Fighting the Good War at Home

Abstract

military, diplomatic, and economic world power. Declaring country would become Arsenal of Democracy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt led nation into Allied effort against fascist aggression that would change face of society forever. At least, this is usual interpretive bent on U.S. involvement in war. To date, major works on American home front suggest that wartime mobilization of 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 revisionist work of last quarter century on 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 home front effort implicitly have presented contrasting interpretations. In first full-length history of home front experience, Richard Polenberg wrote that World War II radically altered character of American society and challenged its most durable values, a view confirmed following year by Geoffrey Perrett, who argued that the war years provided last great collective social experience in country's history.' Yet in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years, 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 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 values