160 e lusive v ictories
“Doctor Win-the-War”
Total war entails a broad redirection of economic activity, with
far-reaching social consequences. Even with expanded wartime powers,
government in a market-oriented society such as the United States must
still induce the voluntary cooperation of major private actors. To meet
the challenge of mobilization for global war, Roosevelt found it
necessary to reach out to some of his most bitter political adversaries,
but the political cost was high. They already had checked the
momentum of his New Deal. They used their enhanced wartime
leverage to gnaw at its political underpinnings and make certain its
advocates would not frame the terms for postwar politics. Meanwhile,
as a consequence of social forces set in motion by mobilization—
demands by African Americans for equal treatment in factories and in
the military—the president’s political coalition threatened to fracture
on racial lines. Racial polarization struck another blow against the
fading prospects for further social reform.
American mobilization for total war began months before Pearl
Harbor but would still require several years to bear fruit. After Roos-
evelt finally accepted the need to commence planning for war in
mid-1941, military and civilian planners quickly generated a document
referred to as the Victory Program. Th is anticipated that American
forces would be ready for full-scale off ensive operations by summer
- Although based on key assumptions that proved incorrect (such
as the possibility that both the Soviet Union and Great Britain might
be defeated), the program’s estimate of 8.8 million Army and Air Force
personnel was very close to the actual mid-1945 fi gures. Adding esti-
mates for the navy and for Lend-Lease, the Victory Program arrived at
total economic requirements for the 1943 target date much higher than
the initial mobilization program had anticipated. Skeptics questioned
whether such production goals could be achieved, but the president
announced them as targets in his State of the Union message to
Congress one month after Pearl Harbor. Remarkably, the American
economy would achieve the production miracles the Victory Program
promised: besides meeting nearly all of its own military needs, the
United States supplied an additional $40 billion in defense output for
its allies.