![]() Roosevelt “indispensable to Earl Browder” the head of the American Communist Party.Ī communist, Dewey told an audience, is “anyone who supports (Roosevelt’s) fourth term so our form of government may more easily be changed.” In New York City, there were more and more reports of an old crime with a new name: mugging.Īnd anyone who thinks red-baiting was a postwar innovation should listen to Thomas Dewey, the 1944 GOP presidential candidate, who called President Franklin D. Los Angeles had its first smog attack in 1943. Problems developed during the war that would bedevil the nation for years. A letter from a soldier overseas often arrived with a few words, a sentence or an entire paragraph snipped out, and the envelope resealed with a bit of tape bearing the label “Opened by Censor.” When Ward’s president refused to leave his office, government agents carried him out in his chair.ĭecades before Edward Snowden’s revelations about government spying, military censors on the home front had authority to open and read every piece of mail that entered or left the country to scan every cable and to screen every phone call. But during the war the executive branch also banned pleasure drives and sliced bread, and seized control of the strike-bound retail giant Montgomery Ward under the legal justification that it was “useful” to the war effort. The internment was the result of an executive order, a presidential prerogative that has become increasingly controversial. But the Supreme Court’s expansive interpretation of government powers in wartime in the Korematsu case, which upheld the internment, has never been overturned. In 1988, however, President Ronald Reagan signed a law that provided financial redress of $20,000 for each surviving detainee. Supposedly designed to fight espionage and sabotage, the move in fact was motivated by war hysteria, racism and political expediency.įor years, this outrage was all but forgotten. citizens) living in Pacific Coast states. history - the internment of about 120,000 Japanese-Americans (two-thirds of them U.S. The war was witness to the greatest single violation of civil rights in U.S. ![]() ![]() The war also raised issues that would become even more pressing in years to come. Wartime shortages gave rise to products whose greatest days were ahead, including plastics (used to replace scarce metals), frozen foods (which saved trips to the store) and microfilm (for shipping civilian-military “V-mail” overseas). Packard ran the company while Hewlett served in the Army Signal Corps, unaware that they were founders of what would become Silicon Valley. In Palo Alto, Calif., a company started in a garage by electrical engineers William Hewlett and David Packard was making radio, sonar, and radar devices, as well as artillery shell fuses. The computer introduced at MIT in 1942 weighed 100 tons and had 2,000 electronic tubes, 150 electric motors and 200 miles of wire. Government scientists refined products (television, air conditioning) and developed new ones. Other developments included quinine substitutes to fight malaria, and numerous repellants and insecticides (including, unfortunately, DDT) used against pests causing epidemics of typhus and malaria. A new process to produce dried blood plasma allowed battlefield transfusions. Penicillin, which had been discovered in 1928, was mass produced during the war to treat blood poisoning and battle wounds. Streptomycin, the first drug effective against the cause of tuberculosis, was the best known in a series of new antibiotics. Medical researchers produced a class of pharmaceuticals whose nickname - “wonder drugs” - pretty much summed them up. Annual federal spending on research and development increased more than 20-fold during the war. The nation’s science labs were mobilized. Radar, improved depth charges and long-range bombers turned the tide against German submarines the long range Mustang fighter protected Allied bombers over Europe after 1943 the B-29 Superfortress allowed the Air Force to pulverize Japan with virtual impunity by 1945. The Office of Scientific Research and Development, directed by mathematician Vannevar Bush, organized the scientists and engineers who developed many valuable weapons. By the end of the war, it was said that no major battle was won with the same weapons as the battle that preceded it innovation had become a constant. “The genius of the country of Whitney, Morse, and Edison precisely fitted such a war.”Īmerica not only made more weapons than its enemies, it kept making new and better ones. “Never before had war demanded such technological experimentation and business organization,” historian Allen Nevins later wrote. A nation that in 1938 was making almost no weapons was, by 1943, making more than twice as many as of all its enemies combined. It helped explain America’s production miracle.
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