World War II Homefront: A Historiography

Abstract

In recent years, the World War II homefront has become a fertile field for historical scholarship. For several decades after the war, historians wrote extensively about the New Deal and the Cold War but neglected the wartime homefront. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars began to fill that gap with a number of outstanding comprehensive accounts and many more specialized studies. As the United States celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the war in the 1990s, historians looked at the impact ofthe war even more closely than before, and we now have a rich collection of scholarship dealing with the entire wartime experience. following are highlights of that scholarship, dealing with the themes appearing in this issue ofthe OAH Magazine of History, for students and teachers interested in pursuing these issues further. Two recent books provide the best brief introduction to the war at home. Allan M. Winkler's Home Front, U.S.A.: America during World War II, 2d ed. (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2000) deals with the economic, social, and political effects ofthe struggle and argues that the war was a watershed that laid the framework for the postwar years. John W. Jeffries's Wartime America: World War 11 Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996) likewise offers a clear overview ofthe changes that occurred but suggests that continuities with the past were equally impor tant and argues that basic American values survived the conflict intact. Both of these books contain full bibliographies of all the recent scholarship. Other books help fill out the picture. William L. O'Neill's A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War 11 (New York: Free Press, 1993) offers a good overview of all sides ofthe struggle. two best books from the 1970s, still useful today, are Richard Polenberg, War and Society: United States, 1941-1945 (Philadelphia:J.B.Lippincott Company, 1972); and John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). Polenberg provides an evenhanded and useful assessment of the important wartime developments. Blum in cludes a fuller sense of the culture and its constraints in his more extended account. Two other older works that are likewise still helpful are Richard R. Lingeman, Dont You Know There s a War On? American Home Front, 1941-1945 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1970); and Geoffrey Perrett, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: American People, 1939-1945 (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geohegan, 1973). Lee Kennett's For the Duration: United States Goes to War, Pearl Harbor-1942 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985) published more recently, exam ines the first six months of the struggle. Anthologies that can be used to supplement the above works include: Richard Polenberg, ed., America at War: Home Front, 1941-1945 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968); Chester E. Eisinger, ed., 1940s: Profile of a Nation in Crisis (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969); and the much more recent Mark P. Parillo, ed., We Were in the Big One: Experiences of the World War II Generation (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002). On the issue of whether the struggle was a good war, see Studs Terkel, uThe Good War1: An Oral History of World War II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). Paul Fussell paints a much more devastating picture of the impact of the conflict in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Richard Polenberg, who authored one ofthe best early analyses ofthe homefront experience in 1972, returned to the subject twenty years later in The Good War? A Reappraisal of How World War II Affected American Society published in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 100 (1992). In this latter essay, he focuses less on the positive accom plishments of the struggle and more on the way the war narrowed individual freedom and reinforced conservative tendencies in all areas of American life. On Franklin D. Roosevelt, such a dominant figure during the war, there is a vast literature. A number of the standard books