T3C: WWII IDs: #43-64

War Powers Act (1941)

An American emergency law that increased Federal power during World War II. The act was signed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and put into law on December 18, 1941, less than two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The act gave the President enormous authority to execute World War II in an efficient manner. The president was authorized to reorganize the executive branch, independent government agencies, and government corporations for the war cause. With the act, the President was allowed to censor mail and other forms of communication between the United States and foreign countries.

Rationing

Restrictions on imported foods, limitations on the transportation of goods due to a shortage of rubber tires, and a diversion of agricultural harvests to soldiers overseas all contributed to this U.S. governmental decision. On January 30, 1942, the Emergency Price Control Act granted the Office of Price Administration (OPA) the authority to set price limits and ration food and other commodities in order to discourage hoarding and ensure the equitable distribution of scarce resources.

Office of Price Administration (OPA)

President Roosevelt established this in April 1941 to “stabilize prices and rents and prevent unwarranted increases in them; to prevent profiteering, hoarding and speculation; to assure that defense appropriations were not dissipated by excessive prices; to protect those with fixed incomes from undue impairment of their living standards; to assist in securing adequate production; and to prevent a post- emergency collapse of values.” It was responsible for two types of rationing programs.

Victory Gardens

Also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens planted at private residences and public parks in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany during World War I and World War II. They were used along with Rationing Stamps and Cards to reduce pressure on the public food supply. Besides indirectly aiding the war effort, these were also considered a civil "morale booster" in that gardeners could feel empowered by their contribution of labor and rewarded by the produce grown. This was a part of daily life on the home front.

Blackout

The practice of collectively minimizing outdoor light, including upwardly directed (or reflected) light. This was done in the 20th century to prevent crews of enemy aircraft from being able to identify their targets by sight.

War Production Board (WPB)

An agency of the United States government that supervised war production during World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt established it on January 16, 1942. It directed conversion of industries from peacetime work to war needs, allocated scarce materials, established priorities in the distribution of materials and services, and prohibited nonessential production. It rationed such commodities as gasoline, heating oil, metals, rubber, paper and plastics. It was dissolved shortly after the defeat of Japan in 1945, and was replaced by the Civilian Production Administration in late 1945.

FDR Executive Order 9066

Signed and issued during World War II by the United States President on February 19, 1942. This authorized the Secretary of War to prescribe certain areas as military zones, clearing the way for the incarceration of Japanese Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans in U.S. concentration camps.

Internment

The imprisonment or confinement of people, commonly in large groups, without trial. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement, rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime. Use of these terms is subject to debate and political sensitivities.

Issei & Nisei

One is a Japanese-language term used by ethnic Japanese in countries in North America and South America to specify the Japanese people who were the first generation to immigrate there. They are born in Japan; their children born in the new country are known as the second term.

Korematsu v. U.S.

A Supreme Court trial asking if the President & Congress went beyond their war powers by implementing exclusion and restricting the rights of Americans of Japanese descent. The Court sided with the government and held that the need to protect against espionage outweighed Japanese rights. Justice Hugo Black argued that compulsory exclusion, though constitutionally suspect, is justified during circumstances of “emergency & peril.”

Japanese American Citizens League (JACL)

Formed in 1929 out of existing Nisei organizations in California and Washington, and spread to become the largest and most well-known Japanese American organization in the United States. In its early years, it lobbied for legislation that expanded the citizenship rights of Japanese Americans, and local chapters organized meetings to encourage Nisei to become more politically active. It was criticized for its decision not to use its political influence to fight the incarceration of Japanese Americans, aiding U.S. intelligence agencies in identifying "disloyal" Issei, and taking a hardline stance against draft resisters in camp. These issues remain a source of division within the Japanese American community and the organization itself.

A. Philip Randolph

The most important civil rights leader to emerge from the labor movement. Throughout his long career, he consistently kept the interests of black workers at the forefront of the racial agenda. Whereas W. E. B. Du Bois argued that the problem of the twentieth century was “the color line,” this man concluded that it was the question of the “common man.”

Tuskegee Airmen

The first black servicemen to serve as military aviators in the U.S. armed forces, flying with distinction during World War II. Though subject to racial discrimination both at home and abroad, the 996 pilots and more than 15,000 ground personnel who served with the all-black units would be credited with some 15,500 combat sorties and earn over 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses for their achievements. The highly publicized successes of these men helped pave the way for the eventual integration of the U.S. armed forces under President Harry Truman in 1948.

NAACP

Established in 1909 and is America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. It was formed in New York City by white and black activists, partially in response to the ongoing violence against African Americans around the country. In its early decades, its anti-lynching campaign was central to its agenda. During the civil rights era in the 1950s and 1960s, the group won major legal victories, and today it has more than 2,200 branches and some half a million members worldwide.

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

Founded in 1942, it became one of the leading activist organizations in the early years of the American civil rights movement. The group had evolved out of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, and sought to apply the principles of nonviolence as a tactic against segregation. The group's inspiration was Mahatma Gandhi's teachings of non-violence resistance.

Double V Campaign

A slogan and drive to promote the fight for democracy abroad and within the United States for African Americans during World War II. Part of it refers to the "V for victory" sign prominently displayed by countries fighting "for victory over aggression, slavery, and tyranny," but adopts a second "V" to represent the double victory for African Americans fighting for freedom overseas and at home.

The Holocaust

The mass murder of some 6 million European Jews (as well as members of some other persecuted groups, such as Gypsies and homosexuals) by the German Nazi regime during the Second World War. To the anti-Semitic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and community. After years of Nazi rule in Germany, during which Jews were consistently persecuted, Hitler’s “final solution” came to fruition under the cover of world war, with mass killing centers constructed in the concentration camps of occupied Poland.

Concentration Camps

Nazi Germany maintained these throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi ones were erected in Germany in March 1933 immediately after Hitler became Chancellor and his Nazi Party was given control over the police. Used to hold and torture political opponents and union organizers, they initially held around 45,000 prisoners.

SS St. Louis

A German ocean liner. In 1939, it set off on a voyage in which its captain, Gustav Schröder, tried to find homes for over 900 Jewish refugees from Germany. After they were denied entry to Cuba, the United States, and Canada, the refugees were finally accepted in various European countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, and France. Historians have estimated that approximately a quarter of them died in death camps during World War II.

The Final Solution

The Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews during World War II. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geo-political terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust which saw the killing of 90 percent of Jewish Poles, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.

War Refugee Board (WRB)

United States agency established January 22, 1944, to attempt to rescue victims of the Nazis—mainly Jews—from death in German-occupied Europe. It began its work after the Nazis had already killed millions in concentration and extermination camps. A late start, a lack of resources, and conflicts within the U.S. government limited the board’s effectiveness.

Liberation

When concentration camp inhabitants were freed by the Allied forces between 1944 and 1945.