World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy by Steven White (review)

In World War II and American Racial Politics: Public Opinion, the Presidency, and Civil Rights Advocacy, political scientist Steven White challenges an axiom of American historical memory: that World War II helped push white Americans toward more liberal views on race and civil rights. According to White, public memory and academic scholarship continue to perpetuate what he calls the “racial liberalization hypothesis,” that widely unexamined idea “that fighting a war against Nazism led to an increase in white support for black civil rights” in the 1940s (pp. 30, 29). In a clever and ambitious move, White attempts to actually test whether this thesis holds up under empirical scrutiny. To do so, White examines a series of underutilized polling and survey data from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1960s to assess the degree to which white Americans, including military veterans, actually expressed changing views on race and civil rights as a result of wartime experience. Not surprisingly, White cites mixed results, concluding that the war’s impact on political culture was “often far more heterogeneous than some accounts suggest” (p. 160). For example, White finds some limited evidence to support racial liberalization on a few specific policy points, like employment discrimination, while finding greater evidence to actually refute racial liberalization on more general issues. “Based on an analysis of the available survey evidence from the era,” White concludes, “the war’s impact on white racial attitudes is actually more limited than has been widely assumed” (p. 30). These findings prod historians to reexamine assumptions about the war’s domestic cultural impact, suggesting a reordering of basic narratives taught every semester in high school and college classrooms.

Yet it is unlikely that White’s interpretation of admittedly limited data will cause a sea change in collective understandings of World War II’s impact. Simply put, the book’s reliance on a small number of opinion polls as singular evidence of cultural change will likely fail to persuade most readers, even if the author’s analysis is cogent and convincing. While historians have not delved into this data, few will be surprised by White’s conclusion that the effects of contingent phenomena like wars “can be uneven and often surprising, [their] consequences both compelling and constraining” (p. 171). How might an analysis of other sources—literature, academia, film, radio—contribute to a fuller understanding of how the war altered public support for civil rights?

White’s greater contribution, from a historian’s perspective, lies in his analysis of why established civil rights organizations decided to “[turn] away from Congress—the branch most constrained by mass attitudes—toward the possibility of unilateral action by the president, particularly when domestic advocacy could be tied directly to the war effort” (p. 31). White also provides rich material detailing the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s awareness of civil rights activists’ Double V campaign—victory against fascists overseas and Jim Crow at home—and White House efforts to simply “‘duck it’” (p. 100). However, White’s exclusive “[focus] on the national agenda promoted by the NAACP . . . in conjunction with labor leaders” all but ignores more radical voices in the political discourse (p. 13). Groups like the National Negro Congress and individuals like Paul Robeson, to take but two arbitrary examples, do not appear in the index, limiting coverage to moderates like Walter F. White and former leftists like A. Philip Randolph. Overall, World War II and American Racial Politics demonstrates excellence in research and writing, even if the author’s effort to have historians reconsider the war’s impact on the black freedom struggle falls short.