From Depression to Enormous Wealth : War Turned Impoverished U.S. Into a Superpower

In September of 1939, just a week after World War II had erupted in Europe, The American Home advertised why a housewives magazine like itself mattered in a time of distant trouble. “Hitler threatens Europe,” the ad proclaimed, “but Betty Havens’ husband’s boss is coming to dinner--and that’s what really counts.”

The ad fixed an awful truth: World War II, the most fearsome and bloody cataclysm of world history, caught America napping and unawares. An enervated giant, the United States in 1939 was weak, poor, isolated and ignorant of the rest of the world. Eighteen other countries--even Turkey--had more soldiers than the United States. The American Army outnumbered the Bulgarian army, but only by 23,000.

Americans were so oblivious of events abroad that James McClure Clarke and his roommate left for a bicycle trip through Europe in the summer of 1939 just after their graduation from Princeton University.

“That was the sort of thing a lot of young men did,” Clarke, now a 72-year-old Democratic congressman from North Carolina, recalled in his Capitol Hill office recently.

Unaware that war was imminent, they cycled into Germany.

“On every train, at every station,” he said, “there were German soldiers. And if you greeted anybody, they would ‘Heil Hitler.’ And even when we climbed in the mountains, you would see young people, Boy Scout age, groups of them, and they would raise their hands, ‘Heil Hitler.’ When we were in the Black Forest, I remember seeing a big sign put up there by Hitler saying the Jew is our enemy and then talking about the Jew in North America, listing Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau and so forth.”

That sign, of course, told a lie. Aside from its virulent anti-Semitism, it was wrong about Roosevelt, although correct about Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau’s Jewishness. But for Clarke, it hit home: Morgenthau’s son was a Princeton classmate.

War was declared before Clarke and his friend could return to the United States. They boarded the British liner Antonio during the first week of the war. The Antonio’s sister ship, the Athenia, leaving only a few days earlier, had been stalked by a German U-boat and torpedoed. More than a hundred people died when the ship sank in the Atlantic.

Did these experiences make Clarke and others like him more vitally concerned about events in Europe?

“Not much, I’m afraid,” Clarke replied. “I think it took a while for America to wake up. It took Pearl Harbor.”

Yet, once America woke up, it somehow transformed itself swiftly into an enormous, engulfing and astounding dynamo that would shake and cow the world. By the end of World War II, a nation once bereft of military strength had turned itself into the most awesome military power ever seen; a nation once contemptuous of entangling alliances had turned itself, however reluctantly, into a natural leader of grand alliances, and a nation still impoverished and reeling from the Great Depression had turned itself into an Olympus of wealth.

Moreover, mobilization for war altered society in quiet but profound ways that would not make themselves obvious for two decades or more. Rural blacks migrating to the cities or fighting in American armies would never go back easily to sharecropping and oppression.

“Rosie the Riveter,” the popular song heroine working in a war factory while her boyfriend fought in the Marines, would return to the kitchen after the war, but her legacy would lead to the women’s liberation movement.

400,000 Lost Lives

Compared to the carnage suffered elsewhere, U.S. casualties in World War II were, relatively speaking, light. More than 400,000 military personnel lost their lives--about 292,000 in combat--a tragic and bitter waste, but no more than a small statistic when measured against the 50 million Europeans and Asians slaughtered. There were more American civilian deaths from pneumonia and tuberculosis during the war than deaths on the battlefield. The wartime population of the United States, in fact, increased by a healthy 6%. The enemy inflicted negligible damage on the American mainland in a handful of incidents, and the United States was the only belligerent to end the war richer than before.

Americans owed the relative comfort and low cost of their victory to geographic distance, natural resources and a good deal of luck. But many preferred to believe that God-given American pluck and ingenuity had counted far more. While many Europeans agitated for radical changes in the political systems that had driven them to Fascism and war, Americans felt more pride in their own system than ever before. An era of great self-confidence came after the war.

“American experience,” wrote Henry R. Luce in a Life magazine editorial, “is the key to the future.”

Looking back, the year 1939 now seems like a last, lost age of innocence in America, undarkened by the clouds in Europe. The Hit Parade was led by a song that asked:

Jeepers Creepers, where’d you get those peepers?

Jeepers Creepers, where’d you get those eyes?

A 23-year-old vocalist named Frank Sinatra joined the Harry James band. Only 3% of Americans earned enough money to pay income tax. Almost 50 million people glimpsed the wondrous sleek highways and blight-free cities of the future in the General Motors Futurama pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. New Pontiacs sold for $862 and Florsheim shoes for $8.75.

Shirley Temple and Clark Gable were the biggest box office stars of the year. Hoping to do something about what it called “our national shame,” Standard Plumbing Fixtures reported in its advertisements that 15 out of 100 homes in 213 American cities still had no indoor toilets. Lou Gehrig retired from the Yankees, and Ted Williams joined the Red Sox.

The New York Telephone Co. explained that it did not hire Jewish women as operators because their arms were too short to operate phone equipment. Two new products--DDT and nylon stockings--were introduced. “Gone With The Wind” premiered in a banner movie year that included “Stagecoach,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Four Feathers,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “Ninotchka.” Pepsi-Cola challenged Coca-Cola with a catchy jingle:

Pepsi - Cola hits the spot, 12 full ounces that’s a lot ;

Twice as much for a nickel too, Pepsi - Cola is the drink for you.

The war probably left the United States with no more dramatic legacy than its transformation from unabashed isolationism to eventual guardian of the Free World. The day war erupted in Europe, Washington correspondent Phelps Adams asked President Roosevelt in his crowded White House office, “Mr. President, can we stay out of it?”

The President, who had been awakened at 2:50 a.m. with the news of the war, sat silently, his eyes cast downward, for several long moments, and then replied solemnly, “I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe we can, and every effort will be made to do so.”

Later, Roosevelt, sounding more firmly convinced that America could avoid war, warned on radio, “Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields.”

As far as many Americans were concerned, Europe had botched the peace cemented for them by American intervention in World War I. They were in no mood to get involved again. Sen. Hiram Johnson of California admonished Americans against heeding the echoes of the First World War. “Beware the words ‘We cannot keep out,’ ‘Our entry into the war is inevitable,’ ‘We must fight to preserve democracy’ and all the Devil’s messages we heard 20 years ago,” he said.

Sen. Arthur Vandenburg boasted: “My passion is to keep America out of other people’s wars.”

Feted in Germany

Charles A. Lindbergh, who had touched the romantic fancy of both Europe and America with his solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 and had been feted in Nazi Germany, told Americans at many isolationist rallies that a Nazi victory in Europe would not hurt the American way of life.

The isolationist mood was so strong that Roosevelt, accused by Republican candidate Wendell L. Wilkie of dragging America into war, pledged in a 1940 presidential election rally: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

Many skeptics believed that he never intended to keep that pledge. But the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, demolished the issue. With their infamous bombing of American territory and ships and citizens, the Japanese had turned World War II into an American war, not another people’s war, not a foreign war.

At the end of the war, no one could deny the United States the status of a superpower, bristling with more military and economic strength than any other country. It had led its allies to victory over Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and militaristic Japan, and it now had the power and influence to lead much of the world in peace as well. It was reluctant to do so at first, but it finally faced the reality wrought by World War II: a world divided into two hostile camps led by superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, once allied against the Axis.

“In 1945,” recalled Don Cook, the 69-year-old retired foreign correspondent who wrote “Forging the Alliance,” a recent history of the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, “you could never have gotten a two-thirds majority in the Senate for entering an alliance with Europe. The rump element of isolationism in the United States was still extremely strong and still had electoral appeal.

“I knew most of the isolationist senators because I had covered the Senate in the prewar period. The extent of their conversion from isolationism was a reluctant readiness to get into the United Nations. They weren’t going to repeat the mistake after World War I of not joining the League of Nations. But the United States had no intention of using military force in its role in the world. The senators had not reached the point of committing our power.”

Yet, in five years, the United States learned to commit its power and entangle itself in Europe and elsewhere. The Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the NATO treaty and the Korean War followed swiftly. By 1950, isolationism was dead.

“This may have been the first real major sweeping change in foreign policy since the founding of America,” said Cook.

World War II also swept the United States into the terrors of the Nuclear Age, for much of America’s immense new power came from its monopoly of nuclear bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and brought the war to a close.

Refugee Scientists

That short-lived monopoly--the Soviet Union developed its own atomic bomb four years later--came out of the prescience of refugee scientists living in the United States in 1939. Unlike other Americans, they could not ignore the awful horror of Adolf Hitler, for they had fled from him. These scientists knew that scientific research had made an atomic weapon feasible and that, though Hitler had driven many scientists away in his obsession for ethnic purity, enough scientists remained in Germany to create a bomb that might ensure his infernal domination of this planet.

Three Hungarian refugee scientists--Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller--met with German-born Albert Einstein, probably the world’s best-known physicist, in Princeton in 1939 and urged him to write Roosevelt about the need for an American program to build an atomic bomb.

In a now famous letter, dated one month before the outbreak of the war in Europe, Einstein told Roosevelt that recent scientific research indicated “that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated.”

“This new phenomenon,” Einstein went on, “would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable--though much less certain--that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.”

It is unclear exactly what role Einstein’s letter played in the President’s decision, but Roosevelt finally ordered an all-out program known as the Manhattan Project in 1942 to develop an atomic bomb. American scientists, many of them refugees from Hitler, won the race with the German scientists but not in time to use the terrible weapon against Nazi Germany. The first and, thus far, only nuclear devastation in history, came in the American bombing of the two Japanese cities in August, 1945. The precarious reality of the Nuclear Age has governed American foreign policy ever since.

Most Americans now are too young to remember how poor their parents and grandparents were half a century ago. It was no accident that John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” a long novel about impoverished Oklahoma farmers trekking to California, selling for $2.75 a copy, led the best-seller list in 1939. The Great Depression of the 1930s had weakened the United States far more than any country in Europe.

Despite all Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, 10 million people were unemployed in 1939, more than 15% of the work force. The American share of world manufacturing was lower than it had been at any time since 1910. At least one-third of Americans lived in or near poverty.

But the United States had enormous productive potential. In 1938, for example, two-thirds of its steel plants were idle. In 1939, it was spending less than 2% of its gross national product on defense. If Americans had the will to harness the potential, they could create a colossus of fearful military might and of enormous wealth. Once the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Americans showed that will.

At the end of the war, the American economy overshadowed the economies of the rest of the world in a show of relative wealth never seen before. Americans had a higher standard of living than any other people in the world and produced more goods per capita than anyone else. Half of the world’s manufacturing now took place within the United States. Practically any American who wanted a job had one.

Some Americans feared that unemployment and depression would return after the demobilization of the armed forces. But, though the economy would experience ups and downs and though thick pockets of poverty would persist, especially for blacks, most Americans have lived for the last 50 years in an era of bounding prosperity.

World War II changed the United States in other, less obvious ways as well. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution, citing the local customs of Washington, refused to allow the reknowned black opera singer Marian Anderson to sing in the DAR’s Constitution Hall in Washington. The blatant refusal struck many Americans as scandalous, and the federal government let Anderson sing instead, with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and other prominent white Americans in attendance, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Yet the shame of the DAR refusal did not change most American attitudes toward blacks. Benny Carter, the 82-year-old black jazz saxophonist and composer, recalls what it was like taking his big band around the United States during World War II.

‘No Black Hotels’

“We weren’t interested in getting into any serious incidents, but it was the same old thing,” Carter said recently. “My bands were mostly black. There might be two out of 17 who were not minority musicians. We had problems about where to stay in the South. We stayed mainly in the homes of people--what they would consider bed and breakfast places now. There were no black hotels, and we weren’t welcome in the others.”

As industries girded for war, they tried to hire as few blacks as possible. In 1941, for example, Douglas Aircraft had only 10 blacks among its 33,000 employees. Under the threat of black demonstrations, Roosevelt created a Fair Employment Practices Committee in 1941 to ensure some kind of fairness in hiring.

The committee had little power, but its creation was looked on later as a significant first step toward civil rights. As the war progressed, blacks were drafted into the army or lured to jobs in the North. That began the enormous migration of blacks out of rural America into the cities of both the South and the North, making the problems of this repressed minority national rather than regional. Rioting soon erupted in Detroit. By 1945, the status of American blacks had not improved very much, but the war had laid the seeds for the civil rights movement that followed.

For women, the war offered, but only briefly, an immense opportunity. The Great Depression had made it even more difficult for women to work. With millions of men unemployed, a working woman was looked on by many as a usurper--snatching a job out of the hands of some family’s breadwinner. Public opinion polls showed that most Americans in 1939 would support laws to prohibit the employment of women whose husbands earned more than $1,600 a year.

The war changed all that.

Factories needed women to replace the millions of men drafted into the armed services. The number of women in the labor force increased during the war to 19 million from 14 million. Nearly half of all American women worked at some time from 1941 to 1945. Many took jobs once typed as masculine: riveting, welding and operating cranes.

There was a good deal of male anxiety about this. Columnist Max Lerner complained that the war may have created “a new Amazon” who could “outdrink, out-swear and out-swagger the men.” Social workers and journalists began to blame an increase in juvenile delinquency on absent, working mothers.

When the war ended, millions of women left or lost their jobs to make room for the returning men. In Los Angeles, for example, the proportion of women working in the aircraft industry dropped from a high of 40% during the war to 18% in 1946. The sexual division of labor reasserted itself, and many women were forced back into lower paying “women’s work.”

Yet, as Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes predicted in a magazine article in 1943, the role of women would never be the same.

“I think this is as good a time as any . . . to warn men,” he wrote, “that when the war is over, the going will be a lot tougher, because they will have to compete with women whose eyes have been opened to their greatest economic potentialities.”

After the war, the numbers of working women never dropped to the levels of the Depression and, in a decade, started to increase to levels well beyond what had been reached during the war. There is little doubt that the ground for the women’s liberation movement was set during World War II.

When the war ended, a nation that had produced 71,000 naval craft, 300,000 aircraft and 2.5 million military trucks now hungered for more ordinary goods. Radio still dominated popular culture, but television, delayed by the war, would come swiftly. New products such as dishwashers, garbage disposal units and aerosol sprays reached the market. Teen-agers, whose families could hardly afford to buy them toys five years earlier, now had loose change in their pockets and wanted records. By 1945, the sales of records had increased tenfold in a decade.

No one expected the United States to return to 1939. No one wanted to.

“For those of us like myself who came out of high school in the Depression,” said Cook, “the war offered us a sense of adventure and change. . . . I think practically anybody of my generation would say that the war was decisive in framing one’s life and one’s future. And, in varying degrees, a considerable majority would say these were the best years of our lives. They gave us momentum. . . . It was tragic for a number of people . . . but there was an exhilaration to those times.”

“One of the best things you realized (serving in the wartime military) was the great diversity of the country. Gosh, here you are thrown in with guys from Georgia Tech, Louisiana State, Iowa--it just made you realize what a big country it was and how a relatively small percentage of the world the Ivy League was. . . . And it was also good for making some of us more confident in being able to stand on your own.” North Carolinians returning from the war “realized there was a world beyond the mountains. They went all over the place. They went to the Pacific, they went to Europe, they were prisoners of war. It was an eye opener to them.”

-- Rep. James McClure Clarke (D-N.C.), 72, a Princeton graduate who served as a naval officer on Guadalcanal during the war.

“Our soldiers were not fighting to make the world safe for democracy like in World War I. This was much more of a crusade of our own. . . . The war took over everyone’s life whether you were drafted or not. It had this sense of adventure. I don’t like the word ‘purity,’ but the war had an uplift about it, because we were fighting Nazis and fighting for ideals. It had an idealism about it.”

-- Don Cook, 69, author and journalist, who covered World War II in Europe and spent 43 years as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

U.S. ACTIVE MILITARY PERSONNEL

Army Navy Marines Total 1939 189,839 125,202 19,432 334,473 1940 269,023 160,997 28,345 458,365 1941 1,462,315 284,427 54,359 1,801,101 1942 3,075,608 640,570 142,613 3,858,791 1943 6,994,472 1,741,750 308,523 9,044,745 1944 7,994,750 2,981,365 475,604 11,451,719 1945 8,267,958 3,380,817 474,680 12,123,455

Source: World War II Almanac