HI 254: WWI on the Homefront

WWI on the American Homefront

  • Wartime mobilization expands government

  • War production energized the economy

  • Demand for labor shifts the workforce

  • Mass internal movement

  • Solidifies US role in the international community

  • Government spending sparks development for future Sunbelt

  • Creation of military-industrial complex

  • Ideas about American nationality

  • Birth of Civil Rights Movement

Selective Training and Service Act, 1940

  • Peacetime draft

  • Voluntary enlistment ended in 1942

Mobilizing for war: Federal government expands

  • New agencies - War production board, War manpower commission, Office of Price administration

  • Massive government expenditures

  • War bonds

  • “Victory” tax

The “Arsenal of Democracy”

  • War worker housing

  • Private industries produce tanks, trucks, jeeps, planes etc

  • Mass production

  • Scientific research

Government-business cooperation

  • Government incentivizes business

  • Industrial areas revitalized

  • West Cost industry develops

Labor in wartime

  • Three sides arrangement of government, business and unions

  • Government issues pro-union order

  • Labor makes no-strike pledge

Four Freedoms

  • Freedom of speech

  • Freedom of worship

  • Freedom from want

  • Freedom from fear

Office of War Information (OWI)

  • Created 1942 to mobilize public opinion

  • OWI workers craft narratives about a “peoples war for freedom”

  • Domestic funding slashed by Congress in 1943

War Advertising Council

  • Private companies

  • The fifth freedom - free enterprise

Women in the Defense Industry

  • Women made up 1/3 of industrial workers by 1945

  • Married women and mothers ended up outnumbering single mothers in the work force

  • White House Conference on children, 1940

  • Department of Labor sets daycare standards in 1941

Government support for working mothers

  • Standards for employers

  • Standard for child care facilities

  • Lanham Act funding 1942

Lanham Act funds for wartime child care

  • Daycare, nightcare, after school programs

  • Employer or communities sought funding

  • UAW push for Michigan centers

Economic Rights

  • FDR proposed economic bill of rights

  • Serviceman Readjustment Act, 1944

  • Continued to push for”full employment”