WWII: America's Home Front

I made sure that Claude included Milton Friedman’s role in tax withholding and Paul Samuelson’s dire forecast of a postwar Depression.

The Second World War — Lecture Three: The Home Front

On the eighth of November, 1942, at Henry Kaiser’s shipyard in Richmond, California, a crew laid the keel of a cargo ship. Four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-six minutes later they launched her. She was the Robert E. Peary, a ten-thousand-ton Liberty ship of the standard emergency design, and she was assembled from prefabricated sections the way a later age would assemble a machine on a line — whole deckhouses and hull segments built elsewhere and craned into place, welded rather than riveted, by men and a great many women who had never built a ship and in most cases had never seen the sea. She was a stunt, and everyone knew it; the yard had rehearsed the sections in advance and thrown its whole strength at the one hull to set a record for the newsreels. But a stunt is only possible on the foundation of a routine, and the routine underneath it was the astonishing thing. The Richmond yards, and Kaiser’s yards up the coast at Portland, were turning out Liberty ships at a steady clip of better than one a day, and the country as a whole, before the war ended, would build them faster than German submarines could sink them, which was the entire point, and which decided the Battle of the Atlantic as surely as any action at sea.

Henry Kaiser had never built a ship in his life before the war. He was a road contractor and a dam builder — he had helped pour Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee, moved mountains of earth on government contracts across the West — and he came to shipbuilding as an outsider who did not know that the things he proposed to do were held to be impossible, and so did them. He broke the hull into subassemblies the way he had broken a highway into gradable sections. He welded where the old yards riveted, because a welder could be trained in weeks where a riveter took years, and the men and women he needed did not exist yet and would have to be made. He built whole towns around the yards to house workers who arrived by the trainload from Oklahoma and Arkansas and the cotton South. And because those workers fell sick and got hurt and had nowhere to go, he built them a system of prepaid group medicine to keep them on the job — the germ of what would outlast him as Kaiser Permanente, a private answer to a problem the country had not yet decided was the government’s.

The Robert E. Peary is a good place to begin because she is the whole story in miniature. A private empire built on public contracts; a workforce conjured out of migration and trained in a hurry; a technology reinvented under the pressure of need; a government that supplied the demand and the money and the priorities and then largely got out of the way of men who could deliver; and, over all of it, the sheer scale of American production, which is the fact from which everything else on the home front follows. The armies whose campaigns the last lecture traced were the visible edge of this. Behind them stood the yards and the assembly lines and the rationed kitchens and a federal government swollen past anything in the Republic’s experience, and a President who had spent a decade enlarging his office and now enlarged it again. How the country became the arsenal, what the arsenal cost it in its own institutions and traditions, and what of the transformation it kept when the guns fell silent — that is the subject.

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Begin with the numbers, because they are almost literally incredible.

In 1939 the United States was still, after a decade, a Depression economy. Some nine million men and women were out of work, better than fourteen in every hundred who wanted a job; the great plants ran at a fraction of capacity. Then the orders came — first Allied orders under Lend-Lease, then the country’s own rearmament, then, after Pearl Harbor, the bottomless demand of a two-ocean war — and the idle economy woke and stretched and discovered how much it could do.

American factories built roughly three hundred thousand military aircraft in under four years, in a country that had built a few thousand a year before the war. They built something on the order of eighty-six thousand tanks, twelve thousand major warships and merchant hulls, two and a half million trucks, and small arms and shells and boots and rations in quantities that supplied not only American forces but, through Lend-Lease, the British and the Soviets and the Chinese besides. The gross output of the economy, corrected for inflation, very nearly doubled between 1939 and 1944. By 1944 the United States alone was out-producing all the Axis powers combined, and doing it while its own civilians ate better and lived better than the civilians of any other combatant on earth.

Wages rose. Overtime became the ordinary condition of industrial life. Families that had spent ten years scrimping found themselves, suddenly, with money and nothing much to spend it on, because the things they might have bought were no longer being made.

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An economy does not double itself in five years by accident, and it does not convert from washing machines to bombsights on its own. Somebody had to decide who got the steel and the aluminum and the rubber and the machine tools, because there was not enough of any of them to satisfy the Army and the Navy and the shipyards and the aircraft plants and the civilian economy all at once, and a market left to bid freely for scarce materials in a bottomless emergency would have bid the prices to the moon and armed no one in particular very well. So the country did a thing deeply against its own grain: it put the allocation of resources, for the duration, under the hand of the state.

The instrument was the War Production Board, set up early in 1942, and its chairman was Donald Nelson, a mild, capable executive borrowed from Sears, Roebuck — a man who had spent his career deciding what a great retailer should stock, now asked to decide what a continent should build. Nelson’s board halted the manufacture of automobiles for private sale within weeks of Pearl Harbor and turned the auto industry, the largest concentration of manufacturing skill on earth, wholesale over to war work; Ford’s vast new plant at Willow Run, built to disgorge a heavy bomber an hour, is the monument of that conversion. The board rationed the strategic metals, set the priorities, and presided over the alphabet of subsidiary agencies that grew up around it. And Nelson himself is a study in the limits of the arrangement, because he never fully controlled the thing he chaired. The Army and Navy procurement officers, who actually placed the orders and held the contracts, ran their own show and rolled over him when they chose; the production miracle happened around Nelson as much as through him, driven by the uniformed services and the industrialists more than by the civilian board that was supposed to ride herd on both.

Above the whole tangle Roosevelt eventually set a single man to knock heads together: James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, whom he pulled off the Supreme Court and installed in the White House itself as director of what became the Office of War Mobilization. Byrnes settled the endless jurisdictional wars among the agencies, decided the disputes that reached the President’s desk before they reached it, and wielded so much of Roosevelt’s authority over the domestic war that the newspapers took to calling him the Assistant President — a man of enormous power whom most Americans could not have named, running the internal war from a corner of the West Wing while the President ran the alliance.

The part of the managed economy that every household felt was price control and rationing, and here the state reached past the factory and into the pantry. In a full-employment economy awash in wages and starved of goods, prices wanted to fly upward — the classic condition of too much money chasing too few things — and unchecked inflation would have robbed every fixed income, poisoned labor relations, and made a mockery of the war bonds the government was busy selling. So the Office of Price Administration froze prices and rationed the scarce goods, and it became the most intimate and the most resented arm of the wartime state. Its first administrator was Leon Henderson, a blunt, combative New Deal economist who understood that his job was to be hated and did it without flinching; he posed for the cameras as “Mr. Inflation” to dramatize the enemy, held the line on prices against the fury of farmers and manufacturers and unions alike, and was duly driven out of office by the resentment he had provoked, a casualty of doing an unpopular thing well.

Under the OPA, sugar was rationed, then coffee, then meat, butter, canned goods, shoes, gasoline, tires. Every household got its ration books, the little booklets of stamps that had to be surrendered along with the money before the grocer would part with the goods; the red points for meats and fats, the blue points for processed foods, became a second currency that a nation of housewives learned to manage with a precision the Treasury might have envied. A black market grew up in the interstices, because black markets always do, and the enforcement of price ceilings against one’s own neighbors put a strain on the American disposition. They accepted it, grumbling, for the duration and not one day longer — the rationing and the controls were dismantled with almost indecent haste the moment the war ended — and the grumbling itself is the historically revealing thing. The country adapted its market economy to the discipline of a command economy under the lash of total war, and it did so provisionally, holding its nose, with a clear inner reservation that this was an emergency measure and no part of the permanent order. The tradition bent under the environmental pressure and then, when the pressure lifted, sprang most of the way back.

The same logic that froze prices froze wages, and the freezing of wages threw off a consequence no one intended and the country lives with still. To hold down the wage side of the inflationary spiral, the government capped what employers could pay — and left them, in a labor market so starved of workers that plants were poaching one another’s hands, scrambling for some legal way to sweeten an offer that the ceiling forbade them to raise in cash. The loophole they found was the fringe benefit. Contributions an employer made to a health plan or a pension for its workers were ruled to fall outside the wage ceiling, and shortly outside the worker’s taxable income as well, so that a dollar spent on a man’s health insurance escaped both the wage cap and the tax that would have shrunk a dollar handed him in his pay envelope. Employers seized on it to compete for labor they could not outbid in wages, unions bargained for it, and health coverage migrated in a few years from a rarity to a standard attachment of the industrial job — the arrangement Henry Kaiser had improvised for his shipyard crews now generalized across the economy by the accident of the wage freeze. That the United States would come to fund the medical care of most of its working population through the employer rather than the state or the individual was decided, in effect, by a wartime expedient meant to do something else entirely, and it outlasted every board and every control that had produced it.

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A war on this scale had to be paid for, and the manner of the paying worked a quieter revolution than the rationing, and a more lasting one.

The government met perhaps two-fifths of the war’s colossal cost out of taxation and borrowed the rest, and both halves changed the citizen’s relationship to the state. Borrowing meant the war bond, and the war bond drives became one of the defining rituals of the home front — a deliberate campaign to soak up the surplus wages that had nowhere to go, to fight inflation by locking away purchasing power, and to bind every citizen, financially and emotionally, into the war effort. Movie stars barnstormed the country selling bonds; children bought war stamps at school and pasted them into books; the radio ran bond marathons, the most famous of them a single day in 1943 when the singer Kate Smith went on the air over and over for eighteen hours and sold thirty-nine million dollars in bonds by the sheer accumulated weight of her sincerity, a performance a sociologist later dissected as a small masterpiece of mass persuasion. The bond was salesmanship, and it was also participation: a way for the great civilian majority to feel that it had a stake and a share in a war being fought by other people’s sons.

Taxation was the deeper change. Before the war the federal income tax was a tax on the prosperous — some four million Americans filed, the well-to-do and the rich, and the ordinary wage earner paid it no mind because it did not touch him. The war made it a mass tax. To raise the sums the war demanded, Congress reached down into the broad middle and the working class, lowered the thresholds, and by 1943 something like forty-two million Americans owed the federal income tax where four million had before. The tax came home, for the first time, to the factory hand and the clerk and the schoolteacher, and it has never left.

The old system asked the citizen to reckon up his prior year’s income and pay the tax in a lump the following spring — a manageable thing for a small class of the comfortable, an impossibility for forty million wage earners living close to the bone. The answer was to deduct the tax from each paycheck as it was earned — pay as you go, the employer withholding the government’s share before the worker ever saw it. The idea for easing the changeover came from Beardsley Ruml, the treasurer of Macy’s department store, who proposed forgiving a year’s back taxes so that no one would owe two years at once in the switch; the technical work of designing the withholding machinery itself was done inside the Treasury’s tax-research division, and among the young economists in that small group was a thirty-year-old named Milton Friedman. The irony is one the historians have not let go of, and Friedman did not shrink from it in later life: the man who would become the century’s most formidable champion of small government and the free market helped, as a wartime staffer, to build the collection engine of the modern state — testifying for withholding before Congress, working out its mechanics, and reflecting decades afterward that it had been a fine expedient for a war and a grave thing to have fastened on the country in peacetime, a device he wished he could see abolished and knew never would be. Withholding solved the collection problem at a stroke, and it did something subtler besides: it made the tax nearly painless by making it nearly invisible, taken before the money was ever in hand, so that the citizen felt the deduction as a smaller thing than a bill he had to write. It was sold as a wartime expedient, and it stayed, because once the machinery existed no government was going to give it up.

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At the center of all this stood a President who had already, before a shot was fired, done more to enlarge his office than any man since Lincoln, and who now enlarged it again under the cover of the war. The changes Roosevelt worked in the presidency are the institutional heart of the home-front story, and they run in two directions at once — the eclipse of the reform that had made him, and the swelling of the executive power that would outlive him.

Roosevelt himself announced the first of these with characteristic slyness at a press conference late in December of 1943. Asked about the New Deal, he spun the reporters a parable. Some years back, he said, the patient — the country — had fallen gravely ill of an internal disorder, and a specialist called Dr. New Deal had been brought in and had pulled him through. But now the same patient had been in a bad accident, had broken bones, needed a different kind of doctor, an orthopedic surgeon, and so Dr. New Deal had stepped aside for Dr. Win-the-War. It was a graceful way of announcing a retreat. The reforming energy of the 1930s was spent, and Roosevelt knew it, and he chose to spend what political capital remained to him on the war rather than on the domestic crusade that had defined him.

The retreat was not entirely his choice, because Congress had already begun the work for him. The elections of 1938 and 1942 had strengthened a conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats that had had enough of the New Deal, and once the war provided both the pretext and the full employment that made relief unnecessary, that coalition set about dismantling the emergency agencies of the Depression. The Civilian Conservation Corps was abolished; the Works Progress Administration, which had employed millions of the jobless, was shut down — given, in Roosevelt’s phrase, an honorable discharge — because in an economy crying out for workers there were no jobless left for it to employ; the National Youth Administration followed. The alphabet agencies of relief died, one after another, killed partly by prosperity and partly by a Congress glad to be rid of them. The New Deal as a program of reform was over, and the war had ended it.

What grew as the reform receded was the executive itself. A world war run from Washington meant that power flowed to the only branch that could act with speed and secrecy and unity of command, and Roosevelt gathered it. He governed the domestic war very largely by executive order, standing up agency after agency by his own decree — the War Production Board, the Office of Price Administration, the Office of War Mobilization, the War Relocation Authority, the Fair Employment Practice Committee, a whole shadow government of war boards answerable to the President and created without waiting on Congress. The emergency became a standing grant of discretion; the President asked for extraordinary powers and got them, and used them, and the machinery of an executive branch that could reach into prices and wages and production and the movement of whole populations was assembled in those years and never fully taken down. Historians would later trace the lineage of what they called the imperial presidency back to exactly this moment — the war that taught the office how large it could be.

Roosevelt ran the whole apparatus in his own peculiar way, which was to trust no single subordinate too far and to keep the ultimate decisions in his own hands. He deliberately gave overlapping authority to rival men and rival agencies, let them fight, and reserved to himself the power to settle the fight — a method that looked like chaos and functioned as control, since it meant that every important thread ran back to the President and no baron beneath him could grow too strong. He kept his own counsel to a degree that exasperated his aides; men left his office each certain they had his agreement, and discovered later that he had committed to nothing. It was maddening to work for and formidably effective, and it concentrated in one shrewd, genial, endlessly indirect man a sum of power the Republic had never lodged in a single office before.

And then, in 1944, he did the thing no President had done and the unwritten rule of the Republic had forbidden since Washington laid it down: he ran for a fourth term, having already broken the two-term tradition in 1940 with the war coming on. He was, by then, a visibly dying man — the photographs from that last year show it, the gray face and the sunken eyes — and the inner circle knew his heart was failing and kept it from the country, and the country reelected him, because in the middle of a world war the electorate was not disposed to change captains and Roosevelt had made himself indispensable to a degree that no successor could easily inherit. The fourth term was the outer limit of the personal presidency he had built. It so alarmed the country in retrospect that within a few years of his death the Constitution was amended to forbid any President from ever attempting it again — a reform that was, at bottom, a verdict on how far the office had grown under his hand, and a decision that this particular adaptation was one the Republic would not keep.

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While the government swelled in Washington, the population itself came loose from its moorings and moved, on a scale not seen since the settlement of the West, and the movement remade the human map of the country.

Something like fifteen million Americans changed their county of residence during the war, and many millions more moved within their counties, drawn by the pull of the war plants and pushed by the collapse of the old rural economy. The jobs were where the contracts were — in Detroit and its ring of aircraft and tank plants, on the shipbuilding coasts of California and the Gulf, at the sprawling new works thrown up in places that had been small towns and were now boomtowns overnight. The San Francisco Bay Area filled with shipyard workers; Los Angeles became an aircraft city; the Willow Run plant outside Detroit drew a workforce so large and so suddenly that there was nowhere to house them, and they lived in trailer camps and shacks and slept in shifts in rented beds. The boomtowns strained past their capacity — too few houses, too few schools, too few sewers, too little of everything but work and wages — and the friction of too many strangers packed too close would presently boil over.

Two migrations within the great migration deserve their own names. The first was the second wave of the Black exodus from the South, which the earlier lectures of this series traced in its beginnings after the First War and which the Second War now vastly accelerated. The war plants of the North and West, desperate for hands, opened their gates at last to Black workers who had been shut out of industrial work for a generation, and hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners left the cotton country for Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles and Oakland, trading the sharecropper’s cabin for the assembly line and the segregation of the countryside for the different and denser segregation of the Northern city. They carried their votes north, into states where those votes could be cast and counted, and the political consequences of that transfer would reshape both parties in the generation to come. The second migration was of women into the paid workforce and, above all, into industrial work that had been the preserve of men. Some six million women took jobs during the war who had not held them before; the married woman working outside the home, long frowned upon, became for the duration an act of patriotism; and the figure of Rosie the Riveter — the woman in the coveralls with the welding torch, doing a man’s job in a man’s plant — became one of the enduring images of the era. How much of that was permanent and how much provisional is a question the peace would answer, and the answer, when it came, was that most of the women were expected to give the jobs back to the returning men and most of them did, though the memory of the wages and the competence did not go back, and it waited.

The war reached into the ordinary texture of daily life in ways large and small. Families were scattered — the father in the service, the mother on the swing shift, the children shifting for themselves in the afternoons, the phrase “latchkey child” entering the language. Victory gardens sprang up in backyards and vacant lots, forty percent of the nation’s vegetables grown at home by people doing their bit and stretching the ration. Hollywood went to war with a will, the studios turning out combat pictures and morale pictures under the friendly eye of a government propaganda office, and the director Frank Capra, drafted into uniform, made a series of documentary films to explain to American soldiers and citizens alike why they fought. Radio carried the war into every parlor, the correspondents’ voices and the President’s fireside chats and the bond drives and the serials all braided together. It was a country more mobilized in its feelings, more of one mind, than it had been in living memory or would be again — and the unity, real as it was, had seams, and to the seams we now turn.

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A war fought, in its official telling, for freedom and against a racial tyranny was fought by a country that maintained a racial order of its own, and the contradiction did not escape the people living inside it. The war put that contradiction under a pressure it had not felt before, and the pressure produced both the first cracks in the old order and some of the ugliest episodes of the home front.

The cracks came first from Black Americans, who declined to fight a war against racism abroad while accepting it without complaint at home. The Black press gave the sentiment a slogan — the Double V, victory over the enemy abroad and victory over discrimination at home — and the slogan captured a mood that had hardened. Its most consequential exponent was A. Philip Randolph, the dignified and implacable head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the union of the Black men who made up the service crews of the railroad Pullman cars. In 1941, with the defense plants booming and Black workers still locked out of them, Randolph threatened to march a hundred thousand Black Americans on Washington to demand their share of the war work — a demonstration that would have been an acute embarrassment to a country lecturing the world about freedom, staged in a segregated capital, on the eve of war. Roosevelt did not want that march, and to prevent it he issued Executive Order 8802, forbidding discrimination by race in the defense industries and the federal government and setting up a Fair Employment Practice Committee to enforce it. The committee was weak, and the enforcement was thin, and the order left the armed forces themselves segregated as they had always been. But the transaction is a clean example of the environment forcing an institutional adaptation: the war’s ravenous demand for labor gave Black workers a leverage they had never possessed, Randolph had the wit to use it, and a President who cared little for the cause conceded to it because the war left him no comfortable room to refuse. It was the first federal action against employment discrimination since Reconstruction, wrung from a reluctant administration by the pressure of the moment, and the movement that produced it did not disband when the moment passed.

The migrations that fed the war plants also fed a racial friction that the crowded boomtowns could not contain. In the summer of 1943 Detroit — swollen with Southern migrants, Black and white, competing for too little housing and too few streetcar seats in the summer heat — exploded into a race riot that ran for days and left thirty-four dead, most of them Black, before federal troops restored order. In Los Angeles that same season, white servicemen roamed the streets attacking young Mexican American men in the flamboyant zoot suits that had become a badge of youth and defiance, in what the papers called the zoot suit riots. These were the collisions of a population wrenched loose and jammed together faster than any city’s institutions could absorb, and they were a warning, largely unheeded at the time, of the racial reckoning that the great wartime migration was carrying into the Northern and Western cities for the postwar decades to inherit.

And then there is the episode in which an American tradition did not merely bend under the pressure but broke: the internment of the Japanese Americans. In the fear and fury that followed Pearl Harbor, with the Pacific coast convinced it was next and rumor running ahead of fact, the demand rose to remove the people of Japanese descent from the coastal states as a security threat. There was no evidence of disloyalty worth the name, and the great majority of those marked for removal were American citizens by birth. But the coast had been schooled for two generations in the exclusion of the Japanese — the very laws and attitudes the earlier lectures of this series traced, the alien land acts and the naturalization bar and the long campaign to keep California white — and that inheritance now supplied a ready channel for the war’s fear to run in. In February of 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, and under its authority some hundred and twenty thousand men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them citizens, were ordered from their homes, permitted a suitcase apiece, made to sell or abandon their farms and shops and houses at ruinous loss, and moved inland to a string of hastily built camps behind wire in the deserts and wastes of the interior.

The administration of it fell to a new agency, the War Relocation Authority, and its first head was Milton Eisenhower — the younger brother of the general — who lasted barely ninety days in the job before the distaste of it drove him out, and who called the whole business, in later life, a mistake he regretted to the end of his days. His successor, Dillon Myer, ran the camps for the duration and came to believe the policy was wrong even as he executed it. The Supreme Court, asked to judge the thing, upheld it: in the Korematsu case, decided in 1944, the Court ruled that the military necessity of wartime justified the removal, a decision that stood as precedent for decades and was disavowed only long after, and that stands now as one of the least defensible in the Court’s history. The bitter irony that the men of the segregated Japanese American combat unit, the 442nd, were among the most decorated soldiers in the Army even as their families sat behind wire is a fact that needs no underlining. Decades later the government of the United States formally apologized for the internment and paid reparations to the survivors — an admission, rare in the history of states, that the thing had been a wrong and not a necessity.

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The war conscripted the country’s scientists as surely as its young men, and out of that conscription came an institution that had not existed before and has governed American science ever since.

The man who built it was Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer from MIT, an administrator of genius and considerable steel, who understood before almost anyone in Washington that the coming war would be a war of laboratories and who set out to organize the nation’s science for it. He persuaded Roosevelt, in a single brief meeting, to create a federal office to marshal the universities and the industrial laboratories for war research, and as head of what became the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Bush invented the modern relationship between the government and the scientist. Rather than draft the physicists into uniform and put them to work in military laboratories, he left them in their universities and their companies and paid them by contract to do the war’s research where they stood — a pattern of federal money flowing to independent laboratories that would become, after the war, the permanent architecture of American science.

The output of that arrangement was formidable and, in one case, world-altering. The laboratories perfected radar, the invisible eye that won the air and the sea; they built the proximity fuze, a shell that sensed its target and burst near it without a direct hit, which transformed anti-aircraft fire and naval gunnery; they turned penicillin from a laboratory curiosity into a mass-produced drug that saved uncountable lives, and DDT into a weapon against the insect-borne diseases that had killed more soldiers than bullets in every prior war. And behind the deepest curtain of secrecy the war produced, the same partnership of government money, university brains, and industrial muscle undertook the largest scientific and engineering project in history — the building of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project belongs, in its origins, to the home front: it was a vast industrial enterprise, whole secret cities raised in Tennessee and Washington State and New Mexico, tens of thousands of workers laboring at tasks they were forbidden to understand, two billion dollars spent without a line item that Congress could see, all of it hidden from a public that learned of its existence only when the weapon was used. What belongs here is the machinery that made it — the marriage of the federal treasury to the research laboratory that Bush had brokered, which won the war’s technical battles and then, in the peace, became a standing institution. Bush laid the case for keeping it in a report he handed the government as the war ended, arguing that the nation should go on funding basic research in peacetime as a permanent public responsibility; and the research state he proposed, the endless flow of federal dollars into American science, was duly built and never dismantled.

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The last lecture set down a promissory note that must now be paid. As the global war took shape and ran its course, the deliberate extermination of the Jews of Europe was underway, and the record of what the United States knew of it, and did about it, belongs here.

The essential facts of the killing reached the West in the course of 1942 — reliable reports, transmitted through neutral channels, that the German regime was engaged in the systematic murder of the whole Jewish population within its reach, not as a byproduct of war but as a policy pursued for its own sake. By the end of that year the Allied governments had confirmed enough to issue a joint declaration condemning the extermination in so many words. The information existed. What it did not do was move the machinery of rescue, for two reasons that compounded each other.

The first was the settled conviction, held from the top of the war effort down, that nothing must be allowed to compete with the single overriding aim of military victory, and that the surest and only real rescue of Europe’s Jews lay in the swiftest possible defeat of Germany. By this logic every proposal for a rescue that would divert shipping, or troops, or aircraft, or diplomatic energy from the war was refused, because the war came first and the war was held to be the rescue. The logic was not simply a mask for indifference — the fastest defeat of Germany did in fact end the killing, for those who survived to see it — and the logic also served, conveniently, to justify doing very nearly nothing while the killing went on.

The second reason was closer to home and less defensible. The machinery of American refugee policy sat within the State Department, and there it encountered officials who did not want the refugees, who regarded the whole issue as a distraction and the immigrants as undesirable, and who used the immigration restrictions the earlier lectures traced — the tight national quotas of the 1920s, still in force — as a wall against the desperate. The most notorious of them, Breckinridge Long, an assistant secretary of state, quietly throttled the flow of visas by piling procedural obstacles in the path of any Jew trying to reach America, so that even the meager quotas went unfilled while the ships of Europe’s Jews were turned away. A conference the Allies convened at Bermuda in 1943, ostensibly to address the refugee crisis, produced a great deal of talk and nothing of substance, and was understood by those who watched it closely to have been designed to produce nothing — a performance of concern in place of action.

The thing was broken open, at last, from inside the government itself, and by an unlikely quarter. The lawyers of the Treasury Department, working under Secretary Henry Morgenthau — a Dutchess County neighbor and old friend of the President, and the highest-placed Jew in the administration — stumbled onto the evidence of the State Department’s obstruction while chasing a licensing question, and were appalled by what they found. One of them, a young attorney named Josiah DuBois, drafted a report and titled it, in the first draft, a report on the acquiescence of this government in the murder of the Jews, and threatened to resign and take the whole thing public if nothing was done. Morgenthau carried the substance of it to Roosevelt in January of 1944, and the President, faced with the prospect of a scandal in an election year, acted: he created by executive order the War Refugee Board, a body charged at last with the actual work of rescue. It came terribly late — most of those who were going to die were already dead — and it worked on a shoestring, and yet in its short life it managed to save perhaps some tens of thousands, funding the operations of rescuers on the ground in Europe, among them the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, whose work in Budapest it helped underwrite.

There remained the question of the camps themselves, and in particular whether the Allies, whose bombers by 1944 were flying over the very region where the largest killing center lay, should bomb the gas chambers or the rail lines that fed them. The request was made and was refused, on the grounds that the aircraft were needed for the military targets that would win the war and shorten the killing, and the argument over whether that refusal was right — whether such a raid was even feasible, whether it would have saved lives or cost them, whether the men who declined it were reasoning or rationalizing — has never been settled. What can be said plainly is this: the rescue of the Jews was never adopted as an aim of the war, was never permitted to compete with victory, and was obstructed at the working level by men within the American government who did not want the victims saved. The country that did more than any other to destroy the regime that committed the crime did remarkably little, while there was still time, to pull the crime’s victims from the fire.

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The war ended the way the last lecture described, in the ruin of the enemy capitals and the flash over the two Japanese cities, and Roosevelt did not live to see it finished — the great stroke felled him at Warm Springs in April of 1945, and the plain man from Missouri who succeeded him inherited a war nearly won and a peace not yet imagined. What remains, at the close of the home-front story, is the reckoning of what the furnace of those years had made, and what of it the country chose to keep.

A great deal of the wartime apparatus was struck down the moment the emergency passed, and struck down eagerly, because the country had accepted it only as an emergency. The price controls and the rationing were dismantled within months, the ration books thrown away with something like joy. The war production boards were wound up, the controls on materials lifted, the command economy demobilized as fast as the armies. The country reached back, with evident relief, for the free market and the private bargain it had suspended for the duration, and the reaching-back is itself the evidence that the suspension had never been meant to last.

It reached back over the strenuous objection of much of the economics profession, which feared the reaching-back would be a catastrophe, and which was wrong. A large body of expert opinion held that the controls should be kept in place well past the war, on the conviction that lifting them would loose a ruinous inflation, and held further that the sudden demobilization of twelve million servicemen and the collapse of war spending would throw the economy straight back into the Depression from which the war had rescued it. The most explicit of these forecasts came from Paul Samuelson, already among the ablest economists of his generation, who wrote in 1943 that a rapid demobilization, a liquidation of price controls, and a sharp fall in deficit spending would usher in “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” Others of the first rank agreed; the expectation of a postwar slump was close to the consensus of the profession. Then the war ended, and the controls came off, and the soldiers came home, and the government spending fell off a cliff — every condition the forecasters had dreaded was met — and the depression did not come. The pent-up savings of the war years met the pent-up demand for the goods that had gone unmade, the returning veterans were cushioned by the GI Bill and absorbed into a booming private economy, and unemployment, instead of soaring, stayed low while employment climbed past its wartime peak. Samuelson had hedged his prophecy with conditions, and the conditions largely came to pass and the prophecy still failed, which is the instructive part. The men who understood the economy best, equipped with the newest and most confident tools their science had yet produced, looked at the transition and saw disaster where prosperity was coming. It is worth carrying out of this lecture as a caution: that the causes of unemployment and inflation are less well understood, even by those whose profession it is to understand them, than the confidence of the forecasts tends to suggest.

But other transformations proved permanent, and they add up to a country structurally different from the one that had entered the war. The federal government was vastly larger and reached vastly further into the economy and the daily life of the citizen, and it never shrank back to its prewar dimensions. The income tax had become a mass tax collected by withholding, and the whole population now stood in a direct financial relationship to the national treasury that it had never known before. The presidency had grown into something like the office we would recognize, the commanding executive at the center of national life, its wartime powers only partly relinquished. The partnership of government and science had been institutionalized into a permanent research state. The demographic map had been redrawn by a migration that carried millions of Black Southerners into the Northern and Western cities, with all the political and social consequence that would flow from it, and had drawn millions of women into a workforce whose memory of their competence outlasted their departure from it. The Black freedom movement had discovered its leverage and its slogans and its capacity to extract concessions from a reluctant state, and it did not lay those down. And returning from the war came sixteen million veterans, to whom a grateful and slightly nervous Congress had voted, in 1944, an extraordinary charter — the GI Bill, which would send them to college by the millions and lend them the money to buy houses, and which would build the suburban, educated, homeowning middle class that defined the America of the next generation.

The country had been put through a furnace, and it came out changed in ways it had chosen and ways it had not, keeping some of the changes deliberately and some without ever quite deciding to. It had proved that it could out-produce the world and govern an economy by command and reshape itself under pressure faster than it would have believed possible, and it had also shown, in the camps in the desert and the visas that went unissued, how its oldest promises could give way when the pressure bore hard enough on the wrong people. It stood, in the summer of 1945, the strongest nation on the face of the earth by an almost embarrassing margin, in possession of a weapon no one else yet held, with its cities untouched and its factories humming and its rivals in ruins — and with the enormous and unwelcome question of what to do with all that power now pressing in, as the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union began, even before the shooting stopped, to curdle into the long antagonism that would organize the world for the next half century. That question, and the weapon, and the peace that was really the opening of a colder war, are where we turn next.

[ END OF LECTURE ]

End of Lecture 4.3 — The Home Front

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