Fighting For The Four Freedoms: World War II, 1941-1945

1. Fighting For The Four Freedoms: World War II, 1941-1945

2. I. Fighting World War II

3. A. Good Neighbors • FDR embarked on a number of departures in foreign policy. • Soviet Union • Latin America

4. B. The Road to War • Japan had expanded its reach in Manchuria and China by the mid-1930s. • Germany embarked on a campaign to control the entire continent. • Benito Mussolini • General Francisco Franco • Although Roosevelt was alarmed, he was tied to the policy of appeasement.

5. C. Isolationism American businesspeople did not wish to give up profitable overseas markets in Germany and Japan. Many Americans were reluctant to get involved in international affairs because of the legacy of World War I. Congress favored isolationism, as seen with various Neutrality Acts.

6. D. War in Europe • Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. • Blitzkrieg appeared unstoppable. • For nearly two years, Britain stood virtually alone in fighting Germany. • Battle of Britain

7. E. Toward Intervention In 1940, breaking with a tradition that dated back to George Washington, Roosevelt announced his candidacy for a third term as president. Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act in 1941 and froze Japanese assets.

8. F. Pearl Harbor On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes, launched from aircraft carriers, bombed the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. FDR asked for a declaration of war against Japan.

9. G. The War in the Pacific The first few months of American involvement witnessed an unbroken string of military disasters. The tide turned with the battles at Coral Sea and Midway in May and June 1942.

10. H. The War in Europe • D-Day established the much needed second front in western Europe. • The crucial fighting in Europe took place on the eastern front between Germany and the Soviet Union. • Stalingrad marked the turning point. • The war claimed millions of lives. • Holocaust

11. II. The Home Front

12. A. Mobilizing for War World War II transformed the role of the national government. The government built housing for war workers and forced civilian industries to retool for war production

13. B. Business and War • Americans produced an astonishing amount of wartime goods and utilized science and technology. • The West Coast emerged as a focus of military-industrial production. • Nearly 2 million Americans moved to California for jobs in defense-related industries. • The South remained very poor when the war ended.

14. C. Labor in Wartime Organized labor entered a three-sided arrangement with government and business that allowed union membership to soar to unprecedented levels. Unions became firmly established in many sectors of the economy during World War II.

15. D. Fighting for the Four Freedoms • To Roosevelt, the Four Freedoms expressed deeply held American values worthy of being spread worldwide. • Roosevelt initially meant the phrase to refer to the elimination of barriers to international trade. • It came to mean protecting the standard of living from falling after the war.

16. E. The Fifth Freedom • The war witnessed a burst of messages marketing advertisers' definition of freedom. • Free enterprise

17. F. Women at War Women in 1944 made up over one-third of the civilian labor force. New opportunities opened up for married women and mothers. Women's work during the war was viewed by men and the government as temporary. The advertisers' "world of tomorrow" rested on a vision of family-centered prosperity.

18. III. Visions of Postwar Freedom

19. A. Toward an American Century Henry Luce insisted that the United States embrace a leadership role in his 1941 book The American Century. Henry Wallace offered a less imperialistic alternative. Luce and Wallace both spoke about a new conception of America's role in the world.

20. B. “The War of Life of Free Men” • The National Resources Planning Board offered a blueprint for a peacetime economy based on: • Full employment • An expanded welfare state • A widely shared American standard of living • FDR called for an Economic Bill of Rights in 1944. • The Servicemen's Readjustment Act, or GI Bill of Rights, was one of the most far-reaching pieces of social legislation in American history.

21. C. The Road to Serfdom • Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) • Offered a new intellectual justification for opponents of active government. • Helped lay the foundation for the rise of modern conservatism.

22. IV. The American Dilemma

23. A. Patriotic Assimilation • World War II created a vast melting pot, especially for European immigrants and their children. • By the war's end, racism and nativism had been stripped of intellectual respectability. • Ruth Benedict

24. B. The Bracero Program The war had a far more ambiguous meaning for nonwhites than for whites. The bracero program allowed tens of thousands of contract laborers to cross into the United States to take up jobs as domestic and agricultural workers. "Zoot suit" riots Mexican-Americans brought complaints of discrimination before the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC).

25. C. Indians During the War • American Indians served in the army. • The Iroquois issued a declaration of war against the Axis powers. • "Code talkers."

26. D. Asian-Americans in Wartime Asian-Americans' war experience was filled with paradox. Chinese exclusion was abolished. The American government viewed every person of Japanese ethnicity as a potential spy.

27. E. Japanese-American Internment • The military persuaded FDR to issue Executive Order 9066. • Internment revealed how easily war can undermine basic freedoms. • Hardly anyone spoke out against internment. • The courts refused to intervene. • Korematsu v. United States (1944) • The government marketed war bonds to the internees and drafted them into the army.

28. F. Blacks and the War • The wartime message of freedom portended a major transformation in the status of blacks. • The war spurred a movement of the black population from the rural South to the cities of the North and West. • Detroit race riot

29. G. Blacks and Military Service During the war, over 1 million blacks served in the armed forces. Black soldiers sometimes had to give up their seats on railroad cars to accommodate Nazi prisoners of war

30. H. Birth of the Civil Rights Movement • The war years witnessed the birth of the modern civil rights movement. • In July 1941, the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph called for a March on Washington. • Executive Order 8802 and FEPC

31. I. The Double-V The "double-V" meant that victory over Germany and Japan must be accompanied by victory over segregation at home.

32. J. The War and Race During the war, a broad political coalition centered on the left, but reaching well beyond it called for an end to racial inequality in America. CIO unions made significant efforts to organize black workers and to win them access to skilled positions. The new lack of militancy created a crisis for moderate white southerners. The South reacted to preserve white supremacy.

33. K. An American Dilemma • An American Dilemma (1944) was a sprawling account of the country's racial past, present, and future. • Gunnar Myrdal • Myrdal noted the conflict between American values and American racial polices. • America had to outlaw discrimination.

34. I. Black Internationalism In the first decades of the twentieth century, a black international consciousness was reinvigorated. W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and others developed an outlook that linked the plight of black Americans with that of people of color worldwide. World War II stimulated among African-Americans a greater awareness of the links between racism in the United States and colonialism abroad.

35. V. The End of the War

36. A. “The Most Terrible Weapon” One of the most momentous decisions ever confronted by an American president-whether to use the bomb on Japan-fell to Harry Truman. The atomic bomb was a practical realization of the theory of relativity. The Manhattan Project developed an atomic bomb.

37. B. The Dawn of the Atomic Age On August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped an atomic bomb that detonated over Hiroshima, Japan. Because of the enormous cost in civilian lives, the use of the bomb remains controversial.

38. C. The Nature of War The dropping of the atomic bombs was the logical culmination of the way World War II had been fought: never before had civilian populations been so targeted in a war.

39. D. Planning the Postwar World • Even as the war raged, a series of meetings between Allied leaders formulated plans for the postwar world. • Tehran • Yalta • Potsdam

40. E. Yalta and Bretton Woods The Bretton Woods meeting established a new international economic system.

41. F. The United Nations • The Dumbarton Oaks meeting established the structure of the United Nations. • General Assembly • Security Council

42. G. Peace but not Harmony • World War II produced a radical redistribution of world power. • It remained to be seen how seriously the victorious Allies took their wartime rhetoric of freedom. • Mahatma Gandhi