This entry is a subentry of World War II (1939 – 45).
Insulated from the war's destructiveness, most Americans foresaw that World War II would shape their future, but not how it would. Alone among major combatants, the United States was physically undamaged and economically vitalized by the war. Even its loss of 400,000 uniformed personnel in combat was censored in visual culture and small compared to other countries' losses. Just as most Americans had to imagine the war itself, they had to imagine its consequences.
To do so, they projected the past into the future. Above all, they felt stung by World War I's tragic aftermath, traumatized by the Great Depression, and transfixed by mighty enemies in World War II. Uncertain, secretive, exhausted by the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave them only a few signals about what to expect, but did voice their broad desire for a better life and for “security”—a word inscribed in the names of countless postwar agencies and acts of Congress. Thus, most Americans saw the war's impact as rising steeply during hostilities, then receding sharply until some ill‐defined, worrisome normality resumed. Enormous focus on returning 16 million veterans to civilian life exhibited that expectation—almost magically, the veterans' readjustment would be the nation's—even as the tool for achieving readjustment, the G.I. Bill (1944), broke sharply from the past. The postwar economy attracted fear and hope, nourished by the depression and by propaganda promising an economic reward for wartime sacrifices. Thanks partly to the G.I. Bill, the hope was largely met.
In contrast, few foresaw the war's consequences for social relations. In fact, the war undermined the existing racial system by extending federal power into the Jim Crow South, inspiring the aspirations and tactics of African Americans, and reshaping national priorities. Pushed by black spokesmen like A. Philip Randolph, leaders increasingly saw racial discrimination as an anachronism that squandered resources needed to wield power abroad and mocked the claim of defending freedom against Fascist and Communist oppression. Though cautious on racial matters, FDR sounded this theme: a nation facing “totalitarianism” should strengthen its “unity and morale by refuting at home the very theories which we are fighting abroad.”
President Harry S. Truman's 1948 order banning segregation and discrimination in the military flowed from forces set in motion by the war, which also eroded religious and ethnic barriers. The war reworked systems of gender and sexuality in more complex ways. Prizing both male virtue and women's contributions, wartime culture set the stage for a virtual invention of the “traditional family,” to the detriment of many women and homosexuals. However varied their fortunes, social groups nonetheless had something in common: their fate was now shaped by America's global power and the national government's resultant additional authority. As world war faded into cold war, this temporary change turned into a lasting one that few anticipated.
Expectations were nearer the mark regarding international relations: Americans knew their nation was a superpower; most expected it to act like one, and few yearned for the isolationism that purportedly had led to World War II. Axis aggression, the Depression, and the war's startling technological advances, all seemed to forecast a seamless postwar world presenting new threats to America's economic and military security. Against those threats, most leaders argued, the United States would have to mobilize power even in peacetime, just as wartime victory gave many Americans confidence that they could do so, alone or through the new United Nations. As Gen. George C. Marshall warned in 1945, the vast “ocean distances” that once protected America had evaporated; reliance on such outdated factors would put “the treasure and freedom of this great Nation in a paper bag.”
Initially, many Americans feared renascent German and Japanese power, but Americans' brittle mix of anxiety and arrogance, stoked by their possession and use of atomic weapons, shaped perceptions of the Soviet Union. Many soon regarded Stalinist Russia as the old Axis wolf in bear's clothing—“Red fascism” was a common term eliding the two. Likewise, for decades, leaders defending their Cold War policies cited failure to foresee Axis aggression and violence, symbolized by the 1938 Munich Conference and the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. While scholars dispute the Cold War's causes, World War II certainly created an institutional and imaginative apparatus in America that at least initially exaggerated—with help from a ruthless Stalinist regime—the Soviet menace to the United States. The war's greatest legacy was Americans' newfound sense of permanent peril and the Cold War it helped to nourish.
Thus, too, postwar developments extended the impact of World II into an indeterminate future. The Cold War gave permanence to temporary wartime improvisations in national governance—secrecy, conscription, repression, industrial and scientific mobilization, and high levels of defense spending. Because of the Cold War, or under its guise, America exercised awesome military, economic, and political power in the postwar world. World War II alone did not make that happen, but it set the stage for it to happen, as did many of America's war‐weakened European allies, who nervously encouraged its postwar role and joined it in NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 1949). Since victory impresses leaders and institutions, American technological and logistical supremacy in World War II also shaped how Americans would wage later wars—including, disastrously, the Vietnam War. Seen that way, World War II accelerated America's militarization—pervasive military and defense influence—in a historical process as defining as industrialization and urbanization earlier had been.
Its handmaiden was a more powerful national government, a development often erroneously attributed solely to the New Deal. Indeed, national security imparted to the federal government a size, reach, and legitimacy never decisively achieved under the New Deal. Its broad mandate embraced social programs—the G.I. Bill, initiatives in civil rights, and federal aid to education, for example—seen variously as rewards for Americans' sacrifices in war, expressions of national vitality, and necessities for tapping all available resources. Rather than imposing sharp choices between “welfare” and “warfare,” the Cold War “militarized” national security and blurred the two, at least as long as national abundance and credible threats abroad allowed. The war taught a related lesson that few leaders would forget: massive government spending promoted prosperity. Only in the 1980s and 1990s did the system dissolve and with it much of national government's legitimacy.
Until then, it helped to sustain Americans' impressive prosperity and economic power. And since the system served “national security,” it largely escaped the stigma of “welfare” or “social engineering” attached to the New Deal. Because it prized military and technological strength, it sent prosperity flowing above all to men, institutions, and corporations in the “gunbelt,” particularly to the south, southwest, and the West Coast—to the long‐run detriment of trade unions, women, minorities, older industrial regions, and the nation's economic competitiveness. But with defense spending so huge, and economic competitors so damaged by the world war, a majority of Americans initially shared in midcentury prosperity.
World War II also forged a new sense of patriotism and nationhood that lingered into the Cold War era. To be sure, unity was defined as well by exclusion—of conscientious objectors, right‐wing zealots, and Japanese Americans during the war, and pacifists, leftists, gay people, racial militants, and others after it. Ethnic, racial, and religious tensions remained. Yet crusades against enemies abroad prized inclusiveness at home, if only to mobilize all the nation's resources. Catholics and Jews (especially those of Southern and Eastern European background), refugees fleeing fascism and communism, African and Asian Americans, and others generally, though unequally, tapped into and benefited from the assimilationist mood.
World War II also shaped postwar culture. Again, national pride—a conviction that America was now the world's cultural capital—swelled. But a darker sensibility—skeptical, tragic, or apocalyptic—characterized fiction, religious writing, and movie genres like film noir. Pearl Harbor, the Nazi Holocaust, and the atomic bomb generated a pervasive iconography of the horrors of modern warfare. Their symbols first served to dramatize not what the United States did to others—as in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but what others—a nuclear Soviet Union—could do to the United States, and thus to undergird Washington's Cold War policies. But it measured the war's staying power that these symbols were recycled decades later to different purposes—by the antinuclear, anti–Vietnam War, anti‐abortion, and AIDS action movements, among others.
The war's most lasting impact was as benchmark of national greatness. As Dwight D. Eisenhower demonstrated, military service in World War II became a virtual requirement for the presidency during the Cold War, just as most leaders invoked World War II when framing Washington's great postwar initiatives at home and abroad. During the war's fiftieth anniversary celebrations in the United States, only a celebratory stance seemed possible—as indicated by the outcome of a bitter debate over the 1990s Smithsonian Institution exhibit of the B‐29 bomber, Enola Gay, that attacked Hiroshima—one that honored the real virtue and unity while dismissing the complexities and conflicts in America's conduct of the war.
Both reassuring and disquieting, the celebratory stance registered national pride, but also the gnawing sense that World War II was the nation's finest hour, its moment of greatest unity and purposefulness, with everything after it more dubious, complex, or tragic. Placing it at the center of their modern history, Americans were left to wonder how, outside the arena of war, they might restore past unity and glory.
[See also China, U.S. Military Involvement in; Gender and War; Germany, U.S. Military Involvements in; Japan, U.S. Military Involvement in; United Kingdom, U.S. Military Involvement in; War and Society.]
Bibliography
- Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy, 1973.
- John M. Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II, 1976.
- Richard Polenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since 1938, 1980.
- Susan Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s, 1982.
- William S. Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s, 1991.
- Ann Markusen, Scott Campbell, Peter Hall, and Sabina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America, 1991.
- William L. O'Neill, A Democracy at War: Americans Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II, 1993.
- George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Culture During World War Two, 1993.
- Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s, 1995
