Fighting the Good War at Home

Scholars often discuss major historical events or periods in terms of the intellectual framework of a “turning point” or a “watershed” event. Both specialized monographs and general works of synthesis have argued that United States intervention in World War II marked America’s rise as a military, diplomatic, and economic world power. Declaring the country would become the Arsenal of Democracy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the nation into the Allied effort against fascist aggression that would change the face of the society forever. At least, this is the usual interpretive bent on U.S. involvement in the war. To date, major works on the American home front suggest that wartime mobilization of the economy, society, and culture brought about more change than continuity. In this brief, well-crafted work University of Maryland, Baltimore County historian John W. Jeffries presents a sophisticated, thoughtful overview of the revisionist work of the last quarter century on the home front, while insisting that traditional emphasis on continuity in business-government relations, racial and ethnic tension, and national partisan politics should not be overlooked.

Major works dealing with the home front effort implicitly have presented contrasting interpretations. In the first full-length history of the home front experience, Richard Polenberg wrote that “World War II radically altered the character of American society and challenged its most durable values,” a view confirmed the following year by Geoffrey Perrett, who argued that “the war years provided the last great collective social experience in the country’s history.” ¹ Yet in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years, the interpretive focus began a subtle, but significant shift, beginning with John Morton Blum’s V Was for Victory, which asserted that “the wartime experience of Americans, nurtured in their culture and expressed in their politics, shaped American expectations about the postwar period at home and abroad.” Blum’s Yale University student Allan Winkler wrote that Americans “confronted shifting social and political issues as they adjusted to new patterns that came to dominate their lives. They embraced changes, even as they clung to the values they had held before: Americans wanted a better America within the framework of the past.” ²

In the meantime, a younger generation of scholars born and raised in the postwar years broadened the focus on the home front by introducing social and cultural studies of the war’s impact on African Americans, women, Mexican Americans, Indian Americans, political economy, military contracting, Hollywood film making, wartime advertising, and other areas of American life. More recently, oral historian Studs Terkel, literary scholar Paul Fussell, and cultural historian Michael Adams led the revisionist charge, challenging what they termed “the myth of the Good War.” ³ Much of the revisionist interpretation of the limits of American military power, diplomatic clearheadedness, and limited commitment to democracy at home for blacks, immigrants, workers, women, and Japanese Americans appeared in the first ambitious attempt to synthesize the foreign and domestic aspects of American intervention found in William O’Neill’s dramatic, iconoclastic, and provocative work, A Democracy at War. ⁴

Over the last generation, practitioners of the now twenty-year old new social history began exploring the racial, class, and gender implications of the war mobilization, while more recently the new cultural history has tried to make sense of strategic debates among Allied leaders, the limits and costs of the strategic bombing campaigns, the recent controversies over the Hiroshima atomic bombing exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, and new interpretations of such seemingly long-settled matters as the symbolic significance of the Iwo Jima flag raising, the necessity of some of the Pacific island campaigns, the complexities of wartime home front culture, and the postwar implications of American power. In this work, Jeffries, another onetime Blum student at Yale, expands his own earlier work on wartime politics in Connecticut, the watershed thesis about the war, and the continuities between New Deal reform and the wartime experience to provide what will become the standard classroom...