking plant in 1942, a web of pipes containing tanks. Soon “cat crackers” were springing up in refineries across the country.

WARTIME INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS

In its capacity as state capitalist, the government also engaged in massive domestic infrastructure projects that bolstered the war effort. One was the Alaska Highway, connecting the United States with Alaska through Canada, which was authorized by Congress in 1942 and remarkably was completed by the end of the year. Another was the Saint Lawrence Seaway, connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes. Backed by Herbert Hoover, the proposal for the seaway was stalled until December 1940, when Roosevelt declared that “the United States needs the St. Lawrence Seaway for defense.” In 1941, the United States and Canada negotiated an agreement. The project was finally completed in 1959, when President Dwight Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth presided at a ceremony in Montreal.

One consequence of the destroyers-for-bases transfer of ships to Britain was a shortage of tankers to transport oil within the United States. In May 1941, executives from eight major oil companies met in New York to discuss the problem. Their proposed solution was a twenty-four-inch pipeline from Texas to the East Coast. The government rejected the idea, but following Pearl Harbor the proposal was revived and approved. A corporation called War Emergency Pipelines, Inc., was formed and funded by the RFC.

Through mountains and swamps and over bridges, the Big Inch snaked from Longview, Texas, to Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, where it split into two segments, one terminating at Philadelphia and the other at Linden, New Jersey. Only 350 days after construction began, the Big Inch was complete. Each day it carried five times as much oil as had ever been carried in a pipeline before to the refineries of the East Coast.

The Big Inch was soon joined by the Little Big Inch, a pipeline that stretched 1,475 miles from Beaumont, Texas, to Linden, New Jersey. While the Big Inch carried crude oil, the Little Big Inch transported gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, and aviation fuel.¹⁷ Six of the seven billion barrels of oil used by the Allies in World War II came from the United States.¹⁸

FROM GUN BELT TO SUN BELT

The New Deal Democrats were supported by southern and western interests like the Brown brothers of Texas, whose Brown and Root evolved into Halliburton; Henry J. Kaiser of Kaiser Aluminum; and independent oil producers like Sid Richardson, who challenged the Rockefellers and Pews of the northeastern oil industry. Members of Congress and administration officials from the South and West used the military emergency to create defense plants in their regions as the nuclei of postwar economic development, achieving the goal of industrial decentralization.

The importance of World War II in the industrial transformation of the United States cannot be exaggerated. Between 1940 and 1945, nearly half of the previous total investment in all US industry was made in war production by the federal government. Before Pearl Harbor, the only states in which a third or more of the workforce was in the manufacturing sector were New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and the states of New England. Between 1950 and 1970, the share of traditional manufacturing activity in the northeastern core declined by 3 percent and grew in the Sunbelt by 56 percent.¹⁹ During the war, the South was the site of two-thirds of military training camps, 47.7 percent of federally financed chemical, coal, and petroleum production, 36.5 percent of total awards for military facilities in the continental United States, and 23 percent of the new plants built for the war.²⁰

Between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and V-J Day on September 2, 1945, the landscape and economy of Texas were transformed by military-led modernization in a revolution far more profound, and with more lasting effects, than Reconstruction or the New Deal. In addition to increasing oil and gas production, the federal government made Texas the site of factories that produced rubber from petroleum, to replace natural rubber supplies from Japanese-occupied Asia and from Brazil, and also magnesium and aluminum. The government expanded and upgraded existing shipyards and created a Texas ship-building industry from nothing. The draining of the rural population into military service and factory work accelerated the mechanization of Texas agriculture, increasing its efficiency.

The Houston construction firm of Brown and Root, a longtime backer of Lyndon Johnson, grew rich from government contracts during World War II and the Cold War. In California, similar beneficiaries of military state capitalism were Kaiser Steel and Bechtel Corporation, which provided many of the members of Ronald Reagan’s cabinet (Reagan voted four times for Roosevelt for president, so his alliance with a corporate client of the Rooseveltian state was only appropriate).

Texas Instruments began before the war as Geophysical Services, Inc., building electronics to help oil companies find oil. During World War II, the company built instruments to help the navy search for enemy submarines. It specialized as a defense contractor providing electronics to the US military by the time it changed its name to Texas Instruments in 1951. TI later produced the first commercial silicon transistors, integrated circuits, and handheld calculators. The history of TI symbolized the birth of a high-tech economy from the oil-patch economy of Texas, midwifed by the US military.

KAISER’S LIBERTY SHIPS

Another beneficiary of wartime industrial development was California. World War II produced a massive expansion of the aircraft production industry around Los Angeles. The region continued to be home to prominent defense contractors for half a century until the end of the Cold War.

Henry J. Kaiser was a master builder who thought in grandiose terms. After moving in 1906 to California, the native of Sprout Brook, New York, founded a road construction company. In the 1930s, the firm took part in the construction of the Hoover, Grand Coulee, and Bonneville Dams. Although he had never built a ship, his record helped Kaiser win a grant from the government in World War II to build shipyards in Los Angeles, Portland, Houston, and elsewhere. Inspired by Henry Ford’s assembly line, Kaiser perfected the mass production of cargo-carrying Liberty Ships, building one in only four days. Kaiser built a steel plant in California and created Kaiser Aluminum.

In addition to being an innovator in shipbuilding, Kaiser was a welfare capitalist in the tradition of Gerard Swope and Owen Young of GE. During the war, Kaiser’s employees were offered prepaid medical plans and, in 1945, Kaiser joined with Dr. Sidney Garfield, who ran the hospital for the Kaiser Shipyards and had first worked with Kaiser during the construction of Grand Coulee Dam, to found the Kaiser Permanente health management organization (HMO). In 1948, he founded the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, which focuses on health care. Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, Kaiser and his nonprofits were attacked by the for-profit medical industry. Today Kaiser Permanente, a nonprofit organization, is the largest managed-health-care plan in the United States.

“THE MAN WHO WON THE WAR FOR US”

Dwight D. Eisenhower described him as “the man who won the war for us” and Hitler grumbled that he was the “new Noah” after 156,000 Allied soldiers landed on the shores of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, in craft designed and built by Andrew Jackson Higgins. Higgins began his business career as the proprietor of A. O. Higgins Lumber and Export Company, a New Orleans firm that built its own fleet in a small boatyard to transport its products. Higgins supervised twenty thousand workers who completed seven hundred boats a month, of two kinds—fast PT boats like the one commanded by the young John F. Kennedy in the Pacific and landing craft like those used on D-Day. His motto was “The Hell I Can’t.”

After Higgins died in 1952, the subsequent history of his Michoud facility illustrated the continuing role of government procurement in the development of the postwar South. It was part of what had been a 1763 grant by the French royal government of 34,500 acres to a New Orleans merchant named Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent. Part of that property was acquired by Antoine Michoud, the son of Napoleon’s administrator of domains, who turned it into a sugar plantation and refinery after arriving in New Orleans in 1827. Following his death in 1863, the property was kept intact by his heirs until it was incorporated into a factory facility for Higgins Industries.

The Michoud facility found a new use during the Korean War, when Chrysler used it to manufacture engines for tanks that never went into production. The inactive facility was employed again as the space race intensified. NASA took over the plant and assigned it to Chrysler and Boeing to make stages of Saturn I and Saturn V rockets that could be transported by water to Cape Canaveral (later Cape Kennedy). After the Apollo program ran its course, Martin Marietta used the property to make tanks for the space shuttle in the 1980s.²¹

THE END OF UNEMPLOYMENT

Unemployment fell from 17.2 percent in 1939 to 1.2 percent in 1944. Mass unemployment came to an end, as millions of unemployed men were drafted or drawn into the military or the defense-industrial workforce. At the end of 1940, five million Americans were still unemployed; by the end of 1941, there were two million in the army and navy.²² The US Army expanded from 167,767 in 1940 to 8,266,373, with 5 million overseas, in 1945.²³ At the peak of World War II, more than sixteen million men and women were in the US armed forces and the merchant marine. Millions of women as well served in the military or worked in defense plants. No longer needed, the WPA and other emergency public-employment programs were dissolved.

Between 1940 and 1945, seventeen million Americans found jobs—ten million in the armed forces, two million working for the military and other government agencies, and five million in the civilian sector, producing both military and civilian goods. Of these seventeen million, seven million had formerly been unemployed; ten million were new entrants to the labor market, about half of them women, with other new entrants provided by former farmers.²⁴ The farm population shrank by a fifth during the war.²⁵

ORGANIZED LABOR

Tight wartime labor markets increased the bargaining power both of white unionized workers and African Americans. By executive order on March 19, 1941, President Roosevelt created the National Defense Mediation Board (NDMB), a tripartite arbitration board with representatives of management, labor, and the public. The membership of the AFL increased by 63 percent between 1940 and 1945, while the CIO made even greater gains, with a 66 percent increase in membership.²⁶

But relations between government and organized labor were strained by wartime strikes. John L. Lewis had broken with Roosevelt over US involvement in World War II and became a bitter critic of the president. He led the United Mine Workers on a strike in the bituminous coal industry. Enraged, FDR called for a national-service law to ban strikes and compel able-bodied adults to be assigned to productive work. He did not get it, but he rescinded draft exemptions for striking miners under the age of forty-five.²⁷

During a strike in May 1941, the US Army took over the North American Aviation factory in Los Angeles. In all the government seized industrial facilities during labor disputes a total of sixty-three times.²⁸

ROSIE THE RIVETER

In 2010, Geraldine Hoff Doyle died, survived by five children, eighteen grandchildren, and twenty-five great-grandchildren. Few Americans would have recognized her name, but many would have recognized the name that made her face famous: Rosie the Riveter.

In 1942, at the age of seventeen, Geraldine Hoff, then unmarried, was working as a metal presser in the American Broach and Machine Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when her picture was taken by the photographer J. Howard Miller. An image of her looking determined, with her sleeves rolled up and her hair wrapped in a scarf, was used in a morale-boosting poster used in Westinghouse plants, with the slogan “We Can Do It!” The poster did not identify her by name, and it was only in the late twentieth century that the Westinghouse poster became identified with the mythical Rosie the Riveter, who symbolized American women working to defeat the Axis in the factories on the home front.

Rosie the Riveter got her name from a 1942 hit song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb.

All the day long,

Whether rain or shine

She’s part of the assembly line.

She’s making history,

Working for victory

Rosie the Riveter²⁹

The inspiration for the song was Rosalind Palmer Walter, who worked as a riveter during the night shift on the marine fighter airplane, the Corsair. Far from being proletarian, this Rosie came from a patrician family, married the chairman and CEO of International Flavors and Fragrances, and became a major philanthropist, funding, among other institutions, Long Island University, the American Museum of Natural History, and public television.

There were other Rosies, too. Kentucky-born Rose Will Monroe, the daughter of a carpenter, was working at Henry Ford’s enormous Willow Run Aircraft Factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan, when she was spotted by the actor Walter Pidgeon and cast as Rosie the Riveter in a series of wartime films. Another Rosie was Mary Keefe, a dental hygienist. She posed as Rosie the Riveter for a painting by Norman Rockwell for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, taking a break to eat a sandwich with her feet propped up on Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

The “real Rosie” who came closest to the archetypal character, perhaps, was Rose Bonaventura, whose parents had immigrated to the United States from Italy. President Roosevelt sent her a letter of commendation after she and her partner set a record drilling holes and driving rivets into a bomber during one overnight shift in 1943.³⁰

There were millions of Rosies. By 1944, women were 40 percent of the workers in the aircraft industry, 34.2 percent of all ammunition workers, 10.6 percent of all steel workers, 10 percent of all workers in shipping, and 8 percent of railroad workers.³¹

The mass entry of American women into the industrial workforce created a crisis in child care. In 1934–1935, the WPA had created 1,900 emergency nursery schools as part of its work relief program. During the war the government increased their number to 3,102 for 128,357 children.³²

By 1944, female participation in the workforce rose to 36.3 percent, with 71 percent remaining outside. However, the mobilization of women was far more limited in the United States than in Britain and the Soviet Union, where only 30 percent of women remained outside of the workforce during World War II.³³

The United States never mobilized its workforce or its economy as much as the other participants in the war did. The sheer size of its economy and the safety from attack provided by its geographic distance from the centers of conflict permitted American leaders to ask for far less sacrifice than the leaders of other nations on both sides demanded. Indeed, in the United States, unlike in Britain or other Allied countries, personal consumption actually grew during the war.

BATTLING RACISM ON THE HOME FRONT

Almost a million black Americans moved from the rural South to industrial jobs in the North and West. Those who remained behind benefited from a tighter labor market.

In the summer of 1941, A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened to lead a march on Washington, DC, to demand equal opportunity for blacks in defense jobs. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote in his diary on January 24, 1942: “What these foolish leaders of the colored race are seeking is at the bottom social equality.”³⁴

After Randolph refused to back down following a meeting with the president and other officials, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination in defense industries. This not only marked the first time that the federal government had intervened on behalf of black rights since the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War, but it also laid the groundwork for the postwar civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., whose 1963 march on Washington was inspired by Randolph’s idea.

While the federal government took the first tentative steps toward dismantling segregation in the workforce, it also carried out one of the worst acts of official racism in American history. Between 1942 and 1945, 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent, the majority of them Nisei, or US citizens, were forcibly relocated to ten internment camps. Decades later, the federal government compensated survivors with only $38 million, a fraction of the $200 million in property that they had lost.

Even as their relatives were interned in the United States, Japanese American soldiers fought from Asia to Europe. Daniel Inouye, who had planned to become a doctor, lost an arm while fighting the Germans in Italy; he later became the first Japanese American senator. The 100th Infantry Battalion earned the name “Purple Heart Battalion” because so many of its members were injured in combat. The 100th, along with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team that followed it, rescued a besieged battalion of Texans in the Vosges Mountains in France in the depths of winter in 1944. When its size and length of service are considered, the 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team was the most decorated military unit in American history.³⁵

Latinos suffered from racism and economic exploitation during the war, as well. In 1943, white sailors and marines stationed in Los Angeles took part in violence in the “zoot suit riots,” named for the zoot suits worn by Mexican American youth. The labor shortage in agribusiness along the Southwestern border was addressed by the Bracero Program, a system of indentured servitude for Mexican nationals that was so exploitative it was abolished during the civil rights era of the 1960s.

Although the United States remained a deeply racist society, World War II had a liberalizing and integrating effect. The fact that the United States was fighting totalitarian and racist regimes allowed reformers to identify antiracism and support for civil liberties with the American way of life. The military-based economic development of rural areas shocked much of the country into modernity. Old-stock Americans and first- and second-generation immigrants, whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians, mingled in factories at home and in military units around the world. The integrated platoon, with Italian Americans, Jews, Texas cowboys, and black Americans, provided Hollywood with a symbol of a postracist America.

PAYING FOR THE WAR

The US government paid for its World War II effort by a combination of taxes and borrowing. The national debt swelled from 43 percent of GNP in 1940 to 129 percent in 1946. Thanks to a combination of economic growth and inflation, as a percentage of GNP the war-swollen national debt declined from two-thirds in 1955 to 47 percent in 1965 and 34 percent in 1981.

Although the government relied chiefly on borrowing, taxes were still high—about 45 percent of all war expenditures, a higher percentage than in World War I or the Civil War.³⁶ Rejecting a general sales tax to pay for the war, the government imposed the personal income tax on 60 percent of households by the end of the war. During the war the practice of withholding taxes from biweekly wage payments, now a fixture of American life, was first instituted. The personal income tax surpassed the corporate income tax as a source of federal revenue, and by the late twentieth century three-fourths of federal revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes.

During World War II, millions of middle-class and working-class Americans for the first time paid income taxes, which previously had fallen on the affluent. The Office of War Information commissioned the composer and songwriter Irving Berlin to write “I Paid My Income Tax Today,” which was performed by the actor and comedian Danny Kaye:

I said to my Uncle Sam,

“Old Man Taxes, here I am.”

And he was glad to see me,

Mister Small Fry, yes indeed—

Lower brackets, that’s my speed,

But he was glad to see me.

I paid my income tax today

I never felt so proud before

To be right there with the millions more

Who paid their income tax today.

I’m squared up with the U.S.A.

See those bombers in the sky?

Rockefeller helped to build them; so did I—

I paid my income tax today.

I paid my income tax today.

A thousand planes to bomb Berlin,

They’ll all be paid for and I chipped in;

That certainly makes me feel okay—

Ten thousand more and that ain’t hay!

We must pay for this war somehow;

Uncle Sam was worried but he isn’t now—

I paid my income tax today.

In addition to paying income taxes, ordinary Americans had to endure the rigors of wartime rationing. “General Max” was not a soldier, but a policy: the General Maximum Price Regulation policy of the Office of Price Administration (OPA). The mission of the OPA was to use rationing to avert inflation.

Because they were not permitted to raise wages, US employers competing for workers in the tight labor market began offering fringe benefits, like employer-provided health insurance. Minor at first, this fringe benefit ballooned into the major method by which Americans received health care by the late twentieth century, after the defeat of postwar plans for government-provided universal health care.

“OIL, BULLETS AND BEANS”

In 1944, the United States completed one plane every five minutes, launched fifty merchant ships a day, and finished eight aircraft carriers a month.³⁷ Mobilized for war, the US economy grew as rapidly during World War II as it declined in the early years of the Depression. US GDP doubled between 1938 and 1944.³⁸ While in 1938 capacity use in the steel industry had been only 40 percent, in 1943 US Steel and other firms in the industry were operating at 98 percent capacity.³⁹ The extent to which capacity had lain unused during the 1930s was illustrated by the fact that, between 1939 and 1944, US gross national product grew in real terms by 52 percent.⁴⁰ By 1944, the United States was producing as many munitions as its allies and enemies combined.⁴¹ Between 1938 and 1948, US national income rose from the equivalent of that of Germany, Britain, France, and the Benelux countries combined to twice as much, and from three times the size of the economy of the Soviet Union to six times.⁴²

America’s converted factories produced 88,410 tanks and self-propelled guns; 257,390 artillery pieces; 105,054 mortars; 2,679,840 machine guns; 2,282,311 trucks; and 324,750 aircraft.⁴³ The number of aircraft manufactured in America grew thirty-fold between 1937 and 1944.⁴⁴ Aircraft production peaked at more than 96,000 in 1944.

The United States also undertook a prodigious shipbuilding effort, constructing 141 aircraft carriers, including escort carriers, 8 battleships, 48 cruisers, 349 destroyers, and 33,993 gross tons of merchant shipping.⁴⁵ The United States also produced most of the energy and raw materials that fueled the victory of the Allies over the Axis powers: 2,129.7 million metric tons of coal, 833.2 million metric tons of crude oil, 369.9 million metric tons of iron ore, 334.5 million metric tons of steel, and 4.12 million metric tons of aluminum.⁴⁶ On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Germans could deploy only 319 aircraft. The United States and its allies deployed 12,837.⁴⁷

According to the historian Alan Milward, “The war was decided by the weight of armaments production.”⁴⁸ The combination of American state capitalism and large-scale corporate industrial capitalism, with the help of organized labor, women, and nonwhite Americans, helped to defeat Hitler and his allies. Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the US Pacific fleet, put it best: “Winning the war is a matter of oil, bullets and beans.”⁴⁹