FIGHTING FOR THE FOUR FREEDOMS: WORLD WAR II ★^863Government military spending sparked
the economic development of the South
and West, laying the foundation for the rise
of the modern Sunbelt. The war created a
close link between big business and a mil-
itarized federal government—a “military-
industrial complex,” as President Dwight D.
Eisenhower would later call it—that long
survived the end of fighting.
World War II also redrew the boundaries
of American nationality. In contrast to World
War I, the government recognized the “new
immigrants” of the early twentieth century
and their children as loyal Americans. Black
Americans’ second-class status assumed, for
the first time since Reconstruction, a prom-
inent place on the nation’s political agenda.
But toleration had its limits. With the United
States at war with Japan, the federal govern-
ment removed more than 110,000 Japanese-
Americans, the majority of them American
citizens, from their homes and placed them in
internment camps.
As a means of generating support for the
struggle, the Four Freedoms provided a cru-
cial language of national unity. But this unity
obscured divisions within American society
that the war in some ways intensified, divi-
sions reflected in debates over freedom. While
some Americans looked forward to a world-
wide New Deal, others envisioned “free enter-
prise” replacing government inter vention in
the economy. The war gave birth to the mod-
ern civil rights movement but strengthened
the commitment of many white Americans to
maintain the existing racial order. The move-
ment of women into the labor force chal-
lenged traditional gender relations, but most
men and not a few women longed for the res-
toration of family life with a male breadwin-
ner and a wife responsible for the home.
- CHRONOLOGY •
1931 Japan invades Manchuria
1933 U.S. recognizes Soviet
Union
1935– Congress passes
1939 Neutrality Acts
1937 Sino-Japanese War begins
1938 Munich agreement
1939 Germany invades Poland
1940 Draft established
1941 Four Freedoms speech
Henry Luce’s The American
Century
Lend-Lease Act
Executive Order 8802
Atlantic Charter
Pearl Harbor attacked
1942 Executive Order 9066
Battle of Midway Island
Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE) formed
1943 Zoot suit riots
Detroit race riot
Congress lifts Chinese
Exclusion Act
1944 Smith v. Allwright
D-Day
GI Bill of Rights
Bretton Woods conference
Korematsu v. United States
Battle of the Bulge
1945 Yalta conference
Roosevelt dies; Harry Tru-
man becomes president
V-E Day (May)
Atomic bombs dropped on
Japan
End of war in Pacific- •