The Darkest Year: The American Home Front, 1941-1942 - Hardcover

Klingaman, William K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250133173 ISBN 13: 9781250133175

Verlag: St Martin's Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

The Darkest Year is acclaimed author William K. Klingaman’s narrative history of the American home front from December 7, 1941 through the end of 1942, a psychological study of the nation under the pressure of total war.

For Americans on the home front, the twelve months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor comprised the darkest year of World War Two. Despite government attempts to disguise the magnitude of American losses, it was clear that the nation had suffered a nearly unbroken string of military setbacks in the Pacific; by the autumn of 1942, government officials were openly acknowledging the possibility that the United States might lose the war.

Appeals for unity and declarations of support for the war effort in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor made it appear as though the class hostilities and partisan animosities that had beset the United States for decades — and grown sharper during the Depression — suddenly disappeared. They did not, and a deeply divided American society splintered further during 1942 as numerous interest groups sought to turn the wartime emergency to their own advantage.

Blunders and repeated displays of incompetence by the Roosevelt administration added to the sense of anxiety and uncertainty that hung over the nation.

The Darkest Year focuses on Americans’ state of mind not only through what they said, but in the day-to-day details of their behavior. Klingaman blends these psychological effects with the changes the war wrought in American society and culture, including shifts in family roles, race relations, economic pursuits, popular entertainment, education, and the arts.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

WILLIAM K. KLINGAMAN holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Virginia and has taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland. He is the author of several books, including The Year Without Summer, The First Century, and histories of the years 1816, 1918, 1929, and 1941.

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The Darkest Year

The American Home Front, 1941-1942

By William K. Klingaman

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2019 William K. Klingaman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-13317-5

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Author's Note, 
Prologue, 
1. Before Pearl, 
2. Lights Out, 
3. An Anxious Trip, 
4. Holiday Wishes, 
5. Cloudy, Turning Colder, 
6. An Unquiet Feeling, 
7. The Golden West, 
8. Dark Tidings, Straight, No Sugar, 
9. Games of Chance, 
10. Borrowed Time, 
11. Last Call, 
12. End of the Beginning, 
Epilogue: December 7, 1942, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 
Also by William K. Klingaman, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

Before Pearl

SEPTEMBER 1939–DECEMBER 1941

There has probably never been a time of such confused prophecy, no time when the nation has been led so frantically in so many directions at once.

— THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1940

When the war in Europe began in September 1939, it seemed unlikely that the conflict would provoke dramatic changes in American society. Americans were united in their desire to avoid involvement in the fighting; public opinion polls revealed that more than 80 percent of the nation's voters opposed entry into the war — a number that would remain remarkably stable over the following two years.

In fact, many Americans had spent the past two decades resolutely ignoring the rest of the world. "Throughout most of my childhood there had always been war," recalled Russell Baker, then a teenager growing up in Baltimore. "Dimly, I had been aware through all those years that worlds were burning, but they seemed far away. It wasn't my world that was on fire, nor was it ever likely to be, or so I thought. Sheltered by two great oceans, America seemed impregnable. I was like a person on a summer night seeing heat lightning far out on the horizon and murmuring, 'Must be a bad storm way over there someplace.' It was not my storm."

Americans' views of the European conflict also were colored by memories of the nation's participation in the First World War. Anyone over thirty years old could remember when the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, an experience that most Americans came to regard as a mistake. Widely publicized congressional hearings in the mid-1930s strengthened the popular perception that the Wilson administration had entered the war at the behest of bankers and arms merchants eager to protect their loans and profits; accordingly, between 1935 and 1937 Congress passed a series of measures known collectively as the Neutrality Acts, which prohibited American citizens from selling "arms, ammunition, or implements of war" to belligerent nations, or making loans to their governments, or traveling on ships of nations at war.

In the autumn of 1939, the embargo on American arms sales clearly favored Nazi Germany, which possessed an impressive advantage in military hardware over France and Britain. Most Americans, however, favored the Allied cause, partly because they believed that a victorious Hitler would sooner or later launch a war against the United States, but also because they had no illusions about the brutal nature of the Nazi regime. "There are few save propagandists and crackpots," observed the Baltimore Sun, "who regard the ethics of Herr Hitler and his entourage with anything but a contempt which frequently becomes loathing."

To redress the balance, Roosevelt asked Congress to repeal the ban on arms sales. The president had promised the American people that there would be "no blackout of peace" in the United States, and strengthening Britain and France seemed to provide the best chance of keeping the United States out of the war. In mid-September 1939, more than 60 percent of Americans supported arms sales to the Allies — on a cash-and-carry basis, to avoid endangering American lives, ships, and investments — largely because they hoped the increased production of war material would give a boost to the American economy, still plagued by high unemployment and sluggish economic growth despite six years of New Deal initiatives.

Nevertheless, Roosevelt's proposal to repeal the arms ban ran into the determined opposition of a vocal minority of congressmen (primarily from the Midwest), who warned that selling weapons to the Allies would drag the nation into the war by provoking retaliation by Germany. "I frankly question," said Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, "whether we can become an arsenal for one belligerent without being the target for the other." They were backed by a well-organized lobbying campaign that flooded legislative offices with letters, petitions, and telegrams, including a single-day record of 487,000 pieces of mail (mostly from women and clergymen) on September 19. Protests on Capitol Hill grew so impassioned that the Department of Justice dispatched a half dozen FBI agents to protect pro-repeal congressmen against demonstrators.

While Congress debated cash-and-carry, news of the war brought the world suddenly very close at hand to Americans. Newspapers carried page after page of the latest dispatches from Europe. Radio, which had been in its infancy in 1917, became a constant companion — "the box we live in," wrote one observer — and reports of the Wehrmacht's crushing victories in Poland gave rise to a new and disturbing form of entertainment known as a radio sandwich: "two bars of music with an ominous voice in between." Even programs of Muzak in elevators interrupted the usual soothing selections from Victor Herbert with bulletins on the war.

As Americans grew increasingly aware that events abroad could become the determining factor in their immediate destinies, a brief moment of panic ensued. Housewives began to hoard food, especially sugar. Towns up and down the East Coast reported sightings of submarines, and one group of fishermen two hundred miles off the coast of Massachusetts swore that "a big, gray plane with swastikas on its wings had circled their fleet twice before putting back for Europe." In department stores, mothers snatched toy pistols and soldiers out of their children's hands, and substituted footballs or a Wizard of Oz doll instead.

"We try to reconcile the cheerful and familiar details of our life with news that may well mean the end of all of them, but it is too soon," noted the New Yorker. "The ten million men who will die are still an arbitrary figure, an estimate from another war; the children who will be starved or bombed belong to people we can never know, the bombs themselves will fall only on strange names on a map." In fact, a Rand McNally spokesman reported that in the first twenty-four hours of the war, the company sold more maps in the United States than it had since 1918; Macy's book department in downtown Manhattan sold more maps than in any week in the store's history.

On Wall Street, investment firms encouraged their customers to buy shares of steel companies. "The machines of war are being continually destroyed," one financier observed, "and replacements use up tremendous additional quantities of steel." Others predicted similar opportunities amid the wartime dislocations of trade. "Unquestionably, war is going to require a lot of imports into England and France," noted one New York businessman, "and that's going to mean business here and all over the United States. Factories are going to boom and smoke's going...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St Martin's Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250133173
• ISBN 13: 9781250133175
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland