American History: A Survey

After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the official US entrance into World War II, many thought the war would inevitably—and soon—reach the shores of North America. Although it never did, the war profoundly impacted nearly every aspect of life in the US. Unlike any conflict before or since, it gained almost total support from American citizens, and nearly everyone participated in the effort to defeat the Axis powers (as Germany, Japan, Italy and their allies had come to be called).

Despite the united effort, in many ways the US failed to protect those most vulnerable to the effects of World War II. The most dramatic example was the effort to block Holocaust refugees from entering the US. Antisemitism was rampant across the world at the time of the war, which was part of the reason that the Nazis focused on Jewish people as their primary target in the first place. US and British officials attempted to deny early knowledge of the Holocaust for many years, but American History notes that they were aware. The public in both the US and Europe was also aware, despite Nazi efforts to conceal their war crimes, and many pressured the government to act, either by allowing refugees or destroying the concentration camps. For reasons that likely included both racism and misguided foreign policy, the Allied forces insisted that the only way to free the Nazis’ victims was to win the war entirely.

Concentration camps were not only a Nazi tactic. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the US declaration of war with Japan, the US began to round up Japanese citizens and move them to camps scattered around the American West. Although the Japanese camps did not enact brutal systematic murder like the Nazi camps, Japanese Americans who were placed in the camps were typically forced to abandon their home and property at a moment’s notice and work at the camps without compensation. This highlights a major difference between American attitudes toward Europeans versus Asians. Although the Nazis were almost all German, anti-German American attitudes never truly took hold in the US. In contrast, even many years before World War II, anti-Asian sentiment was common, especially on the West Coast. When the federal government declared its plan to “relocate“ Japanese citizens, public resistance was basically non-existent. Many people saw the camps as unnecessary and based on false assumptions about Japanese people’s loyalties, but public outcry against the practice was minimal, even in communities from which the majority of people were taken. The prisoners were all released from the camps by 1945, and reparations were finally awarded to camp survivors in 1988. Fully quantifying the effect of the camps on anti-Asian racism is likely impossible, but it was certainly profound, as was the effect on Japan itself. While the US typically ran a calculated and cautious war in Europe, the war in Japan abruptly halt when the US made it the target of the first and only atomic bombings the world had ever seen.

While World War II negatively affected Japanese Americans, the war gave other marginalized groups opportunities—especially women—to participate in society in ways they previously could not. As the military drafted young men in droves, women filled in the gaps they left in the American industrial machine. Wartime employment opportunities for women skyrocketed, and suddenly they were viewed as a critical component of the Allied effort. Popular media celebrated the employment of women through characters like Rosie the Riveter. Black people, still living under segregation even in the military, used the war to force the government to offer them new levels of equality. The government faced a lack of manpower both in the military and on the home front, and Black people seized the opportunity to force the government’s hand—and finally saw some progress in employment opportunities and the easing of segregation. Despite the increases in equality during the war, however, equality for many groups eroded again as soon as the fighting ended. This was particularly true for Indigenous Americans. Like other marginalized people, many Indigenous men and women entered white spaces during the war and began to see assimilation as a good thing. The Navajo “code talkers“ provided an indispensable service to the military, using their native language, which has no relation to any Indo-European language, as an unbreakable code to relay important messages over military radios. However, despite their heroic efforts, most Indigenous Americans returned to their reservations after the war with little reward for their contributions.

By the time the war ended, the American economy had rebounded from the Great Depression. After two back-to-back world conflicts with no warfare occurring directly within the US, the country was not only economically stable but had substantial advantages over the doubly war-ravaged countries in Europe and elsewhere. The postwar years were a critical period in which American culture flourished and began to influence life around the world.

The Soviet Union, still a new nation during World War II, was arguably the most important player in the Allied victory in Europe. Soviet forces were the first to infiltrate and liberate the concentration camps. Their expansive war efforts solidified the Soviets as a newly minted world power, and despite their wartime alliance, after the fighting was over, the US and the Soviet Union entered a decades-long struggle to become the dominant influence on world politics and culture.

The opposition between communism and democracy that would come to define the Cold War was not a crucial source of early disagreements among the powerful Allied nations. Immediately after the war, the world’s nations came together to work out a plan for the future of world power. They formed the United Nations, which—unlike the previous League of Nations—was accepted by all parties. However, the leaders of the Allied nations were far from agreement, as each desired to shape the world in a way that would benefit their own interests. The Soviet Union, knowing that its form of government was at odds with much of Europe, hoped to create a unified Eastern Europe under state-run communism. The US had a vision in which countries could mostly act as they pleased within certain agreed-on guidelines, with the major powers acting as global police. Great Britain, meanwhile, hoped to retain its vast empire.

From the beginning, the former Allied powers agreed on almost nothing. How to deal with Germany became the first major conflict, and peaceful negotiation quickly fell apart. Communism became viewed as a major threat to US international goals, and the Cold War soon became a conflict of ideology. This conflict only increased when China, another major world power, officially became communist in 1949. The same year, most countries in Western Europe joined with the US to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The scope and purpose of NATO has evolved in the years since it was formed, but originally it constituted a pact between member countries to work as a unified front against the threats they perceived from the Soviet Union and other communist countries.

The Cold War is often described as bloodless, but the Korean War represented an exception to this view. As is true today, Korea in 1950 was split between the communist north and the Western-sympathizing south. When North Korea invaded its southern neighbor, countries on both sides of the Cold War quickly became involved. Ultimately, the war ended with thousands of people dead and no real resolution to the conflict. In the US, the war fueled seething anti-communist sentiment and in many ways helped bring about the panic over communism that shaped American political life through the 1950s and beyond.

American anxieties about communism did not begin without reason: In the decade after World War II, the Soviet Union successfully built nuclear weapons and made other advances that indicated they might be a real threat to American world supremacy. The domestic Red Scare, however, was primarily as a political tool by the Republican Party, a tactic that would come to define the party for years to come. Republican federal employees, most notably Senator Joseph McCarthy and then Congressman Richard Nixon, stirred fears of a communist insurrection in the US. The Red Scare culminated in ruin and even death for many government employees and private citizens who were deemed subversive, usually with little to no evidence. Despite having little basis in reality, the anti-communist fervor brought new life to the Republican Party, which dominated the 1952 election with the sweeping victory of Dwight D. Eisenhower. With his victory, 20 years of Democratic governance ended, and the formerly progressive Republican Party solidified itself as the party of the conservative right.