A People’s History of the United States: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

World War Two is unique in American history because it was widely regarded as the “people’s war”—a fight that capitalist, Communist, working-class and upper-class Americans supported. World War Two was a fight against evil: the totalitarian, racist, militaristic German state, headed by Adolf Hitler. However, Zinn asks, did the governments fighting against Hitler “represent something significantly different?” During World War Two, did the U.S. conduct itself in a manner consistent with its commitment to human rights? And after World War Two, did the U.S. exemplify the values “for which the war was supposed to have been fought?”

The U.S. has always positioned itself as a defender of helpless countries. But even a quick look at the historical record disproves any such claim: on the contrary, the U.S. has always acted to protect its own interests, particular the interests of the rich. Indeed, it has done this so consistently that it’s difficult to believe that during World War Two the United States acted out of magnanimity. Many history textbooks claim that the U.S. entered World War Two in part because of its commitment to ending the racism of Hitler’s regime. However, such a claim doesn’t hold much water. Racism was rampant in America during the 1930s and 40s, and most Americans were unaware of the extent of Hitler’s racist policies until the end of the war. For much of the 1930s, the U.S. traded with fascist countries; for example, American businesses sent oil into Italy, which strengthened the fascist government there.

The U.S. only entered World War Two after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. Franklin Roosevelt presented Pearl Harbor as a “sudden, shocking, immoral act,” despite the fact that the bombing “climaxed a long series of mutually antagonistic acts.” Throughout the 1930s, both Japan and the U.S. had been locked in competition for control of the Southwest Pacific, and Pearl Harbor represented Japan’s attempt to assert its dominance there. While it’s almost certainly untrue that, as some have argued, Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor, he probably used Pearl Harbor as an opportunity to strengthen America’s position on the global stage. In other words, he “lied to the public for what he thought was a right cause.” Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S., meaning that the U.S. was now locked in a war with European countries as well as Japan.

In August 1941, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of England, signed the Atlantic Charter, in which they claimed that their countries respected the “right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” However, this was a mostly symbolic gesture—after the war, Churchill and Roosevelt supported France in maintaining its imperial colonies around the world.

Although the U.S. did not fight in Europe, Asia, or Africa with the goal of annexing territory, American business elites spent the war years ensuring “that when the war ended, American economic power would be second to none in the world.” One of the major goals of American business during World War Two was to ensure an “open door policy” after the war, especially in the case of Middle Eastern oil. Also during World War Two, America and England formed the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an organization designed to regulate international exchanges of money, giving a major advantage to its own currencies. American politicians and business elites recognized that, after the war, they would need to send economic aid around the world to influence political events.

The U.S. did not in fight in World War Two to oppose bigotry. Indeed, throughout World War Two, the American military separated blood donations from its black and white soldiers. Fascist countries were notorious for their sexism, and yet the American war effort didn’t take steps to “change the subordination of women”: throughout the duration of the war, the most powerful decision makers were men. Perhaps the U.S.’s most notorious World War Two policy was Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order to arrest every Japanese-American on the West Coast and send them to internment camps. Japanese internment is often regarded as a horrible “mistake” on the American government’s part. “Was it a ‘mistake’” Zinn asks, “or was it an action to be expected from a nation with a long history of racism?”

The chief beneficiaries of the American war effort were the elite. During the war, the government awarded almost all military production contracts to large corporations. Although unions cooperated with the government and pledged not to strike, many non-unionized workers went on strike during the war years—indeed, there were more strikes during the World War Two years than in “any comparable period in American history.”

In spite of the overwhelming patriotism during the World War Two years, there were many who opposed the war. Tens of thousands of people refused to fight in the war, and in the black community, there was widespread opposition to the war, since many black leaders reasoned that the war wouldn’t change the status of black people in the U.S. any more than World War One had. One small socialist group, the Socialist Workers Party, criticized the war, arguing that “the real war was inside each nation.” However, there wasn’t an organized black opposition to the war—or, for that matter, an organized Communist or Socialist opposition.

World War Two represented “the heaviest bombardment of civilians ever undertaken in any war.” American troops bombed civilians, most notoriously in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where atomic bombs killed more than 150,000 Japanese people, many of them women or children. The American government has always offered the same justification for its use of atomic weapons during World War Two: bombs ended the war quickly. However, recent historical evidence suggests that 1) President Harry Truman, who made the final decision to bomb Japan, had been advised to issue a warning to Japanese civilians before doing so; and 2) the U.S. government knew from radio intercepts that the Japanese government was on the verge of pursuing peace negotiations with the Allies.

It’s likely that the U.S. chose to drop atomic bombs on Japan because it wanted to end the war before Russia was scheduled to enter it. Dropping bombs sent a clear message to Russia—an assertion of America’s military power. After the bombing, Truman issued a “preposterous” statement alleging that Hiroshima was a “military base” and that the military had been trying to avoid the killing of civilians. It’s unclear why Truman ordered for a second bomb to be dropped on Nagasaki after the bombing of Hiroshima.

After World War Two, the two most powerful countries in the world were the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Both countries proceeded to “carve out empires of influence,” but without “swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism.” War put the U.S. in a position to control the world and its own people. Only a few years after the Great Depression, war had rejuvenated capitalism and strengthened the elite. Workers and farmers benefitted from war in more modest ways. However, by and large, they believed that “the system was doing well for them.”

The greatest legacy of World War Two is that it created an alliance between business and the military. Zinn argues that this “alliance” explains why, almost immediately after World War Two, the Truman administration manufactured an atmosphere of paranoia and unease, directing the people’s fear outwards toward the Soviet Union. While it’s certainly true that the Soviet Union was America’s rival, the U.S. government exaggerated the threat of the Soviet Union in order to justify 1) spending more on the military and 2) intervening in other countries.

In 1947, Harry Truman claimed that the U.S. would be sending money to rebuild Europe in order to protect people from “outside pressures.” Truman’s remarks were hypocritical, because the most significant “outside pressure” in Europe was the U.S. itself. With the full approval of Harry Truman and Winston Churchill, the U.S. and the Soviet Union divided up Europe along the famous “iron curtain,” so that the Soviet Union intervened militarily and economically in Eastern Europe while the U.S. intervened in Western Europe.

It’s telling to study U.S. intervention in Greece in the late 1940s and early 1950s. At this time, there was a civil war in Greece between populist insurrectionists and the right-wing government. The U.S. shipped thousands of tons of military equipment to the government while characterizing the populists as “Soviet agents.” Because of American intervention, the right-wing government of Greece defeated its populist opponents. Afterwards, American businesses invested heavily in Greece. Poverty and starvation remained widespread in the country.

In the early days of the Cold War, the U.S. tried to build a national consensus. The core principals of this “liberal consensus” were opposition to Communism, support for business interests, and support for an interventionist foreign policy. The first test of the “liberal consensus” arrived in 1950, when Harry Truman initiated war on Korea. Afraid that South Korea would fall into the hands of socialist leaders in North Korea, Truman deployed American troops, supposedly on behalf of the United Nations Army. The Korean War was a devastating conflict: for three years, the U.S forces used huge amounts of napalm and explosives. The war ended when the American army reached a stalemate with the North Korean forces in 1953. It was a sign of the strength of the liberal consensus that there was little opposition to Truman’s deployment of troops to Korea.

One reason that there was little opposition to the Korean War in American society is that, throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, American elites were searching for Communists and communist sympathizers. In the late 1940s, communists took control over the China, and the Soviet Union blockaded the city of Berlin. The American government presented such events to the American people as signs of a “world Communist conspiracy.” Using the anti-Communist fervor at home, Truman and his allies tried to create “a new national unity,” featuring “Justice Department prosecutions and anti-Communist legislation.” Truman’s anti-Communist acts weakened the left in America, silencing the most vocal critics of American government.

In early 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to have information about members of the Communist Party who’d infiltrated the government. McCarthy rose to become an important prosecutor of suspected Communists. Later, he became bolder and began investigating the military for Communist ties. At this time, McCarthy began to alienate his Republican and Democratic allies, and in 1954, he was censured for his conduct. However, Congress continued to pass anti-Communist legislation. McCarthy had gone too far—not by prosecuting Communists, but by antagonizing members of the Establishment. In the 1950s and 60s, politicians denounced Communism, but they avoided McCarthy’s mistake by directing their attacks away from institutions like the military.

Many of the worst abuses of power committed in the name of anti-Communism took place during Truman’s “liberal” administration. In 1947, Truman signed an executive order asking the Department of Justice to draw up a list of organizations suspected of harboring Communists. Within five years, there were hundreds of names on this list. It was also during Truman’s presidency that the Justice Department sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for espionage. Julius Rosenberg was accused of stealing information about the atomic bomb, but the only witnesses the Justice Department could produce were already facing serious prison time themselves, and they may have lied to shorten their sentences. Irving Kaufman, the judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs to death, was later shown to have conferred illegally with the prosecutors. For the rest of the 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) prosecuted thousands of people for being Communists. Though Democratic senators sometimes criticized HUAC, most of them repeatedly voted to fund it. Liberal intellectuals regularly voiced their support for the government’s anti-Communist agenda.

Anti-Communism was useful in giving the government a means of convincing people to support military buildup. Democratic and Republican presidents alike voted to increase the military budget, a decision that greatly benefitted the large industrial corporations that made military weaponry. At the same time, the U.S. created “a network of American corporate control over the globe,” in the guise of fighting Communism. In Europe, for example, the Marshall Plan was presented as a way of rebuilding Europe, when, in fact, it also built up markets for American exports. Foreign aid in European countries also built up military power—supposedly to defend against the Soviet Union.

During the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961, the U.S. continued to spend huge amounts on the military and intervene in other countries. In 1954, the U.S. sent forces to topple a Socialist, democratically elected government in Guatemala; four years later, U.S. forces deployed to Lebanon to ensure that the pro-American government wasn’t “toppled by a revolution.”

In 1959, Cuba came under the control of Fidel Castro, a Communist revolutionary. Castro succeeded in defeating Fulgencio Batista, the U.S.-backed dictator of Cuba, and afterwards he established a nationwide system of housing and education, and he redistributed land to peasants. Castro tried to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund, but the IMF, largely run by Americans, refused to lend him any. Castro next turned to the Soviet Union for aid. The U.S., during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, responded by sending anti-Castro Cuban exiles to Cuba in an attempt to invade Cuba and assassinate Castro. This was later known as the “Bay of Pigs” affair. The invasion proved to be a humiliating failure, all the more so because it violated America’s stated commitments not to “intervene, directly or indirectly, … in the internal or external affairs of any other state.”

In short, the late 1940s and early 1950s saw America become “a permanent war economy,” in which a few powerful people became extraordinary wealthy while the majority of the population made just enough money not to rebel against the status quo. Then, in the 1960s, quite unexpectedly, the people of the United States showed once again that “all the system’s estimates of security and success were wrong.”