Abstract
World War II left a deep impression on the United States. Even though no battle took place on American soil, the war changed numerous aspects of American life. The purpose of this study will be to gain a brief overview of the direct impacts the war had on the country’s economic, political and social scenario. The question of how the Homefront faired during the great war, will also be pondered upon.
Introduction
Nothing at all in America was unaffected by World War II. Over sixteen million men and women, a number which accounted for over one-tenth of the population, were directly involved in serving the country as a part of the armed forces. Those who stayed back were meted out the responsibility of being a “citizen soldier” in almost every aspect of their lives. Day to day choices which characteristically were individualistic, questions like what to purchase, what to consume, etc. all now had international significances.
To understand the level of importance every American’s action had on the outcome of the war, understanding the economic changes, keeping in mind the situation which preceded the War.
Economic Aspect
‘The age of high mass consumption’ (Rostow)
There are no doubts about the fact that the war caused a massive demand shock to the American economy. Inside just four days of Pearl Harbor, the country was completely entangled in a world war and the nation's manpower and monetary resources had to be mobilized for the contest. Inordinate amounts of money, as President Roosevelt on his Navy Day Address elucidated to the country, "more money than has ever been spent by any nation at any time in the long history of the world". Regardless of their positive or negative impact, the supply shocks related to mobilization and demobilization were small, sharp and directly related to America’s growing involvement in the war. Military outlay and manpower triplicated during 1940 and 41, this happened from a very low base, and merely a minor portion of snowballing war spending had really happened when the Japanese attack took place. As a result, the productivity levels were seen to soar in 1941. The military fortification, which was only in its primary stages when on the 7th of December, 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked, which subsequently resulted in a huge upsurge in military and marine building in 1942, a gush in machinery and weaponry manufacture that reached its height in 1943, and a growth of engagement in the federal government, both noncombatant and military, that reached its height in 1944. 1948 saw a complete picture of demobilization Non-military manufacture had seen a great revival, and the unemployment rate was at a meagre 3.8%, a drastic change from the times of the great depression (Rundell).
On December 1940, in a fireside chat, President Roosevelt called upon the nation to take up the role of the “arsenal of democracy”. While this was said a year before Pearl Harbor, America was seen delivering on this promise, setting free its productive strength to direct arms, resources, and food to Great Britain and its allies. By the end of the war in 1945, the American Homefront manufactured a host of equipment and corresponding goods. The counts were somewhere around; Aircrafts – 300,000; Tanks and Armored Vehicles – 100,000; Landing Crafts – 80,000; Merchant Ships – 5,600; Navy Ships – 1,500. Along with this, there were also Small Arms – Over 20 million; Rounds of Ammunition – over 41 billion; Bombs – 6 million, including the atomic bombs (Casdorph). Between 1939 and 1945, the GNP (Gross National Product) grew from $91.1 billion to $213.6 billion, more than doubling itself. The end of the war saw half of the world’s production power and over sixty percent of its gold stocks situated in the country. (Harold U Faulkner) According to Winston Churchill, America’s production power had comfortably positioned them “at the summit of the world.”.
The upsurge in mass scale investment was another factor which contributed heavily to the success of American forces on the war-front. It was seen as one of the many fantastic embodiments of the volunteer essence in American history. The response of the population to a government savings-bond program termed ‘Defense Bonds’ (before the attack on Pearl Harbor) and ‘War Bonds’ afterwards, was seen as a huge boost on behalf of the entire Homefront. These U.S. Treasury securities were built to give fruition to two purposes; backing the war with adequate monetary supply and to take money out of circulation in order to keep inflation rates low. The selling price of these bonds started off at $25. In case someone could not afford them, less costly stamps could be collected in a book and exchanged for a bond. Acquisition of bonds resulted in a substantial loan from the American citizens to the federal government, with them yielding a fine return, 2.9% after a maturity of 10 years. “I cannot tell you how much to invest in War Bonds,” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his “fireside chat” in 1943. The Treasury Department began to authorize bond posters during 1941. The emphasis was not on what the bonds could do for the person’s financial safety, but on what each citizen could do for the cause by purchasing “a share in America” (W. J. Rundell).
Mobilizing Agriculture – Creating the goods to overthrow the Axis, stock the Allies, and facilitate home front Americans – these tasks were accomplished both by agricultural and industrial sectors. In the agricultural sector too, modern technology, production methods, and government mobilization labors were vital, even more, because productivity had to be continued and augmented even as the military and industry tapped off the farmers. As in the industrial sector, there was substantial extra capacity before the war that smoothed wartime growth. By 1940, production had by now increased so much that Chester Davis, the defense official for agriculture, said that some 5 million low earning people in farming should try working in the defense industry and leave agriculture. In due course, the farm populace did deteriorate by some six million people during the war at the same time as agricultural production amplified and wealth returned to rural America. (Harold U Faulkner).
The American Class Struggle
The idea that the war in some way transformed the American class structure is overstated. Examination of income shares, instead of analyzing income and spending points, demonstrates that the war, in reality, did little to reallocate income. Meanwhile, the average personal salary of the lowest 20% of households rose by 96% from 1941 – 1944, whereas that of the uppermost 20% of households rose by only 53%. Alternatively, the lowest 20% made 4.1% of total family personal revenue in 1941 and only 4.9% in 1944, while the share of the maximum 20% of families was seen to be only from 48.8% – 45.8%. And the dollar difference in revenue between the lowest and highest 20% of families essentially amplified by about 50%, increasing from $4,946 in 1941 to $7,390 in 1944. (Jeffries)
The Role of Women
The tales of women and African Americans offer particularly valuable understandings into the influence of the war and the amalgamation of change and steadiness on the American Homefront. For womenfolk, the picture of “Rosie the Riveter” came to signify the time-of-the-war experience and the acceptance of the fact that in bringing much more ladies into the labor force in a much superior collection of occupations, the war laid grounds for the foundations for histrionic change in women’s role in the American society and for the feminism movements which occurred after the war had ended.
At the time of the war, the number of women in the remunerated labor force grew by somewhat 50%. From 1940 – 1945, the number of women working rose from 28% to 37%, and ladies’ share of the workforce grew from 26% to 36%. Around 2.5 million more women operated in working-class jobs in 1944, compared to the statistics in 1940. They were also seen to be allocated a much better range of jobs for the first time in the history of this country, and perhaps any country ever.
More than two hundred thousand women operated in the dockyards and women instituted for almost fifty percent of the labor force at West Coast aircraft plants such as the North American and Boeing. Out of the 13,500-people stationed at the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, fifty percent of them were women. Around thirty percent of a million females helped in the armed forces. Mostly among African American women, the war shaped a change from homely occupations to improved ones in the manufacturing sector.
However, akin to what historian David Kennedy wrote about this change in dynamic –
“Rosie the Riveter might have been more appropriately named Sally the Secretary, or even, as events were to prove, Molly the Mom.” – Despite the fact that women got a better array of manufacturing roles and other roles in the industrial industry, the chances of them being in such jobs such as welding, compared to riveting, jobs that demand a lower level of skill-set, was much more. Greater and longer-lasting service gains were made in white-collar secretarial, ecclesiastical, and sales occupations than in factory labor (Jeffries).
However, this does not indicate that World War II made no alteration in women’s lives and in due course in gender roles. This wartime period, for a large number of women, served as the experience of working independently for the first time. They got educated more about their personal strengths, just men of war and the society as a whole did.
The African-American
About one million African Americans took part in the armed forces where they were given access to education, physical activity, and skills that they could put to use once the war was over. However numerous employers turned only half-heartedly to black workers-favoring to drain the pool of elder, fresher, and female white laborers beforehand. In due course, they had to give in, and from roundabout 1943, the hiring of black workers augmented abruptly. The service advances that African Americans completed were often outstanding. Not only in the military forces, but also in resistance related industry, old outlines of discrimination, separation, and prohibiting continued to be a matter of regularity in the early 1940s. The number of African-Americans working increased by around 20% at the time of the war. However, the number of African-American supervisors, craftsmen, and operators increased dramatically. Even though the openings between white and black revenues and economic position lessened, African Americans expanded comparatively little in specialized, administrative, and managerial occupations.
Racism at the Homefront
African American immigrants frequently were met with ill-disposed receptions. As they migrated in large numbers into packed war production hubs in the North and West, they piled up on the burdens on housing and public facilities and exposed old racial outlines and
divisions. The company of white Southern emigrants in such areas regularly sparked off the
difficulties. In Detroit, pressures simmered into fights in 1942 and into a terrible race-riot 1943 – a year shamed by race riots in numerous places along the home front, together with the anti-Mexican American “Zoot Suit Riots” in Los Angeles. Even though it did not typically affect refugees, anti-Semitism also rose through on the Homefront, and from time to time looked as if they would boil over into something serious, especially in cities like Boston.
The Other Side
There was one more imperative part of this narrative that must be highlighted. Wartime immigrations wind-swept old barriers and doubts, reduced narrow-mindedness and helped harvest both a mutual cause and a collective national culture. Welcoming greetings and random acts of compassion to the immigrants played a role as important as the cold shoulder, and some would argue an even more important role. As old traditioned people and the younger generation both operated in defense jobs, labor-intensive tasks, took part in experiencing triumphs, enjoyed the propaganda-based popular culture and grieved over misfortunes on the battlefronts – they got the chance to know each other more and doubt each other less. Both in the North and the South, the racial pressures and the uprisings of 1943 was complimented with many inter-racial assemblages that were strong-minded in their attempts to battle racism.
Conclusion
Much like all the other aspects, the home front experience for the societal growth of America was multifaceted and highly complex. Did the average American succumb to the pressures of living in a volatile state at the center of the most violent war in the history of the war – people who rose up, stepped out of their comfort zones and embraced the future of America, certainly did show a sense of foresight which the country needed to survive this crucial period in history.
The extensive effects of World War II both at the Homefront and abroad altered countless American households, some for the good, and some for the worse. In the 45 months it took to stop the war, huge forces, commencing with the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and winding-up with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in ruins, altered America's families forever. Furthermore, because of the events that concluded the World War II, the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, the citizens of the country were shocked to the core. The social forces pounding American households were unquestionably influential, and the insistent wartime query was, "Can the American family endure this?". Even though family life was sternly put through a litmus test, the American family displayed its pliability time after time in the face of displacement, leave-taking, and even demise. In spite of the disadvantages of living in a war-boom society, most people took up the hard decision of persisting together as a family, even if there was no heat in the building or no food on the table. And as the war ended, it assaulted mas, dads, and families, but what it also succeeded in doing was the deepening of their gratitude for family intimacy.