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How World War II Ended the Great Depression
Though the New Deal alleviated (made better) suffering during the Great Depression, it was the build-up to World War II that truly ended it. World War II created nearly 17 million jobs manufacturing armaments and other wartime products. Nearly everyone who wanted a job could be employed. Workers got the opportunity to pay off old debts and save earnings, which stimulated the economy.
Women in the War
Because many American men were fighting overseas, by 1944, six million women were working in war industries. The famous Rosie the Riveter advertisement emphasized the important role women factory workers had in continuing the development of necessary military supplies. Though many women embraced the opportunities the wartime industry offered them, women earned only 60 percent of what male workers earned and were expected to give up their jobs to men when the war was over.
African Americans in the War
More than one million African Americans served, representing every branch of the armed forces. African Americans volunteering to fight for the United States found themselves segregated into their own units that were usually supervised by white officers. The Tuskegee Airmen were an all-Black squadron of pilots who fought in Italy. They won two Distinguished Unit Citations for their combat against the German air force. Often, African American soldiers found themselves more openly embraced in European desegregated society than they were back home, and African Americans’ experiences and achievements in World War II provided civil rights activists with evidence that they used in their demands for equality. As a result, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, requiring the desegregation of the U. S. Armed Forces in 1948.
Navajo Code Talkers
One of the keys to American military success was their use of the Navajo language as code to allow for communication. The Navajo language was spoken by only a few people in the American Southwest, so the military hired Navajo speakers called the Navajo Code Talkers to create a code based on their language. The Japanese were never able to break this code.
Bracero Program
During the Great Depression, the Mexican Repatriation Act caused Mexicans and Mexican Americans to be deported from the United States to provide more migrant labor jobs for white Americans. During World War II, however, there was a labor shortage, so the United States signed the Mexican Farm Labor Program (Bracero Program) in 1942. This U.S.-Mexico agreement allowed millions of Mexican men to work in the United States on short-term work contracts.
Japanese Internment
Despite a lack of evidence, Japanese Americans were suspected of being willing to spy for Japan and feared as a security risk. Executive Order 9066 authorized “military commanders to exclude civilians from military areas.” This resulted in the internment (or imprisonment) of 120,000 Japanese Americans in consolidation camps. As a result of internment, many Japanese Americans lost their homes, personal possessions, and businesses.
Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American who had been in an internment camp, asserted that the internment was unconstitutional in the case Korematsu v. US. The Supreme Court ruled that the executive order was a wartime necessity. In 1988, recognizing the limitation of citizen’s civil rights, Congress did award each survivor of the internment camps $20,000 in reparations.
