Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government by James T. Sparrow (review)

In this ambitious book, James Sparrow argues that during World War II, citizens of the United States truly accepted a large, powerful national government. This would suggest that the so-called New Deal order, which many historians understand as lasting until the 1970s, may have owed its foundations more to a war emergency than it did to the Great Depression.

Among the many studies of the U.S. home front during World War II, Sparrow’s ranks as one of the finest. His book covers a range of important subjects, from the birth of the mass income tax to the many instances of wartime racial discrimination and conflict. Thanks to Sparrow’s skillful handling of all this material, this book deserves to be read alongside the classic surveys of the subject, including Richard Polenberg, War and Society (1972), and John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory (1976). Sparrow’s book features not just breadth, but also impressive depth. He draws on nuggets gleaned from dusty government archives, including unpublished surveys of morale and public opinion, investigations of rumors, FBI files, and records of the Treasury Department’s successful campaigns to get millions of Americans to buy war bonds. Sparrow offers clever readings of many films, jokes, songs, posters, and pamphlets, as well as President Roosevelt’s speeches. Using this dazzling array of evidence, Sparrow argues that the Roosevelt administration was successful in convincing Americans to embrace the national state, which expanded in the early 1940s without encountering much resistance.

This claim about what Sparrow characterizes as amazing levels of public compliance is one of many elements of the book that should inspire new scholarship. Given that the perceived threats to national and global security were so high during World War II and the early Cold War, is it really so surprising that many Americans registered for the draft and paid their taxes? Was the United States any more of a “warfare state”—in Sparrow’s terms—than Britain, or other nations? Might Americans have, in fact, been significantly less accepting of “big government,” even in its wartime infancy, than Sparrow suggests?

One reason that such questions seem pressing is that Sparrow’s book presents a model of American politics and governance that seems oversimplified, if not distorted. Thanks to the abundance of rich evidence in the book, readers learn a great deal about the words of President Roosevelt, the propaganda efforts of a handful of executive agencies (especially the Treasury and the Office of War Information), and popular political culture on the home front. To his credit, Sparrow also succeeds in presenting the voices of dozens of ordinary Americans. This is a lot. But a great deal is missing, as well. Congress is a minor character, at best; politics at the state and local level are not much considered. The book says little about the major home front activities of the Navy and War departments, which some might regard as being at the heart of the “warfare state.” The book is surprisingly quiet about the roles of labor unions and business firms, both of which qualified as powerful mediators between ordinary Americans and the national government. Certainly, to demand that any one book deal fully with all these matters is unreasonable. However, it may be fair to ask whether the central claims of Warfare State have been skewed by its research design. By focusing on the relationship between the White House (and the Treasury) and the American people, without paying much regard to the many institutions and political actors that stood between and beside them, might the book be, in effect, built around assumptions that it presents as conclusions?

Such questions about Sparrow’s outstanding book matter, because their answers will inform historians’ continuing efforts to trace the long-run development of American politics and economic policy. If Sparrow’s...